Sam Harris is the poor man’s Richard Dawkins, and he was recently at Notre Dame University to debate whether or not God is the source of morality. In an amusing and at time affecting meditation on the entire phenomenon of our Latter Day Atheists and their determined efforts to set science over and against religion, Notre Dame professor of philosophy John O’Callaghan wonders how it is that we’ve come to the point of imagining that our scientific explanations are at odds with our beliefs about God.
Must we chose between scientific explanation and belief in the God who is the creator of heaven and earth? Here’s part of O’Callaghan’s answer:
The greatest among our Christian forebears certainly didn’t think we had to. Even if one remains unconvinced by the logic of Aquinas’ Five Ways, the attitude expressed in them is not one of natural explanations in competition with God. His natural science was almost unimaginably false with regard to what we now know or claim to know. But the reality of natural causes that allows for scientific understanding was for him the best and “most manifest” argument for the existence of a god, a god Who does not compete with His creatures but, rather, enables them.
For Aquinas, God was not an alternative hypothesis or theory to be superseded by subsequent science; on the contrary God was the best explanation for why there is an intelligible world at all to be understood by successive stages in science. Without God, there is no science and no scientific progress. The best reason for thinking there is a God, after the fact that your mother told you so, the same mother who told you who your father is (and I dare you to tell her you don’t believe her!), is the glory of science, not its failure. The glory of God displayed in scientific explanation “gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.” (Homework for Sam Harris: explain that line from Hopkins’ poem.)
Well put, as is the rest of his meditation on the strange phenomenon of atheists who imagine that science provides them with trump cards.
April 13th, 2011 | 10:01 pm
The conflict is not between God and science. The conflict is between our understanding of God and science that purports to contradict that understanding. However, given the whoopers that scientific consensus would have had us believe not so long ago (to say nothing of centuries ago) I’m not losing any sleep worrying about the latest “discovery”.
April 14th, 2011 | 4:33 am
O’Callagan makes a great point. The notion that, the findings of science should prompt one to not believe in god, is really absurd. If there’s no God, then our universe, and all its contents, came into existence….without intelligible causes. Indeed, one would have to conclude that the universe caused itself. But as those backward, silly, superstitious middle age philosophers, pointed out, for something to “cause itself”, would mean that, it would have to exist prior to itself! Frankly, considering the intellectual giants, who existed in the middle ages, and their awesome productions (Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Occam, Alberus Magnus), and comparing them, to Sam Harris, despite the latter’s talents, I think I’ll take the mediaevals. They may have not known as much, about empirical science, as we do, but they may have been profoundly more advanced, in their understandings of theological, and philosophical sciences, than we are.
It would would be interesting to see this debate. Who debated Harris? Was it O’Callaghan?
April 14th, 2011 | 7:19 am
John O’Callaghan notes in his article, “I am writing this piece just hours before the big event.” I think it goes without saying that O’Callaghan would not have agreed with Sam Harris. But still, might he not have waited to write his thoughts about the debate until after he had seen it?
April 14th, 2011 | 8:09 am
What about atheists who don’t think that science argues against God so much as it simply undercuts a lot of arguments for God? A lot of ‘slam-dunk’ arguments for God have been at least weakened by scientific advances.
Laplace would be the model here, he who (allegedly) said, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
April 14th, 2011 | 8:13 am
AaronS –
You might find this interesting…
April 14th, 2011 | 9:16 am
Bret –
If there’s no edge to the Earth, then it must go on forever, right?
April 14th, 2011 | 9:25 am
Ray, wouldn’t that be an agnostic position?
April 14th, 2011 | 11:18 am
Bret, not necessarily. Ockham’s Razor, for example, might come into play.
In any case, I personally am atheist in the specific – I’ve looked into various gods and found reasons why they just can’t be true – and what you might term “non-gnostic” in general.
“Agnostic” in the classical sense doesn’t just mean that one doesn’t know about gods, but that one can’t know – that such questions are fundamentally undecidable. I don’t go that far. In terms of things like “the origin of the universe” (assuming that’s a well-posed question) I just say, “We dunno… yet.”
April 14th, 2011 | 11:21 am
If you accept that the basic premises of the scientific method are not conditional assumptions, but actual facts (that the world may be presumed to be entirely material, that a thing does not exist if you have no proof that it does exist, etc.), then the statement “there is no God” is not only logical, but tautological.
April 14th, 2011 | 11:50 am
Blake –
Neither of those are “basic premises of the scientific method”. The basic scientific method is to make hypotheses to explain phenomena you see, and then test those hypotheses. That’s the key thing – testing hypotheses.
Lots of things have been confidently declared to require non-material explanations, and then it’s turned out not to be the case. Weather, healing, reproduction, etc. It didn’t have to be the case that biochemistry could account for metabolism and inheritance of traits and all that… but it’s turned out that way so far. Indeed, I’m not aware of anything that’s gone the other way.
And if you don’t have evidence (science doesn’t deal with ‘proof’) that something exists, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. But… from a practical perspective, saying “there’s no evidence for X” means saying “X’s existence doesn’t affect anything we can observe in any detectable way”.
If there’s no need to postulate the existence of something – if its existence makes no practical difference – then why postulate it at all?
April 14th, 2011 | 12:31 pm
Ray,
It’s hard for me to see how science affects any of the traditional arguments for the existence of God: the ontological argument, the argument from design (I know people like Dawkins claim Darwin destroyed that argument, but others, like John Polkinghorne, disagree), the cosmological argument, the first cause argument. All of those tend to fail in various logical ways, as do the traditional arguments _against_ the existence of God: the problem of evil, the paradox of omnipotence (can God make a rock so heavy he can’t move it), etc. But in neither case does science have the slightest thing to do with it. Perhaps you can demonstrate how empirical investigation and experimentation specifically undermines the ontological argument or any of the other ones. That would be interesting.
April 14th, 2011 | 2:09 pm
But why only one God? Is one enough for all the glory we witness? The issue of whether there is a God or not should be secondary to the issue of whether “a single religion common to all men” can be achieved. If we can have only one religion it does not matter if there is one God or many Gods! I say “one religion, many Gods (maybe even as many as there are human beings!
April 14th, 2011 | 3:04 pm
Neither of those are “basic premises of the scientific method”. The basic scientific method is to make hypotheses to explain phenomena you see, and then test those hypotheses. That’s the key thing – testing hypotheses.
Really?
You are saying science does not presume materialism?
You are saying that scientists never use conditional assumptions, such as Occam’s razor?
April 14th, 2011 | 3:13 pm
And if you don’t have evidence (science doesn’t deal with ‘proof’) that something exists, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Then why do scientific types waste so much time coming up with belittling names for people who question their conclusions?
Why don’t they just say, “yes, of course you are right – science doesn’t deal with ‘proof’ – so you are within your rights to question whether we have really proven that vaccines are safe, that global warming is man-made, that high fructose corn syrup isn’t linked to obesity, that the children of gays are not deprived of any important psychological component in having two same-sex parents instead of a mother and a father…”
But that is not what science says. Science claims to have ‘proven’ things.
There are only two times the “we don’t actually deal in proof per se” argument comes out.
The first is when they are backing away from something that yesterday they were presenting as fact, that today they are recognizing is demonstrably wrong – they whip this out while they are Wikifying their history and “disappearing” all the aggressive claims they made.
And the second is when someone points out that people who claim that science can say something about God (or consciousness, or life’s origins/meaning/purpose/direction/goal/etc), are scientists who are misrepresenting conditional assumptions as “fact”.
Whip it out – say “science can’t ever really prove anything!” – then, when the crisis is over, tuck it back in the pocket and go back to the usual arguments that don’t allow people to respond by pointing out that science doesn’t ever really prove anything. Of course science proves stuff, what are you, some ignorant anti-science hick?
April 14th, 2011 | 6:47 pm
Bret –
Sure. Just today First Things contributor Dr. Barr pointed out that science doesn’t need determinism, either. It just requires that the phenomena it studies have observable effects.
Heck, everyone uses that one. Some more than others, but no human could function without applying it regularly.
April 14th, 2011 | 6:57 pm
Fred –
The ontological argument, maybe not. But I’m with Dawkins on the ‘argument from design’. Evolution deeply undermines it in the biological realm (though doesn’t – yet – completely rule it out) and acts as an ‘existence proof’ that cases of apparent design can be accounted for without recourse to a Designer. This can be applied to other areas.
As to the cosmological argument – which is the ‘first cause’ argument – science does have a few things to say. Relativity strongly implies a B-series of time, for example, which puts some constraints on causality. The uncertainty principle puts some tweaks on the form God’s “sustaining” would have to take.
April 14th, 2011 | 7:21 pm
Blake –
Well, I guess I do have to backtrack a little. Science doesn’t deal in positive proof, really. It deals in negative proof.
It can’t prove a theory true, but it can sure prove one false. Astrology. Phlogiston. Behaviorism. The young Earth. Etc. etc.
Some of your examples betray such a misunderstanding. We can’t prove vaccines are ‘safe’ so much as we can show they don’t cause detectable complications. Like, for example, autism – that’s been clobbered many times over.
And even when science does claim to have confirmed things – or failed to disprove something – you get the confidence level and the error bars, if you ask for it. The “aggressive claims” you refer to tend to come from the media reporting on science. (When’s the last time you saw the media accurately report on theology, btw?)
April 14th, 2011 | 11:07 pm
‘Sam Harris is the poor man’s Richard Dawkins…’ – R R Reno
Actually, just the opposite is the case, if two of their better-known books (‘The End of Faith’ and ‘The God Delusion’ respectively) are compared. ‘The End of Faith’ was actually quite a good critique of organised religion, wheras ‘The God Delusion’ was pure, unadulterated rubbish.
April 15th, 2011 | 2:23 am
Ray, you say that the universe may go on, forever. What arguments do you have, to support this?
It seems to me that, as the philosophers of the middle ages argued, intelligent effects, require intelligent causes. If God does not exist, the universe caused itself, which is incoherent, or, as you state, the universe must be eternal, spatially (and, I’m presuming you would accept, temporally, as well), but, as I stated before, you would need an argument, or arguments for this.
At least, the arguments, whether one approves or not, for the existence of God, have been presented (e.g., Augustine, Cicero, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Descartes, William Lane Craig).
April 15th, 2011 | 8:29 am
Bret –
Actually, you misunderstand my point. I asked a rhetorical question: “If there’s no edge to the Earth, then it must go on forever, right?”
There’s no ‘edge of the Earth’. Yet it doesn’t go on forever, either. Back in Sumerian times, there was a hidden assumption – “the Earth is flat”. Once that hidden assumption was abandoned, it became clear how the Earth’s surface could be finite, yet unbounded – it’s a sphere. (Well, technically, an oblate spheroid.)
Now, you say:
Pretty much everything we’ve learned about the universe since we’ve left the savanna has been weird and counterintuitive. Humans suck at extrapolating into areas where we lack experience. The curved Earth, heliocentrism, atomic theory, germ theory of disease, continental drift, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. – all big surprises.
Are you quite sure those are the only options? On what experience with universes are you basing that conclusion?
But, yes, I think the universe could very well be temporally eternal. As I’ve noted, relativity argues strongly for a B-series of time (as Einstein’s supposed to have put it, “Past, present, and future are illusions, if stubborn ones.”) In relativity, time really is another extent like space. (And so far, no matter how hard people have tried to disprove relativity, it keeps coming up with accurate predictions.) An infinite temporal extent is no different from an infinite spacial extent.
At least three of Aquinas’ Quinque viae depend on the assumption that infinite regress is impossible. How, exactly, is that assumption justified? Relativity argues strongly against that very assumption, or at least calls it into question.
April 15th, 2011 | 8:35 am
Some of your examples betray such a misunderstanding. We can’t prove vaccines are ‘safe’ so much as we can show they don’t cause detectable complications. Like, for example, autism – that’s been clobbered many times over.
So basically, you expect to be taken as authoritative, while not actually accepting responsibility for being correct.
April 15th, 2011 | 10:27 am
Physics has proven that a Creator exists because the Laws of Physics have revealed that nothing can come from nothing, and yet, the universe exists, thus there must be a Creator, who exists outside of Time and Space, who created The Laws of Physics, to begin with. The Laws of Physics are limited to Time and Space, which is why the ability of the Creator to live outside of Time and Space remains a great mystery.
April 15th, 2011 | 12:56 pm
Ray: “At least three of Aquinas’ Quinque viae depend on the assumption that infinite regress is impossible. How, exactly, is that assumption justified?”
Just a clarification and correction on Aquinas’ Quinque viae. Aquinas distinguishes different sorts of infinite regresses, and does not deny them all. In particular he does not deny the possibility of infinite per accidens diachronic regresses. In fact he argues against most of his contemporaries that the material universe need not have a first moment. I could have a father who had a father who had a father who had a father on into an infinite temporal past with no beginning in the series. He believes as a matter of faith that it did have a temporal beginning, but it needn’t have. Nonetheless he argues even such a universe with no temporal first point would be created–it would be created as having no first temporal moment.
So he does not identify creation with a temporal beginning. What he argues against might be called synchronic infinite regresses involving essentially ordered causal relations of dependence in act versus potency. And he doesn’t assume such, but provides arguments in other works such as his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, or the parallel discussion in the Contra Gentiles.
April 15th, 2011 | 1:05 pm
Blake –
Science can be quite authoritative about the claims it’s actually making. And can take responsibility for the same.
It can’t claim perfection though. If that’s what you’re after, there are other fields that provide it. Or claim to, anyway.
April 15th, 2011 | 1:11 pm
Of course, he sneaks in the assumption of “essentially ordered causal relations of dependencies” absent or outside time. I’ve never seen a good justification for that.
Can causality coherently exist absent time? And if so, would such causality follow the intuitions of time-bound humans?
April 15th, 2011 | 2:43 pm
Ray: This is the last I’ll write on this.
“Of course, he sneaks in the assumption of “essentially ordered causal relations of dependencies” absent or outside time. I’ve never seen a good justification for that.”
Odd of you to grant that now, since your original objection presupposed that he wasn’t talking about such sequences, and hadn’t snuck them in, but, rather, that he was using diachronic sequences.
In any case, it is hardly sneaking in anything if it is argued for explicitly in other works, even if those who have heard of the arguments don’t recall those works. It is certainly not an “assumption” as you repeat. It may be that the “justifications” in those places are not good. But that judgment itself requires justification; and ‘I don’t get it’ is no more a justification in talking about metaphysics than it is in talking about music, modern art, or quantum mechanics.
An author writing has, among her effects, a temporal sequence of marks coming to be on a page. But that effect considered as a sentence is more than simply the temporal sequence of marks. The sequence as a statement is a single effect of a single act of writing. Was the writing that was its cause before the effect, if all causes must temporally precede their effects? She wrote it before it was written? Or shall we be so bold as to say that the effect was before the cause? She wrote it after it was written? Perhaps best to say that it was essentially simultaneous with it. She wrote it while it was being written. But of course that “while” is not itself a spooky quasi temporal relationship of before and after. It is a mark of a relation of causal dependence for which it is a mistake to speak of before and after.
Did the author do something to the pen “before” she made it write? Certainly she moved to pick it up, before she picked it up. But she wasn’t yet writing with it when she moved to pick it up. And it only does what it does as her effect. Is her using it before or after what it does, its being used? The idea of essentially ordered synchronic sequences of cause and effect is hardly invented or snuck in ad hoc to talk about God.
All of this is on the assumptions that there are acts of writing and things written, and that a sentence is not merely a temporal sequence of marks on a page, even if it is at least that. I myself think those assumptions are justified. Tolle et lege.
“Can causality coherently exist absent time? And if so, would such causality follow the intuitions of time-bound humans?”
Good questions, just like “can a particle coherently exist as a wave? Can a wave coherently exist as a particle?” Progress in understanding has always come at the cost of human beings being willing to stretch the conceptual resources with which they begin their inquiry. Inquiry dies when we refuse to allow reality to confront and challenge our “intuitions.”
Even if he fails, it is quite clear that Aquinas is not arguing for a god conceived of as just another billiard ball, perhaps that billiard ball than which nothing greater can be conceived, slamming in to other billiard balls. Thus questions 12 and 13 of the Summa.
But then even in the mundane world of physics, progress was only made when Bohr, De Broglie, and Heisenberg stopped treating sub-atomic particles like really little billiard balls striking really little billiard balls. And even recent results in quantum mechanics may challenge the “intuitions” about causality and time of those guys. The world is a strange place. Much stranger its cause.
April 15th, 2011 | 3:52 pm
Blake –
So basically, you expect to be taken as authoritative, while not actually accepting responsibility for being correct.
Science can be quite authoritative about the claims it’s actually making. And can take responsibility for the same.
Just make it clear for me:
1. is it or is it not your own claim that science can’t provide positive proof of a thing, but only negative proof?
2. is it or is it not true that “nobody can prove a negative”?
3. is it or is it not the case that science escapes from accountability for the errors it makes – and the harm done – because science is incapable of actually taking responsibility for actually providing a guaranteed correct answer?
4. so how can science be authoritative about anything?
April 15th, 2011 | 4:03 pm
Br. Reginald P. –
The “unmoved mover” argument definitely does depend on a denial of infinite temporal regress. So does the “first cause” argument, at least as Aquinas posed it.
You’re talking about the “contingency” argument. I think it too is susceptible to an ‘infinite regress’ approach… but if it bothers you, I’ll amend my statement to “At least two of Aquinas’ Quinque viae depend on the assumption that infinite regress is impossible.”
Well, it’s hard to tell for now, since we don’t have any rotating black holes handy. But relativity allows “closed timelike curves” so – perhaps – not all causes absolutely must temporally precede their effects.
Which makes me suspicious about how the putative cause seems to fit so well with human intuition. I pointed out a long list of things above where that just wasn’t the case…
April 15th, 2011 | 5:05 pm
Ray, you seem rather confident of God’s nonexistence. What evidence do you base this on.
You say humans “suck” at making extrapolations. Well, the examples you cite, from science, seem to show we’re not too bad, at coming to some rather profitable conclusions.
you seem skeptical that, either the universe had a cause, or it existed forever, as being the only options. Perhaps there are other options. Often people who are critical, of certain options, give some of their own. Perhaps you could provide some?
Also, you seem confident of your reading of aquinas. I’d be careful, here. He’s a genius of the highest order. I’m trusting you’ve read his entire Summa theologiae, so you understand his arguments, in their full context?
I’m trusting that you agree that, an entity cannot cause itself? If so, we can make some progress.
April 15th, 2011 | 5:20 pm
Ray, you seem rather confident of God’s nonexistence. What evidence do you base this on.
Surely the burden of proof is on those who claim there is a God to demonstrate that he exists, not on those who are skeptical of the existence of God to demonstrate that he does not exist.
On what evidence do you base your belief in the nonexistence of Baal, Ishtar, and so on?
April 15th, 2011 | 6:47 pm
Greetings, Mr. Ingles:
You wrote:
“At least two of Aquinas’ Quinque viae depend on the assumption that infinite regress is impossible.”
Aquinas did not assume that infinite regress is impossible. That per se infinite regress is impossible is the conclusion of arguments in other works (in particular, in the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics). He doesn’t go into them in the Summa Theologiae since the Five Ways are not Aquinas’s arguments for the existence of God, but summaries of them.
You also wrote:
Of course, he sneaks in the assumption of “essentially ordered causal relations of dependencies” absent or outside time. I’ve never seen a good justification for that.
I’m not sure what you’re asserting here, and I certainly hope the inference that Aquinas resorted to intellectual dishonesty was unintended. Please explain what you mean by Aquinas’ “assumption of ‘essentially ordered causal relations of dependencies’ absent or outside time”. Are you asserting that Aquinas “assumes” ordered causal relations of entities outside of time, or that he “assumes” something outside time causes time’s existence? If the former, please specify what you are referring to; if the latter, it was not an assumption but a conclusion, much as the above.
________________________
Greetings, Mr. Nickol:
When one goes beyond asserting “I’m not convinced that you are right” to asserting “You’re wrong”, one most certainly does incur a burden of proof. When one goes beyond asserting that the case for God’s existence has not been proved, to asserting that God does not exist (as Mr. Ingles asserts explicitly elsewhere), they likewise most certainly do incur a burden of proof.
April 15th, 2011 | 7:32 pm
David: I think that, the arguments, for the existence of God, are pretty darn good. do they constitute “proofs”? Well, I don’t know, but I think that they’re better than the arguments against god’s existence.
What arguments? St. Anslem’s ontological argument, is good, and, although I’m sympathetic to those who are suspicious of it, I challenge anyone, to find a flaw in it. He also has a posteriori arguments, for God’s existence.
Descartes, has provided an a priori argument, very similar, to Anslem’s.
Plato, Aristotle, provide arguments. Augustine, and Aquinas. As does Duns Scotus, and William of Occam.
Let’s not forget the recent work of Oxford Philosopher Richard Swineburne, The anglican priest, and physicist John Polkinghorne, as well as Philosopher William Lane Craig.
You seem to misunderstand who/what God is. He’s not a contingent being, a physical entity, like baal, or Ishtar. He provides the very explanation for why anything, contingent, exists at all.
April 15th, 2011 | 9:46 pm
Mr. Ingles:
In my hurry to leave earlier to meet the Mrs. for dinner, I neglected to mention…
The “unmoved mover” argument definitely does depend on a denial of infinite temporal regress. So does the “first cause” argument, at least as Aquinas posed it.
No, they definitely do not depend on a denial of infinite temporal regress. Aquinas’ arguments concerning infinite regress is are not concerned at all with chains of causes stretching back in time; none of the Five Ways are. Aquinas was open to an infinite regress of temporal causes, i.e. an infinite temporal (“horizontal”, if you will) plane of existence. The focus of his argument(s) concerning infinite regress was the current, hierarchical causes of existence, i.e. the metaphysical (“vertical”, if you will) plane of existence. As I stated earlier, his assertion that an infinite chain of causes in the current, hierarchical (i.e. metaphysical) causes of existence is not possible is not an assumption he made, but the conclusion of other arguments.
Have a nice weekend,
JB
April 15th, 2011 | 10:36 pm
Yup. You can’t prove a scientific theory true. You can either prove it false, or fail to disprove it. But if a theory survives a lot of challenges, and keeps making accurate predictions that could have been wrong, then evidence (note – evidence, not proof) accumulates in its favor.
Ehhh… not really. In mathematics, one can prove that there’s no ‘last digit’ of pi, for example. I can falsify the theory that there’s a full-grown African elephant in this room pretty easily just by looking around.
There are negatives that are hard to get solid evidence for. Can I prove I’ve never been to Australia, for example?
Nope.
(You know, if you broke that question down into a few subquestions, maybe we could address the complex assumptions you’ve built into that paragraph…)
In the real world, we don’t get certainty about anything. But science can explain what theories it uses, how those theories have been tested, and to what precision. Right now, for example, we know relativity and quantum mechanics give answers to many decimal places. Evolution, too – common descent is demonstrated by the congruent trees we get when comparing genomes among species, which statistically match to astonishing specificity.
If you think, for example, that vaccines cause autism, you should be able to explain why so many studies with strong statistical power have failed to turn up any such effect – leaving aside the question of mechanism.
April 16th, 2011 | 9:16 am
Blake –
The Judeo/Christian/Islamic “god”, yes. The problem of evil is the main problem I find with that conception.
Yes – in areas that we (a) can make tests and gain experience and (b) actually do so. When speculating about things we don’t have any experience with, humans almost always fall flat on their face.
How many universes have you made?
At the moment, no. We don’t have anything to ground our speculations. If actual evidence comes up, though, it’ll be worth another look.
He was also working within a philosophical framework which lacked some key insights that other geniuses have come up with since. Newton was a genius of the highest order, but he also was heavily into alchemy. I make no claim to being a genius – precisely the opposite, actually – but I can stand on the shoulders of other giants.
Well… Google “closed timelike curves” and we’ll talk about it.
April 16th, 2011 | 9:20 am
Bret –
I think I and others have done so.
April 16th, 2011 | 9:33 am
Jerry Beckett –
For the purposes of the Five Ways, he took that as an assumption. And, again going by relativity, then conclusion or assumption, the idea that “per se infinite regress is impossible” is thrown into serious doubt by relativity.
The “sneaking” was unconscious. Aquinas, I’m sure, genuinely believed in the cases he was making.
Either way has problems. Causality as we understand it requires time. I discussed this a bit with Ye Olde Statistician a while back – search here for our discussion of the “Eternal Foot”.
If you want causality, you need an orthogonal time dimension, a “hypertime”, for causes and effects to happen in. Otherwise, you’ve got a static sculpture.
I do assert certain specific gods don’t exist, e.g. the Judeo/Christian/Islamic God, Zeus, Odin, Seth, etc. But I’ve specifically noted in many places that I can’t prove that no god of any type could possibly exist.
April 16th, 2011 | 3:22 pm
Jerry Beckett –
Ah, but in that case the first two effectively devolve into special cases of the third, the contingency argument. I’ve already pointed out issues with eternality and causality, but there’s a more fundamental problem – can you explain how mass/energy does not fulfill every test we could imagine for something eternal? We’ve never seen it be created or destroyed…
We see lots of contingent arrangements of mass/energy, but the mass/energy itself… we’ve no evidence of any ever coming into being or going away.
And that’s assuming that the principle that ‘nothing can come from nothing’ is really accurate, which QM at least casts into suspicion.
April 16th, 2011 | 4:15 pm
In the real world, we don’t get certainty about anything. But science can explain what theories it uses, how those theories have been tested, and to what precision.
Yes, and science has done remarkably well on problems that are (a) material in nature and (b) small enough to know all the variables.
But that is beside the point.
We were talking – or at least I was talking – about the fact that science wants to accept the “right” to be considered authoritative, but refuses to accept the consequences – the obligations, the responsibilities – that go with authority.
Science is wrong more often than it is right. For every hypothesis that has stood the test of time, how many have been disproven?
If science “can’t actually prove anything”when it comes time to assign blame for terrible mistakes that cost people their lives, then science “can’t actually prove anything”, period.
It is irrational to trust any source of knowledge that rejects accountability.
April 16th, 2011 | 6:48 pm
Blake –
Wait.
Does “theology” get personified in your schema as well? Does “theology” get the blame for, say, anti-Semitism?
April 16th, 2011 | 9:05 pm
Ray, you directed your comments to Blake, but I wrote the comments, you quoted, and responded to. No problem.
The problem of evil, seems insoluble to me. There’s a terrible amount of suffering, cruelty, experienced by humans, as well as animals. Why doesn’t God stop this? He could easily do so. Few reasonable people are persuaded with Leibniz’s assertion that, this is the “best of all possible worlds”.
In my experience, atheists are, not only intelligent, but very moral people as well, and they’re understandably troubled, by the evil that exists.
But the argument that you use, to show that humans are not very good at deciphering the underlying reality of the universe, can be applied here: how do we know what God’s reason are, for allowing evil? If the universe, and its workings transcend our ability to know, then, a forterori, our knowledge of its creator, and His intentions, will defy our ability to know. So maybe, as profoundly difficult as it may be for us to understand, there’s a legitimate reason, or reasons, for evil.
April 17th, 2011 | 8:25 am
Bret Lythgoe –
Whoops, sorry about that!
It is indeed possible that the universe and its workings are beyond our ability to grasp. But there’s two problems with that.
First, of course, I don’t blame our cats for not understanding what I say to them. Nor do I blame our children for not grasping things they haven’t developed enough to comprehend.
However, I didn’t design cats or children, nor their manners of development, and thus I am not responsible for their cognitive limitations. On the other hand, if humans can’t understand what God’s about, then that’s because God specifically arranged things that way. God would have to have made us stupid by Its standards.
The second problem with the concept of the ‘unkowable’ or ‘forever incomprehensible’ is that it’s of no practical utility. How do you tell the difference between something we don’t understand yet and something we can’t ever understand?
The only thing you can do is… try to understand it. If you succeed, then it was knowable. If you fail, though, you can’t conclude it’s unknowable. You or someone else may have a critical insight some other time.
And if you decide something is unknowable… you will stop trying to understand it. Lots of scientists have gotten to a point where they didn’t understand what was going on… and they just gave up and said God did it. Another scientist later on decided to take another crack at it, and lo and behold…
In practice, the only division we can ever make is between “stuff we understand” and “stuff we don’t understand yet“.
April 17th, 2011 | 2:29 pm
In practice, the only division we can ever make is between “stuff we understand” and “stuff we don’t understand yet“.
That is an article of faith, not a demonstrably true proposition.
April 17th, 2011 | 2:39 pm
Blake –
We were talking – or at least I was talking – about the fact that science wants to accept the “right” to be considered authoritative, but refuses to accept the consequences – the obligations, the responsibilities – that go with authority.
Wait.
Does “theology” get personified in your schema as well? Does “theology” get the blame for, say, anti-Semitism?
There are methods for telling when a flaw is a system flaw vs. when it is not. (See: W. Edward Deming)
When a given problem is caused by a system, then it is the fault of the system. That is why it is important and significant that the Catholic church has modified the position on Jews that led to the Inquisition and continued supporting anti-semitism up until the policy was changed. That is also why it is important that the Catholic church be required to address the pedophile priest problem – and, also, equally significant that, despite hundreds of known abuses, the public schools continue to deny their own pedophile schoolteacher problem.
When a given problem is related to a system, then it is just plain dishonest to deny that fact.
The scientific method works very well at the acquisition of knowledge under certain conditions – specifically, when the problem is material in nature, and when the problem is small enough that we can be reasonably sure we have accounted for all the variables.
But science starts with the assumption of materiality, so it is incapable of determining whether something is material: it automatically assumes that whatever it is working with is material, so the best you can do is something like, “assuming that it is true that X is material, then we may safely say that X is material” – which isn’t worth much.
When science-worshipers start using science’s success in fields like physics to paper over science’s consistent and dismal failures in fields like psychology, that is a form of dishonesty.
Science has an ugly history – people (both individuals and entire populations) have been killed, maimed, scarred, tortured, and traumatized when science is wrong. When there was no way to know this could happen, then perhaps it was right to release the scientists from responsibility for the harm they wrought. But these days, we have reason to know that science is only accurate when all the variables are accounted for.
So to deliberately and misleadingly present a situation where there might be many unknowable variables as being the same in kind as the sorts of situations where science has been successful in the past is a form of negligence – and ought to be counted as criminal negligence, because it’s based on dishonesty.
April 17th, 2011 | 6:48 pm
Ray, I understand what you’re saying. The problem of evil, is a very big problem, indeed, the suffering that humans, and other animals experience, is a HUGE problem, and an understandable obstacle to one believing in God.
No one, as far as I know, has a satisfactory explanation, for evil. and, sometimes, although I don’t think that their intent is to do so, one gets the impression that, some theologians are trivilizing the horrible reality, of what humans and animals go through (again, I don’t believe that they intend to do this; I think they’re honestly trying to explain, how God can allow it, but it could come across to others, as callous.)
But since we are so limited, maybe there’s a legitimate explanation, for why God chose to make us, so limited in our knowledge, about why evil exists, and we shouldn’t jump the gun, and assume that, either God doesn’t exist, or He’s a “monster” for allowing such evil. Maybe, just as we could not fathom quantum theory, or evolution, maybe we cannot fathom why evil exists.
I understand your concern that, God made us with these limitations, but maybe there’s a good reason for Him making us so limited.
To shift gears, Aquinas has some interesting things to say, about evil. (maybe you’ve already studied them).
Also, Anthony Kenny, a brilliant philosopher, has written about Aquinas. He’s widely recognized as a leading expert, on Aquinas, and an agnostic. He points out, in his excellent book, AQUINAS ON MIND, that, the Summa Theologiae, should be read, from start to finish, because Aquinas’s thought, is best understood, this way. So, an agnostic, is advocating the importance, of reading the Summa Theologiae, from start to finish, to fully unstand, the summa.
April 17th, 2011 | 10:05 pm
Blake –
Really? Give me an example. You run into something you don’t understand. Please walk me through your procedure for deciding if it’s something understandable, or something that no one will ever understand.
Honestly, I really want to see this.
April 17th, 2011 | 10:52 pm
Blake –
Sure. And we’ve gone from consent when experimenting on humans to informed consent, and ethics review boards for human and animal experimentation, etc. etc.
That’s not to say the system is perfect. There’s definitely a lot of worry and work regarding things like disclosure of funding sources and how studies are funded in the first place these days, as there should be.
But I note you listed concrete examples for things the Catholic Church has done, but you were a bit light on specifics of what science has done. Let’s have some systemic examples.
April 17th, 2011 | 11:00 pm
Blake –
Untrue. As I said before in this very thread:
“Just today First Things contributor Dr. Barr pointed out that science doesn’t need determinism, either. It just requires that the phenomena it studies have observable effects.”
It’s just that, oddly enough, things keep turning out to be material. Gravity. molecular biology. And so forth.
April 18th, 2011 | 2:47 am
Mr. Ingles:
Hope your weekend was safe and enjoyable.
Again, your words in italics, my replies in plain text:
And, again going by relativity, then conclusion or assumption, the idea that “per se infinite regress is impossible” is thrown into serious doubt by relativity.
Again, Aquinas was not making a physical argument, but a metaphysical one. As Aquinas is actually talking about “motion” (the concept of what he means by this term is different from the modern sense of the word) as though it is outside of time, invoking relativity (or arguments from modern physics in general) against it only (again) shows that you do not understand his argument.
If you would like to claim that his conclusion about per se infinite regress is invalid, you would have to actually address his argument, and point out the fault. Of course this you have not done, and indeed you appear unwilling to take the time to do so. Your only demonstrated interest in Aquinas and understanding his arguments stops precisely at the point you think you can dismiss them, by whatever means possible, whether applicable or not.
Either way has problems. Causality as we understand it requires time.
In the metaphysical argument that Aquinas is making, it does not. You again are thinking of physics instead of metaphysics.
Ah, but in that case the first two effectively devolve into special cases of the third, the contingency argument. I’ve already pointed out issues with eternality and causality, but there’s a more fundamental problem – can you explain how mass/energy does not fulfill every test we could imagine for something eternal? We’ve never seen it be created or destroyed…
So far, you’ve demonstrated no “problems” with Aquinas’ arguments, only your lack of understanding their nature and terminology, and your inability to distinguish physics from metaphysics. As for your “fundamental problem”, why don’t you track down Dr. Barr? You can write him an email through the FirstThings.com site, you know. I only hope your understanding of physics is better than your demonstrated understanding of Aquinas.
And that’s assuming that the principle that ‘nothing can come from nothing’ is really accurate, which QM at least casts into suspicion.
Dr. Barr would disagree with you about QM’s ability to do any such thing. Instead of cribbing from his work, I’ll let you do what you have neglected to do with Aquinas, and actually research, engage, evaluate, and then critique his arguments.
It is rather difficult to engage with someone on a topic with an individual as obsessed on that topic as you are; accounting for 22 comments in a (currently) 48-comment thread is not healthy behavior. As I am truly beginning to be concerned for your psychological/emotional well-being, I must refrain from further indulging your obsession and use that time and energy to offer a prayer for your health and deliverance.
Take care,
JB
April 18th, 2011 | 9:01 am
JB –
No, I’ve addressed ‘metaphysics’ as well. I’m not willing to grant some of Aquinas’ presuppositions about metaphysics. And I’ve even given a solid justification – we have no such thing as ‘experimental metaphysics’, and no way to test our reasoning in such an area.
Since I’ve already pointed out how terrible we are at ‘mere’ physics without recourse to experiment and hypothesis-testing, why would we not be equally handicapped in the metaphysics department?
(Oh, and the whole teleological framework that Aquinas inherited from Aristotle et. al. – which informs the understanding of ‘motion’ and so forth – has some fundamental issues as well. The very assumption that everything must have a final cause (and why only one?) is problematic.)
April 18th, 2011 | 10:46 am
Blake –
But science starts with the assumption of materiality, so it is incapable of determining whether something is material: it automatically assumes that whatever it is working with is material
Untrue. As I said before in this very thread:
“Just today First Things contributor Dr. Barr pointed out that science doesn’t need determinism, either. It just requires that the phenomena it studies have observable effects.”
Science still presumes materialism.
It “requires” the phenomena it studies to have observable effects, but it presumes that any phenomena it studies is either material or a result of something material (for instance, the “emergent property” argument, which says that all obviously non-material things are somehow properties of material things – and then works to figure out how)
April 18th, 2011 | 11:56 am
Blake –
Still, that could be disproved. Or are you saying that the immaterial has no observable effect on the material?
April 18th, 2011 | 2:29 pm
Still, that could be disproved. Or are you saying that the immaterial has no observable effect on the material?
The problem here is that you are assuming that a thing should be presumed to be true or false until it is disproved.
Nothing should be presumed one way or the other until there is real evidence one way or the other. To say that a hypothesis should be proved true until disproven is logical enough if there is evidence supporting its proof, but not if there is no evidence.
Science has a big – and growing – credibility problem, because we now have the ability to sort information according to more or less probable, but the scientific community continues to treat probable and improbable information as if it were all equal, according to a scientific method that was cutting edge a few centuries ago – but is now in need of an update.
April 18th, 2011 | 9:53 pm
Blake –
I know you hate Ockham’s Razor, but a case can be made that material+supernatural is more complicated than material.
In any case, early science didn’t assume the only things out there were material. There’s a long history of eliminating non-material explanations of things – e.g. vitalism – because they were found after the fact not to be necessary.
But we’ve gone for a long time now, and we keep finding that things that were confidently asserted to be non-material have turned out to be… material. I don’t think it’s all that silly to have material explanations as a default, since that’s been so fruitful. Especially when, as I’ve noted, solid evidence would be sufficient to disprove the idea.
April 19th, 2011 | 10:58 am
But we’ve gone for a long time now, and we keep finding that things that were confidently asserted to be non-material have turned out to be… material.
No they don’t.
They keep getting better at constructing arguments to support their hypothesis, but they haven’t found any real “proof” that things like consciousness are material.
There’s still a great big glaring “and then a miracle occurred” right in between steps 3 and 4. As science grows more politicized and partisan, scientists dedicate more and more time and effort to explaining over what they cannot explain honestly. But at the heart of all the really big debates – including the origins of the universe and the teeny tiny particles – there’s still just assumptions – masquerading as fact.
BTW you suffer from a cognitive bias: you forget that science is wrong more often than it is right.
April 19th, 2011 | 12:00 pm
Blake –
I’ve provided links to concrete examples of putatively non-material things being found to be material. E.g. http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/universe/211420/the-perimeter-of-ignorance
http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/haldane.html
You’ve finally coughed up an example that you consider to be something else – consciousness.
True, we don’t understand it yet. But considering the above track record, I’m leery of asserting that science can’t ever get a handle on it.
Indeed, come to think of it, you haven’t explained to me how you tell the difference between something understandable and something ‘forever unknowable’. Any chance you could elaborate on that?
How wrong?
April 19th, 2011 | 9:32 pm
How wrong?
Wrong enough that the total number of people killed by science’s wrong answers exceeds all the people estimated by historians to have been killed in all the Inquisitions and Crusades combined.
All the spin in the world doesn’t change the fact that sophistry only goes so far. Science has relied too heavily on spin and on justifications for decades. The trick of simply “disappearing” the mistakes is not working any more.. What used to be respect is sinking into contempt, and it’s only going to get worse.
Some of us don’t trust our children with you, because we saw the Thalidomide babies and the Lexapro suicides. Scientists have behaved like the Buchanans in the Great Gatsby: “too careless” with their belongings, who are in fact other people.
If scientists had to participate in each others’ experiments, would Milgram’s experiment have happened?
I think not.
April 20th, 2011 | 7:56 pm
Citations, please – and exactly how are you defining “killed by science’s wrong answers”?
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