The estimable Jason Rosenhouse doesn’t post terribly often, but when he does, it’s worth reading. Over at EvolutionBlog last February, Jason tackled Elliott Sober’s idea (floated in an interview in The Philosopher’s Magazine) that God-guided mutations are not philosophically incompatible with evolution, a topic I wrote about yesterday. I was chuffed that my post seemed to get a lot of attention (over 140 comments) for one that dealt largely with evolution.
Yesterday Jason put up another post on God-guided mutations—actually, a dual post that also dealt with both the recent backlash against philosophy instantiated by Larry Krauss’s ill-advised comments in The Atlantic. (Jason’s title is in fact “The reason for the ambivalence toward the philosophy of science”). He agrees with me that Krauss was uncharitable in his remarks:
Now, I can understand why Krauss was feeling a bit vexed on this subject, since his book had just received an unkind review from a philosopher in The New York Times. Still, his sentiments were so exaggerated and over the top that the criticism directed at him is largely deserved. For example, his charge that only philosophers of science read work in the philosophy of science could be leveled (appropriately revised) at virtually any academic discipline. Moreover, I would think the philosophers could argue that it reflects badly on other people that they don’t take a greater interest in philosophy, just as Krauss would no doubt lament the unwillingness of so many nonscientists to read more about science. Krauss ought to have calmed down a bit before taking such broad swipes at his fellow academics.
On the other hand, I also have moments when I understand the exasperation. These are the moments when I see the truth in the adage that a philosopher is someone who kicks up a lot of dust and then complains he cannot see. For example, when it comes to anti-creationist writing I have generally found the writings of scientists to be more lucid and convincing than the writings of philosophers. [JAC: one comment here: at least two philosophers have written excellent anti-creationist books: Philip Kitcher’s Abusing Science and Rob Pennock’s Tower of Babel.]
Jason’s example of philosophical writing that is unconvincing and less than lucid is Sober’s talk highlighted yesterday, as well as Sober’s remarks on God-guided mutations in The Philosopher’s Magazine.
Both in that interview and [in the video] he presents his argument as a corrective to some pervasive logical error he thinks has been committed by someone or other. But who are these scientists that actually need his philosophical services on this point? Who ever claimed that science has shown that it is flat-out logically impossible that God could be directing the mutations in a manner that is invisible to science?
Indeed. As I noted yesterday, it is logically possible that God has a hand in any natural process—just a hand that is so cryptic and infrequent that it’s undetectable. I still fail to see the novelty in this argument, which has been made, even for mutations, by theologians like Alvin Plantinga and religious scientists like Ken Miller. So what? It’s also logically possible that God influences the coin-toss at the beginning of football games, giving an advantage to the team who has prayed harder. Why is that not equally fertile ground for Sober’s lucubrations?
Jason is rightly peeved about the claim that there’s no difference between the logical possibility of God’s existence and the probability of God’s existence.
I’m more interested in the second goal, since it illustrates another annoying tendency of certain philosophers. I am referring to the endless turf protection. The relentless nattering not about the arguments themselves, but about classifying the argument within the proper academic discipline. Obviously to go from the facts of science to nontrivial conclusions about God you are going to have to add to your argument some assumptions about God’s nature and abilities. If that transforms the argument from scientific to philosophical then so be it. Can we please now move on to the more important question of determining whether the arguments are any good?
I argue again that if there should be evidence for God, but there isn’t, then we have more confidence that God doesn’t exist. And that existence is an empirical rather than a philosophical question. The existence of a supernatural being cannot be decided through philosophy or reason alone: it requires observation or experiment. (That’s why the ontological argument isn’t any good.) If there is indeed a beneficent and omnipotent God, there should be evidence for it (prayers should be answered, we should see miracles, innocent children shouldn’t die of leukemia). But there isn’t any—any more than there is evidence for Bigfoot. Presumably Sober would be willing to accept the provisional non-existence of Bigfoot. Why, then, does he try to keep God in the picture with just as little evidence (i.e., none)? Jason goes on:
Yes, there’s a gulf between scientific facts and theological conclusions. But it’s a very small gulf, readily bridged by assumptions about God that are very common. The millennia of suffering entailed by the evolutionary process does not by itself rule out God, but add the standard assumptions (among Christians at any rate) that God is all-loving, knowing and powerful, and suddenly the problem is obvious. Moreover, the conflict isn’t logical, but evidential. The numerous ways that evolution challenges Christianity (challenging the Bible on the age of the Earth and on Adam and Eve, refuting the argument form design, exacerbating the problem of evil, and diminishing human significance) amount to a strong cumulative case against the possibility of reconciling evolution and religion. They don’t logically disprove theism, but that is neither here not there.
Dealing with those evidential challenges is the tune that prompts the annoying tap-dance of modern theology.
Finally, Jason, like me, claims that Sober’s conclusions are completely trivial—and he adds that they’re likely to be ineffectual:
Truly, though, it is the height of ivory tower nonsense to think that Sober’s argument makes even the slightest contribution to allaying the concerns of religious folks with regard to evolution. They are not worried about logical possibilities. They are worried about plausibilities, and Sober is quite up front that he himself does not find it plausible to think that God is directing the mutations. He points out there is not a shred of evidence for believing any such thing. He could have added that there are grave theological problems with such a suggestion, some of which I discussed in my previous post.
As a final point I would note that there is nothing new in Sober’s argument. The suggestion that God is subtly directing the mutations is commonplace in the literature of theistic evolution. Late in the session, Michael Ruse points out that physicist Robert John Russell has long argued for this general view. Ken Miller has made similar arguments. I am not aware of anyone who has responded to these gentlemen by saying their arguments are logically impossible.
In short, Sober’s presentation reminds me of John Hodgman’s “You’re Welcome” segments on The Daily Show. Sober struts in claiming he’s going to correct a logical fallacy absolutely no one has made, takes forty-five minutes to establish an utterly trivial point, is keen to remind us that we need philosophers to explain these things to us, and then coolly dismisses the idea that there is any necessary tension between non-fundamentalist Christianity and evolution. A bravura performance.
I am baffled why Sober spends so much time trying to argue for logical compatibility of God and evolution when he himself apparently thinks that God hasn’t played a role in evolution. One could argue that he’s just trying to demonstrate the power of philosophy, but perhaps there are other reasons involving dislike of New Atheists, giving succor to worried theists, and so on. That, after all, is what Michael Ruse did in his book Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?
Sober replies in the comments section that Jason misunderstands his thesis, arguing that “evolutionary biology is silent on this question [of God-guided mutations].” It is not, for have looked for them and have not found them. We cannot, of course, rule out that God creates such mutations very rarely and undetectably, but they’re not so frequent as to make mutations seem “nonrandom” in the scientific sense.
Finally, in the first comment on Jason’s post, Nick Matzke pops up to level a completely irrelevant slap at my criticism of theistic evolution as a form of creationism. Nick wants to validate God-guided evolution so that he (and the National Center for Science Education) can count more Americans as being pro-evolution (remember that more than twice as many Americans accept God-guided evolution as accept purely naturalistic evolution):
Apart from the massive logical and definitional problems with the above, Coyne also managed to change evolution from a majority view in the U.S. population, into a minority view outnumbered 5 to 1. Some people just like being disliked I think…
At any rate, I’ve received several private emails from people defending Sober’s views. Their main points are similar, and I’ll summarize them briefly:
1. Sober was not justifying or accepting God’s hand in evolution; he’s only saying that it’s logically possible. I agree. Neither Jason nor I assert that Sober is arguing for theism; that’s very clear in my post. What I claim is that Sober is enabling theism, and I’m not sure why.
2. All the good arguments against God’s existence are not scientific, but philosophical. I don’t agree. You can’t argue against the existence of something that affects the world on philosophical grounds alone. There has to be some appeal to evidence. Even the argument from evil is not totally philosophical: it uses the empirical evidence of undeserved evil combined with the philosophical premise that such evil is incompatible with a loving and powerful God.
3. Sober agrees that empirical evidence is relevant to establishing God’s existence. This, of course, conflicts with point (2). Here is a quote from an email written by one of Sober’s defenders: “[Sober] thinks that mixed claims that involve both supernatural and natural elements—’God created the Earth 10,000 years ago’—can and have been falsified.” Indeed. But isn’t this an admission that some of the best arguments for God’s existence are empirically testable? One of them was Adam and Eve; another the creation of the world and its inhabitats ex nihilo; still another the failure of intercessory prayer. And we know that God doesn’t generally elevate the mutation rate to make species more adapted to their environments. Nor have we seen macromutations (which God could create) that would enable species to evolve around adaptive “valleys” and actually climb Mount Improbable.
When we see failure after failure of such claims for God’s existence, why continue to argue that God could act in the interstices of the DNA molecule? Why doesn’t Sober think that Bigfoot exists? Presumably because there’s no evidence, even though there could be Well, think of God as an ethereal Bigfoot that can intercede in the workings of the universe.
My final appeal to Sober and is this: Elliott, why do you limit your argument for the logical compatibility of God and science to the occurrence of mutations alone? Why not argue that God and genetic drift are logically compatible? Or that God and quantum mechanics are logically compatible? Or that God and plate tectonics are logically compatible? (After all, God could be the one causing the tectonic activity that pushes the continents around.) Or that God could be subtly influencing the outcome of coin tosses?
Indeed, as one of my commenters (Dan L.) noted (and this is quoted by Jason), Sober could argue that “certain elements phone system would cease to work if it weren’t for the daily intervention of some benevolent deity. We can’t look for God in every relay every second of every day, so we can’t prove He’s not at work there.”
Indeed, and if this is what philosophers are going to spend their time doing, then my opinion of that enterprise is greatly lessened.
§
Ditto.
This is the Theory of Intelligent Falling.
God intervenes with the force of gravity. He subtly alters gravity in local areas such that the people he wants to fall, fall. That way he can smite the people he wants to smite without anyone knowing he did it.
(Of course, this contradicts itself but so what, it is religion. What’s the point of a supernatural smiting if no one knows it is a suprnatural smiting?)
And the ever popular, Theory of Intelligent Weather.
God steers the storms. The fundie xian heartland of the south central USA is always getting hit by killer tornadoes and hurricanes. We know why. God hates fundie xians. They never catch on.
Or to keep it in biology, if someone said “I accept the Germ Theory of Disease. I think that demons use bacteria and viruses to cause illness,” do they really accept the Germ Theory of Disease that scientists are putting forth?
+1.
Jason is rightly peeved about the claim that there’s no difference between the logical possibility of God’s existence and the probability of God’s existence.
And probability is certainly a part of scientific turf. Probabilities – heck, you can generalize that to mathematics – shows up frequently in scientific papers, so it would be absurd to claim that probabilities are philosophy and not science. Same with parsimony. Occam’s razor is generally considered to be a routine part of the practice of science.
Reginald,
I think you’ve touched on an interesting point here, the distinction between the use and the justification of a principle or source of evidence.
Certainly mathematics, probability, and parsimony are commonly used by scientists, and in that sense are “scientific.” But I think the ultimate epistemic justification for them has to be non-empirical. Specifically, I’m thinking of these three claims:
(M) Mathematics is sound. (2+2=4 “in real life,” not just in a formal, positivistic system.)
(P) The axioms of probability are sound. (For example, P(A&B) = P(A)P(B|A) “in real life.”)
(O) Simpler hypotheses are more likely to be true. (Ockham’s Razor or a principle of parsimony.)
I don’t know how any of those could be justified empirically, except by inductive arguments, which depend in turn on induction. And of course as Hume pointed out, that’s not justifiable non-circularly by observation alone.
Parsimony is easy to justify empirically.
1. There are an infinite number of entities-lacking-current-support I could add to an explanation.
2. I have no empirical reason to prefer any one such entity over another; empirically, I should treat them all equally. This does not tell me what weight to give them, just that the weight should be equal.
3. As a matter of practice, I can’t add or test them all. I don’t even have the ink needed to write them all into the equation, let alone the time and resources to test them all. So there is only one weight I can rationally give all such entities…
4. Zero weight.
Eric,
That looks fine as a pragmatic or prudential justification, but not an epistemic justification. In other words, you’ve shown that life is easier when we use Ockham’s Razor, but not yet that simpler hypotheses are more likely to be true.
The empirical justification is that it works.
We also know some reasons why:
– It is easier to avoid mistakes in simpler theories.
– They undergo less reversions, since the likelihood for them being simple is higher. (Here again, “it works” or “it works out that way” comes in.)
– It is not used for testing theories, to verify that they are not wrong, but a measure used to compare roughly equally predictive theories. The reason is primarily to choose competitive theories and/or research strategies, not to verify facts and theories.
These are factual justifications, no one claims theories or facts are “true” but not wrong. We don’t need “epistemic” justification for any of this.
“since the likelihood for them being simple is higher” – since the likelihood for the simpler theories being successful is higher.
[Many interruptions today…]
“(M) Mathematics is sound. (2+2=4 “in real life,” not just in a formal, positivistic system.)”
What does that mean, maths is just a highly refined formal system that we can use to help us reason about “real life”, like logic. Aren’t the axioms of probability just a branch of maths.
And ockham’s razor is just a heuristic, it cannot be justified.
And ockham’s razor is just a heuristic, it cannot be justified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor#Justifications
It’s worth doing the five minutes of googling before stating something as fact. Pay special attention to “mathematical” section in justifications and follow up.
Other Tom,
What I’m wondering is how we know that in real life, necessarily, if you have two objects and two other objects, you have four objects. That’s true, but I’m suggesting that it’s not justifiable purely empirically. We never observe necessities; we only observe actualities.
As for attempted justifications of Ockham’s Razor, typically, they depend upon probability, which as I’ve suggested depend ultimately on non-empirical evidence, perhaps induction which is ultimately non-empirically justified.
What I’m wondering is how we know that in real life, necessarily, if you have two objects and two other objects, you have four objects.
By definition. Seriously, 4 is defined as 1+1+1+1.
Dan L.,
Suppose I have $20 in my left pocket and $20 in my right pocket. Suppose I decide to define 1 million as 20+20. Do I now have a million dollars?
Before minds existed, and so before definitions existed, did 2+2 equal anything at all?
Or, to take Abe Lincoln’s example: If a donkey’s tail were called a leg, how many legs would a donkey have?
The answer to that last one, of course, is four. We can define numbers however we want, but it will still be true that mathematics works in real life; it correctly describes the way the world actually is. The world seems to obey laws of mathematics or logic that apply independently of how we humans construct our definitions.
Tom, by applying statistical arguments to a known data set you can confirm empirically that those statistical arguments work. If I know that 90 out of 100 balls are white and the rest are black, and my statistical sampling technique confirms this result with 95% confidence interval that’s pretty good empirical evidence that my statistical sampling technique works.
Dan L.,
That sounds like a circular argument: ‘Statistically, statistical arguments work.’ Is it something more than that?
As noted many times, empiricism is precisely philosophically circular, you build theories on the same observations that you test. But observations are new facts, so: a) there is no empirical problem, but what is expected, b) there is no factual circularity.
Lay down that philosophy, it can be harmful if flailed around.
Science is never about certainty, and so the point that science can’t absolutely, positively, a priori rule out some possibility (gods, pixies, elves, Old Ones) isn’t all interesting.
Well that is good to know.
My favorite deity, Bob the Rain God was starting to look a little mythological there.
I don’t know why anyone bothers to use 6000 years ago or 10000 years ago as a possible start to the universe. An omnipotent dog could have created the universe 5 minutes ago and, being omnipotent, filled me with all these neat memories. Once you allow for intercession from a dog, you can posit that intercession at any level of perfidy. Either we trust that the scientific method works and has no need for an external hand to explain the universe, or we are forced to accept that Bertrand Russell is right.
Here’s at least one theist who argues for incompatibilism in the way Sober is criticizing:
“I contend that evolution and theism are incompatible. Evolution is dependent on random mutations and natural selection. By definition, random mutations are unguided” -James Merritt, God I’ve Got a Question, pg. 65
That seems incredibly silly. Craps is dependent on random dice rolls, but the game has a purpose. Its ‘guided’ by the casino to make money.
I’m NOT implying that evolution inevitably lead to us the way craps inevitably leads to casino profits. I think that argument fails. But I also think Merritt’s argument as you present it here is so incredibly simplistic as to be wrong. Agents can certainly use randomness to accomplish some purpose, and I could probably come up with a whole bunch of guided, purposeful human actions that make use of randomness to accomplish their purpose.
“Indeed. As I noted yesterday, it is logically possible that God has a hand in any natural process—just a hand that is so cryptic and infrequent that it’s undetectable”
Yes, but if you want to go down that road you also have to acknowledge that if god is truly all powerful (which by definition means nothing is beyond god’s abilities including things logically impossible), then god’s intervention need not be subtle to be undetected.
An all powerful deity could make massive changes to any and all natural processes and have them be undetectable to us by retroactively changing the physics and history of the universe &/or our memories and knowledge so as to make the universe appear to be materialistic, naturalistic, and macro-deterministic, even though god is constantly pulling all the strings.
Indeed an all powerful deity should even be capable of creating a universe in which its existence was logically prohibited.
I fail to see much utility in this agnostic philosophy.
Yep, the position Sober advocates always devolves into Last Thursdayism (or The Matrix).
“An all powerful deity could make massive changes to any and all natural processes and have them be undetectable to us by retroactively changing the physics and history of the universe &/or our memories and knowledge so as to make the universe appear to be materialistic, naturalistic, and macro-deterministic, even though god is constantly pulling all the strings.”
This (and related thought experiments, such as the brain in a vat, the matrix, Descartes’ demon, etc.) might actually be incoherent. I couldn’t explain the reasoning well myself (not yet, anyway) because I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it, but Davidson’s essay “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” undermines the very coherence of the idea that we could have massively false beliefs on that scale. So if we are working with a concept of God that forces us to accept that our beliefs might be wrong in that way, we already have reason to reject such a God as impossible.
But I don’t think the sort of impossibility exploited here is specifically logical impossibility. I’m not quite sure how to characterize it.
The idea of an all powerfull being is itself incoherent and illogical. Once I jump that shark of logic, all bets are off.
There’s a great quote which I won’t get exactly right: The undetectable and the non-existent are hard to distinguish. Can someone fix it and give credit?
Carl Sagan said it.
I probably won’t get it exact either.
“It’s hard to tell the difference between the invisible and imaginary”. or
“The invisible and imaginary look exactly the same.”
Sober seems to be argueing that they can be different. Well OK. How do you tell the invisible from the imaginary anyway? If the invisible is truly invisible, you can’t.
Hah, I found it! I heard it on the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, and recorded it in Evernote. It’s by Delos McKown and goes: “The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike”.
They look identical, but they aren’t identical.
They are identical to a very high likelihood, which in the end is what counts.
But an isolated invisible object has no existence, and we have already noted that magic has no theory going for it. Hence invisible magic, aka gods, doesn’t exist.
I mean, no theory that breaks that isolation by non-invisible actions.
Or alternatively, as William James said: “”There is no difference that doesn’t make a difference.”
I think you are far too quickly dismissive of Bigfoot.
It is actually Bigfoot who is intervening in evolution, not this so-called “God”.
From time to time, only when she is sure that she won’t be caught, a Bigfoot causes benevolent mutations by intervening at the quantum level.
Many benevolent mutations are completely inexplicable. This is because Bigfoot can cause quantum mutations.
I believe I have sufficiently made my case at this point. Only the most strident abigfootist would ever attempt to deny the evidence I have already presented here.
And yet, here are answers to some of the questions which Bigfoot has telepathically informed me you’re about to ask in the follow-up comments:
How does Bigfoot cause mutations? There is a special quantum benevolent mutator (the QBM) located in the tail of the Bigfoot. She points her tail in the direction of a gene she wants to mutate, and she wills the gene into benevolence.
How did the QBM evolve? Because Bigfoot intrinsically has the ability to cause mutations, she evolved it herself.
How does the QBM work? It generates a benevolent quantum frequency that mutates a gene by giving it benevolent quanta in a process called quantum transfer.
Why don’t we see footprints near the site of benevolent mutations when we observe organisms in the laboratory? Because Bigfoot doesn’t like to walk on cold laboratory floors.
How does Bigfoot know which mutations will be helpful and which will be harmful? Bigfoot can see the future.
How do we know that Bigfoot loves us? Because she gives us beneficial mutations.
What about harmful mutations? Bigfoot didn’t cause those.
Why haven’t you said anything about the male Bigfoot? Don’t be silly! Everybody knows there is no such thing as a *male* Bigfoot!
Oh yeah?
Jerry,
Glad to see more attention to this question. I agree with most of what you said, although:
(1) It’s not entirely clear what distinguishes a “philosophical” from a “scientific” argument. I would say the former contain non-scientific principles or premises (as I pointed out in my comment to the previous post), which would make all the arguments against God’s existence philosophical. Some contain empirical premises as well, which would make them scientific too. So the Problem of Evil is both. But some are only philosophical …
(2) Must all the arguments against God be scientific? I don’t think so. There are a priori arguments against God’s existence, like the appeal to a priori probability, and especially various problems with divine attributes. It’s impossible to be omnipotent; it’s impossible to be omniscient; it’s impossible to be morally perfect; it’s impossible to have any combination of those attributes, as several philosophers (myself included) have argued. So those are some wholly philosophical arguments against God’s existence. They have the advantage of proving that God is impossible, not merely finding evidence that He does not exist.
(3) More generally: To be honest, I think it’s a mistake to keep updating one’s estimation of the usefulness of philosophy by considering only popular treatments, and the work of theists, who are a minority of philosophers anyway. I would recommend at least looking in recent professional journals to find stuff to criticize, if you want to criticize what philosophers actually do.
Are there [rules, punishment] that govern a philosopher’s conduct when engaged professionally?
Scientists can express opinions as anyone can and they can talk casually about concepts without needing to follow scientific principles strictly. When they engage in scientific practice though, there can be severe consequences if they deceptively or even ignorantly present conclusions that aren’t rigorously sound, based on scientific methodology. Do philosophers have anything like that? If an organization paid a philosopher a million dollars to produce a philosophical statement would that philosopher be bound by conduct rules to produce a rigorous statement? Or is it more of a free form profession where validity isn’t as important as production is.
Notagod,
Of course. If I falsify research, or plagiarize, or behave unprofessionally as a teacher or a researcher, I can be fired, even if I have tenure.
If philosophers don’t use rigorous methods, they simply won’t get published by reputable journals or publishing houses. You can see this by looking at the articles in a good journal.
However, I think we recognize that there’s such a thing as popularizing philosophy, the way scientists recognize that there’s such a thing as popularizing science. Public presentations and non-academic books might lack some of that rigor, but if an organization paid a philosopher a million dollars to produce a statement that was intended to meet the standards of professional philosophy, and the statement failed to meet those standards, that philosopher would probably lose professional respect.
For a philosopher, Sober does not seem to understand the problems with arguments from ignorance, proving a negative, or an un-testable hypothesis. It is “logically possible” that we are living in the Matrix, but such a theory has no utility.
We need not tar all of philosophy by the arguments of one man. This is just an example of poor philosophy.
Preface: I’m trying out this position. I’m not sure that what I’m saying is correct. But I’m going to present it as if I do and see how it goes.
“2. All the good arguments against God’s existence are not scientific, but philosophical. I don’t agree. You can’t argue against the existence of something that affects the world on philosophical grounds alone. There has to be some appeal to evidence. Even the argument from evil is not totally philosophical: it uses the empirical evidence of undeserved evil combined with the philosophical premise that such evil is incompatible with a loving and powerful God.”
I don’t think this is quite right. Science is methodologically naturalistic, and only accepts certain sorts of explanations. Any attempt to provide a scientific explanation of something by invoking God would be inherently bad science (or not science at all). What’s needed, then, is a defense of methodological naturalism’s value as a methodological directive, which will of course be philosophical. Naturally, it will be empirical, too, pointing to the successes of science in achieving its goals of e.g. explaining various phenomena. But philosophy isn’t barred from having empirical elements. What’s crucial here is that the negative (anti-God) aspect of the justification is going to have two fronts, both primarily philosophical:
1. An attack on the common philosophical arguments for God’s existence (ontological, cosmological, teleological, and, more recently, fine-tuning), showing how they all end up begging the question.
2. An attack on the very possibility of God (or similar) providing an explanation for anything at all. (This comes up frequently in the comments here. It’s always a philosophical claim when it does.)
This undermines the very notion of evidence for God by showing, on philosophical grounds, that the sort of evidence scientists collect would fail to be explained by God, whatever it might turn out to be.
The exceptions I can think of are exclusively of the sort that involve God actually announcing his presence in some sort of decisively intentional way. Once you have evidence of intentionality, the game changes. But without that, to get an explanation using God off the ground, you have to assume non-animal intentionality in the first place, and that begs the question. So the issue is going to be philosophical at its core.
On a related note, science’s methodological naturalism precludes it from identifying “evil”, either. Claims of the sort that are admissible in science simply cannot lead to ethical judgments (this is, I think, one way to properly conceive Hume’s is-ought gap, and to see why it is right in its domain). To get from the sort of scientific descriptions you could give of some ethically wrong action to the ethical wrongness of that action, you need some philosophy (or, probably better, you just need the sorts of observations that aren’t admissible in science at all, observations like: “X’s action was cruel”). So the problem of evil is empirical in the sense that it involves observation and description of conditions in the world, but those observations and descriptions are not scientific.
dyssebeia says,
I don’t accept your premise. I don’t think science is limited by methodological naturalism. It’s perfectly acceptable to use scientific reasoning to address questions about the existence of supernatural beings. We might even find evidence for their existence in the form of well-documented miracles or repeatedly answered prayers.
The restriction of methodological naturalism is just another excuse for accommodationism.
Exactly. It is a concept invented by theologians to keep naturalism at bay. I refuse to pretend that naturalism is a mere method that can be hung up alongside the lab coat; naturalism applies, as a working hypothesis, to all truth claims.
I don’t think science is limited by methodological naturalism either, precisely because in adopting that method it loses nothing, precisely because there are good philosophical reasons why supernatural explanations of events are worthless, which is the whole point of my post, and which you did not address. Hume’s essay On Miracles is a great example of a philosophical defense of naturalism as a method — isn’t that one of the bits of philosophy people around here actually like?
I fail to see how what I wrote is in the slightest way soothing to accomodationism. My position basically amounts to: science excludes supernatural questions because philosophy did the wonderful work of showing that such questions are worthless, that supernatural systems fail metaphysically. Put another way, I am saying this: supernaturalism is such a spectacular failure philosophically that it doesn’t even make it to the point where it could be treated scientifically. So – far from being an accomodationist – I am taking a harder line against theological questions than you.
To address Scientismist, excusing the historical inaccuracy of your first claim (again, Hume was a defender of naturalism as a method, and he was no accomodationist), I think it is grossly wrong to say that naturalism applies to all truth claims. Or, at least, it is grossly wrong if by naturalism you mean naturalism as the method that scientists apply. Naturalism in the simple sense that we should not accept explanations of things outside the bounds of science (e.g. ethics, aesthetics) that violate what we know thanks to science, which is naturalistic, is perfectly acceptable. But science only allows certain sorts of descriptions (the “is” side of Hume’s is-ought gap). To get to other sorts of descriptions, e.g. descriptions of actions as cruel or art as wrenching (part of the path to ethical and aesthetic truth), we have no choice but to “hang up” naturalism as used in science “alongside the lab coat.” Science, to its undeniable benefit, does not allow such descriptions. But that just means that science will never suffice to get us to worthwhile claims in ethics and aesthetics, not that there are no worthwhile/true claims in those domains. John McDowell has some truly wonderful essays on this subject, if you are interested in a better defense of something like the position I’m defending than I could ever give. But I’m happy to give the best response I can to any objections you have.
The thing about methodological naturalism is that it works so well! Perhaps it cannot be formally logically proven, but if you are willing to accept a ‘bootstrap’ argument based on half a millenium or so of success, then naturalism is at useful and better than nothing. This gives it a clear edge over alternative suggested by dualism or theism.
If science didn’t limit itself to the “natural” it wouldn’t be effective. If prayers were “answered” science would set about finding out what was going on. The Roman Catholic Church believes that prayers are answered and they believe they know perfectly well what is going on.
If prayers were answered on a regular and verifiable basis the explanation would NOT be the existence of something “supernatural”. We would be dealing with the kind of events that science is used to dealing with – the “natural”.
I prefer to call them simply events.
But we are describing logical possibilities here, not physical actualities. That logical possibilities (“logical worlds”) can be physical actualities is not true.
So we can very well posit magic and describe how it would look, without having to face the problem that it is unphysical. Because that is the very point, and if you are not satisfied with the claim “it won’t work”, what else can we than to go on and show that indeed, there is no such thing?
Here, answered prayers could not possibly have a mechanism, so of course they aren’t observed. One type of magic rejected.
It’s true that Sober is discussing mere logical possibility. Something that is utterly uninteresting to science. Possibly to religion also. I don’t understand you when you say that logical possibilities can’t be physical actualities. It seems to me logically possible that the world could be have been created.
I’m not at all sure we can coherently describe how real magic would look. I think “real magic” could be real nonsense. Notice I said “answered”. Supposing that experiments showed that prayer increases the probability of surviving cancer. Should we assume magic or some unknown mechanism? I say science should assume the latter.
“I don’t understand you when you say that logical possibilities can’t be physical actualities.”
I meant that it wasn’t enough to claim that something is possible in order for it to exist. Unicorns are possible for all we know.
The coherent description of magic is that it acts on the world without having any physical action (as physical systems have due to the symmetries that makes laws, see Noether’s theorems). If it never acted on the world it is either uninteresting (for theologists) or non-existent (for the rest of us, due to physicalism: closure vs action).
Re-reading Jerry’s original post, I can rephrase my point this way:
Because God (and just about anything else) can be made logically possible with (just about) any set of facts, we need a conception of rationality that goes beyond mere logical possibility. One aspect of this is that, when we are engaged in scientific study, it is irrational to accept explanations that aren’t naturalistic in a particular sense (a sense more restrictive than what is broadly natural). And the arguments for this restriction are philosophical arguments (of course, they gain justification from the staggering success science has had in providing good explanations of innumerable phenomena).
They certainly are given the definitions provided by theology. If we are told that suffering is an evil, then we can certainly objectively measure suffering in the world (given some reasonable assumptions). If death is an evil, we can certainly quantify mortality. If disease is an evil, epidemiology can put numbers to it.
It is not science that is making claims about “evil”, it is theology. So as long as theology provides objective criteria for “evil”, science can measure it, and thus test theological claims about “evil”.
But that doesn’t really address my point, because you’ve already had all of the philosophy done for you by the theology.
I suppose that’s true, but that’s also the case for a lot of domains that are subject to objective evaluation. For example, what counts as “touchdowns” may be determined extra-scientifically, but surely we can determine objectively whether one team scores more of them than another. I think you are demanding far too much from a “scientific” question.
I’m really just trying to suggest that though there is certainly an empirical/observational element to ethical and aesthetic judgments (which underly the problem of evil), and though some of these may be scientific in nature (e.g. that this earthquake caused this many deaths), there is more to the relevant observation than what science can provide, because science only allows (rightfully so! — I can’t stress this enough) certain sorts of descriptions. To get from “this earthquake caused this many deaths” to “this earthquake caused unjustified suffering” requires broadening your notion of observation to the point where you can “see” that suffering is unjustified (or infer it from other value-laden claims). And that’s precisely what science precludes.
I suppose we don’t necessarily disagree, but I do think it’s crucial to see this point: science precludes certain sorts of observations, and that makes it inept to answer certain questions. Science can be brought to bear on ethical questions only once the ethical structure in which it’s relevant is present, and that’s why the problem of evil is not a primarily scientific matter (it might be plausibly called empirical, but only if the extension of what is empirical is broader than that of what is scientific).
I’m not sure I expressed myself entirely clearly. If not, please let me know and I’ll try to clarify.
I think I understand your point, but I don’t think it means that science can’t be used to address these issues. Surely science can be used to examine empirical theological claims, such as “prayer works”, or “religion makes one a more moral person”, or “Native Americans are one of the lost tribes of Israel”. All science needs to address these questions is the objective definitions that theology provides. So sure, science can address the question of whether “this earthquake caused unjustified suffering”, as long as theology provides objectively measurable criteria for “justified” and “suffering”. In other words, science can test theological questions empirically using the criteria provided by theology.
You’re right that science can’t provide an independent definition of “evil” (or “love”, or “beauty”, etc. etc.), but it can certainly examine the prevalence/cause/correlates of “evil”, “love”, and “beauty”, as long as one has operationalized those concepts to objective measures.
Ok, I think we largely agree. Science can be used to address particular ethical issues, provided that the ethical framework is such that it uses definitions open to science (i.e. definitions that don’t pull in ethical concepts already). It’s still subsidiary to that framework, though (it seems we agree on this, so I don’t see a reason to push it further).
I do think that any useful/potentially right ethical framework is going to limit the usefulness of science in addressing the question. That’s because I think that ethics will need to take account of thick concepts ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_concept ), and I agree with philosophers like McDowell that the descriptive elements of thick concepts can’t be understood independently of understanding the evaluative elements. That is, you can’t see why just these actions should be classed as cruel or courageous without understanding why we value them as we do. Without understanding the evaluative element, it seems like an arbitrary grouping. But thick ethical concepts aren’t allowed (with good reason) in scientific description. So I think that any good ethical framework will require description excluded in scientific description.
I don’t know to what extent theological ethics respects thick concepts as I’ve described them (following McDowell). So very possibly many theological ways of thinking about ethics will admit of substantive scientific effort being brought to bear on things like the problem of evil. But I would count that as a mark against the worthiness of the ethical system (among its other faults). 😛
As far as claims like “prayer works”, I agree that you can do scientific studies of whether there is a causal link between X’s praying for Y’s recovery and Y’s recovering (or not). But imagine you find a positive correlation. The appropriate response is to look for a naturalistic explanation for it, because we have good philosophical reason to think that the religious explanation will turn out bankrupt.
The Templeton Foundation spent millions of dollars to test the power of intercessory prayer. They found being prayed for had no effect. They also found that knowing one was being prayed for had a slight negative effect (all the participants were, of course, believers.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16569567
The weird thing to me is that the subtle God who fiddles with molecules where we can’t detect it doesn’t have any biblical support, either. Yahweh frequently and openly meddles with natural law and human society. It’s a logical defense of a God who has nothing to do with the Bible and who hardly anyone seems to believe in.
Exactly. My impression was that God is a bit of a show-off and that he gets really upset if one does not acknowledge his existence on a regular basis.
The OT god has been evolving. Either that or he is getting weak in his old age.
He not so long ago, flooded the earth miles deep in water, genociding all but 8 people and killing off all our nonavian dinosaurs. Not exactly a subtle message there.
These days, he is changing a nucleotide base here and there when no one is watching.
Believing in a literal Flood is so ridiculously simplistic and fundamentalist.
Believing in tinkering with the occasional nucleotide is sophisticated.
See, Sober is No True Philosopher. Of course I disagree with Krauss that physics had made philosophy and religion obsolete – philosophy has always been something we can do without and religion only continues through bullying; physics was not really needed to expose both subjects as vapid enterprises.
Jerry writes:
“2. All the good arguments against God’s existence are not scientific, but philosophical. I don’t agree. You can’t argue against the existence of something that affects the world on philosophical grounds alone. There has to be some appeal to evidence. Even the argument from evil is not totally philosophical: it uses the empirical evidence of undeserved evil combined with the philosophical premise that such evil is incompatible with a loving and powerful God.”
This is an interesting try, but this is basically confused. You interpret the first sentence by saying that “you can’t argue against the existence of something that affects the world on philosophical grounds ALONE.” Elliot is nowhere committed to this claim and I would ask you to find some evidence this is how he understands the issue. You are interpreting him in a way he would never accept, and then arguing against that interpretation.
A more plausible understanding of his claim would be to recognize that an argument is “philosophical” just in case it depends on nonempirical (and nonlogical) claims to establish its conclusion. So, for example, take the classic Argument from Evil:
1. God is all-powerful.
2. God is all-good.
3. Evil exists.
4. An all-powerful, all-good God would want there to be no evil.
5. Thus, God does not exist.
Yes, we can all agree that 3 is rooted in empirical evidence since we have to observe evil exists in the world. So we should grant that premise 3 is scientific. But you can’t get to the conclusion 5 WITHOUT using premise 4, which has nothing to do with science or empirical evidence. This is what philosophers mean when they say that an argument is philosophical: the conclusion of the argument is dependent on some nonempirical claim or other. Notice also what your conception of this issue appears to commit you to: If the above argument is “scientific” do you want to say that Hume was really a scientist (where were his experiments?). Do you really want to be committed to the claim that when philosophers reason from the armchair and include one empirical premise they are doing science?
The Argument from Evil is completely, and subjectively, dependent on how one defines “evil.”
Just ask William Lane Craig!
Maybe this is the case. I think this would only strengthen my general point, though.
This is an excellent post, and very enjoyable. But similar to what Tom wrote above, I take issue with one statement:
2. All the good arguments against God’s existence are not scientific, but philosophical. I don’t agree. You can’t argue against the existence of something that affects the world on philosophical grounds alone.
There are concepts of god(s) that are logically impossible on a married bachelor level. For example omnipotence leads to internal contradictions (rock too heavy to lift etc.), and omnipotence combined with omniscience is likewise incoherent. So for certain ideas of god, no empirical evidence would be necessary to reject them.
Of course the religious can simply change their concept of god to make it logically possible – just like they can change it to include more “mysterious ways” every time empiricism fails them. Interestingly, some philosophers (Dr^3, anybody?) think that the second of these goal-post-moves shows the impotence of science before god but not that the first one shows the same for philosophy. Strange how that works…
That was a nice observation!
“I argue again that if there should be evidence for God,..”
I believe that one approach to determine evidence for God is a forensic analysis as to most likely cause.
When we are use approaches to determine most likely cause shall we include Shiva? Trickster aliens? demons? Satan? Magic?
Oy vey. As if summoned from On High, Nu-faithiest-in-chief Matzke shows up in the comment thread and immediately uses Jason’s post as an excuse to open fire on – you guessed it – Prof Coyne. He’s turning into a tiresome little bore on par with the creo-trolls over at Panda’s Thumb.
Just as predictably, I posted before I’d finished reading JAC’s post. Confounded tabbed browsing, it’ll be the death of me!
But my snark stands. Matzke’s hatred of the Gnudists and especially JAC is palpable, evidenced by the anti-Coyne tangent in his comment. One might assume he’s got anti-Gnu screeds pre-written in Notepad, ready to be pasted at the merest mention of faith/science and, clearly, without regard for context.
Yep, the animus is strong there. I suppose part of the reason is that I’ve gone after the NCSE’s pro-religion stance several times, and Nick, who used to work there, dislikes intensely what I’ve said.
I’ve posted a copy of a paper from Sober that addresses some of your general post’s issues over at EvolutionBlog. See #63.
I wonder if Sober would argue that demons and evolution are perfectly compatible?
Certainly he’d have to agree that they are as compatible as gods.
You can’t have good without evil. That is what the myth of the fruit of knowledge of what is good and evil is all about.
If God exists, it means that is an uncreated conscious process. That would also mean we would borrowing right now our own awareness from that process itself. Just like an eye can’t look at itself, our consciousness can’t look at itself, can’t realize that its “personality” isn’t limited to the physical stimulus it receives.
But it is possible for a personal (egotic) consciousness to go beyond the default perception that comes with our default biological and cultural conditioning. That conditioning is what the eastern traditions call our dual mode of perception.
In a non-dula mode of perception, you can see the origins of the grasping through opposites we make under a dual mode. We can also see how the problem of evil is caused by our dual mode of perception and how the biblical myth and the doctrine of the original sin are direct allusions to our default dual mode of perception. The first men separated themselves from God (non-dual consciousness) when they were able to discriminate good from evil (dual consciousness).
To regain that non-dual consciousness is an evolutionary process because it is in the nature of consciousness to know itself and knowing itself implies to return to the original non-dual mode.
But humans first needed that dual consciousness in order to become the sophisticated organic conscious machine.
There is something to be said for the good-guy/bad guy archetypes; they promote in-group amity and out-group enmity which has survival advantages for groups. But I think this black-white thinking is much much more common in men. To me it has always seemed cartoonish.
A well balanced post I think. (As for the philosophy I’m not prepared to embrace it untested, but here is a recognition that we can’t take it for god-given.)
I hearthily agree that we need empirical observation to conclude about likelihoods in nature. We can reject Intelligent Design as a theory of evolution, aka goal-directed Evolutionary Creationism in practice, for the same reason we can reject Intelligent Falling as a theory of gravity. They insert unobserved mechanisms and events while avoiding testing.
But here I deviate from Rosenhouse:
This isn’t obvious to me at all. It suffices to note that success of science is due to an absence of magic.
More basically, it is the existence of systems that we can locally close that is necessary and sufficient. Conservation of energy means the system can go through permutations to new configurations without anything new necessarily interfering with it.
In pity terms: Noether’s theorems proves that gods doesn’t exist if physics works (conservation of energy and charges), and observation tests that physics works.
Hmm… did you mean, “in pithy terms”?
/@
Put pithistically: yes. Thanks!
It would be well for those who want to argue for God-guided mutations that a large percentage of the mutations that give rise to muscular dystrophy are spontaneous – de novo in the germ cell, or even somatic, not inherited. I believe this applies to hemophilia as well. So those must be God-guided too.
It might have been nice if Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and bin Laden had gotten one, just to name a few.
You can’t argue against the existence of something that affects the world on philosophical grounds alone.
If by that you mean that you cannot argue against something that purports to entail some sort of explanation for some empirical phenomenon, then sure you can discard it on philosophical grounds alone if it is a bad explanation, i.e. if it is either not consistent, doesn’t actually address the problem it supposedly helps explain, or is so easy to vary as to be of no explanatory value. If that’s the case, then we do not bring out the big guns of empirical testing, because we’d be swamped in tons of completely unnecessary work. Cf. David Deutsch again:
This is of course a part of scientific methodology, but to the extent that no empirical evidence is needed to reject a certain bad explanation, it can be rejected on philosophical (i.e. non-empirical) grounds alone.