Marcelo Gleiser is a humble guy. The Templeton Foundation just awarded him $1.5 million for being humble, as we know because when asked, “which aspect of your work do you think is most relevant to the Templeton Foundation’s spiritual aims?” by Scientific American, he claims he was given all that money for his humility.
Probably my belief in humility. I believe we should take a much humbler approach to knowledge, in the sense that if you look carefully at the way science works, you’ll see that yes, it is wonderful — magnificent! — but it has limits. And we have to understand and respect those limits. And by doing that, by understanding how science advances, science really becomes a deeply spiritual conversation with the mysterious, about all the things we don’t know. So that’s one answer to your question. And that has nothing to do with organized religion, obviously, but it does inform my position against atheism. I consider myself an agnostic.
Oh. I suspect his position against atheism was a more relevant criterion in the award — I don’t think that people who brag about their humility are particularly humble, especially not when they think their humility is so vast and impressive that it deserves millions of dollars.
I’m also surprised by his claim that being an agnostic means he is opposed to people who make claims against the existence of a god. Does he express a similar opposition to people who make positive claims in favor of the existence of a god? I think not. He wouldn’t have won a Templeton prize if he did. Also, he’s very confused about what atheism is.
I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.”
How dare those atheists simply not believe in a phenomenon for which they have no evidence! That is inconsistent with the scientific method, which according to Gleiser, expects you to accept any hypothesis in the absence of evidence! Better yet, you should accept it even if the only evidence you’ve got is against it!
I’d reply to his question “what is atheism?” by turning it around and asking “what are gods?” What are these things you expect us to respect and even believe? Be specific. I suspect that all I’d get is hand-wavey babble about spirituality.
More seriously, he opposes rejecting a hypothesis for the trivial flaw of being unsupported by any evidence.
But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.” And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that. This positions me very much against all of the “New Atheist” guys—even though I want my message to be respectful of people’s beliefs and reasoning, which might be community-based, or dignity-based, and so on. And I think obviously the Templeton Foundation likes all of this, because this is part of an emerging conversation
OK, I agree with part of that. You do have to have evidence for a hypothesis — you can’t make a proposal to NIH and expect to get funded if you have no preliminary evidence from your lab or the scientific literature to justify it (although you can submit such an empty proposal to the Templeton Foundation and get a big bucket of cash in return). However, we do have the right to strongly and provisionally reject a claim that is advanced in the absence of any support — in fact, it is necessary that we reject unfounded hypotheses out of hand, unless we want to waste immense amounts of time and effort and money in the futile pursuit of nonsense.
I encourage Dr Gleiser to invest that $1.5 million to research the existence of elves, which have roughly the same amount of evidentiary support as gods. It’s the scientific thing to do. Or, since he’s a theoretical physicist, maybe it would be more appropriate to use the money to make a perpetual motion machine. There is an immense number of absurd hypotheses that are dismissed by sensible scientists, and among them is the god hypothesis. That’s the atheist position that Gleiser opposes. Before you can expect rational people to believe your claims, you have to have a body of acts of god that aren’t better explained by natural mechanisms. No, the resurrection of Jesus doesn’t count, because we don’t believe it and you’ve got nothing but cultish claims and confused exaggerations in a holy book to back it up.
To return to his claim of humility, he doesn’t believe that at all. He thinks humans are all special!
You know, I’m a “Rare Earth” kind of guy. I think our situation may be rather special, on a planetary or even galactic scale. So when people talk about Copernicus and Copernicanism—the ‘principle of mediocrity’ that states we should expect to be average and typical, I say, “You know what? It’s time to get beyond that.” When you look out there at the other planets (and the exoplanets that we can make some sense of), when you look at the history of life on Earth, you will realize this place called Earth is absolutely amazing.
Great. What’s the new hypothesis to replace the idea that we’re the product of universal general properties of physics and chemistry? What’s special about Earth? Is there a specific insight that contributes to science that can be used here? The “rare earth” hypothesis is usually used as a tool to smuggle a god into the works, rather than chance and necessity.
He goes on and on, and some of the things he says are sensible — like yeah, we should take better care of our planet — but to be honest, I don’t care. I stopped caring when I read “Templeton Prize”.
Old man Templeton was more commonsense about the prize- it once went to Freeman Dyson. His son (Templeton, not Dyson) is a fundamentalist, and this means the prize now goes to kooks.
Then let us consider the Invisible Pink Unicorn (PBUH). If the humble Templeton prize winners cannot explicitly disprove the IPU, does that mean they must entertain the possibility she actually exists? Russell’s teapot?
This is all a matter of epistemology.
Just awarded him? That was nearly six years ago.
He is looking at it the wrong way.
The xians make the claim that god exists, he is a Trinity except if you are a Mormon or other nonTrinitarian, he hates Democrats and Progressives, chooses sides at football games every weekend, helps you find a parking spot if you pray nicely, etc..
They are making the positive claims so the burden of proof is on them to provide.
They’ve been trying for 2,000 years.
All testable claims by the religious have been falsified.
That the gods exist and do anything noticable is a failed hypothesis with zero evidence for it.
Victor Stenger another scientist, a physicist (now dead), had something to say about science and its application to the God hypothesis.
Spoiler alert. Dr. Stenger found no evidence for the existence of the gods.
It’s been thousands of years and the religious can’t even agree on the number of gods or their names if any. Xianity can have 1,2 ,3 or 4, the Pagan religions can have many, Hinduism has a lot, etc..
There have been hundreds of gods, most of which are ancient history or long forgotten.
How wonderful! He believes one should always dig down through a fresh, steaming pile of shit in order to find the pony that must be buried there because some horse hairs were found scattered on the surrounding ground.
Is it OK to make a statement that isn’t final?
“I am an atheist because I have seen no evidence to support the existence of any gods, and plenty of evidence to suggest that people can easily fool themselves on such questions.” (?)
Why does he consider a declaration of atheism to be “final,” and why does he not apply the same criticism to religious claims? Many/most religious people claim not only certainty about their theism, but they also know precisely what their god(s) want from human beings.
@7
Furthermore, I am open to changing my mind when presented with convincing evidence. Your failure to present convincing evidence is not proof that I am close-minded.
“The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”
This stupid phrase again. The correct statement is “The absence of evidence is not PROOF of absence”
If enough people have been looking for evidence for a long enough time, absence of evidence does eventually become evidence of absence.
Yeah, we’ve all heard that shtick before: atheists aren’t allowed to be certain of their nonbelief; only believers are allowed to be certain of their beliefs, because they’re held to a lower standard. Therefore believers always win every argument with nonbelievers, due to their superior certainty.
I am 100% convinced that there is no god — I’m about as absolutely atheist as one can be. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t change my mind in an instant if someone provided good, solid evidence for its existence.
The thing is, they haven’t.
I was under the impression that the ‘Rare Earth Hypothesis’ was simply the observation that so far it looks like planets with the extremely complex chemistry we call multicellular life are not particularly common, and that this was likely because the extremely complex chemistry requires some conditions (stability of star, lack of collisions, etc.) that often do not stay stable for a long enough time. (If we were finding lots of planets that would be easily habitable by humans I would be more sympathetic to the God Hypothesis, although I would still think it to be a crock of shit.)
Yes, and even if we can’t safely say there are no gods of any sort, we can still safely say that there’s no credible evidence to support any of the specific claims we’ve heard about any of the gods that humans have claimed to believe in. So there may be some entity(ies) out there that may be called “god(s),” but they’re still not the god(s) we hear other people talking about.
And this absence of evidence supports a very confident conclusion that none of those gods really exist. Just like absence of evidence leads to the confident conclusion that I can drive to Baltimore without worrying about invisible cows wandering about on I-95.
I’m proud of my humility.
So much bullsh-t in so few words.
Of course there’s a God. He’s just hiding. But he can’t fool you, ’cause you’re smarter than Him I mean he doesn’t want to hide from you. ‘Cause you’re special.