One frustrating aspect of our discussion about the compatibility of science and religion was the amount of effort expended arguing about definitions, rather than substance. When I use words like “God” or “religion,” I try to use them in senses that are consistent with how they have been understood (at least in the Western world) through history, by the large majority of contemporary believers, and according to definitions as you would encounter them in a dictionary. It seems clear to me that, by those standards, religious belief typically involves various claims about things that happen in the world — for example, the virgin birth or ultimate resurrection of Jesus. Those claims can be judged by science, and are found wanting.
Some people would prefer to define “religion” so that religious beliefs entail nothing whatsoever about what happens in the world. And that’s fine; definitions are not correct or incorrect, they are simply useful or useless, where usefulness is judged by the clarity of one’s attempts at communication. Personally, I think using “religion” in that way is not very clear. Most Christians would disagree with the claim that Jesus came about because Joseph and Mary had sex and his sperm fertilized her ovum and things proceeded conventionally from there, or that Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead, or that God did not create the universe. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints, whose job it is to judge whether a candidate for canonization has really performed the required number of miracles and so forth, would probably not agree that miracles don’t occur. Francis Collins, recently nominated to direct the NIH, argues that some sort of God hypothesis helps explain the values of the fundamental constants of nature, just like a good Grand Unified Theory would. These views are by no means outliers, even without delving into the more extreme varieties of Biblical literalism.
Furthermore, if a religious person really did believe that nothing ever happened in the world that couldn’t be perfectly well explained by ordinary non-religious means, I would think they would expend their argument-energy engaging with the many millions of people who believe that the virgin birth and the resurrection and the promise of an eternal afterlife and the efficacy of intercessory prayer are all actually literally true, rather than with a handful of atheist bloggers with whom they agree about everything that happens in the world. But it’s a free country, and people are welcome to define words as they like, and argue with whom they wish.
But there was also a more interesting and substantive issue lurking below the surface. I focused in that post on the meaning of “religion,” but did allude to the fact that defenders of Non-Overlapping Magisteria often misrepresent “science” as well. And this, I think, is not just a matter of definitions: we can more or less agree on what “science” means, and still disagree on what questions it has the power to answer. So that’s an issue worth examining more carefully: what does science actually have the power to do?
I can think of one popular but very bad strategy for answering this question: first, attempt to distill the essence of “science” down to some punchy motto, and then ask what questions fall under the purview of that motto. At various points throughout history, popular mottos of choice might have been “the Baconian scientific method” or “logical positivism” or “Popperian falsificationism” or “methodological naturalism.” But this tactic always leads to trouble. Science is a messy human endeavor, notoriously hard to boil down to cut-and-dried procedures. A much better strategy, I think, is to consider specific examples, figure out what kinds of questions science can reasonably address, and compare those to the questions in which we’re interested.
Here is my favorite example question. Alpha Centauri A is a G-type star a little over four light years away. Now pick some very particular moment one billion years ago, and zoom in to the precise center of the star. Protons and electrons are colliding with each other all the time. Consider the collision of two electrons nearest to that exact time and that precise point in space. Now let’s ask: was momentum conserved in that collision? Or, to make it slightly more empirical, was the magnitude of the total momentum after the collision within one percent of the magnitude of the total momentum before the collision?
This isn’t supposed to be a trick question; I don’t have any special knowledge or theories about the interior of Alpha Centauri that you don’t have. The scientific answer to this question is: of course, the momentum was conserved. Conservation of momentum is a principle of science that has been tested to very high accuracy by all sorts of experiments, we have every reason to believe it held true in that particular collision, and absolutely no reason to doubt it; therefore, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that momentum was conserved.
A stickler might argue, well, you shouldn’t be so sure. You didn’t observe that particular event, after all, and more importantly there’s no conceivable way that you could collect data at the present time that would answer the question one way or the other. Science is an empirical endeavor, and should remain silent about things for which no empirical adjudication is possible.
But that’s completely crazy. That’s not how science works. Of course we can say that momentum was conserved. Indeed, if anyone were to take the logic of the previous paragraph seriously, science would be a completely worthless endeavor, because we could never make any statements about the future. Predictions would be impossible, because they haven’t happened yet, so we don’t have any data about them, so science would have to be silent.
All that is completely mixed-up, because science does not proceed phenomenon by phenomenon. Science constructs theories, and then compares them to empirically-collected data, and decides which theories provide better fits to the data. The definition of “better” is notoriously slippery in this case, but one thing is clear: if two theories make the same kinds of predictions for observable phenomena, but one is much simpler, we’re always going to prefer the simpler one. The definition of theory is also occasionally troublesome, but the humble language shouldn’t obscure the potential reach of the idea: whether we call them theories, models, hypotheses, or what have you, science passes judgment on ideas about how the world works.
And that’s the crucial point. Science doesn’t do a bunch of experiments concerning colliding objects, and say “momentum was conserved in that collision, and in that one, and in that one,” and stop there. It does those experiments, and then it also proposes frameworks for understanding how the world works, and then it compares those theoretical frameworks to that experimental data, and — if the data and theories seem good enough — passes judgment. The judgments are necessarily tentative — one should always be open to the possibility of better theories or surprising new data — but are no less useful for that.
Furthermore, these theoretical frameworks come along with appropriate domains of validity, depending both on the kinds of experimental data we have available and on the theoretical framework itself. At the low energies available to us in laboratory experiments, we are very confident that baryon number (the total number of quarks minus antiquarks) is conserved in every collision. But we don’t necessarily extend that to arbitrarily high energies, because it’s easy to think of perfectly sensible extensions of our current theoretical understanding in which baryon number might very well be violated — indeed, it’s extremely likely, since there are a lot more quarks than antiquarks in the observable universe. In contrast, we believe with high confidence that electric charge is conserved at arbitrarily high energies. That’s because the theoretical underpinnings of charge conservation are a lot more robust and inflexible than those of baryon-number conservation. A good theoretical framework can be extremely unforgiving and have tremendous scope, even if we’ve only tested it over a blink of cosmic time here on our tiny speck of a planet.
The same logic applies, for example, to the highly contentious case of the multiverse. The multiverse isn’t, by itself, a theory; it’s a prediction of a certain class of theories. If the idea were simply “Hey, we don’t know what happens outside our observable universe, so maybe all sorts of crazy things happen,” it would be laughably uninteresting. By scientific standards, it would fall woefully short. But the point is that various theoretical attempts to explain phenomena that we directly observe right in front of us — like gravity, and quantum field theory — lead us to predict that our universe should be one of many, and subsequently suggest that we take that situation seriously when we talk about the “naturalness” of various features of our local environment. The point, at the moment, is not whether there really is or is not a multiverse; it’s that the way we think about it and reach conclusions about its plausibility is through exactly the same kind of scientific reasoning we’ve been using for a long time now. Science doesn’t pass judgment on phenomena; it passes judgment on theories.
The reason why we can be confident that momentum was conserved during that particular collision a billion years ago is that science has concluded (beyond reasonable doubt, although not with metaphysical certitude) that the best framework for understanding the world is one in which momentum is conserved in all collisions. It’s certainly possible that this particular collision was an exception; but a framework in which that were true would necessarily be more complicated, without providing any better explanation for the data we do have. We’re comparing two theories: one in which momentum is always conserved, and one in which it occasionally isn’t, including a billion years ago at the center of Alpha Centauri. Science is well equipped to carry out this comparison, and the first theory wins hands-down.
Now let’s turn to a closely analogous question. There is some historical evidence that, about two thousand years ago in Galilee, a person named Jesus was born to a woman named Mary, and later grew up to be a messianic leader and was eventually crucified by the Romans. (Unruly bloke, by the way — tended to be pretty doctrinaire about the number of paths to salvation, and prone to throwing moneychangers out of temples. Not very “accommodating,” if you will.) The question is: how did Mary get pregnant?
One approach would be to say: we just don’t know. We weren’t there, don’t have any reliable data, etc. Should just be quiet.
The scientific approach is very different. We have two theories. One theory is that Mary was a virgin; she had never had sex before becoming pregnant, or encountered sperm in any way. Her pregnancy was a miraculous event, carried out through the intervention of the Holy Ghost, a spiritual manifestation of a triune God. The other theory is that Mary got pregnant through relatively conventional channels, with the help of (one presumes) her husband. According to this theory, claims to the contrary in early (although not contemporary) literature are, simply, erroneous.
There’s no question that these two theories can be judged scientifically. One is conceptually very simple; all it requires is that some ancient texts be mistaken, which we know happens all the time, even with texts that are considerably less ancient and considerably better corroborated. The other is conceptually horrible; it posits an isolated and unpredictable deviation from otherwise universal rules, and invokes a set of vaguely-defined spiritual categories along the way. By all of the standards that scientists have used for hundreds of years, the answer is clear: the sex-and-lies theory is enormously more compelling than the virgin-birth theory.
The same thing is true for various other sorts of miraculous events, or claims for the immortality of the soul, or a divine hand in guiding the evolution of the universe and/or life. These phenomena only make sense within a certain broad framework for understanding how the world works. And that framework can be judged against others in which there are no miracles etc. And, without fail, the scientific judgment comes down in favor of a strictly non-miraculous, non-supernatural view of the universe.
That’s what’s really meant by my claim that science and religion are incompatible. I was referring to the Congregation-for-the-Causes-of-the-Saints interpretation of religion, which entails a variety of claims about things that actually happen in the world; not the it’s-all-in-our-hearts interpretation, where religion makes no such claims. (I have no interest in arguing at this point in time over which interpretation is “right.”) When religion, or anything else, makes claims about things that happen in the world, those claims can in principle be judged by the methods of science. That’s all.
Well, of course, there is one more thing: the judgment has been made, and views that step outside the boundaries of strictly natural explanation come up short. By “natural” I simply mean the view in which everything that happens can be explained in terms of a physical world obeying unambiguous rules, never disturbed by whimsical supernatural interventions from outside nature itself. The preference for a natural explanation is not an a priori assumption made by science; it’s a conclusion of the scientific method. We know enough about the workings of the world to compare two competing big-picture theoretical frameworks: a purely naturalistic one, versus one that incorporates some sort of supernatural component. To explain what we actually see, there’s no question that the naturalistic approach is simply a more compelling fit to the observations.
Could science, through its strategy of judging hypotheses on the basis of comparison with empirical data, ever move beyond naturalism to conclude that some sort of supernatural influence was a necessary feature of explaining what happens in the world? Sure; why not? If supernatural phenomena really did exist, and really did influence things that happened in the world, science would do its best to figure that out.
It’s true that, given the current state of data and scientific theorizing, the vast preponderance of evidence comes down in favor of understanding the world on purely natural terms. But that’s not to say that the situation could not, at least in principle, change. Science adapts to reality, however it presents itself. At the dawn of the 20th century, it would have been hard to find a more firmly accepted pillar of physics than the principle of determinism: the future can, in principle, be predicted from the present state. The experiments that led us to invent quantum mechanics changed all that. Moving from a theory in which the present uniquely determines the future to one where predictions are necessarily probabilistic in nature is an incredible seismic shift in our deep picture of reality. But science made the switch with impressive rapidity, because that’s what the data demanded. Some stubborn folk tried to recover determinism at a deeper level by inventing more clever theories — which is exactly what they should have done. But (to make a complicated story simple) they didn’t succeed, and scientists learned to deal.
It’s not hard to imagine a similar hypothetical scenario playing itself out for the case of supernatural influences. Scientists do experiments that reveal anomalies that can’t be explained by current theories. (These could be subtle things at a microscopic level, or relatively blatant manifestations of angels with wings and flaming swords.) They struggle to come up with new theories that fit the data within the reigning naturalist paradigm, but they don’t succeed. Eventually, they agree that the most compelling and economical theory is one with two parts: a natural part, based on unyielding rules, with a certain well-defined range of applicability, and a supernatural one, for which no rules can be found.
Of course, that phase of understanding might be a temporary one, depending on the future progress of theory and experiment. That’s perfectly okay; scientific understanding is necessarily tentative. In the mid-19th century, before belief in atoms had caught on among physicists, the laws of thermodynamics were thought to be separate, autonomous rules, in addition to the crisp Newtonian laws governing particles. Eventually, through Maxwell and Boltzmann and the other pioneers of kinetic theory, we learned better, and figured out how thermodynamic behavior could be subsumed into the Newtonian paradigm through statistical mechanics. One of the nice things about science is that it’s hard to predict its future course. Likewise, the need for a supernatural component in the best scientific understanding of the universe might evaporate — or it might not. Science doesn’t assume things from the start; it tries to deal with reality as it presents itself, however that may be.
This is where talk of “methodological naturalism” goes astray. Paul Kurtz defines it as the idea that “all hypotheses and events are to be explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events.” That “explained and tested” is an innocent-looking mistake. Science tests things empirically, which is to say by reference to observable events; but it doesn’t have to explain things as by reference to natural causes and events. Science explains what it sees the best way it can — why would it do otherwise? The important thing is to account for the data in the simplest and most useful way possible.
There’s no obstacle in principle to imagining that the normal progress of science could one day conclude that the invocation of a supernatural component was the best way of understanding the universe. Indeed, this scenario is basically the hope of most proponents of Intelligent Design. The point is not that this couldn’t possibly happen — it’s that it hasn’t happened in our actual world. In the real world, by far the most compelling theoretical framework consistent with the data is one in which everything that happens is perfectly accounted for by natural phenomena. No virgin human births, no coming back after being dead for three days, no afterlife in Heaven, no supernatural tinkering with the course of evolution. You can define “religion” however you like, but you can’t deny the power of science to reach far-reaching conclusions about how reality works.
I say those two electrons in the core of alpha centauri have not yet collided – they are waiting for someone to observe them before they can collide and collapse into a new wave function state. Where is Shroedinger’s cat when you need him?
I am one of those people who believe in the virgin birth, the resurrection and a whole lot more that seems miraculous. I am also one who very much believes in science and in fact a fan of Sean from his Teaching Company course, have a undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics, and once was in a Ph.D. program in math before deciding the “real world” was more interesting. I am a science junkie and voracious consumer of Teaching Company science courses, books on the history of science etc. It is my love of science that has led me to accept even more these non scientific claims about a specific religion. Not that science can prove the virgin birth or the resurrection, it cannot. But that science is limited the way it is practiced and must always be so.
Now Sean hints that science could accept things that cannot be explained by naturalistic forces. And it is the obvious failings of science that reinforces for me that there must be another explanation. This does not mean that science should stop or give up but maybe should consider other possible explanations. Science has problems with origins. After things have been set up, it does just fine but it the origin of several things that have left science begging. We are enamored with what science can do but we should also be cognizant of what science has failed to do.
For example,
1. Existence – why does anything exist? The most eternal of all questions.
2. Our magnificent existence and universe that seems so fine tuned for a purpose. If not multiverses then why.
3. A very rare Earth. There may be 10^20 planets in the universe but this one is quite unique. There may be a large number of planets in the universe just like ours but then again there may not be. We are far from on a mediocre planet in a mediocre solar system in an ordinary part of the galaxy.
4. How did life arise? Science is nowhere on this. How did the information content necessary in life arise? It is daunting. Just consider the ribosome for starters let alone a working cell. Or if pre cell, a working system.
5. How did life evolve? What is the origin of species? The conventional wisdom is that Darwinian processes explain it but here too the problem of information raises its ugly head and Darwinian processes can’t dent it. Those who believe that evolution is a done deal are in real denial. In this year of Darwin, there may be the seeds of his demise as a factor in evolution and nothing is on the horizon to replace it. Could there have been some intelligent meddling? Hard to see that getting considered with all the Darwin fawning.
6. How did consciousness arise and is free will a figment or our determinist illusions? Will your reactions to this post be the result of a deterministic process that started in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
And those here who decry the inanity of religion, is there anything that could replace it and maintain a stable society? What ethic would replace it when nihilism and meaningless are all that is left to a world that is no longer a mystery and is awash in all the technology that man has created?
A brief quibble @ Ali:
(excuse my tag crappiness, please; I can’t seem to find the View Code option in Chrome so I don’t know how you guys do quotes.)
Quote: Science is only a recent tool of understanding, born of the rigors of Western philosophy and, yes, very useful as far as it goes. But religion has cropped up in every single human culture there ever was. We can survive without knowing about conserved momentum in an atomic collision within some far away star. What we cannot survive without, are stories about why life has meaning, and how best to live meaningfully. /Quote
I think this is a sort of fallacy, to be honest. Science as a codified system of inquiry is fairly new, but empiricism is not. Just as there seems to be an inbuilt faculty in the human mind for religion, there seems to be one for testing the world outside the head. It may not resemble science (much like early religions don’t particularly resemble modern ones) but there have always been people who try things and test them. Initially crude (example: First cave man: “Does this berry taste good?” *thunk* Second Cave man: “Probably not…”) but increasingly refined. It makes good sense along evolutionary lines because we certainly cannot exist outside our evolved savanna niche if we couldn’t adjust to new ecologies, which is a trial and error process much like a proto-science.
I think Dennet had something along these lines in Breaking the Spell. I believe he pointed at the same faculty (pattern recognition) leading to both religious and empirical phenomenon.
It also seems like you’re putting the cart before the horse with the religion thing. Stories about how to live and what makes life meaningful are not exclusively the province of religion unless you’re defining religion that way. And the presence of religion in every society we’ve encountered doesn’t make religion necessary any more than the common cold.
@ali
Correct, but it does ask for people to draw an erroneous category distinction, saying there is something religious/artistic resting “beyond” science, as you do here:
…as though the cognitive processes by which we comprehend aesthetic truths did not belong to science.
A brief quibble @ Ali:
(excuse my tag crappiness, please; I can’t seem to find the View Code option in Chrome so I don’t know how you guys do quotes.)
Quote: Science is only a recent tool of understanding, born of the rigors of Western philosophy and, yes, very useful as far as it goes. But religion has cropped up in every single human culture there ever was. We can survive without knowing about conserved momentum in an atomic collision within some far away star. What we cannot survive without, are stories about why life has meaning, and how best to live meaningfully. /Quote
I think this is a sort of fallacy, to be honest. Science as a codified system of inquiry is fairly new, but empiricism is not. Just as there seems to be an inbuilt faculty in the human mind for religion, there seems to be one for testing the world outside the head. It may not resemble science (much like early religions don’t particularly resemble modern ones) but there have always been people who try things and test them. Initially crude (example: First cave man: “Does this berry taste good?” *thunk* Second Cave man: “Probably not…”) but increasingly refined. It makes good sense along evolutionary lines because we certainly cannot exist outside our evolved savanna niche if we couldn’t adjust to new ecologies, which is a trial and error process much like a proto-science.
I think Dennet had something along these lines in Breaking the Spell. I believe he pointed at the same faculty (pattern recognition) leading to both religious and empirical phenomenon.
It also seems like you’re putting the cart before the horse with the religion thing. Stories about how to live and what makes life meaningful are not exclusively the province of religion unless you’re defining religion that way. And the presence of religion in every society we’ve encountered doesn’t make religion necessary any more than the common cold.
@George V
1. Why shouldn’t something exist? Why would the default state be nothing? You can start with one assumption or the other but you’re still just assuming. Its trivially true that something exists, that we can see and understand parts of whatever it is, and that we can reason our way towards an understanding of it. The anthropic principal, while unwieldy, does a reasonable job of explaining why there is something: because we’re here watching it.
2. The fine tuning argument is essentially trash. The universe we exist has the constraints it does because we’re here to observe it. Check the anthropic principal out. Also there are a wide variety of other values of the 20 or so constants that can support life even better than ours (there’s a program out there that will randomly generate values for these constraints and many of the universes are _more_ welcoming for life than ours). Additionally, this is essentially a warmed over version of the ontological argument, i.e. we live in an ideal world that _couldn’t possibly be better_.
3. Earth is rare in our locality, or at least it appears to be as we’ve yet to get the extra-solar planet survey going. Even if it is locally rare, its a big, big universe and depending on your Drake Equation values, there are still a _lot_ of Earths out there, just not close by. You’re also assuming that Life is always going to be like Life On Earth. Until we get a much better philosophical handle on what life is we’re shooting blind on this point.
4. I’m not sure where you’re getting this information conservation idea from, random crossover adds information to the genome all the time and the laws of universe seem to have a faculty for supporting complexity of a type that seems self organizing at a variety of levels. You’re also just pushing back the problem of information if you assume there’s an outside force providing it. Where did the information for it arise from?
5. Darwinian processes are pretty well established. Going into them here is a waste of everyone’s time. Either you’re convinced in the utility or validity of the theory, you’re ignorant or you’re unconvinced. You do not seem ignorant, so I’ll assume you’ve already heard all the arguments for it and remained unconvinced.
6. The presence or absence of free will or determinism are not at all helped by the presence of an omniscient interferer. If the OI is capable of tinkering with the universe at the level you’re suggesting, solely for the purpose of creating man and ensuring that man operates along certain principals you’re giving it the ability to see all of the future in such detail that our actions are predicted. If our actions are predicted then we have no free will. Augustine (I think) noted this when he was discussing the philosophy of time.
In general, none of these questions are in any way helped by the introduction of an OI or supernatural claims. The addition of an OI not only doesn’t help, it hurts the rest of the body of knowledge by poking flaming holes in it.
And the program I referred to is here: http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Cosmo/monkey.html
Their is no doubt whatsoever in my mind and my experiences with God and from God that He in fact does exist. I don’t have the intelligence of many of your readers and it seems that the more intelligent seem to have the greatest problem believing, but it’s absolutely true that He does exist, and I in fact know this, by His Grace, not from faith, but from direct knowledge of who He is and what He is, but their is no science in any shape or form that will ever prove His existence, nor will their be any intelligence great enough to conceive of Him never, never, never. I am not lying I have nothing to gain, except perhaps ridicule, and there is a great deal of that I may receive.
@ George V
Not to tread on Jerico’s toes in engaging you, but I feel this statement merits its own discussion:
“And those here who decry the inanity of religion, is there anything that could replace it and maintain a stable society? What ethic would replace it when nihilism and meaningless are all that is left to a world that is no longer a mystery and is awash in all the technology that man has created?”
Despite your fear of a godless society, a significant population of atheists manage to live their lives while restraining from theft and wanton murder. Why is external morality necessary?
Also, if our current lives are nothing but the waiting room for final judgment and eternal life, what meaning remains in the comparison of the short to the infinite? What could be more meaningful than what you do with your short time here?
Why is mystery to be lauded? Should we not question the deeper truths of our universe?
You say you believe in science, but then suggest that some things require us to simply shrug and say “God did it”. Your opinions seem inconsistent.
Lastly, and not directed specifically at George V: Others have said this, but tagging the scientific theory of evolution as “Darwinism” is intellectually dishonest. Evolution does not equate to something like General Relativity which was largely developed by one individual. Evolution has been formulated, modified and refined by a whole community. Pinning it to one individual leads to attacks on Darwin, which in truth have no bearing on accepted scientific theory, as well as painting a picture of scientists who are idolizing fanatics with their own dogma.
Short version: If you use the term “Darwinism”, I am not going to be predisposed to take you too seriously.
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Eric Q Says:
If you use the term “Darwinism”, I am not going to be predisposed to take you too seriously. Two things:
1. The term Darwinism is used by people in biology and other places all the time. It has two meanings, one is a science meaning essentially descent with modification, through gradualistic processes and natural selection. The second is a philosophical/metaphysical one implying as Darwin did that there is no need for an outside hand in any of evolution.
2. I did not use the term.
I am well aware of nearly all the ideas proposed for evolution and know that Darwinian processes are not the only alternative being considered. As an aside, I believe Stephen Gould once remarked that neo Darwinism is dead.
I never said that there ever should be any cessation of investigation of anything. I just said that the explanations for certain phenomena may lie outside the natural laws or our universe. By the way the origin in the willful action of an intelligent agent lie outside the natural laws of our universe.
To argue that you, your friends or prominent atheist live their lives in a desired fashion is extremely short sighted because it is not based on something that is transferable to all of society. At the present moment, atheists and humanist are living off the ethic of Western society which was based on the Judeo Christian tradition and inculcated in our legal system. If that ethic is buried, what make anyone think something similar will prevail or how long it will last. I do not want to get into a debate on this because it could go on forever. So we can agree to disagree.
As far as Jerico’s response is concerned. I posed 6 major unanswered issues and he ranted. He obviously does not know anything about the origin of life or evolution issues or else he would not have made the responses he did. I have seen his argument for the universe before and the rare earth. The rest was just a rant.
And to clear things up, I believe that there is at least two concurrent theories of evolution. One is well supported and one is bogus. But again I do not want to get into a debate on this since it could be endless. My main purpose is that what most people here believe is given is not with others who have just as much information on science and belief in it as a very powerful and fruitful activity as do the people here.
@ George
I’m sorry you consider that ranting. I was under the impression that I was addressing your points and the general naturalistic (you’ll note I did not say atheistic) responses to them. In case you were wondering which ideological badge I have on my sleeve, I’m an agnostic on the idea of a creator but an atheist with respect to a participatory deity. I pointed out:
1) That you’re assuming that the universe required a start. Our universe almost certainly had a start (the Big Bang singularity) which may or may not have been a branching off from a parent universe. It could, to steal a phrase, be tortoises all the way down, i.e. there could be a series of parent universes which never end. This was a very, very common view of the cosmos when we were still a species primarily tied to the cycle of the world for survival. I note you didn’t address this point at all.
2) The fine tuning argument is trash. It is not true. It is not the case that we live in the only possible universe capable of supporting (our kind of) life. There are other values for those constants that enable a universe that is MORE hospitable to life. I note you did not address this point at all. (you’re going to see that a lot here)
3) If I wanted to rant about this point, I could’ve told you that every planet is unique. Each one is a beautiful snowflake. But I wasn’t ranting, so I thought I’d actually make a point or something. We’ve examined (at the resolution necessary to identify earth like traits) a vanishingly small number of local planets. I’m glad you’ve seen this argument before, it is about the most common rationale for the continuation of SETI despite the fact that its been years since we started an nobody is calling us to ask for translations of the Bible. Congratulations, you addressed a point!
4) Science is not “nowhere” with respect to this problem. Here you’ll see 19 or so ideas on the subject many of which have been discarded due to not fitting the evidence. You’ll note that these theories can _be_ falsified, something that OI theories cannot. You at least mentioned my point here, so I’ll give you full credit.
5. I don’t really want to get into a real argument over evolution here. If you can’t see that evolution is about as established a theory as say, gravitation or aerodynamics, then you can’t see it. I could point you at all the technology and techniques that have come from evolution, the various fossil records that only make sense if evolution is true, the…well never mind. You mentioned ‘origin of life’ in your response, so I guess I’ll stick with precedent and give you full credit for addressing the point.
6. You ignored this completely. I don’t think you even read it. Really, how can free will be compatible with a ‘designer’ capable of knowing the necessary information to engineer a universe? Hell, I even mentioned a prominent Christian philosopher right there- he was specificially concerned with an omniscient deity, which I haven’t heard you mention directly, but a being capable of doing what your suggesting would be functionally omniscient. Then of course comes the various problems of evil associated with such a being and the associated theodicies made to excuse its actions.
Now, lets look at the rest of this post, shall we? I’m assuming you’re pointing at Eric Q’s friends when you say
Quote: …atheists and humanists are living off the ethic of Western society was was based on the Judeo Christian tradition and inculcated in our legal system. /quote
This is also not true. Please provide a Judeo-Christian backing for democracy? I think you’ll find that is Greek, from a time before Christ was born and unconnected with Judaism in any form. So not Judeo-Christian at all. I think separation of church and state is also not part of the ethic you’re alluding underlies our society. Equal rights for individuals, freedom of and from religion, free-market economy and a whole list of other integral parts of our society are actively antithetical to the Judeo-Christian ethic.
Also: living off? That’s some pretty cheap sophistry right there. I wonder what the ratio of believers to unbelievers on unemployment is…See, I can do it too. I’ll point out for other observers that the reason for that ratio has everything to do with socioeconomics and education and nothing to do with whatever qualities one wishes to associate with belief and unbelief.
And I do believe there is a pretty large world outside of the Judeo-christian tradition that manages to do just fine with respect to ‘law and order’ and that that portion of the world is a) larger than Europe by population and area b) older than Judeo-christianity (I’m sure the proto-Jews and proto-Chinese would love to fight over this). Most of these societies consider Christianity quaint and who are we to tell them they’re wrong? I mean, they have an ancient tradition, we have an ancient tradition, how can we know?
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Suggesting that we should take claims of the multiverse seriously because the method of reasoning used to infer their existence is the same as is used to infer the conservation of momentum is outright silly. The biggest downside to this blog is that it is so very sympathetic to string theorists. We wouldn’t mind if you were string theorists if you didn’t also try to tell people how to think about life, the universe and everything – particularly why science is right and religion is wrong. You’ve invented an entire class of theories that are downright unscientific and try to peddle them as a plausible scientific alternative to religion. Your particular brand of science leads you to seriously consider outrageous and preposterous theories as the nature of reality. You are willing to seriously consider them merely because your equations – which are highly underconstrained – tell you to. Sounds like you’ve got enough philosophy of science problems to deal with on your own.
@piscator and @smijer
I think the two of you have misunderstood Sean. You are saying that an event does not have a scientific explanation iff it’s a miracle. While, I believe Sean is saying that ‘scientific explanation’ is a flexible concept and it is logically possible that an explanation of miracles (which will be necessarily supernatural) may count as a scientific explanation, i.e. miracles can have a scientific explanation.
I think i’ll also add what I believe is the main point of the post, if for no other reason than for someone to point out that i’m totally clueless.
Consider two theories that purport to explain some facts: 1) Newton’s three laws of motion and 2) Newston’s laws + violation of F $neq$ ma at arbitrary times due to divine whimsy. We accept #1 over #2 because of Occam’s razor. If we accept #1 (not that #1 is true) then we do not accept #2. And we seek to explain away any violation of F=ma until there is incontrovertible evidence against #1, in which case we would pass on to #1.1 which is the next simplest theory. It may happen that through continual violation we may finally have to adopt #2, which then by necessity would be the simplest theory best fitting the facts.
Thus, there is no a priori exclusions of any weird form of explanation.
On a different note, I wonder if Mary gave birth as a virgin to a son who went on to be a regular carpenter and later died of old age. Would the virgin birth still count as a miracle or will it be a highly suspicious case of human parthenogenesis?
Following up on Josef Johann’s point in #12:
Sean writes:
“Could science, through its strategy of judging hypotheses on the basis of comparison with empirical data, ever move beyond naturalism to conclude that some sort of supernatural influence was a necessary feature of explaining what happens in the world? Sure; why not?…Eventually, [scientists] agree that the most compelling and economical theory is one with two parts: a natural part, based on unyielding rules, with a certain well-defined range of applicability, and a supernatural one, for which no rules can be found.”
Seems to me that scientists would need some positive evidence for supernatural agency and its specific characteristics and modes of operations to justifiably say that there’s a supernatural component in an explanation. The default position in the absence of actual evidence for supernatural causation, which necessarily involves specifics of some sort, has to be that naturalistic explanations are incomplete, not that the supernatural exists.
Adding to my previous comment:
What if Mary gave birth (as a virgin) to a son who then went on to be an influential demagogue and at 34(?) died of consumption. Would the virgin birth still count as a miracle or will it be a highly suspicious case of human parthenogenesis? What if the boy grew up to become a thief who later at age 34 died nailed to the cross? What if the boy grew up to be an influential demagogue and at age 34 died at the cross for his rabble- rousing?..etc
Sean:
You specify an exact place, time and two electrons colliding. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle assures us that under these conditions, the momenta are extremely uncertain, and therefore we can be sure that conservation of momentum in this case is unkowable 😉
Sean, that was a nice post. I feel one might loosely say that science starts out with the axiom that there are no miracles (or one-off events/phenomenon) while for ‘religion’ it is one of the basic axioms.
I have a minor point regarding: “… Sure; why not? If supernatural phenomena really did exist, and really did influence things that happened in the world, science would do its best to figure that out.” – What if the anomalous observations were so infrequent that each time they are just ignored?
Rephrasing the question how do we explain a phenomenon whose timescale is vastly longer than our own life spans. To give you a better idea, imagine a micro-organism, whose life span is about 30 minutes. How can it possibly explain a phenomenon as an eclipse?
P, if the anomalies are very frequent and apparently significant, we have to take them seriously. If they are sufficiently infrequent, it might make sense to attribute them to experimental error (of one sort or another). Obviously there is some in-between point where the anomalies are frequent enough to not be dismissed, but too infrequent to be carefully studied; that’s the case where you need more data. Happens all the time in real science.
As I read the evidence, most of the time most Christians, like most Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, have been simply superstitious in an uncomplicated sense of the word. That elite opinion has been similarly superstitious is quite a bit less clear, at least to me. That may not matter if you look at religious history under the one-person one-vote rule, but it does matter if your focus is on the comparatively small number of people who put ideas into circulation. In the intellectual tradition of the West I refer to the Origens, Augustines, Anselms, Aquinases, Pascals, Schleiermachers, Kierkegaards, Barths, and Bultmanns and maybe even the Pauls, Luthers, and Calvins. Thing is, I can’t claim to have a terribly clear idea what Hans Kung is up to, but in good light I’m able to distinguish him from Ken Ham.
It makes a huge difference, or so I claim, if investigate religion–or science for that matter–without polemical intent, but I can’t remember the last time I read a comment on a website about these issues that wasn’t a move in an ideological struggle. I’ve got nothing against verbal warfare, which everybody seems to think is tons of fun, but should we dare to be dull now and then? Bloggers have hitherto sought to change the world. How about understanding it first?
#43/44 Infrequent anomalies? Well, there was an era in which being born from virgins wasn’t so infrequent as it is today. Typically though these were royal virgins, or godesses themselves.
Amenophis III was born without his mother having sex. Horus was born without Isis having to do the sexy thing. Semele didn’t have to really get dirty with Zeus to get Dionysos, likewise didn’t Leto before Apollo popped out of her, or Coronis to get Asclepios. Over in Italy they too thought it cool idea 2, so Romulus was crafted the immaculate way by Rhea, rumored to have gotten cosy with Mars (the God, not the entire planet). Mithras too was born the virgin way. In Celtic mythology Llew Llawgyffes (who?) mother Arianrhod (uh?) believed herself to be a virgin when giving birth. Zoroaster was after some consideration born of a virgin. All the avatars Vishnu could take were also born the boring way. Plato couldn’t have been born like normal folk either, some say.
Of course some of these things could also get lost in the translation:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7800822.stm
You would expect something like that to be the case if there was more disagreement among early christians about this so boringly unoriginal virgin birth story than there was at (much) later times, that is to say before they were kicked out of christianity, their beliefs became heresy and like the Ebionites were erased from history almost entirely.
So I gather religious people of different persuasions are going to feel this urge to differentiate between infrequent anomalies that are true (did really happen) and those that aren’t (are just fairy tales.) If so is the burden of proof going to shift accordingly or not?
Sean Carroll and Jerry Coyne both make the essential point that methodological naturalism is a description of the results of scientific investigation rather than a universally held philosophical assumption. The earliest scientists didn’t start off knowing what did and didn’t work, so they experimented with everything they could, eventually concluding, with Laplace, that they had no need of that hypothesis.
Chris Mooney has, I think, asserted a philosophical complement to methodological naturalism, that the supernatural is inherently separate from the natural. It’s perhaps reasonable to define as supernatural all phenomena which cannot in principle be observed in any reliable fashion, but perhaps less reasonable to credit their existence.
In any event, 68% of Americans believe in angels and demons and miracles, so the fraction of the faithful whose notion of the supernatural excludes its practical efficacy is small, and probably already friendly to scientific thinking. The rest need to hear from their ministers that their religion is compatible with science, and unfortunately few are as accommodating as the Dalai Lama.
Science flatters itself if it thinks it could ever incorporate the supernatural. Science assumes too much if it assumes the supernatural is natural. Science has to be observable and repeatable. No doubt if it repeatedly observed a collision that did not conserve angular momentum, it would be notable, but none would consider it supernatural, only unknown and it would work to develop theories that could explain it naturally. It may have difficulty doing so but it is not so weak willed that it will posit it supernatural, only that is beyond its current knowledge.
Science deals with the known and unknown. It has no capacity to deal with the isolated or the unknowable. It may proffer reasonable natural explanations but the choice to believe them is still one of belief even if they believe it more likely. If someone chooses not to, it may be they disregard the evidence or it may be they don’t find it convincing. The evidence of evolution is abundant, the evidence of the absence of a single virgin birth non existent. Barring time travel or an encounter with an alien race that happened to document that distance past or with the divine, both natural and supernatural are only speculation and neither convincing, just the supernatural has one more piece of evidence than the natural, something written. If the omnipotent exists, is there any reason to think it beyond his capability? Occam’s razor is a choice, just as belief is a choice. Evidence may convince, but evidence you must have.
What Ali actually saying is that religion is a social virus, which hack into human brain, bypass causality filters and reward host with endorphin outbursts for it’s storage and replication. Because it use lower level brain functions for its’ processing it function as a rootkit and can not be considerably modified or erased by input form such high-level protocol as “scientific reasoning”.
Some great (unintentional?) puns:
“The other theory is that Mary got pregnant through relatively conventional channels”
“One is conceptually very simple”