Category: scientism

Oy! Rebecca Goldstein versus Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus)

July 12, 2017 • 10:30 am

I am doubly aggrieved this morning, for even us battle-hardened website bosses can be hurt, especially when it’s by a friend. Or at least I thought philosopher Rebecca Goldstein was a friend, as our relations have always been amiable and I’ve admired her work. So I was hurt when I discovered yesterday, by accident, that she took after me big time for being a prime example of  a “philosophy-jeering scientist.” This was in a piece posted about a year ago at The Big Think, in which Jag Bhalla interviews Goldstein about the purview of philosophy. In the third bit of the interview, “What’s behind a science vs. philosophy fight?“, Goldstein levels some severe criticisms at scientists who diss philosophy, claiming that those scientists don’t even understand philosophy or what its task is. And I’m the prime example of such a jeerer. I’m a bit hurt that she never told me she published this, as it’s my own custom, when I criticize a friend in a piece of writing, to let them know I’ve done it. But let’s leave that aside and get to the arguments.

Now Rebecca does a very good job in explaining what philosophy is good for: she says it’s to “maximize coherence”. By that she means the logic and reason of philosophy is good for dispelling incoherent or inconsistent arguments—a method pioneered by Socrates and now given his name.  She also agrees that philosophy has nothing to say about the truth of the natural world, for that’s not its job.  But, she adds, it can contribute to our understanding of the real world by helping scientists ponder the implications of their theories, as they did when quantum mechanics was being formulated.

I agree with all that! In fact, I’ve said precisely that. My latest take on the value of philosophy, in a critical post about Bill Nye, says pretty much what Goldstein said. My words:

My own view is that philosophy is valuable in adjudicating questions about morality and politics, and has also contributed, though to a lesser degree, to the progress of science. Since philosophy specializes in clear thinking and logic, and examining arguments through “thought experiments,” it’s helped clarify our thinking about moral issues (i.e., the trolley problem, abortion, our duty to those less fortunate), political issues (viz., Mill’s On Liberty and The Subjection of Women), and religious issues (I’ve long maintained that Plato’s Euthyphro argument is one of the best contributions of philosophy to thinking about God).

What about science? Well, some philosophers like Dan Dennett and Phil Kitcher have applied their professional skills to discussions of evolution and sociobiology, and have made very real contributions to scientists’ thinking about those issues. Indeed, both of those men have a strong scientific mindset, a mindset sufficient to criticize scientific ideas in a useful way. Their contributions aren’t all that different from the Gedankenexperimentsmade by Einstein and Niels Bohr, for instance, in their epic battle about the meaning of quantum mechanics. Philosophy plays a substantial role in interpreting quantum mechanics and other issues in modern physics, whether or not physicists like Lawrence Krauss admit it (he’s a big detractor of philosophy). Nye doesn’t touch on any of this; it’s above his pay grade.

I will claim that philosophy by itself cannot tell us anything new about nature. It can help us do that using its powers of logic and analysis, but ultimately it is science—reasoned and testable observations of nature that produce provisional “truth”—that must tell us about the nature of the cosmos. But that’s not philosophy’s bailiwick, for the field involves ways of thinking about problems, not telling us what’s real. And it’s none the worse for that.

Now granted, this was in July 5, nearly a year after Rebecca’s post, but my position has been pretty much the same all along. And given that I expressed it in a small meeting that Rebecca and I went to a few years ago, she should know that (it’s also in Faith versus Fact, published two years ago.) And yes, there are some scientists who don’t seem to appreciate the value of any philosophy, for scientists or anyone else: these seem to include Lawrence Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and it’s clear that I disagree with them. But in the Big Think article I’m touted as the Prime Miscreant among their ranks.

First comes a supposed demolition of my argument that philosophy, like math, is not a “way of knowing”. I’ve carefully defined what I meant by that, in Faith versus Fact and elsewhere, as “ways of knowing what’s true about the natural world and cosmos.” I’ve argued, for instance, that math tells us a kind of truth, but a truth about the consequences of its assumptions. Goldstein agrees with me, saying this

 Now whatever it is that philosophy is trying to do (and it’s notoriously difficult to make this clear) it isn’t trying to compete with the empirical sciences.  If it were, it would be just as deluded as the philosophy-jeerers say it is.

. . . Mathematics is a prime example of non-empirical knowledge that is, unassailably, knowledge.  But its aprioricity comes at a price—namely its truths are all necessarily true, which means they describes all possible worlds, and therefore don’t give us knowledge about our specific world, the way the sciences do. The sciences use mathematics to express their truths, but the truths themselves are discovered empirically.

Now what is a scientist “philosophy jeerer”? Goldstein explains:

And a good part of the reason why philosophy-jeerers presume that philosophy must be trying to compete with the physical sciences is that they just can’t imagine any useful intellectual work that doesn’t lead to knowledge as they know it, which is knowledge of physical reality achieved by way of the empirical sciences, with a methodology requiring that theories, no matter how abstract, ultimately be subjected to testing so that our wrong-headed intuitions can be corrected.

Whatever that is, it surely isn’t me, and doesn’t resemble anything I said.

And indeed, all I’ve claimed, when saying philosophy isn’t a “way of knowing,” though it’s very useful to ethicists, scientists, and the average person, is that philosophy can’t tell us what’s true about the cosmos. I was simply including philosophy on a list of things that people have claimed are “ways of knowing” that compete with science, and trying to clarify that, like literature, math, and religion, philosophy can’t tell us anything about what’s true in the natural universe.

But Goldstein apparently thinks I’m trying to say something deeper. Here’s part of her conversation with Bhalla:

JB: I’m reminded of David Sloan Wilson’s observation that “philosophy gave birth to the sciences and parental care is still required” and that “it is the job of philosophers to think clearly about concepts.” That’s a yawning chasm from biologist Jerry Coyne’s response to Blachowicz—“Neither philosophy nor poetry are ‘ways of knowing’… it’s not the business of either to find out truth.” And I’m particularly interested in philosophy’s practice of rigorous non-numeric logic. The “highly quantified” thinking that Blachowicz says scientists typically rely on, doesn’t seem to capture all useful truths (they’re not all in “the numbers”). And hard though it may be, can you say more about what philosophers seek to do?

RNG: Well, before going on to say what it is that philosophy does, the kind of intellectual work it performs, I’d like to spend a bit of time with Coyne’s statement, because it so beautifully demonstrates what philosophy-jeering scientists don’t get. I’m surprised that Coyne, who understands his own field, evolutionary biology, so well and gets quite annoyed when outsiders lodge non-sophisticated objections against evolution, would make such a non-sophisticated statement about another field. I suspect it was made in haste, before he’d thought through the implications.

JB: Please, do point out Coyne’s hasty misstep.

RNG: Coyne’s statement would be absolutely correct if it were understood to read: “It’s not the business of either [philosophy or poetry] to find out truths about physical reality.” Coyne would be on safe ground there, damnably safe, because that statement isn’t only true but trivially true. It’s about as informative as saying that it’s not the business of firefighters, qua firefighters, to choreograph ballets (especially with their full gear and boots on).  [JAC: my emphasis]. But if you don’t understand Coyne’s statement to be asserting this trivially true proposition, then what you have is a proposition that’s not only false but self-falsifying, because it is itself a philosophical claim. So if it’s true, then it’s false, which is just about as false as you can get.  Coyne has demonstrated, in only a couple of sentences, the philosophy-jeerer’s tendency to bumble his way into philosophy without realizing it.  And this is because of the difficulty in making clear what it is that philosophy does.

JB: So philosophers know they’re not doing science, but some vocal scientists don’t know they’re doing philosophy! And that brings us back to what it is that philosophy does.

RNG: Perhaps the most effective way to try to say what philosophy does, and how it makes headway, is to simply point to an example of philosophical work.  And we have an example close to hand, because what I was just doing, in going to work on Coyne’s statement, was a paradigmatic philosophical exercise: closely analyzing what a proposition could mean, distinguishing various possible meanings, each with its own corresponding truth-conditions, and then showing that, under the analysis, the proposition collapses into incoherence.

This is what bothers me. First, I am by no means, nor have ever been, a “philosophy jeering scientist.” Second the statement that I made is indeed the one in bold that Goldstein considers “trivially true.” Well, perhaps it is to a practicing philosopher like her, but not to the general public, who thinks that science is only one “way of knowing” what’s true about the universe, and that philosophy, math, literature, and religion are others. Perhaps it’s trivially true to Goldstein, but I think needs “unpacking” for the layperson.

The rest of her argument I don’t quite understand, and perhaps readers can explain it to me—as well as telling me how Goldstein has construed my “trivially true” statement in a new and different way that falsifies it. If I was indeed doing philosophy, and my statement was “true and trivially true”, what’s the beef?

So my second tsouris comes from being misunderstood. Yes, a trained philosopher could parse and interpret my statement so that it “collapses into incoherence,” but I’m not responsible for that parsing.

Enough. Perhaps I seem defensive, but so does Rebecca.  The rest of what she says is, as usual, very good, and I’ll quote her here on the value of philosophy:

The kind of progress philosophy is after isn’t the same as the progress sought by the empirical sciences, namely to discover the nature of physical reality.  And it isn’t the same as the progress sought by mathematics, which aims to discover conceptual truths about abstract structures. Rather, it’s a kind of progress that has to do with us, the complicated reason-giving creatures that we are. Philosophy is trying to maximize our coherence. We are creatures who happily coexist with many inconsistencies, and it’s the business of philosophy to make that coexistence a less happy one.  Philosophers pay careful attention to what’s being asserted, separating out different possible meanings with their associated truth conditions, forcing hidden premises out into the open and probing the arguments and intuitions behind them, laying out the range of possibilities revealed when you’re forced to justify your inferences, which often reveal new possibilities that are worth pursuing in their own right. And sometimes these possibilities feed new scientific research (as philosophical analysis opened the way for interpretations of quantum mechanics beyond the “Copenhagen interpretation” of Niels Bohr) or even mathematical research (the incompleteness theorems of Kurt Gödel are a good example) or they help us to make moral progress, as when our general ethical intuitions concerning the rights and dignity of human beings were philosophically demonstrated to be incompatible with, say, the practices of slavery. Maximizing coherence has been the job description of philosophy ever since Socrates wandered the agora making a general nuisance of himself by subjecting his fellow citizens to the kind of interrogation that revealed their inconsistencies and incoherencies. It’s not surprising that the reductio-ad-absurdum was the form of argument to which Socrates most frequently resorted, and it’s distinctively of that type of reasoning that you call non-numeric logic.  And it’s useful intellectual work to do, this attempt to maximize our coherence, at least if you value truth, as the philosophy-jeerers so clearly do.

 

NY Times hires science disser as op-ed writer

May 4, 2017 • 10:00 am

Late last month, the New York Times hired conservative Bret Stephens as an op-ed writer. Only 43 years old, Stephens had previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2013.

While Stephens isn’t an out-and-out denialist of global warming, he’s always tried to minimize its potential effects on our planet. As Physics Today wrote in 2013:

As recently as November 2011, in a column headlined ‘The great global warming fizzle,’ Stephens described ‘the case of global warming’ as a ‘system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen’ that, like religion, ‘is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.’

Stephens doesn’t appear to reject outright the data on temperature rise, or even the finding that humans are involved. But he energetically mocks warnings as hysterical alarmism. In a 2008 column he wrote with a smirk:

“What manner the catastrophe might take isn’t yet clear, but the scenarios are grim: The climate crisis is getting worse faster than anticipated; global warming will cause refugee crises and destabilize entire nations…. And so on.”

In December 2009, he published on the incident that he and others framed with the loaded term climategate. He charged that it involved ‘some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data.’ That column carried the headline ‘Climategate: Follow the money’ and the subhead ‘Climate change researchers must believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.’

They added that Stephens “has a record of indicting climate scientists through mockery.”

And indeed, in his very first column,”Climate of complete certainty” (April 28), Stephens continues this gambit, mocking not anthropogenic climate change, which he actually admits, but science itself, which, he says, has given us false certainty about the phenomenon. This is a confusing message, for it gives denialist readers some ammunition not just against climate change, but against the science that has ferreted out its existence and cause. Climate scientists, he argues, have, like other scientists with convincing data, “descen[ded] to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.”  In other words, he’s indicting science for being arrogant and giving a false idea of certainty. And just as surely, that gives ammunition and hope to denialists.

First, his admissions:

The science is settled. The threat is clear. Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument?

and

None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences.

But then he goes on to undercut both the nature of the threat and the “certainty” of science itself using these arguments (quotes from the article are in quotation marks):

  • Polls and experts were virtually certain that Hillary Clinton would win the election, showing the fallacy of certainty.

    “When Bill Clinton suggested to his wife’s advisers that, considering Brexit, they might be underestimating the strength of the populist tide, the campaign manager, Robby Mook, had a bulletproof answer: The data run counter to your anecdotes.

    That detail comes from “Shattered,” Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s compulsively readable account of Clinton’s 2016 train wreck. Mook belonged to a new breed of political technologists with little time for retail campaigning and limitless faith in the power of models and algorithms to minimize uncertainty and all but predict the future.

    There’s a lesson here. We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris. From Robert McNamara to Lehman Brothers to Stronger Together, cautionary tales abound.

We ought to know this by now, but we don’t. Instead, we respond to the inherent uncertainties of data by adding more data without revisiting our assumptions, creating an impression of certainty that can be lulling, misleading and often dangerous. Ask Clinton.

With me so far? Good. Let’s turn to climate change.”

The analogy to Clinton is flawed: scientists don’t take polls, we make testable predictions about climate, our “data” don’t consist of asking people what they’ll do (some of whom have motivations to lie), and the effects of global warming are already clear. Yes, polls can be wrong, and so can science, but that says nothing about whether the data supporting climate change are convincing. They are (see here, for instance). He adduces no evidence against climate change, but simply is telling readers to be deeply suspicious of science, as if science were the equivalent of a political poll.

  • Climate scientists falsely convey an attitude of complete certainty, demonizing opponents as lunatics and moral inferiors.

“Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.

By now I can almost hear the heads exploding. They shouldn’t, because there’s another lesson here — this one for anyone who wants to advance the cause of good climate policy. As Revkin wisely noted, hyperbole about climate “not only didn’t fit the science at the time but could even be counterproductive if the hope was to engage a distracted public.”

Let me put it another way. Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.”

First, no scientist ever says they have the absolute truth. A spirit of openness toward conflicting data is in fact part of the true spirit of science (of course we’re humans, and that’s not the spirit of some scientists!). We always operate on probabilities, making the best inference we can from data. Yes, the data supporting climate change may be wrong, but the likelihood of that is very small. We do not have “total certainty”, but we have enough assurance to begin to take the problem very seriously and try to do something about it. (Stephens cavalierly dismisses climate-change models as “sophisticated and fallible”, as if they are surely wrong.)  But what is the “hyperbole” that Stephens is talking about?

And really, “ideological intentions” underlie our desire to prevent the destruction of our planet? Why would scientists have a bias against finding climate change and an ideology that prompts them to lie about its possible disasterous effects? How would we benefit from that? As for making “few converts”, nearly half of all Americans already accept anthropogenic global warming, not a bad figure given that its disastrous effects aren’t yet clearly visible to the average person.

Further, surely the opposition to global warming is not based on scientists’ supposed “moral superiority”—no more than opposition to evolution (as strong in America as is opposition to climate change) does not rest on evolutionists acting “morally superior.” It’s based on religion; just as climate change is based on secular faith or wish-thinking that “everything’s all right.”

The parallels between Stephens’s attitude and Americans’ denial of evolution becomes clear at the end when he makes his last argument:

  • The “total certainty” evinced by scientists in general degrades their credibility.

“None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.

I’ve taken the epigraph for this column* [JAC: see below] from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who knew something about the evils of certitude. Perhaps if there had been less certitude and more second-guessing in Clinton’s campaign, she’d be president. Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.”

We see here that Stephens’s real objection is not science, but “scientism,” normally taken to be the extension of science into areas where it supposedly doesn’t belong, but to Stephens it’s a form of scientific arrogance.

But there is no scientist who would say that we are absolutely certain about climate change, or about evolution, either. Stephens is tilting at a windmill. The best data available tell us that both pheomena are real, and the probability we are wrong is very, very low. Yes, we could both be wrong, but Stephens is using that very small possibility to do down science as a whole and—let’s face it—to give heart to climate-change denialists.

The Washington Post which is owned by the New York Times, has written a critique of Stephens’s column, as has Slate.  The Post‘s piece in particularly good at pointing out the ambiguities and misstatements in Stephen’s column. They asked the Times’s editorial-page boss James Bennett, responsible for overseeing Stephens’s column, to respond to their critique, and got this response, which they call “Editorial Page Editor’s Boilerplate Kumbaya Response to Public Outrage”:

If all of our columnists and all of our contributors and all of our editorials agreed all of the time, we wouldn’t be promoting the free exchange of ideas, and we wouldn’t be serving our readers very well.

The crux of the matter here is whether the questions Bret’s raising and the positions he’s taking are outside the bounds of reasonable discussion. I don’t think a fair reading of his column remotely supports that conclusion — quite the opposite, actually. He’s capturing and contributing to a vitally important debate, and engaging that debate directly helps each of us clarify what we think. We’re already getting some spirited and constructive responses, and I’m looking forward to reflecting those views in our pages, too.

A “fair reading” of Stephens’s column shows that he’s concluding that science can’t be trusted in general, and perhaps for climate change as well—at least as far as the certainty of the phenomenon is concerned.

In hiring Stephens and allowing him to spew anti-science rhetoric as opinion, the Times is doing the equivalent of publishing an evolution-criticizing piece by a closet creationist. To see that, just rewrite Stephens’s column, but substitute “evolution” for “climate change”. Would such a piece merit inclusion on the paper’s op-ed page?

__________________

*[Column epigraph]

When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God.

But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he’s 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.

— An old Jew of Galicia

Two creationists and an anti-“scientism” advocate write in

October 10, 2016 • 9:00 am

This is just a small selection of some recent comments that didn’t make it below the fold, but are being displayed in prime time here. I can either ban the writers (creationists and science-dissers usually get automatic bans), or can moderate them and let you do battle. Remember, though, that the chances they’ll change their minds is exactly ZERO, and I don’t really like the “chew toy” approach to comments.

All comment are reproduced exactly as submitted.

First, we have a comment from reader “Bill” In reply to jaxkayaker on the post “Evolution denialism by Pence“. I put this one first because the comment about bacteria, bananas, and horses is hilarious (my emphasis):

when you say evolution is true what are talking about? You mean all of what some scientists claim is true without a doubt? Yes, bacteria mutates but it is still bacteria. It is not a horse or a banana. You don’t see it changing all you can do is assume or guess but certainly you cannot fault somebody for questioning it or doubting it. I do understand that the fossils we have show from primitive to more recent depending on how far you dig but I do not see how that proves or even implies common ancestry. So some evolution that we observe is obviously true but going back from the beginning of life is a stretch.

Here we have the usual “we have microevolution but not macroevolution”. The response to that, or to the Ray Comfort claim that we need to see macroevolution happening in real time, is that such a claim is fatuous. First, we do see macroevolution in the fossil record and “Bill” admits it (“I do understand that the fossils we have show from primitive to more recent depending on how far you dig”). This is the slam-dunk refutation of the “microevolution happens but not macroevolution” claim. As for seeing a bacteria evolve into a banana in real time, well, that’s just idiotic.

The claim that we can see change from primitive to more recent forms in the fossil record is true: we have such progressions showing early mammal-like reptiles evolving into reptiles, theropod reptiles evolving into birds, and land-dwelling artiodactyls evolving into whales. (There are many more, as you can see in WEIT.) What Bill doesn’t realize is that this progression does gives evidence for common ancestry, for the earlier versions of these transitional forms resemble more strongly the proposed common ancestor. Early feathered dinosaurs evolved into more-feathered, flying dinosaurs (aka birds), and that gives evidence that modern reptiles and birds share a common ancestry. Early hominins are more like arboreal, small-brained primate ancestors than are later hominins. It’s not rocket science to see that the nature of transitional forms over time gives evidence for common ancestry, but I guess Bill isn’t close to being a rocket scientist.

*********

Reader “John” tried to leave this comment on my post “Reflections on the tenth anniversary of The God Delusion“:

Why do you try so hard to disprove God with this far fetched lunacy. We can not have evolved the odds of winning the lottery every week for you life time are more likely.
If you really were as well educated as some of you think you are, you would question the lodgic of this theory.
You are too amazing to have evolved.
Come up with something better.

“You are too amazing to have evolved” would make a nice creationist tee shirt. I can’t resist adding that although this comment needs no refutation, were the reader educated, he or she would be able to write and spell properly.

**********

Reader “Blackstone” tried to leave this comment on my post “Second most popular TED talk of all time, on power posing, disavowed by senior author“:

Enlightenment methodology applied to human psychology, society and spirituality is farcical and worse than useless — it is a weapon of mass destruction.

The universe revealed by science is a bleak wasteland of atoms in a void that offers humanity no hope, no meaning and no guidance. Scientism applied to human beings is leading to mass depression, drug addiction, obesity, techno-idolatry and other symptoms of the massive spiritual void created by the Enlightenment cult. This cult has terrorized mankind long enough; it’s time to reign [sic] them in and end their reign of terror!

Indeed, “Blackstone” is right in one way: the universe itself, as revealed by science, offers humanity no hope, meaning, or guidance—for that kind of guidance can come only from humans themselves, not from the laws of physics. (I’d add, though, that the Universe offers meaning by revealing the working of physical law and its consistency over time and space.) As for scientism causing mass depression, drug addiction, obesity (really??), techno-idolatry and other horrors of secularism, well, that’s just wrong. Scientism is a canard anyway, as even secular countries like Denmark and Sweden aren’t grossly dysfunctional.

But let’s check one claim: that atheistic countries (I take “scientism” as being correlated with “atheism”) tend to be countries with more obese inhabitants. Here are maps from a 2014 survey by the World Health Organization showing the degree of obesity in different countries (first men and then women. The lighter yellow countries are those with few obese people, and obesity increases as one goes from yellow to orange to red:

screen-shot-2015-01-22-at-10-27-46-am

screen-shot-2015-01-22-at-10-27-56-am

Not much data here to show a correlation between scientism and obesity, except insofar as sub-Saharan countries are religious, as we know, and also less obese. But that’s because they don’t have enough food! And look at atheistic China—inhabitants skinny as rails. In contrast, look at the U.S.—the most religious of First World countries—compared to Northern Europe—far more atheistic. Except for the UK (too many chips and beer!), the U.S. and Canada (too much poutine!) are fatter than the inhabitants of nearly every European country! Mexicans, religious as they are, should surely be skinnier than Americans and Canadians, but the women aren’t. And the biggest exception is the Middle East and North Africa. especially for women: deeply religious Muslims and yet still prone to obesity. I had no idea that Saudi, Iraqui, Egyptian, Tunisian, Algerian, Iranian, and Turkish women were that overweight. Remember, too, that women tend to be more religious than men in the same country, and so should be skinnier.

Now I haven’t plotted a correlation between obesity and unbelief among countries, but if one exists, and I doubt it, then it would surely be mediated through poverty: poor countries tend to be more religious, and poor countries tend to have fewer obese people. It’s not the secularism that causes obesity, it’s the higher well-being, which, by and large, is correlated with nonbelief.  The U.S. would be a glaring exception to the “secularism causes obesity rule”, for we’re religious and overweight.

But let’s leave aside the stupid claims about the perfidies of scientism. The US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Russia, and the Middle East need to slim down. 25% of the population being obese is surely a serious public health problem; but it’s one that “scientism” can help solve!

At last: a rational thinker at “The Stone”

July 18, 2016 • 10:00 am

Over the years I’ve repeatedly documented the wooly thinking, religious apologetics, and general mushbrain-y analysis at “The Stone”, a philosophy blog at the New York Times. But very rarely the editors will deign to let a rationalist or—horrors!—an atheist have a column. And today it’s Duke University philosopher Alex Rosenberg, who is about the most “militant” atheist—and “hardest” determinist—I know. You may have read his 2011 book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, a defense of scientism that had the honor of being named “the worst book of the year” by Leon Wieseltier. I thought it was a pretty good book, though a bit tendentious, but certainly much better than all the tripe that passes as criticism of “scientism” (Wieseltier has purveyed some of that stomach lining).

Rosenberg’s theme is the fallibility of our thinking that consciousness produces absolutely accurate information about our actions, thoughts, and motivations. He maintains that this is wrong: just as when we exercise our “theory of mind,” imputing beliefs, intentions, or motivations to others, so that faculty is equally fallible when turned upon ourselves. Certainly our feeling of being a free agent consciously willing an action, and thereby bringing it about, is wrong, as many experiments have no shown, and as I’ve discussed endlessly. Rosenberg goes a bit further:

We never have direct access to our thoughts. As Peter Carruthers first argued, self-consciousness is just mind reading turned inward.

How do we know this? Well, Hume would have answered that introspection tells us so. But that won’t wash for experimental scientists. They demand evidence. Some of it comes from the fMRI work that established the existence of a distinct mind-reading module, more from autistic children, whose deficits in explaining and predicting the behavior of others come together with limitations on self-awareness and self-reporting of their own motivations. Patients suffering from schizophrenia manifest deficiencies in both other-mind reading and self-mind reading. If these two capacities were distinct one would expect at least some autistic children and schizophrenics to manifest one of these capacities without the other.

That we read our own minds the same way we read other minds is evident in what cognitive science tells us about consciousness and working memory — the dual imagistic and silent-speech process that we employ to calculate, decide, choose among options “immediately before the mind.”

. . . The upshot of all these discoveries is deeply significant, not just for philosophy, but for us as human beings: There is no first-person point of view.

Our access to our own thoughts is just as indirect and fallible as our access to the thoughts of other people. We have no privileged access to our own minds. If our thoughts give the real meaning of our actions, our words, our lives, then we can’t ever be sure what we say or do, or for that matter, what we think or why we think it.

Philosophers’ claims that by reflecting on itself thought reliably reveals our nature, grounds knowledge, gives us free will, endows our behavior with moral value, are all challenged. And the threat doesn’t stem from some tendentious scientistic worldview. It emerges from the detailed understanding of the mind that cognitive science and neuroscience are providing.

There’s considerable merit in this argument, though I’ll be thinking more about it. But to the extent that Rosenberg is right, it puts the lie to the claim that introspection itself can give us truths as reliable as those obtained by “scientific” methods: empirical observation, prediction, and corroboration by others. Introspection is by definition an uncorroborated process, and if you make a claim about the nature of reality based on introspection alone, there’s no reason to trust it. Even when you say, “I’m hungry”, you may be wrong; the only truth there is that your consciousness tells you that you feel hungry. But of course your eyes could be bigger than your stomach.  One of my favorite quotes, by former pastor Mike Aus, expresses this nicely:

When I was working as a pastor I would often gloss over the clash between the scientific world view and the perspective of religion. I would say that the insights of science were no threat to faith because science and religion are “different ways of knowing” and are not in conflict because they are trying to answer different questions. Science focuses on “how” the world came to be, and religion addresses the question of “why” we are here. I was dead wrong. There are not different ways of knowing. There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world.

Templeton invades the World Science Festival (again)

May 9, 2016 • 12:30 pm

Every year the World Science Festival, organized by physicist Brian Greene and CEO Tracy Day, gets a dollop of cash from Templeton (the sponsors are here), and every year it has a few “Big Ideas” Symposia directly sponsored by Templeton. Most of the ones for this year (program here) look fairly tame, but then there’s this one, with the graphic shown below. The indented material is taken from the Science Festival Announcment.

SciencevsScientism_800x494-1-757x467

TO UNWEAVE A RAINBOW: SCIENCE AND THE UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

DATE: Thursday, June 2, 2016
TIME: 8:00 PM-9:30 PM
VENUE: NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
PARTICIPANTS: Brian Greene, Leon Wieseltier, and others

As long ago as the early 19th century, the poet Keats bemoaned the washing away of the world’s beauty and mystery in the wake of natural philosophy’s reductionist insights—its tendency to unweave a rainbow.  Two centuries later, the tentacles of science have reached far further, wrapping themselves around questions and disciplines once thought beyond the reach of scientific analysis. But like Keats, not everyone is happy. When it comes to the evaluation of human experience—passion to prayer, consciousness to creativity—what can science explain, and what are the limits of its explanatory powers? What is the difference between science and scientism? Are the sciences and the humanities friends or foes? Join an animated discussion on science, reductionism, the mind, the heart, freedom, religion, and the quest for the human difference.

The Big Ideas Series is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation.

Note first that they’re using the title of Richard Dawkins’s book, which was written to show that science doesn’t detract from wonder about the universe, but adds to it. (Dawkins’s title was, of course, itself taken from John Keats’s plaint that Newton’s unraveling of the rainbow’s colors destroyed the beauty of the phenomenon).

Wieseltier, you may recall, is a staunch anti-“scientism” man. After Steve Pinker wrote a defense of science in The New Republic, saying that a dollop of science could actually enrich and improve some of the humanities, Wieseltier (at the time an editor of TNR) wrote a scathing response, accusing Pinker of rampant scientism. There’s no doubt which side he’ll take on this issue.

I’m not sure about Brian Greene, as my one experience with him (his refusal to autograph a copy of Faith versus Fact on which I was collecting signatures and intended to auction for Doctors Without Borders), as well as my “scientist’s intuition”, leads me to believe that he won’t argue nearly as strongly against the “scientism” canard —if he argues against it at all—as would Pinker. He is not a vociferous critic of religion.

In fact, Pinker belongs at that symposium, and I’m not sure why he’s not there. The fact that all the participants aren’t named up makes me wonder if they’re having trouble recruiting people.

I don’t really mind such a public discussion; what I mind is Templeton sponsoring it, for Templeton loves the numinous. And I sense that the deck will be stacked. If the organizers are serious, they should have participants like Pinker and Alex Rosenberg along with those who will do down science.

I also don’t like the tenor of the announcement: the allusion to the “tentacles of science”, the reference to prayer, and the idea that at this moment we can say something meaningful about the limits of science.  I’m dubious, for instance, about claims that things like creativity and the “hard problem of consciousness”—subjective sensation and self-awareness—are beyond scientific explanation. Finally, the illustration amalgamates science and religion (you know where the “touching fingers” come from)—symbolic of Templeton’s accommodationism.

But maybe I’m just grumpy today. If any readers go to this presentation, do report back.

 

Matthew Cobb battles with the faithful over my book

February 4, 2016 • 12:30 pm

Denis Alexander wrote a review of Faith versus Fact in the January 22nd Times Literary Supplement (TLS), and, to say the least, it wasn’t kind. But given his position as an evangelical Christian and the emeritus head of the Templeton-founded-and-funded Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, given his criticism of evolution as an “atheistic theory,” and given my repeated criticisms of his religious views on this site, to which he’s responded, I didn’t expect anything else. (Given his position and our history, though, I am surprised that the TLS religion editor chose him.)

I can’t link to his review as the TLS doesn’t have a free website, and I won’t really reply to it, as I adhere to Nick Cohen and Stephen Fry’s advice to never answer critics. But I’ll let someone respond: our own Matthew Cobb.

After reading Alexander’s piece claiming that my book was the most “consistently scientistic” book he’s read in a long time, and that there is indeed falsifiable evidence for religious claims (Alexander uses the Resurrection as an example), so that there are indeed religious “ways of knowing”, Matthew (unknown to me) wrote a letter to the TLS:

Sir—

In Denis Alexander’s review of “Faith vs Fact” (22 January 2016), my friend Jerry Coyne’s claim that theology provides no ‘real knowledge’ is dismissed as a ‘scientistic raid’. I wonder if Dr Alexander, or indeed any reader, could provide an example of knowledge gained through theology, and above all tell us how they know that knowledge is true?

Matthew Cobb
Faculty of Life Sciences
Michael Smith Building
University of Manchester

In the next issue, Alexander responded, as well as another believer, and Matthew kindly transcribed the letters for me. First, Alexander’s (why are all the letters titled “Sir”? Are there no women at the TLS?):

Sir—

Prof. Matthew Cobb enquires as to how knowledge is gained through theology. I am, like Prof. Cobb, a scientist, but I am happy to pass on what I infer through observation of theologians in their academic discipline here in Cambridge.

There are three types of theological enquiry. The first relates to reflection on the properties of the universe, a procedure known as ‘natural theology’. Inference to the best explanation points to a creative Mind underlying features of the universe such as its anthropic fine-tuning, its intelligibility (without which science cannot even get going), the mathematical elegance displayed in the properties of matter and energy, and the emergence of human minds by an evolutionary process that can gain some understanding of these properties. Theological knowledge here refers to interpretation not to description, but the scientific enterprise likewise involves much interpretation of data, so there are some interesting parallels, remembering of course that there are many ways of ‘knowing’.

Second, theological enquiry, at least within the Abrahamic faiths, involves historical enquiry and interpretation of their Scriptures. Christian theology includes textual analysis and study of the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. For example, the belief of the early church in the resurrection of Christ, had it not occurred, could readily have been refuted by the discovery of the embalmed body of Christ in a Jerusalem tomb, easily recognisable by his family and disciples. The Apostle Paul clearly stated that his faith (and that of other Christians) was a waste of time if the resurrection had not occurred. Clearly we do not now have access to the data in the same way as the first century Christians, but again there are some interesting parallels here with scientific enquiry. The principle of refutation can apply (in some cases) to history as well as to science.

Third, theology (which means ‘knowledge of God’) also investigates religious experience, a widespread human trait. In the Christian tradition, knowledge of God is practiced through prayer, meditation, reflection, communal worship and, in some cases, ecstatic experience. There is no particular reason why personal knowledge of God should not be included as an important ‘way of knowing’.

Some scientists (I suspect a small minority) believe that the natural sciences provide the only reliable form of human knowledge. I suggest that this leads to an impoverishment of the human spirit.

Yours sincerely,
Denis R. Alexander
Emeritus Director,
The Faraday Institute,
St. Edmund’s College,
Cambridge

I will say one thing: I’m greatly amused by the scientific-ish evidence Alexander adduces for the Resurrection. Since we don’t have the embalmed body of Christ, Jesus must have risen! Think about that: Alexander’s “principle of refutation.”

UPDATE: Reader Pliny the in Between responded to Alexander’s new scientific principle with this cartoon on his/her website Evolving Perspectives:

SOURCE-CAPTION READY.001

My spirit must be impoverished. . .

There’s one other letter, too—from a pastor:

Sir—

In response to Matthew Cobb (Letters 29th Jan): Medical skill and science brought me through cardiac arrest and major surgery, yet in themselves offer nothing to live for. Theological language – passion, faith, hope, love, grace, glory – addresses why it is worth being alive. The truth of value-knowledge is lived, not “known”. It enables one to be deeply grateful and to appreciate the wonder of factual knowledge.

James Ramsay
St. Barnabas Vicarage
Browning Road
London E12 6PB

Clearly religion offers us the only way to see why life’s worth living!

My formal response to these two letters is thus this:  “Oy! And double oy!”

A reader comments on the value of literature and “ways of knowing”

January 14, 2016 • 8:30 am
I received an email from reader Geoff Howe about yesterday’s post on the value of studying literature, and I thought it was good enough to merit its own post:

I think the article [the piece in Commentary by Gary Saul Morson] does a good job of encapsulating a major problem in society, one that I see on both the left and the right.

It’s the idea that the subjective somehow doesn’t count. The religious tell us that morality is meaningless unless it comes from some objective source. And the liberal arts professors aren’t happy unless their works teach objective lessons through some ill-defined “way of knowing”. These people seem to miss the idea that morality and art matter BECAUSE they are subjective.

Subjective and Objective are two sides of the same coin. One is reality, and the other is how we react to reality. Both are vital. Without knowing the facts, we won’t know how to react. And without a reaction, then what good are the facts? Too many people think that things that are subjective are subordinate to things that are objective. But unlike religion and science, they are truly non-overlapping majesteria. It’s the belief that the subjective is subordinate to the objective that makes the liberal arts want to declare their work as being ways of knowing. In trying to sell up their importance, they throw the actual feelings and emotion that is the soul of art under the bus.

High School literature classes actually crushed a love of reading I had as a child, and for some of the reasons listed here. It wasn’t until the internet critics of the last few years that I was able to find people dissecting works for why they were so good (or why they were so bad), and for why they made us feel the way they did. It’s telling that the people whose love of stories makes them want to share the joy with others are those who talk about how the work makes them feel, and not those who look for hidden symbolism around every corner, or tout literature as ‘ways of knowing’.

All I want to say is that I continue to assert the value of the humanities in the way Geoff mentions above, though I think it’s demeaning for scientists—most of whom know a lot more about literature, art, and music than most people think—to be forced to continually defend themselves this way.

Instead, I am putting up Geoff’s post for readers to parse, agree with, or criticize. I happen to agree with it.

A bishop in L.A. is fed up with scientism

November 13, 2015 • 11:30 am

Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times has an op-ed by Robert Barron called “The myth of the eternal war between science and religion.” Barron happens to be the Auxilary Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles, and is somewhat of a religious media star, with a YouTube channel, his own ministry (Word on Fire), and lots of books and articles to his name.

In the op-ed, he not only uses familiar and erroneous arguments to argue for the harmony of science and religion, but also takes the opportunity to decry “scientism,” a pejorative word that, to Barron, means the erroneous idea that only science can tell us what’s real.

Here are his arguments (his text indented):

Science fails because it can’t tell us what the ultimate cause is. The universe is “contingent,” and that contingency proves God:

Many respondents [to Barron’s YouTube attacks on New Atheism] display what I call “scientism,” the philosophical assumption that the real is reducible to what the empirical sciences can verify or describe. In reaction to my attempts to demonstrate that God must exist as the necessary precursor to the radically contingent universe, respondent after respondent says some version of this: Energy, or matter, or the Big Bang, is the ultimate cause of all things. When I counter that the Big Bang itself demonstrates that the universe in its totality is contingent and hence in need of a cause extraneous to itself, they think I’m just talking nonsense.

The answer is obvious: why isn’t God contingent: in need of a cause extraneous to Himself? The theologians wriggle out of that one by saying that God is the Cause that Doesn’t Need Its Own Cause. But that’s bogus, for why doesn’t the “universe”, or the system of multiverses (if we have one), comprise something that doesn’t need its own cause? I’m always baffled at the argument that when you get to God, you can stop asking about causes. The “Uncaused Cause” argument (or the “Uncontingent Cause”) is simply silly—it’s wordplay. But that’s the nature of Sophisticated Theology™.

There are Other Ways of Knowing

That there might be a dimension of reality knowable in a nonscientific but still rational manner never occurs to them. In their scientism, they are blind to literature, philosophy, metaphysics, mysticism and religion.

Note that he refers to “dimensions of reality” rather than “truths about the universe”. Well, yes, emotions and feelings and revelations can be seen as “dimensions of reality,” but they don’t tell us what’s real except that somebody feels something. And although I have great respect for literature and philosophy (but not for metaphysics, mysticism, and religion), those disciplines can’t tell us what is true about our cosmos. I still have not come across a truth about the Universe discernible from literature or art alone that cannot ultimately be traced to science—broadly construed as a combination of empirical observation, testing, doubt, rationality, and replication.

Science and religion are harmonious because there were (and are) religious scientists.

Leaving aside the complexities of the Galileo story, we can see that the vast majority of the founding figures of modern science — Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Tycho Brahe — were devoutly religious. More to the point, two of the most important physicists of the 19th century — Faraday and Maxwell — were extremely pious, and the formulator of the Big Bang theory, Georges Lemaitre, was a priest.

If you want a contemporary embodiment of the coming together of science and religion, look to John Polkinghorne, a Cambridge particle physicist, Anglican priest and one of the best commentators on the noncompetitive interface between scientific and religious paths to truth.

I’ve discussed this in Faith versus Fact, and won’t belabor the issue except to say 1) back in the old days, everyone was religous, and 2) the fact that humans can hold in their heads two conflicting and incompatible ways to discern “truth” does not prove that those ways are compatible.

Science was made possible by Christianity.

As Polkinghorne and others have observed, the modern physical sciences were, in fact, made possible by the religious milieu out of which they emerged. It is no accident that modern science first appeared in Christian Europe, where a doctrine of creation held sway. To hold that the world is created is to accept, simultaneously, the two assumptions required for science: namely, that the universe is not divine [JAC: what he means is that God is divine but the universe, as God’s physical creation, is not itself divine] and that it is intelligible.

If the world or nature were considered divine (as it is in many philosophies and mysticisms), then one would never allow oneself to analyze it, dissect it or perform experiments on it. But a created world, by definition, is other than God and, in that very otherness, open to inquiry.

Similarly, if the world were considered unintelligible, no science would get off the ground, because all science is based on the presumption that nature can be known. But the world, Christians agree, is thoroughly intelligible, and hence scientists have the confidence to seek, explore and experiment.

Bogus again. Modern science could be said to have started with the ancient Greeks, but also began in the Middle East and in China. The fact that it proliferated in Europe may have little or nothing to do with Christianity which, after all, denigrated and suppressed the use of reason during the Dark Ages. Science is not a product of Christianity, but of the Enlightenment values of reason and inquiry, and perhaps also of certain developments in Europe like the printing press, things had nothing to do with Christianity.  Besides, the claim that the universe is intelligible because God made it does not follow. God could easily have made an unintelligible universe. We discovered that the universe was intelligible by following our secular noses and finding it so, not because we knew it in advance because God made it.

Christians didn’t agree in advance that the world was “thoroughly intelligible” because God made it. Perhaps a few scientists like Newton thought that, but think of the number of puzzling phenomena once ascribed to God but understood understood by secular scientists: epilepsy, lightning, mental illness, the “design” of plants and animals, the Big Bang, and so on. Religion was not a promoter of scientific understanding, but often an impediment. By putting God in as a gap-filler (which religion still does with things like consciousness and morality), it prevents the very understanding touted by Barron.

Here’s Barron’s ringing finish:

This is why thoughtful people — Christians and atheists alike — must battle the myth of the eternal warfare of science and religion. We must continually preach, as St. John Paul II did, that faith and reason are complementary and compatible paths toward the knowledge of truth.

It is the notion that “faith and reason are complementary” that is the very reason why science and religion are incompatible! Science, which incorporates reason and observation, is the only way to find out what is true. Faith is, and must be, a complete failure at finding out what is true, for it abjures evidence in favor of revelation, authority, and ancient scripture. The failure of faith to find truth is definitively shown by the fact that all the diverse religions of the world, using faith, haven’t settled on a consistent notion of God. Is there no God, one God, or many? Is he a theistic or Deistic God? Is there a Trinity? Was Jesus the Messiah, belief in whom is essential for attaining salvation? Is there a Heaven or a Hell? Are gays damned? Can women be priests? All these—and much more—are questions that have been hanging for centuries, impossible to resolve through faith.

In contrast, there’s only one brand of science, and that science has led to enormous progress in understanding the universe over the past five centuries. Faith and reason complimentary? Balderdash! When theologians tell me some real truths about the universe (and not just moral strictures) that faith has produced, then I’ll listen to them.

 

h/t: Janet D.