Sam Harris on lying

September 20, 2011 • 12:29 pm

Over at his website, Sam Harris has announced the publication of a short e-essay for Kindle, “Lying,”” with endorsements by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Ricky Gervais.  I haven’t yet read it (I don’t own a Kindle), but it’s only about two bucks for 26 pages on Amazon.

The book apparently grew out of Ronald Howard’s course on practical ethics that Sam took at Harvard, a course that apparently condemned nearly every kind of lie one could envision, a view Sam apparently promulgates in this book:

One of the most fascinating things about this course, however, was how difficult it was to find examples of virtuous lies that could withstand Professor Howard’s scrutiny. Even with Nazis at the door and Anne Frank in the attic, Howard always seemed to find truths worth telling and paths to even greater catastrophe that could be opened by lying.

I do not remember what I thought about lying before I took “The Ethical Analyst,” but the course accomplished as close to a firmware upgrade of my brain as I have ever experienced. I came away convinced that lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly damages personal relationships and public trust.

It would be hard to exaggerate what a relief it was to realize this. It’s not that I had been in the habit of lying before taking Howard’s course—but I now knew that endless forms of suffering and embarrassment could be easily avoided by simply telling the truth. And, as though for the first time, I saw the consequences of others’ failure to live by this principle all around me.

This experience remains one of the clearest examples in my own life of the power of philosophical reflection. “The Ethical Analyst” affected me in ways that college courses seldom do: It made me a better person.

As I said, I haven’t yet read this, but I’ll need convincing that there are no instances when it’s better to lie, and the Anne Frank/Nazis at the door scenario is one of these.

John Gray: religion isn’t about truth (and science ain’t so hot, either)

September 20, 2011 • 5:50 am

Here’s a short list I quickly concocted giving some religiously-based attacks on science used by accommodationists and others to debase science, dragging it down to the level of faith (readers: feel free to add others):

1. Science is a faith: it depends on “philosophical naturalism” and on on faith that universe is comprehensible (and can be described by mathematics), as well as assumptions that we’re not just “brains in vats” or computer simulations run by aliens

2. Religion isn’t about truth but about ritual, solidarity, etc.

3. Early scientists were religious, so religion had a hand in early science

4. The scientific method and science came from religion

5.  Science can’t prove that God doesn’t exist

6  Science fosters scientism (see yesterday’s post)

7. Science gives us no moral grounding

8. Science has been misused

9. Science is not the only route to knowledge

10.  Science isn’t a good route to truth because it’s often been wrong

Over at the BBC News “Point of View” site, many of these are evinced by political philosopher and accommodationist nonpareil John Gray in his essay “Can religion tell us more than science?” (his BBC show on the topic, of which essay is a transcript, can be heard here).  His points

  • Religions aren’t about particular beliefs or truths, so New Atheist attacks on religious verities are misguided.   Gray:

We tend to assume that religion is a question of what we believe or don’t believe. It’s an assumption with a long history in western philosophy, which has been reinforced in recent years by the dull debate on atheism. [JAC: really? I doubt many would call the debate “dull”]. . .

In most religions – polytheism, Hinduism and Buddhism, Daoism and Shinto, many strands of Judaism and some Christian and Muslim traditions – belief has never been particularly important. Practice – ritual, meditation, a way of life – is what counts. What practitioners believe is secondary, if it matters at all.

The idea that religions are essentially creeds, lists of propositions that you have to accept, doesn’t come from religion. It’s an inheritance from Greek philosophy, which shaped much of Western Christianity and led to practitioners trying to defend their way of life as an expression of what they believe.

This is where Frazer and the new atheists today come in. When they attack religion they are assuming that religion is what this Western tradition says it is – a body of beliefs that needs to be given a rational justification.

Unfortunately, “practice” is rarely kept private, and that’s the problem. If religious people wanted only to go to church, meditate, do proselytizing-free charity work and so on, that would be fine. But they do have beliefs derived from their faith, and they often try to enforce these on society.  That, I think, is the big problem the New Athiests have with religion: not just the false beliefs, but the need to enforce those beliefs on others (that, of course, is also what political belief engenders, but religion produces a more irrational form of belief).  If you want to see what some religious beliefs do to society, look to Ireland a few decades ago or parts of the Middle East today.

And even if religion doesn’t depend on belief so much as ritual, it’s still divisive and a cause for xenophobia and horrible crimes. Gray mentions Buddhists and Hindus, but religion played a role in the horrors of the civil war in Sri Lanka (granted, religion was conflated with ethnicity), and especially in the violence that followed the partition of India in 1947.  In the latter episode, millions were slaughtered on the basis of their religion alone.

  • Science ain’t so hot either because it’s often wrong.  Gray:

Obviously, there are areas of life where having good reasons for what we believe is very important. Courts of law and medicine are evidence-based practices, which need rigorous procedures to establish the facts. . .

. . . But many areas of life aren’t like this. Art and poetry aren’t about establishing facts. Even science isn’t the attempt to frame true beliefs that it’s commonly supposed to be. Scientific inquiry is the best method we have for finding out how the world works, and we know a lot more today than we did in the past. That doesn’t mean we have to believe the latest scientific consensus. If we know anything, it’s that our current theories will turn out to be riddled with errors. Yet we go on using them until we can come up with something better.

Yes, science progresses, and earlier ideas are often replaced.  But some things aren’t likely to be: a water molecule has two hydrogen and one oxygen atom, birds descended from dinosaurs, life began about 3.5 billion years ago, tuberculosis is caused by a specific bacterium.  Place all that knowledge of science against any verities produced by faith—there are none of the latter. It’s simply odious to pretend that there’s something wrong with science because it produces a better and better understanding of the world with time, and is sometimes wrong.  Religious “truth claims” are always wrong.

  • Religious myths give us truths, and can be more truthful than science.

Myths aren’t relics of childish thinking that humanity leaves behind as it marches towards a more grown-up view of things. They’re stories that tell us something about ourselves that can’t be captured in scientific theories.

Just as you don’t have to believe that a scientific theory is true in order to use it, you don’t have to believe a story for it to give meaning to your life.

Myths can’t be verified or falsified in the way theories can be. But they can be more or less truthful to human experience, and I’ve no doubt that some of the ancient myths we inherit from religion are far more truthful than the stories the modern world tells about itself.

Note the implicit slur on science in the last sentence, which undoubtedly inspired Gray’s title about religion telling us more than science.  In Gray’s view, religion performs the function of art, literature, and fiction: giving us solidarity with fellow humans, validating ourselves, and so on.  And that’s fine—I’ve never been one to dismiss the value of the arts in this way.  But you don’t need religion to do that, especially those forms or religion based on beliefs that are palpably false.  But Gray shouldn’t pretend that what these stories convey are “truths,” especially because, earlier in his piece, he says that religion isn’t in the business of providing truth!

  • Humans didn’t evolve as animals that can find truth:

If Darwin’s theory of evolution is even roughly right, humans aren’t built to understand how the universe works. The human brain evolved under the pressures of the struggle for life.

Through science humans can lift themselves beyond the view of things that’s forced on them by day-to-day existence. They can’t overcome the fact that they remain animals, with minds that aren’t equipped to see into the nature of things.

Darwin’s theory is unlikely to be the final truth. It may be just a rough account of how life has developed in our part of the cosmos. Even so, the clear implication of the theory of evolution is that human knowledge is by its nature limited.

This is extraordinarily stupid stuff.  Begin with his questioning of evolution.  Yes, evolution may be wrong, but I highly doubt it.  It has had a million chances to be disproven (fossils out of place, and so on), but has passed every one. As I show in WEIT, the major tenets of the modern theory of evolution (which, granted, doesn’t understand everything) makes that theory as close to a scientific truth as we can get.

More important, humans have evolved to be generally reliable detectors of truth—at least those truths that enabled us to survive on the savanna:  our eyes tell us what is real, our ears tell us real sounds, and so on.  Our brains evolved to enable us to reliably calculate what others might be thinking and to communicate our feelings and desires to others.  That’s all it takes for our evolved brains to be coopted into a reliable device for seeking truth in other realms, i.e., science.  And if we weren’t evolved to find truth, how come science has found out so many things that work well (e.g., medicines) and can make predictions that are verified?  Yes, our brains are limited, but Gray doesn’t realize that his criticism applies with even more force toward religion than toward science:  we evolved to detect real things in our environment, and to suppose that those senses can be coopted to detect spiritual “realities”, like the nature of God, is simple nonsense.  Religious “verities” depend on subjective factors like revelation.

Gray goes on to make other ludicrous comparisons between science and faith; here’s one:

Unbelievers in religion who think science can save the world are possessed by a fantasy that’s far more childish than any myth. The idea that humans will rise from the dead may be incredible, but no more so than the notion that “humanity” can use science to remake the world.

Yep, saving the world demands not only the facts about the world and what we’re doing to it, which come, of course, from science, but wise guidance and ethical behavior.  You don’t need religion to get the last two, for many of the people engaged in saving the world: conservation biologists, doctors without borders, etc., have no religious belief at all.  And there’s no saving the world without science.  If Gray looked at our modern world for five seconds, and compared that with the world of 1700, he’s see that the world has indeed been remade by science: we eat better, live longer, are healthier, don’t have to toil so hard for our bread, have computers to help us with nearly everything, and so on.  ALLL of that comes from science and none from myth and religion.  It is truly science and not “myth” that has remade our world.  And only a moron can maintain that that observation can be equated with the “truth” of the resurrection of Jesus.

  • Only New Atheists and religious fundamentalists deal with the notion of religious “truths” (the former to dismiss them):

Human beings don’t live by argumentation, and it’s only religious fundamentalists and ignorant rationalists who think the myths we live by are literal truths.

Well, do Catholics and Anglicans count as “religious fundamentalists”?  How about non-extremist Muslims?  How about American Protestants, 70% of whom believe in a literal heaven, and 63% in angels.  Gray certainly needs to get out more.  He finishes his piece this way:

What we believe doesn’t in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live.

What he doesn’t realize is that so very often what religious people believe determines not only how they live, but how they try to make the rest of us live. Why else is abortion outlawed in Ireland, women can’t drive in Saudi Arabia, and Catholic children are regularly terrorized by thoughts of hell?

I’m not familiar with John Gray, but rarely have I seen a nonbeliever (Gray says that “I don’t belong to any religion”) amass so many stupid arguments against science.  Gray seems to enjoy a high reputation in England, but, based on this essay alone, I’m baffled.

A fossilized cowboy boot?

September 20, 2011 • 4:12 am

I can’t remember the name of the alert reader who sent me this photo, an exhibit in some creation museum (I believe it’s in Canada, but correct me if I’m wrong).  It shows several examples of how fossils can supposedly form rapidly, with the intent, of course, of casting doubt on the age of supposedly old real  fossil and promoting the idea that the Earth is young.

One of the artifacts is a “fossilized” human leg in a “fossilized” cowboy boot, found in 1980 with the boot dated to about 1950 (top row, middle; click to enlarge):

The response? It’s a fake, of course, not fossilized at all.

NYT profile of Dawkins

September 19, 2011 • 11:23 am

Posted just an hour ago is a longish New York Times profile of Richard Dawkins, including a five-minute video interview.  Readers here will be familiar with much of it, but perhaps not with these tidbits:

  • Professor Dawkins often declines to talk in San Francisco and New York; these cities are too gloriously godless, as far as he is concerned. “As an atheistic lecturer, you are rather wasting your time,” he says. He prefers the Bible Belt, where controversy is raw.He insists he frets before each lecture. This is difficult to imagine. He is characteristically English in his fluid command of words written and spoken. (Perhaps this is an evolutionary adaptation — all those cold, clammy English days firing an adjectival and syntactical genius?)
  • Professor Dawkins feels more than a tinge of regret that he and Professor Gould did not appreciate each other more. “Gould wanted to downgrade the conceit that it all progressed towards us, towards humans, and I fully approved of that,” he says now, even as he makes sure to add, “But evolution most certainly is progressive.”There is a final cosmic joke to be had here.The two men quarreled about everything save their shared atheism. But Professor Dawkins’s closest intellectual ally on progressive evolution and convergence is Simon Conway Morris, the renowned Cambridge evolutionary paleontologist.

    And Professor Morris, as it happens, is an Anglican and a fervent believer in a personal God. He sees convergence as hinting at a teleology, or intelligent architecture, in the universe. [JAC: I told you so! Also note that convergence doesn’t necessarily say anything about progressivism, for many convergences, as in parasites, involve parallel loss of structures.]

    Ask Professor Dawkins about his intellectual bedfellow, and his smile thins. “Yes, well, Simon and I have converged on the science,” he says. “I should think in the world there are not two evolutionary scientists who could rival each other in their enthusiasm for convergence.”

    As to Professor Morris’s religious faith? “I just don’t get it.”

  • Critics grow impatient with Professor Dawkins’s atheism. They accuse him of avoiding the great theological debates that enrich religion and philosophy, and so simplifying the complex. He concocts “vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince,” wrote Terry Eagleton, regarded as one of Britain’s foremost literary critics. “What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus?”Put that charge to Professor Dawkins and he more or less pleads guilty. To suggest he study theology seems akin to suggesting he study fairies. Nor is he convinced that the ecumenical Anglican, the moderate imam, the Catholic priest with the well-developed sense of irony, is religion’s truest representative.“I’ve had perfectly wonderful conversations with Anglican bishops, and I rather suspect if you asked in a candid moment, they’d say they don’t believe in the virgin birth,” he says. “But for every one of them, four others would tell a child she’ll rot in hell for doubting.”

A defense of naturalism—and scientism

September 19, 2011 • 10:37 am

Two weeks ago, Timothy Williamson, a professor of logic at Oxford University, published a remarkably wooly-headed attack on naturalism, “Naturalism and its limits” in the New York Times Opinionator section.  He decried naturalism as a philosophy on various unconvincing grounds, including the idea that using natural methods to investigate nature was tautological, “science” was ill-defined, there was no clear place for mathematics as a science, other methods of inquiry might discover truth, and so on.

Two days ago, Alex Rosenberg, a philosopher at Duke University, responded in a piece at the same site called “Why I am a naturalist.”  His response is succinct and devastating, and makes two main points:

  • Science wins because it works.  That’s a quote from Stephen Hawking, and Rosenberg, like me, agrees: we can ground a philosophical naturalism in the remarkable success of methodological naturalism in helping us understand nature, and the abject failure of any other methology, especially religion, to find the truth.  As Rosenberg notes:

But 400 years of scientific success in prediction, control and technology shows that physics has made a good start. We should be confident that it will do better than any other approach at getting things right.

Naturalists recognize that science is fallible. Its self-correction, its continual increase in breadth and accuracy, give naturalists confidence in the resources they borrow from physics, chemistry and biology. The second law of thermodynamics, the periodic table, and the principles of natural selection are unlikely to be threatened by future science. Philosophy can therefore rely on them to answer many of its questions without fear of being overtaken by events.

If you want to see why the success of methodological naturalism (the reliance on empirical methods to understand natural phenomena) can serve as a grounding for philosophical naturalism (the “worldview” that material and physical nature is all there is), read Barbara Forrest’s important essay, “Methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism: clarifying the connection.”  She shows that we don’t really need an a priori philosophical justification for philosophical naturalism: the worldview is justified from the bottom up—by the success of methodological naturalism (i.e., science) in understanding the universe.

  • Science is the only real way of gaining knowledge about the world.  Yes, I risk being accused of scientism here, but if you construe “science” broadly—as the use of reason, observation, experiment, replication by independent observers, all heavily seasoned with doubt—then I see no other way of understanding our world and universe.  Literature and the other arts can help us empathize with the feelings of others, give us a new way of seeing, and share a sense of personal validation, but that is not knowledge.  As Rosenberg says:

“Why can’t there be things only discoverable by non-scientific means, or not discoverable at all?” Professor Williamson asked in his essay. His question may be rhetorical, but the naturalist has an answer to it: nothing that revelation, inspiration or other non-scientific means ever claimed to discover has yet to withstand the test of knowledge that scientific findings attain. What are those tests of knowledge? They are the experimental/observational methods all the natural sciences share, the social sciences increasingly adopt, and that naturalists devote themselves to making explicit. You can reject naturalists’ epistemology, or treat it as question begging, but you can’t accuse them of not having one.

Religion has an epistemology, too: dogma and personal revelation (seasoned with wish thinking) but in thousands of years it hasn’t vouchsafed us one bit of verifiable knowledge about reality.  And as for the arts:

Naturalism. . . won’t uncritically buy into Professor Williamson’s “default assumption … that the practitioners of a well-established discipline know what they are doing, and use the … methods most appropriate for answering its questions.” If semiotics, existentialism, hermeneutics, formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-modernism transparently flout science’s standards of objectivity, or if they seek arbitrarily to limit the reach of scientific methods, then naturalism can’t take them seriously as knowledge.

That doesn’t mean anyone should stop doing literary criticism any more than foregoing fiction. Naturalism treats both as fun, but neither as knowledge.

Exactly.

An amazing fly-over of Earth

September 19, 2011 • 6:10 am

This should give you a “spiritual” experience: it’s a wonderful one-minute, time-lapse video of what you’d see of Earth from the International Space Station. The YouTube site describes it thusly:

A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earth’s ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.

 

h/t: Matthew Cobb via Roger Highfield