Over at Philosopher’s Magazine (PM) online, Massimo Pigliucci takes it upon himself to review Russell Blackford’s review of my book Faith versus Fact—without in fact having read my book itself (his review is called “In defense of accommodationism: on the proper relationship between science and religion”). Now I’ve done something like that before, but I’ve tried to avoid criticizing an unread book as opposed to what its review says. Massimo doesn’t seem to have limited himself to that bailiwick. Regardless, Russell is going to respond in the pages of PM, so I will be brief, addressing only a few of Massimo’s comments.
Here’s how I see his main points, which, in sum, largely coincide with Steve Gould’s “non-overlapping magistria” (NOMA) view of the “proper” relationship between science and religion. Religion is supposedly about ethics and meaning, and science about facts and hypotheses. And that difference, said Gould, makes their ambits non-overlapping, so they can live happily ever after—even helping each other. Massimo apparently agrees (his quotes, and those of others, are indented below):
Religion isn’t about believing in facts about the cosmos, but about meaning, morals, and values. That’s exactly what Gould said. Pigliucci (my emphasis):
. . . it is simply a gross misreading of the history and meaning of religious practices to claim that their main business is, or even has been, the production of cosmogonies. Sure, the Old Testament talks about the origin of humanity in terms of Adam and Eve, while Hindu texts tell us that the world is cyclically created and destroyed every 8.64 billion years. But so what?
. . . Religions, and religious belief, however, are primarily not about cosmogonies, but rather about ethical teachings and questions of meaning. Whether those ethical teachings are sound, or the answers provided to the issue of meaning satisfying, needs to be assessed depending on the specifics. But such assessment is a matter of philosophical discourse, and perhaps of human psychology, certainly not of natural science.
. . . My mother, for one, was rather scientifically illiterate, and she considered herself a Catholic. But she absolutely did not believe in either Adam and Eve or that the world was created in seven days. She thought, like any sensible modern person does, that religious stories are best interpreted as allegories, not as literal truths.
Well, 42% of Americans are biblical creationists alone, and another 31% accept evolution, but a form of evolution guided by God. Many of these people try to insert creationism into the school science curriculum. If scripture is just an allegory for most “sensible modern people,” then a lot of modern people aren’t sensible. And if they don’t believe the allegories, why do they fight so hard to get them taught in public schools?
Further, here are the results of a 2013 Harris poll on what Americans believe. Allegories my tuchus!
Are those metaphorical angels? And are Hell and Heaven and the afterlife just metaphors? How can “survival of soul after death” even be a metaphor?
I give more data in Faith versus Fact, since an important part of the book is my claim that at bottom many religionists base their faith on beliefs about reality. One “non-negotiable” of Christians is given just below. Sadly, Massimo hasn’t read the book. (Well, maybe not “sadly”: for if and when he does, I’m not expecting plaudits, since he seems to see himself as the inerrant arbiter of proper religion, philosophy and science. Indeed, he often sounds as if he’s speaking ex cathedra.)
Further, if most modern people think that all of scripture—and note that Pigliucci isn’t excluding Islam here—is allegorical, what about the Jesus story? That, after all, is the foundational story for most Christians: Jesus was the son of God (and God Himself, too), died for whatever “sins” we are born with, was crucified, resurrected, and is the locus of our belief if we want to go to Heaven. Is THAT an allegory? If so, are those who take it literally not “sensible”? Or does Pigliucci define “sensible” as “those who see religious stories as allegories,” making the whole thing tautological?
And, Massimo, go tell your “allegory” theory to Muslims. In fact, I dare you to propound it on the steps of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, and see if all the “sensible” Muslims suffer you to live. As the 2013 Pew poll showed, the vast majority of the world’s Muslims who were surveyed see the Qur’an as literally true, not an allegory, and think there’s only one way to interpret the book.
And here are more data showing that Muslims have factual, non-allegorical beliefs (the Middle East wasn’t surveyed, probably out of fear, but you can bet there at least as literalistic as the Muslims below):
Finally, as I show in the book, many theologians (including liberal ones) reject the NOMA solution precisely on the grounds that religion is about more than “meanings, morals, and values.” It’s also about facts. Here are a few quotes that I gave in the book or use in my talks:
But the religion [Gould] is making room for is empty of any claims to historical or scientific fact, doctrinal authority, and supernatural experience. Such a religion, whatever be its attractions to the liberal scientific mind, could never be Christianity or, for that matter, Judaism or Islam.
—Ian Hutchinson (Christian physicist at MIT)“I cannot regard theology as merely concerned with a collection of stories which motivate an attitude toward life. It must have its anchorage in the way things actually are, and the way they happen.”
—John Polkinghorne (trained physicist, now Anglican priest)A religious tradition is indeed a way of life and not a set of abstract ideas. But a way of life presupposes beliefs about the nature of reality and cannot be sustained if those beliefs are no longer credible.
—Ian Barbour (scholar, now deceased, who was the Big Expert on the relationship between science and religion)
Likewise, religion in almost all of its manifestations is more than just a collection of value judgments and moral directives. Religion often makes claims about ‘the way things are.’
—Karl Giberson & Francis Collins (evangelical Christian physicist and geneticist respectively)
Religion and science are logically compatible. Therefore they’re compatible. End of story.
Massimo:
There is no logical contradiction between accepting all the findings of modern science and believing in a transcendental reality. Which is why lots of intelligent people, including lots of scientists, do in fact accept science and believe in a transcendental reality
. . . Here is a second highly indicative quote from Blackford: “Coyne makes clear that he is not talking about a strict logical inconsistency. Rather, incompatibility arises from the radically different methods used by science and religion to seek knowledge and assess truth claims.”
Ah, so it turns out that science and religion are, in fact, logically compatible (not sure why the clause “strict” is necessary here, something either is or is not logically consistent with something else). I could declare victory and graciously leave the room at this point, but I’m not done yet.
I explain in the book that yes, there’s no logical incompatibility between science and religion, but that there’s profound incompatibility in practice between science and religion, involving philosophy, methodology, and outcome of their searches for “truth”. Given that Massimo hasn’t read my book, I’m not sure why he’s declaring victory here. However, the man always sees intellectual discourse as a Manichean battle between light (Massimo) and dark (everyone else), and a battle he has to win.
Accommodationists are almost invariably atheists.
. . . notice that accommodationists usually are atheists, because a religious person who accepts scientific findings (as opposed to, say, a fundamentalist creationist) is just that, a religious person who accepts science — like the majority of people on the planet.
Ah, spoken ex cathedra! Has Massimo done a survey? I don’t think so. He’s simply defined “accommodationist” in a way that tautologically excludes many religious people. But an accommodationist to me and most people is simply someone who thinks that science and religion are compatible, and that includes science-friendly religious people like John Haught, Owen Gingerich, and the five people quoted above, none of them atheists. And it is their arguments I take on in the book.
I could go on, but I’m tired, and at this point I’ll throw the ball to Dr. Blackford and let him finish the job.
One more point: what clearly burns Pigliucci’s onions most is my notion of “science broadly construed”: the application of the principles of reason, empirical examination, replication, and so on, which can be used by historians, car mechanics, archaeologists, and so on. Pigliucci really hates this because he sees himself as the Demarcator of Science, and to him “science broadly construed” is not science. Indeed, I even get accused of the dreaded sin of Scientism!
To refer to the application of basic reasoning and empirical trial and error as “science” is anachronistic, and clearly done in the service of what I cannot but think is a scientistic agenda.
Well, I don’t much care, because the incompatibility that I really emphasize in the book is the one in its title: faith versus fact. Or, if you will, science versus superstition. If you want to deny that “fact” is “science broadly construed,” that’s fine, but in the end it’s a semantic issue.
Pigliucci is yet another example of why univerities need to jettison philosophy and theology both.
Not really fair to Massimo. He puts a lot of effort into fighting woo and communicating philosophy to the lay audience. In general, he’s one of the good guys.
If he has a flaw, it might be that he really hates to agree with anyone.
I wish universities applied Newton’s flaming laser sword to philosophy since it claims to pursue actual knowledge.
I have a feeling Massimo would not be a fan of this.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/46/Newtons_Flaming_Laser_Sword
Interesting. However, nothing Pigliucci said here connects to the Philosophy Department at my University. Care to elaborate your claim that “universities should jettison philosophy”?
I think PZ Myers response to what religionists should do is to organize groups analogous to knitting groups. Safe for others.
That would be a proper jettison. Of course, as for schools and universities they could ans should still study religion and philosophy under comparative religion, “unsupported beliefs constructed broadly”.
Philosophy ended its life in a supernova explosion, which gave birth to physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, neuroscience, ethics, logic, etc. What’s left of it is a supernova remnant: a philosophical blackhole. Engage with it at your own peril……
*Like* 😀
Philosophy is as useful to physicists as ornithology is to birds. R Feynman.
So much naval-gazing.
Scientists do. Philosophers think about it.
Mathematicians can manage with only a pencil, paper and a wastebasket. Philosophers can do without the wastebasket.
Once again, Bravo!
My limited understanding of international survey logistics tells me there’s human subjects agreements that must be entered into which are pretty much impossible without blanket governmental permission–pretty much denied by all the dictatorial regimes in the Middle East. Survey methods would also require an outsider interviewing household females, unobserved, from time-to-time… a big cultural no-no.
It makes me kind-of doubt there will be much data worth more than a spit coming out of there any time soon.
I am always amused at what DrDrDr Massimo Pigliucci says. He is spectacularly uninformed for someone with so much education.
I was wondering if his nickname is the first few letters of his first name and the first few letters of his last name.
Mass Pig
My favorite rock band!
Indeed. “…Religions, and religious belief, however, are primarily not about cosmogonies…” is one of the most ignorant, reality-defying statements I’ve ever come across.
Maybe you should drop that esteemed journal a line and ask to personally rebut the article, ProfE CC?
The author responding to a review-of-a-review in person might be a record of some description.
Agreed on all points. Just to add:
Massimo here suggests that since religions’ *primary* business is not statements of fact about the world, that this rebuts your (Blackford’s and PCC-E’s) criticism.
But, while facts about the world may not be religion’s *primary* concern, it is *one* of their concerns, and, further, their primary concern of ethical teachings and questions of meaning depend on their beliefs about facts about the world.
Thus, if one rebuts religions’ statements about the world, then the whole thing falls apart.
There is no *logical* contradiction between science and believing that a herd of unicorns is currently grazing on the White House lawn.
The inconsistency is an evidential one, not a logical one. So what? Why is this any sort of rebuttal?
Massimo’s whole reply seems to be that people (including philosophers) used these techniques before modern science. Yes indeed they did. So what? Why is that any sort of rebuttal?
Anyone who argues for “science broadly construed” is indeed arguing that this is exactly how humans have always gained knowledge, from farmers 10,000 years ago and before.
Massimo’s point seems to be merely a quibble about a label. No doubt he’d prefer “natural philosophy” to “science”, but the argument is more than just about a label.
The first point you make about Massimo saying the “primary” business of religions is not facts struck me too. The way he expresses that surely means that he concedes that facts are, in fact, their scondary business. As Jerry points out, that’s certainly the opinion of most religious.
The basis of all religion is that there is some greater power – a power that has never been proven to exist but is accepted on faith. That is the incompatibility that will always exist (unless there is proof of that greater power).
Massimo specifically mentions his catholic mother. I am sure as a good catholic she would be quite familiar with the Apostles’ Creed which spells out a quite literal precis of catholic belief – and no it is not numinous, metaphorical or ineffable. And yes – it is incumbent on all catholics to believe it as stated.
I wish philosophers would stay out of these real-world issues but what can one expect from a “discipline” which has been raising problems for 2500 years or so without providing a single solution.
For a more detailed precis one can of course consult the Nicene Creed instead.
Yes!
In order to understand Massimo Pigliucci you have to keep in mind he’s Italian.
My mother is Italian, I have many Italian relatives, and many of them, while they say they’re devout Catholics, behave in a very different way towards their Catholic beliefs from how Evangelical Americans behave towards their beliefs.
The Roman Catholic church has a very lax doctrine about the interpretation of the Bible, compared to the American literalists.
Very few Catholics believe that the bible is inerrant or even just extremely accurate. The creation myths are referred to as a story, or a myth, a moral narrative which tells people not to go against God.
The central dogmas of the Catholic Church aren’t found in the Old Testament. Indeed the Catholic Church doesn’t care about most of the OT. Catholics in Italy are more concerned about their local patron saints or the Virgin Mary than with Adam, Eve or the Jewish Patriarchs.
Many Italian Catholics believe that the old Jewish stories are mostly myths but that Jesus really died and came back, that Mary didn’t die but was beamed into heaven and that if they pray enough their local patron saints will grant them a miracle.
Local saints are worshipped almost as minor gods. Behind the thin veneer of doctrine, Italy is practically still a polytheist country, where Saint Gennare is a demi-god in Naples while Saint Pio of Pietralcina is almost a new prophet in Apulia.
The veneration of saints and of Mary isn’t as widespread among the Evangelicals in the US, but on the other hand many American fundies firmly believe in the inerrancy of the Bible.
So it’s perfectly for an Italian like Pigliucci to generalize from the Italian experience, where the stories of the OT are seen as stories, to the entire world, forgetting that the Italian Catholic semi-polytheism and lax attitude towards Biblical truth ae just A feature of Christianity, not THE defining features of Christianity.
and yet Gays are intrinsically disordered and gay sex is sinful. Abortion is sinful. Birth control is sinful. where does that all come from? Theses are hard and fast rules not suggestions.
Adam and Eve never existed yet somehow, somewhere there was still an undocumented event that caused the “fall” and made every descendant of these non-existent people sinful and deserving of hellfire before they even had a chance to commit any sins of their own. And so they need RCC Inc in order to be saved. And so on and so on – it’s all metaphor and numinosity and ineffability until suddenly it isn’t any more because you run head first into a solid wall of dogma and pseudo history that is the core of the religion.
I quite agree with you that much italian catholicism is a disguised form of superstitious pantheism. It’s that way in Ireland too and Mexico, indeed much of latin America, India, the Phillipines to name but a few. The theologians will simply smile at that superstition although it is greatly supported by the RCC Inc executive tier and for many people is catholicism. But then the theologians go wittering off on their own about their pet “sophisticated” superstitions that only they can understand. Read those creeds; it’s all in there and it ain’t metaphor and it’s all scripturally based.
+ 1
I am sure you are right about the impression he gets of religion from his own experience. But I think the notion that religion makes empirical claims is much broader than the explicit historical claims of a text like the Old Testament. The idea that a local patron saint will grant a miracle is itself an empirical claim, after all.
It is logical too that Odin commands the trajectories of all photons in the nine realms.
It is logical too that during the day I masquerade as a supplicating human and at night I become the mega-ultra genie for all known parallel universes.
The argument for being logical is vacuous.
Very good! 😀
A broad and deep understanding of philosophy seems to make it possible to arrive at and defend any conclusion no matter how absurd.
That is precisely what annoys me about philosophy and philosophers.
You’re far from alone here. I love what Scientifik said above (in comment thread 1):
First, even if you eliminate religion, the hoi polloi are going to believe in “fringe ideas”, paranormal, astrology, New Age. In fact, the unchurched are generally more open to Wu than the churched.
Second, scientists are an elite, self-selecting minority subculture. The views within that subculture are always going to conflict with the majority culture, and other minority subcultures within the general culture.
Third, the Classical Christian Theologians, like Augustine, were not “Biblical Creationists” nor are most theologians today. But theologians are an elite, self-selecting minority subculture, and the views within that subculture are always going to conflict with the majority culture too. You can look at the Great Schism in the Russian Orthodox Church to see this principal in action.
Fourth, classically you have “two dimensions”, a dimension of eternity, and one of linear time. The stories of the Bible in some sense belong to the dimension of eternity, although clearly in the Doctrine of Incarnation, there is a melding of eternity and linear time. From the perspective of antiquity, the dimension of eternity was the “Real” dimension, and the historical, empirical dimension was the ephemeral and false dimension. Religious symbolism and liturgy is in essence the “breaking” of the wall and the evidence of eternity.
In contrast, moderns, whether fundamentalist or secularists, are pretty much rooted in an all pervasive sense of linear time, which means the events of the Bible all need to be located within linear time, or the progress of linear constitutes a refutation. But this a feature of modernism, not really religion or science.
I mean, modernism may be the right way to think about things, and science not mythology might be the right exposition of history, and then religion is falsified. But that is a lot of assumptions.
Myths are action-principles, they induce action in groups. Georges Sorel wrote about the myth of the general strike and how it induced behavior in socialists. Myths are not expositions of the past, nor are they prophesies of the future, but they are intrinsic to political action. Leaving aside religion, there needs to be a treat of myth alongside what we might call objective history, or the anthropology is radically incomplete. Religion could be abolished, but mythology can only be displaced by a new mythology.
Mythology is primal, and forms the basis of group identity and group action. Science, on the other hand, is a historically contingent endeavor practiced by a small elite. As a result, myth is more important than science as far as the preserving the life of a particular polity, so you are always going to have Lyshenkoism or Intelligent Design or something to contend with politically, whatever scientists think. Moreover, given the true nature of mythology, mythos is a potent force of both good and evil.
You are aware that both Aquinas and Augustine believed in a number of literalistic tenets of Christianity, including angels and Adam and Eve. Yes, those stories could sometimes be read metaphorically, too, but the literalistic interpretation was always true and took primacy. See FvF for evidence.
Aquinas and Augustine lived in a time of less empirical knowledge. I don’t see the problem with angels or demons (that is, mediating forces between time and eternity, but I understand atheists generally don’t want to go there), but I think Adam and Eve (as historic personas) is pretty clearly out. But part of the narrative arc of Augstine’s Confessions is a symbolic re-enactment of the Fall of Adam in Augustine’s own life. So here we find Adam functioning as a narrative Archetype, not some dead guy in history.
There are plenty of sharp, scientifically literate theists who are not out to lunch on scientific questions or questioning scientific consensus, while at the same time, they are vastly outnumbered by theists who are not scientifically literate.
Because I suspect religion deals with the Arche, not with the empirical, I don’t see that religion is fundamentally threatened by scientific inquiry (but it may be threatened by reductive metaphysics). On the other hand, if there was conclusive irrefutable proof that Jesus never lived, that would put the nail in Christianity for good (but you would still have Islam, etc.).
Wittgenstein defined religion as a “passionate commitment to a frame of reference”, which I think is overly-simple. But it gets to why religious “truth” claims are unfalsifiable. You can’t “prove” that Cartesian coordinates are correct, and curvilinear coordinates wrong. However, your frame of reference will dictate that certain problems will be solvable or unsolvable.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Those who choose to live their lives based not only on the assumption of a divine being, but on further assumptions about what that divine being wants, are simply being fatuous.
I have no respect for “sharp, seientifically literate theists.” Why are they theists, one might ask? And if their faith tells them what’s true, why shouldn’t we respect those whose faith tells them to kill apostates, or that aliens came to earth, or that the Loch Ness Monster exists.
It’s just silly to give respect for those who spend so much time parsing and promulgating silly beliefs, beliefs held fervently without evidence. We have a name for people who have such beliefs when they aren’t so widespread: the mentally ill (or delusional).
As for Aquinas and Augustine, I take it you now accept that they did take much of Scripture literally.
“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
Well, no, there is no empirical evidence for the assertion that for any given integer, there is a greater integer, as no one has ennumerated all the integers to check. Yet I would reckon the person who denies such a thing a damn fool, as the person who believes it is possible that “2 + 2” will equal something other than “4” if computed on the surface of Mars.
“Those who choose to live their lives based not only on the assumption of a divine being, but on further assumptions about what that divine being wants, are simply being fatuous.”
I would turn this around, ditching God altogether. Given the nature of the world, are there certain sets of customs and social practices that when widespread confer greater survival on the group that practices them? For example, vaccination or hygiene practices like those outlined in the Old Testament?
If there are, then if we incorporate a divine being into things, then you have an individual motivation to engage in those customs and social practices that maximize survival of the group, even if they are unpleasant or even dangerous for the individual. Thus, even if God does not exist, he is sure to be invented as partial solution to the free-rider problem in any collective. On the other hand, if God exists, then he surely designed the cosmos with the intention that human groups would survive and thrive that lived in particular ways, and die off if they live contrary to that way.
This, I think, addresses the question of Faith and First Person assurances, too. We don’t choose our genes, and (especially in traditional societies) we are basically indoctrinated in a religion from childhood, usually. I think we can trust our faith, the way we mostly trust our genes for the same reason: maladaptive religious traditions die out in a few generations, like Jonestown and the Shakers. Here I say maladaptive in the sense of group survival, not in the sense of conforming to anyone’s a priori ideals for how the world should be.
Faith in inherited tradition is actually closer to Darwin than rationalism (e.g. concocting a metaphysics post hoc from abstract reasoning) as far as I can tell. Further, the primary structural advantage of the major faiths of the world stems from the fact that they can maintain fertility levels above replacement levels for over a century, something no secular system has been able to pull off, which is why there are more religious people alive on Planet Earth today on a relative and absolute basis, and even predominantly secular countries are receiving religious immigrants, in part to deal population deficiencies, and not vice versa.
As far as why individual people are theists, you are running the sociological gamut from Newton, Einstein, Bohr to figures like Kurt Godel, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Cardinal Newman and Anthony Flew to every toothless fundamentalist in Alabama. I suspect they believe for many different reasons, and justify their beliefs on many different grounds.
It is not that there are no logically valid proofs for the existence of God (Godel himself developed one), it is that all proofs rest on a set of assumptions, and so the atheist will always reject your assumptions.
I will hand you that if we take contemporary physics, chemistry, and biology viewed through the Neo-Darwinist Synthesis, there is no need metaphysically to go beyond reductive materialism. However, atheists have a very hard time with math, which apparently rests upon objective norms for doing things correctly. [And pragmatic justifications of math are no more valid or invalid than pragmatic justifications for religion.]
What a spectacular fail on your part.
Empirical evidence that there is a greater integer for any integer you care to name is trivial to come by. The empirical evidence is overwhelming. Go ahead — give us some examples of integers, and Iâll provide you in each and every case with evidence for a larger integer.
And weâve run the experiment about 2 + 2 = 4 on Mars. Every robotic lander weâve ever sent there has included electronic circuitry that, at some point, would have calculated that sum and come up with the expected answer. Plus, weâve made astronomical observations over vast ranges of time and space such that, were there regions where 2 + 2 != 4, evidence of them would have been observed by now.
And, indeed, in a very real sense…at both quantum and relativistic scales, 2 + 2 very often != 4. Combine two hydrogen nuclei in the right way and you might well get a result not of an helium nucleus but an Higgs boson plus a veritable soup of other stuff, including more than two hydrogen nuclei.
Just because weâve got some very effective mental shortcuts to reliably predict certain answers doesnât mean that the shortcuts are reality.
Cheers,
b&
>
Goodness Ben, are you some fundamentalist Christian troll? Having displayed earth shattering ignorance of 20th century history of ideas, you now demonstrate ignorance around formal logic.
There is no way to validly establish a universal unless you establish that the universal is valid in all cases, not only the ones we know about.
Of course there is lots of evidence that for every integer that we know of having a larger integer.
But this does not prove the universal, any more than the fact that because all the swans we have ever seen are white establishes the non-existence of a black swan.
Mathematical truth are not empirical inductions, which while reliable are not necessarily true (the sun will rise tomorrow, but one day, it won’t). Mathematical truths are truths.
And “2+2” is “4” on Mars, not based on experience, but because mathematical truths are independent of experience. Euclidean geometry is a perfectly nice thing, but if we accept General Relativity as a description or an approximate description of our universe, we live in a non-Euclidean universe. This does not invalidate Euclidean Geometry.
It is in mathematics where empiricism cracks up on the hard rocks of Reality. And of course, since there is no physics without mathematics, you are really stuck.
We can try to say mathematics is “true by convention” but that presumes that a convention exists. If you develop a novel mathematical proof for a theorem, then no convention exists whereby it can be pronounced valid or not. (Study the history of calculus if you want a real instance.) So how can anyone pronounce it valid or invalid? And further, if math is true by convention, or by group fiat in cases of no convention, then you are stuck with a mathematical democracy, in which the right answers can change.
Kant tried to root it in the “nature of consciousness” but that commits you to philosophical dualism, nor does it tell us why patterns of “consciousness” are isomorphic to patterns in nature.
Platonism is great, but how do these mathematical truths get conveyed from the “Cosmic Platonic mind” to the individual mind? Divine illumination?
And you already mocked my “alternative dimension” discussion, so clearly you are not a Platonist.
The kind of âuniversalâ you describe is a figment of the imagination. Thereâs nothing to establish outside of the imagination itself.
On the contrary. Mathematical âtruthsâ are entirely empirical and have been from the start. A careful enough measurement of the triangles the Egyptians were making with ropes and poles in the Nile delta would have led to entirely different conclusions about trigonometry and geometry, and if our everyday experience encompassed quantum or relativistic scales weâd consider bedrock logical foundations such as the identity principle quaint oversimplifications of something patently absurd.
Again entirely umop-ap!sdn. Math happens to be a good map for describing physics, but if it werenât, weâd either use something other than math for the task or there wouldnât be anything comprehensible to comprehend in the first place.
Reality is what it is and doesnât give a damn what your math says it should be. Weâve seen that time and time again with multiple scientific revolutions, each refining the human map of reality to make it more closely conform to reality itself. Again, to an everyday approximation, the Earth really is flat as demonstrated by your street map. And it really is a perfect sphere as demonstrated by the globe in your classroom. And an oblate spheroid as demonstrated by more sophisticated models, all the way up through an hypothetical real-time full-scale Planck-length model and / or the Lagrangian of the Earth system — the latter which we know is incomplete even as itâs dramatic overkill for finding your way to the drugstore on the corner.
You write that as if itâs a bad thing…and, yet, thatâs the history of mathematics. Used to be that there were no numbers smaller than zero, but now the consensus knows better. Used to be that parallel lines never converged, but now the consensus knows better. Used to be that there was an as-yet-undiscovered whole-number ratio to describe the relationship between a circleâs circumference and its radius, but now the consensus knows better. Used to be that only positive numbers had square roots, but now the consensus knows better. And so on.
The sort of absolutes you so obviously seek can be comforting, but itâs a false comfort with no bearing on reality whatsoever.
b&
>
KD, apologize immediately for dissing another commenter, please. That is a Roolz violation.
KD, you will apologize immediately for dissing another commenter; it’s a Roolz violation.
As an atheist who majored in math and comp. sci. I see that you are obviously a philosopher who is unacquainted with the foundation of mathematics – the axiom. Also one who is unacquainted with that delightful brevity that is the essence of mathematics.
You really seem to misunderstand math and its descriptive nature.
Oh, yes. Atheists’ response to the claims of angels and demons is just that we “don’t want to go there”. Nothing about evidence.
It makes me sad that I feel you’re going to need me to explicitly state that the above is sarcasm.
An insightful interview with John Wathey concerning the naturally selected basis for religious belief.
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/religious_belief_naturally_selected_-_with_john_c._wathey/
The problem with Whatley’s approach is that God is a comparative late-comer (on a relative basis) to the religion game.
Which god?
b&
>
Capital “G” monotheistic God, through whom all things come into being, which came on the scene with Zoroastrianism, which later influence Judaism and the Abrahamic faiths.
Not lower case “g” crawling out of the cosmic chaos like the Titans.
Which capital-âGâ eponymous god? The Catholic one whichâll fry you for eternity in participating in an abortion; the Protestant one which would prefer you donât but will understand if thatâs the least worst option; or the Jewish one whichâll fry you if you let the woman die by withholding a medically-necessary abortion? Or maybe you mean the Capital-âAâ Allah whoâll fry you for thinking Jesus and he are one?
And this notion that thereâs such a thing as monotheism…absurd. Sure, maybe in some textbooks, with perhaps an occasional âclose enoughâ example in Spinoza or the like. But, if Prometheus and Pandora, Romulus and Remus, and Hades and Hermes are gods — and they most emphatically are — then Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, and Satan and Gabriel are gods as well. Not to mention all the Heavenly Host, ancestor worship, and the rest that youâll find run rampant amongst 99 44/100% of the religious today.
b&
>
Associative thinking has its place, along with logical cognition. KD is walking on the associative waters, well, more like gliding by. It’s quite entrancing observing this aquatic flow of ripples and undercurrents.
Does only myth possess the power to get groups to act? Does the potency of theistic religion remain if the God of gaps has shrunken to the size of a quantum particle? Are the young people under the age of 25 who live in Iceland doomed to embrace woo since they don’t entertain the religious notion at all any longer? Will transhumanists, especially the ones who can get off earth, need non-scientific myths to fill them with motivation? If myth is a time-honoured way to connect to each other, what happens to it when we can communicate directly from brain to brain?
To focus on the past use of myth, insisting that since it was the way we always have got things done, therefore, it will be that way forever, is abandoning the very associative skills that got KD to the point it has. Associative thinking is paired with creativity, so it is jarring to see it get mired in a stagnant puddle.
I don’t care for the theology, apologizing for magic and/or mysticism is apologizing for what isn’t.
“First, even if you eliminate religion, the hoi polloi are going to believe in “fringe ideas”, paranormal, astrology, New Age. In fact, the unchurched are generally more open to Wu than the churched.”
References, please. I don’t see that Scandinavia has more ‘paranormal, astrology, New Age’ or ‘Wu-wei’ [?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei ] beliefs than elsewhere.
“Second, scientists are an elite, self-selecting minority subculture. The views within that subculture are always going to conflict with the majority culture, and other minority subcultures within the general culture.”
References, please. I don’t see that science is conflicting with majority culture on any number of things. Including facts, that majority culture accepts on the basis of scientist (science) expertise.
Oh, and anyone can become a scientist. There is – famously – selection for expertise, not membership approval. (With the unfortunate and known exceptions of misogyny and racism effects, which scientists inherit from the majority culture.)
TL;DR: I don’t see any familiarity with science or religion (but apologetics of theology!), or more important their relation, in here. Questions of references remain, but else your comment has been duly noted… YAWN! [ http://cheezburger.com/4915313408 ]
I guess I am at a loss.
The appeal of Wu, in American society, particularly by the unchurched is relatively well documented:
https://www.questia.com/library/103540341/spiritual-but-not-religious-understanding-unchurched
Scientists are an elite, self-selecting community, it general takes many years of training and advanced degrees to be a scientist, so it is an elite endeavor (the vast overwhelming majority of Americans have no scientific training to speak of), and people choose to be scientists, there is no draft. [Only about 30% of the public even has undergraduate degrees, and of post-graduate work, much of it is professional schools or non-science.]
As far as scientists conflicting with “majority culture”, Dr. Coyne has cited a number of statistics that demonstrate that a majority of Americans reject the mainstream scientific consensus on evolution, which I understand upsets him and is in part why he has this blog.
“Fourth, classically you have “two dimensions”, a dimension of eternity, and one of linear time. ”
I find this sentence and everything after it incomprehensible.
Scott:
Are you literate in basic high school level mathematics?
In a two-dimensional space, there is an X axis and a Y axis. In a one dimensional space, there is an X axis.
If you live in a one dimensional space, you can only assign a location to something using one coordinate.
If you live a two dimensional space, it is perfectly possible to locate an object somewhere in such a way that it will not intersect a particular line segment.
Most educated people in history have maintained something like a two-dimensional view of the immutable and mutable, or eternal and temporal, or even, more simply, meaning and fact.
So something can have meaning for a group, such as a myth of a legendary ancestor, or a myth of a coming revolution and the emergence of a class-less society, without these “events” actually being historical, or even possible.
For example, the myth of the general strike is a perfectly good myth, even if the general strike has never happened and never will happen, and if it does, it will not be the advent of a class-less utopia. The myth has a meaning for socialists, even if it is basically fictional from a historical perspective or as a possible future.
You have heard about people called socialists and what they believed, correct? You have noticed the classless and stateless society has not happened, correct? Yet you can meet socialists today who still believe it is coming. Are they irrational? Well, maybe they are, but there are some really smart capable socialists in the world.
I grant you, reifying “eternity” in spacial terms is problematic, as what we are talking about is outside the limits of language. But it is not a metaphor, as there is no “literal” level of meaning underneath the “metaphor”.
But a myth is not the same thing as a fiction (because they don’t have the same effects on human societies) even if most/all myths are literal fictions. So you have to invent something like another dimension if you are going to distinguish myths from fictions.
I’m not sure where you think you’re going with your analogy.
You can take a street map and spread it flat on a table. The map will be superbly useful for helping you find your way to the corner market. But, despite the flatness of the map and the fact that, at human scales, the Earth is, for all practical porpoises, indistinguishable from a bumpy flat plane, the Earth itself isn’t flat.
We know the geometry of the Universe. With some caveats unimportant to this discussion, it’s Einsteinian. We know that Cosmic Inflation happened a baker’s dozen billion years ago, and that said Inflation utterly erased any and all hypothetical remnants of anything that might or might not have come before. From other physics, we know that there aren’t any hyperintelligent transdimensional entities that have the ability to interact undetected with the Universe.
Yes, sure, you can invent all sorts of insane conspiracy theories about how we’re all deluded and really living in the Matrix which itself is a vision in the mind of some god or what-not — but, first, that’s crazy; and, second, any intelligences you might propose as having dominion over us similarly can’t rule out the possibility of themselves being the victims of even grander delusions.
Remember, just because you can imagine a scenario in which your imaginary friends aren’t incompatible with your limited understanding of modern physics…well, your ignorance of contradiction doesn’t mean anything. You’re equally ignorant of contradictions about the Invisible Pink Unicorn (MPBUHHH), and your friends really are as impossible as cows who jump over the moon.
Now, if you yourself wish to use mythology as a mapmaking framework to help yourself make sense of the universe, by all means, knock yourself out. That’s what fiction is all about, and it’s one of the most respectable and important endeavors humans engage in. Just remember, after you’ve willingly suspended your disbelief, to unsuspend it after the curtains come down.
Cheers,
b&
P.S. I’m not a Socialist, but your descriptions of them tell me you’ve no clue what modern Socialism is all about. Might want to pick some other analogy you’re more familiar with…. b&
Dear Ben:
Georges Sorel wrote a book called Reflections on Violence, which influenced both 20th Century revolutionary socialist movements as well as lead to the development of modern fascism and, probably indirectly, German National Socialism. Sorel’s focus was on the role of myth in creation of revolutionary consciousness. He was a major intellectual influence on Lenin and Mussolini. Perhaps you have heard of these people?
Frantz Fanon, influenced by Sorel, wrote a book called the Wretched of the Earth, which launched 20th Century African liberation movements leading to the end of European colonialism. The introduction was written by an obscure 20th Century intellectual, Jean Paul Sartre, who you and your socialist friends have probably never heard of.
Ali Shariati, influence by Fanon, Sorel, and Heidegger, wrote a series of books, adapting revolutionary socialism to an ideology of Revolutionary Islam which lead to the toppling of the Shah of Iran, and has influenced groups like Al Quaeda and ISIS (even though he was Shia).
A myth uses words and images to get people to do things, like revolt against their governments, shoot traitors to the revolutionary cause, or defend their governments from revolutionaries. Now we can criticize the Bolsheviks, the Fascists, the Nazi’s, the African Liberation armies, and Islamist Revolutionaries, but we can’t say that the leadership of these groups don’t understand how to motivate people to take radical action, even if the post-revolutionary promised land never arises.
Myths are mostly fiction, but there must be a way to distinguish between myths (based on their effects) and pure fictions, such as the Harry Potter series. I have suggested that myths touch on or resonate with some sense of eternity or the immutable, perhaps someone can say it better. But why do myths cause people to act in socially transgressive ways? Why do people believe myths, even when they seem incredible to outsiders?
I suspect understanding myths might give someone insight into the nature of religion (based on myth) and why religion is critical to most human social and political orders, for either their preservation or their revolutionary destruction. Moreover, with the exception of Islam, all the revolutionary groups above were all secular, leading me to surmise that religion may go (or at least go for certain periods of time), but myth will remain with the human species, so long as there is a need for collective action.
Speaking of the Matrix, and myths, look at what a life of its own the Red Pill meme has created.
Oh, please. To suggest that the Nazis had anything to do with Socialism then, let alone modern Socialism, is as absurd as suggesting that the German Democratic Republic was and / or is affiliated with the modern American Democratic and Republican parties.
If you want to know what modern Socialism looks like, look to Scandinavia. Or, domestically on a limited scale with all sorts of examples of botched implementation, to Medicare and Social Security and the VA system. And, contrary to what youâve been told by Faux News, the VA doesnât have any gas chambers.
Did you really have to Godwin yourself so quickly?
b&
>
Ben:
I am writing about real revolutionary socialist movements, not bobo poseurs, the people who change the world, not protest it.
But you can study the National Syndicalist movement and its transformation in Italy yourself. Sorel influenced both Lenin and Mussolini, and Mussolini’s movement influenced the rise of the Nazi’s.
Thatâs your problem right there.
The Socialists of today are not revolutionaries. Theyâre majority and coalition minority parties in pretty much all European parliaments.
Geez, itâs like youâre completely ignorant of history since WWII….
b&
>
You think what I am talking about (“the immutable”) is funny, or some kind-of far out mystical hippy crap, but you wouldn’t if you were living in Syria, and dealing with young men driven by real myths to commit atrocities against you.
Just because deluded people commit atrocities in the names of their delusions doesnât mean that the delusions have any bearing on reality.
Sane people should be fully capable of both recognizing and analyzing a delusion without themselves being caught up within it.
Besides, your âimmutableâ is different for each and every person espousing it, and radically mutates with every generation. What, you think your gods today are anything at all like the gods of a century or a millennium ago? In an era when entire new denominations are forming through schism at a rate by now exceeding one per week?
b&
>
Okay, knock of the one-on-one argument here, okay?
“I have suggested that myths touch on or resonate with some sense of eternity or the immutable, perhaps someone can say it better.”
Myths take advantage of traits of the human psyche, almost always appealing to the desire to create a narrative of events and our predilection towards dualistic thinking. Is that better? Because I have no idea what you are talking about with the “eternal” or the “immutable” (contextual definitions please?), but the real world appeal of myths and their impact? Sure, I can acknowledge their power there.
Why does someone join ISIS? It is a serious question to me. Why does someone become a Bolshevik, if you don’t like religion? It is the same problem.
To say it is delusion doesn’t get us very far, because the whole idea of a delusion is that it is an idiosyncratic and irrefutable personal belief. A “group delusion” is not really a delusion, especially when you can be caught up in the myth, without believing that the myth has any factual basis. Sorel peddled the myth of the General Strike as precisely a myth, but that did not affect his political radicalism.
I say immutable, because I think part of what seduces people is that they are somehow participating in something beyond merely themselves, and perhaps merely the world, that they are enacting some kind of cosmic battle, participating in some kind of battle that has been recurring since the emergence/creation of the world.
And maybe this is the archetype of this kind of mythology, Apocalypse, Ragnarok, what have you.
The thing about myths is that they don’t have to be empirically true, nor do you even have to believe they are empirically true, in order for them to motivate behavior.
Ibn Rushd, an Islamic philosopher, posited a “double truth” theory, maintaining truths of philosophy/science and truths of religion (based on revelation). Some people just think he was a free thinker hiding in an Islamic medieval society, but one way of looking at this idea is that he is trying to distinguish an empirical dimension, and a mythological dimension.
A description of the world tells us something about the greater observable world. In contrast, myths are action principles, they motivate human behavior, or transform our self-understanding as subjects. So they serve different social functions entirely, and whatever the epistemology of mythos is (if there is such a thing), it is not the epistemology of natural science.
This, of course, means the accomomdationist perspective is largely correct, and because most people are largely ignorant of science, and the mythos is truly more important in terms of how one lives one’s life (whether you believe in the Virgin Birth or the Campus Rape Culture), naturally most people rank mythos over logos. This is also why the Left and the Right are always more than willing to ignore, bury and distort facts when they perturb their own political mythos.
Replying here in case you’re being notified of responses by email as WordPress won’t allow me to reply directly to your response above.
I agree with nearly everything you say, until the last paragraph.
“This, of course, means the accomomdationist perspective is largely correct, and because most people are largely ignorant of science, and the mythos is truly more important in terms of how one lives one’s life (whether you believe in the Virgin Birth or the Campus Rape Culture), naturally most people rank mythos over logos”
The problem here is that just because the myth is more important to people, or in other words their delusions are more important to them, than reality, doesn’t mean the accomodationist perspective that science and religion aren’t in conflict is correct – what it would mean is that religion (let’s call it “myths broadly construed”) is winning the conflict, or at least will always provide an opponent because humans will always fall prey to it.
The non-accomodationist perspective that I hold, and that I think is most commonly held here, is that science and myth are in conflict precisely because of the way myths appeal to people, precisely because of the way that people hold onto them despite evidence to the contrary, because people aren’t sufficiently taught the critical thinking skills and general knowledge required to help protect themselves against that kind of appeal.
Similarly, our (perhaps just my) position is not just that scientific findings (reality, or close to it) and religious beliefs (myths) are in conflict, but that the very methods used to form them are antagonistic by their nature. Religions don’t just emerge from the myths people believe as ends in themselves, they also encourage further mythical thinking – they encourage belief based upon faith, upon revelation, upon interpretations of scripture. Scientific thought, scientific approaches to questions, do the exact opposite – they encourage doubt, tentative acceptance of ideas, testing our beliefs at all turns. THIS is where the conflict lies – not just in the beliefs, but in what forms those beliefs.
“This is also why the Left and the Right are always more than willing to ignore, bury and distort facts when they perturb their own political mythos.”
Always? No. I wouldn’t apply that to either side. Nor would I apply less extreme a claim equally to the Left and Right, particularly in the current US political climate. Sometimes the mythos of one side is much further removed from reality than that of the other. Sometimes one side indulges in the rhetoric to create and enflame that mythos, while the other does not regarding a contrary mythos, or does so to far less a degree.
…and I clicked on the wrong reply button anyway. Score one for me.
KD wrote: “Third, the Classical Christian Theologians, like Augustine, were not “Biblical Creationists” nor are most theologians today.”
Wha?
Are you not aware that early church figures like Augustine (and Aquinas) DID take significant portions literally?
Some of the things Augustine believed from the Old Testament were:
* That the world was 6,000 years old, that living creatures were created separately according to their kinds,
* That Adam and Eve were historical persons, that Paradise was a literal place.
* That the patriarch Methuselah actually lived to the age of 969.
*That there was a literal ark, which accommodated male and female land animals of every kind.
*That the Flood covered the whole earth.
(Much of this coming from his book City Of God).
Augustine vigorously defended the historicity of such OT claims against some his contemporaries who thought it couldn’t be literal, that the age of the earth and the human race were older than depicted in the OT, that the ages of the particular characters in the OT (e.g. Noah, Methuselah) couldn’t be true, that the Ark couldn’t have been made to hold all the animals, that no such flood did or could have occurred.
Read Augustine on The Flood and Noah’s Ark and you’ll see just the type of OT literalism – offering replies to all the bedeviling practical problems – that you can get from the likes of Ken Ham! And which “sophisticated” Christians disavow as naive with claims that “from the earliest days of the Church we knew not to take that stuff literally, doncha know!”
“First, even if you eliminate religion, the hoi polloi are going to believe in “fringe ideas”, paranormal, astrology, New Age. In fact, the unchurched are generally more open to Wu than the churched.”
The framing of the above treats the woo a church provides as different from the woo one can find elsewhere. I would argue it is not except that the church has a degree of organization and social acceptance that the other forms of woo can only aspire to. The churched are accepting woo from the start, so saying the unchurched are more accepting is nonsense.
“Second, scientists are an elite, self-selecting minority subculture. The views within that subculture are always going to conflict with the majority culture, and other minority subcultures within the general culture.”
Yes, and the views of baseball players are likely to be different from non-baseball players. Relevance?
“Fourth…”
And is there any reason to think that most people thought this way, or only that Sophisticated Theologians and Philosophers did? Because the views of the STs and SPs of today usually don’t line up well with the ordinary believer’s views.
I agree with the general argument that humans are prone to irrationality, so irrational beliefs will almost certainly always be with us. I also agree that humans like to create narratives for things, so stories will continue to be created and with us – so when these two are combined, myths of various sorts will likely always be with us. Was there a point beyond this that I’m missing? Because if there isn’t, then I feel like you wasted a lot of words when fewer would’ve gotten that notion across just fine.
Pali wrote:
“The framing of the above treats the woo a church provides as different from the woo one can find elsewhere. I would argue it is not except that the church has a degree of organization and social acceptance that the other forms of woo can only aspire to. The churched are accepting woo from the start, so saying the unchurched are more accepting is nonsense.”
Yes. Compare two pieces of headgear: A pointy hat made of silk with gold thread; and a pointy tinfoil hat. Both pointy hats, but one is to be respected and the other ………?
Yes, it is the style that is bothersome more than the content. The style of communication seems designed to obscure rather than clarify.
It takes some serious arrogance to review a review of a book that one has not read, and a phenomenal level of arrogance to claim victory over it.
I don’t understand why modernist religious people can’t just admit they’re a minority (though a big one in a few parts of the USA) and stop claiming fundamentalism isn’t really real religion.
There is I suppose a difference between a symbolic metaphor for general intellectual abstractions, and a metaphor for something specific yet construed to be numinous, so it would seem that an allegorical reading of sacred texts along with a definite theism is relatively consistent. But this kind of immunizes religion from inquiry in a way that is problematic.
You ever notice that when you get a group of fanatic pet owners or parents together, the conversation tends to sound like “wow, your story reminds me when my baby…” Then someone else replies “and than reminds me when my little Rufus…”? Its a common failing amongst people to take a conversational topic and try and work their own pet interest (figuratively and literally) into it.
So it’s not surprising to me that ground-of-being theologians always try and turn compatibility conversations to the question of ground-of-being theology compatibility. Or if liberal Christians try and turn the discussion to compatibility between liberal Christianity and science. That’s their baby, and they don’t want to talk about someone else’s baby, they want to talk about theirs.
I like Massimo, but he tries really hard to be disagreeable to those that he probably mostly agrees with. This is probably Narcissism of Small Differences.
I think he’s off-base in claiming what religion is “mostly about”. How can one say what religion is mostly about? The measurement is subjective, and I can say subjectively that I don’t see a whole lot of ethics in the Bible or the Koran.
His criticism of your definition of science is also misdirected. When people criticize science, they’re criticizing the methods of science and these same methods are used in other areas of endeavor which don’t belong only to science narrowly construed.
So Massimo’s criticisms, to me, seems to be that of a nerd, who tries to be accurate to the point of conveying no useful information.
Massimo really is a full on accommodationist, isn’t he? I hadn’t realized that. But here he is making the exact same arguments that accommodationists and apologists have made for decades, possibly centuries, for example Francis Collins and Reza Aslan. His arguments about what religion is are nearly indistinguishable from Aslan’s.
Really, nearly every argument Massimo makes here is non sequitur, which he might (or might not) realize if he had actually read the book.
His arguments about the term “science broadly construed” are, to be frank, complete bullshit. Jerry spent a good deal of time in the book explaining just what he meant by that. Instead of engaging Jerry’s meaning he argues about the label. My guess is that he is upset that science is being given too much credit at the expense of religion/spirituality.
IMO Massimo does not come off well here, neither technically or behaviorally. In other words, he is sort of showing his ass here.
I don’t think he is actually. This is more a case of “must find ways of disagreeing with the New Atheists just for the sake of disagreeing with the New Atheists”.
The word you’re looking for is: auto-fellating.
I have just been reading the comments on Russell Blackford’s original review.
With apologies to the great Obi-wan Kenobi – “Philosopher’s Magazine blogs. You will never find a more wretched hive of post-modern lunacy. We must be cautious.”
Gah, Talking Philosophy blogs for Blackford’s review. Apologies to Philosopher’s Magazine!
Philosopher’s Magazine has published half a dozen of article by my father (who has also published in “Free Inquiry”) and one excellent letter to the editor from myself, so they must have something going for them.
In terms of mythology, think about how many times we read seculars speaking about the return of the Inquisition and Witch trials in the event of a return of Christianity to Europe and America. [You would think these, basically rare, events in the history of Christianity constituted the main point of the Faith.] If you look at the 19th century, you find Americans at peak and pretty intense religiosity, yet no Spanish Inquisition and no Witch trials. I am sure 19th Century America sucked in many ways, but we are talking about a secular myth.
Certainly, in places where Christian Institutions found power and privilege, Christian Institutions generally fought political battles to maintain those powers and privileges, resorting on occasion to nasty tactics. But so have labor unions, guilds, aristocracies, university professors, armies, industrialists, etc.
Well, the Witch Trials, IIRC, ended with US law being updated so that magic was no longer accepted as evidence. This is fairly important, even though a reasonable local act.
The Inquisition (in it’s various guises) is a bit different. That had a run for centuries, and a body count in the thousands. Again, in the grand scheme of things not a huge number, and as an official arm of the Catholic church it’s visible. Anyway, the Inquisition is irrelevant in the US because it is a catholic institution, but it has a legitimately bad rep in places where it had leverage with the local government.
The US has an advantage in that it is a relatively modern nation. It did not have the chaos of The Reformation to deal with, or similar religious upheavals that have been going on for millenia.
One thing that the USA has had going for it is that it has never had a proper holy war fought on it’s shores. But one thing that makes me wonder a bit is whether there was a hint of that with the treatment of the indigenous population during the expansion westward in the time that you mentioned?
Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
The Office of the Inquisition still exists, though it was renamed in c. 1903. Pope Benedict was its head before he became pope. It remains very powerful. These days they don’t have the ability to force secular governments to carry out death sentences of course. Who knows what they would do if they still had that power?
“think about how many times we read seculars speaking about the return of the Inquisition and Witch trials in the event of a return of Christianity to Europe and America”?
I have never read or heard seculars on that topic! References, please.
“basically rare, events in the history of Christianity ”
1. Inquistion: “The Inquisition is a group of institutions within the judicial system of the Roman Catholic Church whose aim was to combat heresy. It started in 12th-century France to combat religious sectarianism … In 1965 it became the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.” [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition ]
I am no expert on religion but my google-fu beats your ignorance.
But I do know that the religion is very much present in both US (dominant) and Europe (where a sect has established a theocracy!). So I question the return/absence of what we observe (christianist sects, Inquisition, witch hunts) in media all too often.
Oops, cut and paste error. I’ll post again:
“think about how many times we read seculars speaking about the return of the Inquisition and Witch trials in the event of a return of Christianity to Europe and America”?
I have never read or heard seculars on that topic! References, please.
“basically rare, events in the history of Christianity ”
1. Inquistion: “The Inquisition is a group of institutions within the judicial system of the Roman Catholic Church whose aim was to combat heresy. It started in 12th-century France to combat religious sectarianism … In 1965 it became the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.” [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition ]
If we go by history, that is from 325 [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_centers_of_Christianity ], so ~ 900/1700 or 53 % of the religion’s lifetime.
If you have any measure for “events” we can estimate better.
2. Witch trials: “The period of witch trials in Early Modern Europe[1] were a widespread moral panic suggesting that malevolent Satanic witches were operating as an organized threat to Christendom during the 15th [century] … It has been reported that more than 3,000 people were killed by lynch mobs in Tanzania between 2005 and 2011 for allegedly being witches.[59]” [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_modern_period#Sporadic_witch-hunts_after_1750 ]
So ~ 600/1700 or 35 % of the lifetime.
How can any of those be claimed to be minor part of the religion’s history?
I am no expert on religion but my google-fu beats your ignorance.
But I do know that the religion is very much present in both US (dominant) and Europe (where a sect has established a theocracy!). So I question the return/absence of what we observe (christianist sects, Inquisition, witch hunts) in media all too often.
“Christian Institutions… resorting on occasion to nasty tactics.”
That’s quite the euphemism, I must say. Seen Spotlight yet?
“If you look at the 19th century, you find Americans at peak and pretty intense religiosity, yet no Spanish Inquisition and no Witch trials.”
We were busy killing/converting heathen natives and teaching blacks that God wanted them to live as slaves. There’s only so much you can do in a day, you know?
Sarcasm aside, to treat 19th/20th Century religion in the USA as something benign is to ignore US history. The difference between that period of US history and that of Medieval Europe may be due to little more than the Constitution (and court rulings based upon it) preventing churches from exercising direct government power. I’ve often wondered how much worse the country’s reaction to Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants might have been had some Protestant church been an official arm of the US govt.
So, instead of witch trials, we got the Scopes trial and many others related to religiously-based laws – but fortunately, the judges weren’t church officials. Instead of the Inquisition, we’ve had mostly non-state discrimination and flare-ups of violence against non-Protestants to the point where it took until 1960 to get an electable Catholic and we’ve still not had a non-Christian.
Truly, we’re a bastion of freethinking and tolerance due to our Christian heritage.
“But so have labor unions, guilds, aristocracies, university professors, armies, industrialists, etc.”
True. But at least these groups are making their cases based on reality, not fantasy. If we’re going to have political institutions with too much power, I want the people running them firmly grounded in the real world. I’d take a secular Machiavellian power-hungry monarch as ruler before I’d take a theocrat of ANY stripe, thank you.
“I could declare victory and graciously leave the room at this point, but I’m not done yet.”
Spoken like a true internet troll. When Massimo gets his knickers in a bunch, he becomes the most illogical, fallacy spewing cretin that ever claimed to do “philosophy”. He forgets the basic principals of self-evaluation and shouts “straw man” while placing the hat on his own scarecrow. Methinks he’s spent so much time in the trenches with creationists that he’s acquired some of their habits.
Well hold on, the competition is quite stiff on this one; there is Mary Midgley to consider! 🙂
Its a very odd article. The only really disagreement of substance is the claim about “the main business of religion” etc, the rest seems to be agreement dressed up as disagreement.
Reminds me of all those discussions about free will…..
sub
I am speculating that for many atheistic accommodationists there is more at play than just an abstract, intellectual debate among academics without any real world consequences. For them, because religion teaches morals and values (largely good ones according to them) the argument that religion and science are incompatible undermines the authority (God) that justifies the validity of these morals and values. For atheistic accommodationists, religious authority is necessary to maintain a stable world, but, of course, they are exceptions to this general rule. The “little people” would run amok if religion was not around to keep them under control.
Jerry, BTW I finished reading your book last night. I want to thank you for having given me the chance to organize my thoughts, to strengthen my arguments, to have a clear and better view of how things are. I enjoyed it a lot, it is a pity I finished it.
That’s irrelevant. The question is whether the cosmogeny it produces is consistent with scientific findings. It doesn’t matter if that cosmogeny is the 1st, 2nd, or Nth most important thing the religion does. If it produces one, we can evaluate it.
AFAIK Gould did not make NOMA work by claiming Christianity makes factual claims but that these are only #432 on its list of priorities. He tried to make it work by saying Christianity ought not make factual claims at all. So in this respect, Pugliucci’s ideas are even less sound than Gould’s.
I challenge people who make this argument to argue in polite conversation that Christian fact-claims are as compatible with science as the notion that faeries live in my garden or leprechauns have hidden pots of gold. Show me you really believe that logical compatibility is a sufficient defense by defending other, less mainstream, logically compatible fact-claims as just as scientifically valid as Christianity.
The logical compatibility argument is just cover for Christian exceptionalism. No believers actually buy that logical compatibility is sufficient to make a belief scientifically credible or reasonable, because they reject as ridiculous a lot of logically compatible fact-claims themselves.
And if you take the argument to its natural conclusion and point out that Christianity is equivalent to a lot of silly beliefs in its logical compatibility with science, believers are wont to get offended.
“Accept science” or “believe in science” (in the philosopher’s sense is vague. Many people hold things like believing that the Broca area is responsible for syntax of language and yet also that psychoneural dualism is true. This is more or less contradictory.
Let’s just cut to the chase here and accept this characterization. As an ethical enterprise religion is a horrible failure. The very fact that religion tells some people to work in soup kitchens and others to fly planes into buildings is enough to show that the category “religion” is ethically worthless.
At bottom, religions make ethical claims based on the words of authorities, usually ancient. Claiming that religion promotes ethics is essentially equivalent to claiming that accepting things without question from authority figures promotes ethics. A priori there is nothing in this claim about what the actual ethics might be. An authority figure can as well say that 900 of you should drink cyanide, or vote to outlaw gays, as the authority figure can say to be nice to each other.
We are lucky, and no more than that, that there are slivers of decent ethics in some of the world’s major religions. That there are also wicked things in those religions is not really in dispute. So what good is it again?
Indeed. A lot of religions are not *primarily* about leading ethical lives – they are about worshipping god(s) or being submissive to god(s) or securing an afterlife, or begging him/her/it/them to make the nasty stuff go away. That people should follow some ethical system to achieve this primary end is almost a byproduct, which might explain why some of those ethical claims are unhinged.
I was struck by the statistics on what Americans believe. That God exists gets only a 54% approval rating, yet every other superstition gets a higher rating. How does that work? You’d think that for someone to believe Jesus was resurrected, you’d pretty much have to accept that God exists, wouldn’t you? Otherwise, who’s dong the resurrecting and where would Jesus be headed off to? Furthermore, the whole set of beliefs is pretty much derived from the divinity of the scriptures which requires that all the myths be equally true. But you have to start with an existent God, don’t you? Or am I expecting miracles?
I’m certain that, if you asked a group of inmates in prison for violent crimes whether they believed in God and Jesus, that the vast majority of them would say, “Of course”- however, if they really BELIEVED that there was a chance that God would send them to Hell to burn forever for their sins, would they have committed their crimes in the first place?
I second jeffery’s comment, and also add that the God question involved “certainty”. Stuff like Jesus being the son of God involves merely “belief”.
Yes, certainty and belief SHOULD largely map onto each other, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised when they do not (even when the swing is 20 percentage points). I can think of many things (in the non-spiritual realm) that people would answer that they believe are true, but would then waffle like crazy if they were pressed as to their certainty.
It kind-of reminds me of the deGrasse-Tysons of this world, who will maintain their “agnosticism” about God as a matter of principle. But then color every last bit of their discourse as an atheist, dropping any pretense of being uncertain about garden fairies when pressed.
Seems like so many are deeply reticent about being absolutely certain about anything, no matter how obvious it sometimes must be.
Yes, and even a good scientific thinker often must qualify what she means to be certain of something by referring to reasonable degrees of probability. So, “absolutely certain” undoubtedly biases the data here.
Yep. There’s quite a bit of slippage, even among phrases that seem to be pretty solid & agreed-upon at first glance. It also makes for measurement nightmares when we compare across (sub)cultures and/or languages used. Another reason trend data are so important.
This reminded me of a part of the Catholic funeral liturgy that blows my mind:
My emphasis…
the Nicene wrap-up: “…we look to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”
I’ve seen roomful after roomful of people monotoning this tasty little bit, and asked quite a few if they knew precisely what they were professing. All thought some vague thing about going to heaven. No one knew that this little phrase encapsulates the bizarre fever dream that is Revelations, with all the earth’s dead literally reconstituting themselves and clawing their way out of the ground (or some way or another magically physically popping up). Like the virgin birth, most didn’t even have a clue as to what they are supposed to either believe or be certain of… which is to be expected, I suppose, since it is all a hodge-podge of insanity.
I have no doubt “KD” above has got it figured out. I’m fairly certain.
“certain hope” is weasel words. Is that even meaningful?
I suppose using a strict definition of hope; i.e. “wanting something to happen,” one could have certain hope, but I agree it is weasel words. If you’re certain, why the hell would you hope for it? Hope, in the normal sense, involves something that you’re not certain about. You don’t say “I hope I get this raise,” after you’ve already been offered the raise. If we’re so damn certain about this resurrection, what the hell is the point in talking about it ad nauseum? It’s like doing hoping the sun will rise in the morning.
To believe that religion and science are “non-overlapping” is absurd, for what we’re talking about here is actually the BELIEF in religion and science. Once you get past genetically-determined reflexes and instincts, “beliefs” (definition of “believe”: “to accept as true, or real”) are the basis of ALL our decisions and actions: they “overlap” in the reality of the actions we take in our everyday lives, and to think that one’s religious beliefs aren’t going to influence one’s subsequent decisions and actions concerning matters in the material world is ignorant wishful thinking (that’s why I’m scared that Ted Cruz is running for President: I’d sooner deal with Trump, who is simply an idiot, than someone who thinks their idiocy is “God-inspired”).
Polls can be useful, to a point, yet it must be remembered that people are notoriously dishonest: they will lie, or couch their answer in a form that paints them in the best light, even when they know, intellectually, that the poll is entirely confidential (this satisfies our “self-image” of what we would like to THINK we believe). To find out what a person actually BELIEVES, you have to look at what they’re doing and, “belief” being the bottom line, not truth, it’s entirely possible for someone to hold two conflicting beliefs, such as a scientist who believes the theory of evolution is true, yet believes, at the same time, that Jesus is the Son of God.
It would be nice if, indeed, science and faith were “compatible”, each concerned with its own sphere of influence, each running on its own separate track in life, but faith-based beliefs are actively seeking to determine the very nature of our societies, in everything from what we should teach our children, to whether women have control over their own bodies (or anything else, where Islam is concerned), to our response to environmental degradation (“Jeebus is coming back soon, so we don’t need to worry about that”) etc, etc. The worst aspect is that faith just can’t leave science alone, anyway: it continually promulgates the notion that mere faith in something is equivalent to actual knowledge.
Its a shame Gould is dead. If he hadn’t died I wonder if he would long since have given up on NOMA. Its just such a bad idea. Its a bland idea that can be immediately and completely demolished by several counterarguments.
Jerry may correct me here…but I remember thinking at the time that this was as much about Gould’s political philosophy as it was about science or religion per se.
Pigliucci simply needs to show evidence for any part of religion being commensurate with nature, then I am on board.
I.e., redefine religion as science then he has nothing to accommodate.
First, as others have pointed out, Massimo’s statements that religious teachings are not “mainly” or “primarily” about cosmogonies are straw men. Neither Jerry nor anyone else I know of have ever argued that that cosmogonies are the “primary” purpose of religion. However, the moral and ethical teachings that religions purport to provide are, at bottom, inextricably tied in some measure to the “truth” of the narratives. Does it really make sense to believe in Jesus’ promise of “eternal life” if we can’t prove there was a Jesus or that he rose from the dead? If we disregard the virgin birth, the changing of water into wine, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the resurrection, etc., as myths, doesn’t this erode the evidence that has traditionally supported Jesus’ claim to be “God,” and so, too, the argument that Jesus spoke with any special authority? Moreover, if we dismiss some portions of the Bible as myth or allegory, what confidence can we reasonably have that anything else in the Bible is true, including the moral teachings? When we abandon the narrative framework, and the claims of miracles and divine inspiration, we are simply left with some moral and ethical teachings concocted by nobody special, with no reason to give their particular proclamations on matters of ethics and morality any particular deference.
Philosophy is obsessed with telling science (and scientists!) what science – and the natural universe – is:
“Pigliucci really hates this because he sees himself as the Demarcator of Science, and to him “science broadly construed” is not science.”
Sure, philosophy and science are logically compatible.
And like religion, philosophy has schemes for ethics that people use at one time or other. [For philosophy within legislation accodting to Krauss] Though I note that universities and other employers have ethics groups, so science (and scientists!) is not unfamiliar with the subject.
TL;DR: Dr^3 Pigliucci is good at alienating his readers.
Makes me wonder why people started reading Dr^3 in the first place. Is it like the nowadays as obnoxious PZ, because he was once good at working against the ‘christian science’ pseudoscience!?
Philosophy is a conceptual investigation, so, of course, philosophers tell people what the concept of science is, and what the scientific method is, what the right concept of reality is, etc. Scientists often return the favor, I think Mach or Bohr were a better philosophers than many of their contemporaries working in philosophy.
They might attempt such things but in many cases the scientists have a de facto better understanding of them than most of the philosophers.
For example, the “scientific method” is what scientists actually do, not what philosophers say in their commentary about it.
Stopping right at the allegory argument. What the heck is the use of allegory? I like poetry and some fantasy and sci-fi. Probably some allegories in there. But so what? And why would we support this insane, complicated, wasteful, predatory, hateful, vengeful (etc etc) bunch of “allegories” at all? Why not just cut to the chase and decide on some ethics? Who needs the profoundly inefficient bilge set forth in the “holy” books of the world? Especially when they are so abysmally BORING.
I never talk about the relationship between science and religion, because there simply isn’t one.
I don’t know that I agree that “science and religion are logically compatible.”
Massimo Pigliucci doesn’t seem to understand that ethics are largely dependent on our understanding of reality. Is it ethical to give children religious instruction to save them from the fiery underworld where God might send them to? Only if hell and God really exist, otherwise religious instruction would be at best a waste of time.
And science is the only game in town when it comes to making sense of reality, for revelation is necessarily personal and subjective, and a subjectivist can’t possibly know whether he’s right or wrong.
I see I haven’t been paying attention, Coel already made this point earlier at #5. Credit where credit is due.
The echo’s in Pigliucci’s head must be deafening and trying to distinguish which direction they’re coming from is as useless as writing a review of a book you have not read.
I understand the professors (A) need to rattle Pigliucci’s dags but it seems a zero sum game to nowhere with someone who can’t come to grip with the scientific method because it doesn’t suit his one upmanship itch.
A pointy tinfoil hat will help with focussing the echoes.
Sounds like Massimo just needs to attend a few fundamentalist church services or subject himself to some online sermons. Then he will actually understand what the faithful believe.
I used to believe more like he did, that it was metaphorical and allegorical, until I went to one to see what it was like. Adam & Even are/were literal people to them. The things the bible says really did happen in their minds.
Wait…
Jerry states outright in his book that his thesis is NOT the claim that religion and science are logically incompatible.
Massimo reads this and believes making the same point Jerry made is to vanquish Jerry’s thesis?
You’ve gotta be kidding me.
I like Massimo, though he can exhibit smugness. But that’s just silly.
I agree entirely. Massimo made a mistake here. He criticized Jerry’s arguments without actually taking a look at Jerry’s arguments. He assumed. And what he assumed Jerry said is insulting, in addition to having assumed in the first place.
This of course does not make Massimo a bad person, or even someone to not take seriously. We all do stupid things. If Massimo is capable of avoiding letting himself be boxed in by pride he may one day read Jerry’s arguments with a fair attitude, in a good faith attempt to understand what Jerry meant to convey, and will then offer reasonable criticisms. And maybe an apology.
According to wiki, Pigliucci once, ‘…in a response personally addressed to Pope Francis, wrote that the Pope only offered non-believers “a reaffirmation of entirely unsubstantiated fantasies about God and his Son…”‘
I can only conclude that he did this prior to becoming “a modern sensible person” himself, or he would have obviously known “like any sensible modern person does, that religious stories are best interpreted as allegories, not as literal truths.”
Note that I have not read Pigliucci’s article, the better to afford myself the same liberty of expression that he retained for his own purposes when writing about F&F (which I do own and have read!)
Massimo is right when he says religions are not primarily concerned with cosmogonies. The Catholic Church, for example, doesn’t care if one thinks the Earth is 6000 years old or 4.5 billion years old. But, that’s just the issue that Jerry raises; religion is not compatible with science because religion cares that you believe God (specifically the triune God in the case of Catholicism) is behind creation.
They don’t care about cosmogonies per se, but they place their authority about ethics and morality in the argument that God created the Universe. What specific mechanism he used isn’t important. It’s here that I think Massimo is loading the term “primarily.” It’s not religion’s primary focus to discuss facts about the Universe that fall within the realm of science, but the bulwark of their authority rests on their claim that they have at least the outline of cosmogenesis correct. To say that they they aren’t primarily focused on scientific facts is not the same as saying they don’t rely on scientific claims to support their ethics and morality.
Religion is about pretending. Science is about trying your hardest not to pretend. Therefore they’re incompatible. End of story.
QED!
Indeed, that’s a great epigram–one that I might steal!
Thank you! Thanks also to Diane and Xuuths!
Music (in the guise of musical beef) once again demonstrates itself as a ‘way of knowing’ a truth. Bravo.
I cannot make heads or tails with Massimo Pigliucci’s reply. As a philosopher proper, he will have a sense for unclear definitions. But from that fountain springs his disagreement. Part of his definition of religion is not true, as noted already: religions make truth-claims and their debunking is not trivial, and never was.
Though even in the most secular apprehension, the believer hopes that a religious frame around their worldview gives them meaning, makes death more palatable, perhaps – or provides a sense of order, beauty and purpose. How would that work if religion was merely fiction, with all truth-claims abandoned? How could anyone find solace in honest, self-proclaimed fiction, of the type that “comes right out and says, I’m a Liar, right there on the dust jacket” {1}
On the disagreement on “science broadly construed” again, something, but not everything, hinges on definitional fine-print. You can call the desire to find out something true about the world, and using a specific method of testing out ideas however you want, and draw lines however you want, sort one into basic homo sapiens faculties and the more refined processes into “science” – it changes little. Perhaps gradual knowledge production takes place on a cultural level all the time in billions of small increments? New findings would be “merely” the spark that makes a visible leap, but is not the electric current itself, that builds up invisibly. I prefer that view over the “Great Man” theory – even though occasional genuis certainly helped bridge gaps in a spark of ideas. After all some idea emerged independently at the same time. For the leaner and researcher, embedded in the knowledge of their times, their own expertise may increase in small steps. But we only take note when they reached an impressive platform and then wonder how they got up there. The pursuit to draw nice lines, between genius and the zeitgeist, and in knowledge itself, marking steps 1—100 as “ordinary”; and 101—1000 as “science” or any such notions seem foolish to me. But philosophers sometimes seem overly attached to essences and definitions and lose track of the underlying fabric.
I always wanted to bring this to attention, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont also construed science broadly. In Impostures Intellectuelles (Fashionable Nonsene), they write:
There’s one area where I think (we) atheists make it ourselves a bit too easy, and it is the realm of metaphors. Metaphors are all over the place in our speech, and indeed, our thinking. They are tools of our mind to understand a new domain by linking it to some already mastered domain of human knowledge, by analogy-making. Cognitive scientists thinkers such analogy making is the “core of cognition” (Hofstadter), or the “key to explaining human intelligence” (Pinker).
But at the end of the day, this detour over a deeper understanding of metaphors inevitably leads to the question whether whatever we describe or grasp, conceptually or metaphorically is also true – which is the real problem with religious metaphors: they aren’t more true or particularily enlightening than other fiction. It always hinges on the mythical quality of “taking things seriously”. If you take Tarot cards, tealeaves fanned out, or the intestines of goats serious enough, your mind can produce “meaning”. Religious practictioners find meanings in patterns of numbers, arrangements of symbols, subtexts, stories, and fancy occult systems. The deeper, more general quality seems to be that humans are equipped with a mind we ourselves barely know. Exposure to symbols (metaphors …), and a “taking things seriously” attitude helps us discover it.
The “taking things seriously” requires Pigluiccis mental acrobatics, or the belief that some numinous entities are out there that assemble these symbols purposefully – like sinisiter conspirators who also always want to communicate, but then somewhat semi-secret so that only the ones “in the know” can take advantage of it (and which gives their group, incididentially, a special status). I wonder why Pigluicci and others don’t see human nature in all these gestures.
_____
{1} Alan Moore, 2003, magician and comic’s book author on fiction. He treats religious beliefs and indeed occult magic as fiction, but fiction worth celebrating, subverting and mocking.
I couldn’t agree more about the incremental and fuzzy nature of science. Much energy has been spent trying to define science in such a way so as to include things we clearly want to call science, mechanics (physics), say, from things we want to call pseudo-science, like astrology. The effort spent on this often comes across to me as an attempt to find knowledge wholesale, by including or excluding whole sections of human activity, rather than going through and tediously addressing all the claims. This strikes me as unlikely to work.
I encountered a lot of these debates when I studied psychology for a time. Behaviorists, already fading by the time I started studying, still had a lot of influence with their insistence that their positivistic outlook was the only “real” science of psychology. Similarly, a lot of ink was spilled trying to include or exclude Freudianism and other schools of clinical psychology from the inner circle of “real science”. None of those debates about the nature of science had much effect so far as I can tell. What had an effect on everyone’s assessment of Behaviorism was a logical and empirical argument from Chomsky and others that convinced many people that Behaviorist ideas about how brains work were simply inadequate (e.g. language is combinatoric in a way that Behaviorist theories couldn’t easily accommodate). Similarly, certain threads of psychology lost a lot of their credibility when experiments were performed, for example with Rorschach ink blots, that showed that contra clinicians claims there was no consistency to their interpretations. These were simple experiments that by their simplicity convinced many people. No Ultimate Arguments about the nature of science needed to be invoked.
It is interesting, perhaps, to try to understand the elements of knowledge-advancing science, but it seems like a fools errand to try to crisply define it so that you can separate the world into scientific sheep and unscientific goats.
MP: “There is no logical contradiction between accepting all the findings of modern science and believing in a transcendental reality”
If the above is true then the following must also be true : There is no logical contradiction between accepting all the findings of modern science and believing in Fairy Tails.
Ironically “transcendental reality” is a logical contradiction.
MP: “ethics and meaning are outside the proper domain of science”
This is simply not true. Science has shown us the fictional character of ethics and meaning.
The core business of science is truth. The moment religion makes a truth claim they automatically are in the domain of science.