Feser to Krauss: Shut up because of the Uncaused Cause

October 4, 2015 • 10:45 am

I didn’t know anything about the Witherspoon institute, where Catholic religious philosopher Edward Feser has published a strident piece called “Scientists should tell Lawrence Krauss to shut up already“, but it appears to be a right-wing think tank. According to Wikipedia:

The Witherspoon Institute opposes abortion and same-sex marriage and deals with embryonic stem cell research, constitutional law, and globalization. In 2003, it organized a conference on religion in modern societies. In 2006,Republican Senator Sam Brownback cited a Witherspoon document called Marriage and the Public Good: Ten Principles in a debate over a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. It held a conference about pornography named The Social Costs of Pornography at Princeton University in December 2008.

Be that as it may, reader Candide called my attention to Feser’s piece, a critique of Krauss’s recent piece in The New Yorker, “All scientists should be militant atheists” (my take on it here). Feser argues that Krauss doesn’t given any reason for scientists to be atheists, but in fact he does, in the final paragraph of Krauss’s piece:

We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered “sacred.” Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.

That seems to me pretty clear: in science no values are sacred, and it’s abandoning the notion that any ideas are beyond question—the habit of doubt that is endemic and essential in science—that militates against religious authoritarianism, endemic to most faiths. Feser also argues, contra both Krauss and me, that the empirical propositions of religion, as opposed to its moral dicta, are not questions of science:

Krauss might reply that, unlike checkers, dentistry, or engineering, science covers all of reality; thus, if God exists, evidence for his existence ought to show up in scientific inquiry.

There are two problems with such a suggestion. First, it begs the question. Second, it isn’t true.

But if in fact one construes science broadly, as a combination of reason, empirical study, and verification, yes, existence of God should show up in “scientific” inquiry.  Since it doesn’t, religionists use the word “reason” to encompass a brew of dogma, scripture, and personal revelation. But these of course lead different people to different conceptions of god. So all the “evidence” adduced by different faiths is simply a confusing muddle of different “conclusions.”

Feser instead proposes philosophy as a way to demonstrate God, starting with the ineluctable proposition that reality is real:

[The claim that we should have empirical evidence for God] begs the question because whether science is the only rational means of investigating reality is precisely what is at issue between New Atheists like Krauss and their critics. Traditional philosophical arguments for God’s existence begin with what any possible scientific theory must take for granted—such as the thesis that there is a natural world to be studied, and that there are laws governing that world that we might uncover via scientific investigation.

To Feser, the existence of the natural world is itself evidence for God, for he keeps insisting that that world had to have a beginning, and if that beginning was the Big Bang, or even if the Big Bang had a natural origin and there are universes that spawn other universes, well, those, too must have a causal chain that, in the end terminates in God.

As far as “laws governing the world,” well, that’s a result of science, not an assumption. It’s entirely possible that some physical laws might not be constant (for example, the speed of light in a vacuum might vary throughout the universe), and if we found that out, well, that would become part of science too. Indeed, the speed of light is not a constant in other media like water or glass, so the “law” isn’t universal. Other physical laws, such as those governing molecular interactions, must exist lest we not be around to observe them. In Faith versus Fact I note that the human body depends on physical and chemical regularities to function. So yes, we’ve found regularities, but that is inevitable given that that finding itself depends on regularities in the brain: a sort of Anthropic Principle of our Body.

Imputing such regularities to a divine being, much less Feser’s Catholic and beneficent God, is no explanation at all. It’s merely saying, “We will call God the reason for the constancy of nature.” Where from these regularities can one derive a Beneficent Person without Substance—one who not only loves us all, but demands worship under threat of immolation, and opposes abortion as well?

And so Feser proves the existence of God from his usual claim: the Uncaused Cause:

The arguments claim that, whatever the specific empirical details turn out to be, the facts that there is a world at all and that there are any laws governing it cannot be made sense of unless there is an uncaused cause sustaining that world in being, a cause that exists of absolute necessity rather than merely contingently (as the world itself and the laws that govern it are merely contingent).

. . . Similarly, what science uncovers are, in effect, the “rules” that govern the “game” that is the natural world. Its domain of study is what is internal to the natural order of things. It presupposes that there is such an order, just as the rules of checkers presuppose that there are such things as checkers boards and game pieces. For that very reason, though, science has nothing to say about why there is any natural order or laws in the first place, any more than the rules of checkers tell you why there are any checkers boards or checkers rules in the first place.

Thus, science cannot answer the question why there is any world at all, or any laws at all. To answer those questions, or even to understand them properly, you must take an intellectual vantage point from outside the world and its laws, and thus outside of science. You need to look to philosophical argument, which goes deeper than anything mere physics can uncover.

For a response to the “Uncaused Cause” argument, and the outmoded notion of Aristotelian causality in modern physics, I refer you to the writings of Sean Carroll (for example here and here, especially the section called “accounting for the world”), and Carroll’s debate with Feser William Lane Craig here.

No, science cannot yet answer the question why there is any world at all, or why the laws are as they are (though the latter question might someday find an answer), but neither can religion. As Caroll notes, the answer to these questions may ultimately be this:

“. .. . the ultimate answer to “We need to understand why the universe exists/continues to exist/exhibits regularities/came to be” is essentially ‘No we don’t.’

. . . Granted, it is always nice to be able to provide reasons why something is the case.  Most scientists, however, suspect that the search for ultimate explanations eventually terminates in some final theory of the world, along with the phrase “and that’s just how it is.”  It is certainly conceivable that the ultimate explanation is to be found in God; but a compelling argument to that effect would consist of a demonstration that God provides a better explanation (for whatever reason) than a purely materialist picture, not an a priori insistence that a purely materialist picture is unsatisfying.”

Indeed, theists like Feser face their own Ultimate Questions: Why is there a God rather than no God? How did God come into being, and what was He doing before he created Something out of Nothing? To answer those, some people might point to scripture or revelation, but that’s unsatisfying, for different scriptures and different revelations say different things. In the end, Feser must resort to the same answer physicists give. When told by rationalists that we need to understand where God Himself came from, Feser would have to respond, “No we don’t. He was just There.” What I don’t understand is how God can just be there, but the universe and its antecedents, or the laws of physics, cannot just be there.

Nor do I understand how an empirical proposition–the idea that there’s a supernatural being who affects the universe–can be demonstrated by philosophy alone, without any appeal to empiricism.

Oxford University bans free speech magazine as “offensive”

October 4, 2015 • 9:30 am

The Torygraph and The Independent report further restriction of free speech (not a “constitutional” guarantee in the UK)—this time at Oxford. And once again, it involves a student union, the OUSU, which has banned a magazine called “No Offence” from the Freshers’ Fair. The grounds? Because the magazine is offensive. From The Independent:

The magazine aims to promote a discussion surrounding ideas people are afraid to discuss, according to the Versa News student website.

The magazine was founded by third-year Philosophy Politics and Economics student Jacob Williams and Oxford local Lulie Tanett and the aim of the magazine is to promote free speech and provoke debate.

They say that ‘No Offence’ was set up to ‘promote debate and publicise ideas people are afraid to express’.

Here’s the email from the Oxford Student Union explaining why they banned the magazine:

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Further clarifying why the Stallholder Regulations were violated,  the OUSU explained to the Torygraph:

”We at OUSU do not wish to have an event which is intended to welcome new students to Oxford associated with a publication making light of racism, sexual violence, and homophobia in an attempt at satire.

“The Freshers’ Fair is one of OUSU’s most widely attended events and while Open Oxford are entitled to book a stall and distribute their publication elsewhere, we chose to withdraw their permission to distribute the publication.

“OUSU exists to represent and enhance the lives of all Oxford students and given that Freshers’ Fair is for new students, we do not wish to subject them to the offensive views of a minority which are present in this publication. Such views are in no way representative of Oxford students as whole.”

The Independent gives more information about the content that led to the banning:

OUSU told The Independent it did not allow the magazine because it “included a graphic description of an abortion, the use of an ableist slur, a celebration of colonialism, and a transphobic article. In an attempt at satire, another article suggested organising a ‘rape swagger’ – in the style of a ‘slut walk’ – in order to make rape ‘socially acceptable.’

“OUSU do not want to be associated with the views in this magazine, therefore do not want it to be distributed at our event. The offensive views exhibited in this magazine do not in any way represent the majority of Oxford students, or OUSU. We therefore are very comfortable with our decision not to allow the publication at our event, and would like to emphasise that the editors of No Offence are, of course, completely free to publish the document online, in the exact form in which it was sent to us, to enable students who wish to read it to do so.”

. . . UEA students’ union (SU) campaigns and democracy officer Chris Jarvis said that the body wants all members to feel safe and accepted by ensuring there is no behaviour, language, or imagery which could be considered racist at all events.

Once again we see the repression of speech that makes students “unsafe” or “unaccepted”.  Now it’s possible that the stuff in the magazine really is odious and offensive (the “rape walk” thing sounds disturbing), but it’s also possible that what we have here is a Charlie Hebo situation, in which the views of the magazine editors are misinterpreted as approving of the “wrong” sides of sensitive issues—issues that do warrant discussion. Regardless, why can’t the OUSU allow a magazine to be distributed that allows “freshers” to make up their own minds?

I remember that when I was younger, a callow and fearless lad of about thirteen, a friend and I visited the American Nazi Party headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, very close to where I lived. We wanted to see what it was all about and meet the infamous Lincoln Rockwell, head of that organization (he was later assassinated). We were given a tour of the facilities by people wearing uniforms and swastika armbands (a huge picture of Hitler adorned the wall), and then presented with a bag of souvenir literature; I remember in particular a pair of “Coon-Ard Boat Tickets to Africa,” expressing the Party’s desire to ship all black people back to that continent (“coon” is an American slur for “black”). I was at once disgusted and fascinated that people could really believe this stuff.

Nowadays I don’t think I’d have the courage to walk into that house (the place no longer exists, as far as I know), but, disgusted as I was, I didn’t and don’t think that this kind of stuff should be banned. After all, it is the speech of Holocaust deniers that have led people like me to learn exactly what evidence there is for the Holocaust, just as it is the speech of creationists (which I find offensive!) that spurred me to write Why Evolution is True laying out the counterevidence. Discussion with those you oppose, so long as you can keep your cool and remain fixed on evidence, can be a valuable learning experience.

The operative quote is from Salman Rushdie:

“Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read.

If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn’t occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don’t like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don’t like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.”

We need to stop putting college students in insulated bubbles and start treating them as adults. There’s lots of potentially offensive stuff out there in the real world, and college is the place to learn how to deal with it.

h/t: Barry

Readers’ wildlife photographs (and video)

October 4, 2015 • 7:45 am

The photo tank is beginning to empty, so do send any GOOD photos that you have. Meanwhile, today we have a treat for arachnophiles: two lovely spider photos and video today from reader Al Denelsbeck. His notes:

Sending along photos of a magnolia green jumping spider, Lyssomanes viridis. This is a juvenile female, 4mm in body length. The translucent chitin allows light to shine through the cephalothorax so the internal motions of the retinas can easily be seen, and they can move independently. I provided food for this one to convince it to hold still – jumpers are such hyperactive spiders – and even got video of the wandering eyes.

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1015Magnolia-01

Here’s the video, which clearly shows the moving eyes:

And his own writeup on the spider, which appears on Al’s website Walkabout.

You may recall that in August I put up a video showing the moving eyes of another jumping spider, as well as an explanation of how we’re able to see the eyes, which are long tubes, moving about.

Reader Mark Sturtevant, a reliable source of great insect photos, sent two pictures of bees:

This is one of my captured bees. I had to chill it down in the refrigerator to get it to hold still for pictures, but I only got maybe two minutes before they regained mobility and flew away. I later learned that they are called the European wool-carder bee (Anthidium manicatum), named after their habit of collecting hairs from furry plants to line their nests. These bees were accidentally introduced from Europe. They are very territorial, and this explains why they were so keen to chase other bees away from the lambs ears.

8Card2

The final bee also had me fooled since it looked more like a wasp. From the picture you can see it has an enlarged basitarsus, and it was that character that informed me that it was a bee of some kind. It turns out to be a species of cuckoo bee (Nomada maculata). These bees are so-named because like the cuckoo birds they practice kleptoparasitism. That is, they lay their eggs in the nests of other bees! Perhaps this explains why these bees are not particularly hairy, since they are only collecting pollen to feed themselves. I have since learned that there are kleptoparasitic bees in several of the bee families.

9Cuckoo

For those of you unfamiliar with the basitarsus, here’s a diagram of an insect leg (a sandfly). You can see the enlarged basitarsus on the rear leg of the bee above.

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Sunday: Hili dialogue

October 4, 2015 • 2:26 am

‘Tis Sunday in Dobrzyn, and the pious are in church (Catholic, of course). But all of us here are going about our Fathers Ceiling Cat’s work: I’m writing two talks and thinking about my speciation book. Hili is especially annoyed with not getting extra shuteye on Sunday:

A: Hili, time to get up.
Hili: Even on Sunday they don’t let a cat get enough sleep.

P1030359

In Polish:
Ja: Hili, pora wstawać.
Hili: Nawet w niedzielę nie pozwalają się kotu porządnie wyspać.

Time to outlaw guns

October 3, 2015 • 12:00 pm

UPDATE: Reader Barry called my attention to a piece in Politico Magazine, “How the NRA rewrote the Second Amendment,” by Michael Waldman, that’s well worth reading. It discusses the origin of the Amendment, and then how legal opinion beginning in the late 19th century consistently argued that the Amendment didn’t guarantee Americans the right to own guns. Beginning in the 1950s, legal opinions changed—largely with funding from the NRA.

One snippet that shows the NRA’s duplicity:

Today at the NRA’s headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, oversized letters on the facade no longer refer to “marksmanship” and “safety.” Instead, the Second Amendment is emblazoned on a wall of the building’s lobby. Visitors might not notice that the text is incomplete. It reads:

“.. the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The first half—the part about the well regulated militia—has been edited out.r

And Waldman’s conclusion:

Molding public opinion is the most important factor. Abraham Lincoln, debating slavery, said in 1858, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” The triumph of gun rights reminds us today: If you want to win in the court of law, first win in the court of public opinion.

________

The more I reread and learn about the Second Amendment, the more I’m convinced that it is not a Constitutional justification for private gun ownership EXCEPT for the original purposes of allowing for a militia—a purpose now outmoded. Read it:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Somehow people read the second part of the statement, about the right to keep and bear arms, without paying attention to the first, which is the justification. What part of “a well regulated militia” don’t you (or the Supreme Court) understand?

Yesterday I pointed out historian Garry Wills’ trenchant analysis of the history of this amendment, a piece written in 1995 and concluding that the amendment’s purpose was to allow citizens to form militias (duh!) In a new piece at the online New Yorker, “The Second Amendment is a gun-control amendment,” Adam Gopnik agrees. And he makes the point, which is bloody obvious, that if mental instability is the real cause of our burgeoning gun violence, why does America harbor such a higher proportion unstable people? That makes little sense, but this does:

Everyone crazy enough to pick up a gun and kill many people is crazy enough to have an ideology to attach to the act. The point—the only point—is that, everywhere else, that person rants in isolation or on his keyboard; only in America do we cheerfully supply him with military-style weapons to express his rage. As the otherwise reliably Republican (but still Canadian-raised) David Frum wisely writes: “Every mass shooter has his own hateful motive. They all use the same tool.”

Then, like Wills, he runs through the history of the Second Amendment, bringing it up to date with the Supreme Court decision in 2008 that established the supposed Constitutional “right” to own guns for purposes like self-defense.  As a palliative, Gopnik recommends, as do I, that you read Justice Stevens’s dissent in that case. Stevens’s last paragraph, relevant to the court’s 5-4 decision to overturn a District of Columbia law banning hanguns, is this:

 “The Court properly disclaims any interest in evaluating the wisdom of the specific policy choice challenged in this case, but it fails to pay heed to a far more important policy choice—the choice made by the Framers themselves. The Court would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons, and to authorize this Court to use the common-law process of case-by-case judicial lawmaking to define the contours of acceptable gun control policy. Absent compelling evidence that is nowhere to be found in the Court’s opinion, I could not possibly conclude that the Framers made such a choice.

For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.”

What Stevens is saying in the penultimate sentence is that he cannot find evidence that the authors of the Constitution saw no limits on the ability of elected officials to regulate gun ownership. Citing another of Stevens’s sentences, below, Gopnik concludes that the Second Amendment was designed to regulate gun ownership:

” . Until today, it has been understood that legislatures may regulate the civilian use and misuse of firearms so long as they do not interfere with the preservation of a well-regulated militia. The Court’s announcement of a new constitutional right to own and use firearms for private purposes upsets that settled understanding . . .”

Yet the gun madness continues, justified now by two arguments. Both of these, I was sad to find, were made in a public Facebook post by The Thinking Atheist, Seth Andrews, a man I admire and count as a friend—but also a gun owner. Seth’s post is more nuanced than many, is thoughtful, and ends with a note that he’s willing to reconsider his views. I hope he will, because I think he’s wrong. Let me first show how Seth’s post is far less strident than the views of many gun owners.

He recognizes that not all people who own guns are responsible or thoughtful (his words are indented):

It’s easy for firearms opponents to caricaturize gun owners as a Wild West circus of reckless, blood-drunk fools who finish each day with reruns of “Dukes of Hazzard.” (And, unfortunately, those people exist.)
Seth recognizes that there are problems to which he doesn’t have solutions:
If someone asked me if I’d rather be pinned down under an active shooter in a grocery store with or without a firearm at my side, my answer is…with! However, it can also be argued that more guns, even on the law-abiding, equals more opportunities for things to go horribly wrong.
Finally, Seth notes that opinions on this subject are not immutable:
There are a thousand steps leading to the ones at Oregon and elsewhere. I’d like to understand all of them. I’d like to see a world where no one, nowhere, wakes with the intent to murder another. And I’m willing to continually assess my perspective and position on legal firearms in this country.

But then he proffers the two arguments for private gun ownership—arguments I hear all too often. The first claims that the monthly carnage we see on American campuses, theaters, and other public places is not attributable to America’s lax gun laws. It is due to mentally unstable people who just happen to use guns to exercise their animus. As Seth argues:

I don’t subscribe to the idea that the weapon to do harm doesn’t matter, only the desire to harm, although I maintain that the desire to harm – often borne of a hugely troubled mind – remains at the root of this terrible problem.

. . . Do written laws cause madmen to say, “Wait…this is illegal?”

Fine words, but they fail to explain why countries that must surely harbor just as high a proportion of “madmen” as the U.S. have so much less gun violence. Are Americans really sevenfold crazier than our Canadian neighbors? (We have seven times the per capita rate of homicide via guns.) Or could the presence of the tools help those madmen hurt others? After all, you can’t kill 22 people in a school with a knife or a taser.

The second argument is that now that we have so many guns floating around, we’ve crossed the Rubicon: it will be impossible to get rid of them, or impose realistic legislation, so that the rest of us must have guns to protect us from those bad people who have guns. Seth:

But does the idea of an armed, law-abiding citizen have merit? Possibly, especially as firearms are ubiquitous, and it only takes one rogue among the peaceful to wreak real havoc. If someone asked me if I’d rather be pinned down under an active shooter in a grocery store with or without a firearm at my side, my answer is…with! However, it can also be argued that more guns, even on the law-abiding, equals more opportunities for things to go horribly wrong.

. . . There are over 300 million firearms in this country. The gorilla is out of its cage. So if we were to approach gun violence deaths by simply removing the guns, how would this be accomplished, what law would be a (forgive the expression) magic bullet more effective than previous gun legislation, how would you get firearms from those who ignore gun laws, and how would you address an underground that can already get any other illegal substance at the drop of hat?

This last argument echoes a pointed piece in The Onion called “‘No way to prevent this, says only nation where this regularly happens.” An excerpt:

“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

I’m sorry, but I think there’s a way to put that gorilla back in the cage. It’s simply not possible to conceive of a democracy being unable to do so. A few suggestions:

  1.  Appoint a liberal Supreme Court to interpret the Second Amendment properly. This is a matter of a single Presidential appointment. This, perhaps, is the most important issue, for all regulatory legislation can be abolished by the court, just as they did in 2008. Republican Presidents have done more damage to American democracy via their Supreme Court appointments than through any policy decisions they’ve made.
  2. Stop saying that the problem cannot be solved, for that creates a national climate of despair.
  3. Get rid of concealed carry laws, which as far as I can know, are not prima facie Constitutional.
  4. Do not buy guns, and question those who own them. (I”m not adamantly opposed to guns for target shooting, but they should be kept at gun clubs in lockers, as in the British system.)
  5. Get rid of semiautomatic weapons; there is no right to own such things. They once were banned, but that federal ban expired in 2004 and has not been renewed (thanks, NRA!)
  6. Tax the hell out of guns and ammunition. This, too, seems constitutional.

A lot of this depends, of course, on the will of legislators and on our citizens to lobby them. Ask politicians their policy on gun control and do not vote for them if they support the existing regulations. (That, of course, may mean that you vote for nobody.)

I refuse to believe that Americans are so much more mentally unsound than citizens of other democracies that the U.S.’s big lead in gun violence must be attributed to American’s peculiar mentation.