Pharyngula

So, you have to be a philosopher or, better yet, a theologists to discuss the existence of God, but anyone (mathematicians, lawyers, philosophers, theologists) is allowed to discuss the evidence for evolution without any of these silly "they don't know what they're talking about" complaints? Actually, that's perfectly in line with many ID-type folk.

Also, I can conceive of the perfect cheeseburger, a cheeseburger in paradise, if you will. Now, this cheeseburger must clearly have both the properties of existence (since if it didn't, it wouldn't be perfect) and accessibility for me to eat (likewise). Somehow this argument doesn't get me a tasty meal.

Posted by: Randall | January 18, 2007 1:16 AM

Ontological argument (any form): God by definition exists. Therefore he exists.

It's so obviously a cheat. A teapot orbiting jupiter is by definition something that exists. Therefore there must be a teapot orbiting jupiter, right? Right? No.

Posted by: Aerik | January 18, 2007 1:30 AM

In the last biology textbook battle in Texas in the 20th century, it was Kenneth Miller who showed up at the last Texas State Board of Education hearing on the matter and dazzled the board with answers to each and every objection, and a tremendous lesson on evolution for the members. In 2003, it was the chemists, Andrew Ellington, and Stephen Weinberg who made the defense.

Physics may not be under the same assault, but Weinberg recognizes the threat. Between Weinberg's public testimony on the value of good science and especially evolution, and the behind-the-scenes pushing of the other Texas Nobelists, evolution in the textbooks was saved.

I don't think Weinberg is quite so sanguine as you might think, P.Z. In any case, this is another case where Ben Franklin's quip is appropriate: We must all hang together, or we shall all hang separately. Weinberg's public support of evolution against the barbarian threat was crucial and timely. He knows.

Posted by: Ed Darrell | January 18, 2007 1:55 AM

Who shaves the barber? That's easy, Occam's razor, which is why he looks like Darwin.

Posted by: Fernando Magyar | January 18, 2007 2:03 AM

The ontological argument sounds interesting but to me it seems to have more to do with the concept of universe, than with the inevitably anthropomorphous concept of god.

Pointing to the amateur level of dawkins is NOT like saying that only political scientists are justified in expressing views on politics. Is Weinberg silly enough to buy that?
All people can express their views on politics, but if you want to learn about politics, you go for a political scientist. And don't you whine.
Dawkins can express himself all he likes about anything. He has earned himself the amateur label because of silly statements, half-baked or frivolous arguments, "anecdotism" etc. All these people are saying is: we are not impressed, we have seen better. There is much better ways out there in defense of atheism, that is just a fact. Quite simply, someone must warn that Mr Dawkins is not precisely the state of the art for atheism ( or science, for that matter).

Posted by: Alexander Vargas | January 18, 2007 2:11 AM

Graham- AFAIK Dawkins has said multiple times he focuses on the Judeo-Christian God because it is the one he is the most familiar with, and its one that's the biggest thorn in our side. I think his arguments would apply to any deity. Disproving the one we're most familiar with seems a no-brainer.

Posted by: Abbie | January 18, 2007 2:48 AM

As far as Nagel's "amateur philosophy" comment goes, I think it's entirely fair. I talk about it here:

http://bajillion.blogspot.com/2007/01/dawkins-nagel-and-god-delusion.html

Nagel, as a philosopher himself, maybe blows some of the philosophy problems out of proportion, but Dawkins definitely dismisses ontological dualism as though he doesn't understand that there are versions of it that 1) are widely, though not unanimously, supported by professional philosophers and 2) have nothing to do with religion per se. He also throws out moral absolutism in a similarly sloppy manner. It's not that he's wrong, it's that he doesn't even seem aware of the very powerful arguments on the other side.

That said, it's a terrific book otherwise, and on the narrow questions of religion he does a pretty thorough job. The documentary's good, too.

Posted by: Paul | January 18, 2007 3:54 AM

The Barber is FEMALE

Oh, and its quite obvious that the religious apologists have never come across set theory - with the exception of John Barrow, but I don't think we want to go there, right now.

Posted by: G. Tingey | January 18, 2007 4:17 AM

In purely logical terms, the ontological argument can be refuted with one sentence. Existence is not a predicate.

Posted by: ChuckO | January 18, 2007 5:33 AM

I *cannot* conceive of something so great nothing greater can be conceived. As long as we're talking concepts, one can always conceive of something as great...and then add a pony. Call it the argumentum ex Belle Waring.

More broadly, this may just be my limited perception (argumentum ex Fafblog, come to think of it), but I find all these proofs in theism somehow unsatisfying. Intellectual empty calories. They all seem to end up being either circular or dependent on highly tendentious assumptions.

But so many serious people seem to accept, if not the arguments, then at least their status as Great Thoughts. Is this because I'm missing something, or is it pure scholasticism?

Posted by: Alex | January 18, 2007 6:11 AM

"

it is like saying that no one is entitled to judge the validity of astrology who cannot cast a horoscope.

There are three ways in which people "judge the validity of astrology" or any such subject.

1) Gut feeling that it is true or false.
2) Reliance on experts.
3) Actually reading the literature, seeing whether it makes sense or contains internal inconsistencies, logically incorrect statements, and assertions inconsistent with more supported fields of research.

In practice, lots of us only get to step 1. Certainly I haven't read any books about astrology. But there's a problem there -- while one's own "goofy meter" is often a good guide, there are lots of non-intuitive things like quantum mechanics which can seem goofy to those not educated on the subject.

That's why step 2 is better than step 1. Certainly, being a non-physicist, I rely on the testimony of physicists who say that as weird as it is, quantum mechanics does work.

But step 3 is really the only truly justified way to judge the validity of a subject. But it takes a lot of time and that's why most people only use step 1 or 2. But if I were going to write a book debunking astrology I *would* devote lots of time to reading astrological literature so I could find the internal inconsistencies and so forth in order to point them out in my book.

Similarly, debunking theology would be better served by reading theological literature and pointing out the flaws. Saying "well, the typical theist doesn't know much theology so it doesn't matter" doesn't really hold water. The populace might not know theology, but the existence of a whole academic field with a huge literature gives theists the notion that there is evidence out there for their beliefs even they themselves don't know it. Just asserting that theology is bullshit without any analysis of it is only going to convince people who *already* think it's bullshit.

Posted by: Jonathan Badger | January 18, 2007 6:34 AM

With regard to the "ontological argument", I will add that it has always- meaning, right back to the Greek pre-Socratics- been one of the chief occupational hazards of philosopers to imagine that they can establish the truth or falsity of contingent propositions (about the true, scientific methods for doing so they of course have no professional expertise whatever) by purely logical arguments (their specialty; when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail). This mental affliction should be met with pity, not with assignments for book reviews, not even in the likes of The New Republic.

Posted by: Steve LaBonne | January 18, 2007 7:14 AM

Whenever someone argues for the existence of a perfect being, I always reply "Of course a perfect being exists--the cockroach!" I have yet to see a good, objective definition of what are perfect traits, so why not define it as "Everything a cockroach has?" :P

Posted by: Baratos | January 18, 2007 8:01 AM

"Maybe we have a problem dressing down the Dalai Lama, but he, in his theology, is just as deluded as the Pope."

Not quite. As noted above, the Dalai Lama has said that if a tenet of Buddhism is contradicted empirically, then that tenet will have to change. (Supposedly, he himself changed a Tibetan tradition that the moon is a source of light, based on his own observations of the shadows on the face of the moon, via a telescope.)

Also, note that unlike Christianity, Buddhism doesn't involve some cosmic spook granting you forgiveness, watching over you, wiping away phantom sins He was kind enough to lay on you to begin with, or granting access to a divine afterlife. Nobody says "Buddha is my copilot" unless they're using it ironically to refer to the pot pipe in the ashtray.

The 'rewards' such as they are, in Buddhism, are attained through mental training (with instructions) and long effort. And for all the mystical talk about "Nirvana", as far as I can tell "Nirvana" is just a constant living state of taking the lemons life gives you and making lemonade. So to speak. In other words, Nirvana is not some mystical place, it's this world seen and experienced in a different way which removes suffering (really, emotional suffering, not physical suffering. But if you're physically hurt, it doesn't help to add needless emotional pain on top.)

Furthermore, the basic principle of Buddhism is cause-and-effect, which is not particularly mystical until you get into the hairy theories of how it transfers from one 'rebirth' (ie life) to the next. (Since the goal of Buddhism is to 'end' the cycle of rebirth, I see it as a metaphor for ending the series of mistakes or unwise behaviors that cause you suffering.) The core is that what you do now will have effects down the road, inherently, not because there's some mystical being arranging things. If you don't tighten the lid on the pickles, you may end up with a broken jar and a stinky mess if you later try to lift the jar by the lid. If you treat your coworkers badly, they won't be very helpful later when you need them. Cause and effect. Not mystical.

Tibetan Buddhism has a lot of mystical baggage loaded on from Hinduism and the native Bon religion, but at heart Buddhism has a lot less than, say, Catholicism. The main practices are meditation to increase concentration and to apply that concentration to examining the mind (ie, thoughts and mental processes). The effects of meditation are testable, and logically, a lot of time spent meditating should have effects just like a lot of time running, or playing piano.

Posted by: Jon H | January 18, 2007 8:30 AM

Nagel knows that, and he also knows that he's not as smart as Hume, who by rights ought to have succeeded in killing off the ontological argument once and for all. That's exactly why he has to resort to ad hominems in order to protect his irrational mysterian beliefs.

Posted by: Steve LaBonne | January 18, 2007 8:41 AM

The problem with "reductionism" is that the word has been used in so many different mutually incompatible senses. That's why I feel that as a slogan "anti-reductionism" has become pretty much meaningless, at least without a great deal of further amplification as to exactly what is meant- and that explanation would be better off on its own without the label attached. More commonly "anti-reductionism", as with Nagel, is basically a smoke screen for something that would sound less respectable if stated openly.

Posted by: Steve LaBonne | January 18, 2007 8:53 AM

Weinberg has a distinctive and certain voice, though I could as well accuse him of being too well-intentioned. He is a physicist that likes to take the philosophical arguments on, instead of dismissing them as the hammer and nail obsession to get to truth that has occupied philosophers and theologists for millenniums. Many physicists seems to treat philosophy like PZ treat religion, tolerance but no respect.

But in this case it is mostly his conclusion that we should not disrespect all religion equally I disagree with. As some commenters noted, it is mostly political, economical and perhaps cultural contingencies that makes the differences. I agree with that it may even be contraproductive to single out some.

Though I don't think that means that one should not point to the religion as a contributor when analyzing specific political trouble. Functionally, religions differ in what the believers are supposed to do.

Dawkins definitely dismisses ontological dualism as though he doesn't understand that there are versions of it that 1) are widely, though not unanimously, supported by professional philosophers and 2) have nothing to do with religion per se. He also throws out moral absolutism in a similarly sloppy manner.

It is probably due to Dawkins background as a scientist - dualisms and moral arguments aren't adequate when they meet reality. For example, physicists has made platonism a monism, neuroscientists doesn't necessarily need qualia, and decoherence has put any remaining measurement problem outside the mind. With that in mind philosophic discussions seems less profitable here. I suspect Dawkins didn't want to waste too much time on it after a rough analysis showing that it is precisely a waste of time.

Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | January 18, 2007 9:54 AM

Jonathan Badger...

Phil Plait debunks astrology pretty effectively his book 'Bad Astronomy' without the need to debate the minutiae of the astrologer's art. It is dismissed on the basis of its own improbability - that our lives and personalities cannot be governed by the position of distant planets and phenomenally distant stars.

Theology is all about achieving internal consistency for organised religions. But, as others have pointed out, the internal consistency of a religious system is not evidence of its material validity. I'd guess that most religions that have flourished and faded during human history have been internally consistent, but we still dismiss them as constructs of the human imagination.

Wouldn't better evidence for the truth of a religion be its external consistency? E.g., miracles, divine interventions, and so on - something indisputably and unequivocally 'supernatural'.

Posted by: Tycho the Dog | January 18, 2007 9:55 AM

Maybe we have a problem dressing down the Dalai Lama, but he, in his theology, is just as deluded as the Pope. Posted by: John Graham

To the other defenses offered I'd add that Buddhism explicitly disallows the idea of a god or of souls, since either would have to be permanent, unchangeable, eternal things -- and Buddhism refutes the possibility of such things based on the observable fact that nothing is permanent, everything changes, and therefore the idea of "eternal" is nonsense.

Jon H went into some of the mechanics behind the philosophical explorations of the religion/philosophy. I tend to concur that Buddhism is heavily burdened by indigenous religion -- in Japan it took on a Shinto flavor, in China it took on a Taoist cant; and in the Indus River Valley it smacks distinctly of Hinduism.

I'd differ with his analysis in one respect, though; Buddhism isn't really about ending suffering -- it's about ending attachment, which is the cause of suffering. (Attachment is the beginning and ending of the concept of "sin" in Buddhism.)

As for the "rebirth" element -- that was actually probably quite heretical at the time Siddhartha Gautama was teaching it 2500 years ago. Imagine Hindus being told that reincarnation (not rebirth) was actually impossible, and that "maya" was a false principle -- there really was suffering going on, which meant by extension that the world must be, in some fundamental way, real.

The idea of rebirth is a bit like a candle flame being passed from one wick to the next, and then the first candle being extinguished, with a sort of nebulous energy of some kind being passed along, but certainly not a soul -- IOW, it's mystical, feel-good hooey that doesn't actually have to be believed in order for the philosophical aspects of Buddhism -- or the principal practice, sitting meditation -- to be used and explored.

On the other hand, of course, the Dalai Lama does call himself the fifteenth incarnation of some holy muckamuck or other, though whether he actually believes it in his heart of hearts is a very different matter.

Posted by: Warren | January 18, 2007 10:26 AM

The link to Godel's proof is illuminating-- one very nice thing about logic is that you really need to put all the ingredients on the table before a proof will go through. There are a lot of strong (and strange) assumptions there, in rather intimidating formal guise. Def 2 is very peculiar: I read it as claiming that phi is or expresses the essence(?) of x if and only if every property of x is fixed by its being phi... Df. 3 and Ax 5 tell us that there is a property, E, such that x has it if and only if every property phi that expresses an essence of x is such that there necessarily exists some x that has phi, and that this strange property E is a perfection. There's more, of course, but the point is clear already-- it takes a lot of deep, dark metaphysical assumptions to prove God's existence. Duh!

Posted by: Bryson Brown | January 18, 2007 10:34 AM

Phil Plait debunks astrology pretty effectively his book 'Bad Astronomy' without the need to debate the minutiae of the astrologer's art. It is dismissed on the basis of its own improbability - that our lives and personalities cannot be governed by the position of distant planets and phenomenally distant stars.

Haven't read the book, but that doesn't seem like a very good argument. It's just the "argument from incredulity" as Dawkins calls it, or the "goofy meter" as I did. Sometimes that argument leads to correct conclusions, as when it causes people to reject astrology and other newage woo, but it can just as well be wrong as when it causes people to reject quantum mechanics or evolution.

But, as others have pointed out, the internal consistency of a religious system is not evidence of its material validity. I'd guess that most religions that have flourished and faded during human history have been internally consistent, but we still dismiss them as constructs of the human imagination.

But they *aren't* internally consistent -- certainly Judaism/Christianity aren't, at least. That's the major reason for rejecting them.

Wouldn't better evidence for the truth of a religion be its external consistency? E.g., miracles, divine interventions, and so on - something indisputably and unequivocally 'supernatural'.

Well, I was raised Episcopalian, and like in most liberal forms of theism there was very little in the way of faith healing or other "miracles" or "intervention" (at least in the present day -- they were a bit vague as to whether Jesus actually had superpowers back in the day). Pretty much the only supernatural element was the afterlife -- conveniently outside experimental verification. But realizing that even the theological explanations for the afterlife weren't internally consistent was probably the start of my path to atheism.

Posted by: Jonathan Badger | January 18, 2007 10:50 AM

A good friend of mine (who has a PhD in Psychology), said that she believes in God because we have concepts of good and evil. And the only way we could have the concepts of good and evil is if there exists in the universe a thing of total good and a thing of total evil. She calls the total good "God" and the total evil "the Devil".

I was stunned because the argument was utter nonsense. I couldn't figure out how she bought this premise that all human concepts had to have physical manifestations in order to exist in the human mind? Does this mean there is a being of total angst? one of total shame? one of total silliness?

There are smart people, such as my friend, want desperately to fit in to mainstream society and therefore know they have to be theists. They just look for more philosophical-sounding explanations to justify their irrational beliefs.

Posted by: Sonja | January 18, 2007 11:24 AM

Dawkins can express himself all he likes about anything. He has earned himself the amateur label because of silly statements, half-baked or frivolous arguments,

Puh-leez Vargas. His arguments go to the core. His detractors never actually rebut him but say he doesn't address this or that which of course would take him 1000's of years to rebut each silly point in 1000's of religions.

He just goes to the underlying premises.

Posted by: GH | January 18, 2007 11:40 AM

Haven't read the book, but that doesn't seem like a very good argument. It's just the "argument from incredulity" as Dawkins calls it, or the "goofy meter" as I did.

I have only read the debunking of astrology on his web site (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/astrology.html), but that argument wasn't an argument from incredulity. He first discussed the fundamental forces and explained why none of them can be reconciled to the claims of astrology. Then he supposes that some as-yet unknown force is responsible, and explains why that can't be. Then he supposes that it works anyway, and demonstrates that the claims are too vague, contradictory, and frequently innacurate to be valid. Finally, he provides links to a survey paper that summarizes the results of most (all?) then-extant results of research into astrology and concludes that astrologers' predictions are no more accurate than chance.

It was far more than a simple argument that he didn't understand how it could work, so it couldn't work (:

Posted by: Beren | January 18, 2007 12:32 PM

You know, it's precisely because of silliness like Anselm's argument that I can't take people criticizing "amateur philosophers" seriously.

The "ontological proof" of St Anselm asks us first to agree that it is possible to conceive of something than which nothing greater can be conceived. Once that agreement is obtained, the sly philosopher points out that the thing conceived of must exist, since if it did not then something just like it that actually exists would thereby be greater.

I can conceive of something that sucks harder than all of the things that suck. The thing I have conceived of must exist, since if it did not, there would be something like it that actually exists and would therefore suck even worse.

I can conceive of something which is even MORE ROCKING than Ted Nugent. (I know - hard to believe. But stick with me.) If I can conceive of something which rocks even harder than Ted Nugent, then it certainly must exist, because its existence would rock even harder than its nonexistence.

Of course, the latter formulation is easily disproved through the simple observation that nothing rocks harder than Ted Nugent. End of discussion.

Posted by: Sammy | January 18, 2007 12:57 PM

Poke:

As I recall, Plantinga's modal ontological argument just rephrases it all in terms of non-actual worlds and the one with God must be actual for it to be God, blah blah.

Some notation: lower-case letters are propositions. L is the necessity operator; Lp is read as "it is necessary that p." M is the possibility operator. > is the material conditional, ^ is a conjunction. Now let's take g to be the proposition "God exists." The formula (L(g>Lg)^Mg)>g should thus be read as follows: If God's existence strictly implies that God necessarily exists and God possibly exists, God exists.

Most people want to say that logical truths are necessary and hence are the same in any possible world. If you say that, then you're probably committed to taking the modal logic S5 to be the 'right' modal logic. And S5 includes the K and B axioms. There are a whole bunch of modal logics that don't include these axioms, but they're all too weak to adequately represent logical necessity properly. So most people want S5 to be the logic of logical necessity.

But (L(g>Lg)^Mg)>g is a theorem of S5, and so anyone who likes S5 is committed to the truth of that formula. However, since it's a conditional, you don't need to buy the claim that God exists unless you're convinced of the truth of the antecedent (namely, L(g>Lg)^Mg). The antecedent says that: God's existence strictly implies that God necessarily exists and God possibly exists.

For my money, the weak part of this claim is the second conjunct.

Posted by: DEQ | January 18, 2007 1:22 PM

I have only read the debunking of astrology on his web site (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/astrology.html), but that argument wasn't an argument from incredulity.

Looking at that article, I agree that it isn't an argument from incredulity. Instead he *does* consider the problems of the internal consistency of astrology and *has* investigated what the astrologers say before rejecting it. Rejecting something as bullshit *after* one has read about it is perfectly justified. But that wasn't how Plait's argument was explained in the posting I was responding to.

Posted by: Jonathan Badger | January 18, 2007 1:40 PM

So it was up temporarily? Strange.

There's plenty of others disagreeing with him... he just must not like me.

Posted by: Abbie | January 18, 2007 1:43 PM

Abbie:

There's a comment of yours that's still up...
It's not objectionable... certainly doesn't warrant a ban

Posted by: ano | January 18, 2007 1:47 PM

grigory:

you have shown yourself to be little more than an annoying troll of a (as you said yourself) "high school student" who was making claims that Godel's argument was clearly wrong but refused to back it up with substance beyond "Take a course in logic. I'm not in the business of explaining people's blog posts to them." You are not being banned, just being held until you actually say something sensible that pertains to the discussion at hand.

abbie:

which comment are you saying I banned you for? In which thread? Your name does not ring a bell ... and I don't ban people because they disagree with me.

Posted by: John Lynch | January 18, 2007 1:54 PM

Abbie:

The only comment I have received from you is this one and it is obviously still online. If you made another one, I haven't seen it (and it's not in the spamtrap or moderation list).

Posted by: John Lynch | January 18, 2007 2:04 PM

I've never been that impressed with S5 as a logic for metaphysical necessity-- the existence of God, in particular, might be held to be such an important metaphysical fact about a world that, from the point of view of such a world, no world where God does not exist would be possible. In that sort of case, the worlds where God exists will be worlds where God's existence is necessary, but there will be plenty of worlds (like ours) where God does not exist. For some such worlds, worlds where God does exist may be possible, so we could have a world where God's existence is possible but not actual or necessary. The key, of course, is that modal accessibility be asymmetrical in some allowed frames...

Posted by: Bryson Brown | January 18, 2007 2:09 PM

If Anselm's argument proves anything, it's that God is the product of human imagination.

Posted by: Kseniya | January 18, 2007 2:33 PM

From the review: "As for the New Testament, he quotes with approval the opinion of Thomas Jefferson, that "The Christian God is a being of a terrific character - cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust"."

It's fine that Weinberg finds much to agree with Dawkins on, but he should be more careful about believing Dawkins' quotations to be accurate. Jefferson actually said these words about the God of Jews, while stressing how the Christian God is different from this picture. Here's the complete letter. Search for the word 'cruel' to find the context.

So, which is it? Has Weinberg misunderstood Dawkins' words, or has Dawkins engaged in selective misquotation, as he had done with other authors before? Can anyone verify?

Posted by: Anatoly | January 18, 2007 2:56 PM