The more I think about it, the more I realize that the huge number of books trying to reconcile science and religion (there is a very long shelf of them at the University of Chicago library) means that there is some fundamental dichotomy that prompts so many to try harmonizing them. The latest attempt is by Britain’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, who has always been a Sophisticated TheologianTM. Last Saturday’s Guardian reports on a new book by Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning; the review is by Richard Holloway. Given that Holloway was once the Episcopal Bishop of Edinburgh, it’s not surprising that he’s pretty soft on what seems to be a dire book:
For [Sacks], the fate of civilisation depends on how we answer the God question. He remarks that while “individuals can live without meaning, societies in the long run cannot” – and only God, he claims, can supply the meaning we need.
His logic goes like this: quoting Wittgenstein, who said that the sense of the world must lie outside the world, he claims that since the meaning of a system has to lie outside the system, “the meaning of the universe lies outside the universe”. The universe cannot mean itself, only that which lies outside it and brought it into being can mean it.
That’s bogus, of course: for the meaning of our lives can indeed lie within our lives—and for atheists it does (indeed, Holloway says this in the next paragraph). And it’s palpably untrue that only God can supply the meaning we need. In many near-atheistic societies, as we see in northern Europe, meaning isn’t supplied by God at all.
Sadly, the good rabbi is engaging in what Jews call “pilpul‘: endless disputation that is meaningless. The statement “the universe cannot mean itself, only that which lies outside and brought into being can mean it” is gibberish to me. Perhaps I am too dense to understand Wittgenstein, but even attributing meaning to God is a human activity, something that takes place within the universe. That statement makes sense only if you think there’s an extra-universe deity that gives it meaning, but that’s presuming the conclusion.
In the end, Holloway finds tremendous virtue in Sack’s “passion,” which is mentioned three times in the piece, first in the article’s header:
Whether or not you accept the chief rabbi’s arguments for the existence of God, you cannot deny his passion.
Then Holloway says this:
What makes Jonathan Sacks such an attractive combatant in today’s wars of religion is the passion with which he engages in the conflict.
And this:
The compelling thing about Sacks is the passion with which he insists that only God can save us from the tragedy of nothingness. His argument may not persuade, but his passion almost does.
Passion in the cause of delusion is no virtue. Jerry Falwell was passionate. Pat Roberstson is passionate. Snake-handlers are passionate. Those are not attractive features. And anyone who is persuaded by passion alone is not thinking straight.
In a generally positive review of this book in the Independent, Ziauddin Sardar levels two criticisms:
However, Sacks’s argument about the complementary nature of the scientific and religious approaches, the one searching for explanation, the other searching for meaning is not particularly original. In the Islamic tradition, for example, it was debated for over six centuries. We find the best exploration in On the harmony of Religion and Philosophy by the great 12th-century Moorish philosopher, Ibn Rushd. Despite his claim to include Islamic tradition in his analysis, Sacks is rather unfamiliar with the rich heritage of Islamic discourse on reason and revelation.
There is also a problem with his central argument. Meaning of a system, he suggests, must lie outside it. Thus the meaning of our empirical world is located outside it, in something we call God. Science needs religion, or at least some philosophical understanding of the human condition, to provide meaning for it discoveries. This is a classical argument from the apologist tradition; and it has a structural weakness. It is easier to argue for the need for something beyond, more difficult to argue for a deity in general, and then quite demanding to argue for one deity rather than the other. It would have been more original to argue why God is needed in the first place.
Finally, one Guardian reader, “fuzzyatheist” made this comment:
Strange to hear Richard Holloway giving Sacks such an easy time. It always seemed perfectly clear to me that he was a perfect example of a Religious leader who didn’t even believe in God. Watch his excruciating interview with Howard Jacobsen and he can’t even bring himself to answer the question.
Curious, I looked up the video and found it; it’s a documentary in which Sacks is confronted with four atheists. Here’s the first part, and Jacobsen’s discussion with Sacks begins at 1:50. And, indeed, at 5:20, Jacobsen asks him if he’s sure his God really exists. Sacks waffles and finally mumbles something about “hope.”
Perhaps Sacks should enroll in Dan Dennett and Linda LaScola’s “Clergy Project,” which is a haven for pastors who don’t believe in God.
h/t: Matthew Cobb
I heard Sacks talking on a BBC radio podcast not so long ago. It was clear that while he struggled to keep up with science, the gaps he was trying to fill were often polluted with pop-science concepts like right/left brain thinking.
Faith is the courage to live with uncertainty.
Bullshit. If anything, faith is looking at contradictions within your beliefs, and between your beliefs and reality, and bravely ignoring them because you like the warm, fuzzy feeling your beliefs give you.
Read Richard Feynman if you want to know what it means to live with uncertainty and not cop out into your favourite fairy-land but face the contradictions and try your best and honestest to resolve them.
We are all part of the script.
Oooh, that’s deep!
Very nice.
I thought you’d be linking to this video, or one like it.
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Yeah. Faith certainly doesn’t take courage. It takes fear and laziness.
At times, faith !*imparts*! courage, but that is quite different from saying faith
!*requires*! courage. The notion that people can gain courage from false beliefs is well-dramatized in the Kurusawa film “Kagamusha”.
What about, closer to us, Nick Wallenda crossing the Niagara Falls, and singing to himself all the way through: “Thank you Jesus, my righteous king”.
His righteous “King”, what a strange mantra. Like a child reciting a lesson from Sunday school.
I would like to see some scientifically critical reviews of his book,in the future, because this concept of an outside of the universe deity would be fun to challenge and quite easy.
Wittgenstein!
Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel…
Spoken like a true Hempenstein. (I was actually wondering how sloshed Wittgenstein was when he wrote that bit of unsupportable weirdness, and once again a pithy Python remark brings it home.)
“Whether or not you accept the chief rabbi’s arguments for the existence of God, you cannot deny his passion.”
Translation: I know this stuff is pretty meaningless, but I gotta say something positive without seeming to be an idiot to the rationalists out there.
“Whether or not you accept Al Qaida’s methods, you cannot deny their passion…”
That, sir or ma’am, was absolutely brilliant. Bravo.
Darn. I was just about to say the same using Hitler as an example (at the risk of Godwinning the discussion).
Though I more often take aim at those who are ‘sincere in their beliefs’. That does not get them off the hook. IMO, sincerity in an evil or deluded belief just makes them more evil or loony.
For example, must my urge to become a serial chainsaw killer be respected because I deeply, sincerely believe some people would be better off without their heads? 😉
Religious people are passionate
Atheists are strident or fundamentalist
The statement “the universe cannot mean itself, only that which lies outside and brought into being can mean it” is gibberish to me.
It was also gibberish to Russell, who told Wittgenstein that he was going insane when Wittgenstein started frothing this nonsense. Wittgenstein replied, “God prevent me from sanity!“
And Russell retorted, “God certainly will.”
I read Ray Monk’s biographies of both Wittgenstein and Russell, and though it was clear that Monk idolized the former and despised the latter, I came away with the opposite sentiment. Wittgenstein was probably one of the most difficult human beings ever to have lived. In my opinion, the guy was completely insane, and a terrible human being. Of course, that has nothing to do with his work and its value, but it’s worth noticing that Wittgenstein, unlike Russell, tended toward obscurity and abstruseness in his work, whereas Russell tended toward clarity. It seems to me that Wittgenstein, a believer, had all the trappings of the theologian—the impenetrability, the impatience with others when they don’t get it, a complete inability to publish work that’s accessible to the public. Anyway, I have great reverence for Russell, and great loathing for Wittgenstein.
I have reverence for Russell’s clarity of thought and for many of the stands he took in the politics of the day, but not for him as a person. It’s hard to revere someone who cuckolded his own son….
I think this whole concept of “meaning” having to lie outside of the subject is inherently flawed. Its only our own minds that feel compelled to search for this “meaning”. I remember a talk by Alan Watts, if you look at certain artwork especially photography, these pieces convey no meaning outside of themselves. Why should our lives be any different?
What would happen to the theist’s argument if it turned out that he was both right and wrong — the meaning of the universe does indeed lie outside the universe, but when this meaning is fully grasped and understood, the theist is. .. disappointed. Underwhelmed. Unimpressed.
“That’s the meaning of the universe??? Why, that just sucks! It means nothing to me, personally. Nothing at all. Now I’m depressed.”
Would the good rabbi and his theistic cohorts STILL be waxing so eloquent about the exquisite necessity of being sure to anchor “meaning” somewhere far, far away from where people can get at it?
If he’s right, can you even understand something that by is nature is not of this universe?
That was sort of Douglas Adams’ point in several places …
Another “possibility” is that it is also incomprehensible to us. That’s Feynman’s famous critique of religion in those videos which have become so popular of late – that all the world’s religions are too simple, too provincial, too local.
Incidentally, some believers are aware of this. There’s a discussion between Gene Roddenberry and his last (hagiographer? biographer?) Yvonne Fern, who had been a nun (for extremely bizarre reasons, it seems), about this. She says that she’s worried that if there is a “cosmic truth” that she will be disqualified from aligning with it because it is incomprehensible to humans.
Yep.
1) People who use “meaning” in this way don’t actually have a clear, precise definition of what they…mean by it.
and
2) As you wrote, there is no external, objective meaning. We create meaning.
And just why should we accept that some external source gets to provide “meaning”, anyway? Weren’t the lives of slaves provided external “meaning” by their owners? If cannibals bred you for food, would that be your meaning? Even if god/dess/es declare that some particular “meaning”, why should we beholden to that, any more than we are to what career our parents want for us?
It’s more the application than the underlying concept that’s inherently flawed, I think. There are senses in mathematics that somewhat fall on these lines, such as Tarski’s Incompleteness Theorem.
However, that doesn’t help the presented argument, as there are other possibilities than the considered conclusion. EG:
1) There is no “meaning” to it; the universe represents nothing except the universe.
2) The philosophical meaning is an implication of the universe together with some abstract philosophical principle. The choice of philosophical principle is arbitrary. Instantiated entities in the universe (like “human concept of math”) are not abstract philosophical principles themselves, but can merely correspond to a philosophical principle via a representation scheme… which itself is an abstract philosophical principle, serving as can-opener outside the can.
I also suspect that in the theist philosophical arguments there’s some equivocations between “meaning” in some mathematical/coding theory senses, and “purpose”. I’m not sure on that, though.
He has a book for sale, so the meaning of life is: cha-ching!
“The universe is corporeal; all that is real is material, and what is not material is not real.” — Hobbes gets it right.
The meaning of anything to us must lie within us. How it got there will always be an interesting question for whiling away the time, but little more.
I just accidentally encountered Barg delivering this drivel, and thought you might enjoy the frothing.
http://youtu.be/vQPM0HSKgqI
Bragg already got spanked here.
Woops sorry missed that one, it was on Sky Arts this afternoon.
It’s a deepity. Those of us who find meaning will find it by valuing something external, which makes the claim superficially, but trivially true, but that doesn’t imply that the thing we value needs to have any intrinsic, objectively true meaning, as the Rabbi seems to imply.
“…Jacobsen asks him if he believes God really exists. Sacks waffles and finally mumbles something about ‘hope.’”
“It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.” –Peter De Vries.
😉
Why do the pratings of theologians remind so much of Arthur Dent’s improvisations on Vogon poetry?
It is like listening to a calypso version of Stairway To Heaven played by a really bad garage band; the scrawled portraits of pirates and cute bears in sunhats offered by would-be Picassos for entrance to Art Instruction Schools (http://www.myarttv.com/)
Find a more humanitarian outlet for your stymied artistic sensibilities, guys. Macrame, perhaps, or unicorns painted on velvet.
A person that uses passion to make something exist is in a delusion. Passion does NOT make something exist. To me this is what I call a “good greif” moment…so if I would passionately think a boyfriend existed for me, he would? Where the hell is he? The religious people are just getting to the point were they are drawing at ANTHING they can think up and put on peoples emotional strings. For a logical person this doesn’t work but for a non-logical person it does work.
…only God, he claims, can supply the meaning we need.
I’ll say it again: Nothing can supply the meaning these folks apparently need.
Interesting link, thanks.
Science is a carefully designed system for finding out what is true about the real world. A very important aspect of science is that ideas that have been disproved are abandoned.
Religion is a handful of cults that got too big for their boots. They bring no new knowledge to the world, none. The stuff that they claim as ‘revelation’ is nothing more than writing that is revered just because it is old. Much of what is claimed as knowledge by revelation has been disproved. If religion was compatible with science those ideas that have been disproved would have been abandoned.
Religion is all about looking backward to, and revering, the past. The golden age was long ago.
A scientific world view is all about looking forward to, and striving to create a better, future. The golden age is ahead of us.
“That’s bogus. Hubble had already produced evidence for an expanding universe around the time Lemaître proposed the Big Bang, and the physics community was divided for a few decades…”
The 1927 discovery of the expansion of the Universe by Lemaitre was published in French in a low-impact journal. In the 1931 high-impact English translation of this article a critical equation was changed by omitting reference to what is now known as the Hubble constant. That the section of the text of this paper dealing with the expansion of the Universe was also deleted from that English translation suggests a deliberate omission by the unknown translator.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.1195v1
See also:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.3928
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v479/n7372/full/479171a.html
As well as John Maddox
“Apart from being philosophically unacceptable, the Big Bang is an oversimple view of how the Universe began, and it is unlikely to survive the decade ahead.”
Maddox, John; “Down with the Big Bang,” Nature, 340: 425, 1989.
If your “a few decades” means sixty-two years and you included ideologically inclined editors of Nature Magazine, perhaps you got something right. “Philosophically unacceptable”, is clearly an acceptable standard to a good many people in the scientific establishment.
Lemaitre didn’t impose his religion on his science that I’ve ever read. You can’t say the same about Maddox.
So what’s your evidence that Maddox rejected the Big Bang because he was an atheist? My impression is that most physicists didn’t buy it because of the perceived lack of evidence. And Maddox (who wasn’t a scientist but an editor), did not have “his science”, he had an opinion about science. And, finally, philosophical rejection isn’t always motivated by religion, as we clearly see from people like Einstein who was philosophically opposed to the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics.
And if we’re talking about people imposing religion on science, we have a bit of a problem with creationism in this country. . .
p.s. You are commenting on the wrong post; I think you wanted the one above.
As I understand it, Einstein also was, at first, dubious about the concept of the big bang and had a substantial correspondence between himself and Lemaitre on the subject. Eventually, he came to accept it.
So what’s your evidence that Maddox rejected the Big Bang because he was an atheist?
I didn’t mention Maddox’s atheism did I? But the answer is that I read that and other of his diatribes. You see, I figure when a written record is left behind the author expected it to be read and what he said taken seriously.
As I understand it, Einstein also was…
Einstein died considerably before Maddox wrote his ideological insertions into science. I’m not as familiar with his misgivings about the idea so I couldn’t talk about those.
It is clear that you equivocate between the big bang expansion and the proposition of a big bang event out of a unique Planck volume.
The latter proposal is often made because it would more likely help pin down parameters for a unique Theory Of Everything, but it is controversial. Modern “big bang” theories often puts a period of rapid inflation expansion before much slower expansion Hubble observed. The current standard cosmology is such a theory. The simplest expansions of standard cosmology makes the observable universe occuring from a process of a local end of inflation.
“Eventually, the observational evidence, most notably from radio source counts, began to favor Big Bang over Steady State. The discovery and confirmation of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964[50] secured the Big Bang as the best theory of the origin and evolution of the cosmos.”
So Maddox is writing this 25 years later, when Big Bang was favored by most everyone, but the question of an “event was, and still is, open.
As for Lemaitre and so on, perhaps Sean Carroll can answer this better. But I believe Livio’s claims are not accepted by the consensus. Lemaitre himself never claimed that Hubble or the community knowingly took credence for his ideas:
“Historian Robert Smith of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says to make sense of the Smart letter it’ll be necessary to study more correspondence from the time. “However, it’s very good that people are looking for further relevant material. It’s also important to have established that the translator was Lemaître himself,” he says. Smith adds that in his view, on a first read, Smart appears to have been acting more as an editor than a censor, asking Lemaître to omit bits of the paper that had been superceded since its original publication in French.”
The first quote was from here.
I meant to say “the question of an “event” was, and still is, open”
The question here was of precedence, not one of distortion. 1927 comes before 1929.
Clearly some have an allergy to the historical fact that a Catholic priest could have been an important physicist who had an important idea. I wonder if they’d like to do without the discoveries of other members of the clergy which they can’t attribute to the reliably materialistic.
Sean Carroll is certainly representative of an ideological side in an ideological use of this history, though even an ideologue can accurately cite history, the point being supported shouldn’t necessarily be mistaken as proven.
The mistake is thinking the big bang is the origin of the universe, one which Lemaitre may have himself contributed to. I do not know, but regardless, it is a mistake. And, a fortiori, a mistake to identify that (non-)beginning with the action of a god, and worse still with that of a god of any particular religion.
Science can’t associate anything to anything except physical evidence. People who aren’t practicing science can come to conclusions that can’t be science. Every single person who is alive does that all the time.
Why the heck does Britain have a head rabbi?
Being a free country, religions are able to appoint one of themselves as their leader. For the same reason we also have cardinals and such.
Britain has had a chief rabbi since the very early 1700s. It is not a government position but rather someone chosen by most of the Orthodox synagogues in Britain. Note that Jews could not vote in England until the 1830s nor could they become MPs until 1858 (due to the form of the oath). The chief rabbi acted as a spokesman for the the disenfranchised Jewish community. The role has somewhat continued even though (a) Jews can vote and sit in Parliament and (b) many Jews are not Orthodox.
Instilling existential terror in knights questing for the Holy Grail?
Oh, wait; sorry. I thought you said head rabbit.
Automatic +1 for MP reference!
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Even if meaning wouldn’t be our model (or perhaps meme) put on the world, this claim lead to the infinite regress:
‘ “That which lies outside” cannot mean itself, only that which lies outside it and brought it into being can mean it.’
And so on.
“First meaning” has the same regress as “first cause”.
Words have meanings. Sentences and occasionally paragraphs have meanings. Lives don’t. Societies don’t. Unless Sacks can explain what he means by attributing ‘meaning’ to lives or societies, the whole thing is just one big category mistake. It’s meaningless gibberish.
In the context of this argument… actually words, sentences, and paragraphs don’t have meanings, in and of themselves. They acquire meaning by their consideration in light of a coding system; informally, the human reading them. (Formally, a human isn’t enough. A philosophically abstract coding system is also required to translate human conceptions to philosophical abstractions like “meaning”.)
Hmm… Doesn’t this become recursive? Isn’t a “philosophically abstract coding system” also a human conception?
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There’s some prospect of recursion. IE, the conception of “philosophically abstract coding system” instantiated in human brians is not the actual abstraction, but an instantiation that under a philosophically abstract coding system that translates the instantiation to “a philosophically abstract coding system”.
Pointers to pointers, as it were.
The notion that meaning must lie outside the universe – or rather: that in order for something to have meaning it must be inscribed within a reality that thing – is also used by William Lane Craig in his argument that atheism is nihilistic.
I discussed and critiqued that view here:
http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/theism-and-meaning-of-life-part-one.html
ack…
meant to say “that in order for something to have meaning it must be inscribed within a reality that transcends that thing”
This is what worries me about Holloway. He doesn’t really give the book a good review, but he seems to. But to have used Sacks’ passion as a commendation, and to use the word three times in a review of 391 words is really trying a bit too hard to say nice things when he has nothing nice to say. Holloway does not want to seem negative, and that leads him to let Sacks off without a scolding. That the good rabbi cannot bring himself to say that he believes in god is interesting, for Holloway says towards the end of his review that theists “will themselves to believe in a God who alone can supply the meaning they crave.” Holloway should ask whether it makes sense to will oneself to believe. Isn’t this precisely what Dennett means when he says that most believers don’t really believe in god, they believe in belief in god, which is a very different thing?
Having said that, I like Holloway, for he is very honest with himself. He can no longer believe, but he remembers with great fondness his experience of believing — or was it an experience of trying very hard to believe? Perhaps he is not quite sure, and that might explain why he is so gentle with old religious fuddy-duddies like Sacks.
There’s perhaps also the feeling that Jonathan Sacks is an aging harmless man who is speaking well beyond his competence and knowledge, so there’s no need to take him too seriously and deliver a Hitchens-like response.
If this brave man cannot even give a clear answer about the question of his own belief in God, which is well in his competency, what understanding can we expect he may have about what is a “system”? Does he even know that? And what is the “meaning of a system”? Does he know that? And “is the universe a system”? Does he know that? And what could be the “meaning of the universe”, in case the universe is NOT a system? Does he also know that? Of course, not.
He has no understanding of any of these logical and scientific questions. Even though he may mumble as if he did.
Is it worth kicking up a rumpus about it and spoil the old man’s day? Probably not.
Not only do we have to choose our battles, but we have to choose our opponents. Dear old rabbi Saks is not worth it. He’s not making the right class of fighting weight.
This seems a definition of “evil” to insist on “…absolute honesty…” while aggressively promoting clear lies — as this rabbi does.
It sounds like something Marshall Applewhite would have said. Don’t miss your comet, Rabbi!
The “reductionist” argument is clever but deeply dishonest. Logically it is nonsense but works because it triggers the fear of one’s solipsistic beliefs being debunked and nonsense.
Non-reductioniasm = anything goes.
Yeah, so if we want to avoid Holocausts let’s learn how the brain works and get a heavy dose of “reductionism” shall we.
If we look at the rhetoric, symbolism and ideology that accompanied mass murder — accompanied, we can’t really say caused — it has the same emotional and structural characteristics as religious ideology. And true believers, like the head rabbi, aggressively promoting supernatural absolutes. Nasty stuff.
why isn’t “the pursuit of happiness” meaning enough for religionists? meaning beyond the universe? then their lives are meaningless because there isn’t anything beyond the universe.
Somewhere I recall Richard Dawkins stating that Richard Holloway had given him some of the best insights he had into the inner workings of the Christian mind.
Holloway seems to be like someone who has lost faith but still has some nostalgic reminiscences of the days past.
It’s easier to be attracted to religious passion when it takes relatively innocuous and/or benign forms such as relief agencies- harder when it inspires mass suicide or murder.
Those for whom religion works well are often most apt to be blind to its dangers.
In the youtube interview, at the point marked by our host, 5:20, Sacks is not in fact asked “if he believes God really exists”. He is actually asked whether he is certain that his God is really there. His answer is addressed to the question of certainty. He says that faith doesn’t require certainty. It is for this reason he mentions hope.
There is no sign here of someone who belongs in the “atheist clergy” category. That faith does not equal certainty is pretty standard fare.
Thank you for actually taking the time to actually view and evaluate the video. You have given very helpful input here. The thing that struck me about the interviews is that there was respect on all sides. Each was sharing their views and each seemed to appreciate the complexity of the topics being discussed. There were honest questions asked by each and topics like this aren’t quickly resolved. I have a lot of respect for the Rabbi for being brave enough to have what he believes exposed to serious, skeptical thought. And I applaud all of them for being fair, respectful, and civilized in how they participated.
And Jerry, honestly “Jews behaving badly”? That’s really tacky and undeserved.
Agreed, and I’ve fixed that statement, thanks. As for “Jews behaving badly,” it’s a general label for posts about rabbis espousing religion. Sorry you don’t like it, but tough.
How is the ‘the meaning of a system must come from outside of it’ argument conviving? It says nothing more than that if there’s anything at all, then there’s a God, that ‘no God’ is an impossibility.
And it doesn’t answer the recursive question of “What is the meaning of the Universe + God”, without Super-Gods. So unless the religious who make this argument want to admit that the Biblical God is a lower god, they shouldn’t make it.
And the meaning of God must lie….
Ignore the man behind the curtain!
The universe can’t mean itself, God is required to give the universe meaning.
Howeever God can mean itself no problem.
Beat me to it.
Lift the corner of the majority of apologetics and you’ll see Special Pleading peering back at you with a big grin.
Vaal
Here’s a thought experiment for the good rabbi, and other sophistimicated theodiots:
1) Take some chapter of their books or article they’ve written that seems relatively innocuous and read it to a congregation at several churches of varying denomination across the country.
2) Watch the reactions of said congregations.
3) Have the ST’s come back and tell us the religion that is regularly scorned in these, and other sites, is really a strawman.
4) Profit!! 😛