…and this is a 
Eugenie Scott in Kansas
Category: Creationism • Godlessness
Posted on: November 19, 2006 7:33 PM, by PZ Myers
I have to preface this with the comment that I like Eugenie Scott, I think she does a wonderful job, and she's trying to accomplish the difficult task of treading the line between being a representative of science and building an interface with culture and politics. I couldn't do that job. I'd be inspiring rioting mobs outside the office window. However, I also think she's wrong, and that she's working too hard to pander to public superstition to be effective at communicating science.
Jon Voisey took notes on her recent lecture in Kansas. Much of what she said I can go along with, although I think sometimes she's failing to go the step further necessary to make the fundamental point. Like this:
Yet despite this, science is a limited way of knowing. The reason for this is that science can only explain the natural world, the universe of matter an energy, and as such, it can only use natural causes.
It's all well and good to say science is limited…to understanding the entire freaking universe. This kind of admission is making a tacit nod to the unfounded claims of the superstitious, that there is something more than matter and energy and time and information and this whole grand collection of dust and stars and galaxies that we live in. Why? If someone wants to claim there's something more, let them explain it and show some kind of evidence that it is worth considering.
Jon and the Lawrence Journal-World report that she also talked a bit about religion, to tell us that scientists shouldn't talk about religion…while talking about religion herself, of course. I think what that means is that we should talk about religion only when we are giving aid and comfort to the irrational prejudices of the public; when we make people uncomfortable, we're supposed to throw up our hands and say we don't have any authority on this matter. It doesn't sound quite fair to me. Why should the tool that has proven itself most effective at dealing with questions of matter and energy be automatically stripped from us when trying to address the beliefs of beings of matter and energy who think they're being affected by some mysterious something?
In the ongoing battle between evolution and intelligent design, Scott told a Kansas University audience Thursday night, science as a discipline shouldn't be part of the battle's landscape.
Rather, Scott said, science's only concern is with the empirical observation, testing and recording of the ways of the natural world.
If there is a fight to be waged, she said, it should be between those who believe some nonmaterial force helps shape the world — including intelligent design proponents — and those who philosophize the purity of the natural, observable world.
No, Dr Scott, I reject your attempt to deny the applicability of science to the affairs of us material beings in this one claim. If someone wants to argue about the outcome of a wrestling match between angels, I'll agree and step out of it (except, perhaps, to mock the debaters over the unknowable). When someone wants to argue that the angels are wrestling with me, or you, or the entire population of Pakistan, though, I do have a dog in that fight, and I say that science is the appropriate method to address the claim.
Jon reproduced a table she used to distinguish science and religion. I depart from the Scott camp at the point in this table where she claims science can offer no opinion.
Characteristic Religion Science Logic YES YES Revelation YES NO Mystical/Personal States of being YES NO Supernatural Powers YES Assume NO Belief in non-material world YES NO OPINION Belief in supernatural beings YES NO OPINION Belief in afterlife YES NO OPINION Concern with Evil YES NO Sense of Awe YES NO OPINION
Wait a minute…what about belief in a non-material world that affects ours, or in meddlesome supernatural beings who affect our lives? Are we supposed to pretend that people are not making claims of an influence on our universe—and a rather acute and personal affect on almost every aspect of our personal lives, from what we eat and how we dress to who we should have sex with and what the entire purpose of our lives might be? That's disingenuous. It is absurd. It is an adoption of the excuses of the superstitious, and it denies the realities of religious belief.
Perhaps there are other things that should be added to that table. Apparently, we should have no opinion on "Belief that the position of Venus in the sky at the time of our birth affects our love life."
We should also have no opinion on "Belief that a chi substance flows through channels in our body to affect our health."
Some people, the Breatharians, believe you don't need food—if you are in the proper state of mind, you can live on air and sunlight. Science can have no opinion on this.
If our president says God personally talks with him and has told him to nuke Iran, scientists shouldn't even blink—we should consider the possibility of non-physical entities sending magic messages to the skull-meat of our leader an event just as likely as that he has gone insane.
Science does have a position on those issues: until there is evidence provided for the claims, they are bullshit. And naively pretending that science has no position is mollycoddling bullshit.
Sean Carroll notes that Natalie Angier has something to say on this topic. It's worth reading.
Scientists think this is terrible--the public’s bizarre underappreciation of one of science’s great and unshakable discoveries [evolution], how we and all we see came to be--and they’re right. Yet I can’t help feeling tetchy about the limits most of them put on their complaints. You see, they want to augment this particular figure--the number of people who believe in evolution--without bothering to confront a few other salient statistics that pollsters have revealed about America’s religious cosmogony. Few scientists, for example, worry about the 77 percent of Americans who insist that Jesus was born to a virgin, an act of parthenogenesis that defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction. Nor do the researchers wring their hands over the 80 percent who believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the laws of thermodynamics be damned. …
So, on the issue of mainstream monotheistic religions and the irrationality behind many of religion’s core tenets, scientists often set aside their skewers, their snark, and their impatient demand for proof, and instead don the calming cardigan of a a kiddie-show host on public television. They reassure the public that religion and science are not at odds with one another, but rather that they represent separate “magisteria,” in the words of the formerly alive and even more formerly scrappy Stephen Jay Gould. Nobody is going to ask people to give up their faith, their belief in an everlasting soul accompanied by an immortal memory of every soccer game their kids won, every moment they spent playing fetch with the dog. Nobody is going to mock you for your religious beliefs. Well, we might if you base your life decisions on the advice of a Ouija board; but if you want to believe that someday you’ll be seated at a celestial banquet with your long-dead father to your right and Jane Austen to your left-and that she’ll want to talk to you for another hundred million years or more--that’s your private reliquary, and we’re not here to jimmy the lock.
Take off the comfy cardigan, Dr Scott. Scientists have a role to play in our culture, and it's not as the pleasant, soothing flim-flam artists, mumbling consolation and excuses in return for a donation on the offering plate. We're supposed to be clear-eyed and critical, even when it's easier to play the priest and lie. I think you're doing a bang-up job of accommodating the American citizenry to the fluff and nonsense of woolly religious thinking, but that's not a job that needs to be done, and it's not your job.
Maybe you could try channeling the ka of Natalie Angier (I know she's not dead yet, but heck, why limit ourselves to mere temporalities, as long as we're conjuring up ætheric intelligences?) next time you're talking to the public about religion and creationism? It might help. It might actually focus the debate on the root causes of the problem. I also found Angier's article much more interesting and informative than the accounts of your talk—it's something to aspire to, at any rate.
Comments
If something other than matter-energy was found, it would still be a part of the natural world.
This point is within the powers of comprehension of any reasonably intelligent person. If Dr. Scott makes arguments that contradict it, she is willfully attempting to deceive, and should be treated as any other deceiver.
Posted by: Caledonian | November 19, 2006 7:50 PM
If someone wants to claim there's something more, let them explain it and show some kind of evidence that it is worth considering.
Why should only those things that can be shown by the evidence you will accept be considered "worth considering"?
Posted by: John Pieret | November 19, 2006 8:05 PM
You have a better kind of evidence?
Posted by: Rey Fox | November 19, 2006 8:10 PM
Why would it have to be "better" and how are you measuring that anyway?
Hint: saying that yours does a good job with the natural world is seriously circular.
Posted by: John Pieret | November 19, 2006 8:19 PM
Framing this debate as a war between science and religion grants science too easy a victory. There are, after all, a great many human activities that are neither scientific nor religious. I think it unfortunate that debates about evolution vs creationism or intelligent design often turn into assertions of an indefensible scientism that proclaims science's hegemony over every other form of human thought, whether legal, philosophical, aesthetic, historical, or political.
Even the world's best can opener is a lousy paint brush.
Posted by: Jim Harrison | November 19, 2006 8:24 PM
This is the same old question of tactics. And the question to be answered first is, 'What do you want to achieve?'
Both the Myers and the Scott camps agree that the real fundamentalists are probably unreachable. It makes no difference what approach you try, you won't change their beliefs one iota.
The next question is, are there more moderate believers who might be swayed if approached sympathetically? If there are then will any attempt to change their views lead to worthwhile practical results?
I lean towards Eugenie Scott's approach that sympathetic persuasion is better than confrontation where possible. Where she would be wrong is if she is misleading her audience about what science is able to investigate.
That said, when atheists and agnostics are confronted about their lack of belief in a god, they should stand their ground and make it quite clear why they have no belief in such a being.
Posted by: Ian H Spedding FCD | November 19, 2006 8:31 PM
Science is on a different plane from a sense of awe?????
Charles Playfair, when he became the second person to properly appreciate the immensity of geological history: "The mind grows giddy looking into the abyss of time."
Posted by: N.Wells | November 19, 2006 8:35 PM
All we have is the natural world. No more, no less. It is all I need.
Posted by: Steven | November 19, 2006 8:36 PM
That does seem to be pre-supposing the existence of some unnatural/supernatural cause(s) for which there isn't any credible evidence. Science could only sensibly be said to be limited in that manner were such things already to have been shown to exist. And, in doing so, they would then pretty much be falling into the natural cause category anyway...
Posted by: SEF | November 19, 2006 8:40 PM
PZ: I know you crave a more red-blooded discourse, but don't you think it's possible that it's 'coloring' your judgement here?
Of course, science has *something* to say about the consequences of claims, and much of the time the claim and the consequence are the same. Sometimes, however, the consequence and the claim are *not* the same.
Take, for example, the claim that some Palestinian female reproduced without two millenia ago. An endless number of studies could demonstrate the improbability of that outcome, but how would you demonstrate the *impossibility* of this outcome via purely natural processes? And, even if you did, how could any of this invalidate the *possibility* of a supernatural claim?
So, I think you should give Dr. Scott a little more slack. I don't really think that she's asserting that the consequences of supernatural claims can't be tested; after all, I'm a believer, and supposedly predisposed to special pleading and hand-waving, but I understand that's not the point she's making. There's a whole class of general claims that are not subject to being falsified, and we don't have to assert the contrary in order to exclude them from science. In fact, that's the beauty of it....SH
Posted by: Scott Hatfield | November 19, 2006 8:43 PM
I have a basic question, absent the answer to which I find it difficult to proceed with this whole "limited to the natural world" question.
I'm guessing that many people have already thought long and hard about this question, but I've never seen a succinct answer to it. Can anybody here help?
Here's the question:
What, in precisely bounded terms, does "supernatural" mean?
btw, this is a genuine question. I'm really not at all sure how to formulate an answer.
Posted by: Millimeter Wave | November 19, 2006 8:49 PM
I'm going to presume that you meant to say "reproduced without fertilization".
And that is not the claim. The claim is that said Palestinian female was impregnated by a supernatural being. The counterargument that reveals with line of argumentation to be false has been demonstrated to be beyond your severely limited comprehension.
Occam's Razor must be grasped lightly, or it has a tendency to cut your throat.
Posted by: Caledonian | November 19, 2006 8:56 PM
Meh. The post isn't really all that convincing. The line between religious belief and what science can verify isn't where you say it is. Yes, science can, at times, verify or falsify a particular religious tenet. But, not all religious claims are subject to scientific tests even when they do affect the world. For example,
I don't believe in God, but neither do I think science can tell us anything about whether Jesus was born to a virgin or rose from the dead. My worldview does not *demand* that miracles don't happen. My worldview is that miracles haven't happened. There's a huge difference between the two. Claiming that the virgin birth and resurection didn't happen because things don't normally work that way is going to sound stupid to everyone except one subsection of people who don't believe in the virgin birth or resurrection. To the religious, this is an extremely poor criticism. On the flip side, it's about as dumb as a creationist claiming that mutations are never good - and they won't accept evidence to the contrary because they already "know" it. If you're going to fight religion, you have to use arguments that the religious are going to understand. Making arguments that you refute the existence of miracles a priori, and therefore miracles didn't happen is just going to make atheists look silly and stupid.
Posted by: BC | November 19, 2006 8:59 PM
PZ (you knew I'd weigh in, didn't you?) Genie is right; you are wrong. Science has no opinion about anything that is outside its frame of reference. Any claims that are made about things science cannot investigate are nonscientific, not antiscientific. Making it the sine qua non of being scientific that one rejects all nonscientific claims is to license the arguments of those who think science is another religion. It also will force people to choose between what they deeply believe and the acceptance of science as a way of knowing (and it is not clear to me, even as a damned physicalist, that there are no other ways of knowing - ethical claims, for example, are not scientifically verifiable, although if they require falsehoods to be true they are falsifiable).
You may not like the fact that Genie herself is a theist. But she's a damned good defender of science qua science.
Posted by: John Wilkins | November 19, 2006 9:20 PM
PZ, you and Dawkins may be good for the world. I just went over to Huffington Post and read a proportion of the letters concerning Depak Chopra's refutation of Dawkins. There are several hundred of them and they seem to run about 9 to one in favor of Dawkins.
Poeple are very suseptible to public opnion. If religious people say "god is real and so are demons, and the pope is right to have a exorcist", and more enlightened people say "we must respect faith whatever we may believe ourselves" it means you have have to be a rebel to stick your neck out and say "Bullshit". What you and Dawkins are doing apart from telling the truth, is to make it allright to say Bullshit to the X-man and the tooth fairy.
I really think it might be working. I wouldn't say the tide has turned, but we are getting significant eddies.
Posted by: oldhippie | November 19, 2006 9:21 PM
On the flip side, it's about as dumb as a creationist claiming that mutations are never good - and they won't accept evidence to the contrary because they already "know" it.
That's a false analogy, BC. People who don't believe in the virgin birth do so because of the evidence - there's no mechanism by which humans reproduce asexually. People who don't believe in mutations that increase information do so in spite of the evidence, because those mutations are inconvenient for them and their beliefs.
Posted by: The Disgruntled Chemist | November 19, 2006 9:22 PM
Miracles are exercises in wish-fulfillment by the human imagination. Religious stories about miracles are just so much fiction, just like the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was a fictional account about some Jews. Fencing off stories dealing with religion from all other stories as if they are somehow not also fictions but instead fact is what's silly to my mind.
Posted by: David Wilford | November 19, 2006 9:23 PM
Science has no opinion about anything that is outside its frame of reference.
Sure it does. If someone claims they see the Virgin Mary in a tortilla, science doesn't refrain from noting that it isn't a miracle but is instead a phenomena known as pareidolia.
Posted by: David Wilford | November 19, 2006 9:33 PM
All of reality is within science's frame of reference. Science doesn't have 'opinions', it has positions, and the position it takes on things outside its bounds is that they do not exist. You and Scott are wrong - PZ is right.
Woosh!
Posted by: Caledonian | November 19, 2006 9:35 PM
What, in precisely bounded terms, does "supernatural" mean?
I'm not sure if i can give a formal, precisely bounded definition, but here goes...
Supernatural, i guess, could be defined as anything that is outside of nature, or outside of natural law. In a practical sense, you could say that something that seems outside of natural law is supernatural.
According to a naturalistic worldview, nothing can be supernatural, because then it could only exist outside of nature, and therefore, not exist. To put it another way, nothing can ever be supernatural because anything that exists can be and must be explained by natural processes, and therefore, is not supernatural, just natural. Anything that seems supernatural to us is probably just natural in a way that we cannot see or detect (yet).
I dunno, maybe i've butchered the definition. Anyone want to try and help me out here? To me, trying to define "supernatural" is like trying to define "unreal", in that it can only really be defined as the absence or opposite of something else...
Posted by: Shnakepup | November 19, 2006 9:38 PM
John, if someone wants to make up stuff about the goings on between Zeus and Hera on mystical old Mt Olympus, you're right: it's non-science, I can't say a thing about it. When one says Zeus impregnated a human female, then I can say that science does take a stand on that: it almost certainly is false. It doesn't even make sense. When people say Zeus is watching over us now and will aid us in our battles if we make the proper sacrifices, science says baloney. There's no evidence.
If you want to tell me there's another way of knowing, go ahead, but you haven't, and it's clear that religion isn't, either. Why should we privilege religion as some kind of intellectually valuable asset to the human struggle to understand our world? It's been a flop so far, and doesn't even have any promise to help.
We could go around and around on this, but you're putting yourself in Michael Behe's position, of having to give credit to astrology as an equal of science in figuring out how the world works.
By the way, Eugenie Scott is an atheist, unless she's had some conversion lately.
Posted by: PZ Myers | November 19, 2006 9:39 PM
Science has no opinion about anything that is outside its frame of reference. Any claims that are made about things science cannot investigate are nonscientific, not antiscientific.
"Scientific" and "Not Scientific" are terms that describe processes, not things. A claim, in itself, cannot be called scientific or nonscientific; it is just a claim. When someone investigates or questions that claim, that is when you can start describing stuff as "science" or "not science".
For example, consider the whole Virgin Birth thing. Anyone can certainly start a scientific study to determine whether or not parthenogenesis is possible. They may not find an answer, but the process would still be scientific in nature. I guess an "nonscientific" way of going about it would be to take hallucinogenic drugs and claim that your spirit guide told you the answer...
Posted by: Shnakepup | November 19, 2006 9:47 PM
Not true, Shnakepup. A claim whose nature is inherently incompatible with the scientific method is necessarily nonscientific.
Posted by: Caledonian | November 19, 2006 9:51 PM
I have a question to those who disagree with PZ. Do you consider the story of the virgin birth and resurrection to be different to scientology's story of Xenu and the volcano?
Neither story can be disproven. Is one more likely to have happened than the other and why?
To me, they are both equally improbable.
If science panders to religious sensibilities, it risks finding itself limited by that pandering. The churches of the late 19th century would have been much happier if Darwin had kept his trap shut.
Even at the end of the twentieth century, the church was still trying to tell scientists what they could study. Stephen Hawking reports that a cosmology conference at the Vatican was addressed by John Paul II:
Should the assembled cosmologists have said, "Yes, your holiness" to avoid upsetting his sensibilities?
If there has been one consistent outcome of the investigation of the natural world by the scientific method, it's that gods have become less and less necessary to explain phenomena. They have been pushed into smaller and smaller gaps and I see no reason to expect that that will change. The smaller the gaps, the more desperate those that have a need to believe will become.
Posted by: Peter | November 19, 2006 10:01 PM
I like Max.
"All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter."
"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"
"Anybody who has been seriously engaged is scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.' It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with."
"We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future."
--Max Planck
Posted by: Bro. Bartleby | November 19, 2006 10:17 PM
Really? Please lay out your research proposal and who you are going to submit it to for funding, that won't laugh you out the door. It is not science that says it is ridiculous, it is some scientists who try to turn science into a philosophy who say it is almost certainly false.
Sorry, now you're making the positive claim that there is no other way of knowing and its you're burden. Billions of people report a personal experience of God. That's enough to make it one of Wilkins' "live questions".
Nonsense. I'm saying you have yet to show support for your contention that the material universe is all there is to the "world". (Astrology claims a natural cause, not a spiritual one, and is subject to empirical investigation anyway. You need a better example.)
So?
Posted by: John Pieret | November 19, 2006 10:23 PM
The above statement is simply a case of equivocation. The issue is exactly as PZ characterizes it. When religion makes supernatural claims about the physical world (not the ethical world), then religion is wandering into territory it has no business entering. The scientific revolution has long passed and sorry but religion lost badly.
Now if you want to relegate religion to the realm of ethics, that fine but let the philosophers defend that piece of real estate. Of course religion would have none of that; it has never been content to keep its supernatural fingers out of the physical world. It advocates an ontological position through and through and is not simply a "way of knowing," which is just an epistemological copout that postmodernists use when they're losing arguments.
Until we decide to go back to a Medieval world of superstition and doctrine, science has decidedly won the day in most everything we do in our everyday lives, even for the most devout fundamentalist. For the latter, it's probably the most outrageous example of biting the hand that feeds you.
Posted by: Buridan | November 19, 2006 10:26 PM
Let me suggest that we consider an analogous issue, which was used by Gould: beauty. Science cannot measure beauty, nor formulate rules on what is beautiful, etc., because no objective, measurable standard exists except in special contexts, e.g., the idea that standards for human beauty may have some relationship to reproductive potential. Note that this involves the correlation of two measurable variables and therefore can be addressed scientifically.
We get along quite well with this limitation, allow one person to decide the Sistine Chapel is beautiful, and someone else a grove of redwoods, and someone else a Van Gogh. Perhaps we ought to cut each other the same slack on the topic of personal belief. If it's not measurable, it's not science, so lighten up and enjoy the ride.
(This position does not imply ignorance of the crimes committed in the name of religion, an assertion that the lack of religion condemns one to antisocial behavior, sympathy for bigots, or any such. Sheathe your flamethrowers.)
Posted by: Frank Schmidt | November 19, 2006 10:27 PM
And the number fallacies that John Pieret has just committed is astounding. I hope that response was meant as a parody. Wow!
Posted by: Buridan | November 19, 2006 10:33 PM
And the number fallacies that John Pieret has just committed is astounding. I hope that response was meant as a parody. Wow!
That would be more convincing if you could come up with something better than "Wow".
Posted by: John Pieret | November 19, 2006 10:39 PM
John Pieret-
I believe PZ mentioned that Eugenie Scott is an atheist simply to correct John Wilkins' claim that she is a theist.
Posted by: Dave Carlson | November 19, 2006 10:42 PM
Billions of people report a personal experience of God.
Near-death experiences don't constitute evidence for God, nor do dreams, so I'm afraid that all such "personal experiences" are just exercises of human imagination rather than proof for the existence of God.
Posted by: David Wilford | November 19, 2006 10:45 PM
Of course science can formulate rules on what is beautiful. If it's the case that no objective standard defines 'beauty', then science can correctly conclude that the concept is an inherently subjective one.
More to the point, subjective criteria does not mean the nature of the conclusion is beyond objective study. Each person may have different criteria for a sense of beauty, but as we find the word 'beauty' to be useful to understanding, science can explore the regularities inherent to the experience.
Posted by: Caledonian | November 19, 2006 10:47 PM
Frank Schmidt, consider the standards of beauty for smell. Roses smell beautiful. Shit does not. That to my mind is quite objective.
Posted by: David Wilford | November 19, 2006 10:49 PM
John -
This is why PZ took pains to highlight two kinds of claims, e.g.:
1) "Angels exist in another reality completely cut off from our space and time" -- a nonscientific claim.
2) "Angels leave their rarified realm every so often to pay a visit to humans" -- a scientific claim.
The vexing thing about this whole argument is that the intellectual defenders of religion keep themselves to type-1 claims, which turn out to be devoid of real content, while Joe Theist has a head full of type-2 claims, which run afoul of science's stringent demands for evidence.
Posted by: Pete | November 19, 2006 10:49 PM
"Angels exist in another reality completely cut off from our space and time"
And as such are fictions, like so many hypothetical teakettles circling the sun.
Posted by: David Wilford | November 19, 2006 10:52 PM
Near-death experiences don't constitute evidence for God, nor do dreams, so I'm afraid that all such "personal experiences" are just exercises of human imagination rather than proof for the existence of God.
And your evidence for those assertions is?
This whole argument is about when you can say science has decided something and when you are making a philosophical/theological statement. At a minimum you have to have empiric evidence that logically bears on the actual question under consideration before you can even begin to call it "science".
Posted by: John Pieret | November 19, 2006 10:52 PM
And your evidence for those assertions is?
From Robert Todd Carroll's The Skeptic's Dictionary (skepdic.com):
According to Dr. Jansen, ketamine can reproduce all the main features of the NDE, including travel through a dark tunnel into the light, the feeling that one is dead, communing with God, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, strange noises, etc. This does not prove that there is no life after death, but it does prove that an NDE is not proof of an afterlife.
Posted by: David Wilford | November 19, 2006 10:57 PM
John, prove your positive. Show us your angels.
Posted by: Stogoe | November 19, 2006 10:57 PM
How? We might think the idea of Zeus existence is silly or unlikely. We might think that the woman is claiming that she was impregnated by Zeus in order to avoid saying that she was having premarital sex. At best, all science could do in this situation is do a DNA sample and perhaps test it against her boyfriend. It's our skeptical viewpoint about the existence of Zeus or about the woman's story, versus the plausibility of a normal, accidental pregnancy plus a lie might make us dismiss the story of Zeus. But, then, that's our viewpoint and our experience talking, not science.
In some ways, yes. The details of Xenu's story involves spaceships shaped like DC-10s (which hints at a made-up story), and the method of extermination (volcanos and hydrogen bombs) seems rather silly (the details are odd, I can think of other, better, more convenient ways to kill a race of aliens). But, it really doesn't matter. For the sake of argument, let's say that both are equally silly stories. What does that prove? Science doesn't really have much to say about either story. Our skeptical viewpoints and our other beliefs are what inform us that these stories are silly, and therefore, worth dismissal. But other people come to the table with other sets of background beliefs. And under those beliefs (which I think are erroneous all the way through), the idea of a virgin birth or resurrection aren't that hard to believe. What's so impossible about the idea that the world works according to laws most of the time, but that a deity could occasionally implant an egg in a woman or raise a body from the dead? There's really no scientific reason we can claim that deities *never* interact with the world. We can get some traction on religious claims that are ongoing (e.g. that God answers prayer), but one time events that are buried in the past may or may not leave traces of evidence that can be evaluated from a scientific position.
Posted by: BC | November 19, 2006 11:00 PM
We can get some traction on religious claims that are ongoing (e.g. that God answers prayer), but one time events that are buried in the past may or may not leave traces of evidence that can be evaluated from a scientific position.
That doesn't prevent us from concluding that the story of Noah's Ark is just that, a story.
Posted by: David Wilford | November 19, 2006 11:02 PM
"I don't believe in God, but neither do I think science can tell us anything about whether Jesus was born to a virgin or rose from the dead."
That's not quite true. We can look at how legends spread, the kind of contents that they tend to have, and so on. That's more psychology and sociology than biology, but it's science nonetheless.
"Claiming that the virgin birth and resurrection didn't happen because things don't normally work that way is going to sound stupid to everyone except one subsection of people who don't believe in the virgin birth or resurrection."
Agreed, and really, it sounds stupid because it is stupid. The obvious response to the complaint that the virgin birth "defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction" is "NO DUH, SHERLOCK! That's why they call the virgin birth a miracle. If it were supposed to have been a natural event, no one would have made a big whoop about it." If one wants to object that miracles are implausible, he or she should base it on the solid grounds that historically the evidence for them has been thin and more parsimoniously explained by human credulity.
To Natalie Angier's credit, she doesn't outright beg the question on miracles here, though one has to parse her words fairly carefully to notice that.
Posted by: J. J. Ramsey | November 19, 2006 11:05 PM
John Wilkins writes,
What I hear PZ saying is "I don't want anyone to put forth a nonscientific claim. People shouldn't be talking about such things. It rots their brains and is the cause of most if not all current and past tragedies."
I think at least part of the problem is that PZ has a rather all encompassing concept of science. It's not just a methodology for him, it's a way of life, a way of expressing oneself, a complete worldview, and the only way to approach any situation. Somewhere in all these posts in Pharyngula is PZ's implied solution to the demarcation problem. Explicitly stated, his solution is "it is all science, there isn't anything else."
Intuitively, it's a neat solution. It's clean, it's fits my sense of things. But it is a crap position to take in a serious debate. It's not supportable, it's not verifiable, it's not falsifiable. It's a lot like religious faith.
John again:
To which PZ replies in part (and a bit petulantly),
Just like there is no talking to YEC creationists about changing their views (because their views are so firmly held it is impossible for them to change), there's no talking to someone who holds an all encompassing "scientific" worldview with that same kind of impervious grip.
I'd be quite content just to see a tiny shift in the way people like PZ (and Caledonian) talk about these things. I'd like them to take a reasonable philosophical position rather than blathering on about "science this and science that" as if science itself was a well articulated philosophy. My suggestion is that they pick one of the forms of naturalism. Dennet, Leiter, and others even have a website http://www.naturalism.org/ to get you started. Maybe then you could articulate your worldview more coherently. As it is, seems like you are just playing the Zen master's game of "not this, not this."
Posted by: AndyS | November 19, 2006 11:08 PM
No, I don't think it is. But I already addressed that here and it's too late on a Sunday to rehash it.
So, when Joe Evolutionist makes bad arguments in favor of evolution (and they do, just go to talk.origins) creationists are justified in ignoring the good arguments and trumpeting their victories over the bad arguments?
Posted by: John Pieret | November 19, 2006 11:08 PM
John Pieret notes that "billions of people report a personal experience of God."
Those claims are not beyond critical investigation. Christians by tradition claim not just experience of their god, which might be a diffuse feeling meaning not much of anything, but a personal relationship with him. Strangely, though, when they want to know his thinking on something, instead of just asking, they turn to what other people have written about their relationship with the same god. Authors mostly unknown, writing in circumstances equally unknown.
There is something very odd about that. I have yet to hear a Christian write, "here are the words Jesus told me to write to you." Yes, of course, if they claimed to relay the words of an allegedly omniscient being, no doubt I would propose some tests of that claim. So perhaps it's -- um, prudent -- that they not claim that. But if their communion with their god is so sere that no information is communicated, then how much should we count their "personal experience"?
Posted by: Russell | November 19, 2006 11:12 PM
We ARE taking a reasonable position, a point which you have steadfastly refused to acknowledge. I don't know whether this is because you're cynically crafting a strawman or whether the very simple concept in question can't percolate through your remarkably dense skull, and at this point I don't really care.
Sturgeon's Law assures us that 90% of everything is crap. Most of the people who concern themselves with "philosophy" have no interest in applying the standards that rational thought requires, and as a result the field far exceeds the minimum guaranteed by Sturgeon's Law. The sophistic wankery burbled forth by so many has nothing to do with actual philosophy, which I doubt you could even recognize if you came across it.
Posted by: Caledonian | November 19, 2006 11:14 PM
Here's an example of a supernatural domain that is perfectly respectable among scientists (indeed, they are utterly dependent upon it): mathematics. Mathematical objects (pi, the set of prime numbers, etc) are not natural objects. Yet somehow we can think about them, and even stranger, they seem to have some sort of ordering influence on the natural world.
My own way of making sense of religion and spiritual concepts is to think of them in similar terms. Gods and souls definitely don't exist in the same way chairs and teapots do -- but that doesn't mean they might not be meaningful concepts.
More amateur theology here.
And yeah, this rarefied stuff may not have much to do with the volk-religions where God is just as real as your balding Uncle Frank. So what? Just because 99% of the religious are naive doesn't compel us to be the same.
Posted by: mtraven | November 19, 2006 11:23 PM
Wrong.
Thus we acknowledge that the concept of numbers is part of the natural world.
Posted by: Caledonian | November 19, 2006 11:27 PM
According to Dr. Jansen ...
And what is your scientific evidence that the presence of ketamine isn't the result of being near the radiation of the Pearly Gates or that it isn't the substance that God made sure was available in human bodies to enable the person to sense the afterlife?
It is only an assumption that finding a sufficient naturalistic explanation is evidence against a supernatural one, very like the creationist's "two model" argument. You're still missing the evidence.
Posted by: John Pieret | November 19, 2006 11:27 PM
What a breathtakingly stupid set of arguments. Aside from the fundamental logical errors, ketamine isn't a substance produced in dying people.
Posted by: Caledonian | November 19, 2006 11:32 PM
Here ya go John Pieret. Your fallacious statements are first quoted in block and then identified with their fallacy title and briefly explained.
Ad hominem (Argumentum ad hominem) A variation on the classical ad hominem but extended to the size of a group - a sort of reversal of the fallacy of appealing to popularity (see below).
Argument from Ignorance (Argumentum ad Ignorantium) Both of these statements are just variations on this fallacy, cleverly twisted to hide its own appeal to prove the negative. Sneaky but no cigar.
Appeal to Popularity (Argumentum ad Populum) Everyone is doing it so it must be worth looking into.
Does this suit your fancy John?
Posted by: Buridan | November 19, 2006 11:33 PM
Catshark and Wilkins:
I think scientists can say that taking Zeus literally is silly. But more importantly,
I think scientists can say that there is nothing to privilege the story of Zeus over
the story of Jesus over the story of the Angel Moroni over the story of the Flying
Spaghetti Monster. There are polite and politic ways to say it. But it can be an
important thing to say in a world where people start taking religious myths
literally.
That is not to say that religious myths aren't useful and important, when
they reinforce ethics. But if they claim to be, in some more literal sense,
"true," then scientists and other rational people can simply point out other
things with equally strong claims to existence.
As to whether "science" and its big bad ole reified anthropomorphised self can say anything on the subject, I'm less certain.
Catshark, you seem to be guilty of something that I'm certain there's a name
for, where you are lumping billions of different things into one category,
that is, saying that billions of people have experience of "god." Especially
when you consider that, not only are their experiences so varied as to
be contradictory (if you suggest their experience reflects some underlying,
unified reality, which is the only possible point in grouping them in one
category), but the people having these experiences make millions of their
own claims about reality, many of them logically inconsistent and ethically
questionable.
Sorry, it looks like the antihistamines have extended even my normally
excessive sentence length.
rich
Posted by: Rich Hammett | November 19, 2006 11:36 PM
And what is your scientific evidence that the presence of ketamine isn't the result of being near the radiation of the Pearly Gates or that it isn't the substance that God made sure was available in human bodies to enable the person to sense the afterlife?
Jansen's work didn't address that question, as was noted. It only disproved the claim that NDE's were somehow evidence for an afterlife.
As to radiation of the Pearly Gates, I don't know what what you're talking about, unless it's something to do with the "light at the end of the tunnel" experience that some who have and NDEs report, which has also been reported by those subjected to ketamine.
I suspect you're just making it all up, which is of course my point.
It is only an assumption that finding a sufficient naturalistic explanation is evidence against a supernatural one, very like the creationist's "two model" argument. You're still missing the evidence.
The evidence as far as NDEs are concerned is that they are a type of associative disorder brought on by oxygen deprivation in the brain. Certain psychoactive drugs like LSD, which are linked to experiences some claim to be religious, also causes associative disorder in the human brain. Such evidence shows that the human brain under certain conditions can malfunction and cause a person to perceive themselves to somehow be in another world.
Posted by: David Wilford | November 19, 2006 11:46 PM
This link may be of interest to those wondering about the definition of scientific thinking:
http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/~lward/Dewey/Dewey_1910a/Dewey_1910_k.html
(I just picked the book up, only to find the text is freely available online. Oh well, I like supporting Dover Books at least.)
Posted by: David Wilford | November 19, 2006 11:51 PM
And each one of a billion different versions most often the God they where raised to believe in, odd huh?
Eh, no one did until it was picked up by a large powerful body of humans.
Posted by: GH | November 20, 2006 12:02 AM
I sort of take the NO OPINION thing to mean that science does not make claims of non-existence based on non-proof. A lack of proof that God exists does not prove that God does not exist. While this may cause scientists to put God in the same category as the Easter Bunny, technically speaking, science does not claim there is no god.
Posted by: Michael Koppelman | November 20, 2006 12:13 AM
Because in a universe where natural laws only work most of the time, and they can be violated at any time by supernatural forces, there is no point in studying the universe.
What is the point in a meteorologist forecasting weather when it could all change at any time because somebody, somewhere is praying for it to change? Should all weather forecasts carry a warning that this might be tomorrow's weather unless god wills it otherwise? No doubt you could find people who would answer "yes".
If you get on an aircraft, do you consider that it might fall out of the sky because the natural laws that enable flight, discovered by science and applied by engineering, might suddenly be changed by divine fiat? Of course you don't.
As Richard Dawkins says, the presence or absence of a god/s fundamentally changes the nature of the universe, and since the study of the universe is the business of science, the question of the existence of god/s is a valid area of scientific enquiry.
Posted by: Peter | November 20, 2006 12:16 AM
Caledonian --
C'mon, saying a flat "Wrong" is not an argument, is not interesting, does not advance the conversation. Surely you can do better than that!
The nature of mathematical objects is controversial of course, there is a whole subfield of philosophy dedicated to it.
And, in case there is confusion, by saying mathematics is "supernatural", I do not mean to imply that there is anything magical about it, or that there is anything about it that violates natural law. You can throw out that word and use another if you like, but it's just
Posted by: mtraven | November 20, 2006 12:25 AM
"Because in a universe where natural laws only work most of the time, and they can be violated at any time by supernatural forces, there is no point in studying the universe."
I don't see how that follows. If interference is rare, you can still figure out how the universe operates normally. Planes may occasionally fall to supernatural terrorists, but they'll mostly fly.
If interference is common, then it is random, reasoned, or perverse. If it's random we can collect statistics with which to hedge our risks. If it's reasoned then we can infer the rules the gods go by -- the rules might involve intelligent input such as "when chanting the right formula by a person who's given enough alms in the past month" but they'd still be rules.
Perverse would be if the gods deliberately defy prediction and frustrate our plans, which I think moves into ongoing sadism.
Posted by: Damien | November 20, 2006 1:37 AM
mtraven,
What makes mathematical objects anymore "supernatural" than the text you're reading right now? Mathematics is only a contrived syntax, just like human language. If you are going to define "supernatural" in such a fashion you have rendered it vacuous.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | November 20, 2006 1:42 AM
And what is your scientific evidence that the presence of ketamine isn't the result of being near the radiation of the Pearly Gates or that it isn't the substance that God made sure was available in human bodies to enable the person to sense the afterlife?
Wow, good point.
I'm now awaiting supposedly "scientific" evidence that my penis is not 600 feet long and erect right now.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | November 20, 2006 1:45 AM
Sorry about the claim Genie is a theist. I thought I heard her say she went to a church when I met her and her family, but my memory isn't all it once was. I think. It may be, and I just don't remember.
As to Argumentum ad populam, I'm not arguing that the existence of God is live because forty million Frenchmen can't be wrong, but because in the cultural conversation, enough people discuss this topic that it is something worth debating. Personally, I don't think there's reason to accept there is any kind of deity. But as a matter of parity (and civility) I don't think there's reason to deny it either. If people want to believe in the existence or nonexistence of God, that's there concern, not mine. I will continue to treat them as if they were reasonable people anyway. The headline is: people are neither rational nor irrational simply in virtue of taking a stance. And it's foolish to think otherwise.
As I said before, if a claim is made for a God that entails an empirically testable state of affairs, then it is within the scope of science. Many such claims are. The existence of qi is well within the scope of science (it doesn't exist). The age of the earth defeats both fundamentalist Christian and Islamic creationism, and Hindu creationism. But what religions typically do is trim their doctrine to match the best current knowledge (or rather, the current knowledge of the youth of the present generation of theologians, which is usually about 30 years out of date), and personally I think that is a good thing. We shouldn't chide anyone for revising their belief system to match the evidence and the best (ceteris paribus) science.
On "supernatural"; it is defined as a negative set. It is anything that is not susceptible to empirical investigation that can be claimed as part of the "nature" of God or the divine. There is no general positive definition of it, and no way to investigate it. For those who think that nothing that cannot be investigated should be asserted to exist, the supernatural is nonexistent. But many people have epistemic standards that allow such things to be asserted. Cavil with them all you like - it gets down to "I say, you say". So far as I know, there is no independent way to specify what does and does not count as a proper epistemic standard outside the arena of empirical science, and possibly logic and mathematics (and the latter I think is conventional anyway).
On