When I visited Matt Dillahunty in Austin, he suggested that we do a one-on-one interview not only about Faith versus Fact, but also about science in general and evolution in particular. This video was one of his productions for his Patreon contributors (you can find it here), but is also posted on YouTube, and I embed it below. As always, I can’t bear to watch it, so I can’t say how it went. It’s fifty minutes long. I have no idea why that blasted photo is the video avatar; it looks as if I can’t stand my own book!
Matt is doing superb work lecturing and especially debating theists: as a former diehard Southern Baptist, he’s uniquely qualified to debate believers, does so regularly, and, so I hear, has a remarkable record of victory.As most of you know, he also is one of the hosts of The Atheist Experience on Austin cable t.v., perhaps the nation’s most famous television show for nonbelievers (see the archive here).
I was greatly impressed by his knowledge of religion and philosophy, and by his ability to counter the arguments of both garden-variety theists as well as Sophisticated Theologians™. These efforts, which largely constitute Matt’s work, deserve our support. And you can tender your support, at least in a pencuniary way, by making a donation on Matt’s Patreon page.
Matt says ‘blog’ in the introduction – just so you know 🙂
I was shocked and horrified by this.
I’ll give him a pass; he probably doesn’t know the convention!
subbing while watching the video…
Maybe Matt could be the go-to person for those believers who claim PCC doesn’t get to have a say because he doesn’t have — fill in the blank: background as a Christian, any history of real belief, etc….
imo Lewontin’s remark makes perfect sense when read in context:
“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. […] Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”
The sciences can only concern themselves with well-defined concepts, not with undefinable quasi-concepts like “god” etc. There can be in principle no proof of the existence of one or more gods, because “god” is just an empty word, pointing to nothing. Only when someone comes up with a definition of their god, together with criteria to decide whether or not this god exists, becomes the hypothesis testable and a matter for science. This hasn’t happened yet, and probably never will. I think it is a mistake often made by agnostics to say “I don’t believe in the existence of a god” before asking “What do you mean when you ask me if I believe in the existence of a god?”
You need to read Faith versus Fact to see where I disagree. The “supernatural”, including manifestations of God, can indeed be tested by science. The claim, for instance, that God answers the prayers of Christians can be tested. If you posit “God” as some celestial being who answers prayers” then that is not an incoherent concept. Now it may become more incoherent when you press believers for more explanation, but the fact is that science in its early days did concern itself with God. It was, for example, Newton’s explanation for the stability of the planetary orbits, and most of the world’s explanation for the designoid features of plants and animals, as well as their origin. Would you tell Newton and Darwin to stop arguing against God because the concept was incoherent at the outset?
And of course science can also let the Paranormal Foot in the door, as it has when testing for whether ESP or telekinesis exists. If any paranormal or divine phenomena are supposed to have effects on the world, then the concept of what causes them, however ill-defined, can still be tested scientifically.
Darn it, Arno, you preempted my post below.
Jerry: “[God] was, for example, Newton’s explanation for the stability of the planetary orbits, and most of the world’s explanation for the designed features of plants and animals, as well as their origin.”
I think Arno and I, as well Lewontin and Beck, would respond that this is no explanation at all.
God was the default explanation because, as is still often the case (as with the origin of life), people tend to say that if science can’t come up with an explanation NOW, it must have been God. It’s the fact that we have come up with naturalistic explanations time and time again that has taken God off the table. It is not, as Lewontin claimed, that we ruled out God’s intervention as impossible from the outset.
That is certainly how the history of modern science unfolded in the Christian West.
Sorry, Zado!
No, you can *not* posit gods as celestial beings, because what would ‘celestial’ and ‘being’ mean in this context? I maintain it is a mistake to make this first step into their Land of Makebelieve. What you do is you grant the possibility of the existence of God (which you use as a proper name, as indicated by the singular and the capital G) and *then* test for his (or her?) effects. Why make the second step before the first? It would not prove the existence of Yahweh if the prayer study had come out differently.
Agree.
There’s an infinite variety of paranoid conspiracy theories one could propose, each of which would be self-consistent and an actually-possible perhaps-really-real explanation for the phenomenon we observe. Space aliens seeding life on Earth a few billion years ago and continuing to guide evolution along the way would be one of them — and would be a perfect match for “celestial being.” In this particular case, we have overwhelming reason to be confident that’s not an accurate description of history to date…but it’s conceivable we ourselves might take on the role of “celestial being” in some distant future, assuming we survive the next few centuries.
You could also propose a Matrix-style simulation, or a Star Trek holodeck, or the philosopher’s favored brains in vats, or the CIA controlling your thoughts with mind rays, or whatever.
In each case, the key element is that the theory can’t, even in principle, be disproven — any more than Turing’s famous Halting Problem can be solved, for they’re all of the same class of construction. And they can be infinitely nested. The CIA is controlling your thoughts because they’re Agents of the Matrix which is part of Alice’s Red King’s Dream.
And since the paranoid conspiracy theories are infinite and beyond disproof, there’s no sane reason to even bother with them. Is it the CIA as Matrix Agents in the Red King’s Dream, or the KGB as Klingon holodeck operators in Zhuangzi’s Butterfly’s Dream? Or maybe the one masquerading as the other to throw you off?
If somebody proposes such a conspiracy, you can dismiss it out of hand until some sort of evidence is presented to support it. If it’s framed sincerely and coherently, it might be worthy of a bit of consideration, as the panspermia models demonstrate — but, again, in the case of terrestrial life, we can be overwhelmingly certain that life has been evolving without outside influence for four billion years and that early conditions were perfectly favorable to abiogenesis; even if the earliest common ancestral replicator did hitch a ride on a comet, it would have done so from somewhere just like Earth, and there would have been similar replicators of purely terrestrial origin forming within roughly the same half-billion-year window regardless.
A number of popular conspiracy theories we can rule flat out. Loch Ness has been scoured; we know with as much certainty that there aren’t any monsters there as you should know that there aren’t any herds of ravenous tyrannosaurs stampeding around you right now. There aren’t any gods atop Mt. Olympus. There wasn’t ever any global Flood, and, unless you wish to propose one of those Matrix-style conspiracies, the Earth wasn’t formed in a week in the middle of the Egyptian Dynastic period. Jesus is an ancient Jewish demigod with a well-documented pre-Caesar history (including in the Bible itself) and his sojourn in Judea is a bog-standard Euhemerized epic biography no different from Zeus’s tomb on Crete or Romulus and Remus’s adoption by wolves. Muhammad, too; only myths ride off into the sunset on the back of a flying horse.
As a final note, I’ll point out that even any proposed gods, even if demonstrated real, would simply be in some position of power relative to us and be no better able than us to discern the ultimate nature of reality. Even Alice’s Red King, even if he Dreamed the Matrix that created Agents that acted as CIA agents with mind rays, couldn’t rule out the possibility that he himself is nothing but a minor character in some author’s children’s story.
b&
Ben, I’m trying to imagine an event that would demonstrate the existence of some god, but I can’t. What do you have in mind? And how would you tell the difference between “Yes, now I know there is a god” and one of your other scenarios? What specific criteria would make that distinction? Keeping in mind the fact that we are already a “brain in a vat” (i.e. the cranium) fed information by sensors (i.e. senses), as Searle has pointed out.
There are many claims in each religion that would test their existence. The existence of a single human breeder pair bottleneck would have been a passing test for christianism say, same as the prayer studies could have been.
Some have noted that stars aligning instantly to quote something from the christianist religious texts (from the viewpoint of Earth) would be a conclusive “pass” test.
How is the alignment of stars to quote Christian texts “a conclusive ‘pass’ test” for Christianity? If they quoted Harry Potter instead, would that be conclusive proof of Voldemort’s existence?
If an entity has the power to rearrange stars at will, the ability to quote scripture as well seems unremarkable, and gives us no useful information about the nature of that entity or the truth of the texts being quoted.
But perhaps I’ve completely misunderstood what you’re saying.
Thanks Torbjörn, that last scenario is brilliant. Hard to come up with a naturalistic explanation for that one. Which is all that it shows. Nothing about the existence of Yahweh or any other Christian claims.
I think granting xianity a “pass” based on either of those scenarios is setting the bar rather low. Especially on the first case. Nothing about them rules out a non-xianity explanation, and given the amount of evidence we already have that contradicts xian claims, I’d say it would be incumbent upon us to require something more definitively an either of those examples.
Great googlymoogly. Please excuse the spelling/grammar errors.
It depends entirely on your definition of what constitutes a god.
For many, the programmers of the Matrix would qualify as gods. I think Jerry might fall into this category. An entity who could demonstrate ultimate control over every aspect of your perception of reality would, from a practical perspective, be indistinguishable from any of the gods of any religion to date.
Yet, as I mentioned, even such an entity would not in turn be able to eliminate the possibility that it itself is similarly at the mercy of some other even more powerful entity. And what sense does it make to describe in divine terms a “god” that itself has no clue about the true nature of reality and can have its own reality distorted at the whim of another?
I would suggest that there’s really only one coherent definition of the term, “god,” and that’s as a particular class of character in a certain popular genre of fiction whose literary purpose is to establish ultimate and unquestionable authority for the author’s views. The gods demonstrate their powers (and thus authority) by doing that which truly is impossible. And it’s essential that the miracles the gods perform really actually be impossible, or else somebody would be able to themselves perform the miracle and thus usurp the power and authority of the gods…and of the authors of the fictions in which the gods reside.
For example, no priest is going to be stupid enough to create a god that proves its worth by performing the “impossible” task of, say, throwing a rock a couple feet farther than the strongest kid in the village has ever been able to throw it; rather, the god would lift a mountain even bigger than the one on the other side of the valley, form it into a ball, and lift it into the sky to become the Moon. And if the god can do that, you damned well better be sure you don’t want the god to smite you for failing to offer up the choicest of your flock as a sacrifice at the temple for the priests to feast upon….
Cheers,
b&
Ben, I’m trying to imagine an event that would demonstrate the existence of some god, but I can’t.
Sincere prayer invoking a specific named entity works. Other names don’t. Seemingly insincere believers can’t make it work. Further research using brain scans is able to identify the notion of “sincerity” as a mental state, and the ability to invoke working prayers is correlated 100% with this state (no false positives or negatives). That’s just one example. Is it definitive/deductive evidence of the existence of that god? No, of course, not; nothing in science is definitive or meets the criteria of a deductive proof. Is it supportive of the hypothesis that that God exists? Yes.
I also think you’re getting too wrapped around the axle with the thought of the range of possible gods. Yes, that range is infinite. But science doesn’t have to address all of them at once; it merely has to address those hypotheses brought to the table. One at a time if necessary. Thus we can test theologies as they are offered up. If one of them seemingly passes tests in which both a disconfirming and confirming results is possible…then passes some more, better controlled tests…then passes even more stringent tests, eventually we’re going to call that theology “tentatively confirmed” or “provisionally true.”
The problem with theologies and god-concepts isn’t that they are inherently outside the scope of science, its that after thousands of years of failure (1) modern theologies have generally stopped linking themselves to testable claims, and (2) it is hard to think of further tests we haven’t already done. Thus the “how can we test it” question leaves us flummoxed because the closely related question “how can we test it in a new or novel fashion it hasn’t already failed” is pretty hard to answer.
The problem with that approach is that it’s common for theists to explicitly put their goalposts on rocket sleds in such a way that the proposed set of gods coming from a single theist really is infinite. That’s the whole point of the “omni-” properties.
That also runs headlong into another problem typical with god proposals: the proposals themselves are typically fundamentally incoherent, with the incoherence glossed over with “mysterious ways” or other such “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” bullshit.
You wouldn’t seriously consider a scientific investigation of an entity whose defining characteristic is that he’s a married bachelor, would you? Even if it’s claimed that he’s got a stash of Cheetos hidden at the top of the bookcase? Sure, you could verify the Cheetos claim easily enough, but that’s irrelevant to the question of his married bachelorhood.
Similarly, there’s no point in considering a scientific investigation of an all-powerful universe creator, even if it’s also claimed that said all-powerful universe creator occasionally helps drunks find their keys. Omnipotence is its own self-contained contradiction, as is the notion that all of everything could be created. Maybe there is or maybe there isn’t some special something-or-other that helps drunks find their keys, but it’s entirely irrelevant to the incoherent questions of ultimate power and origins.
b&
But from a Bayesian perspective, 100% correlation offers more support for the hypothesis of hitherto unknown mechanical processes that are 100% predictable than it does for the hypothesis of a specific superintelligent agent whose decisions are 100% predictable by puny humans.
It’s not just a question of whether other explanations are logically possible. It’s a question of which explanations are (a) best supported by the evidence, and (b) most parsimonious. An explanation that invokes the entire apparatus of Christian mythology to explain the correlation of effective prayer with particular brain states fails on both counts.
There’s another problem.
Even if we started today observing some new phenomenon that reasonably fit theological explanations, theology still falls far short of explaining the overwhelming mass of explanations to date. Why didn’t Jesus ever call 9-1-1 when his official agents were busy raping children in his name? Sure, maybe he’s restoring amputated limbs today, but where the fuck was he for the past couple millennia?
If you found a rabbit in the precambrian today, your first thought would be of some sort of contamination through upheaval or similar processes, and quickly on the heels of that would be some sort of human-originating hanky-panky. If it could be reliably established, your next thought wouldn’t be to overturn biology but to propose time travel. After that, you’re headed squarely into the realm of paranoid conspiracy theories in which your own sanity should be one of the first things you question.
Same as if the Sun started rising in the West, or the stars spelling out Bible verses, or what-not. That’s a bad acid trip, even if whatever is tripping is outside your skull.
b&
It is a rather transparent attempt to separate science from culture to claim, against evidence, that we can’t test superstition of all kinds.
Specifically I have to disagree with Lewontin because he is simply wrong, loking for “what works” has never made use of any fixed constraints. In that sense what philosophers call “materialism” – and what I call absence of magic action or the existence of thermodynamics of all closed (and so all open) systems – is an observation.
I also have to disagree more specifically with this idea: “I maintain it is a mistake to make this first step into their Land of Makebelieve. What you do is you grant the possibility of the existence of God (which you use as a proper name, as indicated by the singular and the capital G) and *then* test for his (or her?) effects.”
Yes, of course we must grant the possibility of _anything observable_ (and then we can test it). How else is science supposed to work? Protect superstition from testing because of religious special pleading!? That would be a quick way to destroy scientific objectivity!
Re prayer studies, their history is that there is a very old strain of religious superstition (that you may have heard of). They use prayer, and so it was tested. If prayer had come first and the hypothesis it was based on later, possibly someone could have made a model independent test. But in this case there was an accompanying model (of magic action) that was tested with the observation.
We all agree that you must grant the possibility of anything observable.
The point Arno et al are making is that you can’t test for something that is not well-described. How do you search for something when you don’t know what it looks like, or even what it is?
But that’s not an argument against the claim that theological or religious hypotheses are testable. Its pointing out that religious people rarely parse their belief-claims as testable hypotheses. If they did, we could test them.
Look, Sagan’s garage-dwelling dragon is not testable. Does that mean no dragon-belief is testable by science? Of course not.
Does Sagan’s example imply that dragon-beliefs are not testable by science in principle, that the whole category “dragon belief” is inaccessible to science? Again, of course not. The only thing Sagan’s example shows is that some dragon beliefs can be made inaccessible through clever property-choice. The same is true for gods and theologies; the fact that some can be made inaccessible through clever property-choice doesn’t put the entire class of such entities outside the purview of science.
“Dragon” is much better defined than “god”.
You’ll get much more agreement among a random sampling of people regarding what a dragon is than regarding what a god is.
Additionally, I haven’t come across a definition of god that’s concrete enough to be amenable to search.
There’s one big one though that should be open to testing. That is, the monotheistic claim that God created our Universe and has told people that he has done it. If this God actually cares about people verifying this, it should be pretty straight forward to tell anyone how to objectively verify this. God showing up would be a start.
That would be because you’re limiting your selection of definitions to those offered by believers. Look at it from an anthropological perspective, and the definition becomes crystal clear: a certain class of fictional character whose purpose is to provide unquestionable authority for the claims of the author — with the authority being established by the accomplishment of truly impossible feats.
b&
Well yes. But that’s beside the point about not being able to search for an actual entity in the universe if you have no useful description, no “landmarks” for which to look.
I like your definition, but you might as well tell me I can go out and legitimately look for a florfelfraggen because one definition is the collection of letters “florfelfraggen” right here on this blobsite.
“florfelfraggen”
I feel the need to announce that I pleasantly discovered the German for “bumblebee” – “hummelflug.”
Not exactly right there I’m afraid: bumblebee is Hummel, Hummelflug is flight of the bumblebee.
Interesting! Johann Nepomuk Hummel wrote a very notable trumpet concerto; I had no clue about the entomological etymology of his name.
…and now you’ve got me wondering about how to do a mashup of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXN4GAar4CI
with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNnoTqvmdM4
b&
Okie-Dokie. Well, pray tell, enlighten me. How does one say in German, “flight of the bee” (as opposed to the bumblebee).
@Filippo: flight of the bee = Bienenflug, or, depending on context, Flug der Biene
Awww what a cute name!
Oh, I wouldn’t even begin to pretend that you could actually find a god — that’s the obvious conclusion from the observation-derived definition. The gods can only exist within fiction, as a god existing outside of the priestly-authored fiction usurps the power of the priests, and the whole point of the god is to bestow godly power upon the priests.
So, if you ever do actually find something you suspect of being divine, even if what you find is real, it’s really not a god. It might be really powerful and really impressive and really whatever-other-property, but its divinity is fake.
b&
It is? Can you name a property everyone agrees is shared by all the things coming under the label ‘dragon’?
It’s like deja vu all over again: It makes no sense to invent a word (“dragon”, “god”), and then rack your brain what it could possibly mean. Like Lewontin taught: Better start with an observation and work from there (as of today there haven’t been any sightings of either dragons or gods that I am aware of).
Still, dragons and gods are different kinds of chimeras, because a dragon would be an animal, no? We already have a category it would fit in. Biology would have to deal with them. If gods were beings, they too would be the subject of biology.
Oh, that’s easy. Flying reptilian, typically a winged hexapod, exhales fire, mercurial and dangerous, fearsome in battle. Has very powerful magical abilities, often with respect to the ability to persuade others. Nearly always considered otherworldly in some form — whether not of the Earth or from some magic plane parallel to the Earth or originating long before familiar species or the like. In the West, usually the hero’s penultimate enemy; in the East, usually a more distant divine force — with character and personality often inverted for theatrical effect.
Variations on the theme may exist in the same manner as there’re lots of variations on the “carnivore” theme or the “primate” theme.
b&
Well, no single thing that’s definitive – “fabulous reptile of huge size” is probably closest to a working definition that encompasses fire and cold drakes, winged or not, Western and Eastern.
But the “parameter space” is significantly smaller than it is for “god”.
/@
But the claims are designed (whether intelligently or evolutionarily; doesn’t matter) to be untestable. It’s kinda the whole point of religion…you wouldn’t need faith if you could test the claims, after all.
b&
To put it another way, I think you’re confusing non-definitive, testable claims (like “prayer works” or “there were two progenitors of all humanity”) with definitive claims.
There are lots of claims made by theists that can indeed be tested. The hopelessly vague “god exists” is not one, which only means that it can be dismissed with Hitchens’ Razor.
This is why some atheists say that there is no possible evidence that could convince them of “God”; for whatever evidence you might conjure, there are other explanations available that are less fantastic that could explain the same evidence.
P.S. Your question “Would you tell Newton and Darwin to stop arguing against God because the concept was incoherent at the outset?” I simply don’t understand. They weren’t arguing against “God”, because no such thing exists. They did what Laplace did: get rid of one extra, Ockhamly superfluous (vestigial?) hypothesis. If someone says “My guardian angel makes me insensitive to pain” I can hit them on the nose, but what does that prove? Is that an argument against the existence of said angel? When indeed I can’t make them cry by anything I do to them – does that prove that their premise (“my guardian angel did it”) is true? When they say “My guardian angel kept me out of accidents today” – what can I do? You can neither prove nor refute the existence of god as long as nobody knows what the word stands for.
My response to Jerry’s question would be: no one’s saying we shouldn’t even argue against god. It’s just that the first step in the argument is already conclusive. Theists haven’t presented any coherent picture of what we should even be looking for, much less any objective evidence. Telling theists their god is an “anti-concept” *is* an argument.
Theists need to get specific and coherent. Then we can proceed to the steps of looking and either finding or not finding.
Specific claims like “prayer works” are indeed testable, but they are not synonymous with the claim “god exists”.
As Arno points out below, even if you tested prayer and it was shown to work, you still wouldn’t have addressed the question of god’s existence. Prayer’s efficacy may be due to some other reason.
To address the claim “god exists”, “god” would need to be defined in a more specific way than “the thing that answers prayers”. You couldn’t demonstrate Bigfoot’s existence based on a vague definition like “a tall, hairy thing that lives in the woods”, because in that case, my father is Bigfoot.
(I guess it turns out Arno’s comment is above.)
This is my view as well. Even supposing you could demonstrate that prayer is efficacious, if you want to understand the mechanism of its efficacy, all your work is still before you.
Moreover, the more reliable, repeatable, and predictable your demonstration of prayer’s efficacy, the less likely it becomes that the underlying mechanism involves a celestial being with a mind of its own making yea-or-nay decisions beyond our ability to fathom. Rather, a highly repeatable demonstration argues strongly in favor of an explanation in terms of impersonal, mechanical forces of a sort we don’t yet understand.
No, Aron Ra is Bigfoot.
/@
We don’t withhold our provisional acceptance from GR or QM using the logic “there might be another explanation for all these observations.” That statement is always true in science – indeed, it’s just Hume’s problem of induction. We basically ignore it: we provisionally accept hypotheses that make accurate predictions, that explain a wide range of phenomena, that are fruitful, etc… even if there are a theoretically infinite number of other hypotheses that can explain the same data.
So if we aren’t hyper-skeptical when it comes to other inductively supported hypotheses, why should we be hyper-skeptical of theological ones? I’m not saying the evidence for a god is there and we should all become believers. I’m saying that if, in the future, some prophet comes along and makes remarkably prescient knowledge claims (hands us the cure for cancer. Then unifies GR and QM. Etc..) and also performs testable miracles, why shouldn’t we provisionally accept that person’s hypothesis, that his knowledge and miraculous effects come from a powerful being? Yes there are other explanations. With inductive reasoning, that is always true. That doesn’t stop us from tentatively/provisionally accepting theories in other cases, it shouldn’t stop us from tentatively/provisionally accepting a theory in this (hypothetical) case.
I don’t think it would be hyper-skeptical to look at a test that showed prayer works and be reluctant to conclude that it demonstrates the truth of xianity. There’s too much other evidence against the truth of xianity.
Prayer-miracles that only Baptist ministers (and every Baptist minister) could perform in a testable, reproducible (etc.) matter would certainly make people reevaluate whether Baptist belief is credible. Again, I think the problem with religion isn’t that it’s fundamentally or philosophically inaccessible to science. The problem is that we have accessed it and it has failed…so much so, that now we have a difficult time thinking up new tests for it, because pretty much everything we’ve thought to try we’ve tried, and its failed. We must have this argument about hypothetical futures where prayers are answered because in reality, they aren’t.
No; the problem is that the Baptist ministers are all too eager to offer up “proof” that their prayers and only their prayers work. And, of course, Mennonite ministers do the same, as do the imams and all other flavors of witch doctor.
b&
For the same reason you should be hyper-skpetical of claims of alien abductions or sales of the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Theological claims have been overwhelmingly thoroughly investigated for at least a few millennia, now, and the conclusion that they’re nothing more than the product of an highly profitable confidence scam is overpowering.
…or would you like to spend some of your time investigating my claim of some prime Arizona oceanfront property for sale…?
Those sorts of things happen all the time. Deepak Chopra and many others like him make fucktons of money selling nostrums to cure cancer based on his claims of successfully unifying physics. And it’s all backed by lots of sincere testimonies and entire books filled with technobabble. Do you really think it’s worth provisionally accepting Deepak’s hypothesis?
b&
eric, if your prophet tells us his god wants us to wear blue underwear on Tuesdays, should we provisionally accept that part of his hypothesis as well, even though it’s untestable and irrelevant to his ability to perform miracles?
Or does parsimony still apply? In which case, we should provisionally accept the simplest hypothesis that explains the prophet’s abilities, which probably does not match the explanation he offers.
” . . . in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, . . . its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises . . . the tolerance . . . for unsubstantiated just-so stories . . . .”
To whatever extent these “constructs,” “promises” (more likely made by politicians and capitalist entrepreneurs, IMHO) and “just-so stories” exist in science (practiced after all by human primates a half-chromosome away from a chimpanzee), what is that compared to the extent to which these notions exist in religion/politics/mass culture?
(Hitch’s reflection on the efficacy of a poll of the U.S. public, and its (un)informed, (in)competent evaluation of the prospects for Ronald Reagan’s recovery from colon cancer, comes to mind.)
Very nice interview.
Interesting thread about science and the possibility of the supernatural.
Now, I don’t disagree with anything that was said about scientific methodology and the importance of being open (at least initially) to all possible explanations. I just have to wonder: did we really need centuries of experiments and observations to rule out the supernatural? To suggest this, to me, is to suggest that the supernatural used to be a viable hypothesis. But was it? Ever?
Democritus came up with materialism and atomism 2400 years ago. While he had no inkling of the Cosmos as we now understand it, his conception of the Cosmos–as a sphere of order, explicable in terms of the phenomena that comprise it, and reducible to fundamental patterns of behavior–forms the philosophic bedrock of modern science. This is, in effect, what Cosmos means. When I was a child I had no idea who Democritus was, or what the philosophic tenets of materialism were. I can only remember a visceral conviction that the world was ordered, and that this orderliness is what made possible, not just its comprehensibility, but its very existence.
So where do deities and omens and magic fit into this ordered universe? I would claim, by definition, that they don’t. As a more contemporary scientist-philosopher put it, the real miracle is that there are no miracles.
So my question to others: does this make me a dogmatic naturalist?
If you are suggesting that the non-existence of the supernatural is evident, I don’t think this is or has been true for most people. Democritus, Epicures and Lucretius seem to me exceptions.
We may have now a better picture of the world, but naturalism seems only to attract the happy few. Even today in academic circles it’s not the clear winner, what I think is pretty disappointing:
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/04/29/what-do-philosophers-believe/
That’s very interesting. I’d love to know what “non-naturalism” comprises. I’d also love to know how any natural being, created by and enmeshed within Nature, can sensibly claim to be aware of anything beyond it.
That’s what I’m claiming: not that the non-existence of the supernatural is evident, but that the very concept of the supernatural is incoherent and insane–by definition. As Carl Sagan said, “The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”
Again, I may just be a rabid ideologue.
Formulated like this it sounds like hindsight-bias or it is meaningless; by definition the earth could be flat and the center of the universe.
Without reference to science the naturalist may have a hunch but he has no defend-able case against a supernatural claim.
He does not need a defend-able case against a supernatural claim. That’s my point. Coming from a fellow ordinary mortal, a supernatural claim must by definition be utter bullshit. (Now, if the heavens part and a voice booms down collectively at a group of townsfolk, we might have something interesting.)
A propos, whether the earth is flat or not, or at the center of the universe, is certainly a naturalistic claim one way or the other. Discovering the truth one way or the other would, naturally, depend on observation and reality-testing (i.e. science). But “supernaturalism” (whatever that is) need never for a moment be taken seriously.
It’s the answer to Anaximander’s Paradox: the first human could not have been an infant, for it would have died without its mother. But where did its mother come from, if she herself could not have grown from an infant?
Most people threw up their hands and said some magic being(s) did it.
Anaximander thought the first humans gestated inside fish and sprang from them as adults.
I think one of these is to be taken seriously. (And that’s not hindsight. Anaximander was making a claim about a relationship between people and fish, both natural entities.)
I mean, you could argue at some level that this is as baseless an assumption as a supernatural one, but is it really?
Baring a number of intermediate steps, Anaximander was kind of right …
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Ok, I understand now. For non-empirical claims I think you are right.
Maybe untested empirical claims should get a little more respect. But personally, I wouldn’t take any claims serious until fully confirmed by science.
Though false beliefs can be very entertaining on birthday parties 🙂
“Baring a number of intermediate steps, Anaximander was kind of right …”
He was certainly on the right track. Not bad for a dude born in the 7th century BCE, am I right?
Interestingly, Chinese philosophy never fell into the anthropomorphic trap of atomism (“Your feet never touch the ground!” George Takei on Facebook), and therefore never had a need for cartesian dualism. They start from “everything changes naturally” (=on its own). Western science is now slowly catching up with them.
I think an assumption of supernaturalism is quite reasonable (see hyperactive agency detection). This is my favourite bible verse:-
“The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they have committed abominable deeds”
It suggests some people could see it was all BS even then.
Ah… I thought for a second you were pointing to Michael Fumento’s “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS”, on the bookshelf. This is the first time I’ve seen that book on anybody else’s shelf. I’m impressed. (great book, BTW. Meticulously argued and well-researched… It has stood the test of time, too. [was written in 1990])
Excellent interview! So cool to see this as I work on yet another book…
JAC, after all those days of cross country driving, you actually look more full of life, of verve in this interview than I recall from previous ones. It’s a very good interview.
I thought the same – you’re looking very refreshed, and it was a great interview.
If anyone’s curious as to Matt’s talks and whatnot, I’ve collated a list of practically everything of what he’s ever done and what he’s up to: http://tinyurl.com/themattlist
And yes, Matt is aware of the list and approves of my friendly stalking.
That TinyURL redirects to:
https://piratenpad.de/p/r.7c4c481041cdbd0695b2d7e68ffaee04
…which can’t be opened because of some sort of SSL error. Any chance of the content being available on a functioning server…?
b&
That opens fine for me.
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I’ve seen it happen that piratenpads won’t open on some castrated devices (e.g. my 1st gen ipad). Can you give it a try on a real computer?
It works on both iOS and OS X for me.
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Thanks, Ant. I’ve checked with virgin Firefox and Edge installs, both also work fine. Ben, it’s probably got something to do with you 🙁
This is with Safari on OS X 10.8.5, all updates applied. I don’t have any other devices handy.
b&
OS X 10.10.4. Upgrade, Ben! Upgrade!
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‘Tain’t so simple any more…various overlapping version requirements…besides which, 10.8 is still officially supported and on the regular patch cycle.
I used to be one of the first to upgrade software. Now, I find I get a lot more stuff done and spend much less time fucking around with pointless bullshit if I put off upgrades until there’s some really compelling reason — typically something approaching end of life, or some other critical bug or what-not.
I’m vindicated in this at home by comparison with the way we do things at work…which, again, is usually instant-upgrade. I spend a much higher percentage of my time at work fucking around with pointless bullshit than I do with my own stuff….
b&
YMMV, but 10.8 → 10.9 → 10.10 was painless for me, and with some nice new features along the way.
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That was my experience, too. Pretty painless.
At the time of 10.8 => 10.9, I remember distinctly that Canon’s utilities for working with their DSLRs was known to crash and burn. And I think Adobe’s Creative Suite might have lagged a bit as well. So there was a really, really big incentive to delay the upgrade to 10.9…and, though those problems have been fixed, there hasn’t been any other incentive to upgrade.
Certainly when Apple gets ready for EOL for 10.8 I’ll upgrade. I might get a Retina iMac sooner rather than later…the Canon 5Ds with its 50 megapickle files puts a noticeable strain on my six-year-old iMac. My current iMac would become an hand-me-down for my parents, who’ve got an even older iMac that might not be able to run 10.10 at all.
But that’ll likely be the last significant upgrade for quite some time. The 5Ds has as much resolution as my printer (a Canon iPF8100) can deal with, and I couldn’t deal with a bigger printer; realistically, it’s damned hard to imagine the point of any upgrades beyond that. What would I even theoretically gain, really?
b&
I keep my computers forever too. I had my ginormous macpro tower for around 6 or 7 years before replacing it with a Mac Mini & external OWC drives it sits atop.
I find a good way to maximize the life of a computer and minimize long-term expenses is to max out the computer you’re buying. I’m typing this on a six-year-old iMac, but it’s still got more oomph than today’s mid-level iMac. Were it not for the 5Ds, I’d probably look to get another several years out of this one.
If I do wind up getting a new iMac…it’ll be a looooong time before I outgrow a 4 GHz quad-core i7 with 32 Gbytes of RAM.
It costs less than twice as much to get a computer that lasts more than twice as long, so, if you can spare the capital expense, you come out ahead in the long term. better to spend $3000 today for a computer for the next decade than $2000 for a computer for the next couple years, and another $2000, and another $2000….
b&
Yeah, I max mine all out too.
That is a horrible workplace policy. My company takes the exact approach you do with your personal stuff, upgrade when there’s a compelling business or security reason to do so. Our windows machines still run Windows 7, despite the fact that Windows has now jumped to versions ahead. The Linux box I’m on is running Red Hat Enterprise 6.6, so that’s not too far behind, but not bleeding edge. We have a similar policy with browsers, generally a few versions behind the latest so we’re not auto-upgrading to a new set of bugs. Let the other people deal with that. This means less time fucking around with trying to get the system to cooperate so we can do actual work. Therefore, my time spent fucking around is better served reading WEIT comments.
As for me, I’d rather confront the occasional new bug than have to live with the old bugs and an out of date system. Upgrades and updates for me tend to be far less problematic than they are for my wife who takes the “don’t upgrade unless I have to” strategy that some here seem to prefer.
It may well depend on the nature of what you do. As I mentioned, when 10.9 came out, the Canon utilities were known to stop working after the upgrade. If I upgraded, I wouldn’t have been able to use the camera — and the camera is a big part of what I use the computer for. In essence, the upgrade would have, essentially, rendered both the camera and the computer useless (or, at least, with severely reduced functionality).
One of the reasons I’m not jumping instantly at upgrading today is that I need to make sure I’ll still be able to print to my 44″ printer. Today, I use a special Photoshop plugin…but I’m also in the process of getting away from the Adobe Creative Suite. That plugin right now is the last significant remaining piece of the puzzle…and could well either put upgrade plans on hold indefinitely, or mean setting up some special system (VM or old computer or some such) dedicated solely to printing, or who-knows-what.
But if you’re the typical computer user who doesn’t do much past email and Web and office and consumer-level photo editing and that…sure, instant auto-updates is a good thing. At the other end of the spectrum, if the sole purpose of the computer is to control your shop’s $100,000 CNC milling machine, you don’t even think of “upgrading” the OS until the vendor tells you it might be a good idea — even (nay, especially) if said computer is running DOS 3.11.
b&
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About 26 minutes in, that really hits the nail on the head when you talk about theists reading about evolution to “know their enemy.”
This was one major factor in my life having been raised as a Catholic young earth creationist. By the way, I’d like to sincerely thank the Church for taking such a waffly, noncommittal approach to the topic that the message is clear that evolution actually can be a threat to faith. The Church is more than happy to let the faithful wallow in ignorance, the sophisticated theology only comes in for the more educated folk.
Anyhow, when I started investigating the actual evidence for evolution, one of the aspects from the Church that stuck with me was the supposed respect for Truth and honesty. When you read young earth creationist claims and read the evidence for evolution, it becomes unambiguously clear which side is doing the lying. And of course, that lead me down the road of wondering what other “sins of omission” is the Church committing in happily letting believers wallow in ignorance. Yes, the truth is valuable, so long as it’s the kind with the lowercase ‘t’.
People often talk about the concept in some versions of Islam that it’s OK to lie in certain circumstances. They don’t talk about the Roman Catholic clergy, for example, having a similar concept i.e. It’s okay to lie to the laity as long as you tell the truth to God. This revolting idea has been very useful in enabling the Church to cover up some of the many horrific things done by its priests.
In Christianity, the tradition dates back to Eusebius, who got it from Plato. The idea is that you tell a lesser lie to prepare the way for a greater truth. In modern terms, you might teach a child about Santa and, when the child is old enough to figure out that Santa isn’t real, make the parallel construction with Jesus who, this time, would be claimed really is really real.
As espoused by Plato and Eusebius and practiced by the Church today, the concept is abhorrent and destructive. However, it’s worth noting that a defused version of the idea remains an effective pedagogic technique.
The classic example would be atomic theory. Especially when taught in conjunction of the history of science (a superb practice), students are typically introduced to atoms as being indivisible minuscule bits; then they get the solar system model of the atom; then electron shells; then weirdly-shaped electron shells; then probability distributions of electrons; and, eventually, quantum field theory. But they’re also told up front that, though each of these models are useful in certain contexts and as stepping stones to work through the ideas, they’re just rough approximations that give very bad answers if you push the model too far. And, if the teacher is any good, at each step along the way, the student is shown exactly how the old model breaks down and how the new model solves that particular problem (but still has other problems to be fixed by the next model in line).
The difference, of course, is whether you’re being honest about the limits of your explanation. The Church is happy to let the Flock believe in weeping statues and Lourdes and the Shroud and what-not because it keeps the collection plate full. A physicist is going to be eager, if you’re willing and interested and able, to get you all the way to quantum field theory because she needs all the help she can get in figuring out how to quantize gravity….
Cheers,
b&
“It’s okay to lie to the laity as long as you tell the truth to God.”
Holy… this explains so much about the history of the dominant Abrahamic faiths.
I have heard of this concept in Islam as well as Orthodox Judaism. I have never heard it explicitly mentioned with regard to Catholicism, but the fact that it’s done is pretty obvious.
I think there are many members of both the clergy and laity who do it without even realizing it–a combination of compartmentalization, cognitive dissonance, and denial. The for mat that I typically see the lies presented is something like, “What science says is not important, the goal here is to ensure your eternal salvation,” and anything about reality that seemingly contradicts the religion is happily dismissed as not being essential to the doctrine. Conveniently, anything essential to the doctrine has been dressed up in vagaries since the Church caught on to the fact that specific claims about the world could be overturned by science. But try to drill into this ambiguous language and, at bottom, one will find that “eternal salvation” is very much a claim about the world we actually live in.
Obviously that should be “format” not “for mat.”
I wanted to donate to Matt but he says 1 USD per video. How many videos? One thousand? Can’t handle that much, sorry.
You can cap your donations per month at a given figure, so that even if more videos are posted, you don’t pay more money. Besides, Matt doesn’t post tons of videos; his are few, thorough, and meticulously edited. They’re much better than some other nonbelievers who crank out brain-dumps that seem largely unscripted and rambling.
I mean can’t handle that much money. And videos too, btway.
You only pay for future videos — so if you want to contribute $1 per video, and he makes three videos next month, you pay $3. Of course you can stop paying any time you want, and by the way all his videos are on YouTube, where you can watch them for free any time.
That was a really good conversation. Matt is a great interviewer!
I’m tempted to send it to my annoying Catholic relatives who I recently argued with over numerology. Apparently my cousin talks with my dead grandparents all the time too.
I’m pretty sure the Catholic Church dismisses numerology as superstition and also groups it with dangerous activities that could lead to unwanted evil entities intruding into their lives. Your relatives seem really confused about magic. Numerology is silly. Eating a cracker and living forever, that makes sense!
Yes they are completely confused as the Church rejects numerology. I think they must belong to the branch of Catholicism that believes anything except science.
There’s another branch?
b&
Well, of course. Everybody knows that eating an animal cracker turns you into the animal, right? Eat a lion cracker and you become a lion, eat a giraffe cracker and you become a giraffe. So, it only follows that, if you eat a zombie cracker, you’d become a zombie….
b&
That fits nicely with this hymn I remember hearing frequently growing up.
Christ Almighty, if this isn’t a religious claim about reality, I don’t know what is…”And if you eat of this bread, you shall live forever.” Though given the impenetrable logic of your animal cracker analogy, I’m not sure they know what they’re signing up for.
An entertaining sidenote…the top comments on the YouTube video immediately have an interfaith dispute between a Catholic and an Episcopalian. Go further down and there’s a complaint that it’s disrespectful to
the crackerGod to sing hymns in the vernacular while cannibalizing the Creator of the Universe (ok, I paraphrased)…I’ve actually played that hymn more times than I care to think about…it was a favorite at a church I gigged at regularly for some years. And, as I’m sure you well know, it can take a long time to cycle everybody through the play-pretend zombie tea party ceremony, meaning a lot of repeats in whatever accompanying music is on the schedule.
b&
Can your cousin also talk with Cecil?
I should ask – start the whole fight up again.
Does Cecil want to talk to Diana, via her cousin? Knowing what she does to toilet paper …
Great interview. I’d like to see more interviews with Jerry Coyne because I think it’s pretty entertaining to hear someone who you’re a fan of answer interesting questions. I’m sure most fans will agree. Conversations with scientists are kind of addicting to watch. Thanks Dr. Coyne!
Jerry, I think you are one of the few people who smiles perhaps even more than Brian Cox. It’s great to see science represented in this way, so different from the staid, restrained, and boring days of old.
Perhaps one might call it a Hummeltrump. 😉
We should distinguish supernatural entities (like unicorns or Bigfoot) and faculties (like clairvoyance or telekinesis), that can be described in naturalistic terms from those that can’t, like “God”. Only the former can be coherently discussed and investigated.
I agree.
For example, we once treated multiple sclerosis under the diagnosis of hysteria. The word “hysteria” is derived from the Greek word for uterus. MS occurs far more often in women, and its somatic signs and symptoms can only be explained, altogether in one disease, through understanding of brain matter and function, where the disease actually does occur, and in no less a physical manner than, say, kidney disease.
Yet, even once this connection was made, MS was under-diagnosed, because it could only be proven after a patient died, if the family allowed autopsy, because the lesions could, then, be seen, no microscope necessary.
It was not until around 1990, a mere 25 years ago, that MRI came available, proving the diagnosis with a simple, risk-free picture of a living, intact brain.
Before that, no one would have believed a magnet could actually help diagnose any organic disease.
We’ve not yet the capacity to really explore and measure clairvoyance and telekinesis. We can’t isolate them from other influences which might affect their function, either. We’re still learning of bosons and gravity and the like. There might yet be forces we haven’t learned to recognize, just as we had to learn to recognize the existence of air, and then of oxygen.
And do you also agree to my point that one cannot meaningfully use the word “God” in conversation, or argue its existence or any of its alleged powers, unless someone comes up with a description/definition of that mysterious entity in naturalistic terms?
I suppose so.
It appears to me that each person has his/her own perception of “god”, based on a foundation of indoctrinated concepts, then tweaked by the individual to suit the individual, so that the individual can’t really define “god” without admitting “god” was purely made up. If that admission is too difficult, if it risks overwhelming cognitive dissonance, the person will dance around any definition, trying to avoid that result, while stirring up little ripples of same, to disturb his/her dreams, later on.
When I use “god” while speaking with a believer, I do it to create human connection. It’s not unlike my approach to Alzheimer’s patients, though with them, I start (or direct their family members to start) conversations in ways that connect through the disease to the person underneath. It works. Still, with believers, it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, as though I’ve been lying. What I mean to do is communicate with them in their chosen language.
God : They entity people who say they worship God imagine they worship.
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Yep, that sums it up well, Ant.
* The entity … (obviously)
Can you really call it communication, when the two sides are talking about two different things? I think it is just the illusion of communication, even when two members of the same local branch of the same sect talk about “god”. Everyone who talks about “god” is fooling themselves into believing that they have a meaningful conversation. It is not possible, for the reasons stated above.
Example: Patient needs orthotics. Patient is a Bible Belt Christian with no significant scientific background. I explain to the patient that his/her foot problem is simple: While God made his/her feet, only man made the floors we walk on. The floors are flat, and the feet adjust to fit the floors. What the patient needs, because that adjustment to the flat floor is so detrimental in his/her case, is a floor specially designed to fit said feet, and fit into the shoes so that each time the feet step down, they’re stepping on floors made perfectly for them.
Hallelujah says this orthotic-wearing atheist;-)
🙂
My problem is not with talking about feet and floors; I doubt the meaningfulness of talking about “god” (what it is, what it can do, etc.).
Also, I don’t believe that theists all have their own individual conception of “god”, rather, they only have a hazy cloud of a few weak associations with real things. Like children, when they hear people talk about a subject they don’t know yet.
Like most adults when they hear people talk about “natural selection” or “quantum field theory”.
The difference is the vigour with which they’ll defend that hazy cloud of weak associations.
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Very good point…when I heard religious dogma as a child, there was always a voice in the back of my head saying it’ll make sense when I get older. Well, it didn’t and it still doesn’t.
Actually…we can most emphatically close the book on clairvoyance and telekinesis.
James Randi and similar people have overwhelmingly demonstrated that all claims of such powers have, when examined, turned out to be the exact same sort of fakery as stage magicians have used for entertainment for forever.
And, especially since the discovery of the Higgs Boson, we have an exhaustively complete understanding of human-scale physics, with absolutely no possibility whatsoever for either clairvoyance nor telekinesis, even hypothetically. Were either demonstrated, it would be no less an incomprehensible impossibility than discovering some remote mesa in the Amazon with dinosaurs and levitating boulders.
b&
I mentioned clairvoyance, because it can be described in clear and precise naturalistic terms. We can discuss the concept in a meaningful way. For example, it is not unthinkable that in the future, possibly with the help of a brain implant, people will be able to read out the memory of the person who drew that test picture. Then we need to discuss whether or not that feat should count as clairvoyance. Etc.
By such analogy, television sets would have been called crystal balls had they been introduced to an earlier age. I think we can safely point to that and countless similar parallels to state with utmost certainty that clairvoyance is bullshit, and that any yet-to-be-invented technology that mimics it is entirely different from what today’s mystics are proposing with their scams.
b&
Scientific study is now showing a person’s answer to a question before the person, him/herself, knows how s/he will respond.
Those chemical processes in the brain, which show on functional brain scans, illustrating this, are not so different from the chemistries of tissues we cannot consciously sense, yet are clearly sensed by man-made machines.
Do we consciously sense everything to which we respond? Probably not. Think “pheramones”, before they were even described.
James Randy et al are very, very good. That doesn’t make them perfect.