Will Salon’s string of atheist-bashing pieces ever stop? This week’s is an excerpt of a new book by Amir D. Aczel, Why Science Doesn’t Disprove God—a book that’s gotten a fair amount of press on the Internet.
Aczel is an Israeli-born writer and lecturer on science and mathematics who, now living in Boston, has written a lot of popular science books. You can hear Ira Flatow interviewing Aczel on NPR’s Science Friday here, where it appears that he’s a believer. Be sure to hear Aczel’s waffle-y logic that the existence of a multiverse, supposedly disarming the “fine-tuning” argument, actually strengthens the argument for God.
As Aczel notes in the interview, he was inspired to write his book by hearing Richard Dawkins’s response to a question from his daughter. And so the title of his excerpt is “Science doesn’t disprove God: where Richard Dawkins and new atheists go wrong.”
While you might think that the book’s contents could consist of one line: “Science doesn’t disprove all deities absolutely”—Aczel’s excerpt is basically a God-of-the-gaps argument based on the existence of consciousness. So his piece boils down to the the six-word argument recently made by David Bentley Hart in his book The Experience of God: “Science can’t explain consciousness; ergo God.”
What is it with this revival of God-of-the-gaps arguments? Truly sophisticated theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer decried such arguments as being bad for religion, for when the gaps are filled, God shrinks. If you’re going to find your God in the gaps in human understanding, you’re putting yourself at severe risk. (Of course, religious people can always recover: recall that Darwin’s 1859 book was the greatest gap-plugger of all time, but didn’t severely weaken religion.) Given the remarkable success of science in understanding previously puzzling phenomena, and of neuroscience in unravelling how the brain works, one would think that Aczel would be a bit reluctant to proclaim that consciousness will never be explicable by naturalistic science, and therefore is evidence for God. But he wades right in.
Here are a few excerpts from his piece:
- “We don’t know how from the chaos and fuzziness and unworldly behavior of the quantum, the structured universe of macro objects we see around us came about, with its causality, locality, and definiteness—none of which are characteristics of the quantum realm. We don’t know how self-replicating life emerged from inanimate objects. And we don’t know how and why and at exactly what point in evolution human consciousness became a reality. The inexplicability of such emergent phenomena is the reason why we cannot disprove the idea of some creative power behind everything we experience around us—at least not at our present state of knowledge.”
Well, if that’s his argument, every unsolved puzzle becomes a way to keep the idea of God alive. Isn’t it enough, in the absence of evidence for a divine creative power, to simply say, “We don’t know the answer”? After all, the “inexplicability “of such phenomena also means we can’t disprove the idea that the “creative power”, if there was one, was an elf, a space alien, or, indeed, Fred Postlethwaite in Poughkeepsie, New York, who looks like a man but is really a Creative Power in disguise. Such possibilities, however, give no solace to adherents of the Abrahamic faiths.
- “Dawkins does make an interesting point: to whom do we accord “humanness”? But he skirts the main issue: To what extent can evolutionary theory answer this question? Evolutionary science cannot indicate to us the location of the point on the continuous evolutionary scale, which Dawkins believes is there, at which human consciousness arises. Evolutionary theory is unable to tell us how life began, how eukaryotic cells evolved, how intelligence came about, or how consciousness arose in living things.”
This is misguided because it all depends on the subjective criterion for “humanness”. If by that you mean a certain level of consciousness, then that almost certainly emerged gradually in evolution, and drawing a line between “prehuman” and “human” consciousness is arbitrary. If you mean the advent of symbolic language, there’s another arbitrary line to be drawn.
But who cares, anyway? We evolved from ancestors probably more similar to modern chimpanzees than to modern humans, and our diagnostic genetic traits emerged gradually. The question of “when did we become human?” is not only profoundly boring, but meaningless.
And, of course, evolutionary theory can’t tell us how anything happened, for the ambit of theory is to make suggestions: to see what is theoretically plausible and what is not. But theory can never tell us how things happened. Here Aczel, despite his background in popular science, simply misuses the term “evolutionary theory.” To know what really happened, we need empirical observations.
I’ll give just two more quotes showing Aczel reprising Alfred Russel Wallace’s old argument (also reprised by D. B. Hart) that the ability of humans to create powerful works of art, as well as refined achievements like calculus, could never have been the mere product of evolution, and hence provides still more evidence for the divine:
- “We have not created even a shadow of consciousness in any machine thus far. Consciousness, symbolic thinking, self-awareness, a sense of beauty, art, and music, and the ability to invent language and pursue science and mathematics—these are all qualities that transcend simple evolution: they may not be absolutely necessary for survival. These attributes of the human mind may well be described as divine: they belong to what is way above the ordinary or the compulsory for survival. The origins and purpose of consciousness and artistic and musical and literary and scientific creativity remain mysterious. Why would evolution alone bring about such developments that appear to have little to do with the survival of an individual or a species?”
Building submarines and skyscrapers aren’t absolutely necessary for survival, either. Are those things evidence for God?
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“Dennett and his collaborators consider the human mind from two problematic viewpoints: looking at the brain as a kind of computer, and looking at the brain as the result of animal evolution. The human brain is far more than a computer: computers have no consciousness. And to think of the brain as simply something that has evolved out of animal ganglia and primitive brains is also a mistake: there is a giant leap from the brain of a monkey or a dog to the brain of a human being.
Neither approach explains Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Picasso’s Guernica, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or the palaces on Venice’s Grand Canal. Neither do they explain Einstein’s general theory of relativity or Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis. Both the mechanistic and animalistic views of the brain fall flat in their attempts to explain any of these great historic achievements of the human mind. We are not machines, and we are not simple animals, either.”
Mona Lisa: ergo Jesus. That should be known as The Argument from Fine Arts.
We are in the early days of neuroscience, and the brain, much less its subjective sensations, are among science’s toughest nuts to crack. But we’ve cracked tough nuts before—ones thought uncrackable. So what makes Aczel so sure that 1) consciousness could not have been a product of evolution, either selected for directly or piggybacking on some other adaptations; 2) consciousness will never be explained mechanistically, much less evolutionarily; and 3) when the brain reaches a certain level of complexity, phenomena like art and music (an ability to create things that please our evolved senses)—and even chess—will emerge as mental spandrels? After all, even chimpanzees and macaques have a kind of cultural evolution, though it doesn’t involve symbolic language.
I wish people like Aczel would be content to admit ignorance instead of fobbing off on God. (I recall Robert G. Ingersoll’s quote, “ Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”)
I think one of the reasons for this is that scientists, and those who truly love science, are not only content with doubt, but happy with it. Give us a big, juicy unsolved problem, and we’re like a dog with a meaty bone. Once the problem’s solved, it’s on to some other problem. We’re happy only as long as we don’t know something.
As H. L. Mencken observed, the scientific researcher is like a dog sniffing at an infinite series of rat holes. Once we get a rat, it’s onto sniffing those other holes. In contrast, believers aren’t content with ignorance; it bothers and discomfits them, and they spend a lot of mental effort to explain it away. That is, after all, what apologetics is all about. And the biggest Apologetic is the use of an imaginary God to plug the gaps in our understanding.
I count 3 uncensored D*gs. Reading sophisticated theology must be taking its toll.
Richard should start charging a fee to those who gratuitously use his name as click-bait.
Victor Stenger is the only scientist I know of who has actually written a book claiming that science could disprove God. And while his argument has some interesting ideas, no-one could call it universally accepted among atheists.
But one should never let actual facts stand in the way of a good anti-atheist rant. It’s not as if his intended target audience will ever bother to fact-check his claims.
And even then, Stenger doesn’t say that science does absolutely disprove a sky fairy, just that it’s could. And as you pointed out, he’s the only one. So that makes this guy’s title intellectually dishonest at best.
But then, what would you expect from a delusional.
+1 on the gratuitous click-bait fee.
I watched a debate between Shermer/Krauss and d’Sousa/Hutchinson for intelligence^2. The topic was “does science disprove God?” It’s still up on youtube.
Jerry, I don’t know if you’re subscribed to Sean Carroll’s bl*g, but he recently posted the rest of the videos from the event that included his debate with WLC.
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/04/15/talks-on-god-and-cosmology/
One of those is a talk by Alex Rosenberg who makes an overwhelmingly compelling argument that Evolution is ironclad evidence of the nonexistence of deities. He traces it back the chain all the way to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and shows how there’s no room at any point for any god to do anything.
Sean himself, of course, though not as explicitly, has done the same thing by observing that the laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood.
Cheers,
b&
That’s one of the themes Rosenberg explores in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions.
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It is amazing how much highbrow creationism is almost solely an argument from personal incredulity. God of the Gaps, Consciousness, Magisterial Wonder, and of course Beauty and Quality—all seem to be emergent arguments that spring from unexamined incredulity.
We should expect the argument from incredulity to intensify, and, to increasingly be produced by educated intellectuals as the domain of what deism and theism can explain shrinks rapidly under the regime of science.
I agree. To steal a phrase, “it’s personal incredulity all the way down.”
Just because you’ve never seen a turtle doesn’t mean that they don’t exist!
Let me tell you about my mother!
b&
I would like to quibble with your assertion that the God of the Gaps (GOTG) argument is flawed because “for when the gaps are filled, God shrinks. If you’re going to find your God in the gaps in human understanding, you’re putting yourself at severe risk.” It seems to me that you are stretching a metaphor beyond its usefulness here. After all, as we home in on the Higgs Boson by eliminating alternative theories, did this somehow shrink the significance of the boson? No. I think GOTG is flawed simply because it is an unsubstantiated non-sequitor. There is no rational reason to leap from “I cannot explain it” to “a supernatural being did it.” There is strong evidence that our brains are predisposed to falsely ascribing agency to events of unknown provenance as an adaptive trait.
I think you’re right – ‘God’s in the gap’ arguments are, first and foremost, non sequiturs. Nevertheless, reminding people of the history of science filling gaps where God had been supposed to reside is powerfully illustrative of the folly of this particular kind of non sequitur.
I think you are misunderstanding the GOTG argument. Your analogy to the Higgs Boson gets it exactly backwards. If we had discovered other things that made the idea of the Higgs unnecessary, and never found any evidence of the Higgs Boson, then yes, the importance of it would shrink.
A “God of the Gaps” Argument usually points to a god which is potentially falsifiable. If God is a hypothesis which explains say lightning, then a naturalistic explanation of lightning would presumably make the previous explanation obsolete. The question here then is whether it is possible in theory for a satisfying explanation of consciousness to come out of science.
I’m going to guess that the answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ Even if we had a sufficiently detailed step-by-step explanation of the evolution and workings of mind from matter so as to leave no more ‘gaps’ in our scientific understanding at all — there would still be a gap between the objective explanation and subjective the feeling of what it is like to be conscious. This is where they’re really hiding God. These theists are Mysterians who believe that it’s logically impossible to close this particular gap.
But in the meantime, they enjoy the conceit that science is on their side.
minor quibble: I think you mean “The question here then is whether it is possible in principle for a satisfying explanation of consciousness to come out of science.” “Theory” gets misused more than enough by theists.
Good point. I was using a colloquialism and that’s probably not a good idea.
I think there’re still multiple points lurking in there.
First, we can be extremely confident that, once we have a sufficiently sophisticated human-modeled artificial intelligence, there’ll be no doubt both that it’s every bit as conscious as any healthy human and that the ultimate way we know as much is the exact same way we know any other human is conscious: by observing its behavior. And then we’ll have the added benefit of being able to analyze its internal workings, perhaps even with its conscious assistance.
But will even that be enough to convince the die-hards? Of course not. We still have people who sincerely think the Earth is flat, after all….
Cheers,
b&
Are you saying that the Higgs Boson was a Particle of the Gaps theory? I don’t think it ever was. It fell out of existing theory, but was impossible to prove until we could generate sufficient energies to detects its fleeting presence.
God of the Gaps doesn’t results from any prior theory, but from a desperate attempt to plug (ever-shrinking) gaps in our existing knowledge with a supernatural explanation. As pacopicopiedra said, I think you have something backwards here.
Happy Easter, everyone!
As I understand it, you are misunderstanding the problem with the magic-sits-in-the-gap claim. I see theists doing this intentionally, by the way, so it is a sensitive point.
First, progress on gaps falsifies specific magic. To use your example, non-standard Higgs fields has been eliminated. To wit, the abrahamistic gods are falsified. (Say, by the 2011 find that the human bottleneck was way many thousands of breeder pairs, not precisely the demanded 1.)
Second, it shrinks the magic. Yesterday, there was no magic potent enough to “create” species. Today, there is no magic potent enough to “create” life, or the observable universe.
The remaining valid claim on magic is that there is no magic. Even pantheism, taking nature as “magic”, falls because it is either over-determined or confused (as a non sequitur, indeed).
Right, Rich. You have nailed it!
The argument is actually a logical fallacy called “affirmative conclusion from a negative premise”. In this case, the negative premise is that “science cannot explain consciousness” and the affirmative conclusion is that “god did it”.
It’s the same with ID in that it claims that evolution is not sufficient to explain the complexity we see and therefore god did it.
It floors me that sophisticated theologians are so ignorant of basic logic.
“Consciousness, symbolic thinking, self-awareness, a sense of beauty, art, and music, and the ability to invent language and pursue science and mathematics—these are all qualities that transcend simple evolution.”
“Simple” evolution? Jeez, so much for biochemical manifestations due to billions of years of selection pressure, unpredictable adaptations, and the vagaries of gene frequency.
Indeed.
The biosphere is robust, it has survived billions of years and extinctions alike. In the godbotherers mind such a fantastic fact translates to “boring and mundane”.
That translation is born out of religious arrogance. The world can’t evolve around them, it must revolve around _them_. So anthropomophizing nature is key for them.
I am surprised you missed the Darwin bashing that was just above this piece.
Salon is becoming very tiresome. There is a complete lack of humor in the people who write there, and everybody takes paragraphs and paragraphs to make a non-existent point. The comments sections though are amazing.
“[T]here is a giant leap from the brain of a monkey or a dog to the brain of a human being.” It’s not at all clear that this is true. The big difference is language, which is a huge multiplier of intelligence because it allows us to preserve knowledge over many generations. But canine, feline, equine awareness are all real, as anyone who lives with such animals knows. And who are we to say that cetacean awareness is of a lower order than ours? Sure, they don’t have opposable thumbs, which makes them less adept than us at destroying planets. But it appears that they have language and substantial social skills.
I wonder if they also think there is a giant (and thus miraculous) leap from the brain of a human fetus to the brain of an adult. Is the biological development of the individual just as unbelievable as the biological evolution of the species?
‘Fess up: you stole that one from Richard!
…and, yes: if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best….
b&
Ah, I hadn’t remembered if or where I came across that. Dawkins is excellent. It’s an obvious analogy — it also works with vitalism.
I once had a creationist ask me if I could give an example of life coming from non-life. He assumed he had me. I told him I had billions of examples — but I’d use him. Personally.
Is an atom “alive?”
(His partner said “yes” but he corrected him: no)
Is a molecule “alive?”
No.
Is a cell “alive?”
Yes. “But oh ho, that’s not the kind of example I’m looking for.”
I told him it was the kind of example he got. And that the more he thought about it, the more it was going to start bothering him.
Richard Dawkins called it the “discontinuous mind.”
Don’t you just love lighting the fuse to little logic bombs like that? Especially in those who’ve never before ventured outside the echo chamber….
b&
Sastra,
Sometimes you think up explanations or examples before you have ever read about them from someone else.
In my younger days, I used to think I was the first to ever think up certain explanations. Then, as I became wiser and more knowledgable, I realised that I was just reinventing the wheel. And that others much more intelligent and knowledgable than myself had already thought up those explanations with a much higher degree of sophistication than I would ever be capable of.
Even others here on this blog – you can take a bow.
I comfort myself with the knowledge that there are those who will never be able to understand those explanations let alone think them up themselves.
That’s the great thing about logic and reason though. I realized that all the questions I had as a child had been asked before and we’re valid. Whether I got my analogy that Evolution happens in the same way that an infant becomes an adult from Dawkins or not doesn’t matter. When we deal with empirical evidence and objective reality, science is rife with examples of people coming to the same independent conclusions and then later having those conclusions enhanced further with more independent discovery.
This is the area where theology can’t even pretend to compete (well, maybe they can pretend, the sophisticated theologians are good at that). How many people, without having heard the various creation myths would independent come up with the same account? I’d put up a pretty hefty wager that there’s not even a method that would allow for this to happen, short of allowing time to go much further towards infinity than it currently sits.
“We’re” should be “were.” Stupid Android…
Frederick the Great summed it all up well too:
“Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand.”
These folks just adore the eye, calls it the most complexly perfect thing ever proving gaawd. Suggesting that the eye’s inability to use the infrared or ultraviolet may be a indication of a gross deficiency or that it’s inefficient to first pass light through a nerve at the farthest point in the back of the eye in order to see is pure heresy. Their solution in these cases is to simply ignore the contrary evidence and keep repeating the same tired, old dribble that people like Hart and Aczel heave upon their credulous readers.
BTW: Happy 4:20.
The link between faith and cowardice: it’s safer, more comforting, to cling to something that you are absolutely sure about, no chinks whatsoever, than to wonder, to not know, to question, to view a perceived abyss that is gonna git you if you lack that total faith. Stay afraid and your faith is strong and protective and that’s why religions instill overwhelming fear, always. Evidence is irrelevant when one is that scared.
Physicist Alan Lightman also reviews Aczel’s book. His opinion is that science can neither prove nor disprove God.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-why-science-does-not-disprove-god-by-amir-d-aczel/story.html
“when the brain reaches a certain level of complexity, phenomena like art and music (an ability to create things that please our evolved senses)—and even chess—will emerge as mental spandrels?”
Another possibility is that sexual selection might have had a role – the peacock’s tail idea. Geoffrey Miller is interesting on this.
“The origins and purpose of consciousness and artistic and musical and literary and scientific creativity remain mysterious. Why would evolution alone bring about such developments that appear to have little to do with the survival of an individual or a species?”
Our minds evolved as information-seeking and analyzing tools because enabling our reflexive/instinctive decisions to better take advantage of the opportunities that reality presents benefited reproductive success. Art, music, literature, and science are precisely what you would expect to occur when greater information-seeking and analyzing is available for implementing behaviors such as those displayed by birds, mammals, fish, and octopuses. The only mystery is in the details, not the existence of those details….and those mysteries are being tracked down and grokked at an every-increasing rate. (I suspect that some theistic folks are beginning to vaguely grasp that it is becoming more and more obvious that they are making stuff up to suit their whims and egos.)
I did enjoy one thing about the Science Friday interview, and that was this: Aczel admitted, almost as a side comment, that although he advocates for the existence of “a god,” he concedes that science has effectively disproven pretty much all of what he calls “scripture”. This means that, at the very least, he is putting forward the idea that all of the claims of every religion practiced today, aside from the idea of a creative power, are positively ludicrous. He is quietly refuting almost all of the claims of all religions, and he is doing this in a book whose title and approach make it likely to be ready by religious people. He is planting many seeds of disbelief whether he means to or not, and I like that.
No, it’s already known as the Argument from Beauty. One of its variations is Art-as-a-Route-to-God and more than a few theologians couple it with evolution for a gosh gee whiz Argument from Incredulity.
I can’t blame them too much because as I’ve mentioned before the Argument from Beauty was the last reason I had for believing in my Transcendentalist God (a god which was pretty much identical to the ‘properly understood’ one Hart thinks knocks new atheism out of the park.) I gradually discarded it as I came to appreciate both the gradualism of evolution and the shallowness of what I’ll call idealistic essentialism.
I used to think atheism couldn’t deal adequately with abstractions; I began to realize that it was the only position which actually does.
In your experience do more invocations of the AfB take the form of “this thing contains a beauty-essence and god must’ve put it there” or “our capacity for aesthetic experience must be god-given”?
I’ve seen both I think, but in my experience with the Spiritual the argument seems to blend the two, with our capacity for aesthetic experience entailing that our own godlike nature and Beauty are both connected in irreducible essence. God is both the creator of Beauty AND/OR Beauty itself — with our aesthetic capacity somehow merging us with God.
I suspect “our capacity for aesthetic experience must be god-given” is more common, though, because most religious people don’t articulate or even analyze their beliefs as entailing “essences.”
I also suspect they eventually settle on the latter, although I asked the question because I don’t think theists I’ve heard make the argument start off seeing a distinction; they just make a facile, amorphous “beauty ergo god” argument.
But if their argument is just “beauty exists, therefore god”, then they run afoul of the problem of defining beauty.
Talking about our ability to perceive beauty is a little more sophisticated, I suppose. But what makes this ability any more special than any of our other abilities? Why don’t theists say our capacity for tasting yummy food is evidence of god? Or maybe they do?
If chocolate chip cookies = bliss, then maybe Hart does.
Sometimes when you peel the layers back on what they mean by “Beauty” or “Love” they start to talk about it as if it was some sort of spiritual substance or force. I’ve gotte4n some seemingly traditional Christians to admit that maybe Beauty, Love, or even God could be “energy” (which is nothing like what physicists mean by the term of course.)
Abstractions puzzle them. They’re real, but you can’t pick them up and hold them. Make them “spiritual” though and now it feels like you just one-upped the atheist. You solved the problem and atheists must be left with thinking that Love and Beauty aren’t real and can’t matter because only the physical exists.
The non-overlapping magisteria keep drifting apart, and Salon celebrates the ‘majesty’ of the dumb side. Here we see an article that makes a fetish out of ignorance, and wallows incredulity. Heck, even when bringing up some items in the periphery of knowledge (origin of life, the nature of consciousness), rather than say that yes, we do know a thing or two, and these things we know do seem natural, it quite deliberately plays the dumb card. It says ‘no, we know nothing! Praise be! We are soooo dumb!’
This is simply wrong. A combination of decoherence and statistical interpretation gives us a pretty good idea of how quantum events result in deterministic behaviour. Aczel appears to be yet another of the posers who think that invoking their misunderstanding of “quantum” somehow buys them credibility.
I call bull. If these phenomena were inexplicable or completely unknown, we couldn’t form theories predicting them. But that has been done in all 3 cases:
– Emergence of classicality and locality: decoherence and relativity. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence ]
– Emergence of life: submarine alkaline hydrothermal emergence of life. [ http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/articles/2014/4/15/the-seafloor-electric/ ]
– Emergence of consciousness, soft and hard problem: toolkit of attention. [ http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-01-toolkit-human-consciousness.html ]
There are no gaps here anymore, the answer is “42” for what it is worth, Aczel is Not Even Wrong. Yes, we don’t know _for sure_, we don’t really know the questions in all their details, it is a futile idea that we should do so. But that is the same status as generic phylogenies (say). Yet the potential pathways exist!
Again Aczel is too late, it can indicate all right. If the attention toolkit is the basis for consciousness, it is evolutionary old.
But drawing that line … here we must draw a line! =D
I see that I missed update before posting, so I’m inadvertently repeating Richard Bond’s point.
I really do not know how science can prove something has not be shown empirically to exist. I would expect something like this to lead to a proof of existence of God, gods or any supernatural entity:
1) There is a phenomena that science cannot yet explain.
2) Let’s assume, quite preposterously, that science will never be able to explain such phenomena. Well, the logical step is to think that science does not have all the tools or expertise to handle such mystery.
3) Now, if you consider God or gods as the hypothesis to explain it, obviously, such hypothesis must contain assumptions/ideas that make predictions that can be verified. For example, Newton’s law of gravity predicts, among other things, the orbits of the planets.
Maybe it is a poor analysis, but it is the fair way I feel to insert God or gods into the equation. You cannot simply smuggling it into.
Yes, but the problems with any ‘Goddidit’ hypothesis are legion. The Goddidit hypothesis can only reside in the unknown, or at least what is unknown to the investigator. It cannot make predictions, or predict results since they can be bent to whatever the investigator wants them to be.
As soon as a thing becomes known, or better known, it instantly morphs into something materialistic and natural and therefore not from God. The Goddidit proponents stand on a shrinking iceberg.
All robust theories have ‘external’ references. That is, peripheral facts that are not directly relevant but are still critical b/c there must be continuity from one theory to another. A truth must be a friend to other truths.
Take macroevolution as an example. This asserts that repeated speciation has led to the great tree of life such that all species today share common ancestry. That last statement, that all species share common ancestry, is an extraordinary claim. But we have gobs of evidence directly for it and we have ‘outside’ references that give it continuity with other theories. These include the overwhelming geological evidence that the earth is billions of years old. Another is that we see populations evolve today, and that they speciate. We have seen speciation many times.
Contrast that to the ‘Godiddits’. All they have are appeals to the unknown. Their ‘evidence’ is only ignorance. Their data is only shrugging shoulders. Their iceberg is shrinking…shrinking….
Makes me thinking that we should call it “The Case of the Shrinking Gods (a mystery novella with CSI Richard Dawkins searching the world for the purported phenomena)”.
Or institute it as a fallacy, akin to how correlation is not causation:
“Gap thinking, the formal fallacy of attributing causal relationships between actions and events where scientific consensus is not yet established”.
Aczel was interviewed on KPCC (Los Angeles) radio show AirTalk last week. I heard it when it aired. Here is link to the broadcast ..
http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2014/04/16/36987/does-science-disprove-god/
-Florian
I am thrilled to read from someone with scientific credentials what I have been saying of myself for years: that doubt is something that makes scientists happy and fills True Believers with fear.
I am comforted by my doubts and I look for bias in every one of my certainties.
—Gideon
Channeling Professor Pedant just now re two confusing terms employed in some posts on this page which are distinctly different while simultaneously subtly similar. I get ’em mixed up all the time:
Credulity – : readiness or willingness to believe especially on slight or uncertain evidence
Incredulity – : a feeling that you do not or cannot believe or accept that something is true or real
Full Definition
: the quality or state of being incredulous : disbelief
Examples
the teacher’s incredulity about the claims in the essay proved to be well-founded
Aczel is getting beat up pretty thoroughly on the NPR Science Friday thread, and Ira Flatow is taking some well-deserved hits, too.
Science Friday hosted by Penn Jillette would be much more interesting with Penn summarizing Aczel’s argument with one word: Bullshit!
I don’t see any difference between Aczel’s “argument” and Francis Collins being inspired by a frozen waterfall. Both delusional.
I can only imagine the argument goes like this
1. New Atheists think we are machines
2. But we are not machines
3. Evolution cannot explain this
4. God could explain it
5. Therefore the New Atheists are wrong
As Edward Current would put it: Checkmate, Atheists!
“Once again, with absolutely no scientific justification whatsoever, a New Atheist wants to reduce the amazing human mind with its hopes, desires, aspirations, abilities, creative genius, goodness, love, and other complex emotions and qualities to a simple machine.”
I think this is the key paragraph of the article. It’s almost as if he’s suggesting that the New Atheists are blind to the significance of consciousness.
Could be rephrased as:
“Once again, with solid scientific justification, a New Atheist wants to describe the amazing human mind, with its hopes, desires, aspirations, abilities, creative genius, goodness, love, and other complex emotions and qualities, as the most marvelous and elaborate machine ever conceived.”
You’d think with that simple rephrasing, there’d be no objectionable point. “Isn’t it amazing that this singular organ is responsible for all our subjective experience?” Unless the very notion that our mental lives have a physical basis is somehow offensive, in which case it isn’t the New Atheists Aczel need worry about, rather it’s neurobiology in general.
The problem is, at least as far as I can see, is that whatever our consciousness is doesn’t really say much about the truth of our inner lives. It’s why introspective a priori musings on consciousness aren’t going to tell us much beyond the introspective process – we can’t see what makes consciousness by examining consciousness. The argument over whether physical processes are enough isn’t going to be settled by appealing to creative genius or complex emotions – just how does that show it’s something other than brain activity involved?!
It’s all well and good to be a mysterian about consciousness at this stage as we don’t have good answers. But we shouldn’t ignore the good evidence that we have that our consciousness is the function of our brain simply because we don’t have a good answer for what that means yet. Dennett’s attempt, like Smart’s (brain-mind identity) or Putnam’s (functionalism) before him, and necessary in the development toward a better understanding. What’s not happening, however, is finding something external to our brain activity involved.
It is worth pointing out that the solipsist argument (“you are all just fig newtons of my imagination”) is simply rejected, even though we have no way of knowing otherwise. It is pointless. The same thing, in a subtler form, applies to the “proof” of consciousness in a machine. How we will really know?
I actually object to the line “We have not created even a shadow of consciousness in any machine thus far.” I think we have created “shadows” of consciousness – faint ones, but shadows nevertheless.
I have watched the execution of an elaborate recursive search algorithm, as it “prunes the search tree” and “probes possibilities.” Even if I wrote the code myself, I still catch myself thinking things like “it is looking for something” and “it is getting closer” and “it got stuck on something there.”
When the day comes that we see a machine that does perhaps 1% of what a human mind can do, we will find it irresistible to attribute consciousness to it. It is like a threshold of complexity, at which point our minds give in and want to treat it like a thinking entity. And then we will argue on the Internet about whether it is really thinking.
“Data, do you experience qualia?”
“Yes, I compute that I do.”
It seems that a “God of the gaps” argument looks at the body of human knowledge from the outside. It (knowledge) is getting bigger all of the time in an uncontrollable manner and a rate that might engulf them soon. It is something to fear.
The rationalist/atheist… looks at the body of human knowledge from the inside and wants to see how far it can be extended. It is our best and last hope. It is something to welcome not fear. It also what sets us apart from “all the rest” and it might be what kills us.
Of course they both will fail ultimately. The person that employs the GotG argument because knowledge will expand as long as humanity exists. The rationalist because there is no end to the subdivisions of the infinite body of “all knowledge.”
And both will succeed. The “GotGer” because people are short-lived and don’t personally remember those arguments raised before (on an emotional level) and dashed by the expansion of knowledge. They are also (oddly enough) intellectually flexible enough to form justifications for the changing ground on which their previous view of unknowable-knowledge stood.
The rationalist because knowledge continues to expand and provides success in coping with our environment. (Course it is infinite. Maybe.)
Interesting problem. Where will the balance be struck and will humanity survive the process and the outcome? I won’t but my kids or their kids (…) might.
Minor modification. “The humanity which contains my kids and their kids might.”
How does he know computers can’t obtain consciousness? We haven’t even precisely confined the phenomena yet. But insofar as a human brain could be modeled by a powerful enough computer with parallel processors, there’s nothing about the brain that would seem to prevent it. How do we know a sufficiently powerful quantum computer wouldn’t have some notion of self awareness?
Aczel says that if it takes a powerful entity to create one universe, how much more powerful an entity would it take to create an infinite number of universes.
(Therefore multiverse theory is evidence for god).
In other words, if we are clever enough to make one 747, we must be even cleverer if we can make two 747s, and even cleverer if we can make there 747s etc etc.
As Sean Carroll points out, it is number of concepts that count, not the counting within concepts.
Next he says that in fact there are no actually existing infinities, only mathematical infinities.
But all we need to do to castrate that argument is to say that the number of universes in a multiverse is tending towards infinity. Which, I have always taken this to mean in any case. After all, you cannot actually reach an infinity as if it’s an actual number set in stone. There we now have an infinite number of universes!
KEY FLAW in the above religious nonsense is regards how apparently we can never know when “in evolution human consciousness became a reality.“, ergo God. However a LOT of non-h animals possess consciousness – I can confirm this as a zoologist, and there are heaps of published papers in ethology by likewise scientists evidencing irrefutably that consciousness exists along any branches of the tree of life (http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf). Totally destroys the whole God gave man, the highest of his creations, consciousness bullshit doesn’t it? =P
Also, bowerbirds have created powerful works of art way before people did, did god decide that he wold grant a lineage of birds art and the ability to appreciate beauty too? and dolphins, birds and marmots language? These ARE “mere product of evolution“, as they contribute to reproductive success.
And definitely NO there is a giant leap from the brain of a monkey or a dog to the brain of a human being. Anatomically and functionally there are incredibly similar. Dogs and monkeys are arguably wiser since they do not waste their brain power or time on fabricating fictitious gods =P
Eukaryote evolution, really? We got quite a good command of that. I think he just likes the ring of the word Eukaryote and makes up gaps, his audience won’t mind…
I heard Aczel (on Science Friday of all venues!) last week flogging this book which must be excrible.
He trotted out every religous apologist trope in the book, in badgering, sneering tone, like these things were just obvious. Really, Amir: Bagering mild-mannered Ira Flatow?
Completely explodes is rep. as a science journalist — if he ever had one.
He uses Fermat’s last Theorem to “prove” that “non-existence can be proved; sicence can’t disprove god, therefore there is one!”
Talk about sleight of hand. He needs to encounter a good, hard-nosed interviewer.
Oh, Jesus…nonexistence proofs are as ancient as the regular kind…Euclid on the nonexistence of the largest prime number, anybody?
…and the same basic logic as Euclid used can similarly prove that there’s no “most powerful” entity, which rather does away with the other half of his claim….
b&