Elliott Sober responds to my challenge

May 16, 2012 • 5:02 am

A few days ago I did a post about philosopher Elliott Sober’s talk and paper about the logical possibility of God-guided mutations.  In that post I offered Sober a three-point challenge, to wit:

1. Can you demonstrate that the logical compatibility of a rarely-acting God with evolutionary biology is a serious and important philosophical question?

2. Your argument about that logical compatibility would seem to extend not just to mutation and evolution, but to all of science. Is that correct? If so, why did you concentrate on mutation?

3.  If the answer to the first part of (2) is “yes,” then would it be equally important for philosophers to write papers and give talks about how we can’t rule out the logical possibility that God influences coin tosses to favor outcomes He wants (like a favorite football team winning)? If not, why not? After all, isn’t the coin-tossing argument basically identical to the one you were making for mutations?

Elliott has kindly responded to this by email, and with his permission I reproduce his response, unedited and without comment, below.  Readers may respond in the comments section, but please be polite and stick to the points at hand. Remember, Elliott did not have to respond, and I don’t want acrimony in the comments.

________________

Dear Jerry,

When people ask me about my theological convictions (not that you did), I reply by asking them what they mean by “God.”  If by “God” you mean a being who separately created species within the last 50,000 years, then I am an atheist.  But sometimes when people tell me what they mean by “God,” their answers makes me doubt that science could ever provide evidence about whether such a being exists.  In this case, I feel obliged to be an agnostic.  This is why I find statements like “there is strong scientific evidence that shows that God does not exist” unsatisfactory; the claim is correct for some concepts of God, but not for others.

The talk I gave at U of Chicago wasn’t about science in general, but about evolutionary biology in particular.  But you are right that my argument applies to probabilistic theories generally (setting aside for now the possibility that quantum mechanics is a special case).   I think that evolutionary theory is true, but this says nothing about whether it is causally complete.  I hope you’ll agree that evolutionary theory says nothing about whether determinism is true; the theory leaves open that there may be hidden variables.  It therefore leaves open that there may be supernatural hidden variables.  As I said in my talk, the same story applies to our conventional probabilistic understanding of how gambling devices work.

My point in saying this is not to suggest that we should believe in supernatural hidden variables.  The point is that evolutionary theory is silent about this.  You ask why this is worth saying.  The reason is that many theistic opponents of evolutionary theory think that accepting the theory forces one to be an atheist. They hear biologists say “mutations are unguided” and think that the theory says that God plays no role in the evolutionary process.   I see no comparable reason to publish a paper about the possibility of supernatural interventions in gambling devices.

You ask why this is a “serious and important philosophical question.”  One reason is that many smart people apparently don’t understand the difference between a theory’s being true and its being causally complete.  Theology aside, it is important to philosophy of science (and to science as well) to understand what scientific theories actually say.

You have said on your blog that the absence of evidence for God is evidence that there is no such being.  To me, that depends on what you mean by “God” (see above).  But perhaps more importantly, I think that your statement about absence of evidence isn’t a consequence of evolutionary theory; it is a philosophical thesis.  I trust you will agree. I mention this because I think it is important for atheists to make it clear that this or that argument for their position is not a consequence of evolutionary theory. Concerning your statement about evidence, you may be interested in my article “Absence of Evidence and Evidence of Absence”

I think that you and I differ in two ways.  First, we disagree about what evolutionary theory properly includes – what its defensible scientific content actually is.  Second, we differ about what the best strategy is for protecting evolutionary biology and science more generally from religion.  Your strategy is to attack religion.  Mine is to try to persuade religious people that science and theism can be reconciled.  This probably won’t work for many fundamentalists, but I think it may have some chance of working for many other religious people.

Let me conclude by apologizing to Dan Dennett for the parenthetical remark I made in my paper “Evolution without Naturalism”, in which I say that he holds, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, that evolutionary theory “entails” that there is no God.  What I should have said is that he thinks that there is a conflict between evolutionary biology and theism. Dennett thinks that evolutionary theory shows that it is irrational to believe that God exists; he thinks that the theory has this consequence because he thinks that the Design Argument was the only remotely plausible argument for God’s existence and evolutionary theory destroyed that argument.  This interpretive error on my part doesn’t affect the points I was making in that paper.

Elliott

A cat-themed xkcd

May 16, 2012 • 4:39 am

The LOLsy comic xkcd has produced a kitty themed cartoon that is actually a three dimensional plot whose axes are cat phylogeny, coolness of cat name, and temporal order of Mac OS X system names:

May I suggest to Apple a Macintosh OS X “Pallas’s Cat,” the most wonderful of small felids? (Perhaps its other name, “Manul” would go down better):

Image Credit Flickr User muzina_shanghai

 

h/t: Grania and Matthew

Bargain hardbacks of WEIT

May 15, 2012 • 7:20 pm

I just noticed that Amazon is selling WEIT at the bargain price of $11.18—that’s only twenty cents more than the paperback. If you don’t have one, here’s the opportunity to get the hardback (whose print life, I’m afraid, is about to expire) for very little dosh. I have only a few copies myself, so all contest winners from now on will get paperbacks. (Nb: I have a dozen hardback copies in Korean that I don’t know what to do with. Suggestions welcome.)

Do note the caveat, though:

This is a bargain book and quantities are limited. Bargain books are new but could include a small mark from the publisher and an Amazon.com price sticker identifying them as such.

Houston, we have ducklings

May 15, 2012 • 1:07 pm

Every year a pair of ducks breeds in Botany Pond, the artificial pond right outside my building.  And in most years the ducklings disappear, either because they wander away or are taken by feral cats.  Two years ago two faculty (I was one) lobbied for a “duck fence” to allow the ducklings to go up on shore and still be protected.  They also built a “duck island” in the middle of the pond. I don’t know if these worked, but last year every duckling fledged, and we were all very happy.

This year we have a new brood, and they’re all alive so far, though it’s early days.  Here they are yesterday, being fed by a student.

The pond also has turtles and goldfish.  Click to enlarge, and note the worried mother standing (or floating) by:


Stenger spices up HuffPo again

May 15, 2012 • 11:34 am

Today’s HuffPo features a column by Victor Stenger—”Scientists and religion“—that’s reprinted from “Science + religion today.”  His point is to dispel the old canard that science can’t test God or the supernatural. (I once had a long argument with Genie Scott of the National Center for Science Education about this—she took the “can’t-test” side).  And the reasons he’s right are bloody obvious, but can’t be said too often, especially since the “can’t-test” position appears in official statements by America’s two most prestigious science organizations: the AAAS and the National Academies:

The rationale usually given by those who reject any role for science on religious matters is that science concerns itself, “by definition,” solely with natural phenomena. Since the supernatural is unobservable, then, they assert, science has nothing to say about it.

However, while supernatural entities may not be directly observable, any effects these entities might have on the material world should manifest themselves as observable phenomena. Anything observable is subject to scientific inquiry. On the other hand, if the supernatural has no observable effects on the natural world, then why even worry about it?

In recent years, right under the nose of the NAS [National Academy of Sciences], reputable scientists from reputable institutions have vigorously pursued several areas of empirical study that bear directly on the question of God and the supernatural. Any one of these experiments was capable of providing evidence for at least some aspect of a world beyond the material world. I will mention just two.

Teams of scientists from three highly respected institutions — the Mayo Clinic and Harvard and Duke Universities — have performed carefully controlled experiments on the medical efficacy of blind, intercessory prayer and published their results in peer-reviewed journals. These experiments found no evidence that such prayers provide any health benefit. But, they could have.

For my second example, over a period of four decades extensive investigations have been made into the phenomenon of near-death experiences (NDEs) in which people resuscitated from the brink of death report a glimpse of “heaven.” Despite thousands of such reports, not a single subject has returned with new knowledge that could be tested by further investigations. No prediction has been made of some future catastrophe that later occurred on schedule, and not for lack of opportunity given the many natural disasters — earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, tornados — of recent years. Similarly, no divine revelation has provided an answer for any currently unanswered question in science, history, or theology; such as, where in the universe we will find extraterrestrial life or the location of Noah’s Ark.

Now it’s harder to test one-off interventions like the supposed resurrection of Jesus, but everything we know about nature suggests that dead people can’t come back to life, and there’s no independent evidence for this outside the Gospels. And if you show that the more frequent interventions of God are bogus, one naturally begins to suspect the one-off miracles as well.  Even when one-off miracles are tested, like weeping Jesus statues or the Shroud of Turin, they, too, fail to pass the test of divinity.

I wasn’t able to make any headway with Genie, who was either deaf to my assertions or determined to defend a position that the NCSE has adopted to coddle believers; and I suspect Stenger won’t make headway with most HuffPo readers (watch the comments section). Nevertheless, he’s right. As I pointed out today, Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria” brand of accommodationism works only with deistic religions that posit a hands-off God.  And, in the West, that kind of religion is found only among well-fed theologians and extremely liberal believers.

Victor’s penultimate paragraph:

So, scientists and science organizations are being disingenuous when they say science can say nothing about the supernatural. They know better. Their policy of appeasing religion for presumably political reasons only empowers those who are muddling education and polluting public policy with anti-scientific magical thinking.

Can anybody really deny that?  They do know better, or if they don’t, they’re dumb.

I hope they don’t bounce Stenger’s tuchus from HuffPo, since he violates Arianna’s mission of reconciling science and faith. But perhaps he gives them what they want most: traffic. And traffic = $$ (for HuffPo, not Stenger: columnists aren’t paid there).

A book to anticipate—with a bit of trepidation

May 15, 2012 • 8:26 am

Reader Phil called my attention to a new book by primatologist Frans de Waal that will be published next year, The Bonobo and the Atheist  (March 2013, W. W. Norton, though Amazon says Feb. 25).

The Norton description sounds intriguing:

Drawing on his landmark research, esteemed primatologist Frans de Waal traces the biological roots of human morality.

In this thoroughly engaging book, leading primatologist and thinker Frans de Waal offers a heartening, illuminating new perspective on human nature. Bringing together his pioneering research on primate behavior, the latest findings in evolutionary biology, and insights from moral philosophy, de Waal explains that we don’t need the specters of God or the law in order to act morally. Instead, our moral nature stems from our biology—specifically, our primate social emotions, which include empathy, reciprocity, and fairness. We can glimpse this in the behavior of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom: chimpanzees soothe distressed neighbors, and bonobos will voluntarily open a door to offer a companion access to their own food. Building on a wealth of evidence, de Waal reveals that morality is not dictated to us by religion or social strictures. Rather, it is the inevitable product of our biological nature.

The fact that the roots of morality can be seen in some of our closest relatives is a common theme of de Waal’s work.  And the rejection of God-given morality implied by the description is heartening—a good palliative for the “Moral Law” argument of Francis Collins.

What worries me a bit, though, is what Frans posted 24 hours ago on his public Facebook page:

The book is almost done! It is a reflection on religion and the origins of morality. It questions whether we get any closer to the truth by bashing religion, the way neo-atheists have been doing, even though I also believe that morality antedates modern religion. The book is of course heavy on primate behavior, but also covers philosophy, discusses medieval art, and seeks a way of bridging the gap (loved by philosophers) between facts and values. All in one book!

De Waal has gone after New Atheists before, most notably in a New York Times piece I highlighted in October of 2010. There he said this:

Over the past few years, we have gotten used to a strident atheism arguing that God is not great (Christopher Hitchens) or a delusion (Richard Dawkins). The new atheists call themselves “brights,” thus hinting that believers are not so bright. They urge trust in science, and want to root ethics in a naturalistic worldview.

While I do consider religious institutions and their representatives — popes, bishops, mega-preachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis — fair game for criticism, what good could come from insulting individuals who find value in religion? And more pertinently, what alternative does science have to offer? Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. We, scientists, are good at finding out why things are the way they are, or how things work, and I do believe that biology can help us understand what kind of animals we are and why our morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral guidance seems a stretch.

Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.

I welcome de Waal’s demonstrations and arguments for the origin of morality as at least a partial inheritance from our primate ancestors.  But the atheist-dissing seems gratuitious, something that doesn’t belong in a book of this type unless de Waal is trying to occupy some nonexistent “middle ground” (“halfway to crazy town,” as P.Z. calls it).  The goal of New Atheism, as I see it, is not mainly to insult religious individuals, but to question the tenets of belief, point out the invidious consequences of unsupported belief, and question the unwarranted privilege that religion has arrogated to itself. Surely that’s something that a scientist like de Waal would approve of.

And what would morality look like without religion? Have a gander at Scandinavia.  That doesn’t look too bad to me; in fact, the region looks more moral than the U.S.   Please, Frans, lay off the gratuitious and incorrect characterizations of New Atheism.

But I will of course read Frans’s book, as I’ve greatly enjoyed his other books on primate behavior. You can order it here.

A sophisticated theologian claims that religion can’t be falsified

May 15, 2012 • 5:45 am

I’m reading lots of sophisticated theology, so you’ll have to suffer along with me.  It’s no surprise that many theologians—and religious people—argue that despite the fact that their religions make claims about empirical truth, they can’t be tested or falsified.  That’s because they have been falsified, repeatedly, and by adopting the “no more testing” stance, the faithful have immunized their beliefs against both scrutiny and rejection.

One such theologian is an eminent scholar who was here at The University of Chicago: Langdon Gilkey (1919-2004). Famous for his beard, beads, scarf, and earring, he took them off (and shaved) only once: when he testified for the plaintiffs in the Arkansas creationist trial of McLean v. Arkansas. In that famous trial, Judge Overton handed down his eloquent decision banning the teaching of “scientific creationism” in the state’s public schools.

By all accounts Gilkey was a terrific teacher (specializing in the work of Reinhold Neibuhr) and a lovely person. He also had a colorful life—he moved to China in 1940 to teach English, for example, and during WWII was interned by the Japanese as a foreign alien. In that camp, he got to know Eric Liddell, the Scottish runner who took the gold in the 400 m run in the 1924 Olympics, and whose achievements were portrayed in the film Chariots of Fire.  Liddell, who had moved to China to be a missionary, died of a brain tumor in that camp, and Gilkey wrote some reminiscences.

At any rate, Gilkey wrote about his experiences in the Arkansas trial in a book I just read, Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock (1985, Winston Press).  There’s a long section in which he testified before the judge about the nature of science and the difference between science and religion—testimony that obviously impressed the judge, who threw out creationism because (as Gilkey testified) it “wasn’t science.”  (Well, I think creationism was science at one time: it was an empirical explanation for the origin and diversity of life. But it was simply bad science and has been falsified. Unfortunately, you can’t legally reject bad science from the public schools, but you can reject religiously-motivated “bad science”, which is the grounds we always use.)

Anyway, Gilkey succumbs to two discredited tropes in his testimony. The first is the NOMA ploy, though Steve Gould’s idea of “non-overlapping magisteria” hadn’t yet been published. Here’s a transcript of part of Gilkey’s testimony (from p. 109 in his book):

“Correspondingly, science asks objective questions, questions directed at knowledge in its strictest sense. What sorts of things are there here, or in the world?  What causes what? What sort of invariable relations are there between events—what laws govern existence?  If we do (a), then does (b) follow?  Does it always follow? And if so, how can we explain that? Science asks how questions, questions about the character and processes of change. It seeks after laws of change, and thus it concentrates on material, universal, and necessary or automatic causes, structures, laws, and habits.

Religions asks different sorts of questions, questions about meaning.  Thus religions myths, symbols, doctrines, or teachings answer these sorts of questions.  Why is there anything at all, and why are things as they are?  Why am I here, and who am I? Who put me here and for what purpose? What is wrong with everything, and with me? And what can set it right again? What is of real worth? Is there any basis for hope? What ought I to be and do? And where are we all going?”

There are two problems here.  First of all, most of the questions in the second set can also be properly asked by philosophy or just secular curiosity, not just by theology.  Second, the assertion that faith doesn’t make claims about what is real in the world and how it got there is simply wrong. That’s what the trial was about in the first place.  Yet faith still makes those claims: one that’s nearly non-negotiable for Christians is the resurrection of Jesus.  Any theistic claim is perforce within the ambit of science. And 78% of American still accept either straight young-earth creationism or the notion that God has guided evolution.

Second, science can actually answer some of its questions, but religion can’t. It can only offer suggestions that can’t be tested.  Note that there are no definitive theological answers to the “religious” set of questions posed by Gilkey.

Gilkey’s other trope is to insulate faith from testing. Again from his testimony (pp 113-114 in his book):

“And, as we have seen, religious explanations are based on special sorts of experience, special insights or revelations, not objective, sharable experiences.  Religious theories or beliefs cannot, therefore, be falsified by evidence or by new evidence.”

Really?  Can’t be falsified? What about the religious “theory or belief” of Adam and Eve, of Noah and the Ark, and of the Genesis story of creation itself?  All—all of them falsified.  Bereft of life, they rest in peace. They are ex-beliefs.

This sort of NOMA-ism goes down well with the courts, but it doesn’t describe reality, at least in the United States. Religion makes truth claims (I have a whole file of statements from sophisticated theologians asserting that religion aims to find out what’s true and what’s real), and morality and meaning are not only not the sole purview of faith, but faith does a damn bad job of dealing with them.


Reader’s kitteh contest: Copernicus and Galileo

May 15, 2012 • 4:52 am

Daniel Ortiz-Barrientos is my “grandstudent,” that is, he’s a fledged Ph.D. from my second student Mohamed Noor. Daniel is at the University of Queensland, studying speciation in plants, and contributed photos and a description of his two cats.

My wife Antonia took this picture of our two cats.  You should know that every time I tell her something about cats, she immediately asks me if I learned that from one of your posts at WEIT (I follow it continually). She was particularly sharp when I told her about the dissertation on cat pictures that you recently posted about.

Our two cats are called Copérnico and Galileo. Coper is the one that is stretching and has that massive tail. I just thought you would like the picture.

That’s quite a brush on the cat!

Copérnico and Galileo are our two gregarious cats that we adopted a year ago. It was not easy to find their names, mostly because some names would be difficult to pronounce in English. We thought of Rodrigo, Rafael, Aracataca, and Aureliano. Not that people would see the cats all the time, but mostly because we have translated our own experience with our own names (e.g., Daniel Ortiz Barrientos and Maria Antonia Posada Olaya) to our animals as well, and more recently to our son, Isaac. So we chose Copérnico and Galileo.

Copérnico, or Perni or Coper, is the skillful one, the very clever one, the lazy one, the one that eats vegetables and loiters by the fridge, or gets into the grocery basket to eat chives, the one that you can cuddle any time you want, the one that jumps 2m high, and can turn his body upside down in a millisecond when dropped from 10 cm above the ground—that is the way we test their catness.

Galileo, or Gali or Galipicho, on the other hand, does not pass the test, is incredibly cuddly but shy, loves meat, and seeks you out all the time; my wife could not be more affectionate to him, and he could not enjoy it more. The two cats play with each other, particularly at night, going up and down the stairs, and sometimes jumping on our beds and walking over us. We love them, and they make life much more fun!!! My boy Isaac smiles and giggles to them very often, but they know how to keep the minimum distance to prevent hair loss, but still incidentally make him happy. And boy, do they have tails!