I’ve long maintained that both the New Yorker and the New York Times are unconscionably soft on religion, even though I suspect that many of their writers and editors are atheists. (A welcome exception is Lawrence Krauss’s recent New Yorker essays on atheism, such as this one).
But the good gray Times remains a resolute “believer in belief”— even being accommodationist in their views about science and religion. In fact, a new Sunday Book Review piece by James Ryerson, a senior staff editor for the paper’s op-ed page, is explicit about it, as is clear from his title: “The twain shall meet.” The “twain”, of course, are science and religion. The essay simply rehashes the shopworn accommodationist tropes, so there are no new ideas. Ryerson simply trots out dubious claims to show that science and religion are harmonious.
You can intuit Ryerson’s biases from the outset, simply by the way he characterizes nonbelievers (my emphases):
In recent years, the scientists and polemicists known as the New Atheists have been telling a certain type of evolutionary story.
and
The real reason the New Atheists doubt the claims of religion, Jones contends, isn’t that religious beliefs have natural causes (what beliefs don’t?); it’s that these crusaders are convinced that science is the only arbiter of reality and truth.
Would Ryerson use words like that to describe passionately religious people? I don’t think so. At any rate, here are his tired talking points:
a. Just because religion had a tangible origin in human mentality (say, as the “agency detection device” touted by Pascal Boyer) doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Research shows that children instinctively believe in God, but this doesn’t mean that Thomas Aquinas was just a big dumb kid. Religious convictions can be, and often are, shaped by sustained sophisticated reflection. The real reason the New Atheists doubt the claims of religion, Jones contends, isn’t that religious beliefs have natural causes (what beliefs don’t?); it’s that these crusaders are convinced that science is the only arbiter of reality and truth. They may be right about that. But that is a philosophical claim, Jones reminds us, not a scientific one.
Well, I agree with the claim in bold, but this doesn’t mean that religious beliefs are true, either! In fact, I’d maintain that the more science tells us about the evolutionary and psychological roots of religion, the less likely we can see religious belief as something given us by God (a common belief), or even as something that’s revealed to us by God. After all, different believers have different religious convictions. Are the beliefs of a moderate Sunni Muslim theologian correct, or are the beliefs of semi-liberal Catholic theologian John Haught? They can’t both be right, even if both are formed by “sustained Sophisticated Reflection™.” (How “sophisticated” can reflection be, anyway, if there’s no evidence for one’s beliefs?)
And really, Aquinas was smart and savvy, and may not have been a “big dumb kid”, but he was a big deluded kid. Aquinas, for instance, believed in many types of angels, and wrote extensively about their actions and nature (read his “Treatise on Angels” in Summa Theologica). I defy Ryerson to tell me why that’s “sophisticated”!
As for science being the “only arbiter of reality and truth”, which I pretty much believe, that may be a philosophical claim, but it smells like an empirical one; and at any rate I’ll deny it when Ryerson shows me how religion can be an arbiter of reality and truth. What has Sophisticated Reflection shown us to be true about God?
b. The conflicts between religion and science are exaggerated.
Also important to the New Atheist movement is the idea that religion and science are opposites, competing forms of inquiry that have been locked in a zero-sum struggle for supremacy. Many of the essays in the anthologyNEWTON’S APPLE AND OTHER MYTHS ABOUT SCIENCE (Harvard University, $27.95), edited by the historian of science Ronald L. Numbers and the researcher Kostas Kampourakis, challenge this dichotomy. To start with, the historical episodes commonly understood to be exemplars of this conflict — from Giordano Bruno’s execution as a scientific martyr to the uniformly hostile religious reception of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” — are frequently misunderstood or misrepresented. Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, for example, did not in fact threaten to demote the exalted place of humans in the universe: The Earth was previously thought to be at the center, i.e., in the gutter, of the world, where filth and disorder gathered. Nor did Copernicus or most other early modern advocates of the new astronomy think it was incompatible with Christianity.
Ronald Numbers has based his career on arguing that things like the Galileo affair and the Scopes trial weren’t “really about religion”, but were about politics and other stuff. And granted, there were other factors, but flatly denying that these episodes instantiated clashes between faith and science is to brand yourself as biased. (Notice that while Copernicus and Galileo may not have thought their views were in conflict with Christianity, the Pope sure did!) In addition, Ryerson conveniently leaves out the many ways that religion has opposed science and still does: the introduction, for instance, of vaccination, lightning rods, and anesthesia were fought by religion, and a fair amount of global-warming denialism still comes from the ambit of faith. And don’t forget the legal pass that Christian Scientists and other faith-healing sects get when they kill their children by neglecting medical care in favor or prayer. Or the fact that in 47 of the 50 states, you can avoid getting your child vaccinated by claiming religious exemption. (In only 20 states will a philosophical objection get you a pass.)
c. Religion gave rise to science and the scientific method.
Religious considerations have also influenced science in constructive ways, as the intellectual historian Peter Harrison notes in an essay about the “conflict myth.” The work of 17th-century figures like Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton was informed by their religious thinking. The very notion of a “law of nature” was at first a theological idea. And even the experimental method itself may be indebted to theological notions of human nature that emphasize our intellectual and perceptual fallibility. Indeed, the “conflict” idea is fairly new: Historians trace it back only to the 19th century, though Harrison observes that many of its characteristic themes (ignorance versus knowledge, superstition versus rationality) appear in 17th-century Protestant polemics against Catholicism for being “anti-science.” Only the villain has changed.
I deal with these claims in Faith versus Fact, and the verdict is: we don’t know. Yes, surely some discoveries were prompted by numinous or goddy ideas, but against that we must see the way the medieval Church held back science. We have no idea whether science would be further along now had religion never existed. But what we can say is that, at present, religion isn’t palpably advancing science, since most good scientists are atheists—including 93% of the National Academy of Sciences in the US and 86% of the Royal Society. As for evolution education, there’s no doubt that religious views are holding as back. Finally, as for the experimental method resulting from theology, as a check on the fallacies of perception, well, Ryerson is just whistling in the dark. He’s making it up with no evidence to support his claim. That again shows his biases. And if the “conflict” idea is new, well, pretty much everyone in the West was religious a few centuries ago, so there was no soil in which that seed could sprout.
The rest of Ryerson’s essay is curiously disjointed, with some deprecatory remarks about intelligent design (Gad! He’d better!), and then a nod to a new book on science blogging.
The main incompatibility between science and religion is one to which Ryerson alludes but then ignores: which of the two areas (or both) are “arbiters of reality and truth”? To answer that one we can confidently claim that science is but religion isn’t, if for no other reason than that there’s only one brand of science, with most scientists agreeing on what’s true, but there are tens of thousands of brands of religion, many making conflicting and incompatible claims. If religion has arrived at some truth or knowledge of reality, let Mr. Ryerson tell us what it is. If he can’t, then he must explain why there’s such a difference between the two areas. Could it be that religion, although it arrogates unto itself many claims about reality, has no way to see whether they’re true?
h/t: Greg Mayer
“set the way?” Don’t you mean see?
Yes, fixed, thanks.
“Religion gave rise to science and the scientific method.”
Hopefully someday we’ll be able to say “Religion gave way to science and the scientific method.”
It’s the same old story.
First they persecute it.
Then they tolerate it.
Then they take credit for it.
Indeed.
“because religion had a tangible origin in human mentality…doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
Well, it does undermine one of the reasons that people think it’s right. People seem to have a tendency to think that anything that a lot of people believe must have some degree of correctness. If you can show that beliefs don’t depend on correctness, you’ve broken one more of the struts of the religious support structure.
And what does ‘tangible origin in human mentality’ mean?
A tangible orange in human mentality is a tangerine dream.
We know that people made this shit up.
/@
Human societies around the globe did science, broadly construed. Ingenious thinkers, tinkerers and experimenters have discovered many a law and invention, regardless of their particlar faith. We assume our world is lawful, and seem to do to so regardless of culture or time. We can’t help ourselves and are evolved to learn and memorize experiences for the future. We have the idea that there are patterns and “laws” built right into our minds.
Half of this answer is also a word game. Suppose we call our God the “The Great Unknown” who is mysterious and who represents what we don’t know. Obviously He inspires scientists to do their work, since they are motivated by the unknowns, which are His mysterious nature. It says little about God, or their faith, or their particular religion. And Christianity’s success has little to do with the faith itself. It came at right time and the right place and was intolerant enough to make itself the State Religion. It didn’t cause the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire — this was due to Ze Barbarians who behaved as if Rome was the Oktoberfest — but the Christians did little once they were in charge. They neglected libraries, confiscated old sites of knowledge and put it all behind monasters walls, where they were occupied with such important subjects as Demonology and Angelogoly, who seem the be rather unpopular today.
Freah air came in with the Renaissance, the “rebirth” of the classical antiquity. This isn’t a coincidence. Christians were in charge and the religion was were the money was (the arts were for the longest time associated with the religious, and sciences belonged to the “ars”, the arts). It is thus trivially true that scientists started in the vicinity of religion, or even at monasteries since this was the place where the money, free time and books were. Evidently, arts as well as religion or anything can “inspire”, and religion did, too, in the trivially true sense.
Religion can be deemed compatible with science only if one of two circumstances obtains: first, if the spiritual world hypothesized by religion does not interact with the material universe (in which case, how is the undetectable distinct from the nonexistent?); second, if the spiritual does interact with the material (as nearly all religions assert), believers can hypothesize some means by which those interactions occur (in which case, such interactions should, in theory at least, be detectable by science).
The first circumstance would render most religious claims about God’s relationship with man void. The second is extremely dubious given that, as Sean Carroll has explained, the laws of physics at the level of human experience are completely understood, and appear to leave no room for a mechanism through which a spiritual realm could interact with the material.
Unless the faithful can satisfy one of these two circumstances — or can show that a third option (beyond “the Lord works in mysterious ways”) exists — it cannot logically be maintained, in any fundamental sense, that science and religion are compatible.
“In the beginning was the WORD”
Proof needed.
“The BIRD is the WORD!”
/@
Needs an earworm trigger warning!
By the way, what do we do now that Pinker and Chomsky’s linguistic theories have pretty much cracked up on the hard rocks of empirical reality?
Huh?
Which theories and what rocks would those be?
I tried to post the link to the nice article in Aeon but it kicked my post. Google Aeon language instinct and I am sure you can find it. But language is truly a mystery.
I did and also found this: http://ow.ly/YpVmL “3 Reasons Why Evans’s Aeon Piece is Wrong and Largely Begs the Questions that Generative Linguists Have Been Trying to Address for Over 60 Years (A Short Series of Posts)”
/@
And you’re proposing what as an alternative — the literal truth of the Tower of Babel story?
sub
Religion can be said to have given rise to science in this narrow sense: As Europe shook itself out of the dark ages, religious scholars began to systematically study the nature of God. This type of study gave rise to a parallel systematic study of nature, which morphed into natural theology, and from there into natural philosophy, and eventually into science.
This doesn’t make extant religion any more compatible with science than earlier failed scientific theories like phlogiston, luminous ether, or vitalism can be deemed compatible with current scientific theory.
There’s another way in which religious thinkers have advanced science. I for one am a big fan of the Reverend Bayes.
Father Lemaître and a monk named Mendel did their part, too.
Was he a prior?
/@
“Research shows that children instinctively believe in God..” I call bullshit.
Having never been exposed to religion I can tell you I never believed in a god, same with my son who was spared indoctrination. I may not be able to explain it, but having never been exposed to religion I find the concept of believing in god(s) unbelievable.
If the claim is children will believe anything once you have their trust I’ll agree. To limit children’s belief in fantasy to god is giving religion special consideration it doesn’t deserve.
sub
I think that children, like primitive man, instinctively tend to attribute agency where none exists — thinking, for example, that there is intention behind the weather or a random noise in the dark.
This thinking leaves them more vulnerable to religious instruction, which teaches that there are spirits acting with intention in the world. This is a far cry, however, from claiming that children have a “religious” instinct or that they instinctively believe in “god(s).”
what ryerson describes as an instinctive belief in god i would call every child’s very obvious recognition of powers greater than themselves — namely adults.
For all intents and purposes, parents ARE gods to babies & toddlers.
yes, that’s what i was implying.
I was gong to make the same comment. Dawkins et al have talked about childrens’ credulity being an adaptive instinct, and so are likely to adopt their parents’ beliefs at an early age, but that a child specifically has an instinct to believe in god? I’m going to have to see that research.
Citation needed.
This seems tangentially related to those stories about kings or emperors who had children raised without allowing any of their nurses to speak to them, with the hope that they would grow up speaking Hebrew. This did not eventuate.
I seem to have a glitch when viewing this post. The 1st 4 paragraphs seem to be from some other post about an ISIS stoning incident. Since other commenters haven’t mentioned it, I wonder if this is universal?
I see them as well, assumed they’d disappear when refreshed.
I see them too. It looks as if P.C.C. accidentally pasted something from another essay into this one.
Whoops, an error. I’ll fix it. Thanks!
Is Ryerson really suggesting that the belief in a divine sky fairy who created the universe and watches you poop, and in eternal hellfire and damnation awaits you for touching yourself has a natural cause? I guess you can paint religious claims with the brush of them all being perfectly normal and natural as long as you strait up ignore the WTF insane ones.
What the heck is exaggerated about an electron never obeying faith?
Ryerson needs to find himself a water source that has no EPA rating and see how comfortable his faith lasts.
Don’t be too hard on the New York Times. It’s also the home of Natalie Angier, who has written (nearly) as cogently as PCC(E) on the conflict between science and religion.
Yes, but not in the Times itself. One exception may be her review of The End of Faith, which was a generally positive piece (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/books/review/the-end-of-faith-against-toleration.html). But her prime atheist piece was, as I recall, written for The American Scholar.
And that piece, “My God Problem” was far more cogent than anything I’ve written. It’s a classic. http://edge.org/conversation/my-god-problem
Gosh, that piece by Angier is great. Quite embarrassed I haven’t read it before now.
Me too!
“Just because religion had a tangible origin in human mentality (say, as the “agency detection device” touted by Pascal Boyer) doesn’t mean it’s wrong.” Boyer and Dennett et al don’t argue that inherent teleological thinking and over-active agency detection are evidence that religion is false, as Ryerson claims. Rather they offer these as evidence for an alternative explanation for why people are religious. Not the same thing at all.
While I wouldn’t want to deny anyone their Scientism, I am struck by Einstein’s statement:
“I am not a Positivist. Positivism states that what cannot be observed does not exist. This conception is scientifically indefensible, for it is impossible to make valid affirmations of what people ‘can’ or ‘cannot’ observe. One would have to say ‘only what we observe exists,’ which is obviously false.”
From a philosophical perspective, although English philosophers like Mill tried to come up with empiricist explanations of mathematics, by Russell’s day, even the English realized that it was unworkable, and Russell’s attempt to ground mathematics in logic (which would leave the problem of logic, of course) cracked up on the hard rocks of reality thanks to Godel’s work in logic.
Since mathematics amounts to something like an intersubjective system of norms, and you can’t have science without math, I don’t think scientism ultimately can cut it as a cogent philosophy.
But that doesn’t mean that science isn’t wonderful, and interesting, and important, and it is a pleasure to witness your clear love of life, and hatred of stupidity where you discover it.
Even assuming (contrary to better available arguments) that your analysis is correct, the answer is to keep working toward a scientific solution — not “ergo God.”
But you suppose I am offering a positive response, when I am simply pointing out that the scientistic metaphysics is a perpetual motion machine. I’m not saying what the machine will look like, I am saying this particular design will not work. You can look at the fate of logical positivism, which was an attempt to create a philosophically sound scientism, which cracked up on the hard rocks of conceptual clarity. Further, what has displaced in in the analytical philosophical tradition is not a return to theism, although we can question the adequacy of contemporary analytical philosophy as well.
Except that the positivists (see Einstein’s quote in the historical sense of the word, not the term of abuse used today) had no inclination for metaphysics at all! Scientific metaphysics is like the work of Bunge or Armstrong (who are science-friendly, but not positivists).
cant have science without math
I dont think thats strictly true. How much maths do you need to establish the germ theory of disease, for example?
/@
>
“I am not a Positivist.”
That would be the problem with identifying empirical absence of magic with philosophy. No scientist can rely on the latter to make empirical claims.
As context, we use Einstein’s advances to predict the absence of velocities larger than the universal speed limit, absence of quantum clones, absence of a strongly curvature of the universe in cosmology, et cetera.
You are trying a bait-and-switch.
“although English philosophers like Mill tried to come up with empiricist explanations of mathematics, by Russell’s day, even the English realized that it was unworkable,”.
And here you go again. You describe attempts to found mathematics in elements of reality (such as pure logic), instead of attempts to describe (predict) what it is.
Mathematics seems to be a game of mutually agreeable least elements, in order to develop tools that have empirical use – in other math, or in science and technology.
As context [here we go again =D], it is the latter use that are cherry picked to claim the ‘surprising efficiency of math’. Well, our screwdrivers are surprisingly efficient too, in comparison with the workings of the graxflitter. (Since there are neither graxes nor flitter tools to handle them.)
“Scientism” is not supposed to be a philosophy. that is the beauty of it – we can see wether or not it is wrong. Scientism, or better “skepticism writ large” as Jerry could say, is an empirical claim on the absence of magic. Like other useful claims, it is so far not wrong.
Actually, I can make that stronger.
For example, if magic action existed, thermodynamics as a theory wouldn’t. And I have estimated, using a binomial test, that the observation hurdles the quality of at least a 3 sigma test, which is sufficient for testing thermodynamics as a whole and as an ordinary theory.
« it is the latter use that are cherry picked to claim the ‘surprising efficiency of math’. Well, our screwdrivers are surprisingly efficient too, in comparison with the workings of the graxflitter. (Since there are neither graxes nor flitter tools to handle them.) »
Nice!
/@
I think you would benefit by ignoring what I said, and directing your energies to understanding Einstein’s views on the questions of God, nature, mathematics. I presume out of veneration for Einstein, you would attempt to understand his thought, rather than construct straw men.
My views are, by contrast, much too threatening and create too much cognitive dissonance.
You can read the philosophy of mathematics from Mill to present. You will find almost no one taking the view that mathematics is empirical, and for well developed and thought out reasons. Don’t take it from me on authority, verify for yourself.
I have so read, and I agree that mathematics is not a factual science (or “empirical” in the usual sloppy terminology). However, *mathematics is not about the world*, it is used as a way of getting our ideas about the world into the right form (or approximately such). See Bunge’s _Treatise on Basic Philosophy_, volumes 1-2. Most philosophers fail to see that a “two dimensional” semantics is necessary here, but so be it.
(Incidentally, I don’t think the factual-formal science division says anything at all about foundering on the rocks of Goedel’s theorem: only a “strawman Hilbert program” does – see W. Sieg.)
Pointing out that Copernicus didn’t think heliocentrism was incompatible with xianity doesn’t move the ball at all in this game. The point is that science is a method for arriving at reliable knowledge. Religion isn’t. It simply isn’t. And worse, it promotes faith, which is something completely anathema to science.
How many times must it be said? Can a scientist be religious? Sure! Are science and religion compatible in terms of establishing reliable knowledge? Not at all!
I am going to take the bait, and I may come to regret it.
If we speak of analysis, we are talking about breaking something down into its component parts. We can then fashion a description of this thing in terms of its components. Although this is static, we could imagine a physics of fundamental particles based on laws of mechanics, and the rhythm of the physical universe consisting of the morphing of these particles into various combinations. We can’t really be deterministic anymore, but theoretically we can establish a “world book” describing one such iterations, and then assemble a library of world books representing something like Sean Carroll’s “possible worlds”.
In contrast, in synthesis, we discern some underlying unity between different components, for example, we may classify a set of bugs as a distinct species based on some morphological similarities of some sort or another. Or, more simply, we don’t witness two eyes, a nose, a mouth, we see a face with a particular expression (perhaps anger, sadness, joy). Here one wants to utter the word gestalt.
Now here the reductionist and the holistic thinker get in a fight, because the holistic thinker would contend that the something new emerges from the relations of the parts. To get to business, the teleology of the heart can only be conceived in reference to the higher order of the organism, and in relation to the other organs. It can only have its function and purpose because of its relation to other parts. If we imagine a universe where God created one thing, lump of matter identical to a human heart, and we were somehow able to view this universe, you could not say this lump of matter had any purpose or function at all (except in relation to God or the observer, which is totally different from a real human heart which has a function within a biological system). But scoff, because even if we go all reductionist, we certainly perceive faces and organism and species and impressionist paintings, we don’t just observe atomic components, and the meaning is not merely the sum of the parts, as you would surely agree if someone you loved was run through a threshing machine, but you were able to capture the results.
To tie things up, you have analysis and synthesis. Related to these, you have the act of saying, or describing, and that act of showing which is related to naming. We can also speak of a distinction between fact (a description of a particular anatomy of a face) and meaning (what a face shows).
Science is primarily concerned with facts, and description, and religion is primarily concerned with meaning. Corn is very important to the village, it is their main source of food, so they do a ritual before they plant the corn, to demonstrate that the corn has great meaning to the village. In contrast, agricultural technique, while important, is important to the village in a different way. One would imagine that the agricultural technique could change and develop, whereas abandoning the corn ritual would really be the extinction of the cultural form of the villagers. Further, one imagines Crusaders or Saracens invading the village and stamping out the corn ritual, but presumably not the agricultural techniques of the villagers.
We can also draw a line between historical description and myth, one being a factual account of the past, the second operating as an orienting principle for the life of the village.
Which leads to the problem of scientism, a divesting of meaning from life, which never quite succeeds, it just gets sublimated into Marxist/Leninism or something. Something important! An importance which is based on. . .
Wittgenstein was good enough to mock Frazer’s description of African rain dance as some form of pseudo-science, by pointing out that if the Africans really thought that the rain dance caused the rain, why did they only perform the dance at the beginning of the rain season, why not for example, in the middle of the dry season.
Truth is a problematic word for many, but we can say science and religion perform two different anthropological functions. . .
If we look at the life of the village with their corn ritual, we can see that the function of the corn ritual binds the villagers together into a sense of mutual purpose and solidarity.
It is not an accident that community and the sacrament of communion share a linguistic root. So we can speak of the power of myth and ritual to bind people together in bonds of love, in this mutual relationality.
From this, we can abstract the concept of a perfect relationality of persons, as an ideal, a perfect expression of love.
But I think it is important to separate this ideal from the created world, because if we don’t, we may go seeking this perfect community through some means of politics. I think this is a spiritual danger for atheists, they get drawn into revolutionary and utopian politics very easily, because they are seeking this perfect communion that they sense incompletely, without recognizing it can never be obtained in this world. Here we live in alienation.
As far as the truth of this way of looking at things, I don’t personally think there is any problem with this understanding of myself as fundamentally in loving relationship with others within families and communities. In fact, I think this is what it truly means to be a person, to exist in relation to other persons.
This seems a higher truth than the understanding of myself as an overweight skinbag that can be dissected into organs and tissues and cells. But this is simply my lived experience, what I discover when I look in the depths of my heart. It is not a syllogism or an empirical observation, it is where I discover my identity. If someone else feels it is more profound to conceive of themselves as a complicated meatbag, they must be free to do so.
KD, the issue under question has nothing to do with “identity”, “relationships”, or “love”. It’s epistemology, and whether scientific and religious “ways of knowing” are compatible, or indeed whether religious “ways of knowing” are really “ways of knowing” at all. The topics you’re dragging in are irrelevant to either issue, and if someone’s identity, relationships, etc. hinged on believing something that epistemically holds little to no water, then to put it bluntly: tough luck.
When you see that, you should also see that the answer to both issues is a resounding “no”. Religious claims and methods – respect for tradition, appeals to divine authority, uncritical acceptance of revelation, casual throwing around of words like “love” and “perfect”, deference to canonical sacred texts and beliefs – contradict the strict demands of scientific enquiry for skepticism, strength of argument instead of appeals to authority, peer review, and testing an idea by trying to disprove it rather than by trying to confirm it, just to give a partial list of the differences.
To simplify the distinction: science is about using fair and defensible rational methods and tests, regardless of what you want the results to be, whereas religion has a set of cherished or biased results in mind ahead of time and argues by any means necessary for those results.
Your “higher truth” of “a perfect expression of love” is frankly as good an example as any. A reluctance to concede the thoroughness and evidence-based case for physicalism leads to an acceptance of some pretty ropey argumentation, to the point that you invoke love as if it were automatically in favour of your belittlement of the “overweight skinbag” idea.
Heck, the very fact that you phrase it as a dismissive “overweight skinbag” idea is practically an admission that you’re in no mood conductive to arguing about truth at all, “higher” or not. The fact that you invoke words like “abstract”, “perfect”, and “communion” so glibly – with no apparent care for expressing what they can possibly add to your argument that love is somehow a higher truth than physicalism because you introspected it to be so – is another. And if that disturbs your sense of identity, then epistemically speaking: tough luck.
Look, I doubt anyone is willing to take on the above word-salad.
It’d be like Br’er Rabbit fighting the Tar-Baby; the more you struggle, the more it oozes all over, until you’re hopelessly entangled.
Which is to say that I recognize the words you use, and your sentence structure and syntax vaguely resemble that of standard English. But trying to decipher meaning from what you’ve written is like trying to nail Jell-O to a post.
In an older age of literacy, educated people, especially pretentious people who thought they were right about everything and that their opponents were daft, had a basic familiarity with English letters.
For example, most educated people had read Brave New World by Mr. Huxley, and had a basic familiarity with the themes of that novel. Such an educated person would understand my condensed attempts to explicate parts of Huxley’s understanding of the modern social question and the relationship between technology, modernity and tradition.
But alas, I see the field has been left to Toni Morrison, SJW’s and ISIS. Pity. I suppose the post-modernists have so poisoned the well with obscurantist prose that signifies nothing that our young people assume that any writing that poses mental difficulties is a reflection on the author and not the reader. As if someone had promised that philosophical reflection was supposed to be easy, just like downloading porn and purchasing toothpaste.
« pretentious people who thought they were right about everything and that their opponents were daft »
Well, it seems clear who fits that description.
/@
>
One of the funniest fits of pique I’ve read in a long time. Still laughing! 😀
I stopped reading at “reductionist”.
If there is an empirical observation of the world in there somewhere instead of in the context [my favorite word today!] meaningless philosophy, you may want to tell us later.
Trigger warning: This post makes reference to basic concepts in philosophy that anyone with an undergraduate education should be able to understand. If you are triggered by European intellectual history, anthropology, or contemporary philosophy of science, please do not read.
There is a dispute in philosophy of science and the philosophy of biology about the question of holism and reductionism in science. Obviously, I am a partisan, but many people who are reductionists can at least understand and discourse with others who take another point of view.
Here is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on holism in physics and biology:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physics-holism/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reduction-biology/
If atheists can deal with contemporary disputes in philosophy of science without getting triggered, then I am afraid that their atheism doesn’t have much of an intellectual future.
Practicing natural scientists are *systemists* when they don’t take philosophical holidays, so we might as well adopt that position as it does seem to work. We should also adopt it in social and mixed science, where there are individualists and what not still around (for example in economics) but these are “backward” in part precisely for that reason.
KD
It seems you are raising a standard reductionist straw man….
“To get to business, the teleology of the heart can only be conceived in reference to the higher order of the organism, and in relation to the other organs. It can only have its function and purpose because of its relation to other parts.”
Though it makes far more sense to see such “teleological” thinking as being imposed by us upon what we see, rather than that we are discovering some form of objective “purpose” (objective purpose making no sense to begin with) as theists tend to invoke.
“Science is primarily concerned with facts, and description, and religion is primarily concerned with meaning.”
Depending on how that is to be taken, it is contestable from various angles. Science, for instance, is simply our most well honed method of justifying confidence in one proposition or another. If “meaning” exists in some knowable way, there is no reason that it could not also be put under scientific scrutiny. And on the other hand, it’s very clear that much of religion also makes claims about facts.
I’d also add that I would argue that religion regularly makes invalid leaps from fact to value that theists often accuse of materialists. So religion deserves no privileged position as a method of dealing with “purpose, meaning, morality, value…”
“Which leads to the problem of scientism, a divesting of meaning from life, which never quite succeeds,”
Which is a complete straw man. People who argue against “scientism” regularly do this; make up a label and stuff views into that label that few people actually hold. I don’t know a single atheist, for instance, that holds a “scientistic” view, if that means “divesting of meaning from life.”
We are beings who can turn our stringent methods of study upon ourselves to realize we seem to be material as anything else we study in the universe. Nothing about that obviates “meaning” or “purpose” since it’s plain to see our neurology results in persons who have beliefs, desires, aims, goals, methods of reasoning about how to achieve those aims, and the ability to act toward fulfilling those aims. We have the very stuff from which “creating meaning/purpose” arises, so it makes no sense to think this would somehow be excluded from our world view.
I meant to re-phrase this part to:
“Science, for instance, is simply our most well honed method of justifying confidence in one hypothesis or another regarding our experience. “
I think the unstated premise here is that things like “love”, “meaning”, etc. are intrinsically special and exceptional, such that, by virtue of existing contradict the exclusive rights of, say, science to truth. This is why, for example, it’s often accompanied by so much talk of What Makes Us Human.
Unfortunately, it’s a premise that confuses the phenomenon – that everybody can agree exists – with an explanation – that it’s just some uber-special stuff beyond scientific or rational ken.
When you realize that confusion, then the position is exposed as a denial of a physicalist position as indicated by scientific knowledge of minds and brains: that there is no special ingredient, and that we don’t need one. It is therefore an example of the current debate in action: faith and commitment towards a prior belief shapes the argument, not the other way around, with the result that it contradicts or dismisses the accepted scientific facts about our minds and brains.
Or to put it more casually: KD belittles the “overweight meatbag” idea because it rides roughshod over their self-image and belief, which in turn rely on their being an Exceptional Human. After all, it’s common sense from the heart that atoms can’t feel love, right? Right?
No, no, no. I am not trying to “prove” religion or “prove” science, or even argue that they are compatible. I am trying to provide a description of the function that religion generally plays, and contrast it to the function that scientific inquiry plays. These function have a dimension of overlap, so compatiblists have a problem, but so do those who view religious language as primarily some kind of scientific description.
Religion is very much wrapped up in human social order, and therefore language and politics. Science tends to be an elite and narrow institutional interest in modern societies, but we cannot pretend that science is protected from politics both within and from without. It is also naive to pretend that religious institutions can compete or repress scientific inquiry. Further, it is very naive to pretend that religion is some kind of benign substrate, as preserving a social order is nasty business.
I am really just trying to demonstrate that there are two ways of looking at the world, science generally employs one method, and religion another. I am sort of dismissive of truth arguments in this domain, because I think religion and science both fulfill certain fundamental human needs, so whether we are a militant atheist or a member of the Flat Earth society planning a theocratic revolution, I don’t think either revolution will amount to much in the long-term. The balance of power and levels of interest will shift back and forth, in response to social and political demands, and I hope the tradition of free thought and free inquiry stays on top for a long-time to come.
One of the functions you assign to religion is the use of myth to unite a community. This sounds fine, but here’s the issue of contention: when asked, will said community admit that the myth is fiction, or will they defend it? Fans of stories and franchises, who interact and form relationships within their groups, can enjoy and delight in the experience and even extract morals from their encounters, and there’s no problem for them that the story is complete fiction. But I put it to you that this is not the reaction you’d get if you tried the same with a religious myth. A sacred text like the Old and New Testament or the Qu’ran is not treated as a fictional work. Ask US citizens at random, for example, and you’d find most would give you funny looks for even suggesting it. And I’d be interested to know how the “it’s a metaphor” school of thought would react if compared with someone taking morals from, say, Othello or Star Trek.
Moreover, the “myth” idea has a strong implication: getting people to behave in certain ways by telling them untruths. If the only way of getting people to cooperate was to lie to them, then fact is fact, but someone promoting the “myth” idea should at least admit that this is what they are doing instead of trying to ennoble what basically amounts to manipulation.
It’s true that religions promote behaviours and attitudes and policies, but that’s mostly because they have an identifiable rationale which itself is a question of epistemology. In any case, promoting behaviours and attitudes and policies is hardly something you need religion for, and arguably science does the same each time its findings are applied to any particular issue.
For these reasons, I don’t think religion answers any need at all, fundamental or not, though like an “alternative” medicine it presents itself as such. Certainly not one in a separate magisterium from science (the better candidate would probably be philosophy, or more specifically applied philosophy, including ethics, aesthetics, and politics). Most obviously, you don’t need religion to have a functional society or a satisfying and loving relationship – in many cases, quite the opposite, as Jerry’s often indicated with poll results and other surveys found from organisations like Pew.
As a side note, it’s also true that scientists and scientific endeavour are vulnerable to familiar weaknesses such as political bias, incompetence, oversight, and outright corruption, but it should also be clear that such incidents are deviations from scientific standard, not rational indictments of the standards themselves.
And getting back to my original point, yes, yes, and yes. You have basically admitted to gaining a higher truth through a dubious method of validation (introspection), with your suggestively dismissive description of the “overweight meatbag” idea (i.e. physicalism), and furthermore you’ve all but admitted to having a biased stake (your identity) in said conclusion. This would make little sense if I didn’t pinpoint what unstated premises you were relying on, and thus what belief was motivating your reasoning.
Keeping it at the level of descriptive, not prescriptive:
1.) Myths are not true or false. They are embodied {“living myths”) or they are dead. That is to say, they are intertwined with a living, breathing social order or they are not. If you treat myths as historical attributions, it is clear that as far as fulfilling their social function, their historical truth is irrelevant.
2.) The interconnection between mythos and the Noble Lie goes back to Plato’s Timaeus. This is a complex topic, in the sense of what it means that something is both “ennobling” and a “lie” at the same time. Especially when you consider the numerous myths invoked by Socrates, the myth of the divided line, the myth of Er, the myth of Atlantis. . .
3.) I think you have a highly idealistic view of how science works, which is fine if not very realistic. Science has lots of politics, corruption, influence by corporations, institutional pressures, as well as academic politics, petty scientific vendettas, cooked research, etc. You certainly can’t compare the ideal goddess of science to the real exercise of religion.
4.) “Higher Truth” I am trying to suggest that beyond the facts of the world as disclosed by science, a person, any person, ascertains an interpretation of what the world means, Weltanschauung. I think this is less than even a choice, it is an existential stance from which we relate to the world. Even if we say it is all JUST science, it is we and not science that adds the “JUST”. As I said, I think this flows more from conviction than choice.
I wear eyeglasses so I can see, but what I see does not determine my eyeglasses, but my eyeglasses color what I see. So I suppose Weltanschauung is a “higher truth” as it precedes the content of experience, and remains independent of it, and “colors” experience. But perhaps it is equally a “lower truth” because at its heart it is both arbitrary and plural, in that we can generally agree on perceptual judgments in ways we can’t on fundamental matters of orientation.
5.) In terms of human evolution, Eric Kaufmann wrote a book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth which looks very closely at the demography of religion, and develops the relationship between extreme fundamentalism and extreme fertility. Likewise, atheism tracks very low, below replacement, fertility.
Well, you know what happens, given infinite resources (like a modern welfare state), if you have two breeding populations with drastically different fertility rates over a few generations, especially when one population shrinks by a third or more. You can see this in high gear in Israel with the Haredim, which started at less than 1,000 in the 50’s, and now are pushing something like 23% of the population. I suspect in the end, it is demographics more than say Aquinas’s proofs that makes religion a continuing feature of human societies.
1.) Myths are not true or false.
You’re dodging the issue. A myth is a story, fictional though in some cases with historical antecedents. Like any fictional account, they may be used as a fictional representation of some broader point that may or may not be true, but that point can be discussed separately. Despite your claim that you’re being descriptive, it’s hard to look at your point here and see it as anything but transparent evasion.
2.) The interconnection between mythos and the Noble Lie goes back to Plato’s Timaeus.
What’s your point, and how is it relevant to the current discussion?
3.) I think you have a highly idealistic view of how science works, which is fine if not very realistic.
I made very clear in my penultimate paragraph that I can and do distinguish between science as it should be and science as it actually plays out. Your point here is redundant, if not outright patronising.
As for comparing science and religion, ideal forms and actual forms, I have made my point: whether epistemologically or practically, the standards of religion don’t measure up. Even the “functional” claim that religion makes people behave more morally is questionable, besides the obvious ethical issue of manipulating people with untruths in order to get them to behave.
4.) “Higher Truth” I am trying to suggest that beyond the facts of the world as disclosed by science, a person, any person, ascertains an interpretation of what the world means, Weltanschauung.
What with? Any interpretation is, in the end, a factual claim, albeit one that is impossible to confirm or deny in many cases because the relevant information is lost or missing or inaccessible. Even so-called “subjective judgement calls”, if you step back, are facts and claims expressed – however tentatively or uncertainly – in different terms because it boils down, in the end, to a description of the subject and the thing in question.
There is no “interpretation” beyond science, as if we get to pick and choose our facts. There’s rational epistemology and “epistemology”, scare quotes and all, just as there’s medicine and “alternative medicine” i.e. quackery. By and large, science is in the former category, religion the latter.
5.)
You’ve changed the subject here. I’ve been making the point that religion is neither epistemologically respectable nor a necessary answer to some deep-seated need, and here you are talking about religion as though it were some unstoppable and ineradicable virus. Whether or not that is the case (and frankly I remain skeptical of most versions of such a claim, given that the trajectory in the West is towards irreligiosity), it is irrelevant to the point raised in the OP and by myself in this discussion. The demographics of religion say nothing about whether it is epistemologically sound or socially necessary (or even useful).
[As far as atheism, atheists don’t really seem to grasp that a god is simply an ideal personified,
This is totally untrue in the majority of cases: just look at the polls on this site detailing the explicit beliefs of religious Americans, to say nothing of Muslims and other religious devotees. God is not some symbol of some secular virtue or concept; these people really believe in an actual deity.
But even on its own terms, it’s dubious. I can talk about Death the skeleton with a cloak and a scythe, but easily admit when pressed that it’s simply a fictional anthropomorphic personification of a real phenomenon that can be discussed independently. I might personify death simply to tell a fable, but in that case I can also independently discuss the information I’m trying to impart when pressed. Even if I cast Death in an otherwise accurate account of a historical event, I can at least distinguish between symbol and reality.
And I’m pretty confident religious devotees of the “personified ideal” would squirm even to go that far. They couldn’t bring themselves to say that their symbolic devotion to an ideal is on par with someone playacting and being aware it’s pretend play, albeit play with a point behind it. Some of them would confuse symbol with the concept being symbolized, as if “God” and “love” were the same thing. In short, they either don’t believe what they’re saying and are “God is actually real” believers in denial, or they’re not realizing the inconsistency. And it is this sort of intellectual mess that many atheists oppose, not least because decisions based on and behaviours resulting from such shambles are likely to be confused at best.
Which is why this sentence is so off the mark it would be understatement to claim it was wrong:
Atheists… just have irrational taboos about fashioning personifications of their ideals, and dislike pomp, circumstance, and rituals.}
Well, this atheist has no problem with personifications, pomp, circumstance, and ritual. I have a problem with people who misuse them as a smokescreen for dodgy ideas and who can’t tell a performance from reality.
Vaal,
Meet Alex Rosenberg.
I modestly submit Torek’s Law: there is no position so weird or outlandish that someone cannot be found holding it. And I’m out to prove it! (amphiboly intended)
I think you’re wrong about teleology by the way. The purpose of the heart would still be to pump blood, even if there were no humans (or other thinkers) around to notice. Moreover, the very possibility of subjective purposes may well depend, Ruth Millikan style, on objective ones.
The “Father of Experimental Philosophy” is generally held to be Francis Bacon, who was a very unorthodox religious fellow (like Isaac Newton). However, it is not clear that the Bacon’s experimental method is theological in origin, (though Newton’s concept of a “law of nature” almost certainly IS theological in origin.)
Bacon spends a long time arguing against Aristotelian approaches to finding truth. (Hence his title “Novum Organum” in contrast to Aristotle’s “Organum”.)
Now there may be some religious propositions which are true, but if so they certainly are not verifiable in any universally acknowledged way, so if we are talking about arbiting truth, then indeed science (broadly construed) is one’s best bet.
Science never asks for blind trust.
Science is better with Bacon…
/@
Everything is better with bacon. (Well, maybe not custard.)
Newton’s concept is theological as is a lot of his thought, but *not* orthodox. This is what the “historical compatibilism” stuff repeatedly gets wrong. That is, the partisans of this view repeatedly fail to notice that almost to a man were heterodox. *Why*? Well, they were free thinkers, after a fashion. Newton *denied the trinity*, for crying out loud.
sub
Conversely, just because religion isn’t wrong by default it doesn’t mean it is correct by default, as Jerry notes, but more importantly likely to be correct. What would be the chances that a myth is correct? Zero to none.
And simple checks show that invisible bearded men are as scarce as flying bearded men (Santa).
Re the rest of religion’s relation to science, I think this recent work is interesting at the very least. It can even be partly correct:
“Disbelieve it or not, ancient history suggests that atheism is as natural to humans as religion”
“People in the ancient world did not always believe in the gods, a new study suggests – casting doubt on the idea that religious belief is a “default setting” for humans.
Despite being written out of large parts of history, atheists thrived in the polytheistic societies of the ancient world – raising considerable doubts about whether humans really are “wired” for religion – a new study suggests.
The claim is the central proposition of a new book by Tim Whitmarsh, Professor of Greek Culture and a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge. In it, he suggests that atheism – which is typically seen as a modern phenomenon – was not just common in ancient Greece and pre-Christian Rome, but probably flourished more in those societies than in most civilisations since.”
““We tend to see atheism as an idea that has only recently emerged in secular Western societies,” Whitmarsh said. “The rhetoric used to describe it is hyper-modern. In fact, early societies were far more capable than many since of containing atheism within the spectrum of what they considered normal.””
“The book, titled Battling The Gods, is being launched in Cambridge on Tuesday (February 16).”
[ http://phys.org/news/2016-02-disbelieve-ancient-history-atheism-natural.html ; my bold]
Religion can be relied upon to regularly get reasoning backwards, as it does for meaning, purpose, morality, teleology etc.
This also seems to be the case for this claim:
“The very notion of a “law of nature” was at first a theological idea. And even the experimental method itself may be indebted to theological notions of human nature that emphasize our intellectual and perceptual fallibility.”
But surely anyone with eyes to see perceived regularities in nature. If they didn’t notice any such regularities they could incorporate into their theories of how to act in the world, they wouldn’t have survived.
Humans didn’t need to posit God to notice regularities in nature – they posited God sometimes to EXPLAIN the regularities in nature. (And also posited God to try to impose order on apparently chaos, the things they didn’t know, like why fate seemed to befall people in a way that seemed random with respect to their well-being. “Must be a God who controls that aspect of nature being pissed off at us, so let’s think of reasons that would be so.”).
Similarly, the observation of our perceptual and intellectual fallibility goes as far back as philosophy and other observations of the human experience.
Further, one could just as well infer from “theological notions” of our perceptual fallibility that we are not up to the job of trusting our inferences form nature. Which would actually be reason to UNDERMINE a scientific inquiry and punt the ball to revelation or pure skepticism. So such notions don’t help predict or suggest a line leading to science in the first place. It’s just ad hoc rationalization as usual trying to give some virtue to religion.
I don’t think this is entirely fair.
Modern science arose in Western European countries that were predominantly Christian. They believed in One God that created Heaven and Earth, and ordered it. So it made perfect sense to them that the universe is intelligible and orderly.
You don’t really find this stuff in India in contrast. The ancient Taoists were obviously doing some interesting scientific inquiries, but it never really got that far.
The issue remains that while it might take something like monotheism to kick start scientific inquiry (as well as a geopolitical interest in more accurate cannons), can science kick away the ladder? The answer would appear to be yes at present.
[As far as atheism, atheists don’t really seem to grasp that a god is simply an ideal personified, and every pagan will tell you the idol merely stands for the god/ideal. Atheists believe in ideals, they just have irrational taboos about fashioning personifications of their ideals, and dislike pomp, circumstance, and rituals.}