I have redefined them! Those limits, that is. This is the view of Father Robert Barron, in response to — well, something I said, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what. But I know it was me and not some other Sean Carroll, because there’s a video in which my picture appears a couple of times.
I think his remarks were spurred by Natalie Wolchover’s article about my piece on why the universe doesn’t need God. (Here is a related article, not quite a transcript of the above video but close, in which he mentions Natalie’s piece but not mine.) He may have read the original piece, although it’s unclear because he doesn’t link to anything specific, nor does he reference particular arguments from the essay itself. He also refers to a book I’ve written, but none of my books actually fit the bill. And he talks a lot about my arrogance and hubris. (I’ve finally figured out the definition of “arrogance,” from repeated exposure: “you are arrogant because you think that your methods are appropriate, when it fact it’s my methods that are appropriate.”)
In any event, the substance of Fr. Barron’s counter-argument is some version of the argument from contingency. You assert that certain kinds of things require causes, and that the universe is among those things, and that the kind of cause the universe requires is special (not itself requiring a cause), and that special cause is God. It fails at the first step, because causes and effects aren’t really fundamental. It’s the laws of nature that are fundamental, according to the best understanding we currently have, and those laws don’t take the form of causes leading to effects; they take the form of differential equations, or more generally to patterns relating parts of the universe. So the question really is, “Can we imagine laws/patterns which describe a universe without God?” And the answer is “sure,” and we get on with our lives.
As good scientists, of course, we are open to the possibility that a better understanding in the future might lead to a different notion of what is really fundamental. (It is indeed a peculiar form of arrogance we exhibit.) What we’re not open to is the possibility that you can sit in your study and arrive at deep truths about the nature of reality just by thinking hard about it. We have to write down all the possible ways we can think the world might be, and distinguish between them by actually going outside and looking at it. This is admittedly hard work, and it also frequently leads us to places we weren’t expecting to go and perhaps even don’t much care for. But we’re a flexible species, and generally we adapt to the new realities.
Which reminds me that I still owe you a couple of reports from the naturalism workshop. Coming soon!
Jim McCann, do you not see arrogance in the idea that someone might dictate a view of how the Universe works, because he or she thought up this view, without recourse to empirical evidence? Yet somehow it is arrogant to point this out. Go figure.
There is a great deal of arrogance in the Christian communities as well, religion as well as science looks for truth in the created universe, each with their own objectives. I like to think that the universe is a shadow cast by God, within which we dwell, and by studying learn a little of that uncreated Creator that is Love itself.
Pingback: A priest goes after scientism (again) « Why Evolution Is True
BlakeG answers Paul Benoit this:
“You say one can’t prove or disprove theism. Do you realize that you’ve single-handedly dismissed the entire academic field of “philosophy of religion”, which is virtually devoted to that topic? Am I right to assume you haven’t done any work on the subject or read even one relevant peer-reviewed article or book?”
Maybe Paul apparently dismisses the “philosophy of religion” by saying theism is not subject to proof or disproof,– not because he has not read up on the subject,- but-because he has; that is if he is anything like me personally who has studied the subject as an amateur for 55 years (I am now 72), and find the “philosophy of religion ” an empty waste of time, and that the natural result of studying it is to reject its conclusions.
The fact that there are endless writings about religion and philosophy of religion seem to suggest that no conclusions have yet been reached which might support its veracity. Or to put it briefly; it’s all just words.
” Make no mistake: If you did read philosophy, it’s very likely that your worldview would sharpen and you wouldn’t be the same coming out as you were coming in”.
So are you implying that we have not read philosophy, because if we had, we would be agreeing with you that God is in his Heaven and anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant? Bit patronising , no?
Incidentally, I give regular Philosophy talks to my own U3A Philosophy group.
” Empirical investigations are generally repeatable investigations primarily meant to discern *regularities* of the natural world. Insofar as miracles, trivially, aren’t claims claims about regularities, the proper investigation for miracle claims is rational/historical investigation (which at most make take into account pre-established deliverances of empirical investigation), not empirical investigations in and of themselves. Investigating whether Alexander the Great conquered Tyre isn’t discerned by scientists camping out at Tyre and seeing if people named Alexander the Great regularly take over the city.”
So then are you saying that empiricism is invalid if a particular piece of empirical evidence is not regularly repeated, thus disallowing us from drawing inductive conclusions about it?
Must therefore every phenomenon be duplicated or infinitely repeated before it is acceptable as evidence? If you see a man kill another man will you refuse to believe it happened unless he kills several more? Are there no one-off events at all,–ever? If you say no,–then that is obviously false. If you say yes, –then every one-off event must be a miracle;if you drop a particular jug on a particular floor, is that a miracle because that particular jug cannot be re-smashed again on the identical point on the floor. I would say that it is empirical evidence for the existence of the now broken jug,–but presumably you would say it never happened as it is not repeatable;–or else that it is a miracle. Are all one-off events miracles?
Perhaps Father Robert Barron has not seen Daniel Dennett commenting on “scientism”?
http://old.richarddawkins.net/videos/517674-daniel-dennett-on-scientism
John Haught is also present.
Back again to reply to BlakeG some more:
Carroll takes the priest’s argument to be about causes and says that causes are not fundamental, so reasoning like “all things have a cause, but there can’t be an infinite regress, so there must be one thing which doesn’t, et hoc dicimus et cetera et cetera” won’t work, because Carroll won’t concede that all things (or perhaps anything) has a cause. Given this, why would he think that an argument over whether the laws of nature have a cause made a difference to whether or not there might be a god?
On (d), of course I didn’t carry out every experiment in the history of science, but Carroll (and you) are talking about rationalism and empiricism. The history of science was not in my mind without first being in my senses. I doubt Carroll is claiming that it’s illegitimate to reflect on that history, rather he’s complaining about claims like “Everything that begins to exist has a cause, I mean, it stands to reason, dunnit?”
On induction: One sometimes sees theists saying stuff like “science relies on faith, therefore you atheistic scientists are just like us, really”. If that’s your argument, it is wrong, though we’d need to tease out what “faith” means here to see which wrong argument is being made. As Talmont-Kaminski says, doing science does not need commitment to believe an ontology (“faith”) in the way that being an evangelical does. Sometimes the argument is that we all need “faith” to avoid radical scepticism. Chris Hallquist says “belief in the Christian God isn’t very much at all like most of the common-sense beliefs commonly cited as threated by Descartes & Hume-style skepticism (like belief in the reliability of our senses), but is an awful lot like beliefs most Christians wouldn’t accept without evidence–namely, the beliefs of other religions.” So I don’t think it’s that either.
Perhaps you meant to argue specifically that the claim that “there are causes” or “all things have causes” is as justified as our rejection of grue as a silly category. I think that might be right until we encounter evidence to the contrary, but Carroll is claiming he has it in the case of causes. If we got to 2013 and stuff stopped having mass, we’d probably reconsider that too.
I’d include history in what I mean by empirical investigation: historians don’t learn stuff by sitting in their armchairs and thinking about it, either. I don’t think repeatable experiments are necessary for science: I don’t imagine geologists do many of those.
Religious claims are subject to examination by our best tools for finding out about the world, which are empirical ones including (but not limited to) science. Attempts to rule out such investigation with claims like “science cannot investigate the supernatural” end up effectively saying “well, what if anything could happen in my favourite special case?” In one sense this gets something right: the results of these investigations are subject to revision in the light of new evidence, and to set the prior probability of anything to exactly zero is irrational. If pigs do in fact fly occasionally, clearly we’re missing something. But I don’t see why we should take flying pig claims more seriously if the claim is that God did it than if the claim is that advanced aliens levitated the pig with their tractor beam (a naturalistic claim): merely saying “supernatural” isn’t going to make me think “oh it was supernatural, why didn’t you say so? Obviously that’s much more reasonable.”
Here’s Russell Blackford over at Talking Philosophy (“Religion and science: the issue that won’t go away”: I’d link to it but I think links get moderated here): “Recall that the rise of science did not subtract from our pre-existing resources for investigating the world. Rather, it added to them; and the old pragmatic and scholarly methods and the new, distinctively scientific, ones can always be used together in any given case. We need to know whether such claims as that Jesus rose from the dead and that the universe was created by God are plausible when set against what we know overall about how the world works, both through methods that we could have employed anyway and through the distinctive methods developed by science. When the question is framed like that, surely we don’t think that these claims come under no pressure at all from our best empirical investigations of the world?”
I guess the real issue here when it comes to Christianity and science is that snakes don’t talk, seas don’t part, bushes don’t burn without being consumed, you can’t walk on water, and before Christianity was invented everyone was into Ammon Ra, Zeus, and Thor. Let’s just look forward to whatever brilliant crazy new ideas humans come up with next. Maybe Scientology will actually continue growing outside of its rather violent mother organisation to the extent that we’ll all be following Hubbards ramblings. Of course, there is always Mormonism, another triumph of making up gibberish rather than growing up and facing the stark reality, namely that snakes don’t talk.
Here are a few ideas that came up during the video.
The use of the word ‘Scientistic’ seems to be to frame science as a belief system. Science is a skeptical system, if anything. Do scientists refer to themselves as ‘Scientistic’? Creating a label for your opponent is disingenuous. It’s name-calling.
Predicting what questions Science won’t be able to answer has been a bad bet in the past. Beauty, for example, is subject to scientific inquiry already.
Definitions of God that put God outside of the Universe, or give God special properties, have not been biblically based. Where do these come from? This is Christian theology based in quicksand.
Indeed, coming up with a definition of God is not a great idea. Before “The act of ‘to be’ itself”, an Ontological Argument had it as “The most perfect being.” No one uses this Ontological Argument definition anymore. But both definitions define God to exist. It’s pretty silly. The idea that ‘Serious believers’ believe this definition of God is totally arrogant. Where is the reference to a survey? How does one define ‘Serious believers’?
Philosophy brought us forward. That’s what Aristotle used. But once the scientific method required evidence, it turned out that much of what Aristotle and others had proven was wrong. Though philosophy continued to aid in the search for truth, of late, philosophers have added little, and even mislead the search. But philosophers do care if their ideas are correct.
While “Can we imagine laws/patterns which describe a universe without God?” is great, it is not a disproof of the existence of God. It does say what God isn’t.
On the other hand, God’s role in the Universe has shrunk with time. Pinning your hopes for a proof of God’s existence on a required role is not a good bet.
IS THE FACT that you’re a Howdy Doody Puppet for the atheistic establishment starting to bother you?
The daily tirade by this frightened community has become nothing more than a clown show. You and others like you are sooo transparent. Keep trying to reenforce you’re not whistling past the graveyard but the noise is becoming deafening.
The obviousness of Design has been backing you guys into the corners of absurdity for a while now—first by what we can plainly observe and experience and Now, without question , by the Math itself. You’re own discipline has betrayed you guys. You entered the field of origins to make sure their was no piper to pay and now its clear you’re gonna be broke. The “appearance of design” is gone. The math matches the appearance.
A prudent man would just zip it from here on out but I guess its your very nature that leaves you guys in the shadows defending your creepy little worldview.
The things with Fr. Barron discusses as that which the sciences cannot explain (ie: beauty, truth, goodness,….) are precisely that which Dennett, a cognitive scientist, is trying to naturalize and explain.
It is absurd that this person has chosen to lump Dennett in with Dawkins, since they are dealing with very different parts of the human experience of religion, and that, specifically, IT IS COGNITIVE SCIENCE WHICH ATTEMPTS TO NATURALISTICALLY BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN THE MATERIAL AND QUALIA. We may not need “God” for this at all.