I’m going to be a bit distracted for a while, with some upcoming travel and various other bits of busy work, but I was listening to this lecture by Ken Miller (in which Carl Zimmer was in attendance, too) as I was puttering away on a lecture of my own . It’s pretty much the same talk he gave in Kansas, sans talk of shooting at new targets and other obnoxious language, but I still find myself disagreeing with his conclusions. I had to take just a minute to bring up my objections.
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He wants to argue that evolution is compatible with, even strengthens his faith, but his god is remarkably aloof from his creation. There’s no evidence for him, and even in the Q&A Miller distances himself from any attempt to pin a god down to a discrete intervention. So his god is a hypothesis that is indistinguishable from the hypothesis that there is no god, and he postulates no possibility of a test to support his idea. It’s simply not parsimonious. Shouldn’t every nerve in a scientist’s body be itching at the inclusion of an unnecessary and inaccessible and overbearingly complex yet utterly needless entity in a hypothesis? Why isn’t Miller dissatisfied?
- Two discordant notes: Miller cites and praises St. Augustine’s insistence that a good Christian should not be insisting that doctrinal matters are factually true when they clearly contradict the observable world, and that such unthinking acceptance of contradictions is apparent to, and objectionable to, unbelievers. That’s not a problem; I’ve used ol’ Augustine myself. But then he goes on to praise Francis Collins’ recent book as a wonderful example of reconciling science and religion.
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Somehow, the creationist wars are going to be resolved by turning the whole debate to the issue of the existence of god rather than evolution. Nah, I don’t believe it, not for one minute. This conflict isn’t about some rarefied abstraction, it’s about deeply ingrained doctrinal issues: evolution contradicts biblical literalism, and that’s a fundamental tenet of many of the religions in this country. It’s like expecting Southern Baptists to happily go along with the suggestion to start attending Unitarian Universalist services instead of the fire-and-brimstone raging preaching they’re used to…isn’t that far more naive and stretching the imagination than any atheist proudly stating his or her beliefs, and expecting not to get lynched?
I think what he’s really saying here is that he’d rather argue with the Richard Dawkins of the world—they’re certainly smarter and better informed—than with patently foolish ID creationists. I think he’s assuming, though, that such a debate would go well for him, and he’s only right that the audience that now favors Ken Ham and Kent Hovind and Paul Nelson would certainly side with Ken Miller against Richard Dawkins. I don’t think that’s a point in favor of his position.
I’ve read Collins’ book, and the religious part is the most appalling, facile, illogical gobbledygook. This unbeliever sees Collins’ faulty reason as testimony against Christianity, because clearly his faith has made him willing to accept the most astonishingly foolish nonsense. You have to be fully indoctrinated into Christian dogma to be unable to see through that crap about waterfalls and the Trinity and the unquestioning acceptance of C.S. Lewis’s equally goofy theology.
Most importantly, I still think his attempt at reconciling science and theology is ultimately anti-scientific. We’re supposed to question and test everything, a point Miller made very strongly at the beginning of the talk, but at the end he’s essentially left holding a flabby bag labeled “faith”, and insisting that we can’t really question whether it’s empty or not, because his god is a supremely cunning and evasive god who made the bag to look empty. That’s unconvincing and unscientific. It undermines that whole issue of being good questioners that science should reinforce.
If Miller wants to bring his God into the scientific arena, then I hope he’s not suprised when his God is subject to rigorous scientific scrutiny and scorn, just like any other hypothesis in science. And if he keeps peddling that quantum nonsense, his credibility will erode rather quickly.
As I stated on another thread on this blog, it appears that Miller has shifted his position relative to the issue of theism vs philosophical naturalism. Millers’ position is that philosophical naturalism is not science but philosophy. I see nothing untoward in this; this is also the position of Barbara Forrest, based on her testimony at the Dover trial and Eugenie Scott, based on a lecture she gave at the Virginia Citizens for Science. To my knowledge, both ladies are professed atheists. Millar also agrees that theism is philosophy, not science. It appears that the problem is that PZ and his more militant atheist followers insist that philosophical naturalism is science. Given the fact that the individuals who, unlike PZ, are called to testify at trials go to great lengths to distinguish between methdological naturalism and philosophical naturalism, it would appear that they have good reason to do so.
Also of interest, Miller produced a part of an article written by Dr. Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict in which it appears that he is endorsing evolution and denigrating intelligent design. I have thus far not been able to track down where this fragment came from; maybe one of the other commenters knows.
I’d rather this whole. remarkable silly debate wait until after the current wait until after the current outbreak of Creationism is eradicated, as far as is ever possible, from our schools, and further efforts are made to instill better science teaching, etc.
I enjoyed the one Miller lecture I heard greatly, but he did not go into detail about how the science he knew validated his personal beliefs. The previous occasion to this one, which blew into such a useless, nearly conterproductive, catfight, I thought he was entirely at fault, though perhaps through simple blindness to what his attack (and it was an attack) on atheists would look like when read.
The idea that science has anything to say about Christian muths is entirely laughable, in a sad way.
Another point, though: I see wonders everywhere, and as Dawkins does I find no need, even a certain distaste, in attributing them to some “spiritual” entity/ies: that would somehow reduce the Universe and human existence to human scale – the most ridiculous notion I can, while human, imagine. However, there is something in Dawkins’ version of atheism, and I think in PZ’s as well, that is remarkably “puritanical”. When I hear or suspect “purity” I gingerly move away.
Moreover, my mind is fascinated and entertained by religious exercises, and I have met a variety of wonderful characters, real and unreal, and enjoyed many fascinating fantasies through their exercise. From a pantheist I am now an atheist, none the worse, perhaps the better, for the journey. I certainly have not the scorn and self-righteousness n my heart that many atheists, still somehow angry over their divorce from the One True Faith or another often seem to have.
Religious practice is very much like drug use (a true if unoriginal metaphor), and while a doctor may advise abstention it is rarely actually practiced (and often only by the dullest, least creative, or craziest) but more often rationalized. Careful use and skepticism are, as with all human practices, called for.
I’ve enjoyed many of your posts on this blog, PZ…but I still just can’t believe how stubborn and obtuse you are on this issue.
I’d like to echo SLC and just add that Miller is not making his god a scientific hypothesis. He makes it very clear that his god and his theology are very outside of science. I think that PZ and some of the commenters on this blog need just an ounce of humility. You have to realize that science is a human endeavor and that there is a possibility that things can exist outside of this realm as we know it today. We humans are just but tiny specks in this universe. How can you possibly think that something created by our species in this present time can absolutely positively encompass every truth in existence in this universe or any other? Science can handle everything that we can possibly think of in the physical world as we know it today but that does not mean that it is absolutely boundless.
I’m not suggesting that you renounce your atheism (you can most certainly be an atheist and agree that science is not without bounds) but just be careful with claiming that the jurisdiction of science is infinite.
The comments have just started and already you’re seeing the cognitive dissonance run wild.
The position of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, PZ, myself and many others is simply this: THE CLAIMS OF RELIGION SHOULD BE SUBJECT TO THE SAME SCRUTINY AS EVERY OTHER CLAIM. There. Nothing unambiguous, nothing unscientific. Just saying we should do away with the obfuscatory special pleading of people like Miller and Collins.
Sorry: should be “nothing ambiguous“. My sloppy posting once again comes back to haunt me.
That’s exactly the point. As a man of science, how does he justify his belief when the rules of science do not permit that belief?
You seem to be arguing that since the findings of science are limited compared to the space of possible knowledge, we shouldn’t criticize a belief that doesn’t fall under the aegis of those findings. That is not the point. The point is that the beliefs in question contradict the very nature and basic rules of science – and in several cases, logic itself.
There it is again – you’re confusing the method with the findings. The findings most certainly cannot handle everything we can think of or know of in the ‘physical’ world. We cannot explain superconductivity. We cannot explain the lack of particulate gravity, or reconcile it with quantum scale effects. We don’t know for certain that our high-level models (such as aerodynamics) are truly derivable from low-level ones.
The method does not include a category of existence other than physical, so your point is rather peculiar from that perspective.
Re DiPietro
Millers’ position, if I understand it correctly, is that religious claims are not testable by science. So what? Claims that Bach was a superior composer then Beethoven (or vice versa)are also not testable by science. Or that Rembrandt was a greater artist then Vermeer. The bottom line is the philosophical naturalism is not science and all the kings horses and all the kings men will not make it so.
I find my own thoughts rather in consonance with goddogtired’s point. Should you choose to see it that way, there are wonders of nature all around us. The atheist may see them as random events following laws of probability, while the believer may find an expression of a divine entity, especially if the outcome is good or bears joy. This, perhaps, reflects the concept of philosophical naturalism as mentioned by SLC.
I don’t want to distract Dr. Myers from preparing his lecture on Tuesday, but I would just point out one fallacy in his opening argument. He asks, in the first point:
The concept of God is indeed complex and not easily accessible, and perhaps unnecessary in day-to-day functioning in real life. The same can be said for the principles of quantam physics also. Does that necessarily negate the existence of either?
I know exactly what Dr. Myers and others would say at this point: the principles of quantam physics are directly or indirectly testable using experiments. The concept of God is not. However, I am sure you would agree that in order to measure anything a frame of reference is necessary. The more sophisticated the technique, the better accuracy of measurement is achieved. At present, do we have a frame of reference and a technique to estimate the presence or absence of God? If not, you run the risk of a type II error. If you choose merely empirical methods, that would be akin to measuring intangible concepts such as beauty and joy. If you use a scale to reduce them to ordinal variables, the result would always be open to interpretation.
On the other hand, observed and experimentally established facts such as natural selection and evolution do not leave any doubt as to their veracity, except in the closed, obstinate minds of the indoctrinated and the ignorant. There lies what I view as the chief function of a science education: clear misconceptions, present evidence and encourage a questioning attitude.
“Millers’ position, if I understand it correctly, is that religious claims are not testable by science.”
Then why is he making the association? Why use all the quantum stuff as an attempt to provide informal scientific support for his religion? That exposes his God to scientific scrutiny. If he were to say his God operates in the untestable domains of “spirituality” or “conciousness”, no one would argue.
I agree with SLC: So what? When Di Pietro says “THE CLAIMS OF RELIGION SHOULD BE SUBJECT TO THE SAME SCRUTINY AS EVERY OTHER CLAIM”, I’d like to add “IF THAT RELIGION CLAIMS TO BE SCIENTIFIC”.
For example an insult of ID is simply that it claims to be scientific, yet also claims exemption from scientific scrutiny.
Personally, I used to be somewhat mushy on religion. But the shenanigans by the Right caused me to examine my own position, which I had to conclude is completely athiestic. That said, I don’t have any problem when someone claims to believe in a god or a supernatural explanation. Where I DO have a problem is if that person expects me to agree with them via bullshit explanations.
If Miller is holding an empty bag, but is happy because he thinks it’s full, more power to him. But if Miller then explains why *I* too should think his bag is full (as opposed to explaining why *he* thinks it is), then I’m out of there.
Ken Miller is at least partially guilty of obfuscating the issue by making fuzzy statements like “religious claims are not testable by science.” He should rather define what he means by ‘religious claims’. If they refer to biblical mores like the divine origin of human life four thousand years ago, or divine intervention in the sundry events of the world, yes, they are testable – and eminently refutable – by science. If they refer to the mere presence of a God, perhaps science has not yet evolved to acquire the right measurement techniques to accept or reject that claim, because as jefw says: it falls in the domains of ‘spirituality’ or ‘consciousness’. There are some techniques in medicine and psychology to test physiological consciousness, but those are hardly adequate to judge the matter in question.
I do not believe in Miller’s God, but I have some sympathy for his position that science and religion need not conflict. Science can describe a complex series of variations in air pressure, and can extract the waveforms via a Fast Fourier Transform and plot the curves across a spectrum of different frequencies, but for all that analysis, the concept of “symphony” does a better job of communicating the essence of the significance of the sound waves we hear when the orchestra plays.
Science is a way of looking at the world, and it’s a good way, if your goal is an accurate understanding of specific cause-and-effect relationships. But it doesn’t always capture the personal significance of one’s experiences as meaningfully and intuitively as other (less technically accurate) ways.
Not for all people, anyway. I think that for some, like PZ, the scientific way of comprehending the world is entirely adequate, and hence his bafflement over why everyone else does not find it equally adequate. But a lot of people don’t, and I don’t think they’re wrong, I just think they’re different.
That said, I do acknowledge that a lot of religions bring in a lot of superstitious baggage, with negative consequences. Such tendencies need to be opposed, not only because they are wrong, but because those who promote them will not willingly participate in any attempt at reconciling their dogmas with objective science. They can’t: they need somebody to serve as a scapegoat for the paradox that God is supposed to be in control, and yet the world seems to be “going to hell” (pardon the expression). They can’t blame God, and they can’t accept the condition of the world, so they have to blame somebody, and scientists are it.
The responses to me thus far have been the exact sort of cognitive dissonance I was talking about.
Whether one composer or another was/is/will be “better” (to use SLC’s example) is a matter of subjective preference, hardly at all analogous to Miller’s positions on religion. Miller wants to make existential claims to God, miracles, etc. But then he says “don’t scrutinize them, they’re not scientific!”
That’s nonsense. As Sam Harris has pointed out, if I claimed something along the lines of “there is a diamond the size of a refridgerator buried in my back yard” and defended it with the sort of rhetoric with which Miller, Collins et al. defend their religion, I’d be immediately written off as an idiot and/or a lunatic. Religion should be no different.
Matters of subjective preference fall within the scientific method – we can just look to see which composer’s music you prefer.
If a claim cannot even in theory be operationalized, I see no reason to hold the position that the claim is coherent.
PZ said:
“So his god is a hypothesis that is indistinguishable from the hypothesis that there is no god, and he postulates no possibility of a test to support his idea. It’s simply not parsimonious. Shouldn’t every nerve in a scientist’s body be itching at the inclusion of an unnecessary and inaccessible and overbearingly complex yet utterly needless entity in a hypothesis? Why isn’t Miller dissatisfied?”
Perhaps he is not dissatisfied because he does not accept a concealed premise of your argument: that, if we are scientists, we are only entitled to those beliefs that the scientific method endorses. If I understand him correcty, his position is that all hypothesis which are scientifically testable ought to be accepted or not according to the scientific method (including those that some view as religious in nature, like the origin of species, etc.) but those that cannot be tested in any way because they are about a purely “supernatural” or “metaphysical” realm, can be accepted on other grounds (call them “faith”, “revelation” or whatever). Your position, and also mine (note: I am an atheist) is that the scientific method commands to not accept any proposition which goes against it, in particular any one which is untestable and unnecessary for any scientific explanations. But this disagreement is not one that science itself can resolve, precisely because you and Miller agree on all scientific, testable matters. It is a meta-scientific or philosophical disagreement about the meaning and extent of rationality.
What about rationality and the rules of evidence? Do you really think that we are entitled to beliefs that aren’t compatible with those principles?
Those who support religion on this blog seem to be missing a major point. Granted, there is a lot we don’t understand. If you then say you think some major intelligence created it all and call him god, Ok, there is no evidence for it, but ok anyway for the moment. But people’s religion goes way beyond this. It stipulates that this god is real, is present, is intensely interested in our sexual lives, favors humans over the rest of creation, has set certain moral standards for us, and wants us to pray and obey certain rules. The vague god may be excusable as an idea that makes you comfortable in some non-rigorous philosophical way. To believe in the specific god (or gods, sorry Hindus,) whose major concern is human affairs, is approaching on narcissistic idiocy.
PZ,
I appreciate your atheism as a belief, and I appreciate your evangelism for it. But your reasoning for it is really just Logical Positivism, which as a philosophy got pretty beat in the work of Popper, Quine, and Kuhn.
Physicists appreciate this more than biologists, I think, because their classical theories were blown out of the water by modern physics. Whereas, biology is still in its classical stage, working through its first great unifying theory.
It would be interesting to poll scientists to see which field has the most atheists. I bet the answer is not Physics.
Anyway, I offer this in all due respect for your work, PZ. I certainly am not advocating moving science beyond methodological naturalism. This is its one secret of success. What I am arguing for, is that it is not obvious that science leads to ontological naturalism. One can only get to that as a matter of faith.
The reason why some scientists are not atheists is because they are not all logical positivists. Clarifying that, what I mean is that they accept methodological naturalism, but not ontological naturalism.
Re Caledonian: “Do you really think that we are entitled to beliefs that aren’t compatible with those principles?”
You didn’t read my whole post. I don’t think we are; that is why I am an atheist. But I don’t know how to refute “scientifically” someone who believes we are entitled to them, as the question of what are the standards of rationality we ought to have is not itself decidable rationally without circularity. And if I don’t know how to convince someone to abandon a belief, and that belief those not imply any practical disagreement about testable matters, then I am inclined to tolerate that belief as long as its holder does not try to force it into me.
philosophical naturalism is not science and all the kings horses and all the kings men will not make it so.
Why? Creationism somehow is?
Re Millers’ invocation of Quantum Mechanics as evidence of the existance of god.
Prof. Miller wrote in his book that he sees the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of quantum mechanics as evidence for the existance of god because one might expect god to set things up so that his intelligent creations could not have perfect knowledge of everything. The trouble with this hypothesis is that there may be what is known as a hidden variable theory underneath quantum statistics which involves deterministically measurable quantities. If such turned out to be the case, that would consign Millers’ hypothesis to a god of the gaps argument. For instance, it is possible that the current investigations into super string theory could develop into such a hidden variable theory. I would agree with jeffw that Miller would probably be better off to refrain from invoking science altogether and just base his religious beliefs on faith and the fact that philosophical naturalism is not science.
According to The First Vatican Council, Canon 2.1:
If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema.
In other words, if Ken Miller is claiming that God’s existence is not really provable, as he seems to be, he is a heretic.
PZ –
While I consider myself an atheist, I’m not sure if I agree with you fully on this issue or not. Having said that, I, for one, am grateful that you were able to express your objections to Miller’s talk in this post using what seemed to me to be less invective and more level-headedness than a couple of the previous posts on the subject.
Also, is there any chance that we might get a meaty review of Dawkin’s The God Delusion anytime soon? I was at B&N today and read about the first couple chapters of the book. So far, I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly.
Actually, my review is published in a for-real print publication, this month’s issue of Seed. If it’s put online I’ll be sure to point to it.
Do me a favor, critics. Since I’m not arguing for ontological or philosophical naturalism here, nor am I insisting that Science Is All, nor am I suggesting that scientists aren’t entitled to be Christians, it’s rather a waste of effort to complain that I am. I’ve raised some very simple points.
1. Miller’s hypothesis is not parsimonious and he will not provide evidence for it, so why should I believe it?
2. It’s disingenuous to insist that Christians should represent their faith ala Augustine with reason and evidence while praising the unreasonable dreck Francis Collins proposed.
3. I find his tactical rationale for refocusing the evolution debate on the existence of god impractical, irrational, and wrong-headed.
You can disagree, no problem, but disagreeing with things I didn’t say is a waste of time.
In other words, if Ken Miller is claiming that God’s existence is not really provable, as he seems to be, he is a heretic.
Well there you go. He can be all the “Mr. Reasonable Dude” he wants to be, but there’s no getting around the fact that the book he worships has a lot of ignorant crapola in it.
Movin’ up in the world, eh? Congratulations, that’s fantastic! I’ll be sure to buy that copy of Seed.
Sorry, there should have been quotatoin marks around the first two sentences in my previous post as they PZ’s words, not mine.
To a fair extent I’m in agreement with PZ on this topic: Attempts to justify religion by reference to science, or vice versa, cannot be effective. (Same goes for attempts to show science is nonsense by reference to religion, or vice versa.) IMO neither can have anything logically to say about the other, much as people try otherwise.
Our rabbi gave a very nice sermon today about showing religious commitment by performing good deeds in the world (giving blood; helping the physically and psychologically ill and giving their caregivers a break; feeding the hungry; and the list goes on). It seems to me that’s where, if at all, the usefulness of religion lies – giving good folks that extra kick in the pants to get off their duffs and make a positive difference in the world. (Nor do I think that religion is the only or even the “best” [whatever defines “best” in this context] means of encouraging people to make a positive difference.) But what that has to do with population genetics, natural selection, the Big Bang, or quantum mechanics, damned if I know.
Do me a favor: limit yourself to things you can know. You can argue that my statements show I didn’t understand what you wrote, but you simply can’t know if I didn’t read your whole post.
We developed a formal, codified model of rationality without possessing a formal, codified model of rationality. ‘Logic’ is just a label we put on correct forms of argumentation that were observed in practice, combined with applied grammar. Reason is not justified by itself – that would be silly, as reason itself demonstrates – but is justified by the behavior of the world.
And if they try to force its consequences upon you…?
The bottom line, I think, is that metaphysical naturalism as a working theory is about as well supported through our scientific findings as any other working theory. We might discover the supernatural, but so far, we haven’t. The principle of parsimony kicks in along with that of consistency. Mind and the products of mind appear to be formed from the bottom-up. This is a problem for those top-down views.
The problem with sticking God in the same category as “intangible concepts like beauty and joy” or the belief that “Bach was a superior composer to Beethoven” is that this would make “God” an intangible concept, an emotion, or a matter of preference also — which is actually what the atheists are saying. If God is taken seriously, on its own terms and not as a human need, then it’s an hypothesis.
I think people like PZ and Dawkins approach the concept of God as if it matters, as if it ought to fit in and be consistent and make sense. Treating it with kid gloves and “special rules” because you like it puts too much focus on the believer, instead of on the belief. What theists see as hostility, I interpret as respect.
No, it really didn’t.
Where did PZ advocate logical positivism?
Popper didn’t disagree with the basic premise of his fellow thinkers in Vienna. He too was highly critical of the acceptance of beliefs that were no supportable via rational means of inquiry. What he critiqued was their reliance of verification of a means of justifying beliefs (he emphasized testing conjectures in the context of solving problems).
Not sure about Quine myself (never read him), but referencing Kuhn to mutually reinforce Popper is a bit silly. The two could not possibly have disagreed with each other on any more subjects than they did.
Caledonian, this is related to many previous exchanges and I hope it will lead to a fruitful exchange.
Simply put, is Logical Positivism still a viable position? Some evidently think so, but it appears that after nearly a century the Vienna Circle’s attempt at producing a ‘seamless garment’ hasn’t materialized. After all, they issued a ‘manifesto’, held regular conferences, and proclaimed a ‘unifed science’, issuing an Encylopedia and all that.
My university has a complete set of the Encyclopedia and you know what? They’re covered with dust. Nobody reads that stuff, including the science majors, with the possible exception of Kuhn and when they read that, they don’t read him as part of that collection, they read him on his own and the only thing they remember is ‘paradigm shift’, anyway.
Why do you think that is?
I know you’re awful fond of defining science in unilateral terms, but if history is any guide logical positivism hasn’t been embraced as ‘THE scientific method’, but is just one of many ideas floating out there that describe some of the things scientists do as science, but not everything.
Again, why do you think that is?
Respectfully submitted….SH
I’m afraid I’ve never found it possible to take anti-realists like Kuhn seriously. A person who doesn’t believe theories can meaningfully be said to approach or approximate truth has no reason to believe his own theories about theories are true.
It’s like a person who insists on semantic rigor but doesn’t see anything wrong in describing a thing as ‘indescribable’.
I’m afraid I’ve never found it possible to take anti-realists like Kuhn seriously. A person who doesn’t believe theories can meaningfully be said to approach or approximate truth has no reason to believe his own theories about theories are true.
I’m in 100% agreement with you here. Richard Rorty (try saying that five times fast) scarred me for life with the sheer convolution and idiocy of his arguments for anti-realism. Reading it all is like being bukakked with stupid.
Ditto for Kuhn, Foucault, Derrida and host of other postmodern idiots.
Having just listened to the lecture, I do not believe the reservations raised by PZ are accurate. Miller did not defend the content of the Collins book so much as emphasise the importance of its existence – his point was political rather than intellectual – unlike the Haught book, whose content he did endorse.
More important, to say “his attempt at reconciling science and theology is ultimately anti-scientific” is quite wrong. The attempt is not scientific because it is philosophical, but that doesn’t make it “anti-scientific”, which I think is intellectually slanderous.
Given the huge contribution Miller has made in these battles, I think he is at least owed the courtesy of being accurately reported and his position taken seriously, even if one disagrees with his metaphysics, which I do.
Tyler, to dismiss Kuhn and Foucault as “postmodern idiots” is simply not acceptable if you hope to engage serious people in serious discussion on these matters. Perhaps you really should stick to CS.
More casual anti-post-modernists simply means more people I can safely scoll past as unworthy of entering into a discussion with. (Ditto for the ass who casually slurred Kuhn, BTW, while having a mother who wears army boots.)
Tyler, to dismiss Kuhn and Foucault as “postmodern idiots” is simply not acceptable if you hope to engage serious people in serious discussion on these matters. Perhaps you really should stick to CS.
Oh yes, John. You see, I was thinking about opening my word processor and typing out an elaborate thesis paper about the invalidity of Kuhns anti-realism with the regard to science and the finer points of it’s similarity to Foucault and Derrida, forgoing the casual nature of my post. I was then going to post the entire multi-page effort here, chewing up bandwidth on SB server so you can all just look at it and “holy crap, Tyler, that’s WWWAAAYYY too long.” Then I remembered that this was a fucking message board and comments are usually quite casual with regard to everything.
How about getting off my case, asshole. This isn’t a philosophy class.
The attempt is not scientific because it is philosophical
No, in Finding Darwin’s God he actually implies that God can pull strings from the quantum level, and gives examples of how individual quantum events can be amplified to become significant in the macro world (genetic mutations, etc). The implication is that quantum mechanics appears random to us, but God is actually (and necessarily deceptively) affecting things behind the scenes. That goes beyond the philsophical.
Loren Petrich and 386sx:
I don’t think you’ve shown that Miller is a heretic. You can only draw that conclusion if you identify what can be known “by the natural light of human reason” with verifiable scientific hypotheses. But although Miller is clear that God’s existence can’t be verified experimentally (so it’s not a scientific hypothesis at all, in spite of what PZ says in his original post) it does not follow that there can be no reason for belief in God. Miller himself has written that he finds his God in the process of evolution. In the Pope’s famous address of a couple of weeks ago, there is an argument for broadening the scope of human reason beyond the strictly scientific. There are intimations of this in Miller’s responses in the Q&A to the lecture (where he speaks of the importance of preserving humanistic disciplines like literary criticism as rational enterprises without simply assimilating them to natural science).
So, to sum up, I take it Miller would accept the Vatican I teaching you cite, but not take that teaching to entail that God is an experimentally verifiable scientific hypothesis.
More casual anti-post-modernists simply means more people I can safely scoll past as unworthy of entering into a discussion with. (Ditto for the ass who casually slurred Kuhn, BTW, while having a mother who wears army boots.)
More casual posters who accuse others of sins they commit in their own posts means more people I can safely dismiss as idiots. Thank you, you’re a life-saver.
jeffw, I don’t think Miller would see his take on quantum mechanics as science, and neither should we. It is a philosophical interpretation (as I believe is the Copenhagen interpretation itself) to try to explain what the science is describing. It would be “scientific” if he were suggesting any amendment of the theory, which he is not.
And tyler, I don’t think needlessly abusing me is advancing whatever point it was you were trying to make. Messageboard does not equal school playground.
Okay now, how many of you people invoking Kuhn have actually *read* what he has to say? An awful lot of people like to talk about his concept of “scientific paradigms” without actually understanding what he was getting at. One thing to remember, he wasn’t a philosopher of science, he was a historian of science.
BTW, yes that’s my real name, and yes, I’m related to him.
jeffw, I don’t think Miller would see his take on quantum mechanics as science, and neither should we. It is a philosophical interpretation (as I believe is the Copenhagen interpretation itself) to try to explain what the science is describing. It would be “scientific” if he were suggesting any amendment of the theory, which he is not.
And tyler, I don’t think needlessly abusing me is advancing whatever point it was you were trying to make. Messageboard does not equal school playground.
Heather, I wasn’t invoking Kuhn, I was simply objecting to dismissing him as a “post-modern idiot”, and I first read Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1975 as a philosophy undergrad. It is impossible to get a grip on the epistemology of science without understanding its history. Kuhn made a contribution to both.
jeffw, I don’t think Miller would see his take on quantum mechanics as science, and neither should we. It is a philosophical interpretation (as I believe is the Copenhagen interpretation itself) to try to explain what the science is describing.
Well, his interpretation is certainly false (unlike copenhagen). Quantum mechanics has to be utterly random to work. Can a philosophy be falsified? If not, then his take must be scientific.
jeff, while Miller’s quantum argument doesn’t convince me, it is less clear that it can be described as “certainly false”, which would require it to be either logically inconsistent or contain propositions that contradict established science.
In the end, though, it gets off the ground for him because of a pre-existing belief in a god that is independent of any evidence-based practice. My position (which is basically Gouldian) is that that’s okay as long as it does not trespass on rational, empirical inquiry.
(By the way, there are many physicists who would also question the Copenhagen interpretation, including I think Alan Sokal.)
Oh dear.
( again )
No god is detectable.
And, therfore, no account need be taken of any “god”.
Unless, and until this testable proposition is disproved (falsified) any discussion involving “god”, or indeed any religious belief, is a complete waste of time.
There, that wasn’t difficult, was it?
“No, in Finding Darwin’s God he actually implies that God can pull strings from the quantum level, and gives examples of how individual quantum events can be amplified to become significant in the macro world (genetic mutations, etc). The implication is that quantum mechanics appears random to us, but God is actually (and necessarily deceptively) affecting things behind the scenes.”
If Miller is saying this it is quite dotty. God subtly guides mutations to give a boost along to evolution? Presumably he also then mutates lots of things that die out (dinosours, as well as badly mutated animals that die in utero, or after birth). He does it in such a way that it looks exactly like a series of random* events – as though it were -really- happening by chance?
As so many others have said before, why bother invoking additional complexity when the simple assumption works just as well. Mr Occam would be turning in his grave.
*random events constrained by the physical world
Let me find the appropriate level to properly engage cetain people besmirching this now useless thread.
[ahem]
“In fact you do suggest something, a baboon! … I’m sorry I said that. It wasn’t fair to the other baboons.”
Nyah! I’m rubber and Tyler’s glue,…!!!
Say what? I hope you count evolution as that first GUT of biology. Then there was genetics which looked (to some) like it might blow evolution out of the water until they were reconciled in the modern synthesis. But I don’t see how being blown out of the water is a requirement for good science.
I’d like to see that too. Such polls have been done but I don’t have a link. I bet physicists aren’t the least atheistic, either.
A science-friendly religion or religion-friendly science will always be a losing battle. They are just not compatible. Ken will expend lots of energy and twist himself into a pretzel to have it both ways. For what, exactly? A nice feeling about an invisible entity in his head? Time to pull up stakes and breath the clean atheistical air, Ken.
Besides, the Pope is turning out to be a real jerk.
The link to the Miller lecture also has the earlier talk by Lawrence Krauss, who describes the notion that science is incompatible with religious belief, or that science necessarily implies atheism, as both wrong and “dangerous”. It is my perception that his view is shared in some form or other by the great majority of working scientists – regardless of their personal metaphysics. Are they all wrong?
I am with Stephen Weinberg: science does not mandate atheism; but science makes it possible to be an atheist.
It seems there were other presenters that could be criticized, but I understand the focus here on Miller, if he still is inconsistent on science and tries to refocus the debate.
I can tolerate a view that doesn’t encroach on science and doesn’t insist that a persons necessarily use of bounded rationality means that other fields different rationale then are necessarily consistent with scientific rationality or philosophy consistent with the latter. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be Miller’s view.
SLC:
“Millers’ position is that philosophical naturalism is not science but philosophy.”
I think you mean to say metaphysical (ontological) naturalism here. When the endeavor of science got underway it was recognized that part of its method could be philosophically described as methodological naturalism, that only natural explanations could be used in theories. The other position is that only natural explanations exists.
It’s a mistake to think that science and methodological naturalism doesn’t have implications on theological claims. Methodological naturalism has been found to work for a long time now. Putting trust in the sufficiency of methodological naturalism while observing the debunking of dualisms means that there isn’t room left for gods-of-the-gaps, for instance.
“The trouble with this hypothesis is that there may be what is known as a hidden variable theory underneath quantum statistics which involves deterministically measurable quantities.”
There could only be a hidden variable theory if it isn’t local, ie it would undermine determinism by not obeying the requirements for lorentz invariance. Supralight signals destabilises gauge theories and would be observable. So there is no such theory expected in any string theories.
You could speculate in gods who manages nonlocal theories by supernatural means. But they would be Cosmic Cheaters, running the universe wholesale behind a curtain to fool us in our search for knowledge. Certainly not a parsimonious scientific theory, and bad theology to boot.
“Miller produced a part of an article written by Dr. Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict in which it appears that he is endorsing evolution”
Yes, so called theistic ‘evolution’, which is but another form of creationism. Creationism calls for something to be created, by nonnatural means, for example physical laws, life or minds.
egbooth:
“How can you possibly think that something created by our species in this present time can absolutely positively encompass every truth in existence in this universe or any other?”
That science is a human endeavor doesn’t preclude scientists to ascertain that their theories are robust against anthropocentric mistakes. There are both principles and verified theories with universal application that says both what is and what isn’t. But measured facts and verified theories have always a residue of uncertainty. That residue is industinguishable from zero in some cases, like evolution.
JohnC:
When Miller is suggesting correlations (really causation) between the completely finegrained (ie genuine) randomness of quantum mechanics and our observations he is suggesting a scientific theory that is both falsificable and “dotty” (thanks, Dale!).
“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt,
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1
That’s god talk in a nutshell. An endless spiel about an airy nothing.
JohnC:
I think I wrote my comment before I saw yours. The thing is, I think most people who reference Kuhn haven’t really gotten a grip on his ideas. If they truly understood what he was saying, he wouldn’t get held up as an icon of postmodernism, or called anti-realist.
Shen, I get the impression from his introduction to The Essential Tension, a collection of speeches and essays, that he wasn’t happy with the direction that some people took his work in. Part of the problem, by his own admission, is that he used the word “paradigm” to mean two or three different things at different points in his writing, as his ideas evolved, and many people miss that detail. At any rate, he never claimed that paradigms define reality as many people who cite him seem to think; his actual claim is that paradigms define how one perceives reality and therefore limits the kinds of questions one can ask, and how one interprets the answers.
I don’t see this as disagreeing with Popper either. They’re both saying that the model provides the questions to be asked, they’re just coming at it from different angles.
It seems to me that Miller is saying that when it comes to empirical, verifiable and falsifiable propositions, you have an obligation to believe – and teach – the position supported by the best evidence, but when it comes to unfalsifiable metaphysics, believe whatever you want, nobody can prove you wrong. Therefore, if you want to believe in a god, go ahead (as long as it isn’t one that would have left fingerprints on the universe, because we observe that there are none.)
PZ, on the other hand, appears to think that you should continue to apply parsimony to unfalsifiable propositions like those of metaphysics, and believing in gods or dragons or teapots orbiting Mars is just silly.
Apologies to either side if I have misrepresented them, but that’s what the positions look like from my post on the sidelines.
I tend to lean toward PZ’s position (or my representation of it, even if that’s not his actual position), but I don’t think I can call Miller incoherent. Miller’s god *isn’t a hypothesis* because his god lives outside the space of empirically testable propositions, in a conceptual space where there are no hypotheses or theories or observations, and everyone just believes whatever they want (according to Miller).
I *think* this is unjustified line-drawing and painting gods in the gaps even though (or precisely because) we haven’t found them anywhere else, but by the nature of the claims involved, I can’t prove that. Ultimately I’m prepared to agree to disagree with Miller’s metaphysics if he stands with me on empirically observable phenomena.
That’s why I also agree with PZ’s point that changing the focus to the existence of God would be exactly the wrong move. The existence or nonexistence of a god like Miller’s is, pretty much by definition, irrelevant. Teaching demonstrable falsehoods regarding empirical questions is anything but.
I think the text from which Miller quotes is this:
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040723_communion-stewardship_en.html
I think he puts up paragraph 63 on the screen and reads it, and then later paragraph 69.
This isn’t clearly something written by Ratzinger — Miller might be accused of cheating a little bit there. It is a text produced by the International Theological Commission of the RC Church, of which Ratzinger was at the time the head; and it was approved by him for publication. But it appears to have been the work of several people, possibly including Ratzinger, although he is not mentioned specifically in the description of the composition of the text provided at the end, except as having approved it:
“The theme of “man created in the image of God” was submitted for study to the International Theological Commission. The preparation of this study was entrusted to a subcommission whose members included: Very Rev. J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., Most Reverend Jean-Louis Bruguès, Msgr. Anton Strukelj, Rev. Tanios Bou Mansour, O.L.M., Rev. Adolpe Gesché, Most Reverend Willem Jacobus Eijk, Rev. Fadel Sidarouss, S.J., and Rev. Shun ichi Takayanagi, S.J.
As the text developed, it was discussed at numerous meetings of the subcommission and several plenary sessions of the International Theological Commission held at Rome during the period 2000-2002. The present text was approved in forma specifica, by the written ballots of the International Theological Commission. It was then submitted to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the President of the Commission, who has give his permission for its publication.”
Nonetheless even Ratzinger’s approval is significant.
windy writes…
“Say what? I hope you count evolution as that first GUT of biology. Then there was genetics which looked (to some) like it might blow evolution out of the water until they were reconciled in the modern synthesis. But I don’t see how being blown out of the water is a requirement for good science.”
Yes, I am counting evolution as the first GUT in biology. Genetics might be the next but it did not cause a paradigm shift. My point was not about whether that suggests good science for ToE or bad (in fact it probably suggests superb science, such as Maxwell’s E&M suggesting Relativity and then surviving it.).
My point was to say that so far ToE has not been replaced by anything else (such as classical physics to modern physics) that is vastly different, so biologists don’t have the disorienting experience of that in their history. As such, biologists are less apt to be Kuhnists in their Phil. of Sci., than physicists.
G.Tingey writes…
“Oh dear.
( again )
No god is detectable.
And, therfore, no account need be taken of any “god”.
Unless, and until this testable proposition is disproved (falsified) any discussion involving “god”, or indeed any religious belief, is a complete waste of time.
There, that wasn’t difficult, was it?”
G. Tingley, this is the assertion of a Logical Positivist, as I understand the term. And under LP, I agree with that. My point was that LP is not the only legitimate point of view.
PZ, this was my original point (the G.Tingey response). I am sorry if I am misrepresenting you on this but GT seems to sum up your argument as far as I can see. I only bring it up because I think it is germaine to understanding Ken Miller.
(But maybe it is only germaine to my understanding of Ken Miller).
SLC, Alejandro: Once again, what is the dividing line between science and philosophy? This is just the NOMA argument again, and played out in a realm where it is even worse as an argument, since philosophy and science do both have to do with the world, or at least do so in principle. (I won’t beg the question in favour of a realism, but I must say that the question of realism itself is what is at issue when it comes to the thesis of disjointness.)
suirauqa: And what is wrong with measuring joy? Assuming (as one should, see elsewhere) that my affect and emotional state is a function of my neuroendocrine system, then there is (in principle, I will grant that the research isn’t there yet) a way to measure my joy from the outside.
Chiefley: (Oh dear, not again.) No, at least while a practicing scientist, PZ is not a positivist. Positivism fails to account for (inter alia) the transphenomenal hypotheses used everywhere in science. Moreover, unlike some scientists who may pay lip service while speaking to the positivists (or to Popper), their practice contradicts their words. Real science is more complicated than those views.
Heather Kuhn: Hi. I haven’t mentioned your relative in passing, but you will see that a lot of practicing scientists find his famous theses of incommeasurability to be ridiculous. There’s a very good reason for that – as was pointed out nearly 40 years ago (by Mario Bunge), they are logically false and (more recently) the historical analysis strictu sensu is likely mistaken, to boot. I’ve written on this elsewhere, so I’ll leave this summary as is.
jeffw: Hidden variable theories are not false. None are known to work (Bohmian mechanics has yet to be made consistent with special relativity) but nor is there any general impossibility result on offer. I would say that one of the realist, propensity interpretations is the best bet around. (Copenhagen can be dismissed on logico-semantic grounds alone – again known for nearly 40 years at least.)
Keith: Hidden variables may not be dead, but it’s on life support. As for Copenhagen: (http://www.answers.com/topic/copenhagen-interpretation)
“According to a poll at a Quantum Mechanics workshop in 1997, the Copenhagen interpretation is the most widely-accepted specific interpretation of quantum mechanics, followed by the Many-worlds interpretation.[1]”
Then maybe you should be silent and let people who know more about quantum mechanics than you so pass judgment on the argument, hmmm?
PZ writes…
“… There’s no evidence for him, and even in the Q&A Miller distances himself from any attempt to pin a god down to a discrete intervention. So his god is a hypothesis that is indistinguishable from the hypothesis that there is no god, and he postulates no possibility of a test to support his idea. It’s simply not parsimonious. Shouldn’t every nerve in a scientist’s body be itching at the inclusion of an unnecessary and inaccessible and overbearingly complex yet utterly needless entity in a hypothesis? Why isn’t Miller dissatisfied?”
Sorry to be argumentative. This is the paragraph I am referring to as logical positivism. Am I missing the point of it? It seems that PZ’s objection to Ken Miller’s talk is that Ken didn’t subject his theology to the rules of scientific inquiry. Naturally, any theology will be unparsimonious in the light of that.
This is a sincere question, by the way. I am not just being argumentative. This is an area that I am trying to understand for my own sake. I appreciate all the responses so far.
I think Chris’s said in his last post what I was trying to say, but his is better stated.
Oi, had to rewrite my post, did one last google search and finally found it. Such a study was done, but it doesn’t give all the numbers. The ones that stuck out, however, were 41% of biologists didn’t believe in god, while that number was only 27% for political scientists.
I’m glad I found it, I misremembered a few things about it. I thought it was anthropologists that had the fewest nonbelievers , and that they were suprised at that result (it was the “social sciences” group as a whole that they were suprised at).
Re Torbjörn Larsson
1. I am using the term philosophical naturalism because that is the term used by Barbara Forrest in her Dover tsstimony.
2. In your discussion of hidden variables, I haven’t the slightest idea what you are talking about. Although I could go into a discussion of issues of microcausality and the Heisenberg principal, I don’t think it is appropriate on this board, which is not a physics discussion board.
Re George Cauldron
Creationism is also not science, nor is philosophical thesim. Miller, who is s philoscphical theist, states unequivocally that philosophical thesim is not science.
Nes,
My understanding is that only a minority of scientists (around 40%) believe in a personal god, and a similar fraction believe in an afterlife. The majority are either atheist or agnostic, or believe in some kind of “god” thing that most people wouldn’t call god. Of those three groups, I think the largest is atheist. IIRC, most scientists either think there’s no god, or don’t particularly think there is one, and are atheists in the broad sense of being non-theists.
Biologists are less likely to believe in god than scientists in general; physicists are even less likely to. (Around 30% and 20%, according to some study or other.)
The rate of god belief is much lower among eminent scientists, apparently. Only 7 percent of National Academy of Science members believes in a personal god. (With about 72 percent expressing “personal disbelief” and 21 percent expressing “doubt or agnosticism.”) About 8 percent believe in an afterlife.
Check out Edward J. Larson and Larry Whitham, “Scientists and Religion in America” Scientific American, September, 1999.
I’m skeptical of the article you link to at Rice. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s downplaying the level of nonbelief by citing only the figure for people who express positive disbelief, not the figure for lack positive belief.
It’s easy to make it sound like most scientists believe in God because most scientists don’t identify as “atheists.” This obscures the apparent fact that the majority of scientists don’t buy the god thing. (There’s been a lot of that kind of spinning of Larson & Witham’s results.)
As I suspected, the Rice study results have been seriously distorted. The Rice PR release cited the lower figures, and many mainstream media assumed a false dichotomy and reported that the majority of scientists do believe in god.
Wrong. The Rice results don’t actually say that.
They confirm the Larson & Witham result that the majority of scientists don’t believe in god, being atheist or agnostic.
http://www.lsj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060323/OPINION02/603230336/1087/opinion
W.V.O. Quine from http://tinyurl.com/gejux
(Dan Dennett, who transferred to Harvard to work with Quine, coined the verb “to quine”, meaning “to deny a distinction others feel to be obvious.”)
I think Quine would say PZ is arguing with theists over where to draw a line in a very gray area.
Thanks, Paul W, for retrieving the actual facts about the Rice study. What I think is REALLY significant is:
“Among the scientists Ecklund surveyed, less than 1 percent agreed the Bible was the actual word of God”.
Biblical literalism is undoubtedly at the intellectual root of this American disease. As far as I am aware there are only 2 groups of any significance who define their faith via a literalist view of their holy text – American fundamentalists and orthodox Muslim. Now it may be that it is their rejection of modernity (for a host of reasons) that has led them to embrace literalism, rather than the other way round. But it nonetheless seems to me that rather than waging war on theism in general, science and other evidence-based disciplines should be mobilised to attack literalism directly, as vigorously and publicly as possible.
There are no epistemological quandaries here, while intellectually there is almost complete unanimity in the scientific community (as distinct from attitudes to theism). And a focused attack would seem to be a better alternative than constantly fighting defensive campaigns.
As a final note, the principal weapon in such an attack should be ridicule, which shouldn’t be hard since literalism really is preposterous, and research has shown this tactic to be highly effective. People don’t mind feeling embattled, but they don’t want to appear silly.
On 1 — no reason for you to believe it under those terms. So don’t.
On 2 — one may praise the work of Francis Collins in science without endorsing his theological views. As I have noted on this blog before, many of us think Christianity calls us to reason, not unreason. It’s not science.
On 3 — good place to debate. The chief objection to evolution in school books that I have found is the belief that high school textbooks say “there is no God.” THAT is an irrational belief, absolutely ungrounded in fact. Refocusing the debate on that point, and making that point clear, that science doesn’t deny what it can’t test, is a key point in getting the many more rational believers to stop flapping that teaching evolution is somehow “unfair.” I give points to Miller for finding the problem; let’s discuss the rhetorical strategy and tactics to make the point.
Look — I confess my religion is irrational. Get over it. Your love of pirates is irrational, too. That’s part of the joy of being human, isn’t it? If you don’t agree with my faith, don’t join my church. (But you can still drop by and sing some of the better songs on occasion, and you’ll be welcome.)
I don’t lobby to have more pirates and squid put into the school curricula, though, and wouldn’t be too upset if I were told that there were other more important things going on during the Age of Piracy to discuss (like, say…The Enlightenment).
I also don’t mind when people admit that a belief is arational or irrational. I’ve told creationists that all they have to do to explain fossils and the flood is say it was a flat-out miracle by an omnipotent god — then we’re done, I can’t argue with them. The beef is with the false pseudo-scientific veneer they layer on top of their tale of miracles. Miller and Collins do the same thing. They clearly feel queasy about just saying “poof”, so they invent far-fetched rationalizations involving quantum mechanics, for instance, that just don’t fly, and they package their books as coming from a “scientist” and addressing “evidence,” when they don’t.
It’s true that the textbooks don’t say “there is no God.” Even I, fiendish arch-atheist that I am, don’t get up in class and announce that. The reality, though, is that science textbooks, including Miller’s, only discuss natural mechanisms. When we discuss the reality of biology, chance plays a major role, purpose does not. Evolution is a profligately wasteful, harsh, and to our eyes, cruel process. We don’t have to deny God — the real world that we describe is a standing rebuke to the sentiments of the Christianists. Sugar coating it isn’t going to help in the long run.
A bit more from that piece:
In 2004, about one-third of Americans agreed, “the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally.” Only 15 percent agreed, “the Bible is an ancient book of fables.”
Among the scientists Ecklund surveyed, less than 1 percent agreed the Bible was the actual word of God, and more than three-quarters agreed it was a “collection of fables recorded by men.”
I think that bears on what you say next:
The problem isn’t just literalism per se. It’s inerrantism in its many forms, i.e., the idea that the Bible is a reliable source of factual and/or moral guidance, because it’s divinely inspired.
And the root of that problem is the idea of divine inspiration. If the Bible is divinely inspired, it should have special status—it should be literally inerrant. Failing that, it should be mostly right with a few human errors creeping in somewhere.
The Bible should be generally true.
It is natural that Christians would think that the Bible is inerrant or close to it. I don’t think there’s anything very mysterious about American fundamentalist inerrantism. That’s not what needs explaining.
What needs explaining is why Christians elsewhere, notably in Europe, are so much less inerrantist.
I think the reason for that is historical. Europe had a priestly class for over a thousand years. The Catholic church kept the Bible away from the general run of people, who not only couldn’t read, but couldn’t have gotten their hands on a Bible anyway. It was up to the priests to interpret the Bible and tell you what you needed to know. This allowed the (relatively educated) priestly class to make accommodations with the secular world, ignoring and concealing much of what the Bible actually said.
After the Reformation, which threw a big monkey wrench into the Catholic monopoly, similar things happened in some important Protestant denominations, which also had a relatively educated “priesthood.” (Whether by that name or not.) Continuing the European tradition, ministers were generally expected to be educated experts, not just enthusiastic bible-thumpers. For example, for a long time most Anglican priests went to Oxford or Cambridge, where they were exposed to top-notch natural philosophy. This helped suppress Biblical inerrantism, from the top down. They were also rich guys, with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and keeping the general run of people from getting overly enthusiastic about religion in its rawer forms.
That did not happen in America, for the most part, because America wasn’t a densely-populated place with an established church hierarchy, or much of an educated aristocracy, or a tradition of expecting ministers to be educated. America was settled in a westward wave by people who didn’t have educated priests, so they rolled their own. Some ignorant half-literate farmer would feel the call, read his Bible, and take up preaching. Denominations that allowed this grew because they had a source of cheap ministers. (Notably the Baptists.) Denominations that didn’t stagnated. (Notably the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, and to a large extent the Catholics, except in major northern cities.)
So naturally, the emphasis was on the Bible as the source of reliable knowledge—not some expert class of city slickers with hifalutin’ educations. Bible-based sects could keep up with the wave of settlement by making cheap preachers on demand, and elite education-based sects got left behind.
This destroyed the long-standing tradition of watering down the Bible and leaving it up to experts who made accommodations with temporal power and secular knowledge. Without those established selection pressures keeping it in check, Christianity reverted to the wild type.
The suppression of inerrantism took a lot of infrastructure; it doesn’t happen by itself. In Europe, it depended on power arrangements to exert systematic top-down pressure from wealthy educated elites and squash reversions to the wild type among the commoners.
This has a lot of unfortunate implications. One is that it’s hard to fight inerrantism and literalism, because liberal theology is in no position to throw stones, and it just doesn’t have a lot of clout.
Theologically liberal Christians generally don’t want to mix it up with the fundamentalist inerrantists, because they don’t want to emphasize the unreliability of the Bible. They may know the Bible is terribly unreliable, but even the ones who do more or less know that often kid themselves that there’s something especially beautiful and inspiring about it that’s especially deep and right. It’s mythic, but it’s not just that—it’s divinely inspired in some sense that makes it more than just a big book of fables collected by a bunch of not-very-special and relatively backward people.
Because of this, they very rarely say what really needs to be said: the Bible is often profoundly wrong, and often on major points. To avoid saying this, they tell little white lies about how the Bible can’t be taken literally, must be interpreted “metaphorically,” etc.
That’s mostly wrong, and it’s giving away the store. The point is that most of the Bible is meant literally, or the metaphors and morals are obvious, and much of is just flat wrong, especially on some central points of theology. (E.g., the nature of evil, substitutional punishment, salvation, etc.) The Bible isn’t just wrong on some minor points that people take too “literally”—it’s a profoundly messed up book in a way that reveals the factual and moral corruption at the very heart of Christianity.
Which is why liberal Christians mostly wimp out on opposing fundamentalism. They aren’t going to make the best arguments, because they’d sound like atheists, God forbid. Their accommodation between reason and unreason is pretty delicate, and can’t withstand much analysis or exposure. The fundies make better arguments.
The best we can expect from most liberal Christians is some namby-pamby whining about how the fundies are not nice when they take the alleged Word of God too seriously. It’s hard for liberal Christians to ridicule people for taking the Bible too seriously, because too many liberal Christians take the Bible seriously, too, and they have no principled way of distinguishing between the reasonable parts and the unreasonable parts. So their emphasis is on niceness, not truth, which makes them vulnerable in any real argument.
One reason for atheists like me to say these things is that most liberal Christians don’t get just how bad the Bible is, and just how shaky the foundations of Christianity are. They also don’t get that they are part of the problem of fundamentalism.
If you quote scripture approvingly, you’re supporting fundamentalism; the tacit but obvious implication is that scripture is a particularly useful guide to truth, beauty, or righteousness. That’s not only false, but an extremely dangerous idea, given what’s actually in the scriptures.
It is most certainly possible to argue against the claim that miracles were accomplished by omnipotent deities, but it’s usually pointless – a person self-deluded enough to actually believe that thesis is beyond reason, and a person willing to forward the thesis despite knowing it’s not true won’t be honest enough to acknowledge your points.
The people we’re dealing with are the stupid and the power-hungry dishonest, which constitute the vast majority of the population. There are ultimately only a very few ways a minority can maintain its personal safety in such a situation.
Caledonian, am I correct in guessing you own a gun and are a libertarian?
“Supralight signals destabilises gauge theories and would be observable.”
And as usually it seems to be more complex than the main effect. I stumbled on a somewhat technical, somewhat tendentious explanation on the blog of a somewhat cranky theoretical physicist. But it is a broader and more erudite explanation, albeit centered on an offending paper. He also discusses cases of reparametrisations of the theory.
“It is no secret that I consider all people whose main scientific focus is a revision of the basic postulates of quantum mechanics – and a return to the classical reasoning – to be crackpots. They just seem too stubborn and dogmatic or too intellectually limited to understand one of the most important results of the 20th century science. …
Every new prediction based on the assumption that there is a classical theory that underlies the laws of quantum mechanics has been proven wrong. …
The non-local hidden variables predict a genuine violation of the Lorentz symmetry. I think that all these theories predict such a brutal violation of the Lorentz symmetry that they are safely ruled out, too. But even if someone managed to reduce the violation of the laws of special relativity in that strange framework, these theories will be ruled out in the future. Their whole philosophy and basic motivation is wrong.” ( http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/09/wavefunctions-and-hydrodynamics.html )
That was the tendentious part. Then comes the technical part… In the end:
“The very idea that the wavefunction should be reparameterized into different variables by a non-linear transformation is a deeply flawed misconception. The linearity of the Hilbert space of the quantum mechanical wavefunctions is one of the key principles that allows quantum mechanics to work. …”
Keith:
“Copenhagen can be dismissed on logico-semantic grounds alone – again known for nearly 40 years at least.”
Copenhagen (mostly with wavefunction real) seems as jeffw notes be the most accepted among physicists, when they discuss metaphysics. But decoherence and the manyworlds interpretation is also discussed. Tegmark notes that it is most parsimonious. (I believe one drop two axioms while adding one new property, manyworlds.)
SLC:
1. Fair enough.
2. Well, I can’t discuss QM without refering to some properties of QM, and SR & QFT (QM+SR). I’m not sure this is helpful, but here is a more elaborate discussion:
What we observe and why:
Specifically, I’m refering to Bell’s inequalities and the measurements that shows that they are violated and that Bell’s theorem is correct: “No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem )
We also observe that causality is a fact. Also, relativity says that no information or material object can travel faster than light, and we observe that too.
This follows from that the theory obeys the property of lorentz covariance, and conserved quantities like light speed are lorentz invariant. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_invariance )
Now comes the clincher:
In quantum field theory, which is a relativistic formulation of quantum mechanics, causality is retained by keeping locality but dropping oneworld realism, or by introducing manyworld realism.
Locality is essential to separate objects in spacetime and be able to speak about individual particles.
(“Locality is one of the axioms of relativistic quantum field theory, as required for causality. The formalization of locality in this case is as follows: if we have two observables, each localized within two distinct spacetime regions which happen to be at a spacelike separation from each other, the observables must commute.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_locality )
(((And see above about reparametrisations (reformulations) of QM axioms. I can also give you the references to papers that discuss stability of gauge theories like QFT’s when assuming temporary breakage of lorentz invariance, ie temprary supraluminal signals since locality can’t be broken.)))
To sum up, we can’t have a local hidden variable theory, it must be non-local.
“but dropping oneworld realism, or by introducing manyworld realism.”
That should be determinism here, not realism.
As usual, you are quite mistaken.
Such stupidity requires not only significant innate intelligence, but years of careful study and training. No uneducated person can be that stupid, no matter how hard they might try.
SLC:
Just to clarify on point 1, Forrest means metaphysical (or ontological) naturalism:
“Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection (2000)
Abstract: In response to the charge that methodological naturalism in science logically requires the a priori adoption of a naturalistic metaphysics, I examine the question whether methodological naturalism entails philosophical (ontological or metaphysical) naturalism.
I conclude that the relationship between methodological and philosophical naturalism, while not one of logical entailment, is the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion given (1) the demonstrated success of methodological naturalism, combined with (2) the massive amount of knowledge gained by it, (3) the lack of a method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of evidence for the supernatural. The above factors together provide solid grounding for philosophical naturalism, while supernaturalism remains little more than a logical possibility.” ( http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/barbara_forrest/ )
To continue clarifying this point, the case in science is generally stronger than in philosophy. By the nature of theories they do predict things that can’t be observed besides the testable ones. (Contrary to what Ed says above.) For example, the very moment of big bang, or the very instance of the first biological replication, both likely impossible observations. Theories also predicts universal positives or negatives. For example, the universe do expand forever, and it doesn’t compress ever.
The trick here is to find such a theory, or conversely show it is impossible to find one. When the scientific position would be the philosophical one. But no one can today say whether it is impossible or not.
Only that as we learn more, the impossibility seems less likely by extrapolation since the gaps keep disappearing. A pity theories are sometimes posed but never proved by induction. :-)
Goodness gracious, if the “formal, codified model of rationality” that you helped develop is written down anywhere, perhaps you could provide a reference — maybe it’s in the citation to your Fields Medal. Must not be part of Quine’s work, though, since you think little of that lightweight logician.
The supernatural ceases even to be a logical possibility once you decide to keep an open mind to new natural phenomena. For something to recognized as beyond nature, we need to have a criterion for determining when something is part of (or not part of) nature. That criterion can be conceptual, assigning phenomena to one category or another by properties, or merely definitive, consisting of a list of phenomena and their (arbitrary) classification. Since ‘nature’ is whatever we observe, neither method can coherently exclude an observed phenomenon from nature.
Caledonian, you are simply reiterating Quine’s point, albeit with far less eloquence.
Um, no. We don’t acquire the concept of ‘objects’ from our cultures. The concept of ‘objects’ is not on equal footing with that of the ‘gods’. The difference between them is not one of degree, but of kind.
I’d say you were intentionally misunderstanding my argument, but possibly you’ve failed to understand both Quine’s statements AND my own. Against that kind of intellect, I contend in vain.