Category Archives: Accommodationism

Arguing about God again — with thanks to Jerry Coyne

Standard

I do apologise, but I have made some significant editings of the following post, which will be different from the one that some readers will have received by email. It’s so easy to think that something is finished when there is still work to do. So, please read this version instead of the first one! I’ll stop tinkering now!

————————————————

Over at Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne has been arguing about god again, giving us yet one more look behind the secret curtain into the rather dingy world of what Jerry calls Sophisticated Theology™, this time with reference to the work of William E. Carroll, who is, as his blurb over at Biologos tells us, “the Thomas Aquinas Fellow in Theology and Science at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford and member of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Oxford.” With credentials like that he must of course be right and everyone else must be wrong. And this, not to put to fine a point on it, is a problem. Sophisticated Theology™ tends to carry its own defensive perimeter around with it. Most people can’t really make sense of what Sophisticated Theology™ says, can’t even say whether its use of language is a legitimate use, and yet, on it are based a number of claims, not only to scholarly recognition, but also to the effectiveness of Sophisticated Theology™ in demolishing the arguments of its opponents.

Let me give you an example of this in Carroll’s argument in his Biologos essay on “Creation, Cosmology and the Insights of Thomas Aquinas.” He plays the same game in his review of Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing — “The Science of Nothing“ – so it is clearly standard fare at Blackfriars Hall. The argument is a simple one. We start with the cosmos as it is, and we ask how it got to be that way, or, even more fundamentally, why there is anything at all rather than nothing. Of course, Krauss’s idea that nothing is a real, physical something out of which the cosmos crackles into being is the perfect foil to Carroll’s claim that Krauss is simply working with ideas way above his pay grade. After all, if nothing is not nothing after all, then Carroll would seem to be right when he says in his review of Krauss’s book that, while Krauss does not add anything to our knowledge in this area,

[w]hat causes us pause is the provocative way in which he moves from these theories to draw all sorts of philosophical and theological conclusions. In a culture heavily dominated by the authority of science, we need to be especially wary of scientists who use (or rather misuse) that authority to make claims which are well beyond their own disciplines.

Now, there is, after all, some justice in the remark. After all, when Hawking and Mlodinow begin their book The Grand Design by announcing the death of philosophy, and then, a few pages later, actually make some undoubtedly philosophical assumptions — as when they speak of “model dependent realism” — which is clearly not an empirical but a conceptual claim – the only suitable conclusion is that they misspoke themselves at the beginning.

Continue reading →

About these ads

God’s Atheist Friends

Standard

This is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista. Thanks once again to Malgorzata.

————————————–

It’s a bit like a blood sport. Once you start, there’s a kind of lust for it, that betokens obsession, and, no matter how ridiculous it makes you seem or sound, it’s almost impossible to give it up. Criticism of the new atheism, I mean. New atheists are either shallow and uninformed, or they’re unnaturally aggressive and strident. They can’t help themselves, it seems, and they’re so like the fundamentalist Christians they abhor that the underlying psychology must be basically the same. A lust for certainty, a refusal to acknowledge nuance and complexity, and a settled disposition to take things literally: it’s all of a piece. Fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist atheists need each other and feed off of each other’s worst faults and foibles.

At the same time, of course, being so alike and being so rebarbative and uncouth, refusing to listen to reason, and blind to each other’s strengths, new atheists and fundamentalists simply talk past each other. Neither will convince the other, and, in the meantime, they’re doing untold harm, one to the cause of sensible, reasonable religion, the other to the cause of science. Indeed, the fact that the new atheists tend to be seen as the public face of science — the media does like sensationalism, and conflict stories are their bread and butter — science itself is in danger of being seen as an atheist project, and will be rejected by all right-thinking, sane religionists as unworthy of their attention.

Of course, you will say, I should be used to this by now. It has been so from the beginning, when the Colgate twins jumped onto the accommodationist bandwagon, making this a matter of style and framing, rather than of substantive disagreement. And then, of course, mentioning no names, there were others like them who couldn’t distance themselves fast enough from the despicable new atheists, who simply refuse to let sleeping dogs lie. One after another these atheist friends of God kept doing a little dance of qualification around disbelief, casting darts of aspersion towards their erstwhile friends — in some signal cases actually defriending them on Facebook. And as they went, they began to chastise the new atheists in the most uncharitable ways they could think of, preserving at the same time, of course, their academic cool, so that no one could accuse them of passion or radicalism. This is not the time deliberately to épater les religionists; besides, we can all work together — and that is what we should be doing — to make the world safe for any opinion under the sun, even if some of it keeps cropping up in the news as carrying out the latest horror against the decencies of humanity in the name of their gods.

Continue reading →

The Idea of a Catholic University

Standard

Which should be a good thing, I should have thought.

The Huffington Post reports that the “Pontifical Catholic University Of Peru Stripped By Vatican Of Right To Call Itself Catholic.” It doesn’t measure up to the standards expressed by Pope Wojtyła, the last pope, in his Apostolic Constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church). According to HuffPo:

The university in the Peruvian capital, Lima, was founded in 1917 and has been identified with liberal, progressive thinking  for decades.

The liberation theologian Gustavo Gutteriez taught at the university for years, but the Vatican withdrew its right to call itself Catholic for unspecified reasons. “[T]he break came after the  university had several times unilaterally modified its statutes and had “gravely prejudiced the interests of the Church”. It did  not elaborate.”

However, in the Apostolic Constitution at the heart of the dispute between the Rector of the university and the local bishop, there are fairly obvious reasons why there might have been a breakdown. It is often said that the contemporary university grew out of the educational needs of Christians in the mid to late medieval period, and much credit is given to the church for the establishment of institutions of higher learning. I don’t know enough about the history of education to be able to comment, though, as I understand it, the origin of the universities originated with the students, who developed learning cooperatives to which scholars were attracted as teachers. The later control of universities by the church may signal an effort by the church to exert ecclesiastical control, rather than providing evidence that the universities came to birth in the church’s bosom – a case more of post hoc ergo propter hoc, than of the origin of universities in any deliberate plan or purpose of the church. Indeed, some famous universities in Italy (Padua comes to mind, though I stand to be corrected) did not originally have faculties of theology at all.

Reading through the earlier part of Ex Corde Ecclesiae provides pretty clear evidence why universities might have been suspicious of ecclesiastical involvement. In paragraph 8 Wojtyła says:

Having already dedicated the Apostolic Constitution Sapienta Christiana (Christian Wisdom) to Ecclesiastical Faculties and Universities, I then felt obliged to propose an analogous Document for Catholic Universities as a sort of “magna carta”, enriched by long and fruitful experience of the Church in the realm of Universities and open to the promise of future achievements that will require courageous creativity and rigorous fidelity. [my italics]

It is surely the “rigorous fidelity” that would turn out to be the sticking point, for Wojtyła had already said this (quoting from himself):

A Catholic University’s privileged task is “to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical: the search for truth, and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth.” [paragraph 1; my italics]

And then, of course, he expands on the role of the already known fount of truth in the search for truth:

By means of a kind of universal humanism a Catholic University is completely dedicated to the research of all aspects of truth in their essential connection with the supreme Truth, who is God. It does this without fear but rather with enthusiasm, dedicating itself to every path of knowledge, aware of being preceded by him who is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”, the Logos, whose Spirit of intelligence and love enables the human person with his or her own intelligence to find the ultimate reality of which he is the source and end and who alone is capable of giving fully that Wisdom without which the future of the world would be in danger. [paragraph 4; my italics]

The reader will not have missed emptiness of the words, but the presumptuous and unfounded (and perhaps unfoundable) claims that are being made for the church’s claim to truth, and the priority of that presumed truth to the search for truth that the university is devoted to carrying out with impartiality.

Continue reading →

Religion and Morality

Standard

You can now read this post in Polish at Racjonalista.

—————————–

How many times do we have to say it in order to get it across? You don’t need religion to be a moral person. In fact, religion itself has very little if anything to do with morality. It may be, as Philip Kitcher suggests in his book The Ethical Project, that, at a certain point in the development of morality, religion served as a way of getting people to avoid altruism failures when they were all alone, and no one would know that they had not acted altruistically — which Kitcher takes as a helpful but dangerous stage in the ethical project — but the idea that we need religion for that purpose was discarded long ago. As long ago as Plato, and perhaps earlier. And people who assume that morality is bound up with religion often prove that it is not, for they themselves are prepared to make judgements about religious morality. If morality depends upon religion, this should be impossible, but it isn’t, so it doesn’t.

In fact, the truth seems to be diametrically opposed to the assumption that religion and morality are dependent on each other. Now, I know it’s difficult for some people to see this, because they’ve already done all the work necessary in order to sort out, from amongst all the possible prescriptions and proscriptions of their religion, those things that they consider bad or good. However, the truth is that almost everyone has done this sorting for themselves. Catholics, for example, don’t need the Church to teach them what is right and wrong, because large numbers of them don’t follow the moral dictates of the Church in the first place. They figure — and they figure correctly — that they can distinguish bad from good on their own. Of course, they may be stuck — if they’re at all serious about their faith — with telling some little white lies when and if they go to confession. After all, if the Church says that abortion is wrong, and a woman has had, for perfectly good reasons, an abortion, then that’s something she might find herself confessing, and being shriven for; but she’ll keep her fingers crossed, because she doesn’t really think she’s done such a bad thing.

Continue reading →

Gods and algorithms — jeu d’esprit for a Sunday morning

Standard

Can there be a philosophy of religion? My immediate response to this is that the “philosophical” discussion of religion is part of religion, so that it belongs to religion and not to philosophy. I have wrestled with the problem most of my adult life. When I was studying philosophy, I never read anything about religion, and deliberately avoided the area called philosophy of religion because it seemed to me a corruption of philosophy. When I was studying theology I scarcely thought of it in philosophical terms at all. There were linkages with philosophers, but not with philosophy, as such. The reason is simple. Religion is closed in a way that philosophy must not be, and while theology may seek to clarify concepts philosophically, or to use certain trends in philosophy to clarify theological ideas and conclusions (as when Bultmann or Tillich or Macquarrie use existentialism to develop their theological explorations), or to defend them, the end product is not philosophy, but theology (religion). Of course, there is that department of philosophy which is devoted to the critique of theological arguments, and to the disproof of the existence of god, and this is indeed an attempt to clarify the confusions that are created by those who believe in a god or gods. However, when it comes to the religious attempt to use philosophy in order to prove the existence of a god or gods, and thus to prove the rationality of faith or religious belief, this is always part of a particular theology or positive religion. Religion never comes to us in a generalised form, but always in terms of specific religious commitments. This does not mean, of course, that theologians cannot sometimes be philosophers, and speak entirely in philosophical terms, but when their subject matter is religious belief, they are no longer doing philosophy. The term Christian Philosophy is, I believe, an oxymoron. The purpose of philosophy is to destabilise belief, not to confirm it.

This is particularly clear in the Catholic Church’s idea of the relationship between reason and faith. As Pope Wojtyła says in his encyclical Fides et Ratio:

The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others.(54) The underlying reason for this reluctance is that, even when it engages theology, philosophy must remain faithful to its own principles and methods. Otherwise there would be no guarantee that it would remain oriented to truth and that it was moving towards truth by way of a process governed by reason. A philosophy which did not proceed in the light of reason according to its own principles and methods would serve little purpose. At the deepest level, the autonomy which philosophy enjoys is rooted in the fact that reason is by its nature oriented to truth and is equipped moreover with the means necessary to arrive at truth. A philosophy conscious of this as its “constitutive status” cannot but respect the demands and the data of revealed truth.

Yet history shows that philosophy — especially modern philosophy — has taken wrong turns and fallen into error. It is neither the task nor the competence of the Magisterium to intervene in order to make good the lacunas of deficient philosophical discourse. Rather, it is the Magisterium’s duty to respond clearly and strongly when controversial philosophical opinions threaten right understanding of what has been revealed, and when false and partial theories which sow the seed of serious error, confusing the pure and simple faith of the People of God, begin to spread more widely. [Chapter V, Para 49]

Notice here that the wrong turning is defined, not in philosophical, but in religious terms. If philosophy falls into error it is because it fails to achieve a “right understanding of what has been revealed.” But this is not something that can be part of philosophy, since the notion of revelation is itself philosophically suspect. Of course, this will not stop religious believers from continuing to make the claim that they have received revelations from their god or gods, but it does at least, I think, raise the question whether this is relevant to the philosophical project.

Continue reading →

Betrayal

Standard

Giant’s Causeway

Jerry Coyne has been busy with professional responsibilities lately, and has not been doing a lot of (what shall we call it?) web-siting, but he did connect to a radio call-in show that Richard Dawkins did for the BBC. It has to do with evolution and creationism, and more particularly with the decision of Britain’s National Trust to include creationist nonsense in its account of the Giant’s Causeway (picture to the left). Here is a description of the phenomenon:

This natural scenery consists of 40,000 basalt columns [off the northeast coast of Ireland] that were formed when lava cooled fast 60 million years ago. This is now a World Heritage Site that was discovered in 1693. Since then, it leaves the visitors stunned.The place is so great, that it is said to be formed by “supernatural forces”. Legend says that it was believed that two giants, one Irish and one Scottish, always at odds, threw stones together without ceasing. This led to the formation of a field of stones on the sea.

Of course, creationists claim that this rock formation is no more than 6,000 years old, agreeing with James Ussher (1581-1656), onetime Primate of All Ireland, who calculated the age of the earth, based on biblical chronology. That’s why many King James (Authorized Version) Bibles still include, on the first page, the date 4004 BC.  That we have other ways of estimating the age of the earth does not weigh with creationists, who insist that the Bible, God’s Holy Word, no less, can contain no shadow of error, and therefore 6,000 years, more or less, it will have to be, no matter what scientists have proved.

Continue reading →

Philosophy should not be in the business of making the world safe for religion

Standard

In my website Categories I have one entitled “Religion and Science,” under which this post, in part, falls. I put the terms in that order, instead of the more familiar order “Science and Religion,” for a very simple reason. The faux-discipline “Science and Religion” makes the assumption that there is room in science for religion; that is the presupposition underlying the study, if books like Thomas Dixon’s, the many books of John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacock, Francis Collins, etc., are anything to go by. Indeed, Thomas Dixon is right up front about it in his book, Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. By giving priority to science in his title the subtle suggestion is made that the impetus for the study comes from the side of science, but it is almost entirely a religious undertaking, as the following quotation makes clear:

The goal of a constructive and collaborative dialogue between science and religion has been endorsed by many Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the modern world. The idea that scientific and religious views are inevitably in tension is also contradicted by the large numbers of religious scientists who continue to see their research as a complement rather than a challenge to their faith. [Loc. 246/249 -- viz., in that general area of the Kindle version]

The problem with this is immediately evident. There is no reasonable claim that there is a constructive and collaborative dialogue between science and religion. Religion is a matter of beliefs founded in past events or in supposedly present subjective experiences reinforced by faith communities in which those beliefs (in their many different possible configurations) are foundational.

Continue reading →

Kepler and the Divorce between Religion and Science

Standard

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

Since Kepler (see Wikipedia on Johannes Kepler) spent so much of his time expatiating with baroque grandiloquence on the harmony of the spheres, the perfect solids, the cosmological influence on individual lives (though he came to regard the specific predictions of astrology to be superstition), and tied all this and his cosmology up in Christian vestments and theological presuppositions, it might seem strange to speak about Kepler and the divorce between science and religion. Indeed, Kepler’s own laws of planetary motion almost got lost in debris from the Christian past with which his books were stuffed to overflowing; but when it came down to the fine points, the facts spoke for themselves, and religion was just the icing on the cake, and had nothing to do either with his major discoveries, or with the method used to discover them.That, at least, is my conclusion from reading Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers: The History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. Now, no doubt many scientists and historians of science will consider Koestler’s book a bit of wheeze, really, a kind of jeu d’esprit, mainly concerned with the creative process, the near unconscious manner in which scientists stumbled onto their discoveries as if by accident, as though they were sleepwalking, and sometimes, as in Kepler’s case, almost without knowing that they had actually stumbled onto them. Kepler was, according to Koestler, much more concerned with the Pythagorean solids than he was with the actual mathematical relationships of the planetary orbits to the sun, and yet, despite this idée fixe, he managed to acknowledge not only the power of the facts, but their priority.

Continue reading →

Robert Wright’s Illusion

Standard

Robert Wright, in a recent Atlantic article, proposes a “theory.” He later downgrades that to “hypothesis”. Neither word fits. Here’s the theory:

My theory is highly conjectural, but here goes:

A few decades ago, Darwinians and creationists had a de facto nonaggression pact: Creationists would let Darwinians reign in biology class, and otherwise    Darwinians would leave creationists alone. The deal worked. I went to a public high school in a pretty religious part of the country–south-central    Texas–and I don’t remember anyone complaining about sophomores being taught natural selection. It just wasn’t an issue.

A few years ago, such biologists as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers started violating the nonaggression pact. [Which isn't to say the violation was wholly unprovoked; see my update below.] I don’t just mean they professed atheism–many    Darwinians had long done that; I mean they started proselytizing, ridiculing the faithful, and talking as if religion was an inherently pernicious thing.    They not only highlighted the previously subdued tension between Darwinism and creationism but depicted Darwinism as the enemy of religion more broadly.

If the only thing this Darwinian assault did was amp up resistance to teaching evolution in public schools, the damage, though regrettable, would be    limited. My fear is that the damage is broader–that fundamentalist Christians, upon being maligned by know-it-all Darwinians, are starting to see secular scientists more broadly as the enemy; Darwinians, climate scientists, and stem cell researchers start to seem like a single, menacing blur.

Now, here’s the funny thing. At no point does Wright produce a shred of evidence showing that his theory is plausible, let alone true. As Jerry Coyne points out, the numbers that Wright uses, and that are printed as a graph with his “theory” as his only piece of evidence, simply do not support the “theory”. According to Jerry:

This is madness. First of all, the data on YEC [young earth creationism] and theistic evolutionism have fluctuated over the years:  although its adherents were 46% this year and 40% last year, they were 47% in 1993 and 2000.  There is no evidence that an uptick like this is sociologically meaningful, and I’m not even sure whether it differs significantly (in a statistical sense) from the previous survey’s 40%.  And acceptance of straight naturalistic evolution has risen 6% since 2000.  Why does Wright pay attention to a single year’s results and not address the long-term pattern, which is stasis with a slight increase in the good stuff?

Why does Wright pay attention to a single year’s results? Simple. Wright is looking for a stick to beat the new atheists with, and any stick, apparently, will do.

Continue reading →

M-Theory and Creation

Standard

Jerry Coyne has already put up a critique of Russell Stannard’s HuffPo piece on the limits of science and the demand for humility, Russell Stannard being amongst those scientists who think that humility consists in injecting religious questioning into the scientific enterprise. In his article, “Science: A Call for Humility,” he raises the humility question in relation to scientific theory, not by suggesting that there is still more for science to learn — which is where real scientific humility lies — but by suggesting that we can always ask the question: Where do scientific theories come from?

After saying that Stephen Hawking has offered M-Theory as the ultimate theory of everything, Stannard explains, the ultimate question is still not answered, even if we knew what M-Theory looks like when written down; for,

even if the M-theory hypothesis is correct, does it in fact answer the question of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It would certainly account for the existence of the world. But would it not raise a fresh question: “Where did M-theory come from? What is responsible for its existence?”

To which Jerry Coyne’s answer is decisive:

M-theory (an extension of string theory) was suggested by Edward Witten in 1995. That’s where it came from. A theory is a model of nature produced by a human brain.

This is something that Stannard apparently does not understand, for he goes on with a long spiel about the inability of knowing things-in-themselves:

What has been written down is not a description of the world at all, but a description of acts of observation made on the world. All our customary scientific terms such as energy, momentum, position, speed, distance, time, etc. — they are terms specifically for the description of observations. It is a misuse of language to try and apply them to a world-in-itself divorced from the action of an observation. It is this misuse of language that leads to problems like that posed by the wave/particle paradox. Which is not to say that the world-in-itself does not exist outside the context of someone making an observation of it. Rather, as Werner Heisenberg asserted, all attempts to talk about the world-in-itself are rendered meaningless.

Continue reading →