In some ways it seems almost pointless to argue with Christians and others about the relationship between their beliefs and science, for it is quite clear that science, though it may have arisen in the context of Christian Europe, worked at cross purposes with religion from the very beginning. That the first scientists who made the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century were many of them religious believers is nothing to the purpose when it comes to relating theology and science. Not dismayed by lack of evidence, however, religious believers continue to make absurd claims about the consistency between religious believing and the discoveries of science.
The latest installment in this game of science vs. religion musical chairs — you just have to find a position to adhere to before everyone stops talking — comes to us from Australia (and the link to it comes via the courtesy of Jerry Coyne, who commented on it yesterday). We start with an article by Peter Kirkwood, who, we are told, is a freelance writer and video consultant, and has a Master’s degree from the Sydney College of Divinity. (The latter reminds me that, on the books, I have such a degree too, but a point came when I decided that theology and related “disciplines” is not a source of knowledge, so I clipped up my degree certificate into little pieces and threw them out in the trash, and no longer claim this as amongst my achievements — except, as in this case, to explain its lack of credibility.)
Kirkwood’s article mainly serves the purpose of introducing us to Chris Mulherin, an Anglican priest with some knowledge of the philosophy of science, currently writing a dissertation at the MCD University of Divinity (originally founded as the Melbourne College of Divinity in 1910), which is really an amalgam of various Christian seminaries and theological schools located in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney, in Southeastern Australia, which is what happens, generally, when separate schools are no longer viable on their own because of reductions in vocations to ministry (though I do not say, because I do not know, that this is the case here). However, it is notable that, though called a university, it is really an organisation run by and for the churches.
Nevertheless, to get back to the Wunderkind, Chris Mulherin, Australia’s new bearer of the flame for the religion vs. the new atheism debate. Mulherin is embedded in Kirkwood’s article in a video in which Mulherin purports to explain the “marriage” between science and religion, but Kirkwood has a few things to say on his own. He begins by speaking about the Global Atheist Convention held in Melbourne this year, and then he says this:
To believe Dawkins, and many of the other speakers at the conference, you’d think there is a deep gulf between science and religion, that the two are intractably at loggerheads and have nothing useful to say to each other.
But this is at odds with what many other theologians, philosophers and scientists tell us. They say science and religion are both quests for truth dealing with different aspects of human experience. This is well summed up in Galileo’s famous statement that ‘the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go’.
That little bon mot of Galileo’s, if actually said and meant in the way suggested, has just about had its day; and it is wrongly used today to support the claim that religion and science are compatible, yet different ways of knowing. However devout Galileo was I have no idea, though it seems, from his attitude towards the pope and various other ecclesiastical hierarchs, that he was more concerned about his own scientific priority in a number of discoveries or inventions than he was with getting to heaven. It was quite clearly at least a smokescreen laid down to protect himself from the prying eyes and dangerous proclivities of the Inquisition; for just as Hume wrote in the shadow of the execution in 1687 for blasphemy of the young student Thomas Aikenhead, so Galileo had the spectacle of Giordano Bruno being burnt at the stake for heresy to urge caution in dealing with ecclesiastical authorities.
Kirkwood’s claim, however, that the new atheist belief that science and religion are at loggerheads is belied by “what many other theologians, philosophers and scientists tell us,” is not actually borne out by the evidence, for, while it goes without saying that most theologians are in some sense believers, most top ranking scientists and philosophers are not religious believers, and do not see the relationship between science and religion as one of complementary ways of discerning truth. Indeed, the greatest problem that religious believers have is accommodating different religions, with their very different core beliefs, into a single discipline of which acknowledged truth is the outcome. This is what Philip Kitcher calls the symmetry argument, and it is important to note that, while religion may be studied comparatively, comparative religion is nowhere near showing that different religious traditions are dealing with the same “truths”. Religions make incompatible and opposing claims, and so cannot be thought, without further evidence, as providing truth or knowledge at all. Whether they still have a valid cultural role, or are merely impediments to progress, is another and different question, and not one that either Kirkwood or Mulherin address.
This is particularly noticeable in the video that accompanies Kirkwood’s article, so let’s go through it, noting how confused Mulherin is as we go. We start at the beginning:
Like all lasting marriages, says Mulherin, Christianity and science have had to work at their relationship. This is nonsense on a number of levels. First, there is no marriage between science and Christianity. Indeed, science has no interest at all, qua science, in religion. But the problem is more serious than that. For, second, even to begin to show that science and religion are complementary ways to truth, Mulherin must show that the religion he has chosen, because he is, after all, a Christian, is the true religion, and that all other religions are false. He cannot begin dealing with the relationship of science and religion until he has done this. But third, simply saying, as he does, that religion deals with one kind of truth whilst science deals with another kind of truth, is not to show a relationship between science and religion at all, but to isolate religion from science in such a way that science cannot have anything definitive to say about religion. Quite clearly, Christianity and science are not working together in the pursuit of truth. In saying this, however, Mulherin assumes that science has no interest in the scientific study of religion. This, of course, is false, for science has a great deal to say about religion, and, indeed, the scientific study of religion is vital to dealing with the completely intransigent nature of religious belief, and its effects on political and social reality. So, so much for the marriage of science and Christianity.
This is made even clearer by what Mulherin says next. Remember, he is saying that science and religion are involved in a close relationship, like a marriage, working together in the pursuit of truth. But now he is going to tell us that there is no real relationship here at all:
Now, this is strange. Science only has to do with the mechanics of things. It does not answer the why questions, which is where religion shines. But I ask you to recall that religion answers the why questions in one way, science in another. According to Dawkins, as we saw in a recent post here on choiceindying.com,
[t]he universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Now, not to put to fine a point on it, believing that the universe has towards us no relationship of care, no purpose or design, no evil or good, but simply blind, pitiless indifference, is surely a very different world, and answers why questions in a very different way than a world thought to be lovingly created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving creator. That Mulherin cannot see this is a measure of how deeply he is invested in religious myth, for, though indeed philosophers since the Greeks have tried to prove by logical means that there must be a god who created the earth, none of these attempts can be considered sufficient to underwrite any of the particular religious beliefs of different religions. There comes a moment when the believer must make the great leap of faith from supposed logical possibilities to conviction that the world is — and here it has to be added — despite all the evidence – the creation of an all-powerful loving god who made us and gave us minds to be able to understand the world. And for the Christian this is the God who sent Jesus to be our Saviour. But there is no reason to make this leap, for, at the same time, it is evident, given the long history of the world in which most people had no scientific understanding of the world at all, that it is the evolutionary process that has, in the end, given rise to minds that can – with great difficulty, it might be added – come to know more about the deep structure of reality. But it is clear that the worlds of science and religion are poles apart and are not engaged, as Mulherin suggests, in the common pursuit of truth, because the “big picture” that Mulherin discusses is not part of the scientific world picture at all, but a completely independent and arbitrary way of regarding the universe as we know it. That it is arbitrary is evident simply from the fact that there are many different religions, all of which have a different take on what is to be included in this bigger picture.
Nevertheless, let’s soldier on, and see whether, in the fulness of time, Mulherin may yet snatch something from the fire. Here is his description of a Christian who is also a scientist doing scientific work:
Now, this raises a problem for Mulherin, and he does not notice. For, if science and religion are compatible, then religious belief should contribute something to the work of the scientist who also, as it happens, is a Christian (and here, again, we note the oddness of thinking just in terms of one religion and its orthodox beliefs). For if God does not “mess with the experiments,” this also means that God does not mess with the world either. For if God did mess with the world, then we would be faced with the same problem of an inability to understand. How often, for instance, could there be actual miracles, that is events that went clean contrary to the laws of nature, before we would be forced to say that the world is simply unintelligible? At what point would intelligibility break down? And if scientists leave their religious beliefs at the church door, then in what sense are science and those beliefs compatible? What kind of compatibility is this? And is it any different from the fact that a scientist who is also someone who loves someone does not bring his love explicitly into play in doing his scientific experiments? Mulherin suggests that presumably the scientist who is also a Christian does science because it seems worthwhile in terms of (and he just puts this in general terms) their world view. But which world view? The scientific one, or the Christian one? And if the Christian one, then how does he cash his scientific experiments in in terms of that world view? All we are given is a kind of promissory note here, when, in the context, we need much more.
At this point we reach the point where Mulherin is completely muddled. He wants to say that religion provides knowledge about the world, but he apparently has no idea what kind of knowledge this is. Consider this:
Now, as I say, this is just plain muddle. The point that Dawkins was making in the quote above, and in so much else that he writes about science, is precisely that science does ground our why questions? Why do we exist? Because of a sequence of physical events producing the elements necessary for the type of life that developed on earth, plus the further sequence of evolutionary events which brought our species as well as many other species into being. That answer provides a further basis for answering other why questions, for if we are, as it seems, the product of an algorithmic natural process, then we do not have meaning in the sense of a telos (or end) spelled out beforehand, but meaning is something we must ourselves provide. So the very mechanisms by which we came to be indicates the direction in which we must look in order to provide meaning for our lives. Presupposing meaning based on ancient myths is not an answer to the question as to what meaning our lives can have in the 21st century, because we have much more knowledge to go on than the mythmakers of the past had, and so the parameters for the creation of life meaning are now very different. The attempt to force a different kind of meaning onto the recalcitrant facts discovered by science is simply to give up the contemporary search for meaning altogether, in preference for meaning based on a very different view of the world. For Mulherin simply cannot separate science and religion in the way that he does into mechanism and world view, for science itself provides the essentials for a contemporary world view in such a way as to make religious world views irrelevant to the world as science has come to present it to us.
I won’t carry this much further. Mulherin thinks the “incompatibility thesis” has been thoroughly debunked, but I think he is wrong in this. Certainly, in the video embedded in Kirkwood’s article we have been given no reason to think this true. Quite the contrary, Mulherin, though he does not notice it, has in face made the incompatibility quite clear, while not noticing that science does provide the basis for a new world view which is incompatible with most religious belief. He asks the question: “Why is the message of the new atheists currently so popular?” He thinks it lies in a confluence of a number of vested interests:
But this simply has to be wrong. The reason for the popularity of the new atheism is that religion is increasingly showing itself unable to cope with the modern world. Practically everywhere you look nowadays we see religion retrenching rapidly, trying to stave off the corrosive effects of science. And Mulherin has not given us a single reason to think otherwise. Indeed, he has demonstrated, in the course of the video, that religion and science are incompatible.
By denying that science provides a basis for a world view, he has simply misunderstood the impact of science, and the meaning of science. For science is not only about mechanism, as Mulherin supposes. Just as the idea of creation gave earlier peoples a grasp of their place in the world, so science provides a new appreciation of our place in the order of things. Carl Sagan used to account for the new world view by emphasising two things: (i) the microscopic role that human life plays in the vast immensity of the universe; and (ii) the fact that, insignificant on the cosmic scale as we are, human intelligence has at last reached the point where it has gained an insight into the very nature of things. And what we learn when we put those two points together is the fact that we are, as it were, orphans in a cosmic storm, but we are intelligent orphans, and must put our intelligence to work in producing a world view which is consistent with what we have come to know about ourselves and our place in the universe.
What Mulherin does so effectively is to point out how important it is that, as those who are heirs to the great scientific enterprise that has been underway for the last four hundred years or so, we need a world view which is consistent with the knowledge that we have gained, which includes a scientific understanding of how religions themselves have played their part in the human experience, but are now largely orphaned by history, even though they continue to claim that they alone can provide meaning for us in a world otherwise devoid of meaning. But this just shows that religion does not understand, and cannot encompass, the enormous changes that have taken place since the seventeenth century scientific revolution. Nor, to be truthful, has the new atheism yet succeeded in providing such a world view. Our task has been largely negative, a matter of showing that religion does not and cannot provide the answers to our most insistent questions about human meaning. What will provide that more comprehensive understanding of our place in the universe is still a task yet to be completed. But we have made a beginning. Attempts like Mulherin’s to drag us back to mythical world views is simply a wasted effort. Jesus was not a god, after all, and he did not die for our sins. We need a better story than that. There must be better songs to sing.
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Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.
The videos aren’t showing up in my browser. Is it just Safari, or is something else wrong?
Might be Safari. They show up in Google Chrome.
I don’t use anything other than IE 9, but even with that it took me about two hours to get the videos to play. Perhaps part of the problem lies with WordPress (at the moment), because usually I have not had this problem.
I am pretty much in agreement with this, and Jerry Coyne’s, takedown of this latest attempt at promoting accomodationism. My one gripe would be your suggestion that there is a need, not provided by the New Atheism, to provide meaning. Speaking for myself I find meaning just by having a life. I have a job, a family, a garden, a motorcycle, books, a piano, beer, prog-rock music and I live in a beautiful part of the world. The whole notion that life without religion is meaningless comes from the religious side. As far as I can see, that assertion is demonstrably false.
Regarding that parting shot about Jesus not dying for our sins. If you take Christianity at its word, he didn’t die for mine, because you have to buy into the whole ridiculous scheme of salvation to be included in it, and I don’t. What an absurd criterion for deciding who gets saved, one that is dependant upon where and how you were raised and whether you are stupid enough to believe in absurdities.
Eric,
this is a brilliant contribution, thank you.
I especially like your conclusion. It is a real problem that there is a university level program to train people to think like Mulherin, and also I fear that his comments would not generate much controversy in a modern university. I worry that the academy does not see it as its job to compose the music you say we need.
It would be great if Scott Stephens reposted this to the ABC religion and ethics site, and if MCD flew you in to discuss their response to your civil critique.
1. Challenge to anyone claiming that religion in any way aids the progress of science:
Provide an example where a scientist contemplating alternative hypotheses to explain a set of facts, preferred one because it was more compatible with some religion.
2. Christianity claims to “know” by faith; so what is the quest for worldly knowledge? Is it “10 simple exercises to increase your faith”?
3. Since the reward of heaven is eternal and infinite, what would be the point of knowing anything about this very fleeting universe? Why would Christianity give two hoots about what scientists are doing?
Hear, hear Stonyground!
Atheism does not need to provide meaning but is a bulwark against religion and its dogmas. *We* provide the meaning to our lives and live on in the memories of our loved ones and, if one is lucky enough, in the lessons and experiences with which we’ve provided them. Why anyone would need or want more than the things they’d add to their own lists (you forgot good books, scotch, and wine!) is beyond me.
Accommodationists will charge that it is counter-productive to challenge faith, because it puts people on the defensive and causes them to resist reason. In fact, most people have never been asked to justify their beliefs and, when they try, may find contradictions of which they had been unaware. Mulherin’s hostility toward new atheists is understandable, as is his reverence toward “true” atheists, who just don’t do that sort of thing.
About a minute into the eight minute video over at WEIT, I guessed that Mulherin, despite talking about science, would never use the word evidence. Again, no sense provoking ideas.
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We’ve recently had a religious experience here in Britain, called the Olympic Games. National pessimism, economic despair and cynicism has been temporary replaced with a kind of spiritual nationalism.
What this says to me is that religion, even if irrational, is something that is part of what makes humans flourish, and won’t go away. Although Christianity is doomed, I don’t believe religion will ever go away.
Egbert, you are probably right. I have been watching what you call “a kind of spiritual nationalism” growing over the last couple of weeks with a great deal of surprise. I simply cannot understand this in response to “excellence” in sport. I put the quotes around it because the matter has become at once too technical, too specialised, and too nationalistic. If this is what the Olympic Games are about, we could do without them, in my view.
However, doubtless religion will not go away, which is precisely why I think, besides finding meaning in our own lives without religious belief, and giving them individual meaning, we need to be telling new stories and singing new songs about the possibilities of flourishing human life without gods.
If the Olympic Games can spark the efflorescence of a kind of spirituality, surely human life itself is capable of stirring similar kinds of responses. I appreciate Stonyground’s point of view, but I fear that, without something which can engage people’s imaginations, religiion will remain around to trouble us with its irrationalities.
Humanism is a movement of this sort, but has been left on the sidelines in the surge of new atheism. It seems that there still may be life in such movements, and we should not, I think, disparage them. For some, joining is not something that would contribute meaning, but for others, it is a vital way of sharing in a common task which gives meaning and purpose to life, something that is beyond life and family, job and occupation.
Atheists should not despise what religions have been able to achieve, a commitment and loyalty and common purpose that has contributed much to people’s lives, however misled we may hold the beliefs which enabled this sense of meaning and purpose. That it is done in response to myths and irrationalities is worrying, but the sense of working together to achieve something, not just for a company or a business or even a university, but for humankind, is, I suspect, the only way that we will be able to turn the multitudes to more reasonable ways of understanding their lives and their place in the world.
#11, Really, Eric, very well said.
Eric, you may enjoy this speech from 1883, delivered in Victoria, Australia (Where Mulherin is working) in the Scot’s Church. There are only a few copies of this speech in existence, and all in rare book collections, but in the day it was headline news and the whole of society discussed it. It was wildly popular, delivered by a supreme court justice, and fully part of the spirit of the day. It is linked in a scribed at this link:
http://statereligionvic.posterous.com/pages/about-our-icon
Mulherin now, 130 years later, pretends that Richard Dawkins is just now kicking up some fuss about something which has heretofore not been controversial. Yet there are large bronze statues in his city to men who spent much of their civic lives attacking the incompatibility of Science and Religion, in more or less the same words as Coyne and Dawkins et. al. use.
Another irony, overlooked by Mulherin is that the men who created the University at which he now studies, deliberately refused to award degrees of Divinity – because they did not see theology as a proper subject in a University. It has only been in the last year that this degree has emerged as part of the purview of the university.
If by “science” you mean a philosophy of naturalistic materialism, of course it is incompatible with religion. They are diametrically opposed. That does not mean, however, that a devout Christian cannot engage in experimental science. The Christian believes that there is a rational order to the universe, put there by an Intelligent Being, and that it can be studied scientifically, without coming to the conclusion that it all happened by accident. And if life is an accident, what meaning and purpose does it have?
The problem for religion is that evolution is sufficient to explain the appearance of humans and the human brain is sufficient to explain consciousness and mind. It leaves little necessity for gods and this is why theists are so worried.
Dan Dennett gave a pretty good talk on “The Evolution of Purposes” that provides an analysis of telos in sane, Darwinian terms. You can watch here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L7uNyQL0H0
The quality of high-level staff at the Australian Catholic University can be gauged by this childish and self-righteous diatribe written by its Vice-Chancellor:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/a-plague-of-atheists-has-descended-and-catholics-are-the-target-20091103-hv52.html
The quality of the subordinate staff can only be imagined.
Bob, of course Christians can be scientists. That’s not the issue. The issue is whether science and Christianity are compatible, make compatible assumptions, and are consistent in such a way as to be mutually supportive. I think the answer to that is no. The fundamental assumption of Christianity (and note that he does not include any other religion), as Mulherin points out, is that the universe was created by intelligence for a purpose. There is no reason, based on our scientific understanding of the universe, to suppose that the universe exists for a purpose, and we do not need to assume intelligence as its source. Purpose, in fact, is an higher-level evolved capacity for pursuing ends. So purpose comes from us. The fact that religions claim otherwise makes them immediately suspect on scientific grounds, for that is attributing to the universe something which is not derivable from it. It is a form of anthropomorphism.
Interestingly, until Darwin, the apparent design of life was an obstacle to arguments against the existence of an intelligent, purposeful creator. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume comes very close to developing an evolutionary theory, simply based on his need to counter claims that the universe displays intelligent purpose, but he is forced, in the end, to acknowledge the strength of the opposing argument. Now, however, Hume would have had everything he needed to make the existence of a god very improbable indeed, and so do we.
You’re almost certainly right about theology schools having to merge due to a dearth of enrollments, Eric. In Melbourne, the only university offering a degree in theology for students from high school is the Australian Catholic University. Last year a total of nine students enrolled, and only four came directly from high school. Universities courses with that level of enrollment would normally be cancelled.
So an xtian can’t make the most parsimonious assumption that we are not the center of the universe but instead must modestly assume that the universe was created with Bob Wheeler in mind by his very special invisible friend who he never, ever gets tired of telling the rest of the world about.
And apparently this friend wrote a book that, to quote Christopher Hitchens, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, and this very same terrible piece of literature is the only thing keeping Bob Wheeler from descending into a nihilist, orgiastic spree of murder, rape and other sundry old testament patriarchal role model behaviour.
This is one of the more eloquent things I’ve read in some time. It goes in my file of articles to save, share and refer back to often.
Galileo had the spectacle of Giordano Bruno being burnt at the stake for heresy to urge caution in dealing with ecclesiastical authorities.
Yes, but
However devout Galileo was I have no idea, though it seems, from his attitude towards the pope and various other ecclesiastical hierarchs, that he was more concerned about his own scientific priority in a number of discoveries or inventions than he was with getting to heaven
because truth matters, and Galileo had discovered some actual facts.
They say science and religion are both quests for truth dealing with different aspects of human experience.
Science is indeed a quest for truth, in the sense that it tries to establish facts as nearly as it is possible to do so. Religion is not a quest for truth: religion is a statement that the truth is such-and-such and you had better believe it. Believing this “truth” is more important than searching for facts, because religious “truth” and fact do not coincide.
If two different quests for truth produce contradictory results, then at least one of them is wrong. Only by redefining truth can religion make its claim, but a redefined “truth” is not factual, it is only a definition. The only way in which religion comes close to a quest for truth is in the experience of the facts of our existence and the conformity of the mind to interpreting those facts in the “light” of religion. In other words, religious truth is no more than “fact” for the brainwashed, “fact” for the wilfully blind. It is not a quest for what is the case, but only a saga of the struggle to conform to assumptions.
Quote
” And if life is an accident, what meaning and purpose does it have?”
Try to keep up Bob. Both myself and Strider have covered this already. Do you not read other people’s posts or are you assuming that we are either fooling ourselves or lying?
What the hell does “meaning” mean anyway? As I understand it, religious people think that life doesn’t “mean” anything unless it is eternal, by which they seem to mean that their going on for ever and ever and never ceasing to be confers some idea of importance or necessity to their existence. All these ideas are difficult to define: meaning, importance, necessity, what on earth are they? But it is certainly the case that what is involved in the use of these words is a sense of continuance: that ceasing to exist is even more difficult to grasp than the fact of billions of years of previous nonexistence. “If there is no life after death, what is the pointof it all…?”
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the Big Bang did not inconvenience me in the slightest. Religious people would perhaps say “but the Big Bang presupposed me, so in a sense, I was there, in potentia“. This idea might perhaps make sense of their worry over abortion on the one hand and assisted suicide on the other: potential is as good as existence, for those who grasp at straws, and the desire not to exist cuts deeply into the existential significance of those who want never to die. But in a world where eternity confers the desired sense of “meaning” I see no reason why they should worry about either eventuality, so why are the religious so worried? Eternity is timeless, so talking of ending life at any point is meaningless. There is a whole muddle here of existential fears and superstious dread, and the inconsistencies are almost palpable as the terror.
Bob: Nobody says Muslim people can’t be scientists. Nobody says Sikhs can’t be scientists. Nobody says Buddhists can’t be scientists. But they cannot be a good scientist while allowing their religious dogma to interfere with (or even interpret) their scientific work. There are Muslim/Sikh/Buddhist scientists, but there is no such a thing as Muslim/Sikh/Buddhist science.
That’s a category error you engaged in, Bob. Please stop doing it. It’s annoying.
“Purpose” and “meaning”: Religious code for “the size of my apartment in the after-death.”
There’s no such thing as an after-death, Bob. When you die, you decompose. What’s left are the atoms that comprised your body at death, and the memories others have of you. That’s it. Nothing else.
The entire concept of a coherent consciousness surviving death (ie, a “soul”) is anti-science. It cannot happen. It violates the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. There are only three laws of thermodynamics, and the last one is about the inability of a system to reach absolute zero. You can’t violate any of them. Not here, not anywhere, not ever. Never.
There is no “soul”, Bob. Science tells us that.
And you’re now going to try to invent a new science called “supernaturalism”. Well fine, you go ahead and do that. But you’re going to have to play by science’s rules to do that.
That means bringing the evidence, Bob. Disproving the null hypothesis, Bob. In this case, the null hypothesis is “there is no soul”.
You didn’t do so well with describing your god’s ontology. I can’t imagine you can even begin with the “soul”. But here’s the bar – and remember, science, not holy books:
1. What is the soul made of? How do you know? What measurements did you make, and how can I confirm your work?
2. How can a soul stay coherent after death?
3. Once it leaves the body after death, where does it reside? Again, prove that with evidence. Show me the soul spot. If it’s not in this universe, how do you know? Since we can’t measure anything outside our universe at present – that’s going to be tough.
4. What is your evidence that the post-soul state involves emotions of happiness and/or sadness? Bliss or torment? Ennui, even.
5. What is your evidence that the belief state of the soul carrier impacts the post-death emotional state of the soul?
Evidence, Bob. Evidence. You got none. Zero. Zip. Nada. Bupkis.
Again.
Meaning derives from the fact that we were created by an Intelligent Being for a specific reason purpose, the “telos” in the Greek. In Darwinian terms you are here purely by accident, for no specific reason whatsoever.
Ah, but Stonyground and Strider say that we create our own meaning — we find meaning and purpose in our work, etc. I hate to tell you this, guys, but “creating your own meaning” is called “self-delusion,” and it is a form of neurosis. You are doing the same thing that you criticize religious believers for, except that you are trying to do it on a non-theistic basis. But if the literal truth is evolution as a blind, purposeless natural process, any attempt to created “meaning” is delusional. What is the difference between trying to find “meaning” in religion or finding it work or any other human endeavor? I send you to your psychiatrists for further help.
As for the epistemological question, Christianity is based on revelation. If the only path to knowledge you can acknowledge is the scientific method, then by definition you are a materialist — all you know is what your physical senses can perceive. Based on pure science, you can infer that God exists, but little else about the ultimate meaning and purpose of the cosmos.
This creates a problem. Apart from revelation, the idea of “salvation” is absurd. Either justice exists or it does not exist. If it exists, then rationally we must be punished for or misbehavior. If it does not exist, then we live in an unjust world. Take your pick.
I vote for an “unjust” world – matches my experience.
Bob Wheeler on self-delusion: why is it that the religious seem to think that their best arguments against atheism is to accuse non-believers of acting as badly as they do ?
Bob, you have created meaning in your own life, exactly in the way described by Stonyground and Strider but you are not honest enough to admit it.
The fact that the meaning of your life is based on a (very badly written) book of bronze age fairly tales is not necessarily a bad thing. I personally think it’s pathetic and sad that you find more meaning in homophobia, misogyny, child abuse, slavery, xenophobia and genocide than in the accomplishments wrought by science but I guess that this is just a reflection of your nature.
While you revel in animal sacrifice, burning bushes, talking snakes and ethnic cleanings I take wonder in the fact that as a species we are beginning to understand the workings of our universe from the microscopic to the cosmic in scale.
While you cower in terror at noises in the sky and mumble imprecations to imaginary beings, real human beings have recently pushed forward our understanding of reality at CERN via the large hadron collider and on the surface of Mars with the amazing landing of Curiosity.
It’s your continuing attempts to inject this barbaric morality into our secular society that I find objectionable and will work to enure that your delusions remain strictly “self”.
Bob: Fail. Again. F in logic, F in evidence, F in argumentation.
1. There is no evidence we were “created” by an “intelligent designer”. You haven’t even described what this “god” thing consists of, and you’re acting as if you’ve proved it exists.
2. There is no after-death “meaning” to life, because after death there is nothing.
3. The “ultimate purpose” of the human species is to survive. To continue as a species. Because of our evolutionary history as social animals with language, larger brains, and opposable thumbs we do this by living cooperatively in society. And by being careful stewards of the Earth’s finite resources.
4. Yes, you can insert your meaning into your life because it provides you a temporary sense of worth, belonging to your species, etc.
5. Christianity is most definitely NOT based on revelation. It is based on a fable. It based on the alleged activities of someone named “Jesus”, who allegedly lived in the first century. There’s no revelation involved at all. You folks believe these events happened and you point to your “gospels” as proof. There’s no revelation there, Bob. Revelation would be if someone named “Bob” declared that he spoke with “God” who told him that there was a “Jesus” who would forgive sins…without any evidence to support that assertion. Revelation is personal, non-corporeal, and completely evidence-free. Oh no. You have “evidence” — it’s just lousy evidence. In fact, it’s so lousy, you appear to be embarrassed by it.
6. Based on pure science, you can only infer that god does not exist. There is no “supernatural” anything in pure science, Bob. You just did what I predicted — you invented a new science without backing it up with evidence.
7. Why should we be punished or rewarded in the after-death? That makes no logical sense at all. Because you want the universe to be “fair”? Where is your evidence that the universe is “fair”? On Thursday, an 8-month-old baby was mauled to death by dogs in San Diego. What’s “fair” about that? What’s “fair” about childhood cancer? What’s “fair” about Mitt Romney being rich and almost president instead of behind bars as a tax cheat?
8. In order to posit an after-death punishment or reward, you must first prove that there is a coherent after-death state. You put the cart before the horse. Still waiting for you to provide evidence of the existence of the soul, Bob. You can’t do it. You can’t even posit a coherent way to even try to test for it. Pure science, Bob, tell us that such a thing does not exist.
9. Your religion DOES NOT TEACH that people are rewarded or punished for their earthly behaviors. Jeffrey Dahmer — according to the preacher who converted him in prison — is in heaven. The people he carved up and ate — according to that preacher — are in hell. Your religion teaches that your after-death emotional state is tied to your belief system in life. John 3:16, and many others. Do you even read your bible? Fail.
Bob, in an article at the Guardian, Dean Jeffrey John has urged people not to “judge God by the church,” but John’s for gay marriage. How does that square with your god? Who’s right?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/14/anglicans-gay-marriage-jeffrey-john
To reiterate, Bob:
1. First, prove the soul exists.
2. Then, prove that the soul survives as a coherent entity the death of the soul carrier. Spinoza argued that it doesn’t, so don’t say “everybody knows”. Nobody knows any such a thing.
3. After that, prove that the soul has an emotional condition (ecstasy, torment, etc.) after death. You should also prove that this emotional condition is permanent/fixed. Once in this condition, no change is possible to a different state.
4. After you’ve done all that, THEN you can go ahead and prove that the emotional state of the post-death soul is contingent on the belief system of the person who carried that soul during life — and specifically at the point of death.
5. THEN, you can prove that the belief system which is requisite for a pleasant post-death experience is Christianity. Muslims and a few thousand other religions disagree with you, so you’d better be prepared to convince them as well.
6. THEN, you can prove that the belief system which is requisite for a pleasant post-death experience is your version of Christianity. You’ll have to get every other Christian denomination and sect to agree with you, so you’d better get started.
7. THEN, if you’re feeling lucky, you can prove that good and bad deeds done during life somehow mitigate the after-death emotional state of the soul. Prove whether Jeffrey Dahmer’s in heaven or not.
Using “pure science”, of course.
Kevin @ #31,
s/prove/provide evidence that/g
Otherwise you invite yet another in an apparently endless series of public masturbation by the indefatigable Bob Wheeler.
Not that that will stop him.
Where does he get the time and energy ?
For those who don’t know the computer reference, s/something/something else/g means “replace ‘something’ with ‘something else’ throughout.”
Kevin,
I’ve always found your pre-condition demands a bit weak, especially since you rely to heavily on the notion of “prove”, which many people here — good atheists all — point out might mean demanding logically certain proof, which no one can generally provide and that you yourself don’t demand for most of the things you accept. Putting that aside for the moment, let me address your “soul” demands:
1) Your demand for “measurements”, it seems to me, presupposes what kind of stuff you’re talking about, specifically meaning material. As for soul itself, it is generally presumed to be immaterial, and would be best categorized, likely, as “mental stuff”. We can get at its qualities — and thus start asking if it is material or not — by doing introspection on our mental experiences and asking what sort of substance that could be. This is what Descartes did in at least one place, asking how the mental which doesn’t seem to be in space could be material which seems to require it. Now, the problem here is that it’s hard to say what it would mean to be immaterial because the definition of “material” has been contorted so far as to essentially mean existent. So, if that’s what you mean by material, then perhaps the soul would be material … but then the question of it not being in space while the body IS would still be an indication that we need a separate entity from the body for the mental. Perhaps not; this and other problems don’t rise to the level of logical proof. But it certainly gives one reason to think that maybe the best way to answer the question is to say that there is a separate entity that is not a body and is not material in the same way as the body, and that is what people mean when they talk about the soul.
2)The same way it does now, since it is associated with the body and may even BE embodied, but that does not mean that it depends on a body for its coherence. Now, perhaps not; much more work would need to be done on this, including on OBEs and NDEs beyond simply trying to prove they don’t really happen.
3) Well, considering that the argument was that the mental didn’t really seem to be in space which is why we think it immaterial, this would be a question that’s already answered: it doesn’t have to be. What this means has major philosophical implications.
4) Well, the experience of emotions is, in fact, a mental property. If the soul encompasses the mental, then it must have emotions, since that’s all the actual experience is. One can ask about how it would get input disembodied, but that’s another question and one that more work needs to be done on.
5) Since beliefs are also mental events, then they would also be possessed by the soul, and since beliefs impact emotional states, then they would continue to do so.
Note that I won’t claim that these are slam-dunk proofs of a soul, but they seem to address your comments at least as well as any alternative that isn’t just simply dismissive.
As for this part:
Define “pure science”.
Eric,
Why? Computer programming and calculus are compatible — and had better be, considering that some parts of computers rely on it — and yet if you ask me how calculus contributes to my every day work my answer would be “Not at all”. I haven’t done calculus since second year university. Does that mean that they are incompatible? I have a Master’s degree in Philosophy, and philosophy is compatible with computer programming, and yet I don’t really see the direct impact that philosophy has on my programming.
Basically, to say that X and Y are compatible says nothing more than that one can reasonably do both X and Y. So, yes, nothing more than that one can be both a scientist and a Christian (say) without contradiction or cognitive dissonance. Not all religions are compatible with all sciences, but in general religion and science are compatible in that sense … even if they sometimes come to different conclusions.
So, that science sees no need for an intelligent designer does not mean that religions that do are incompatible with science. As long as the scientific data does not contradict that idea, all we have is a difference of opinion. Basically, if you have to appeal to parsimony then certainly a faith-based field will be willing to abandon parsimony in order to preserve faith, and there is no rational argument that can be made to say they’re wrong to do that in their field.
Verbosestoic, I don’t see why you deliberately ignore the context in which the compatibility argument is made. Christians do not only think simply that you can both be a Christian and a scientist at the same time, which is unarguable; but as Mulherin puts it, that Christianity and science are involved in something analogous to a marriage relationship, working together in the pursuit of truth. It is that kind of relationship that I had in mind — and that most people who speak of accommodationism have in mind — when they speak of the compatibility of Christianity and science, or, more properly, religion and science. And that ‘more properly’ is a defeater for Christian claims to compatibility every time, as I also point out.
But, after all, lying and telling the truth are compatible in the sense you attribute to the idea of compatibility, since one who tells lies can also tell the truth, though not about the same things at the same time. And that, I think, is the problem with science and religion. Religions make assumptions which are undermined by science at practically every turn. Just read some of the accommodationists like John Polkinghorne and Alister McGrath, to see the point. The pope (JPII), to take another one, when discussing evolution, says that human beings are ontologically distinct, thus stating that biology does not provide the answer to the origin of human life. Only God can do that. This is immediately incompatible with evolutionary biology. Of course, it is “compatible”, in that you can always say that God mysteriously injected soul substance into archaic Homo sapiens to create modern Homo sapiens, or at least at some point in the transition, when talking as a Christian, and then speak otherwise when speaking as an evolutionary biologist, but the Christian bit is a pointless addition, scientifically, since it depends upon presuppositions for which there is no scientific basis. If compatibility only means that you can both be a scientist and a believing Christian, and hold two incompatible world views sequentially, then it is no doubt true and done everyday. But Christians make much stronger claims than that. That they don’t express it very well is due to the fact that it is not true that they are compatible in the strong sense that they desiderate.
When you say:
you are really pointing out the compatibility between computer programming and calculus in the strong sense, even if you don’t use calculus as a programmer. The compatibility is at another level, obviously. But the compatibility is important, and makes both programming and calculus compatible critical pursuits of which either knowledge or technology is the outcome. The same cannot be said of religion and science.
Michael Fugate (#30)
This may seem like a circular argument, but the rule of the thumb laid down by Jesus Himself was “by their fruits you shall know them.” If God exists, He has a certain character, and if someone knows Him in a mystical or experiential way, he will share some of the same character. How do we know what God’s character is like? Largely through two avenues, written revelation and our own moral intuitions. If we are talking about the [Christian] church, the obvious question would be how does it measure up to the New Testament? How well does it follow the teachings of Christ Himself? By this standard it will be seen that the Italian Renaissance popes were not very good representatives of Christianity.
One can replace “we don’t know” with “the gods did it” – but we won’t know any more than we did before. This is why religion and science are incompatible; “religious knowledge” does not require one to actually know anything.
VB:
1. It’s Bob who says that “pure science” allows one to infer the existence of a god. I’m just taking him at his word that he understands what that means. Hint: It’s called “sarcasm”.
2. My conditions are what any empiricist might expect to describe. I see nothing unusual about asking one to describe whether the aliens with anal probes are carbon-based life forms or not. Nor whether Bigfoot is a humanoid or a bear. Or the Loch Ness monster a fish or a dinosaur.
3. With regard to things that are allegedly “supernatural”, one can think about them all you want. The same as you can think about pixies living up your nose. You can even believe and logically deduce (badly) that pixies indeed live up your nose.
4. The crux of the matter comes when trying to convince someone who is an a-pixie-ist that pixies indeed do live up your nose. You can argue until you’re blue in the face, but at some point in the proceedings, you must provide evidence sufficient to counter the skeptic’s view, which is “that which is proposed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” I have never put a “material” condition on describing the ontology of the supernatural. I only demand that it be described in such a way as it can be verified. If it’s made of “supernatural-unobtainium”, well, OK. What is that? And how do you know?
5. With regard to the “soul”, many words have been written. Volumes. I have yet to see a scientific exploration of the ontology of the soul. If it resides within all humans, then it must be part of our universe. If it’s part of our universe, then it must be detectable/measurable. Even if it’s made of “supernatural-unobtainium”.
6. I’m just setting out what I think are reasonable goalposts to convince me (note the personal pronoun here) of the theistic position. Indeed, I’ve said this many times: “If you prove to me the reality of your position with sufficient evidence, I’ll convert to your religion.”
7. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that MY standards for converting from disbelief to belief are MY standards. Yours may be different. You may indeed posit that you can think yourself into belief. Sorry, I can’t.
8. You are free to scan past my posts in the future. I certainly do with yours.
Eric,
I want to start with a minor textual note: you do realize that when you claim that I am deliberately ignoring the context, you are essentially making a claim that I am being dishonest, right? By deliberately ignoring something that you think is really important? Which will be made even worse by the fact that I think your argument is, in fact, strawmanning the compatibilist argument taken in context, although I wouldn’t assert that that’s deliberate. One really should be careful about implying dishonesty, I think.
Anyway, moving on from that, I interpreted your argument — and the argument of some others — as “If science and religion are really compatible, then religious scientists should do science differently than non-religious scientists as they should use their religious beliefs in their work. They don’t, so that’s evidence that science and religion are not compatible”. But most compatibilist arguments are NOMA-style arguments, which are explicit that this should NOT be the case (the magisteria are NON-OVERLAPPING). So a religious scientist, by that argument, ought to do science no differently than a non-religious scientist. Haught is clear about this, in his “differing levels of explanation” argument. Ruse is also clear about this as he claims that some arguments are theological and not scientific. In the case of the marriage argument, it strikes me — taking his likely religious view of marraige — as being the idea that you have two separate and different things that come together to provide a whole, which is best interpreted in my opinion as you have two things that go after different kinds of truth that when are put together produce all the truths worth knowing. (I haven’t watched the videos, so can’t say for certain). In the context of the compatibilism debate, few if any compatibilists think that your religious views should impact your scientific work, at least regularly. Sure, there’s room for impacts on science from religion and on religion from science, but that’s not their focus.
Thus, their main focus is this: is it possible to build a consistent worldview without cognitive dissonance that contains both science and religion? While in some specific cases this won’t be the case — you’d have to deny facts from one side or another — for the most part this does seem possible. And if the incompatibilist side is not addressing the worldview argument, it’s hard to see how they could have an interesting incompatibility.
But it wouldn’t contradict any scientific facts, and there is no reason to presume that any field other than science would care whether their presumptions have a scientific basis. Again, when you’re doing science you’d stick to the scientific facts, but your worldview can be more than just science, and ultimately what you believe and know can be informed by any way in which you can get knowledge. One does not need to wait for science to rule that they should find watermelons tasty to know that they do simply from tasting it. Essentially, this boils down to two problems with all incompatibilist arguments:
1) It seems to argue that science and religion are not the same field, and so have different standards for what they accept and what they reject, what counts as evidence, and what counts as justification. Thus, that they aren’t same thing. Everyone accepts that.
2) That you introduce a challenge that philosophy cannot meet, as it also will draw theories based on presuppositions that have no scientific basis — meaning the narrower, natural sciences type of science here — and yet to suggest that philosophy and science are incompatible seems absurd.
I think, at the end of it all, you make the same mistake Jerry Coyne does. What you want to argue is not that science and religion are incompatible, but that religion is WRONG, that it doesn’t produce truths AT ALL, and that part of the reason you say that is because we accept truths that science produces as truths and they contradict the supposed truths of religions. It would be better to stick to that argument, especially since that would get us talking about specifics and away from the counter-argument that it is easy to imagine a religion that accepts all scientific fact, which would then be compatible with science.
Kevin,
First, you use your pre-conditions as more than just a set of personal preferences. You claim that theists not being able to meet them says something about the intellectual credibility of theism. Thus, any theist can fire back that your standards are too stringent and thus that you are setting an unreasonable standard to START the debate, which is how you use them. And, of course, one can indeed criticize even personal standards as being too stringent.
Second,
Clearly, since you basically asked 5 questions, which I shall now quote here:
I replied to each of them, in order. You did not address any of my replies, and instead re-asked questions that I had answered. This would not be an indication that you honestly wish to discuss these questions and get answers.
If science and religion were compatible in the way that calculus and computer programming are, then observations made of the world by religious doctrine and faith would confirm and be confirmed by observations made of the world by scientific methods. Thus, a religious observation of the sun would confirm that it is correct to say that it exists because of gravity acting upon hydrogen gas. In fact, the religious “observation” is that the sun exists because it was created for some purpose by a supernatural being, and such a claim could be made even if it were conclusively shown by science that the sun is an incandescent teapot. It might be claimed to be compatible with the scientific observation only in the sense that the one does not necessarily deny the other, whatever it is. As with “compatibility”, the claim falls when we see that there are two meanings of “observation”. However, we can see that the claim of compatibility is not analagous to the claim of compatibility between computer science and the calculus, because in the later case compatibility arises from the fact that both disciplines are founded on the same mathematical principles and are merely different applications of them for different purposes. Unless one is clear as to what is meant by “compatibilty” one creates no end of confusion, and the false analogy exemplifies this.
One then has to deal with what the claim of the compatibilty of science and religion is based on. It comes down to saying that religious belief does not necessarily deny the theories of science. And that is it. Galileo’s bon mot (thank you, Eric) is one way of putting the NOMA argument. But such a notion of compatibilty cannot prevent conflict, as when pope JPII makes statements about the ontological distinction between humanity and brute creation. “Creation” cannot be dismissed as a NOMA statement, because the scientific theories about the origin of life and the evolution of species, and even of the origin and nature of the universe, cannot work with that assumption (at least, unless it can be shown scientifically). Likewise, statements about an ontological distinction cannot square with anything known to science. JPII’s statement might be taken as an attempt to reconcile science and religion, but he cannot avoid entering the scientific sphere when he makes any factual statement about the nature of things. To do so undermines the distinction between religion (interpreting appearances theologically) and science (finding out the facts in the first place). What I mean is, you can’t make religious assertions relative to science that do not involve making factual claims which contradict the science one is ostensibly trying to justify.
This is the problem that the Renaissance Church recognised, and which Galileo could not side-step with his NOMA argument. Religion has to be able to tell scientists what they may or may not discover, because the whole concept of religious life and duty and faith rests on obedience to doctrine; and in so far as doctrine precedes all possible future scientific discoveries and theories religion must in practice exercise authority to undermine science in whatever way it can.
Can any one name a religious truth? what would it look like? how would it be discovered?
Well, to quote Bob Wheeler:
Meaning derives from the fact that we were created by an Intelligent Being for a specific reason purpose, the “telos” in the Greek. In Darwinian terms you are here purely by accident, for no specific reason whatsoever.
I also read somewhere: Thus saith the Lord.
I think that this is as true as religion gets.
Dunno wot i dun wiv de italics. — you didn’t close them! Done!
The compatibility only arises because one can always tack a religious explanation on to any scientific explanation. Evolution is true just as explained by biologists, but it is also a gift from god. Humans are primates, but according to theologian Peter van Inwagen, “[god] gave them the gifts of language, abstract thought, and disinterested love—and, of course, the gift of free will.” See it is so easy.
@ Michael
Precisely. The allegation of compatibility between science and religion is the product of religious people attempting to square their beliefs with scientific discoveries. This “compatibility” is not the same as the compatibility between two different applications of mathematical principles within the sphere in which mathematics is relevant. The compatibility of religion and science exists only to the extent that it remains possible to say “god dunnit” without fear of contradiction.
At the point where scientists need to understand the ultimate origin of matter god can only be accepted as an explanation if god can be scientifically verified. And verifying god would require an understanding of the principle by which god can exist in the first place. And such a principle must, in the philosophical sense, precede god. So god can never be a final answer.
What we have to deal with is a simple-minded philosophy based on irrational feelings which are common to the human race to the extent that some people can make living out of threatening other people by appealling to innate fears. The “obvious” facts of life with which religion deals are contradictory to the precise observations of reality which are the very stuff of science. It is only science, or the principle of reason that underlies it, that can free us from those innate fears, but if science and reason were to succeed, religious authories would lose their jobs.
appealling – wot? i dint rite that no way.
Verbosestoic. I didn’t mean dishonest, but I did mean contrived. By putting the compatibity question in the terms you do, as though the religious are simply saying that their religious beliefs and scientific discoveries can be held by the same person at the same time is a much weaker claim than religious believers are making. Indeed, it is irrelevant to the main question, whether in fact the compatibility relationship between religion and science points to a genuine compatiblity at (let us call it) a metaphysical level. Of course, there are lots of religious scientists. That has never been at issue, and is not what the discussion is about. If it were, there would be no point even discussing the matter.
Thus, for example, great efforts are made to show that, despite the fact that evolution demands that there be more than one original couple from which Homo sapiens descended, the story told in Genesis about the first sin and the Fall of Man, must be in some sense true of that human group from which all humans now living are descended, and it is important that this can actually be shown to be a reasonable position to take. So, Denis Alexander wrote a White Paper for Biologos to this effect, aiming to show that there is a sense in which an original couple fell from grace, whether as representative humans, or as federal headship, or whatnot. That theological “truth” is applicable to the same population to which evolutionary biology points as the originating group from which contemporary Homo sapiens is descended is vital to the religious argument about compatibility.
As for NOMA, this doesn’t work satisfactorily from a scientific or moral perspective; nor does it work from a religious perspective either. It is not what most religious commentators mean when they are speaking about the compatibility of religion and science. If that is what they did mean, then Mulherin could have pointed that out clearly, but he didn’t, because this is not what is typically meant when religious believers talk about the compatibility of religion and science. If religion is simply saying that there are separate realms, and that science deals with one and religion with another, then there is no problem, at least from the religious side, and no one need mention the issue again. That it is a constant concern from the religious side shows that there is more to it than NOMA suggests.
So, when you say the following, you miss the whole point entirely:
From the religious perspective, unless you are just going to adopt a know-nothing fundamentalism, it is vital that science and relgion be genuinely compatible, in the sense of speaking about the same world in different registers. But in order for it to be compatible in this way, it must be able to rework doctrine in such a way as to be consistent with the findings of science, because religion either has implications for the world about which science speaks, or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, there is something seriously amiss with doctrine — as, I am afraid, there is. In fact, for all their attempts to show that there is compatibility between science and religion, all they have been able to show is that they can add anything they like, by way of theological position, after the science has been done, as Michael Fugate says above (#46). But this is scarcely a robust or meaningful kind of compatibility.
Have you read Richard Carrier’s book “Sense and Goodness without God”?
I ask because defining his own naturalistic worldview is precisely what he attempted in this book and for the same reasons that you give: that atheism conenctrates on debunking the religious worldview more than constructing its own (or at least articulating our worldview, as we do have at least an implicit worldview).
Note that I haven’t had time to read it yet, I just thought I would mention it as it might interest you.
Julien, thank you. I read the book several years ago now, and of course there is the Centre for Naturalism and Tom Clark too, who is trying to develop a consistent, comprehensive naturalistic world view. This is important, but I guess when I was speaking about world view above I was really thinking in terms of political ideology, and that I don’t think is going to happen, or should not, since there must be room within naturalism for a number of different political emphases,
Religious apologists keep trying to make this about science – as in “science can’t answer everything” – and believe that all they need do is to show this to be true and they have won the argument. When the issue really is what can religion answer and how does it generate those answers. We know how science does, but how does religion do it? This is something that has never been addressed to my satisfaction. I have read theologians – such as Alister McGrath’s “Scientific Theology” – but it is empty on methods even for Christianity. The one thing often invoked by religion is revelation – communication from a god to a human – if so, how does any one know when a god is communicating? Is it every thought that pops into our heads? If not how is one to distinguish between brain-generated thoughts and god-generated ones? If these gods act in other ways, such as guided mutations, once again how do we tell them from the unguided ones? Methods, please.
how does any one know when a god is communicating?
They believe it, and you can’t argue with that, because faith is a gift from god. And when you just see it, it’s true: stands to coughreasoncough.
Is it every thought that pops into our heads?
Really good question. Not the wicked sinful bad nasty thoughts, obviously. And if it is all the good ones, what makes them good? I’d be prepared to bet that it’s personal disposition. I suppose the mediocre thoughts are entirely one’s own.
I’d like to do a prayer experiment in which all the subjects are told to go away and pray for guidance on some specific moral or social or religious issue, and then report back. Would the answers all be the same? Surely, we can already guess that this would be unlikely, because Christians already disagree amongst themselves on just about every topic. How can God possibly be giving them all different answers?
C S Lewis:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
Actually, Dr Lewis, that’s a serious problem.