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.
Riiiiight… so what is your point again, then?
If you actually read what Sean wrote in this blog post, his very second sentence is:
And, if I understand you correctly, you just acknowledge that “God” and “religion” in that particular sense is something that science can very much comment on! Right?
Brandon has a good response to Sean, I think.
Enjoying the discussion.
“You neglected a possibility. Parthenogenesis.”
In organisms where two like chromosomes determine the female sex, the offspring will always be female. There is no mechanism for, and thus no examples in nature of, females with two like chromosomes (as humans have) producing male offspring. Even if parthenogenesis occurred in humans, it would only produce female babies, and thus parthenogenesis (if it even were possible in humans) will not get you a naturalistic explanation for Jesus’ “virgin birth”.
James,
Yes. My point is that you shouldn’t in any way imply that your atheism is supported by scientific arguments and use your scientific status to backup this claim.
You must admit that your atheism is just another belief. Otherwise you mislead people. I’m not refering to Sean specifically.
The difference is one of evidence and the likelihood of producing it. The probability of a virgin birth has next to nothing to do with the probability of a virgin birth and everything to do with whether God exists and was involved. Whether he wasn’t involved in any others is immaterial to the question. The number of questions that science can answer about specific history is next to nil and the likelihood of answering them dependent on developing time travel, and those needn’t have anything to do with the supernatural. Consider if God only worked through thought. Science could do no more than suggest delusion or self generation. Then there is the question of what is meant by immaculate conception, artificial insemination?, embryonic implantation?, someone from the 29th century creating history? Talking about probability is a meaningless exercise in the case of the isolated fact.
Nice article.
Question, this doesn’t seem right to me:
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 after the collision
Shouldn’t the first after be a before? I’m not out for pedantic points, just quite vague on particle physics.
Bah! No, you miss the point again!
I acknowledged that the origin of the universe is currently unknown, and that if you want to label that with the letters G-O-D, that is your business. But just because it is unknown, that does not mean we can’t say certain things about this origin.
One of the things I think science makes quite clear is that the universe was almost certainly not originated by a conscious agent. For one, this is a non-explanation: If I say I cannot accept that a bunch of particles and physical laws sprang causelessly into existence, than I most CERTAINLY cannot accept that agency sprang causelessly into existence!
For another thing, the cosmological data we have makes the idea of creation by a conscious agent rather implausible. What we do know with a relatively high degree of certainty is that there was some kind of singularity, and that shortly forward in the time axis of this singularity, all the matter in the universe was expanding outward at an incredibly high rate of speed. This does not sound like the action of a conscious agent… where, pray tell, would this conscious agent be while it was making all of this happen? Inside the singularity??? Uh, yeah, now you’ve got some serious ‘splaining to do if I’m going to buy that…. and if this hypothetical agent was somewhere outside of the singularity, well then I really haven’t explained the origin problem at all, have I?
Now, if you abandon the idea of that which you call “God” being a conscious agent — for example, if you want to refer to the singularity itself as “God” — then that’s all fine and good, but that is not theism, nor is it a belief in the supernatural. You are just using a rather funny three-letter word to describe a physical phenomenon.
The idea that “God” is not a conscious agent and is merely represented by a quantum singularity at the beginning of time is, when you get right down to it, an atheistic worldview. It does not leave room for theism, hence it is a-theistic.
(By the way, I have no “scientific status” beyond what any other college-educated adult has. My degree is in engineering, not science. I am not a scientist. It only takes a lay understanding of science to see that it contradicts the vast majority of theistic worldviews, though…)
Brian, that was just a mistake; I fixed it.
Facepalm!
That’s what this entire blog post was about. To paraphrase it again: If you insist that science must be mute about specific events in the past and is not allowed to make predictions about their likelihood, then science must also be mute about specific events in the future. In fact, then science would have to remain silent about everything except for specific things that had already been observed.
That way madness lies. If we accept that interpretation, you could not even say that the acceleration due to gravity at sea level on Earth was approximately 9.8 m/s^2. All you could say would be, “Well, when I dropped this particular rock, it accelerated downwards at approximately 9.8 m/s^2. But if I drop this very similar looking rock over here, who knows what will happen! Certainly not science! Better call a theologian and ask him…”
Back in the real world, I can safely bet that that other rock will accelerate at approximately 9.8 m/s^2; I can safely bet that if Jesus dropped a rock off the side of the Mount while he was giving his Sermon, it surely accelerated at approximately 9.8 m/s^2; and I can safely bet that Jesus’ mom’s egg was fertilized by a human sperm. To say that science can make no claims on those things would be to castrate science entirely, it would make it nothing but stamp collecting.
BTW, one theistic worldview that I will acknowledge doesn’t quite contradict science is the one in which God, being the notorious practical joker that He is, magicked all of this contradictory evidence into existence to test our faith. In fact, He specifically laid out the cosmos so that no reasonable person could possibly reconcile His existence with the evidence. Then He decided to take everyone who accepted this evidence at face value, and make them burn in Hell forever. That God, what a joker!
I find this as implausible as it is repugnant, but I suppose it doesn’t directly contradict science. (Neither does Russell’s Teapot, though…)
Thanks for the posts all. I think Sean and Peter more or less captured what the new atheists refer to as “epistemic compatibility”, albeit at a level of detail and presentation that is uncommon. When Peter talks about philosophical illiteracy, I think he hits it on the head, and I’m encouraged by the sight of some developments here. Peter, like Sean, emphasized cognitive incompatibility, over logical or social incompatibility. Well, those certainly are central issues to the conversation. However, there are other sorts that are central to a cluster of important topics that we might want to consider. So I’d like to pick up on a theme first introduced by Ali in this thread, and then take it in an entirely different direction.
Some, like Ophelia Benson (echoing, I think, Coyne), have effectively claimed that religion is not cognitively compatible with science — that you cannot hold the one and the other without compartmentalizing them. In other words, science and religion are incompatible, not because they are destined to come to different answers concerning common questions, but because they have to keep each other at arm’s length in order to stay mutually viable.
If they share the same cognitive functions — i.e., if they are both concerned with arriving at truths about the natural world — then they can’t help but conflict, as Sean remarks. They’re epistemically incompatible. But it seems entirely useful to distinguish religion and science as having different methods by which beliefs are validated, ostensibly to capture different functions (or magesteria), the ethical and the factual; Sean, you do this in a prior post. But the trouble is, to the extent that we rigidly separate the one and the other in practical affairs concerning the lot of our beliefs, they can’t help but be incompatible: for we have willed it to be so!
NOMA is sometimes able to pass through the conversation as if it were the grand peacemaker, when in fact, it is an entirely adequate exemplar of what it means for two doctrines to be cognitively incompatible. The scientistic magesterians cannot leap over their wall and give their critical assault upon their neighbors, and vice-versa; no interaction, no interpollination. This incompatibility is not an accident; it is the entire point.
Surely, NOMA aims to produce results in social life that settle things down, a kind of social compatibility. But what kind of peace is this? A peace for whose benefit? Peace in order to fulfill whose needs? Why, for instance, should a social scientist / critical theorist motivated by humanitarian concerns believe that it is a healthy attitude to keep their factual stories and value stories at a distance? And from the other side, how would an ethical consequentialist react when told that rigorous empirical examination is out of their league? Both of these are positive doctrines that happen to take a dim view of NOMA, by design. And both would react negatively to NOMA, since both require a mutual interrogation between the magesteria. Critical theory and ethical consequentialism are examples of compatibilistic doctrines, in the cognitive sense. They make no guarantees about success at achieving every sense of social compatibility.
Well, maybe that’s just how it ought to be. Maybe they have a different sense of peace in mind. And maybe the kind of Third Culture that has NOMA at its centre is not a Third Culture worth having.
That’s probably the best concise explanation of why rational people prefer scientific explanations to supernatural ones that I’ve ever read. Thanks, Sean! I will definitely be using your analysis (with attribution!) in upcoming discussions with Christians, New-Agers, etc.
James have you realized what are you doing?
You are trying to falsify the notion of God using scientific arguments. Well you just can’t do that.
No matter how hard you try it’s not a falsifiable hypothesis by any scientific standard and that’s the beauty of it.
And since you can’t in principle exclude the possibility this hypothesis to be true, then anything goes. Everything is possible.
There is no place you can hide. You can mumble something about the “laws of nature” but the game is really lost and you know it.
So let physicists do physics and theologists do theology. It’s that simple.
Why not?
The null hypothesis can never be proven false, but we can establish it is so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. Again, Russell’s Teapot. You cannot prove that there is not a teapot orbiting the sun right now exactly equidistant between the Earth and Mars. But I think we can safely assume (using science!) that there isn’t one.
Um, I suppose, but again, that only leads to solipsism, which is epistemologically useless. It’s also possible that you will burn in Hell forever if you don’t deposit $10 in my PayPal account. It’s not a falsifiable hypothesis, and that’s the beauty of it!
When you get down to brass tacks, everything is possible, sure. But that’s not a useful statement. Then you can’t make any statements about anything. Hell, you can’t even prove that I am trying to falsify the notion of God. Maybe you are imagining the whole thing! Everything is possible!
I don’t think I mumbled anything about the “laws of nature”…? Yep, just searched for it, I said nothing of the kind. But I do think I quite clearly stated that our best available tools for understanding reality contradict the idea of the universe being originated by a conscious agent. Do you dispute this statement?
What, pray tell, qualifies a theologian to “do theology”? The ability to make stuff up? The ability to read old books written by a superstititous sectarian tribe?
Seriously. I’d like to know. What epistemological advantage do they think they have?
And what even does it mean to “do theology”??
Actually, forget all that. Let’s grab the bull by the horns. Tell me exactly where in my argument in post #107 did I go wrong? I assert the following statement: Present scientific knowledge indicates it is extraordinarily improbable that the origin of the universe was initiated by a conscious agent. I believe post #107 supports that statement. Could you tell me where precisely you think my reasoning is flawed?
If you don’t respond to this particular challenge, I will assume that “the game is really lost and you know it.” :p
Lord, I just happened to visit your blog and saw your post on June 29, 2009. The final paragraph is particularly interesting given the nature of your arguments in the comments here. I would like to quote from that paragraph:
“… and none of this makes sense, but to make sense of efficient markets one has to theorize investors had expectations … The only way to make sense of it is to assume limited rationality that makes momentum speculation reasonable.” Now my question is this: Why is “limited rationality” the only way to make sense of it; have you considered divine intervention to make sense of it? It could have been the case after all.
The point is there is no way science or any other system of thought can ‘know’/prove the existence of god. Science is not about “knowing” what is (it can never be known) but rather about providing reasonable explanations based on observations that would help predict certain things, such as the next economic bubble and possibly control or prevent it in future. The divine intervention idea is also a theory to ‘explain’ an economic bubble. But does it help you in predicting the next one? That is the key question.
I don’t accept the challenge because if I do I will implicitly admit that the God hypothesis can be falsified by scientific arguments and this way I would undermine my own argument.
Of course you can assume what ever you like. It’s free:-)
This Lord guy is cool. Some of his amazing statements in the comments above:
#48: “Science deals with the known and unknown. It has no capacity to deal with the isolated or the unknowable.” – if something is unknowable what/who/which can know it?
#48: “… both natural and supernatural are only speculation and neither convincing, just the supernatural has one more piece of evidence than the natural, something written.” – so does this blog post count as a piece of evidence for “natural” or do only clay tablets count?
#84: “That is why science cannot study the supernatural because it would cease to be supernatural. It can not study god because it would cease to be god.” – So, do you mean to say that if science were to start studying about Jesus, your god would then be satan or something else?
#96: “From this we should take there are some questions science can answer, the age of the universe and the earth, the evolution of life in outline. There are other questions it can only answer by way of experience, evidence, and simple probability …” – No, anything that science answers is by way of experience, evidence and simple probability.
#96: “And there are other questions it can’t really answer at all. Pretending these questions don’t exist, or pretending we already know the answers is as imaginary as anything else.” – There are indeed questions science or for that matter any system of thought can’t answer. For example, does god exist? Science doesn’t pretend this question doesn’t exist. Rather it recognizes that the answer can never be known and doesn’t delude itself or others that it does or can know the answer to it, unlike most religions.
#105: “The probability of a virgin birth has next to nothing to do with the probability of a virgin birth and everything to do with whether God exists and was involved.” – Can someone explain what he means?
#105: “…likelihood of answering them dependent on developing time travel …” – what is his obsession with time travel. This is the second or third time he mentions it.
#105: “Then there is the question of what is meant by immaculate conception, artificial insemination?, embryonic implantation?, someone from the 29th century creating history? Talking about probability is a meaningless exercise in the case of the isolated fact.” – Ah, time travel again. I guess artificial insemination and embryonic implantation are not isolated phenomenon. Moreover, they are directly observable.
When science cannot answer a question, it’s not like some guru can. There is no way to tell one supernatural explanation from any conflicting supernatural explanation in terms of liklihood.
I agree with this post. whenever someone appeals to god or some other supernatural explanation, they may as well be saying “it’s magic” to me. It might feel like “an answer” or “an explanation”, but it’s indistinguishable from a delusion.
Pray tell, where and when did he drop this stone? How far did it fall? What did it strike? What was it composed of? These are all objective questions. You should have no trouble detailing the answers since you know it all.
You may offer divine intervention but as with you what would it add in way of explanation? Those involved seem intent on blaming chance or the devil. No doubt it is a tale of exuberance and greed for which religion does have something to say. And that is at least as important.
As far as science can tell, believers in gods and souls are identical to believers in demons and fairies. There really is no way to tell one invisible undetectable form of consciousness from any other… You can’t tell the ones people believe in from the ones they don’t… You can’t tell any such entity from a delusion of such an entity.
To me, consciousness without a material brain is like “sound in a vacuum”– it doesn’t compute.
#119: “Pray tell, where and when did he drop this stone? How far did it fall? What did it strike? What was it composed of? These are all objective questions. You should have no trouble detailing the answers since you know it all.”
First “where” and “when” are not exactly objective questions. Would you give an example of a question you are interested in? Is the birth of Jesus an example? (By the way to me, it is quite an objective question.)If yes, please consider the some of the hypothesis mentioned in the blog post. To me, based on experience virgin birth is a highly unnatural phenomenon. It is also quite clear that people mislead other people if they have the means and a motive. Hence to explain the birth of Jesus and at the same time continue to make sense of the world I reject the virgin birth hypothesis until I am presented with more evidence in it’s support.
“No doubt it is a tale of exuberance and greed for which religion does have something to say. And that is at least as important.”
Let me say this. The collapse of the economy is as much a result of unquestioning nature of many people as it is of greed. And religion has played a major role in promoting this unquestioning nature. In any case, I am not very sure greed is restricted to irreligious people.
Wow. I guess what was bugging me last time happened again here. For some reason, Sean’s posts don’t speak to the unconverted.
If anything, this comment thread seems even less productive than the last one. But again, perhaps someone has learned something from this, and changed their mind. Tell us!
Giotis, explanation isn’t as easy as you seem to think. How does the hypothesis that there is a God ‘explain’ the ‘origin of things’? It seems to be purely stipulative, that is, we simply stipulate that if God exists, then God would create a world (like ours?). Then, from the hypothesis, ‘God exists’, we can infer that a world exists. On the assumption (i.e. further stipulation) that the conditional stipulation is lawlike, we have an old-fashioned deductive-nomological explanation. But we have no basis beyond mere (and ad hoc) stipulation for either the conditional or its lawlike status. Worse, and more famously, declaring God as the explanation of the ‘origin of things’ leads to an obvious question: what explains God? The response seems to be yet another (and all-too convenient) bare stipulation: God is self-explanatory. As Dawkins points out, this seems implausible in the light of our natural understanding of how beings complex enough to have minds and beliefs and desires have actually come to exist. At best, from the scientific point of view this hypothesis is empty (because its explanatory force is stipulative and so untestable) and pointless (because it’s ad hoc at two levels: why should we suppose a God would create a world– on this, by the way, see Spinoza, and why/how are we entitled to say that the demand for explanation stops with the God hypothesis). So science can say a lot more than just that this hypothesis (like many other silly hypotheses) can’t be falsified. In particular, science can say that this hypothesis belongs to a particularly suspicious and useless class of self-indulgent, ad hoc stipulations, and declare (with Laplace), ‘je n’ai accune besoin de cette hypothese’.
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