We’ve encountered Michael Voris before: the painfully dogmatic and fervent Catholic Dominionist kook. He has a ridiculous video in which he asserts that theology is the queen of all the sciences because everything reduces to god, ultimately — which does leave one wondering why theology never produces any ideas that are actually useful to all of those scientific disciplines. I mean, take math for example: mathematicians are constantly coming up with tools and ideas that chemists and physicists and biologists and geologists all find awesomely useful. But what has theology given us? Nothing.
Michael drones on, going through the motions — he really seems dead-eyed and robotic in this video, doesn’t he? — and you probably got bored 30 seconds into the 5 minute clip. So I want to focus on just one point that Voris made, and mentioned in the caption, and which actually isn’t unique to Catholic nutjobs at all.
The fields of science can offer all kinds of information in answer to the question how… through the observance of the human intellect. But when asking the question why, man MUST turn to the divinity of the Creator.
How many times have you heard that claim: science can answer “how” questions, but it can never answer “why” questions, therefore we have to leave those kinds of questions to a non-scientific domain, which must be religion, therefore god. And that’s wrong at every step!
There’s no reason the interpreter of “why” questions has to be religion…why not philosophy? That seems a more sensible objective source than a religion burdened with a dogma and a holy book and wedded to revelation rather than reason. Voris assumes there has to be a divine creator, but that’s one of the questions, and you don’t get to just let it go begging like that.
The more fundamental question, though, is this oft-repeated distinction that science can’t answer “why” questions. Of course it can, if there’s a “why” in the first place! We are perfectly capable of asking whether there is agency behind a phenomenon, and if there is, of exploring further and identifying purpose. Why should we think otherwise?
Imagine you came home, as I did the other day, and saw this on the edge of your yard.
You’d immediately assume it was artificial, as I did — the perfectly circular outline suggests that a machine came by, and someone lowered some auger-like device and drilled a large hole in the yard. You could also look up and down the street and see that the hole-driller had struck several other places, all in a line parallel to the road and exactly the same distance from the curb. They are almost certainly the product of intent.
Does that in any way imply that I’m now done, that asking why these holes were dug is beyond the scope of all rational inquiry? That I ought to drop to my knees and praise ineffable Jesus, who caused holes to manifest in the ground for reasons that I, as a mere mortal man, cannot possibly question? Oh, Lord, mine is not to question why, I must accept what is!
Of course not. I can speculate reasonably; it looks like a hole for planting something in. I can check into the city offices, and learn that there’s concern about emerald ash borers killing trees in our community. I can see the next day that a city crew came by and put new saplings in place all up and down the street. Even without actually talking to anyone directly, I can figure out from the evidence why there is a hole in my yard.
Similarly, if there was a god busily poofing the entirety of the cosmos into existence, that’s an awful lot of evidence that can be examined for motive…are we to instead believe it is so incoherent that we can discern no possible purpose behind all this data?
And what if instead, I’d come home and found one hole in the neighborhood, it was a rough-edged and asymmetrical crater, and in the center of it was a small rocky meteorite? Then I could ask how it came to be there (it fell out of the sky and smacked into my yard), and I could try to ask why, but the answer would be that there was no agency behind it, there was no purpose, and it was simply a chance event of a kind that happens all the time.
When people try to argue that science can’t answer “why” questions, what they’re actually saying is that they don’t like the answer they get — there is no why! There is no purpose or intent! — and are actually trying to say that the only valid answer they’ll accept is one that names an intelligence and gives it a motive. That is, they want an answer that names a god as an ultimate cause, and a description that doesn’t include agency doesn’t meet their presuppositions.
I don’t know what science has done for me lately but religion has given us the concept of just war. With out that where would Iraq be today?
Every time you see the word “Revelation” used by a religious, it should be translated as “someone/thing whispered in my head”. Whether it was Abraham, Elijah, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, Rev Moon, the Pope, WLC, Fred Phelps or your next door neighbor…..they are just claiming they know what God wants everyone to do because a voice in their head told them so.
Michael Voris is the gift that keeps on giving — an endless supply of unintentional humor. He’s such a perfect self-parody that one has to admire the chutzpah of someone who attempts to go him one better (and does a pretty good job).
The problem is, they keep saying that religion tells us “why” but it doesn’t. It always boils down to “God only knows” or “It’s God’s will” and the always popular “God moves in mysterious ways”. None of these are a real answer to “why” but just hand waving.
@Mr Ed: “I don’t know what science has done for me lately…”
You can’t be that…I mean, nobody is that dense…right? Been to the dentist lately? Ride in a car much? How’d you type that comment?
And I’m not even gonna respond to the idiocy of the last half of your statement.
The Spanish Inquisition!
Yes, you see, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Yay, my major isn’t worthless!
On the one hand, yay saplings! On the other, what’s with cities impinging on private property without advance notice? A couple of years ago we heard some ruckus and looked outside to find a few guys digging a hole in our lawn to put in a huge storm drain/gate. I was not pleased. I understand they can emininently grab that part of our property, but a little notification so I didn’t think there were hooligans ripping out my lawn, please?
I would look at that hole and think “very tidy mole men“.
Reminds me of that book “Night at the Gates” where the theist cannot see past his own pre-conceived ideas surrounding the “why” when confronted by the rational of biology. Read it here: http://rdcoste.com/
It’s actually planted on that little grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street, which I think is municipal property. It’s also where the fire hydrant and traffic signs are located.
the part on science’s capability to answer why questions were pretty well said. This will really help if I get into any arguments.
To be fair, John Paul II was opposed to both Iraq wars, in 1991 and in 2003. Of course, he didn’t threaten to excommunicate Catholic politicians who supported the war, but he did make his opposition known, FWIW.
Voris
You have to love the way the crazies make “human reason” or “human intellect” into a pejorative. I remember seeing the same crap in pictures from the creation “museum”. Its sad that they don’t recognize that the alternative to “human reason” is not “divine grace” but “human not using his/her brain”.
@Dustan, #5
Check your sarcasm detector. I think it might be malfunctioning.
I’ve never heard one of those “Why is there anything?” questions that didn’t really mean “Why did God do that?”
—
Dustin
Think irony.
—
Carlie
In my city the metre or so of “my” lawn nearest the road actually belongs to the city.
It’s “their” trees and “their” sidewalk.
Voris is on the wrong side of history or sanity. The US Catholic church has lost 20 million people in the last few years, 1/3 of their membership.
Exactly. Supernaturalists are convinced that there is a why behind it all, and that why is their god. Science does not deal with the question of “why” because science has nothing to say about god. Of course, science has nothing to say about their presupposed “why” because it does not exist, and science only speaks of what actually exists.
That is a nice looking hole. However, the dirt around it on my screen is a bright purple or mauve.
Anyone else see that or is that an artifact of my screen?
I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. I was too distracted by the dead squirrel on his head.
My question: why is the dirt purple? Is it just me? Makes me want to get down on my knees and, err, find out….
As a friend of mine says, the person who invented the water heater has brought more good to more people than all of the theologians who have ever lived.
Excellent piece PZ. I’d say it is entirely accurate–religious beliefs stem from overzealous application of social-cognitive systems and this seems to always assume intentionality.
One thing that I’d add that seems to get rare mention in this discussion is that intentional causation — the thing that religion necessarily posits in its interventionist forms — always produces some type of discernible pattern.
Even the causation resulting from the intentions of an insane agent leaves a trace of a pattern.
Not so for gods.
Oh, of course individual believers tend to make out some pattern like “God answered prayer A but not prayer B for reason X that I now know” but in the grand scheme of all these claims for multiple religions and gods and contradictory interpretations, it breaks down into incoherence.
The religious even have the built-in rationalization: divine mystery. But if it is an actual intentional scheme, then a pattern would necessarily be discernible and not incoherent.
The much more parsimonious explanation is just what you have touched on but I would simply word a little differently: the entire enterprise of assuming there is a “why” is a result of the over-application of the heuristics of our social cognitive systems. It works in both a bottom-up and top-down manner. It is intuitive to assume intentional causation and hence a why (at least initially for many circumstances). This tendency can become amplified by the cultural sources of religion that posit invisible intentional agents at work in the world both past and present. Thus you have a recipe for tenacious and fallacious reasoning.
Some people just go make a living out of it like Voris here.
Very nice piece! I particularly love this bit at then end:
When people try to argue that science can’t answer “why” questions, what they’re actually saying is that they don’t like the answer they get — there is no why! There is no purpose or intent!
Also, I’m not the first to ask, but HOW is it that the ground at your place is purple? :)
I prefer asking ineffable Jeebus.
Jeebus has a much more appropriate sound: kookier as are the followers.
The funky colors are because it was a casual shot taken on my Hipstamatic.
Hipstamatic is so much fun…
5PB 3/2
I came up with an answer to the “why are we here?” question a while ago, when I was struggling with exactly this sort of thing, wondering whether there was a purpose to my existence, or anyone else’s.
My answer: we’re all here to make art. Humanity is a giant art project. I think it’d be awesome if everyone took this on as their purpose and applied it to all walks of life, from politics to molecular chemistry. I think life would be a lot more interesting, not to mention appealing, that way. I decided that this would be a good purpose after realizing that humans were not created by any one agent, but arose spontaneously, just like the rest of life, yet have the capacity to create things deliberately ourselves. It’s a fascinating paradox. And I don’t see everyone can’t be an artist in one way or another. PZ is a biologist, but he is also an artist with his words. It’s the rare person who doesn’t have some sort of artistic outlet, whether it be gardening or cooking or crocheting or sports even. Imagine how much cooler things would be if we all thought of ourselves as being artists in addition to being teachers, politicians, plumbers, hedge fund managers, and treated the task of creating beauty as intrinsic to whatever metier we’ve chosen.
Of course, that’s my pie in the sky fantasy talking. But the point is that I came up with that purpose, and I think it’s a pretty cool one, but because I recognize that it wasn’t provided by some supernatural entity that created me, I don’t expect everyone to agree with me on its potential coolness. Purpose is something we all get to decide for ourselves, because we are the only beings for whom the concept of purpose matters (so far). I think that’s great. Religious people find that sad and/or frightening, to think that they alone are in charge of determining their purpose. I find that sad and limited.
Yep, from UFO fanatics, to pseudo-scientists, to people looking for “quantum consciousness” (and sadly, we even get some of those here among the otherwise rational), its not about what is true, but about not liking the existing answers. Its not about even trying to come up with a different one. For something like consciousness, for example, its seems perfectly plausible that the brain handles retrieval in a haphazard fashion, with possibly thousands of alternative paths, then “filters out” the obviously bad ones, like a computer checking multiple files it finds against a generated hash from the input, in an attempt to “find” related content. There is no certainty that its going to be right, and the mere fact that viewing the same object, from the same position, even under the same lighting, can’t 100% guarantee that other sensory inputs, what you where already thinking about, your mood, or how sleep deprived you are, or even whether your head was tilted a bit differently, won’t generate a completely different, yet still similar, output. Throw enough of those inputs off though, and even the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the hash system goes nuts.
There is literally no bloody reason you *need* randomness in the brain, or “quantum effects”, because the inputs are *never* identical. But, this is not what people *want* to be true, so they deny neuroscience, and go looking for spooky shit, or just babble, “There must be more!” Religion is just this tendency written over the whole world, not just one aspect of it. “We don’t like the answer, it scares us, annoys us, or makes us feel less special, or something, so there *had to be* some other explanation!” So, what the hell is it, without invoking complete gibberish then, because if that is all you have, you are wasting everyone’s time?
My problem with “religion can tell you why…” is its circularity. Religious thought assumes it knows there’s a why and interprets everything in light of that. Science tells you how tornadoes work, religion tells you one hit your house because god hates the gays. Or is it karma? A tricksy Jinn? Your star sign?
raven, #16
That’s interesting how they are apparently in denial about their member reduction. Is it possible that they still count all the baptized as their “members”, and not only the practicing ones, to puff up their numbers (like they often do when we hear that magic “billion catholics” number)? If so, they’re not just liars, they’re stupid liars.
Sally Strange:
Oh, we’re just here because the mice want answers.
Crap. Did I miss a Deepcrap-ist quantum consciousnesser wandering through Pharyngula? Was this recent? Sounds like fun.
The purple dirt is proof positive that our dear P.Z. has been corrupted by the vile splinter group worshiping the false idol of the ‘purple’ flying spaghetti monster:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=31692747545
Reader take note: raven uses mental illness per se as an insult (including in this recent thread not yet indexed by google).
While the pattern is clear enough, I suspect very little planning goes into these insults. IMO, rather, raven like most people holds some degree of contempt for mentally ill people, has not encountered much public resistance to expressions of this contempt, and so finds these to be simply high-efficiency insults: hard-hitting with little or no blowback, and of course no collateral damage to anyone raven cares about.
I can never decide whether I should, laugh, cry or run in fear every time I watch an episode of The Vortex. The only thing I know for sure is that Michael might actually learn something if he pulled his head out of his own vortex.
And I was wondering about the S.T.B. in his title so I wiki’ed it. Turns out it’s a Bachelors of Sacred Theology…ooohhhhh. Of course this bachelors degree is considered a graduate level degree in the theological realm. They can’t even get degree nomenclature right.
According to the Catholic church itself, they were up 1% last years.
Other Catholic sources claim they are down 33%.
There is a huge discrepancy here. The Catholic church usually counts baptisms. They also won’t let you leave anymore. So with that methodology, they will always report an increase.
One of my Catholic relatives is now a mid level lay official. In a Protestant church. They are still counted as a Catholic.
The churches are notorious for cooking their numbers and reporting as many people as possible. They do this for the same reason a cat arches its back and fluffs its fur out. To look larger and more important than they really are.
Well, kind of meant in the more general sense of, “Modern neuroscience doesn’t have all the explanations, so…”, type things. For me, its all in how you look at the problem, not some failing in the existing explanations. But, for some people, if it doesn’t explain why they are scared of spiders, and like vanilla, instead of chocolate, its not sufficient an explanation. This is fairly absurd. All its saying is, “You couldn’t map someone’s brain onto someone else’s.”, its not a case of, “We don’t have a clue why any of it works that way.” There is a major difference.
The first thing I thought after seeing that was “Sandworms”.
The second thing I thought was “Wait a minute… the picture doesn’t look like it occurred in a desert”
Immediately after my brain went “ALL HAIL SUBURBAN SHAI-HULUD”
AHS is a troll. And a stalker. And a crazy loon.
It tries to derail as many threads as possible anyway it can.
This thread is now over with and it’s the AHS the troll show now. Too bad, it was amusing to laugh at the Catholic Dominionists.
@21…
And the person who invented Preparation H…
Bullcrap. Any mom can answer the “Why?” question.
BECAUSE I SAID SO, THAT’S WHY!!!
This true? I was planning on having a little apostasy party when I go back to my country.
Looking for meaning?
Why not Zoidberg?
/overused internet meme
andyo:
Sort of, but it came down to quantum tomatoes and dog piss of destruction. Silliness, really.
No complaint here, but I always read these posts of yours in the voice of Baghdad Bob.
:)
+++++
“The fact is that as soon as they reach Pharyngula gates, we will besiege them and slaughter them. Until now they have refused to do battle with us. They are just going places. One can describe them as a boa: when it feels threatened, it runs to somewhere else.”
Raven:
No he isn’t, anymore than you are.
Purple soil: it could be the picture. Pinkish pictures are an artifact of some cell phone cameras. For more realistic pictures, PZ can tone down the red about two notches when the pictures get to his computer, using whatever image-processing software is handy. OTOH, maybe it’s just rich, black earth.
Similarly, a lot of football stadia have artificial grass that is the same colour as the fake grass mats that you see in grocery stores. The camera operators or perhaps the studio control operators adjust the colour until the grass looks more natural and makes other colours, such as the players’ uniforms, inaccurate.
Hey look, it’s a recursive proof of my claim. Thanks, raven.
This is of course not a charge you would level at anyone who complains about sexist, racist or homophobic insults.
For whatever reason, you exempt from criticism the use of mental illness as an insult.
Terribly sorry about spoiling your fun. Had you laughed at them without using mental illness per se as an insult, I would have had no legitimate cause to complain.
Answers:
Easement – look it up.
Never EVER plant anything on an easement that you would be upset to find pruned, mangled, dug up or otherwise trashed. Amazing how many people think they have sole control over “their” property….
EAB: Ask a theologian WHY the EAB is killing our native trees.
(I have the answer…the Asian ashes co-evolved with the pests and developed resistance to them. Our thin “skinned” trees are incredibly susceptible. In five years, a mature live ash tree in Ohio will be a rare thing.)
Well actually science can answer “why” in many cases, while theology cannot do so at all.
Why do birds have the anatomy they do? Because they are modified dinosaurs.
Why do viruses and pathogenic bacteria exist? Mere survival and reproduction.
Now what “answer” can theology supply to those question? None, except those that science give. ID can’t give us a purpose except to say either that “God wanted it like that,” or god wanted everything to survive and reproduce–which is the answer that came from science, apart from the superfluous mention of God.
In some sense it’s true that science can’t answer “why” questions when those presuppose purposes for things that don’t have actual purposes, other than the a posteriori purposes given to them by us. In those cases, however, the premise that there is some hidden purpose is illegitimate, at least insofar as we can determine.
Glen Davidson
Where I live, the city owns sixteen feet from the edge of the road, which includes a chunk of my lawn. The good news is that if I have a problem with the drains or water pipes under that part of the lawn, they’ll fix it for free. The bad news is that I can’t cut down a tree on that part of the lawn once it gets more than a foot in diameter, without the city’s permission, which is seriously backlogged. The good news is, if the roots of their tree cause a problem, they pay for it. You should know these things, PZ.
The province also owns 66′ from the high-water mark of all lakes, in case they want to put in a towpath to speed up boats by towing them with horses.
PZ, a meteorite hole is almost always circular no matter how much of a slant the meteorite came in at, until it’s practically scraping the ground on the way in. You can experiment with mud and stones to see that it’s true.
Stop being so defensive raven. AHS (OM) is right to call you out. Accept it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon
I like loons.
I interpret “Why” as meaning “To what end?”. Then asking why makes much more sense, as it doesn’t imply agent causation.
The “Why?” of our existence is the same as bacteria or any other life form: To consume and thereby attempt to continue existing. All other pursuits are secondary.
Asking “Why?” meaning “Who caused this and for what purpose?” is a loaded question and begs the question of a higher order of agency. And if the answer is god, you may as well ask again: “But Why god?”. And again, “But why?”. Even 2 year olds learn to stop asking why…
Wasn’t there a study done where researchers actually went out and counted cars in church parking lots to get some sort of factual numbers about church attendance. ISTR that that method revealed much lower attendance rates than self-reporting, either by the church or by the parishioners.
Interesting information, Raven! When mere companies, clubs, or service organizations lose members, they can do market surveys to find out what people want and change their offerings. But churches are in a bind: they’re offering The Truth and they can’t change it to suit their market. Even Vatican II’s attempt to be user-friendly has been reversed by the church’s current conservative leadership. They’re right, everybody else is wrong, end of story. With luck it will be the end of the church as a significant force.
So it’s not my TV that gives red football uniforms a sort of pinkish cast? If so, I’m glad to know that.
Yep, there’s been numerous studies that use indirect methods like this. This one is not quite the one you’re thinking of (I’m trying to find it right now), but scroll down to “Church attendance studies by Presser and Stinson”
http://www.religioustolerance.org/rel_rate.htm
philosophically, the “why” question is of little to no value. In any meaningful way the “how” question answers the why.
the why question is a trap created by the power-trippers to confuse the believers.
Motive is never really know for certain(as in scientific certainty). We people can never really know why we do something. We can simply settle on a “reason” why we did it.
A major problem with old psychology is it tries to show motive. Freud and Adler were great thinkers and helped to open the mind to us. But the certainty of their ideas is not available. As Karl Popper said, Freud and Adler’s ideas can’t be falsified. and that is a major problem.
excellent book on this is,
How To Think About Weird Things, Theodore Schick Jr. and Lewis Vaughn, 1995.
He has correctly identified your pattern of using mental illness as an insult.
Oops. The most famous of these parking lot studies (Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves) is in fact mentioned in the above link.
It’s this one from 1993: http://www.umt.edu/sociology/faculty_staff/ellestad/documents/318_Hadawayetal1993_USChurchAttendance.pdf
There’s been a lot of responses: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hadaway+marler+chaves
Yes, they do count everyone who was ever baptised as a member. It’s hard even to get excommunicated — although one way that seems underused is reporting a suspected child-abusing priest to the secular authorities.
Ireland had a procedure by which you could apply to be taken off their list, which I think took about two years; but when applications went over 7,000 per year they stopped doing it.
However, if you want to do it in a way the church won’t recognize, you can do so here:
http://www.iamanatheist.com/
There’s also Atheise the dead.
I found out about the football uniforms when I went to a few Argos games.
I imagine a lot of people would walk to their neighbourhood church.
Here’s how they attempted to deal with that problem. (Tpyos mine.)
Here is a response by (as far as I can tell) secular researchers Michael Hout and Andrew Greeley, who say:
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/stuff_for_blog/church2.pdf
Voris, why ebola, why flu, why cancer, why starvation (Matt 7:7, Luke 11:9)? Why, why, why? Reality generates so many why questions, religion generates so many bullshit answers. Of course, with religion all the answers are the same.
Has anyone else noticed the clue in the introductory music, which seems to go woooOOOO!
“Why? There is no why.”
Yoda
“So knowing deep withing his own being that he is lost, he writhes about computing mathematical formulas and projecting into the deep of space and setting off on great explorations of the human cell, completely blithe to the most simple of all truths; that it is the logic of God that makes mathematics possible and the darkness of space and all its wonders is nothing except ripples in time from God whispering, ‘Let there be'”.
This is one heck of a run-on sentence.
I have to wonder how “computing mathematical formulas”, “projecting into the deep of space”, and “setting off on great explorations of the human cell” could possibly be bad things as he implies, especially if one was initially “lost”. (That’s not what he means by the word “lost”, but the way he uses it is interesting…) He seems to think that this generic person’s time would be better spent learning theology as if that is more important and more useful than studying the Universe.
On a side note, I’ve always hated it when people use the word “he” as a third person singular pronoun for a generic human.
QFT. In fact one can view the brain as a device for taming,/I> the randomness* of the environment, and free will as its (partial) success in doing so: if I decide to do X, then whatever random events the world throws at me, I try to harness them to achieving that goal, or at least to prevent them preventing me achieving it. IIRC (I don’t have a reference handy), people are very bad at producing even pseudo-random sequences, although that might sometimes be very useful (game theory shows there are many cases in which a strategy incorporating randomness would be advantageous).
However, as a caveat, it is at least possible quantum effects are involved in human cognition, since they seem probably to be involved in photosynthesis, and possibly in birds’ magnetic sense.
* Even if the universe is actually deterministic**, photons are constantly arriving from parts of the universe that have been out of causal contact with our own location since the era of inflation, and at least some of them will individually have non-negligible influence on events on Earth (e.g. gamma rays causing mutations in our DNA). But even without taking these photons into account, many of the events we encounter would be “effectively random” in the sense of being uncorrelated with anything going on in the brain before they impinge on the senses.
** Quantum mechanics is often said to be non-deterministic, but physicists seem to differ on whether this is actually so: the evolution of the Schroedinger wave equation is deterministic, and the interpretation of collapse events is controversial.
Seems to me that part of the argument made in this column is the same as when Samuel Johnson and Boswell were standing by a well discussing David Hume, and Boswell was arguing that we do not know causes. Johnson stomped his toe. “Then who did that?”
The juxtaposition reasoning was very intense.
But it is not always so reliable. The thousand year practice of bloodletting for example. Well, the face was red before the bleeding wasn’t it? Must have helped. George Washington was among other victims of this seemingly perfectly logical and time-honored medicine done by doctors, the learned, and barbers- come-right-in.
As I recall, Voris is also a supporter of Catholic monarchy.
Ooh! That must tickle your fancy, Walton!
Science can answer “why” questions and I see the importance of stressing it, but the retort to the stupid “theology can answer why questions” is very straightforward:
“Why does God exist?”
Remember the question “How the world came into existence?”
If you answer “God”, you just move the question to “How God came into existence?”
This is the same.
“God” does not answer much.
And nor does theology.
Why?
Because out was thermodynamically favorable.
It… Not out…
Farm airport…darn architect
damn autocorrect! Arg!
Hadaway, Marler and Chaves’s response to Hout and Greeley
doi: 10.2307/2657484
http://www.zshare.net/download/96155619c9d2e45a/
Oh! Convenient. http://andrewgelman.com/2006/07/counting_church/
That’s a blog post that includes the original 1993 study by Hadaway, Marler and Chaves; the 1998 replies by Theodore Caplow, Michael Hout and Andrew Greeley, and Robert Woodberry; Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves’s reply; an article by Tom Smith and an article by Stanley Presser and Linda Stinson.
with PDFs for all.
I tried, i really tried to watch this video. But…30 seconds in my head started to ache. I didn’t want to lose another 5 years of my life in a coma (as I did after watching Waterworld with Kevin Costner) so I quickly hit the pause button.
Another fun thing to ask theists is for a list of 10 things that theologians have settles as conclusively as, say, geologists accept plate tectonics theor, or physicists accept Newtonian mechanics. Even the number and names of the real gods and goddesses have never been settled.
Walton wrote: “As I recall, Voris is also a supporter of Catholic monarchy.”
Yes, and if that doesn’t tell you he is a dominionist, nothing will.
He must have skipped eighth grade history as our forefathers told our last king (George III)to fuck off as we intended to be a free nation governed by its inhabitants.
Walton wrote: “As I recall, Voris is also a supporter of Catholic monarchy.”
So he’s half right in your book?
I’m sorry, did some scientist somewhere develop a “metaphysics detector” while I wasn’t looking? Did someone manage to explain existential intertia? Did someone manage to explain how causation functions without final causation after Hume denied causality? No? Huh, the way you people are talking, I thought that they had.
I love the way people like Voris constantly tell us that because understanding their deity and the utterly inexplicable things he/she/it apparently does involves ‘complex theology’, it somehow requires a brain the size of a small planet to comprehend. Which is actually a bit of a cheek when in reality it’s all just a contrived, torturous exercise in crass stupidity that tries desperately hard to make religion fit with reality. Which, of course, it never will.
Ha ha!
Did someone manage to explain how colorless green ideas sleep furiously?
QFFT!
Though if they thought for a minute about what the why questions would answer, then maybe they’d see the absurdity. For example, holding up the carbon atom as some miracle of fine-tuning effectively comes down to saying the “carbon atom is as it is because it permits our existence, and the eventual coming of Jesus to redeem our sins.” The way the why question is framed makes it so absurd, that no answer is preferable to any answer hinted at by the religious.
Thoughtform,
Existential intertia? No, as far as I know, no kind of intertia been explained, possibly because it doesn’t exist. As for “existential inertia”, it’s a pseudo-concept invented purely to give the entirely redundant concept of “God” something to explain. But since one can simply ask how it is that God would continue to exist, if it existed at all – how “God” has “existential inertia” – it is of no explanatory value whatever.
David Hume said, in a letter to John Stewart:
“I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that something could arise without a cause.”
Now whether we agree with Hume or not that every event has a cause, it’s quite clear that he did not “deny causality”. Evidently, Thoughtform, you haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.
Some “why” questions that theology has not answered very well:
Why are there gods?
Why can’t everyone agree on the names and numbers of real gods?
Why do the gods permit evil?
Why do the gods need my money?
Why is it that the people who say they know what the gods are thinking always think that the gods want those very same people to run other people’s lives?
Thoughtform,
A metaphysics detector would be great. Sadly, “metaphysics” at present just seems an excuse to shuck and jive in lieu of presenting evidence to support an argument. It’s no fault of ours that it is yet another emperor with no clothes. And it is far more illogical to hold that “metaphysical” things and entities exist with no support than it is to dismiss until such support is presented.
The idea of existential inertia is much more logical than the contrary assumption: That God created reality, and yet his input is constantly necessary to sustain reality. That’s a pretty strange requirement for the creation of a perfect, timeless entity, no?
(Of course, both ideas are irrelevant unless you assume God from the outset.)
And Hume didn’t “deny causality”, but merely cast it into doubt, along with general induction. The fact that you bring up Hume without realizing the thing that he is best known for is interesting, to say the least.
Thoughtform #85 wrote:
As a philosophical term “metaphysics” refers simply to the nature of reality, and scientists have indeed, over time, managed to rule out supernatural explanations as either unnecessary, wrong, or not even wrong. Naturalism is a highly successful working theory.
In other words, while you apparently weren’t looking, we have taken the concepts of God and the supernatural out of the invented category theologians and woosters like to call “metaphysics” and placed them under scientific scrutiny, like all claims about reality. No more special pleading, and no more trying to sneak protections against falsifications into the definition of God, either.
You can kick and scream all you want: what is done is done. Wouldn’t have made any difference if you were paying attention: we were.
Let’s say there was a first cause. Now, how does that make the why question meaningful?
Originally it just referred to the writings of Aristotle that came at the end, after his Physics, in the standard arrangement of his works used by subsequent commentators (“meta” in ancient Greek just meant “after”). It is not an internally consistent work, unsurprising as different bits were almost certainly written at very different times. One of Aristotle’s preoccupations was to reconcile the loopy ideas of Plato’s theory of ideal forms with his own far more empirical studies, but in the judgement of just about all philosophers, Thomist pholisophers, excepted, he failed.
What want to know – Why has god chosen to punish PZ by putting a volcano in his front yard?
And it’s a cinder cone, to boot! Watch out for pyroclastics, PZ!
It’s all just childish why-ning.
Richard Feynman gives a good explanation on how the question “Why?” can quickly loose any meaning.
So is it safe to say that theology is the drag-queen of science? The religious patriarchy masquerading in the robes of the muses?
I prefered the funny hats. You know where you are with funny hats.
You sure do!
Slightly off-topic, but I don’t get why people have to ask ‘why are humans here?’
Do we need a why? That’s like asking ‘why are those tissues on that side of your desk?’ They’re not there for a reason, they’re just there. There’s no reason behind it.
Why do we need a reason to exist? Why do we need to justify our existence?
Why can’t we just make up our own individual purposes for our lives?
When comments are disable on a YouTube video it usually means the video is BULLSHIT.
And yes it is.
Apologies, complete blockquote fail.
I was referring to SallyStrange’s post (#27) and in particular her observation that “Purpose is something we all get to decide for ourselves”.
Didn’t mean to make everything bold either. Much to learn.
I think normative questions can be reduced to descriptive questions, and science can answer all of them. The last step is: “because that is what humans want; that is what we mean by good and bad”.
Ahs:
I disagree. Because then we are at a loss to to decide between two humans who want contradictory things. All we can do is say that they do want them, and science can tell us that they cannot both be simultaneously satisfied.
The question that inevitably follows is which to prefer; and that is something that cannot be reduced to description. Reduction to description in this sense is an abdication of responsibility (and ultimately must be based upon a non-descriptive normative claim).
Did someone bother to tell Thoughtform that Hume is not the final word on causality?
ahs #67
Michael Hout is a professor of sociology at UC-Berkeley.
Andrew Greely is a Catholic priest.
The religious do go in for funny hats.
The actual harm of depriving one person rather than the other is probably never equal.
+++++
Ah, so he is. His bio at the end of the article sure sounded secular.
Actually, Michael Voris has a perfectly good point. But only if you replace “theology” with “physics”. Fundamentally, almost all the sciences are just specialized branches of physics. In fact most of them (medicine, engineering, politics, etc) are specialized branches of chemistry, which is itself a branch of physics. Of course that’s not a useful way to proceed at all – having physiotherapists worry about the wave/particle duality of their patients quarks is not terribly productive.
The sciences that aren’t derived from physics are either math or a combo of math and physics (e.g. computing).
I haven’t yet heard anybody claim that Yahweh created math (and if not, who did?). I’d love to hear that argument, seeing as the Bible seems to have a real problem with basic counting.
The notion of “actual harm” is essentially contested – it cannot function as a neutral descriptive. As is the notion that morality equals necessarily and only the avoidance of harm.
Each of these is sustainable only on the basis of a prior normative judgement, which cannot be descriptively validated. This seems to me to be precisely the mistake that Sam Harris makes.
I don’t see why not. Someone is more inaccurate, someone is more accurate.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that it’s only that. Harm is just what we describe as bad. Also relevant is what we describe as good.
PZ Renounce the hole. Follow the Shoe!
“But what has theology given us?”
Leaving aside the bad stuff for the moment, it’s given us a shit load of stupidity we can to point and laugh at.
Since theology is the study of the imaginary, it’s given us some very boring fiction.
I watched that video from beginning to end.
My first thought was, “Damn, this is poorly put together. Random text floating around, distracting background and logos.”
My second thought was a desire to tear that damn pencil out of his hands.
My third thought came when my brain woke up and I noticed the content.
Wow. I’ve seen stupid, but that was STUPID.
Andrew M Greeley, Catholic Priest and author. I must confess I quite enjoy some of his books, but then I enjoy reading a lot of sf and fantasy.
I’ve only read up to comment 83 so far.
Dick the Damned@6, I rather like my comfy chair and soft cushions!
Glen Davidson@50,
The religious answer is: Well obviously, they are demons and when you get sick it’s because you are possessed.
chigau@54, I prefer boobies.
boobies?
larix@95, Darn it, I want a volcano in MY yard!
ahs@120, Yes, that’s the stuff!, and a lovely pair of boobies they are!
They can be a little obtrusive at times.
Dammit, ahs, you got me all riled up for nothing.
In response, I have no choice but to give you blue balls.
I kept expecting Voris to post a note: “No woodchucks were harmed in the making of my hairpiece.”
But so is every other damn thing. Science itself is based on the uncontested* assumptions that natural phenomena require natural explanations and that the world is real and we can learn about it through observation. Medicine is based on the normative assumption that health is better than illness. Is there any reason reject the premise that acts that promote well-being are better than acts that increase misery? Is there a better premise on which to base judgements regarding morality?
I just finished The Moral Landscape and was surprised to find my mind changed about what I initially considered to be a bad idea.
*Well. Idiots contest it.
@Antiochus Epiphanes
Absolutely agreed. You have to decide what the best basis for judgements regarding morality is – and promoting well-being is a perfectly good idea, with a long philosophical pedigree.
What you don’t get to do is shut down disagreement with the claim that your idea is somehow “descriptive” or “objective”, and on that basis superior to others. It’s not about a rejection of well-being as a central (perhaps the central) moral criterion; it is about jettisoning the idea that disagreement about whether well-being is enough or exhaustive, or about whose well-being counts, or about constitutes well-being in the first place, can be shut down with some spurious appeal to “objectivity”.
In order for there to be events that we can consider to be meaningful, there must be other events that we consider to be meaningless, otherwise there is no contrast between the two ideas. To say “everything” has meaning is to say no more than that everything is what it is. And to claim that “God” is behind and gives meaning to everything is merely to claim that God is meaningless.
Meaning is a form of relationship between notional objects of our thought, but that means that the universe, considered as everything that exists and that has or will exist, cannot have any meaning, since there is nothing outside it that it can have such a relationship to.
Imbecile:
Speak for yourself.
PS Are you aware you’ve just implied that there exists such a “best basis”? Question-begging, that is.
‘Tis Himself, OM@122, It’s OK, I don’t really like my house (or my neighbors) anymore.
Esteleth@123, How about Intercourse instead?
In my experience, it doesn’t shut down disagreement. People disagree with me just fine.
IMO, I wouldn’t say that my descriptive method is morally superior, in that sense which Daniel Fincke recently objected to. Perhaps I should say that it is, but I’m just not sure about that yet.
I do understand why most people would take my claims to objectivity or descriptiveness as claims about moral superiority, but I think this is an artifact of the way that people treat objectivity, honesty, and empiricism as morally valuable in and of themselves, which I’d argue they ought not to do.
Of morality qua morality, as well as my opinion of it, I’d just say it is what it is: one of several methods humans use to negotiate their conflicting interests.
I’m right because people use “good” and “bad” to mean certain things. If people started using “good” and “bad” to mean different things, then I’d have to change my arguments drastically, or I’d no longer be right. And if they somehow jettisoned these concepts entirely, then I’d have nothing descriptive to say about it, except that there is no longer any such thing as morality.
Well I got some cash leftover from my grant to develop the invisible unicorn detector, so I’ll get right on it.
@John
Not my intention, but I can see how it could be read that way. The ultimate authority for what is best lies with the individual; it is his or her own creation, and the decision to adopt it is the affirmation of personal responsibility. FWIW, I do not think there is an objective “fact of the matter” about what is morally best. I see nothing question-begging there.
I do indeed speak for myself, but I’m curious as to what you would find objectionable in that formulation.
@ahs
If all you are doing is sketching a concept of morality (i.e. an account of how people in fact deploy the term), that is fine, and useful. It does not in any way suggest, however, that normative questions reduce to descriptive ones; indeed, in my experience, conceptual analysis of that sort usually insists all the more heavily upon a stringent separation between the two.
Imbecile, you’re both stating that there is no objective morality, and that there can be no authority as it is a subjective opinion.
You consider that any decision to not adopt it [what is best] is not “an affirmation of personal responsibility”? :)
Can I get around this by saying that I see a decision not to adopt it as simply a decision to adopt a different “it”?
My view is indeed that there is no objective morality, but I’m not convinced that this commits me to the second element – that there can be no authority. Just a different kind of authority from that conferred by objectivity (or scientific validity) – because we are not talking, in the final instance, about facts.
Only trivially (and paradoxically), equivalent to saying that not making a choice represents making a choice.
Imbecile Heureux:
If morality is subjective, then that there can be no authority follows; you yourself put it thus: “The ultimate authority for what is best lies with the individual” — which is essentially no different from stating De gustibus non disputandum est.
But morality when applied must take place in reality, where facts (the specific circumstances) are not just extant, but paramount.
‘Tis Himself, OM@122, That is a beautiful picture. New desktop, I think. Thanks!
I think it does though, by continually appealing to the meaning of good and bad.
The most pressing normative question is usually “why should I care what happens to others?”
I really think this can be answered for the individual by insisting that they focus on the question of whether caring what happens to others is good or bad: Is it good when someone else cares what happens to others besides themself? Yes, because this is something you appreciate; to whatever degree, it contributes to your pleasure. So we can state factually that this is generally preferable. At this point I would ask the person to formulate some argument why they should act otherwise; if they fail to come up with one, then they should to what is generally preferable, because that is what generally preferable means.
(It’s also possible that hedonism makes a person stupid, and that’s why I’m saying these things. But I don’t think so.)
should
todoJohn,
Nothing trivial or paradoxical about it – just the claim that it is not possible not to choose.
I don’t agree that by removing objective morality all we have left are our individuals tastes, which cannot be disputed. This is the argument that you either have moral objectivity, or a very basic form of relativism in which “anything goes”. This is a false dichotomy; at least, it can’t simply be asserted without assuming the conclusion to the debate (question-begging)… :)
And you’re absolutely right that facts are paramount in applied ethics – they constitute the context in which we must decide. However, my point is different: it is that there is no “fact” about what is the right thing to do.
Ahs
So someone who doesn’t ask themselves why they should care about others, or care whether others care about them, is immune from moral criticism?
You keep testing your position with hypothesis of where no-one disagrees. That doesn’t seem to me to be particularly enlightening. How do we descriptively decide between two opposing claims, each of which is based upon sincerely-held but mutually exclusive understandings of wellbeing, or of harm, or of pleasure?
Are you saying there is no right thing to do? Because you also seem to be claiming that there is, but that it depends on each individual. Is each person in his or her own universe or something? I mean, sure, there are variations between individuals, differences in circumstances, etc., but those sort of things aren’t non-factual. So what specifically makes it non-factual?
“human reason”, “human intellect” …so they would respect atheist arguments from an AI?
BTW, “Voris”? Shouldn’t it be “Vorbis”*?
(* Pratchett reference)
— — — — — — —
Speaking of volcanoes, I might consider believing in a volcano god. Silicaceous life, and all that. But their influence wiould be limited to the crater.
And if you can get plasma strings to form logic circuits, a lightning “god” is not beyond the realm of the possible but that individual would have a rather short life span. Where do thunder gods hang around where there is no thunderstorm?
What if what contributes most to my pleasure is seeing andor making others suffer? Or what if I’m simply indifferent to the suffering of others? There is no argument that can show that either stance is irrational: neither Harris (and BTW, I consider some of Harris’s moral judgements to be absolutely vile) nor any other moral realist has produced one that is sound.
On a different take, closer to IH’s argument, people differ on fundamental moral questions such as whether the interests of non-human animals, or people who have not yet been born, or the maintenance of biodiversity, should be taken into account in our decisions. How could you resolve such disputes “objectively”? There are certainly facts relevant to them, but facts cannot determine them.
I don’t agree that by removing objective morality all we have left are our individuals tastes, which cannot be disputed. This is the argument that you either have moral objectivity, or a very basic form of relativism in which “anything goes”. This is a false dichotomy – Imbecile Heureux
QFT. There can be no objective morality, but we can and do argue rationally about moral judgements. They can be criticised as internally inconsistent or otherwise impossible to apply (and this of course applies to critiquing our own moral judgements when we come across new facts). Where there is a necessary minimum of agreement they can also be criticised in terms of their likely consequences. The point is perhaps more easily seen in with regard to esthetic judgements: if someone insists that Harold Robbins is a better novelist than George Eliot, I cannot show that their claim is irrational if the criterion they are using is how much they enjoy reading them, or how many copies of their works sold last year: we simply disagree on what makes one novelist better than another, and there is no objective arbiter. But with someone with whom I have a measure of agreement I can rationally argue the case, and even persuade them (or be persuaded).
Imbecile Heureux:
1.
(later)
2.
You disagree with yourself, then, since 2 belies 1.
That’s insulting to robots
No, I would press them to ask themselves.
Don’t be silly. You disagree!
Someone is factually wrong about their sincerely held understandings. Well-being, harm and pleasure are measurable. I discard well-being as an unnecessary second-order restatement of utility, but it is measurable.
+++++
“The actual harm of depriving one person rather than the other is probably never equal.”
Preventing you from indulging in that sort of pleasure is unlikely to result in harm comparable to the harm you’d prefer to inflict.
I’m not sure I understand the question. You may indeed be indifferent, but this is not an objection to my premise of what constitutes good and bad: “Is it good when someone else cares what happens to others besides themself? Yes, because this is something you [being one of those others] appreciate; to whatever degree, it contributes to your pleasure. So we can state factually that this is generally preferable. At this point I would ask the person to formulate some argument why they should act otherwise; if they fail to come up with one, then they should to what is generally preferable, because that is what generally preferable means.”
(There are known methods of making you less indifferent, if we treat this as a social engineering problem.)
That may be true? I haven’t thought about it lately. What I consider relevant about rationality here is whether one accurately recognizes the meanings of the words good and bad. For instance, I can argue rationally that those who prefer excellence over hedonism are incorrect.
I’m not sure I’d consider it important to show that it is irrational to be indifferent to others’ suffering; I think it’s sufficient to show that it is not good.
In principle, one could resolve these disputes by determining their likely outcomes in terms of pain and pleasure, for that is what we mean by good and bad.
ahs
I misunderstood the referent of “you”. I thought you were saying it contributes to my pleasure if A cares what happens to others (B, C, D etc., not including me). In fact, and generally speaking, it does, but it might not. Now I agree with you that the justification of caring about what happens to others (and prefering that good things do), is that those others are likely to be better off. But there’s no way I can argue someone else into caring about others if they don’t. Their argument might be simply “I enjoy seeing others suffer”. More interestingly, it might be “It is good that people should get what they deserve, and most people deserve to suffer.” Your definition of “good” is in no way privileged.
It’s doubtful if even in principle we can weigh the pain and pleasure of one individual against another; and no, pain and pleasure are not what we mean by good and bad – that’s why we have different words for them. There are goods and bads that are not reduceable to pain and pleasure: knowing the truth is good, even if it brings pain; believing falsehoods is bad, even if it brings pleasure.
So theology answers the Why question. Good, let us ask a Why question: Why did God create humans? The Roman Catholic Church has an answer for that. They even created a book to answer this ans other questions, its called the Baltimore Catechism. All Catholic children in my day memorized the answers. We know that god created us to worship Him. that’s it, worship. Nothing else. Just hosannas day in and day out.
Now ask the follow up Why question (one the RCC does not answer): Why does God need worshiping? Doesn’t it have a day job and a hobby to keep it busy? Nope, it needs the distraction of billions of worshipers to occupy itself. What a loser.
@consciousness razor #140
I do think there is a right thing to do, and I try to work out what it is in any given situation and do it. I just don’t think that there are any objective facts that can grant that decision any ultimate authority over those who disagree. I see it as a normative, rather than a descriptive (or factual) judgement; I see the two statements following as different in kind:
The house is green
Murder is wrong
The first is a factual statement; we know how to verify whether or not it is true. There is not, in my view, any such empirical process by which we could verify the “truth” of the second (unless we interpret it as “murder is viewed as wrong in society x – but then we have simply turned it into a descriptive, not a normative, question, because we still haven’t affirmed whether murder is wrong regardless of what society x thinks).
@John #143,
The very nub of our disagreement. I just don’t see those two statements as in any way contradictory. They can be disputed, and on good grounds; just not on objective or (ultimately) on factual ones.
@ahs #145,
Again, our central disagreement in real focus. I deny that pleasure and misery are measurable; that they are objectively commensurable in any community; that the boundaries of relevant community can be objectively determined; and that there is any objective reason to prefer your pleasure/misery approach to morality over opposing ones (and there have been many: pretty much any nonconsequentialist approaches for a start; even ascetic forms of consequentialism).
A question: what if we could demonstrate objectively that the wellbeing of every other species on the planet would be improved immeasurably by the extinction of humanity? Is the anthropocentrism that would reject a moral obligation to mass suicide objectively valid?
@KG
Agree absolutely. Moral discourse seems to me simply a form of rhetoric (and I don’t mean this in any disparaging sense); and like all rhetoric, it needs to proceed from commonplaces, from certain shared assumptions. Fundamental moral discourse is really about the struggle for topoi.
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