Category Archives: Science

The fatal ambiguity of Religion

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The most salient difference between science and religion is that science comes to (relatively) unambiguous conclusions, whereas religion is left swimming around in a slough of imprecise and fatally ambiguous promissory notes as to what its devotees are to believe and hold to be true. We have recently been blessed with a signal example of this in the person of one of the commentators here on choiceindying,com — one David Roemer, whose blog, New Evangelist, is something of a paradigm case of religion’s failure to make sense. For example, Roemer writes this (on the linked page):

Richard Dawkins in his latest book said evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because of the sun. He must have gotten this idea from a peer-reviewed article published in the American Journal of Physics. Catholic Truth in England just published my explanation of why the article is absurd.

The trouble with people like Roemer is that he imagines that things that he has read are also determinative for the positions of others. The article in the American Journal of Physics to which he refers was published recently (2009), and one may be assured that Dawkins was saying that evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics long before this. Indeed, the second law only applies to closed systems, which the earth patently is not, so even if you don’t understand the math of the article, it is plain that, if evolution defies the second law, it must be because there is another energy source which militates against increased entropy here on earth (in select instances), and that that source provides the energy needed to defeat the suggestion that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.

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Philosophy can sometimes be irritatingly boring and irrelevant! Elliott Sober take note!

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I simply cannot forbear, and must wade into swamps where others have already marked out the quicksands, and talk briefly about Elliott Sober’s argument that science does not contradict theism (the whole hour and three quarters of boredom available through Vimeo). Jerry Coyne and Jason Rosenhouse have already commented, and I need to put in my two cents worth. If this is all that philosophy is good for, then there’s not much point in doing philosophy! In fact, I think spending as much time as Sober does to show that for all we know there might be a being (like a god) guiding mutations is just so much time wasted, and I came to that conclusion after the first few minutes of his talk. All the distinctions that he makes, and the unnecessary introduction of Hume into the discussion, is wasted effort. He could have begun and ended by stating this: There is no way we can prove, logically, that a god or gods do not actually guide mutations, even though the evidence, so far as we can tell, indicates that mutations happen randomly. There still could be a guiding hand involved.

But this is just silly. It’s like the old philosopher’s joke that you can’t prove logically that there isn’t an elephant in the room right now, sitting on the sofa. As long as I am allowed to make as many qualifications to the characteristics of the elephant as I like (that is, in Dennett’s terms, if I am allowed to play tennis without a net), there’s no way that you can prove that he doesn’t exist. But the argument would be pointless: adding qualifications to qualifications to every response you make would not show anything. All it would do is to demonstrate that the notion of logical possibility is not a particularly interesting concept in a context such as this.

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Why is there something rather than nothing?

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This is the large “philosophical” question that underwrites a lot that passes as philosophical theology nowadays, and, to the degree that it does not track the progress of science — and in particular, here, of course, physics — it is a nonsense question, and attempts to answer it with a god or gods or some transcendent cause or Aristotelian first mover are bound to end up in a dead-end. Lawrence Krauss has now, for the benefit of us all, provided a more comprehensive, and clearly thought out version, of what he said off-the-cuff in his earlier interview with the Atlantic. In this he has also expressed his apology to those whom he “may have unjustly offended by seemingly blanket statements about the field [viz., philosophy],” and has placed those remarks very carefully in context — and now I find little to disagree with him about. Indeed, it seems to me that he says some very important things that are worthwhile ruminating on for a few moments.

Let’s begin at the end, where he says, trenchantly:

To those who wish to impose their definition of reality abstractly, independent[ly] of emerging empirical knowledge and the changing questions that go with it, and call that either philosophy or theology, I would say this: Please go on talking to each other, and let the rest of us get on with the goal of learning more about nature.

And to this I can only say: Agreed. By and large the attempt to speak abstractly about reality, as though we could spin out a theory of the nature of Being (with a capital “B”) from our own minds, is the proprietary bailiwick of theology, though a pursuit that, in the person of someone like Leibniz, trespassed ever so slightly into the domain of philosophy. It is important, in this connexion, to remember that the ancient Greek “philosophers” were as much empirical scientists as they were armchair ontologists or metaphysicians. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is the book the comes after (“meta”) the Physics, and while it may seem to be an abstract discipline, was, it is fair to say, a conceptual amanuensis to physics and not a freestanding theory of being on its own. Philosophy does not, and cannot, exist independently of science. Even morality or ethics must keep the science of human origins and evolution, as well as discoveries in neuroscience, sociology, political science, and history in mind, if it is to apply with any purpose to real human beings living their lives in the world as we are coming to know it. Perhaps the most cogent moral theory today is Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project (which I am slowly making my way through), which provides an evolutionary account of a project which is steadily developing and evolving along with our knowledge of ourselves. Patricia Churchland’s book Braintrust is another work by a philosopher who takes serious account of the discoveries of neuroscience and their impact on morality.

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New Scientist on the Science of Religion

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New Scientist has just published “The God Issue”, which begins with an Editorial: “To rule out god, first get to know him.” The subtitle is: “The new science of religion tells us where secularists are going wrong.” The surprising thing is that there’s nothing really new here that most of us haven’t heard before. Indeed, practically everything mentioned in the articles published in The God Issue is included in Anderson Thompson and Clare Aukofer’s Why We Believe in Gods: A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith. I don’t want to repeat it all here, since you can read the articles for yourself. Just register — it’s free — and you will be given access to all the articles in The God Issue. What I want to do is to put some pressure at a few points, because (i) I don’t think secularists are going wrong, and (ii) I think some of the claims made about the science of religion are less convincing than they may appear at first sight.

First, consider the point made in the introductory editorial. The claim is that most people perceive religion

as something that must be imprinted on young minds. [But on this, the editorial continues] The new science of religion begs to differ. Children are born primed to see god at work all around them and don’t need to be indoctrinated to believe in him.

And then we are referred to Justin Barrett’s “We are all born believers.” According to Barrett,

Children are born believers not of Christianity, Islam or any other theology but of what I call “natural religion”. They have strong natural tendencies toward religion, but these tendencies do not inevitably propel them towards any one religious belief.

Instead, the way our minds solve problems generates a god-shaped conceptual space waiting to be filled by the details of the culture into which they are born.

Now, this is, strictly speaking, untrue. Barrett provides not a shred of evidence that we are born believers in what he calls “natural religion.” What Barrett does show — and what is shown as well by researchers like Anderson Thompson, Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran, and others — is that children’s cognitive development makes belief in non-natural agents attractive. Here’s what he says:

Drawing upon research in developmental psychology, cognitive anthropology and particularly the cognitive science of religion, I argue that religion comes nearly as naturally to us as language. The vast majority of humans are “born believers”, naturally inclined to find religious claims and explanations attractive and easily acquired, and to attain fluency in using them. This attraction to religion is an evolutionary by-product of our ordinary cognitive equipment, and while it tells us nothing about the truth or otherwise of religious claims it does help us see religion in an interesting new light. [my italics]

That is worded deceptively. Saying that “it tells us nothing about the truth or otherwise of religious claims” is not only an understatement; it is misleading.

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Not a right hook in sight

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This is going to be quite a short post, since I have to go see the doctor this morning. Before reading further, first listen to Giles Fraser’s “Thinking out loud” from the Guardian for this morning, 27th February 2012.

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Giles Fraser on the Dawkins – Williams “debate”

Now that you’ve done so, you can see, I hope, how hopelessly adrift Fraser is. It’s not because he says something outré, or anything like that. The problem is that he didn’t listen to the so-called “debate”, which was about as far as you get from what he calls a boxing match style set-piece debate, and the misperception that the truth lies in some sort of ”intellectual muscularity”.  Even more difficult, Fraser suggests, is the idea that faith and unfaith exist in some sort of binary opposition, for he cannot see how faith can exist without doubt.

Now, there’s some good sense here, because, for a thoughtful faith, at any rate, is always coupled with doubt, the kind of doubt, for example, expressed by Job, or even, as Fraser suggests, by Jesus on the cross. This sense of having been betrayed, that at least one of the Passion narratives in the gospel expresses in the famous words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” shows, suggests, as Fraser claims, that doubt not only is the constant accompaniment of faith, but is an integral part of it.

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How Theologians Play With Words

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Warning! This is much longer than it set out to be!

In celebration of World Philosophy Day (of whose existence I was lamentably ignorant!) Wiley-Blackwell sent me a number of free special issues of various journals published by Wiley-Blackwell as well as a selection of various articles published in some other journals published by or related to the Wiley-Blackwell group of companies. One of them was published in New Blackfriars (which I stopped receiving years ago when an editor was sacked because, as I understand it, he was becoming too “liberal” in his theology). It is entitled “The New Atheism: Its Virtues and its Vices.” Of course, it piqued my interest, so I read it, and noticed, once again, how theology plays with words. This is the kind of thing that Jerry Coyne means when he alleges that theology “makes stuff up,” and I think, after considering what Brian Davies, OP, has to say, it will become clear just to what extent this is true.

I want to begin by considering the following.

When it comes [writes Davies] to what makes New Atheism new, the third point I want to note is that its exponents largely seem to write with little reference to the history of theology. They often talk about something called ‘religion’ and (especially in the case of Dawkins and Hitchens), they focus on what they call ‘belief in God’. But, we might ask, ‘Which religion?’ and ‘Whose God?’ My impression is that the fathers of New Atheism have not much studied the fathers of Old Atheism or the fathers of theism in its classical Christian form. [20]

The questions ‘Whose God?’, ‘Which religion?’ are meant to distract us, just as the similar questions of Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, are meant to do. One of the problems with religion is that there are so many of them. One of the problems with the concept of god is that there are simply too many of them too. To individuate or identify something as rarefied as a god is not an easy thing to do, and the idea is that we can do it with words. But defining ‘god’ is a bit like defining ‘number’. In Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead, if I remember correctly, define number in terms of the class of all classes that are similar to it. This makes the idea of number very elusive, and the idea of a god is even more elusive. Most of us can count, and count alike, though we  might count in tens or twenties or twos or twelves. But with gods it is all over the place, and agreement is hard to reach. Even Christians, who presumably believe in and worship the same god, cannot really agree, and are divided up into thousands of denominations, and then new denomnations, because someone thought there should be just one!

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Curiouser and Curiouser: Now Dawkins is an Anti-Intellectual Coward!

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More contempt for Richard Dawkins. In today’s English Press there are two articles arguing that Dawkin’s refusal to debate William Lane Craig is “cynical and anti-intellectual “– thus, Daniel Came — and intellectual cowardice – thus Paul Vallely. It seems, at any rate, that Craig’s PR team has at least convinced a few people that Richard Dawkins should relent, join William Lane Craig at the rostrum at the Sheldonian, and give a good account of himself. Daniel Came suggests that he can’t, and that that is why he is refusing. Indeed, Daniel Came, lecturer in philosophy at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, and an associate lecturer in philosophy at the University of Kent, goes so far as to say this:

Given that there isn’t much in the way of serious argumentation in the New Atheists’ dialectical arsenal, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Dawkins and Grayling aren’t exactly queuing up to enter a public forum with an intellectually rigorous theist like Craig to have their views dissected and the inadequacy of their arguments exposed.

This response comes as a bit of surprise to me, for having listened through two whole debates by Craig (the ones with Lawrence Krauss and Lewis Wolpert), and spottily to several others, Craig simply does not demonstrate the inadequacy of the arguments of others — and his voice is unctuous and a pain to listen to. He has a pretty standard spiel, and he is in the habit of deliberately refusing to address the arguments of those with whom he enters into debate.

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Julian Baggini Again

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I don’t want to be hard on Julian Baggini, since he’s one of the good guys after all; and, as I pointed out some time ago, he’s much more like a new atheist than he sometimes claims to be. Today, in the Guardian, he has put up the fourth in his series on the New Heathenism. It consists mainly in a warning to humanists not to put too much stock in science, because it could yet turn round and stab humanism in the back.

One of his points has to do with freedom and autonomy:

If the science of humanity has shown anything at all over recent decades it is that human beings are far less autonomous, rational and free than we usually suppose. As a matter of fact, I don’t think any of these challenges defeats what really matters about the humanist view of ourselves. But to argue this would be difficult and I’m not sure I could successfully do so as yet. What’s more, it remains possible that progress in science really will shatter a few atheist shibboleths in time. These are reasons enough to think that by embracing science so closely, atheists are only making it easier for it to stab them in back.

Since a great number of atheists argue the case for determinism quite strongly, subverting freedom and autonomy wouldn’t really trouble them greatly, though I continue to argue that we do, as Dennett puts it, have all ”the varieties of freedom worth wanting” that we need. But even if science showed that we do not have this amount of freedom, and that this is the truth about us, would that amount to a stab in the back? If being a humanist is to a large extent wanting to live a life that is based on the truth about the world as well as about ourselves, and science can achieve knowledge of this truth, how is this being stabbed in the back?

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Tudge is such an apt name for someone so unimaginative

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Yesterday I was busy with a project all day, writing a short article which tries to show that someone writing about assisted dying is full of hot air. One of the first things that I came upon when I went online this morning was Ophelia’s post about Colin Tudge’s “review” of Richard Dawkins new book for children, The Magic of Reality. Since I am just reading the book in the time before I fall asleep each night, it came as quite a surprise that someone should so roundly and contemptuously dismiss Dawkins’ enchanting book. The subtitle of the book is “How we know what’s really true,’ and he spends a reasonable amount of time contrasting what we know scientifically about the world with myths and fairy stories. The last chapter, which I have not reached yet, asks the question, What is a miracle? Appropriately enough, this holds up to examination the claims that people have made about miracles. But it is simply not true, as Tudge alleges, that Dawkins “rails endlessly against fundamentalists.” He doesn’t rail in this book against anything, but he does, in a thoughful and a measured way, contrast what we know to be true with mythical stories from the past. Indeed, in telling the mythical stories he scarcely anywhere holds the stories up to contempt, although when writing about the sun worship of the Aztecs he does remark that it’s too bad they didn’t stop making sacrifices just to see whether the sun would rise the next day, and did not really need to be placated with beating human hearts torn from the breasts of living victims. He also explains elsewhere that the sun’s rising is an illusion based on the earth revolving on its axis, and might have pointed out that it would have made more sense to make offerings to the earth, to keep it spinning, instead of to the sun, to keep it rising. Perhaps some kind of vegetable  would have served as an offering to the earth, instead of the thousands of living hearts cut from the breasts of sacrificial victims that were offered to the sun.

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Here We Go Again!

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The new atheists seem to have hit a nerve. But it’s not like hitting your thumb with a hammer. When you do that, before long the pain dissipates, and, though sore, you can go on with whatever it was you were trying to hit with the hammer. Being hit by the new atheism isn’t like that. It produces a weeping sore that never heals, something like the wounds that phosphorous weapons make. Once they’ve been hit by the new atheism, the pain just won’t go away. In fact, it’s hard to find a newspaper nowadays that doesn’t have someone telling the new atheists what they are doing wrong. The new atheists – my, oh, my! – misunderstand religion, they don’t recognise that religion is so much more subtle than they imagine it, that, in fact, some religious people don’t have a clue as to what it is that they really do believe. And besides, all that shrillness and stridency! Will it never cease?! If people are that worried, the new atheists must be doing something right. There has been a continuing outpouring of complaint about the new atheism for well over five years, and almost every one of them begins by saying something like: “I agree with their conclusions, …. but.”

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