Earlier this year I participated in an Oxford workshop entitled Is God Explanatory? (Not really, as it turns out.) The videos for the conference are now available, including a couple by me:
(Traveling like crazy, as I’ve been doing this last year, doesn’t leave much time for real blogging, but at least there is an extensive video trail I can use for content.) Other speakers included Lara Buchak, William Stoeger, Joe Silk, and John Hawthorne. See the playlist for videos of the question-and-answer sessions, which were posted separately.
Those are formal talks with power point and the whole bit. But I also participated in dueling after-dinner talks at the conference banquet; that was fun, so I’ll post the video here. First we have Keith Ward, talking about God as Explanation, then me, talking about Nature as Explanation.
Note that I haven’t actually watched the video myself. And both speakers, if I recall correctly, had imbibed a glass of wine or two. So who knows what we actually said?
In cases like this, the chance that people will respond to the actual contents of the videos rather than just the titles is vanishingly small, but I remain defiantly optimistic in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Doc C- Your comments seem to imply that a materialist worldview is bad because it has unpleasant consequences, but how much humans like an answer or how much an answer would help us govern our behavior has nothing to do with how true the answer is.
Mickey,
What is truth? Do we even have cognitive access to absolute truth, or only to effective fiction? If life’s but a walking shadow, is it better “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them”? If life’s a tale told by a idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, does it really matter if materialism is accurate or not?
Doc C- Truth in this sense is obviously the condition of objective reality. The rest of your/Shakespeare’s questions are all just subjective, so don’t address anything about reality except for the condition of my opinions. It doesn’t matter to me if humans have access to absolute truth or merely to approximations, as long as we don’t believe fictions when we know they are fictitious, no matter their effectiveness. I personally would rather experience life in my only chance to do so, as I judge it to be better than the lack of experience which is the alternative. Finally, it does matter to me if materialism is accurate or not, even though I’m fairly certain my life is finite, will involve some pain, and lacks ultimate purpose.
The alternative view that life needs eternity and/or a cosmic purpose to be worthwhile, and that reducing our lives and experiences to physics makes them somehow less valuable, just seems selfish and misses why people actually value most things. Note you never did address my point- would you choose a worldview merely for how much you preferred its consequences and/or how much input it gave to moral decisions, regardless of its accuracy?
Mickey,
To answer your question, yes, I choose to view the world based on that view’s consequences and how well it moves humanity, regardless of its accuracy. The reason I would make that choice is that I see our experience of the world as inherently limited by our sensory and cognitive capacity, and therefore whatever we experience is inherently subjective. We can’t get outside of our own subjectivity to test the ultimate accuracy of reality. In that circumstance, we will always need metaphor (mathematics and language are both based on metaphors) to describe our experience. So stories are our fate.
I respect our ability to accurately sense and write stories about much of reality, but I respect the power of stories to help us navigate the rest of the abyss. I do agree that we should not cling to stories that are inaccurate, once proven so, but I embrace stories that probe the darkness and carry us through it, even though we have no way to know their accuracy. I believe, for example, that “all men are created equal”, even though the full accuracy of that belief is not testable. It’s a fictition I hold to be truer than the empiric truth I can experience.
I wonder how Keith would react to being compared to a jovial version of Puddleglum the Marshwiggle… consider a moment his remarks at about the 13th minute.
As usual most place the cart before the horse. Before one can debate if there is a God, one needs to define what God is and if the universe itself was designed or here by chance. If chance then there is no need to debate God. But if designed then is God simply a creator of this universe or something else? This changes then entire fundamental direction of the whole debate.
It boils down to two options. Did this universe happen by chance or was this universe designed. Remove God from the discussion. There are no alternatives to designed vs. chance. (If you know of any please mention them). Multiverse basically argues that we are in a universe that through chance allows our type of life to exist. The uniqueness of the forces and precision argues that it was desinged.
If the universe was designed, by an advanced species from the brane then can we logically call them a creator, can’t we? See the argument over God is a sideshow. What the real argument should focus on is if the universe is here by chance or by design.