“Atheism” is a fine word, and I’m happy to describe myself as an atheist. God is an idea that has consequences, and those consequences don’t accord with the world we experience any better than countless other ideas we’ve given up on. But given a choice I would always describe myself first as a “naturalist” — someone who believes that there is only one realm of reality, the material world, which obeys natural laws, and that we human beings are part of it. “Atheism” is ultimately about rejecting a certain idea, while “naturalism” is about a positive acceptance of a comprehensive worldview. Naturalists have a lot more work to do than simply rejecting God; they bear the responsibility of understanding how to live a meaningful life in a universe without built-in purpose.
Which is why I devoted my opening statement at “The Great Debate” a few weeks ago to presenting the positive case for naturalism, rather than just arguing against the idea of God. And I tried to do so in terms that would be comprehensible to people who disagreed with me — at least that was the goal, you can judge for yourself whether I actually succeeded.
So here I’ve excerpted that opening ten-minute statement from the two-hour debate I had with Michael Shermer, Dinesh D’Souza, and Ian Hutchinson. I figure there must be people out there who might possibly be willing to watch a ten-minute video (or watch for one minute before changing the channel) but who wouldn’t even press “play” on the full version. This is the best I can do in ten minutes to sum up the progress in human understanding that has led us to reject the supernatural and accept that the natural world is all there is. And I did manage to work in Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia.
I am curious as to how the pitch goes over (given the constraints of time and the medium), so constructive criticism is appreciated.
Gabe– I’m not sure why you think that I’m saying scientists, or in particular physicists, should be the ones to help figure out how to live meaningful lives in a dysteleological universe. It doesn’t sound like something I would ever say. I think *naturalists* should tackle the problem (as indeed they have been, for many years), but that includes people from the arts and humanities just as much as from the sciences.
I don’t see how you can deduce deep metaphysical conclusions about the ultimate nature of reality on the basis of empiricism.
Good catch, Julian, I did fail to capitalize the name of the Christian diety. No need for hostility though.
Naturalism is enough for me. As LaPlace (allegedly) said in reference to God ensuring the stability of planetary orbits, “I had no need of that hypothesis.” There are so many religions in the world, why should anyone assume theirs is the right one? A person’s religion is simply a matter of geography. Or, in other words, where you were born and who your parents are.
Given that we can explain the observable universe pretty well, why invoke the supernatural at all? Such hypotheses are simply no longer necessary in the 21st century.
No afterlife? Sure! But it might have been easier to swallow if you had left the undertaker outfit at home.
( Although you do look good in Armani.)
The ideas Sean expresses in the video are similar to my own, although I usually describe myself as a “materialist” rather than a “naturalist”. The essential point is that my atheism is a consequence of my materialism, not the other was around.
I have two suggestions.
First. Stay away from trying to explain why people become religious or why religions flourish. This is a complicated story. I think there are lots of possible reasons and I doubt that the motivations are the same for everyone. In any event, while almost any explanation will play well to an atheist crowd I think that confronting a believer with a claim about why they believe is likely to meet resistance and draw attention away from you excellent arguments for naturalism.
Second, I think some mention needs to be made of morality. The common knock on naturalism is that it is amoral. My response to that is morality is a human trait that comes from human’s nature. Plato’s Euthyphro is still a strong argument, although hard to summarize in just a few seconds.
Ironically, the best defense of religion comes from the most unsuspecting source, Karl Marx. Everybody is familiar with his famous ‘religion is the opium of the people’ quote. However, as usual, the context of the quote is never given. Here it is:
”Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality.
“The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”
You did a great job explaining clearly what seems obvious to me yet difficult to express to family and friends on the other side of the fence. I just wish this clip would show on the Today show and the evening news. I wish that the majority of Americans would stop ignoring the obvious or even just take a moment to consider that what they were brought up to believe is not right and that scientists are smarter than their parents. The overwhelming consensus among learned people should be enough evidence but it’s just not. The sadest part is that most people just don’t even care to think about it. Please continue your work and try to change the closed-minds of the masses. Thank you!
H. says, “we can explain the observable universe pretty well”.
Why does Benford’s Law work?
In the decimal expansion of pi, do one million zeroes occur consecutively?
Why does gravitation exist?
In forces such as gravitation, how do objects exchange particles, such as gravitons, then attract and not repel?
If “we can explain the observable universe pretty well”, why does “science” keeps changing its mind on previously held “theories”, why are experiments still being done, why are satellites still being launched, why are there no fusion reactors?
As for invoking the supernatural, I pointed out numerous times across the net that it is not an arbitrary thing, that, in fact, if one adopts a particular way of acting, they will directly witness and experience the actions of God in their life.
Sean,
Enjoyable introduction. I think it could be reworked in a way that offers fewer opportunities for misunderstanding and would make your case much harder to resist. I have three complaint-ish remarks.
1. The term “naturalism” is too slippery to be helpful. Suppose for the moment that there is a divinity that interacts with the world in the way that many religionists think it does. Is the divinity part of the natural world? Seems to me the answer is yes. And insofar as the divinity leaves traces or signs of activities in (the rest of) the world, the divinity is discoverable by scientific investigation. This is true for all kinds of “weird” things: ESP, ghosts, extra-terrestrials, etc. The point should be to say that on our best evidence, the natural (real) world contains these things (people, tables, atoms, quarks, etc.), rather than those things (gods, demons, ghosts, etc.).
2. A better label for your position — one that fits well with previous things you’ve said about the relationship between science and ethics — is “experimentalism.” Experimentalism has no pre-commitments about what reality is like; it does not make an a priori division of things into “natural” things and “non-natural” things. Rather, experimentalism has only two commitments, both of which have to do with the nature of evidence. First, whatever evidence we have for our beliefs about what exists must be experimental evidence. Taken broadly, experimental evidence is public, third-person-checkable observation, including observations of interventions (as in the case of controlled trials). Second, if no experiment could be devised to decide between two competing hypotheses, then those hypotheses are not really different — they are merely notational variations. In addition to these two suppositions, the experimentalist carries with him or her a hope that whatever reality is like, it may be discovered through experimentation.
3a. You ought to more carefully separate dualism and non-naturalism. The reason for rejecting Cartesian, interactionist substance-dualism was not that thinking substances were non-natural. Nor was it that Descartes couldn’t think up a way for interactions to work. It was (as you say) that interactionism was incompatible with things like conservation of energy. But now, suppose we made very careful measurements and discovered that when people decide to do this or that thing, some energy is added to the physical system of their brains. Maybe the pineal gland gets a measurable little kick, as Descartes thought. Had that been what we found, I think we accept Cartesian dualism as at least roughly correct today, even if we had no good account of precisely *how* the interaction took place. The point is that (at least one version of) interactionism makes some experimental predictions that are not upheld in actual experiments.
3b. Dualism potentially muddies the waters further in that dualism has several varieties — not all of which are interactionist, substance dualism, and not all of which have been given up by respectable people. Even among the early moderns, you find non-interactionist dualisms. And today, you find varieties of dualism, like predicate dualism and property dualism, that are not so easily knocked down as is substance dualism. (Moreover, some prominent proponents of predicate or property dualisms today are atheists, and they think of their dualist commitments as perfectly naturalistic. And you can also find sophisticated theists who are not dualists.)
Summing up: You would be better off calling yourself an experimentalist and then pointing out that experiments lead you to believe that active, personal divinities don’t exist and that inactive, impersonal divinities do not provide opportunities for experimental test. You can happily stay away from dualism, which is a bit of a red herring in theism-atheism debate. Instead, defend the experimentalist pre-suppositions, since if you get people to agree to be experimentalists, then the experiments will carry them to the truth, whatever the truth may be. And then lay out how you think experiments bear on the question of the existence of divinities.
I wish there were a word for the idea that all the universe is governed by mathematical laws (perhaps statistical laws if the universe is nondeterministic, although I lean towards the deterministic many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics). “Naturalism” is vague because it might allow for ideas like vitalism (and there seems to be not that much difference between belief in vitalism and belief in supernatural spirits influencing physical events, whether individual “souls” or the spirit of God), while “materialism” seems to promote a particular type of metaphysics which need not be believed by all those who believe in the universality of mathematical law. An example of someone with a different metaphysics would be the philosopher David Chalmers, who believes materialism can’t adequately account for subjective consciousness and “qualia” but nevertheless thinks that all physical events, including those in the brain, obey mathematically-describable physical laws, and also suggest that there may be mathematically-describable “psychophysical laws” governing the relation between physical brain states (or states of other-information-bearing systems) and subjective qualia. So he’s not a materialist but he’s still a naturalist and a “mathematicist” (or whatever word we might choose for belief in a universe where everything is governed by mathematical laws).
I am afraid that naturalistic fallacy is quite common in physics. It means that in the process of advancing from certain starting points (parameters, theories), sone might encounter problems which make it necessary to reconsider the starting points/theoretical basis. Any experienced projectleader knows that. Not doing so one might fall into the trap of naturalistic fallacy which means that one loses one’s way. Being part of a community of physicists sharing the same view and not easily accepting dissenting views, makes it diffcult to change course in time. Example: dark matter as “sure thing” solution for calculations which do not give the results one expects, would require first of all a principal reconsideration of starting points like the Big Bang, gravitational laws and the like. Apparently such a discussion is not done, at least not in the community. The problem with physics is a lack of inconsistency management.
i endorse the move from against god..but 2 questions:1) whats the rational engaging d’souza (in my opinion he is deranged) and 2) natural laws??what are they? I mean it
Sean, you may just have convinced God to become an atheist.
@61, Marten van Dijk:
I’m afraid the fact that you think physicists don’t reconsider all theories from scratch all the time shows clearly just how little you understand science. As for your example, as long as there has been the dark matter problem, there have been attempts to explain it by altering gravity instead of invoking new unseen matter. It is known as MOND (and TeVeS). This approach has been popular in the past; the advances of the past two decades have diminished its support in favour of dark matter.
secretseasons @ 47:
“What meaning is there in creating lives worth living if we couldn’t have done otherwise, because we don’t have free will?”
In a deterministic universe, we’re caused to value things, want things, have projects, be curious, love, hate – Zorba’s “the full catastrophe.” Being motivated in all the ways we are is what creates the possibility of meaning, from simply enjoying a good meal to making high art to saving the whales. None of this changes when you realize you couldn’t have done otherwise in an actual situation, since after all you don’t know what you’ll do in future situations, or how they will turn out. Since we don’t know what the future holds, even though as Sean would likely agree it’s fixed in 4 dimensional spacetime, there will always be suspense in the pursuit of our needs and appetites, and along with that comes meaning.
Dropping contra-causal free will is the next big step for secularists in moving toward a consistent naturalism, as Sam Harris has recently pointed out in his book and recent talk at CalTech.
http://www.naturalism.org/freewill.htm
@ 64 James
MOND was and is not a mainstream project. Indeed there are physicists outside the mainstream who do not shun controversiality. And also there are mainstream physicists who dare, very carefully, express their doubts about f.i. Big Bang. But my point is that the mainstream keeps going on despite of projects failing to prove the existence of dark matter, gravitational waves etc. or find a solution for various inconsistencies between various theories. You can’t deny there is a bandwagon effect. You have the same problem because you react as if I am swearing in church. Take my advice and start looking for dark matter in the constellation of Taurus, You might find it there.
Thanks Dr Sean for your tireless activism.
I was wondering if someone could point me to a transcript of this tremendous presentation for Naturalism.
Greatly appreciate your assistance. Many Thanks!
S!
Wonderful presentation. I have personally been unable to ever explain to anyone why Naturalism as a belief system could be considered spiritual in nature. The beginning of the talk was great, but the best part was the end, where you explain the role of hope in this belief system. For theists, that really is the biggest problem, and they do not understand that creating meaning from within is valid and beautiful. I would love a little more expansion on that, and how it’s even more meaningful than hope and meaning that comes from an external source.
Thanks for the reply (#51 to my #49). Sorry if I conflated your position with that of, say, Krauss, who isn’t afraid to say that physicists know more about some philosophical questions than philosophers do. But at 9 minutes into the talk you do say that “science” “has something to say about those [meaning, purpose, etc.] issues”, and that it is delivering “news” to people with a lingering interest in religion. (The “news” of course, is that “the universe doesn’t care about you”.) This is what I find suggestive of a lack of familiarity with relevant work in the arts and social sciences.
The assertion that “the universe doesn’t care” isn’t as blatantly polemical as Dawkins’ famous “pitiless indifference”, but it’s close. Dawkins used a phrase that normally would apply to humans (inanimate things not being capable of pity or indifference), and applies it to the universe. His procedure is in the same logical category as those asserting that the universe loves you–as if the universe might be the sort of thing that loves or hates you, but turns out to be rather more of the latter. Similarly, your assertion, while simply negative, carries a hint of this pseudo-anthropomorphism. The proof? Listen to the cheers of the young atheists in your audience. They associate “pitiless indifference” with a kind of existential heroism: “we can take it”, they say.
And what I’m saying is that this “heroism” is uninformed and crude. There are many ways in which our feelings about the world or life in general can be rationally articulated so as to portray the world (or parts of it) as welcoming or appalling or boring (etc.), as worthy of our reverence or contempt or whatever…without reverting to a simplistic religious picture or its shadowy antithesis. Furthermore, there is an ethical argument to be made about what feelings toward the world we *should* express to others. We should be optimistic, for example, so as to encourage our children and neighbors (and ourselves); and we should, by the same reasoning, portray the world as welcoming rather than hostile, if we can find a rational way to do so.
You didn’t address my point about meaning as transcending the individual (because it inheres in culture and society). It’s relevant because the idea that the individual is the source of all meaning is very much in line with the attitudes of young fans of Dawkins, Harris, et.al., viewing themselves as heroes who can suck it up in the face of the withering cosmic indifference. This is, in my view, a pernicious sociological development, for which some scientists bear an ethical responsibility. Don’t go there Sean!
I see some major problems from the get-go – most of them I think can be attributed to the fact that you are a scientist trying to talk about what is really a metaphysical or philosphical view of the world. What experiment have scientists ever done for instance, that shows that reality is strictly singular/material?
Sean, you say that two key components of science are empiricism and skepticism. So I think two very important questions for you would be:
1. what empirical observations support Naturalism as a worldview.
2. what sort of skepticism have you subjected Naturalism to?
Gabe – you write “It’s relevant because the idea that the individual is the source of all meaning is very much in line with the attitudes of young fans of Dawkins, Harris, et.al., viewing themselves as heroes who can suck it up in the face of the withering cosmic indifference.”
Indeed, this is just another extreme form of anthropocentrism. Instead of meaning being inherent in reality itself, the locus of meaning becomes simply the mind of man.
As someone who has spent my life outside, primarily working with horses, I must admit to a low grade theism. That life is inherently aware, though not often intellectually complex and that our intellectual complexity is essentially a projection of this awareness into increasingly complex formulations. A bottom up spirituality, with the absolute as basis from which life arises, not an ideal from which it fell.
To suppose biology and awareness arose separately would seem to be a form of dualism that really isn’t logically supportable. What is the driving motivator of life otherwise? Why isn’t it as pitilessly indifferent to its own propagation as a rock? We know it is our sense of awareness which motivates us and there is nothing more meaningful to life than recognizing and connecting with that sense of awareness in others, so how far down the biological chain does it go? Often people do fail to recognize it in other people, often societies deny it in other cultures, it has often been denied and ignored in other, obviously sentient, creatures. One might say fungi have no sense of awareness when they cooperate to propagate, but rather than arguing for it, why not argue our abilities of cooperation do not arise from any sense of mutuality, but are simply code programed into our genes, as with fungi? I think life on this planet is trying to organize itself into a singular entity and human civilization will be its nascent central nervous system. Obviously we are now just top predators in a collapsing ecosystem, but when this current bout of extreme hubris blows up and those left pull their faces up out of the mud, there will likely be a stronger sense of connectedness to the planet and obligation not to destroy it. This ruling physics paradigm of reality as digitized discretion will have to be replaced by a less reductionistic, holographic understanding that everything is connected, even if our pre-frontal cortex is designed to categorize differences.
Interesting bit of news: http://www.nature.com/news/a-boost-for-quantum-reality-1.10602
“Theorists claim they can prove that wavefunctions are real states.”
Life is a game where the goal is to discover the rules.
There is a problem with the words atheist and atheism. The -ist implies someone who actively does or believes in something. And the -ism implies a formal doctrine, a proper noun, something that’s existentially positive. The -ist in “atheist” allows religious people to more plausibly argue that “atheism is just another religion.” And it’s NOT. Bill Maher put it best when he said “abstinence is not a sexual position.” Choosing not to believe in religion doesn’t mean I’ve partaken in my own religion. Just like choosing not to join your game of baseball doesn’t mean I’ve started my own game.
The better words are “nonbeliever” and “nonbelief.” They avoid the positive -ist and -ism that make atheist and atheism sound like affirmative actions/beliefs/groups/etc. These two words are based on theism being normative, and that’s improper and unfortunate. Whenever you say “atheist” and “atheism” you play right into the hands of the theists, who will use those words to imply that you maintain a positive belief system. Of course they are wrong – the lack of a belief is not a belief in and of itself. But the -ist/-ism words certainly imply that they are due to the nature of the english language. It’s a matter of syntax and it should be avoided. I’m an “atheist” but I try very hard to always use the words nonbeliever/nonbelief instead. I’m not perfect and I sometimes slip up and say atheist/atheism by mistake. But we should all try very hard to not use these words, as they play right into the hands of the religious people.
Same goes for calling the Higgs Boson the “god particle.” I’d like to slap the idiot who came up with that nickname. When it’s found, religious people will be thrilled to proclaim that “scientists prove the existence of god!” We scientific, rational-based humans need to do a better job with the words we use. Truth, reason, logic… they shouldn’t need propaganda. But we should at least not be reckless about the choices of words we use, lest our own words get taken advantage of by the immoral, anti-science faith-based community.
I was with you right up to the point where you said, “We create purpose and meaning in the world. If you love somebody, it is not because that love is put into you by something outside.” Actually, love *is* put into you by something outside: evolution. Humans who experience positive emotion—“love”—toward sexual partners, offspring, relatives, and fellow group-members, have had greater reproductive success than those who did not.
As other commenters have noted, the notion that we can create *anything* independent of the causal forces acting on molecules and structures in our brains raises the idea of free will, which has been neatly dispatched by Sam Harris in his book by that name.
The “good news” that you might have mentioned is that the Universe *has* provided us with purpose and meaning by way of evolution. Purpose and meaning are ideas that evolve in response to their effect on reproductive success. We can study their evolution through history and across cultures, and our brains can reach decisions about which variations might be most conducive to our individual and societal well-being, given our own personal evolution. This is not the kind of “absolute” foundation for meaningful lives that religions attempt to offer, but it can be quite gratifying.
I, like you, grew up in a religious household, prayed to God, etc., and for people like us there is often a sense of loss when God is removed that is difficult to eliminate. Hopefully there will come a time when children are raised without that difficulty to overcome, when they will grow up familiar with the legacies of biological and social evolution, and with a satisfying sense of awe and wonder for how we came to be.