Some of you may be wondering: “Does God exist?” Fortunately, Richard Dawkins has written a new book, The God Delusion, that addresses precisely this question. As it turns out, the answer is: “No, God does not exist.” (Admittedly, Dawkins reached his conclusion before the Cards won the World Series.)
Nevertheless, there remains a spot of controversy — it would appear that Dawkins’s rhetorical force is insufficient to persuade some theists. One example is provided by literary critic Terry Eagleton, who reviewed The God Delusion for the London Review of Books. Eagleton’s review has already been discussed among some of my favorite blogs: 3 Quarks Daily, Pharyngula, Uncertain Principles, and the Valve (twice), to name a few. But it provides a good jumping-off point for an examination of one of the common arguments used against scientifically-minded atheists: “You’re setting up a straw man by arguing against a naive and anthropomorphic view of `God’; if only you engaged with more sophisticated theology, you’d see that things are not so cut-and-dried.”
Before jumping in, I should mention that I have somewhat mixed feelings about Dawkins’s book myself. I haven’t read it very thoroughly, not because it’s not good, but for the same reason that I rarely read popular cosmology books from cover to cover: I’ve mostly seen this stuff before, and already agree with the conclusions. But Dawkins has a strategy that is very common among atheist polemicists, and with which I tend to disagree. That’s to simultaneously tackle three very different issues:
- Does God exist? Are the claims of religion true, as statements about the fundamental nature of the universe?
- Is religious belief helpful or harmful? Does it do more bad than good, or vice-versa?
- Why are people religious? Is there some evolutionary-psychological or neurological basis for why religion is so prevalent?
All of these questions are interesting. But, from where I am sitting, the last two are incredibly complicated issues about which it is very difficult to say anything definitive, at least at this point in our intellectual history. Whereas the first one is relatively simple. By mixing them up, the controversial accounts of history and psychology tend to dilute the straightforward claim that there’s every reason to disbelieve in the existence of God. When Dawkins suggests that the Troubles in Northern Ireland should be understood primarily as a religious schism between Catholics and Protestants, he sacrifices some of the credibility he may have had if he had stuck to the more straightforward issue of whether or not religion is true.
Right out of the gate, Eagleton bashes Dawkins for dabbling in things he doesn’t understand.
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology…
What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?
These questions, of course, have absolutely no relevance to the matter at hand; they are just an excuse for Eagleton to show off a bit of erudition. If Dawkins is right, and religion is simply a “delusion,” a baroque edifice built upon a foundation of mistakes and wishful thinking, then the views of Eriugena on subjectivity are completely beside the point. Not all of theology directly concerns the question of whether or not God exists; much of it accepts the truth of that proposition, and goes from there. The question is whether that’s a good starting point. If an architect shows you a grand design for a new high-rise building, you don’t have to worry about the floor plan for the penthouse apartment if you notice that the foundation is completely unstable.
But underneath Eagleton’s bluster lies a potentially-relevant critique. After all, some sophisticated theology is about whether or not God exists, and more importantly about the nature of God. Eagleton understands this, and gamely tries to explain how the concept of God is different from other things in the world:
For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or “existent”: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
Okay, very good. God, in this conception, is not some thing out there in the world (or even outside the world), available to be poked and prodded and have his beard tugged upon. Eagleton rightly emphasizes that ordinary-language concepts such as “existence” might not quite be up to the task of dealing with God, at least not in the same way that they deal with Al Gore. A precisely similar analysis holds for less controversial ideas, such as the Schrödinger equation. There is a sense in which the Schrödinger equation “exists”; after all, wavefunctions seem to be constantly obeying it. But, whatever it may mean to say “the Schrödinger equation exists,” it certainly doesn’t mean the same kind of thing as to say “Al Gore exists.” We’re borrowing a term that makes perfect sense in one context and stretching its meaning to cover a rather different context, and emphasizing that distinction is a philosophically honorable move.
But then we run somewhat off the rails.
This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.
The previous excerpt, which defined God as “the condition of possibility,” seemed to be warning against the dangers of anthropomorphizing the deity, ascribing to it features that we would normally associate with conscious individual beings such as ourselves. A question like “Does `the condition of possibility’ exist?” would never set off innumerable overheated arguments, even in a notoriously contentious blogosphere. If that were really what people meant by “God,” nobody would much care. It doesn’t really mean anything — like Spinoza’s pantheism, identifying God with the natural world, it’s just a set of words designed to give people a warm and fuzzy feeling. As a pragmatist, I might quibble that such a formulation has no operational consequences, as it doesn’t affect anything relevant about how we think about the world or act within it; but if you would like to posit the existence of a category called “the condition of possibility,” knock yourself out.
But — inevitably — Eagleton does go ahead and burden this innocent-seeming concept with all sorts of anthropomorphic baggage. God created the universe “out of love,” is capable of “regret,” and “is an artist.” That’s crazy talk. What could it possibly mean to say that “The condition of possibility is an artist, capable of regret”? Nothing at all. Certainly not anything better-defined than “My envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.” And once you start attributing to God the possibility of being interested in some way about the world and the people in it, you open the door to all of the nonsensical rules and regulations governing real human behavior that tend to accompany any particular manifestation of religious belief, from criminalizing abortion to hiding women’s faces to closing down the liquor stores on Sunday.
The problematic nature of this transition — from God as ineffable, essentially static and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth — is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of “sophisticated theology.” It’s a millenia-old problem, inherited from the very earliest attempts to reconcile two fundamentally distinct notions of monotheism: the Unmoved Mover of ancient Greek philosophy, and the personal/tribal God of Biblical Judaism. Attempts to fit this square peg into a manifestly round hole lead us smack into all of the classical theological dilemmas: “Can God microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself cannot eat it?” The reason why problems such as this are so vexing is not because our limited human capacities fail to measure up when confronted with the divine; it’s because they are legitimately unanswerable questions, arising from a set of mutually inconsistent assumptions.
It’s worth the effort to dig into the origin of these two foundational notions of God, in order to get straight just how incompatible they really are. Until the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, Israelite religion was straightforwardly polytheistic, as much as the Greeks or Romans or Norse ever were. Originally, the Canaanite High God El (often translated simply as “God” in modern Bibles) was a completely distinct creature from Yahweh (often translated as “the Lord”). It’s not until Exodus 3:6 that Yahweh asserts to Moses that he should be identified with El, the God of Abraham. (Why do you think that Yahweh’s very First Commandment insists on not having any other gods before him?) Remnants of Judaism’s polytheistic origins linger on throughout the Scriptures, which are an intricately-edited pastiche of various earlier sources. Psalm 82, for example, describes Yahweh making a power play at a meeting of the various gods (the “Council of El”):
1 God presides in the great assembly;
he gives judgment among the “gods”:
and show partiality to the wicked?
Selah 3 Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless;
maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. 4 Rescue the weak and needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked. 5 “They know nothing, they understand nothing.
They walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken. 6 “I said, ‘You are “gods”;
you are all sons of the Most High.’ 7 But you will die like mere men;
you will fall like every other ruler.” 8 Rise up, O God, judge the earth,
for all the nations are your inheritance.
The quotes around “gods,” of course, are nowhere in the original Hebrew; they were inserted by the translators (this is the New International Version), who were understandably squeamish about all this talk concerning “gods” in the plural.
The development of Hebrew monotheism from its polytheistic beginnings is a long and complicated story that contemporary historians only incompletely understand; see this review of a book by Mark Smith of NYU to get some flavor of current thinking. But the crucial point is that the emergence of One God was an essentially political transformation. The ancient Hebrews, surrounded by other unfriendly nations, promoted their tribal deity Yahweh to the position of the most powerful god, promising dire consequences for any backsliders who would choose to worship Ba’al or Asherah or other pretenders (as Ahab and Jezebel learned the hard way). From there, it was a short doctrinal leap (requiring only the imaginative re-interpretation of a few Scriptural passages) to declare that Yahweh was the only God out there — the well-known others weren’t merely subordinate, they were imaginary. Even in its own right, this claim was somewhat problematic, as Yahweh had to serve double duty as the God of the Hebrews and also the only god in existence. But the conception of God as some sort of being who cared about the fate of the people of Israel was relatively sustainable; none of the Prophets went around defining Yahweh as “the condition of possibility,” or even ascribing characteristics of omniscience and omnipotence to the deity.
Meanwhile, the ancient Greeks were developing monotheism for their own purposes — essentially philosophical rather than political. They had quite the robust pantheon of individual gods, but it was clear to most careful thinkers that these were closer to amusingly anthropomorphic fairy tales than to deep truths about the structure of the universe. Unsurprisingly, the monotheistic conception reached its pinnacle in the work of Aristotle. In the Metaphysics, he presented a version of what we now know as the cosmological argument for the existence of God, which (in Wikipedia’s rendering) goes something like this:
- Every effect has a cause.
- Nothing can cause itself.
- A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
- Therefore, there must be a first cause; or, there must be something which is not an effect.
Admittedly, this is merely an informal paraphrase of the argument. But the more careful versions don’t change the essential fact that these days, the cosmological proof is completely anachronistic. Right after step one — “Every effect has a cause” — the only sensible response is “No it doesn’t.” Or at least, “What is that supposed to mean”?
To make sense of the cosmological argument, it’s important to realize that Aristotle’s metaphysics was predicated to an important extent on his physics. (Later variations by theologians from Aquinas to Leibniz don’t alter the essence of the argument.) To the ancient Greeks, the behavior of matter was teleological; earth wanted to fall down, fire wanted to rise toward the heavens. And once it reached its desired destination, it just sat there. According to Aristotle, if we want to keep an object moving we have to keep pushing it. And he’s right, of course, if we are thinking about the vast majority of macroscopic objects in our everyday world — which seems like a perfectly reasonable set of objects to think about. If you push a book along a table, and then stop pushing it, it will come to rest. If you want it to keep moving, you have to keep pushing it. That “effect” — the motion of the book — without a doubt requires a “cause” — you pushing it. It doesn’t seem like much of a leap to extend such an analysis to the entire universe, implying the existence of an ineffable, perfectly static First Cause, or Unmoved Mover.
But the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible is very far from being “Unmoved.” He’s quite the mover, actually — smiting people here, raising the dead there. All very befitting, considering his origin as a local tribal deity. But utterly incompatible with the perfect and unchanging Aristotelian notion of God.
For the past two thousand years, theology has struggled to reconcile these two apparently-conflicting conceptions of the divine, without much success. We are left with fundamentally incoherent descriptions of what God is, which deny that he “exists” in the same sense that hummingbirds and saxophones do, but nevertheless attribute to him qualities of “love” and “creativity” that conventionally belong to conscious individual beings. One might argue that it’s simply a hard problem, and our understanding is incomplete; after all, we haven’t come up with a fully satisfactory way to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, either. But there is a more likely possibility: there simply is no reconciliation to be had. The reason why it’s difficult to imagine how God can be eternally perfect and also occasionally wistful is that God doesn’t exist.
In fact, in this day and age the flaws in Aristotle’s cosmological proof (just to pick one) are perfectly clear. Our understanding of the inner workings of the physical world has advanced quite a bit since the ancient Greeks. Long ago, Galileo figured out that the correct way to think about motion was to abstract from messy real-world situations to idealized circumstances in which dissipative effects such as friction and air resistance could be ignored. (They can always be restored later as perturbations.) Only then do we realize that what matter really wants to do is to maintain its motion at a constant speed, until it is explicitly acted upon by some external force. Except that, once we have made this breakthrough, we realize that the matter doesn’t want to do anything — it just does it. Modern physics doesn’t describe the world in terms of “causes” and “effects.” It simply posits that matter (in the form of quantum fields, or strings, or what have you) acts in accordance with certain dynamical laws, known as “equations of motion.” The notion of “causality” is downgraded from “when I see B happening, I know it must be because of A” to “given some well-defined and suitably complete set of information about the initial state of a system, I can use the equations of motion to determine its subsequent evolution.” But a concept like “cause” doesn’t appear anywhere in the equations of motion themselves, nor in the specification of the type of matter being described; it is only an occasionally-appropriate approximation, useful to us humans in narrating the behavior of some macroscopic configuration of equation-obeying matter.
In other words, the universe runs all by itself. The planets orbit the Sun, not because anything is “causing” them to do so, but because that’s the kind of behavior that obeys Newton’s (or Einstein’s) equations governing motion in the presence of gravity. Deeply embedded as we are in this Galilean/Newtonian framework, statements like “every effect has a cause” become simply meaningless. (We won’t even bother with “A causal chain cannot be of infinite length,” which completely begs the question.) Conservation of momentum completely undermines any force the cosmological argument might ever have had. The universe, like everything in it, can very well just be, as long as its pieces continue to obey the relevant equations of motion.
Special pleading that the universe is essentially different from its constituents, and (by nature of its unique status as all that there is to the physical world) that it could not have either (1) just existed forever, nor (2) come spontaneously into existence all by itself, is groundless. The only sensible response such skepticism is “Why not?” It’s certainly true that we don’t yet know whether the universe is eternal or whether it had a beginning, and we certainly don’t understand the details of its origin. But there is absolutely no obstacle to our eventually figuring those things out, given what we already understand about physics. General relativity asserts that spacetime itself is dynamical; it can change with time, and potentially even be created from nothing, in a way that is fundamentally different from the Newtonian conception (much less the Aristotelian). And quantum mechanics describes the universe in terms of a wavefunction that assigns amplitudes to any of an infinite number of possibilities, including — crucially — spontaneous transitions, unforced by any cause. We don’t yet know how to describe the origin of the universe in purely physical terms, but someday we will — physicists are working on the problem every day.
The analogy to a penthouse apartment atop a high-rise building is quite apt. Much of the intricate architecture of modern theology is built on a foundation that conceives of God as both creator and sustainer of the world and as a friendly and loving being. But these days we know better. The Clockwork Universe of Galileo and Newton has once and for all removed the need for anything to “sustain” the universe, and the “creation” bit is something on which we are presently closing in.
In fact, although it is rarely discussed in history books, the influence of the conservation of momentum on theological practice is fairly evident. One response was a revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism, which claimed that it was simply wrong even to attempt to apply logic and rationality to questions of religion — claiming that you had “proven” the existence of God could get you accused of atheism. The other, more robust response, was a turn to natural theology and the argument from design. Even if the universe could keep going all by itself, surely its unguided meanderings would never produce something as wonderfully intricate as (for example) the human eye? The argument doesn’t hold up very well even under purely philosophical scrutiny — David Hume’s devastating take-down in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, interestingly, actually pre-dates William Paley’s classic statement of the argument (1779 vs. 1802). Hume, for example, points out that, even if the argument from design works, it allows us to conclude next to nothing about the nature of the Designer. Maybe it was a team? Maybe our universe is a rough first draft for a much better later universe? Or even just a mistake? (Okay, that has something going for it.)
But then, of course, Darwin’s theory of natural selection undercut the justification for the design argument just as thoroughly as classical mechanics undercut the justification for the cosmological argument. Indeed, the unpurposeful meanderings of matter in the universe can produce the wonderful intricacies of the human eye, and much else besides. Believers haven’t given up entirely; you’ll now more commonly find the argument from design placed in a cosmological context, where it is even less convincing. But for the most part, theologians have basically abandoned the project of “proving” God’s existence, which is probably a good move.
But they haven’t given up on believing in God’s existence (suitably defined), which is what drives atheists like Dawkins (and me) a little crazy. Two thousand years ago, believing in God made perfect sense; there was so much that we didn’t understand about the world, and an appeal to the divine seemed to help explain the otherwise inexplicable. Those original motivations have long since evaporated. In response, theologians have continued to alter what they mean by “God,” and struggled to reconcile the notion’s apparent internal contradictions — unwilling to take those contradictions as a signal of the fundamental incoherence of the idea.
To be fair, much of Dawkins’s book does indeed take aim at a rather unsophisticated form of belief, one that holds a much more literal (and wholly implausible, not to mention deeply distasteful) notion of what God means. That’s not a completely unwarranted focus, even if it does annoy the well-educated Terry Eagletons of the world; after all, that kind of naive theology is a guiding force among a very large and demonstrably influential fraction of the population. The reality of a religion is manifested in the actions of its adherents. But even an appeal to more nuanced thinking doesn’t save God from the dustbin of intellectual history. The universe is going to keep existing without any help, peacefully solving its equations of motion along the way; if we want to find meaning through compassion and love, we have to create it ourselves.
SLC: The sun holding still is indeed quite implausible, assuming the laws of physics that hold now also held then. (Does the bible ever state this assumption?) Nevertheless, it is not testable. By a testable claim, I mean something about the result of an experiment that you can actually do (i.e., in the present), not something that one might have done at one time. Here is an example: If you go outside and hold a rock and let go, it will fall down. Here is not one: If you had gone outside yesterday and helf a rock and let go, it would have fallen down. The second will never be testable, even though it was testable yesterday.
If god can create logical contradictions, he could put you in endless pain and call it heaven. And you would suffer and agree. Nothing would need to make any sense.
Paul Kemp (#30) begins to make an interesting point, that quickly gets lost in his post, and the rest of the thread. We, as users of the English language, seem particularly attentive to a monotheistic theological construct. Eagleton makes a glaring and revealing error along those lines, at one point writing “Christ-Buddha-Allah” as if all three were even remotely similar. They are not, and labelling them as such is a major disservice (other blogs regarding Dawkins and Eagleton seem to have also fallen afoul of this example). The judeo-christian-islamic strand of human religious behavior is just one strand of several on the earth, and among the associated and related sects within that strand are diverse and competing theological constructs (and more so each day it seems).
Yet there are also other very different manifestations of human religious behavior: Hinduism with its three dieties Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; Buddhism with none, although the teachings us divine symbolic referents to point out the illusion of them all; various indigenous polytheisms among peoples of Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, Pacifica; and newly developing spiritually oriented faiths free of omnipresent divinity but encompassing the efforts of researchers who study consciousness (for example those who examined the psilocybin and DMT molecules). Having spent the last 40 years in the academic study of the history and phenomenology of religions, I have come to a couple of conclusions: both Dawkins and Dennett are more accurate than not, and given the archaeological evidence, humans evolved for a relatively long period of time without religious activity. Maybe, just maybe, if researches can find some evidence of religious behaviors among the cetacea, then i would start to reexamine its evolutionary necessity and applicability. As yet neither the whales, nor bonobos, exhibit any traces.
Hello B,
To explain something means that you explain it in terms of some other, more fundamental, things. So, you always seem to end up with things that cannot be explained.
The only way out is if what we call “reality”, “the physical world” etc. only exists in an abstract mathematical form. Reality could be just the mathematical model that describes our universe. Other mathematical models describe other universes and they are thus just as real to any creatures that live there, so this lead to modal realism.
I like this idea, because it gives better answers to some philosophical questions that Sean discussed above. E.g. if the universe is not eternal then where did it come from? This would not be a problem if you only have mathematical reality, because then “the universe” is just a timeless mathematical model. This model describes a big bang and observers that ask questions like “what was there before the big bang?”.
Another example: Considering simulating a brain using a computer. It is difficult to deny that the simulated brain would be conscious. So, we intuitively accept that what makes us conscious is not the “hardware” but the “software” that our brains are running…
RPfb, perhaps you misrepresented his statements, displayed ignorance of the existence of formal systems (‘P=1’), tractability (why oh why aren’t quantum phenomena calculated explicitly at macro-scale), and made-up and debated from a non-standard definition of ‘closed system’ for starts?
Hi Nojoy,
If they ‘come from’ anywhere, it’s from the 0
0 is the identity element of the addition, it’s a finite closed subgroup, it never gets you anywhere.
0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0=0.
B.
You can define them recursively:
0 = {} (empty set)
1 = 0 U {0} = {0}
2 = 1 U {1} = {0,1}
etc. 🙂
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Frege lives!
It nice to come across this oasis of thought on the internet.
There are some excellent arguments here, but unfortunately I’ve heard the only response the crazys need – “the Holy Spirit gives understanding to those that are his – why should he do the same for the corrupt”. There’s just no response to that…
From bittergradstudent:
But the point is, if, at some later time, I measure the values of these dynamical variables, their values depend only on the initial values and the field equations. It is not much work to identify the final values as an ‘effect’ and the inital values as a ’cause.’ The field equations are simply a means by which to convert cause into effect. Aristotle used those terms vaguely, but the notion can be preserved in classical theories.
They can, in the sense you presented, but I think this misses the point. The field equations, or more generally, the invariant structure of dynamics, is what physics—at its core—has come to be about. The ancients’ consideration of causality only contained the first glimmerings of this understanding.
Kristine,
The Grand Unified Theory, if one must call it that, may be precisely the fundamental theory of those “checks and balances”; it will explain how they work. The fundamental balance that the universe seems to strike is between determinism (rigid causality) and utter, formless chaos. This balance seems to be essential for life, while posing the problems that life must solve to perpetuate itself. It is not obvious that these problems should be soluble, especially if there are no absolutes, ie, if change is primary and pervasive (as I believe it is).
bittergradstudent:
Oh, I agree. In that last part I meant that I’m not partial to “causes” – they have their uses, even here, but Sean’s model is broader.
Three points about your passionate commentary on Eagleton’s piece on Dawkins.
First, Eagleton points out that Dawkin’s book is academically incompetent: you should have a reasonable grounding in the theory you are critiquing if you are doing a responsible academic job. That is actually a good point. In addition to Dawkin’s lack of knowledge of theology, which can of course be responded to in the way you do – it’s not worth knowing (think how string theorists would respond if all the unsubtantiated claims of string theory were responded to in that way) – is his gross misrepresentation of history. He claims religion has been responsible for all the worst evils in history. Religion has of course been responsible for major evils in a totally unacceptable way (as well as being responsible for many good things, not acknowledged by Dawkins). But that statement of Dawkin’s shows a profound lack of knowledge of the history of the 20th century, when national socialism, based deeply in the philosophy of social Darwinism (see FROM DARWIN TO HITLER: EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS, EUGENICS, AND RACISM IN GERMANY by Richard Weikart) was the single biggest killer, apart from the massive killings by Mao Tse Tung (responsible for more deaths than any other individual ever). Dawkins of course does not mention the contribution of social Darwinism to the history of evil that would be too embarrassing for his thesis.
Second, Dawkin’s book is philosophically incompetent. It is driven by one particular faith position – atheism – which is just as unproveable as theism. That simple fact has been known since the time of Kant and Hume, and has been expressed very clearly by both of them. His book, like your review, is strongly driven by that faith position:
“But they haven’t given up on believing in God’s existence (suitably defined), which is what drives atheists like Dawkins (and me) a little crazy.”
Fair enough. But Dawkins is not entitled to claim, as he does, that science proves God does not exist. Certain reductionist philsophical positions associated with science by some scientists and philosophers argue that science can be interpreted as showing that God does not exist; but science itself cannot prove this statement (or disprove it). Please read Hume on this. Atheism, like theism, is an uprovable philosophical position, which can be argued for and against with vigour. To claim it is scientifically provable is not just philosophically wrong, it is also fundamentally damaging to science. Dawkins, as the Professor of Public Understanding of Science, has put this false dilemma to the British public in hard-hitting TV shows: choose between science and religion, you can’t have them both. The inevitable result is that he fuels the anti-science sentiment that is at large in many parts of the wider population. It is an irresponsible act by someone trusted with representing science to the public at large.
Finally, you yourself state:
“We don’t yet know how to describe the origin of the universe in purely physical terms, but someday we will — physicists are working on the problem every day.”
That is fantasy. Science will never be able to answer that problem because to answer it would involve doing experiments we will never be able to perform (re-running the universe for example, or probing conditions before the universe existed). We may be able to make plausible theories about how pre-physics might have led to physics in some way or other, but they will never be testable theories. They will inevitably be philosophical theories rather than tested science. It is fine to have such theories, but they must be acknowledged for what they are. It is crucial that scientists working on the foundations of cosmology respect the boundaries of what is scientifically provable and what is not, separating out clearly the philosophical foundations of their work from its scientifically testable aspects. This boundary is already highly blurred in many writings on the possible existence of a multiverse, for example. Claiming too much for science will in the end be counter productive. Science needs crucially to maintain its integrity as an observationally and experimentally testable subject, and to resist the temptation to abandon these pillars of its past success.
“First, Eagleton points out that Dawkin’s book is academically incompetent: you should have a reasonable grounding in the theory you are critiquing if you are doing a responsible academic job.”
Eagleton makes it easy for himself by equating theology and religion. “This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.”
Sean seem to discuss this, and PZ Myers takes this further to distinguish between a personal “god” of beliefs and an abstracted “oom” of theology. ( http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/10/carroll_steps_up_to_the_plate.php )
“think how string theorists would respond”
They seem quaite happy to discuss what background independence and lorentz covariance means with LQG:ers. Why should Dawkins abstain from discussing the epistomological basis of respective world view?
“the contribution of social Darwinism to the history of evil”
This is an old point that has been rehashed many times. The gist of it seems to be summarized well by Wikipedia: “Social Darwinism is the overextension and misapplication of Darwinian biological ideas to the social realm.”
Leaving this point superficially supported, I want to note that Richard Weikart is an associate of the creationistic organisation Discovery Institute ( http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=37&isFellow=true ).
On the evolution site Panda’s Thumb is a series of critique of the Darwin – evolution – social darwinism – nazism connection. ( http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/05/from_darwin_to.html ; http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/06/from_darwin_to_1.html ) by Nick Matzke, NCSE.
“To be fair to Weikart, his webpage lists his replies to historian critics, including Richards (evidently Weikart has another critic who bashed his book in the Journal of Modern History, although I have not yet read the review in the March 2006 issue of the journal).
Weikart’s reply is basically “But I didn’t mean to tar Darwin and evolution with the odious reputation of Hitler and the Nazis, I put some weak disclaimers to this effect at the beginning of my book.” But this is ludicrous. The title of Weikart’s book is From Darwin to Hitler, and he has participated in and endorsed the streams of anti-evolution propaganda put out by the Discovery Institute and related groups — see the links above, and don’t miss http://www.darwintohitler.com — based explicitly on Weikart’s book (which, if memory serves, the Discovery Institute financed in the first place). At best, Weikart is an innocent academic who is being used by the creationists for their own nefarious ends. But it’s impossible to believe that he is that stupid, especially since he has regularly shown up at ID conferences and events (and in their videos) to advocate his thesis.”
If Weikart book book is financed by anti-scientists and is heavily criticized (“bashed”) by several historians, I don’t see how he possibly can make a good reference.
“It is driven by one particular faith position – atheism – which is just as unproveable as theism.”
Strawman, I think. The reviewers seem to say that Dawkins view is not that is provable, but that atheism, or rather pure naturalism, has high probability. This is consistent with earlier claims from him.
“We may be able to make plausible theories about how pre-physics might have led to physics in some way or other, but they will never be testable theories.”
Ehrm. If you are George Ellis the cosmologist I should probably leave this to Sean as a fellow scientist. But I confess to curiosity how for example Linde’s eternal inflation ideas of pushing the start indefinitely back fit into the idea of a pre-physic and why it is a philosophical choice instead of science as usual to shave a theory to the skin of it, or perhaps use the cosmological principle where it takes us. The demarcation problem is partly a philosophical problem too, so it seems rather like question begging to try to separate out what is philosophy and what is science, especially on a specific problem.
Ooof! Too many spelling errors to correct all.
“I want to note”: I want to go on to note
“the Darwin – evolution – social darwinism – nazism connection”: the evolution – Darwin – social darwinism – nazism connection
“The reviewers seem to say that Dawkins view is not that is provable”:
Dawkins view is not that it is provable
No Joy #43
Curiously or rather historically
1 came long, long before 0 in Mathematics
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Bee #42
Reality is purely mathematical in mathematics
But it is amazing how much reality is not maths
or purely mathematical
So where do these ‘thoughts’ come from?
thru a macrostate blackhole
and where do the thoughts which don’t stay, go?
out thru another macrostate blachole
or thru the same (bivalve) macrostate blackhole
Scientists nudge closer to the edge of a black-hole
–
Hi Count,
You can define them recursively:
I know. That’s what I meant to say. Is there something like a ’cause’ for the natural numbers? Or is it just a set of axioms? Besides this, the recursive definition doesn’t change the fact that you can’t use the element 0 as a generator, once you’ve defined the elements of the group. On the other hand, there’s nothing special about using 1 whatsoever, since the group (actually, the natural numbers are only a semi-group, so lets make that integer numbers instead) generated by, say 23, is isomorphic to the one generated by 1.
1 gets a special meaning only if you clarify its the identity of another structure: multiplication. Inversion of which gives you all the fractions, and so on and so forth,…
So, in the end you’ll sit in this field of complex numbers, and every one of them is just a point in a plane. Does C have a cause?
B.
> But Dawkins is not entitled to claim, as he does, that science proves God does not exist.
I haven’t read TGD yet, but in the video lecture that I linked-to above, Dawkins says (at time offset 1:23:10), “I think the issue of whether God exists is strictly a scientific question. I don’t think science can answer it yet. There are lots of questions that science cannot yet answer. Science is working on it. What I think we can do, using the methods of science and logic, is to shade the probabiliies and say we can’t disprove God, and we can’t prove God, everybody agrees on that. But what you can do is answer the question, ‘What is the probability; what is the likelihood, that there’s a God?’ I haven’t had time to go into it this evening. I have made hints at it. My book goes into it further. I believe that one can produce a very, very strong case, although you can’t disprove God, just like you can’t disprove the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or faeries, that the likelihood that any sort of supernatural intelligence exists, is very, very low. I don’t think you need to be qualified in theology to do that, anymore than you need to be learned in astrology, to say that astrology is bunk.”
Given the above quote, can anyone who has read his book state that the book contradicts his public statments? Does his book actually say that “science proves that God does not exist”?
The book does not say that the existence of God can be disproved, by science or otherwise. But it does make the excellent point that this fact is a red herring.
Is there any statement about the world, not about logic or about mathematics, that can be proved? Can one prove for example that Santa Claus doesn’t exist – as opposed to say making a very strong case based on many observations? Or as Dawkins asks, what about the Gods Zeus, Poseidon, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
So what one should think about is not the trivial question of whether there is a proof, but rather the question: in which direction does the evidence point? And how far in that direction does it lead? Is the existence of God on a par with the existence of Santa Claus? Or is it better supported than that? Dawkins argues in an interesting way for the former – it’s worth reading.
If it’s the case that the existence of God is only as well supported by observations as the theory that say there’s an invisible pink elephant in the center of the sun, then a rational person should not believe in God (assuming they don’t believe in the pink elephant), despite the fact that there is no proof of non-existence.
Since it’s relatively clear that there’s little in life we really can prove, I can’t help but wonder why so many people immediately shout “you can’t prove that!”. It is not an argument, but a cheap debating trick.
They’re also reviewing the review of the review of the… eh… at Dawkins Website
Lawrence Krauss went over there the other day to review the review of his own reviw…
Okay, I’m so dizzy now that I have to lay down…
I’m hesitant to reply, since I feel like we’re hijacking the thread, so I’ll pretend that the discussion is topical.
Quasar9 #67
Ah, but this thread is all about whether modern understanding obviates the need for historical superstitious understanding. 🙂
Count Iblis #57
Thanks for providing the standard set-theoretic definition of the natural numbers.
B #56
Defining the natural numbers in terms of zero is just another example of creatio ex nihilo!.
I’m a big defender of zero since taking classes from Edsger Dijkstra, who wore a shirt that said, “Life begins at 60. Counting begins at 0.” In fact, I have an infrequently updated blog about zero and nothing.
This is an excellent post, but I still think you and everyone else get hung up on the ontological status of God. If God is immaterial (as in both sophisticated and unsophisticated versions of theology), it isn’t appropriate to talk of either existence or non-existence. Immaterial things (which include numbers and fictional characters as well as spiritual concepts like God and soul) just don’t work that way, and language always trips us up.
More confused thoughts at the link.
I’m going to go ahead and throw my two cents into this, because I’ve noticed a couple of things about this whole affair that have been recently modified:
1) Lawrence Krauss has softened toward creationists since he made has infamous appeal to the “higher-authority” of the Pope.
2) Richard Dawkins seems to have sharpened his point by taking a nearly-word-for-word page out of Lenny’s book to defend his cosmological position, including potentially valuable admissions that the universe “appears to be designed” and other near-exact statements to some that Lenny has made, which are new to Richards vocabulary.
Lawrence Krauss is trying to get along with moderates, because he knows that the extremists aren’t going to go away.
Dawkins is reacting extremely to the relentless pressure from extremists that is felt most predominantly by evolutionary biologists, so he seems to be perfectly justified, but I have to ask what motivates him and the interpretation of his “anti-chance-mechanism” since he also supports all of the rest of the stereotypical ideological positions that would predisposition-away from the recognition of valid science that gets mixed in with the creationists wishful thinking.
Professor Ellis’ comment that Dawkins’ “faith position – atheism – which is just as unproveable as theism” is a strawman. Professor Dawkins, in his new book, and in his lectures, interviews, and other writings acknowledges the fact that atheism, unlike theism, is falsifiable. As Professor Dawkins admits, modern Science cannot disprove the existence of God, but modern Science can make probabilistic (albeit, subjective) estimates about God’s existence. God, of course, if he/she/it truly exists, could settle the matter this afternoon, and Professor Dawkins admits that he himself would become a believer if such evidence would be uncovered. What evidence, if any, could convince Professor Ellis to abandon his philosophical and religious point of view? Fundamentally, The God Delusion asks the question “Does it make sense to believe in propositions that can never be verified nor falsified?” Atheism’s response is that we, at a minimum, should “suspend judgment” to such propositions while at the same time viewing more skeptically those propositions (such as “God”, the FSM, IPUs, fairies, etc.) that posit extreme complexity in the absence of any empirical data.