The "angry atheist" debate has broken out again, like a fire that smolders on until it finds new fuel. I am moved to make a few points, which are worth all you paid for them.
1. There is an assumption that reasonable people can only come to one conclusion. To theists this is theism of some kind. To atheists this is atheism. It presumes that people who are reasonable in one domain (say, science) are reasonable in all. But I know atheists who are libertarians, and a more irrational faith in rights I haven't found, and I know theists who are absolutely in line with all the social, scientific and moral programs that many atheists hold to be typical of their view, except the one that states that belief in anything that one cannot find empirical evidence for is irrational.
And is it true that all atheists have only empirical beliefs, like David Hume's famous comment at the end of the Inquiry?
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
I think this is a gross exaggeration. All individuals have unramified beliefs of some kind. That is, everyone has beliefs that are incoherent or inconsistent with other beliefs they hold. Having a belief set is not a static thing, like a laundry list, but a dynamic thing, like an argument, and whether or not these beliefs are ever brought under challenge is a matter of contingent experience. Maybe the atheist believes in mirror neurons, and has not yet been presented with problems in that belief. Maybe the theist believes that God is consistent with all science and liberal social views. To test each belief individually would take a lifetime, so the "rational" thing for limited thinkers to do is let each set of beliefs stand until they are challenged and tested by fire. After all, if those around them hold these beliefs and are not yet dead, the beliefs must have some prima facie validity.
This view of rationality is called bounded rationality and it relies on a number of heuristic rules, one of which is "believe what those around you do unless the belief is shown to be wrong by one or another of the other heuristics". And of course direct experience is a form of heuristic. But the likelihood of a belief being rejected is in inverse proportion to the depth and weight of the belief. A weighty belief that is deeply embedded in the belief web of an individual is the last to go under challenge. Since people often hold their religious faith deeply, it being embedded early in conceptual development, if people are to engage in the modern world as sensibly as they can while holding that belief, they must find an accommodation with scientific beliefs that are well founded on experience and pragmatic grounds (like making TVs and the Interwub possible).
So I believe
2. That we should be tolerant of other people's beliefs even if we think they are being inconsistent across their belief set, for two reasons:
2.1 because we all have inconsistent belief sets, atheists included, and
2.2 because the crucial project is to get good science accepted more widely in the population, so that a threshold is reached that makes science the "default view" and puts the onus on those who would reject it, rather than the other way around.
Toleration of other people's views doesn't extend to what many think is appeasement, however. When religion (or politics, or fashion, or bad philosophy) gets toxic, then it should be called to account. But it should not be "framed" that all religion is accountable for the sins of the few, nor is it the case that only antireligionists are able to make that call. Religious thinkers and leaders themselves often attack the toxicity of the extremists, even if they are blind to their own toxic views, just as atheists are. Everyone has toxic views, and everyone should be held accountable by those who see the toxicity.
One point I fully concur with the "angry atheists" about: there is no case for religious exceptionalism. We should not tread lightly because it's religion in our criticisms. There's nothing about religion that makes it less criticisable than other forms of public belief such as politics or ethics. It is, after all, a human activity, whatever else its adherents may think it is. But this likewise applies, tu quoque, to atheisms and humanisms and so on. If we assume that we are all errant on occasions, all human activities are equally to be critiqued.
But tolerance is a crucial facet of a civil society, as many wars have taught us. If a lab assistant is a muslim, you may think that irrational, as irrational as supporting the wrong football team, but so long as she does good science and fails to launch a Jihad on infidel lab assistants, welcome her, don't attack her.
Some have asked me if I have evidence that attacking religion wholesale is a bad strategy for communicating science. I only have anecdotal evidence on the basis of comments made to me over the past 30 years by theists who accept the modernity of science. There are a lot of them, but I don't have a statistical valid sample. But I think that it is a bad strategy to isolate those who may accept what does matter - science and the results of science - even if they fail to accept your own personal ideological commitments. If you think that is not the Greater Good, or that all religion is equally toxic, well then I have really nothing more to say to you than "is not". I hope you tolerate this. I'd hate to be the next one attacked.
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I think reason is such a hopeful claim that people will cling to it beyond any sort of rationality claim. Back when the talk-radio conservative thing was becoming all the rage, with Limbaugh and his clones trying to out-conservative each other they loudly proclaimed for all the land that their positions were based on Reason and Reason alone; liberals had only emotion.
But they quickly veered off into Patriotism (nationalism), duty, doing what's right, choosing one's actions based on Moral Absolutes (as if people have the capacity to determine whatever they may be from the ever-so-slippery Holy Texts.)
I call myself an atheist while allowing for the slim chance, the very slight chance that evidence which is undeniable will change my mind, perhaps not far from your own position. Our differences are in labeling, I would say.
But yes, as animals we don't have the capacity to act and think with pure rationality. And I do think that many of my atheists can be too comfy in their superiority, it's an irritating habit of our species. Of course, my position is superior because I recognize my humility.
As for libertarianism, I think it is an adolescent fantasy of how it would be like to live in a ruralist society; a very simple society in which the consumers would have access to the facts of their choices and the ability to weigh pro's and con's of all that is out their on the marketplace. It doesn't make allowance for the increasing complexity of our real world.
But what really rankles me is the attacks from other atheists that our noisiness is making it more difficult for everyone else. And I think that any religious person who also has a good grasp on science should be mature enough to be able to hold out for their beliefs in discussions when it comes to religion. For Nisbet to make the claim that famous scientists shouldn't discuss their atheism in the open for fear of driving away those who would otherwise be allies in the war against denialism is patronizing, not just to atheists but those same "moderates." Their adults. Some of them may be (ugh) Packers fans and some Vikings fans (or the Footy equivalent rivalry.)
I have found that my religious friends respect my opinion more that I hold them and explain them rather than use them as a shield against discussion. And I needn't waver in order to ameliorate enmity, either.
Hear hear! I'm a little tired of this meme for treating atheism as the shibboleth for rationality. As a case in point, there was a recent letter to the Canadian Humanist news spouting the whole vaccines-don't-prevent-disease and-they-cause-autism spiel, right down to defending the Geiers and their work. So who, in any practical sense, is more dangerous: an atheist who swallows the anti-vaxxer line (likely because it plays into their personal sense of being counter-cultural), or a doctor who relies on the current recommended practices re vaccination -- and happens to go to church and pray on Sunday?
Oh, right: the doctor, however moderate himself, is enabling the extremists. Sam Harris says so.
I think, with religions declaring wars on each other and on atheism, that we have perhaps gone too far in defending ourselves... that at times we have sunk in the same quagmire of anger that the religious have.
I know at times I'm as guilty as anyone of religion bashing, but I also find myself respecting those who adhere to their beliefs and cultural values so long as it doesn't interfere with their ability to be rational. I know plenty of Christians who feel no need to "prove" the existence of God, and who can accept science and reason while still holding onto certain religious beliefs. Since religion and knowledge don't serve the same function in our lives, I would be forced to admit that there are those who are quite comfortable living with whatever contradictions may arise.
The problem is that some atheists have lost the realization that the battle here is fought by EXTREMISTS and not mainstream religious adherents. At times like these I wonder how many of them have kids who believe in Santa Claus, and whether they would say that such pleasant myths are harmful to children and that one must be "rational" 100% of the time.
In this war between faith and reason, I wonder if we aren't shooting innocent civilians.
It's interesting, I happen to hold the view that religion is, in and of itself, immoral. It is immoral because it proclaims itself - loudly, if I may add without coming across in too confrontational a manner - as a bastion for moral living, yet if you scratch the surface of any religion at all, you find at its heart an Appeal from Authority, a logical fallacy. Worse still, are those religions that have as one of their edicts that 'The ends do not justify the means.'
How is it possible to keep a rational discussion concerning anything but the most trivial matters with anyone who's moral code derives explicitly from irrationality? How do you argue with someone who thinks god told them that gay people are bad? How do you convince someone that it's necessary that women have reproductive freedom, even if the consequences can be gruesome when their pastor tells them that Jesus himself has said otherwise? How do you prevent someone from strapping a bomb to his chest when he's absolutely convinced that his deity wants him to?
When you base your morality on a logical fallacy, literally anything is possible. Appeal from Authority arguments automagically divest you of any personal responsibility for your actions. When your holy book tells you that it's perfectly OK to harm the infidel, you are doing a moral GOOD by doing so and no rational or reasonable argument is going to convince you otherwise.
You might say, "But some, even most, religions are relatively harmless," and you'd be correct. They are. Most mainstream religions ARE harmless, but this is purely an accident of history and opportunity. Most of mainstream Christianity is harmless, but it wasn't always so. Only a few hundred years ago, it was a hotbed of intolerance, evil, spite and corruption. Think of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the granting of indulgences, &ct. Can you honestly predict with any certainty that Christianity will be just as harmless as it is now in 500 years? In 100? You can't. And the reason is that religion itself allows people to justify their actions as 'good' based on irrationality.
The type of thinking that allows people to come to these scary conclusions IS harmful, it IS bad, and it IS morally wrong for those of us who know better to stand by and let people either fall for it or get away with it if they already know better. The solution is simple, it's education.
What Dawkins & Hitchens are doing is a technique called 'rallying the base'. It is a process that absolutely must occur before any social change can happen. You can argue technique all you want, but non-theists of all stripes absolutely need people like Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett and Richard and Chris and Hector Avalos to stand up at the forefront so that the more moderate people have some room to be themselves. The Civil Rights movement has never gotten everything it's major players wanted, neither has the Women's Rights movement. The same is true for the Gay Rights, Animal Rights and even Environmental movements, but they've ALL gained much needed respect, tolerance and social standing because of the brave actions of a few that people throughout history will consider 'radicals'.
2.3 If you perpetually go around with the look that Dawkins wears on his face in his latest show, someone is likely to try to give you an emergency enema.
Very nicely done, John.
Roger, if you deny that moral value comes from God, as I do, then you are left with the following problem: whence comes value. For my money, it comes from social tradition, and so any appeal to moral values relies on an appeal to the authority of tradition. So it's another tu quoque.
Appeal to authority is not, in itself, a fallacy. The fallacy lies in the inappropriate appeal to authority (I can dig up the authoritative logical texts discussing this, if you like :-) ). The problem with religious morality is that it appeals to an inappropriate authority for non-believers. It is not fallacious for them to appeal to their own authorities, but it is to insist that we who do not share that tradition must agree with them.
I agree that Dawkins, Dennett (whose book is not really part of this angry atheist movement), Harris and others are both entitled to make their point, and that they should - a pluralistic society is better for free discussion. What is more, they are entitled to aggressively promote their views for the same reason (again, there's no case for religious exceptionalism here). But they must be tolerant of those they disagree with, short of the harm principle, for that is as far as their warrant goes.
As to the future of religious behaviour, may I point out that since religion is a human activity, what is true of that is true of all human activities. We do not know if atheism itself will degenerate into an authoritarian monstrosity in 100 years. We do not know if democracy will persist. We can only act on what is happening now.
Mike, I am not attacking atheists for making their case, but I am trying to convince them that this need not involve demonising all religious believers, as some seem to want to do. I find it unnecessary and offensive when they do. Make the case, and argue for it, but be civilised.
"There is an assumption that reasonable people can only come to one conclusion. To theists this is theism of some kind. To atheists this is atheism."
To IPU believers this is the IPU. Are all these really equivalent? Your heuristic of bounded rationalility cannot help here. If it is simply a pragmatic matter of tolerance then we are stuck with radical relativism, if somehow "good science" is different, you need need to make a serious argument why that is so... assertion will not cut it.
"Mike, I am not attacking atheists for making their case, but I am trying to convince them that this need not involve demonising all religious believers, as some seem to want to do. I find it unnecessary and offensive when they do. Make the case, and argue for it, but be civilised.
Posted by: John Wilkins "
AMEN to that (ha ha). I drew some angry comments over at Pharyngula today for stating this, albeit less elegantly. It is entirely possible to support rational thought without insulting religious people. And whether those religious people are insulting me does not matter - I don't set my behavior standards according to what other people do, its a matter of maintaining civility/dignity. That said, I do at times get very angry that fundamentalist christians are using government to force their views on me. But I can separate that anger at their movement from how I behave in interacting with them.
John, there is much to agree with in your post and comment, but I don't understand what the great concern is about any of the so-called New Atheists. I don't see any of them being intolerant if that is supposed to be more than just arguing in a robust way in their books, and, as you say, promoting their views aggressively. I keep thinking, as I participate in these debates, that there's some bit of secret code that I'm not being told about. What, exactly, is it that Dawkins and the others are accused of doing, beyond what you consider legitimate? Or is it really someone else who is not being named? I'm getting more and more puzzled, especially with Shermer's "open letter", which looks to me like silly grandstanding.
This is in response to arguments made by Jason (in the link), PZ Myers, and Larry Moran in various forums. Dawkins does seem to imply, if not state outright, that all religion is an unmitigated evil. I think he's overreaching and demonising humanity in general. I have no time for that approach.
It's all dependent on context. In a crowded community, being a strict libertarian is irrational. If you live in the outback, maybe not.
Nice set of straw men there, John.
The atheist side isn't arguing for intolerance at all -- I don't know of anyone who is saying you shouldn't elect religious people to high office, for instance, let alone calling for executions and book burnings.
Nor has anyone claimed that adoption of atheism leads to universal rationality. When we say that religion is irrational nonsense, that claim is based on the goofy content of religion; it is not a rebuttal of that argument to point out that some atheists are Libertarians or anti-vax quacks. Atheists subject one thing to that test "by fire" you propose, see it shriveled to ash, and are ready to move on...except for the hordes that demand we bow to their demolished relics.
And I'd like to know exactly how we're supposed to get people to embrace good science when we're sending mixed messages -- it's OK for you to believe in utter nonsense if you really want to, and here, these claims are set aside, and are not to be inspected and criticized because it might make baby Jesus cry. The core of scientific thought is constant criticism and evaluation and testing of ideas, something religion demands that we suspend. I would hope that a philosopher would recognize that there is a substantial difference in the scientific way of thinking; you seem to have confused getting people to embrace the outcomes of science, vaccines and stem-cell treatments and catalytic converters and fossils, with getting people to actually understand and embrace core principles of scientific thought.
John Wilkins: "To test each belief individually would take a lifetime, so the "rational" thing for limited thinkers to do is let each set of beliefs stand until they are challenged and tested by fire. After all, if those around them hold these beliefs and are not yet dead, the beliefs must have some prima facie validity."
You're right, there are a lot of not-necessarily-verified beliefs out there, so because of that, how is it most rational to assume they are ALL potentially valid? Since there are so many, wouldn't it be more rational to assume that they are all invalid until proven valid? Especially since neither critical thinking, nor peer review, etc. are required to hold any kind of belief? If my friend Carl told me an invisible dragon lived in his garage...
(Now, maybe you are you simply stating that that IS the way most people operate, rather than this is the way most people SHOULD operate... in that case, I may agree.)
Is a person who seems otherwise rational, but believes that alien greys abduct people and whisk them away to their secret base in the Hollow Earth, rational?
It only takes one violation of the defining criteria to be excluded from a category.
As for this 'assumption' that reasonable people can only come to one conclusion - it's not an assumption. Given the same data, reason produces the same results, no matter who's applying it. As long as everyone involved is sharing the data they're using to reach their conclusions, as good faith argumentation requires, reasonable people will agree.
The 'secret', of course, is that most people aren't reasonable.
I'd love to see the justification for this universal claim, by the way.
One of the problems with using a term like "rational" is that it sounds normative. But you'll note that I used scare quotes. Rationality of the bounded kind is not normative, it is inescapable due to the cognitive limitations we as humans have. In short, it's what we do.
So "rationality" here is rather more like economic necessity - we can't afford to spend unlimited amounts of our funds trying to locate the ideally optimal solution; we must budget. It is a matter of rational bets rather than rational purchase.
There is critical review for some of our beliefs at one time or another, but not for all beliefs, and not all at once. If your friend thinks he has the dragon, obviously that will be tested by you and the corpus of common knowledge (although it may have been rather different in, say, the 9th century), which is itself the outcome of a large number of limited heuristics over many years. But if he thinks there is a deity, that belief may not ever be strenuously tested, even if he has otherwise quite scientific beliefs. Atheists who argue (and I've been known to do a fair bit of it myself) with theists try to stress test those beliefs from time to time, but given how entrenched they are in many born theists (here I disagree with Dawkins - of course people are born to religions; it's highly heritable, more so than many genetic traits) such tests have little effect on most. If it has effects at all, it does so in those whose theistic belief set is less entrenched.
"Validity" in this case is not like logical validity (or properly soundness), but more like consonance with the rest of their beliefs. And in the absence of some belief-independent way to tell what is right or wrong (epistemic transcendence) everyone is in the same boat. Epistemology is fallibilist.
Paul, I do not think this is a strawman at all. If everyone has irrational (in the traditional meaning) beliefs, then there is no mixed message, but accusing theists alone of being irrational is special pleading. We all are. So we should (and here is my normative claim) accept this, and accommodate so far as we can their views. I think we should all argue for what we think, but let's face it, there is as much demonising ordinary theists by ordinary atheists as there is the other direction (excluding the extremists).
Of course it's a strawman!
Even if we accept your claim that everyone has irrational beliefs (which is something I doubt very much you can back up), the issue isn't the nature of the beliefs, but our claims about the validity of belief.
Scientists claim that a belief cannot be validly held unless it has been rigorously tested against observation and evidence. Religious apologists hold that at least some beliefs can be considered valid without meeting the standards imposed by rationality.
If we substitute another irrational belief for theism, it is patently obvious that proclaim that treating that belief as valid is incompatible with science. Can a person be said to be supportive of science if they espouse N-rays? Or HIV-AIDS denial? Or a Flat Earth? Of course not!
Yet you seem to be very unwilling to acknowledge that you can't believe in a deity and be supportive of science at the same time, either. The evidence - and in some cases, basic logic - is totally incompatible with such a position.
Sam Harris says so.
I forgot to mention: Sam Harris, who believes in reincarnation, says so.
That was easy.
You seem unwilling to acknowledge the depth to which humans can be inconsistent. Look at the statistics of the number of scientists that are atheists. Notice that it is not 100%. Unless you are willing to claim that all of the non-atheist scientists are not only not doing science but are failing to support science, then it is obvious that it is possible to believe in god and support science.
You are correct that it is not very consistent. That does not preclude it from happening or even from being common. Humans are amazing animals like that; we can defy logic itself.
1) That's not an irrational belief.
2) Even if we disregard point #1, at most you've just demonstrated that *I* have an irrational belief, when what you had to do was show that *everyone* does.
3) Point #2 demonstrates that either you're being sarcastic for no particular reason in a way that weakens support for your espoused position, which seems unlikely, or you definitely have an irrational belief of your own.
Perhaps you would care to explain how it is that, logically, that one can support science while claiming justified belief in a deity.
That is precisely what I'm claiming. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge the inconsistency is not a scientist.
Of course, most 'scientists' are actually just technicians, but that's another argument for another day.
You can't believe in alien grays and support science. You can't espouse N-rays and support science. You can't believe in deities and support science. It's that simple.
I happily concede that we all have irrationalities and unfounded beliefs. What I reject is this claim that we say theists alone are irrational -- I certainly don't -- or that because everyone has wrong ideas we must therefore accommodate them. Not so. We must argue strongly to demolish false beliefs, whether they're held by atheists or theists. It's just that religion is a major problem in the world today, and libertarian atheists...not so much.It's also not a matter of demonising ordinary theists. It's a matter of rightly pointing out that their silly ideas are symptomatic of a deeper problem, and the fact that they own a nice car and hold down a good job and are kind to puppies does NOT excuse their bad ideas from criticism.
It depends on what you mean by "support science".
If you take "support science" to mean that you think that science is an important process, that the specific claims of science are not to be challenged except through the means of science and that science should strongly inform public policy, then no. There is nothing logically necessary about holding that position and believing some unscientific things.
If you think that the only way to "support science" is to adopt the larger philosophical framework of science and attempt to apply to every aspect of one's life, including private personal beliefs, then you may very well be correct. However, I don't think that is strictly necessary to "support science".
Should read:
Actually, it should read something more articulate, but you work with what you can do.
Eamon Knight, have you ever considered that we militant atheists ARE ALREADY pulling our punches? Your strength, intelligence, and charisma seem to be failing this morning...
I am constantly amazed at those who think that a god who intervenes in the universe is compatible with a scientific viewpoint. I do note however that scientists who claim belief in such a god are very clear that any intervention cannot occur in their field of study. Which does lead one to ask, just where do they allow an interventionist god to intervene.
I am constantly amazed at those who think that a god who intervenes in the universe is compatible with a scientific viewpoint.
That's not what theists who practice good science believe (yes, there are such people). Rather, they believe that God is the ground of being who exists outside the universe and sustains it.
In any event, one facet of the debate is this tendency to conflate religion and theism, which blurs the issues at stake.
Maybe I don't get around enough, but in the blogosphere, I've yet to see either a theist or athiest who sympathetically and accurately depicts the range of world-views of those holding the opposite belief. Perhaps that's too much to expect from this sort of forum.
Caledonian do you get a kick of making a fool of yourself in public or do you suffer from foot in mouth disease?
Kepler is not a scientist! Newton is not a scientist! Faraday is not a scientist! Boole is not a scientist! Goedel is not a scientist! I could go on but this handful is enough. Not only is each and every one of the historical figures I have named, a person who has made undeniably significant contributions to the progress of science and is therefore without question a scientist each and every one of them was undeniably a certifiable religious nutcase. At least three of them even believed that their scientific achievements were a result of their religeous beliefs.
Nope. He was one of the first people to attempt to put the scientific method into practice. Unfortunately, he didn't manage to do so properly.
No, Newton was a mystic, numerologist, alchemist, and theologian. He's one of the best examples of the difference between science and non-science - just look at what he accomplished when he concerned himself with observable phenomena from which he excluded supernatural intervention, then compare what he accomplished when he concerned himself with the supernatural.
Heck, he missed predicting the existence of planets because he interpreted the divergence of their orbits from his equations as divine intervention.
Goedel was stark raving mad and starved to death because he believed someone was poisoning his food. (Despite explicitly recognizing that all available evidence was against the possibility.)
All of these people applied sciencelike thinking to specific subsets of the universe, and achieved wonderful results, but failed to apply the method to their study of the universe, and so produced utter nonsense.
They demonstrate just how important it is to apply rational thinking consistently and completely; they're object lessons.
That's nonsense - there is no existence 'outside' of the universe. 'Is' is not a word that can be applied to things beyond the boundary of existence.
Theism is how religion manifests in my neck of the woods. It's religion that is the problem, but you can't have theism without religion, so they're practically equivalent. If any nontheistic but religious people show up, tend 'em our way - and we'll tear their claims apart, too.
I have sympathy for those who grew up conditioned to believe the universe is run by a deity according to some complex dogma. None of us is born knowing the actual principles of the universe; and dark matter came as a considerable surprise, to me at least. So I am inclined to think, "there, but for the grace of there being no God, go I."
I am reminded of a quote from "The Mote In God's Eye" (not a religious text BTW), something like, "The polite, the tactful way of disagreeing [with someone] is to say, 'That turns out not to be the case.'"
Where I see inconsistencies in religious dogmas, both internally and with empirical observations, I will try to restrain myself to stating, that turns out not to be the case.
"That's not what theists who practice good science believe (yes, there are such people). Rather, they believe that God is the ground of being who exists outside the universe and sustains it."
It is what the overwhelming majority of religious people believe. In case you has not noticed nearly every religious denomination prayers for the sick, for political leaders etc. They would not do so unless they thought it possible for their god to intervene. Now some people can be religious but not believe in divine intervention. Spinoza comes to mind. The only issue with that is that Spinoza's god is NOT the god Dawkins et al have an issue with.
Tolerance and reason are undeniably what we should strive for. However, I fail to see either applied in many of the variations of the "atheist noise machine" arguments and subsequent apologist blogs. Why does "tolerance" include respect for religious traditions that, by the silence of their moderate majorities, condone the actions of the fringe actors? When the fringe actors of the atheist/humanist/rationalist camps speak out, the response is, to put it mildly, quite different, and not exactly the picture of tolerance. To quote Martin Luther King, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal," and by their silence, the religious moderates (which, I assume, includes theist scientists) betray the aims of science and its preference for knowledge over superstition.
Um ... If I have to demonstrate that everyone has irrational beliefs (is your significant other handsome/pretty, are your children paragons and is Shakespeare -- or fill in the blank -- the best author in English?), then you equally have to demonstrate that everyone who believes in a deity is not supportive of science (including Newton, Ken Miller, Theodosius Dobzhansky, etc.). Of course I was being sarcastic. Whether or not it was for no particular reason is a matter of opinion that you have not demonstrated was reached through rational means.
Hey, it was the position *you* put forward.
I've already done so. Deity-belief, with the currently available data, is not compatible with the scientific method. Anyone claiming to generate truth through a method other than the scientific is rejecting the scientific method as defining what it means for claims to be justified - and science does not recognize alternate methods as producing justified knowledge.
This is obvious.
Done, done, and done. All believed knowledge could be attained with methods that violates the strictures of science - none are scientists. Newton nearly qualified as a scientist, but he abandoned science in favor of mysticism.
Whether or not it was for no particular reason is a matter of opinion that you have not demonstrated was reached through rational means.
Wrong.
Geez, you're bad at this.
Geez, people give up already. Caledonian is clearly going to win by the simple virtue that his definition of a scientist is different than anyone else's. See a scientist isn't just someone who uses the scientific method to increase human understanding of whatever it is they're studying. No, being a scientist is, like, a way of life, man. Woooah.
caledonian said: "Newton was a mystic, numerologist, alchemist, and theologian. He's one of the best examples of the difference between science and non-science - just look at what he accomplished when he concerned himself with observable phenomena from which he excluded supernatural intervention, then compare what he accomplished when he concerned himself with the supernatural."
It looks like your view of what a "scientist" is would be roughly congruent with Wilkins' "person with a totally consistent belief set." So it does appear that what you would call nonscientists and Wilkins might call scientists with inconsistent beliefs are capable of making major contributions to scientific knowledge.
With regard to holding a self-consistent set of beliefs, G�del's incompleteness theorems of course show this to be impossible. Ironically, the person I have known who comes closest to self-consistency - a scientist who has had experiments on Hubble and publishes regularly in scholarly journals, an unfailingly kind human being who spends his free time doing charitable works, whom I have literally never in years of close everyday acquaintance and friendship heard utter an unkind word about anyone - is a believing Christian.
Go figure.
John:
This is a nice piece. Hopefully a constructive intervention in what has become a pretty tiresome ritual.
I always scratch my head with the "sending messages" line of argument. The "Oh, if we tolerate x we're sending a message that . . ." line that we hear so often when kids get suspended from schools for ridiculous things (like having aspirin).
It's a matter of scale and appropriateness, PZ, not high principle. At some point you've got to draw a line where you stop caring how people arrange their mental furniture, unless their paying you to do the interior decorating or there is some other compelling reason.
So we are always sending mixed messages: some things may not fit with our principles, but are a) none of our damned business; or b) not worth bothering with.
If you are still worried about the message you are sending . . . let me consult the ether here . . . ah here it is: "I am a monomaniacal busybody."
No worry about mixed messages there.
Who says they should be exempt from criticism? Funny how we go from accusations of strawman making to equal and opposite strawman making.
I think a pretty good case can be made that humanism is just a bunch of humbug, but I don't see you obsessing about that. How come? Why so selective in your persecution of silliness?
Don't forget Einstein. He was fairly religious, and except for the hair and mismatched socks, not particularly crazy. Unless you count the EPR paradox. And his failure to find a grand unified theory. What an idiot...
Caledonian, I have access to most scientific journals. Just give me a journal name, a date, and an article title, and I can look up your work without you needing to give up your name online. If you can't do this, then I have to conclude that these unscientific nutjobs have contributed more to the scientific community than you ever will. Funny, them not being scientists and all.
John Wilkins, thanks for this contribution. Thanks for sharing your insight about this iceberg.
Best regards
Drekab@37: Geez, people give up already. Caledonian is clearly going to win by the simple virtue that his definition of a scientist is different than anyone else's.
...which prompts me to ask: Caledonian: you aren't Bob Puharic, are you? He used to spout stuff like this on t.o.
Scholar@26: Eamon Knight, have you ever considered that we militant atheists ARE ALREADY pulling our punches? Your strength, intelligence, and charisma seem to be failing this morning...
I'll accept the implied compliment, but I'm a little unclear (ie: no friggin' idea) what that has to do with what I wrote.
Mr Wilkins unfortunately I got side-tracked by a bad dose of Caledonian Spongiform Encephalopathy which seems to have finally turned terminal so I can now turn my attention to that which I originally intended saying.
I just wanted to congratulate you on a truely excellent posting, thank you.
Wilkins said:
Is this humor? Otherwise, of course if you were to include, in the definition of heritable, things one learns from one's parents and one's culture, Dawkins would certainly not disagree that religion is heritable. But that's not how he's defining it, so it's flat wrong to say you disagree with him when you know you are using a different definition.
Oran Kelley: I think a pretty good case can be made that humanism is just a bunch of humbug, but I don't see you [PZ] obsessing about that. How come? Why so selective in your persecution of silliness?
Because humanists do not make up the majority of parents, teachers, voters and political leaders in this country. How is that not obvious?
Thanks for a nice reminder that we all need to acquire some humility re our own epistemic limitations - rather than simply assume it is those *other* idiots who are clueless. Pluralism has its frustrations, but makes it much more likely that we can approximate 'truth' (small t). As Hume put it: Truth springs from argument amongst friends.
AFAIK, 'humanism' boils down to a set of normative claims, or even more abstractly, value judgments. I don't know how rational inquiry could ever really show such judgments to be 'humbug'.
So let me see if I understand the situation. Your post is a reply to mine, and yet yours is on the Most Active list while mine is not? Folks, there is no God. Deal with it.
That, and what P.Z. said.
Wilkins appears to be suggesting here that outspoken atheism is the same thing as intolerance, which I don't buy at all.
I consider myself generally allied with Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al. I'm an atheist, I'm fairly public about it, and I generally regard dogmatic religions as harmless silliness at best, and massively destructive forces at worst. As such, I think if the atheist viewpoint was more widespread, the world would be a better place. At the very least, we'd have reduced the number of justifications humans find for annihilating each other by one. So of course I'm going to argue for it, and of course I believe that my position is the reasonable and correct one - as does anyone who holds an opinion.
That said, I certainly don't think anyone I know would describe me as "intolerant" of the religious! Much of my family is religious, and I certainly don't resent my religious upbringing in any way, I just feel I've outgrown it. I'm always happy to discuss my beliefs, respectfully, with anyone who cares to hear them, and I don't consider believers to be idiots, I just consider them to be wrong. Neither do I consider myself, or any human, infalliable or unfailingly rational. (Not even Caledonian).
That said I don't suffer fools gladly, be they religious maniacs, 9/11 conspiracy nuts, rabid libertarians, or Mac zealots. There are any number of ways to be an idiot; religious delusion is unique in that it is so strongly ingrained into our society that when attacking the worst offenders, it's difficult to avoid offending people who, themselves, are quite inoffensive. One cannot really, fully argue against Pat Robertson or Dr. Laura without, to some extent, arguing against the whole basis of Christianity - the bible really does, after all, say that homosexuals should be put to death, and that Christ will return to oversee the destruction of the earth! There is simply no way to argue against intolerable ideas without appearing intolerant.
No, it is silly essentialism that I doubt any scientist could live up to. Scientists are human beings and believe things are true about many sorts of things that they don't test through the scientific method. Science is a methodology and a process, which means that someone is a scientist only while engaged in the method/process. It is an activity not a state.
Someone can only violate the method/process while actually engaged in the method/process. At other times they can believe in the truth of the rightness of democracy, the beauty of Mozart's music and the sexiness of their spouse, all without putting them to the rigors of scientific testing. As long as they don't claim those beliefs are scientific results, they have not violated the method/process. In contrast, your rigid and unempiric essentialism winds up with the counterfactual result of ejecting people who you admit were great contributors to science, such as Newton and Dobzhansky, from the ranks of scientists.
But you are good at making bald assertions rather than cogent arguments, aren't you?
This really gets to be completely twisted whenever the subject comes up. The way that I took this original article was not as John telling atheists to be quiet, and so apparently my first comment was misconstrued. I think he was saying that too often atheists react as jerks like Caledonian does and question the work effort of a religious person who does science; because the idea doesn't fit with their concept of rationality.
My comment was that scientists who have faith should be expected to be able to defend their having faith without the framers deflecting criticism aforehand. They are grownups and can be expected to stand firm if they need to.
This has to be commnet #467000 for the contest.
PZ Myers: "Nor has anyone claimed that adoption of atheism leads to universal rationality."
No, but advocates for atheism often imply that theists are irrational (as opposed to merely having some false beliefs). At the extreme end, we have the so-called Rational Responders describing theism as a "mind disorder," and Penn Jillette using the epithet "Christard." On the more subtle end, we have Dawkins likening religious belief to a mind-altering drug. You yourself recently strung together a list of adjectives connoting either stupidity or mental defect, applied them to religious Americans in general, and then expected people not to think that you were calling them stupid. Also, advocates for atheism tend to trumpet their rationality. Again we have the Rational Responders, and the subtitle for Dawkins' web site is "A Clear-Thinking Oasis." And I could go on.
PZ Myers: "The atheist side isn't arguing for intolerance at all -- I don't know of anyone who is saying you shouldn't elect religious people to high office, for instance, let alone calling for executions and book burnings."
One can be intolerant without any of those things. All one has to do is demonize the other side. Let's see now, we have the recently-coined playground insult "faith-head," we have theistic evolutionists being likened to a Hitler-like menace. We have an insistence--based more on intuition than actual evidence--that moderates abet extremists. There are also the lazy overgeneralizations that reflect casual contempt, such as the sentiment that religion demands that we suspend constant criticism and evaluation and testing of ideas. Being critical of religion is one thing. Throwing around "Christard" is being a bigot.
Okay, so it's the content of Dawkins' ideas - or John's interpretation of them - that John doesn't like. That is a different thing from intolerance. I've still not seen any sign that Dawkins is doing more than expressing his ideas about religion, sometimes satirically or aggressively. As PZ says, his ideas don't involve using fire and the sword against religion.
For what it's worth, I don't consider religion an unmitigated evil. I consider it a somewhat mitigated evil. My impression is that Dawkins has the same view, but perhaps I'm wrong.
Not exactly. To be a scientist, all a person has to do is apply the scientific method - which requires NOT asserting that conclusions reached through any method other than science are valid.
He wasn't fairly religious, either. About the closest he ever came was saying that pondering the complexity and elegance of the universe gave him a sense of awe.
Scientists can have whims and opinions. They just aren't allowed to claim that there's any particular truth value to them. By definition, every scientist lives up to that standard - it's just that the people we generally title as 'scientists' usually aren't.
That's the point - it's a methodology and a process used to weed through hypotheses and produce valid descriptions of reality. If you produce and assert claims you think are valid, but you violate the rules of science in the process, you've left science.
Scientists are defined by the performance of science, not being part of a profession or being socially identified as a scientist. A four-year-old child can be a scientist, while a professional biologist who believes in perpetual motion isn't.
If they claim to have produced truth without applying science, they've broken the method. Claiming that their beliefs are objectively true, without testing them rigorously, is a violation of science - they don't need to claim the results are 'scientific', because objective truth is what science attempts to understand.
Alchemists contributed quite a lot to chemistry. It doesn't mean that they were scientists.
As for your complaints about 'umempiric essentialism', how do you think we know that triangles have three sides? Do you think we went out, identified things that people called 'triangles', and counted?
I have to say, I'm fascinated by this concern with 'essentialism'.
At some point, we have to agree on the meanings of the words we use, or we're just throwing sounds/letters at each other without communicating. If a scientist is a person who applies a particular methodology, what is the nature of that the methodology? How is it applied? There has to be some agreed-upon definition, some 'essence' if you wish to use that term, that underlies the word. If there isn't, then we've just defined 'scientist' in terms of something we can't define or even describe properly, and no information has actually been communicated.
It would be like saying "a pleskit is a fromp who triqules knipdibulosly" - there's syntax, but no meaning.
The scientific method requires that truth claims about objective reality be put through various kinds of tests in an attempt to verify, however imperfectly, that they're actually correct, and it doesn't permit claims to be treated as valid or provisionally correct unless they've been tested.
Collins has declared that he believes certain things about objective reality that he has not tested. This is incompatible with the requirements of the scientific method. But more importantly, he has declared that believing while not testing is a virtue. That's not just failing to apply science, it's rejecting science as a method.
If you have a problem with the definition of science, or the reasoning above, feel free to point out the places where you have issues. But to complain about 'essentialism' when we try to use terms consistently and with their generally-recognized meaning to produce conclusions is inane.
Russell Blackford: "As PZ says, his ideas don't involve using fire and the sword against religion."
That's an absurdly low standard, though.
^Well, what standard do you propose? It seems like the correct standard to me, if we're talking about toleration rather than solicitousness or niceness. Shermer seems to suggest that someone is in danger of breaching such a standard, or else the last part of his open letter to Dawkins, etc., makes no sense.
But in any event, I've been seeing some absurdly high standards of late. Just what is the standard supposed to be for robust, aggressive argument against ideas that you consider wrong, dangerous, frequently absurd, and often cruel?
I've never yet come across a truth that didn't turn out to be useful, sooner or later.
So why add "dangerous, frequently absurd, and often cruel" to "wrong"? It seems to me that all of those properties are implied by "wrong" alone, and listing them again is redundant.
In mainly in accord. The only problem I can see, from a gay man's perspective, is that when I hear religious condemnation of my state, when I hear about the latest nutjob who kills or discriminates against a gay person in God or Allah's name, I am at a loss to counter them.
The religious people I have known have been lovely, but they also believe I have no right to children or state sanctioned partnership, and often they proudly continue to believe this no matter what. I'm young, 23 today, and have such a life ahead of me, but so little chance of building a family as I want to without first engaging with and pleading with the religious community. These people smile and they sympathise with my plight, but they do not empathise, care, and would not dream of voting in my future family's interests. As loathe as I may be to criticise their fundaments, I'm increasingly uncertain that I see any other approach. I can ask, 'Why do you oppose family rights for homosexuals?' Or I could question any of their other irrational beliefs. The problem is, ultimately, that they do not see the value in assessing, questioning, or justifying their beliefs. The problem is, ultimately, the inherently unquestioning faith of the religious in their own groundless beliefs.
In case you has not noticed nearly every religious denomination prayers for the sick, for political leaders etc. They would not do so unless they thought it possible for their god to intervene.
I had assumed we were referring to scientists.
In any event, I'm not trying to argue for or against prayer but rather trying make the point that the notions you have about prayer as a request for divine intervention in the physical world are simplistic. To illustrate my point. here are a couple of my favorites:
Prayer
Galway Kinnel
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
Poem to be read at 3 a.m.
Excepting the diner
On the outskirts.
The town of Ladora
At 3 a.m.
Was dark but
For my headlights
And up in
One second-story room
A single light
Where someone
Was sick or
Perhaps reading
As I drove past
At seventy
Not thinking.
This poem
Is for whoever
Had the light on
-- Donald Justice
Hi John, your first point was v.good I thought. Also the others (and re the first point, I also think that all our beliefs are inherently incommensurable, due to the differing senses we give to our words:)
A bit more slowly, please. Suppose that an authority exists which is omniscient, infallible, and omnibenevolent. To argue from such an authority would not be a logical fallacy.
Of course, the existence of such an authority is not testable. Thus, although the argument itself is sound, it has a quite shaky premise.
I haven't bothered looking up what N-rays are supposed to be, but for the other two, yes, it is in principle possible to be a good scientist and yet hold those beliefs. To do so, one must merely be ignorant. In the case of a flat earth, one would have to be so deeply ignorant that no instance of a scientist believing in a flat earth may ever have existed, but I'm talking about the principle. The average HIV denialist, I'm sure, is not a liar, but simply doesn't know diddly squat about AIDS and HIV. Just like the average cre_ti_nist has no idea what evolution is, what the fossil record is, and so on. Or how the average believer has never heard about the studies on the lack of effectiveness of prayer.
Where I come from -- unlike what you're probably used to from the USA! --, most people believe in a deity so ineffable that it is way beyond testability. Sure is it indistinguishable from special pleading to approach problems like theodicy with "whatever, we puny humans are just too dumb to understand that", but you can't disprove it. To believe in something untestable is not the same as believing in something disproved (flat earth, non-HIV causes for AIDS).
Regarding people like Newton, I'd simply say they were scientists part of the time, able to switch it on and off.
As the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, the founder of modern optics, the founder of crystallography and the theory of close order packing and a mathematician who made major contributions to the theory of conic sections, to the theory of semi-regular solids, the theory of logarithms and to the establishment of the integral calculus I would say that Kepler must have been doing something right as a scientist.
Wrong Newton was neither a numerologist nor a mystic. He was indeed an alchemist and a theologian but he was also a geographer, a historian, a chronologist, a chemist, an astronomer, an astro-physicist, a metallurgist, a physicist, a mathematician, an inventor, an instrument maker, philosopher of science and an excellent literary stylist.
You write; "just look at what he accomplished when he concerned himself with observable phenomena from which he excluded supernatural intervention". Newton never concerned himself with observable phenomena whilst excluding supernatural intervention. He was a convinced prisca theologian, which means that he believed that he was rediscovering truths that had been know to man at the time of creation and had been lost in the intervening period. He also believed that he and he alone had been chosen by God to make these rediscoveries. For Newton his scientia was not compartmentalised, as you have done, between natural and supernatural but his researches in alchemy, physics, astronomy, astro-physics, history and theology were all different facets of one great truth. His research was motivated, guided and driven by his religious convictions. A simple example of the integration of his world-view is the fact that his third law in the Principia is taken from an alchemy text by Van Helmont.
In several other postings you babble on about 'the scientific method' without apparently giving a moments thought to the fact that this method was first clearly defined by Newton a man to whom you deny the status of scientist, a denial, which is, to put it mildly, laughable. You are correct in claiming that scientific theories should be tested and that this is a purely rational process but you, like the justifiably from Mr Wilkins criticised Popper, give no thought to the origin or generation of those theories. The history of sciences teaches us again and again that the production of scientific theories can be and often is anything but rational. In fact it is doubtful whether purely logical deductive thought would ever lead to any really meaningful new scientific theories. Creative science at the highest level is an art that like other forms of creativity such as music, painting or poesy defies rationalisation, a statement that will almost certainly bring Caledonian the paranoid essentialist on to the barricades.
I'm surprised that you're unfamiliar with N-rays, given their infamousness and wide use as an example of pseudoscience - but I suppose no one can be aware of everything.
I acknowledge your point, but I was speaking about people in the present day with access to the available information. Obviously, in a world where the Earth was flat, and there was sufficient information to know this to be true, a scientist could easily believe this. But without sufficient information to make a judgement, having any beliefs about the shape of the world would be improper - and given the information we do have, no one could put the scientific method into practice and yet hold the belief in a Flat Earth.
Thony C writes:
There are more than 100,000 pages of his writings on numerology, theology, alchemy, and mysticism that contradict you.
Thing is, science can't be picked up and dropped at will. People like Newton were following a different method, one that is vaguely similar to science some of the time, but that includes things science explicitly disallows.
I'm sorry, Caledonian, but you're claims are incoherent:
Who is it who enforces this? Who makes sure that 'unallowed' truth claims result in the person's expulsion from the ranks of scientists? Larry Moran, atheist and uber rationalist is right now declaring the apparent heresy that Newton was the second greatest scientist of all time (Darwin being #1, quelle surprise!). I'd give a link but John's antispam software always causes trouble ... just go to his blog, Sandwalk and look up the post "Top Five Dead Scientists" from August 24th. Who goes about keeping track of who is and is not a scientist? Is it the vaunted Caledonian? Where can I find the list?
Needless to say, I think that it is the community of scientists (with perhaps an assist from philosophers of science and historians of science) who are authoritative on this point. Do you have any evidence that even a notable minority of scientists think Newton wasn't among their ranks?
Yes, that's what I said ...
Yes. "Left science" in the sense that they are not acting like scientists at and for that moment.
Subtly wrong. They only can break the method while claiming to apply it. When a scientist says, say, 'Babe Ruth was the greatest baseball player ever', s/he can assert a "truth" without violating the scientific method by the simple expediency of not claiming that the "truth" is a scientific result.
This is flat out wrong and an attempt to turn the methodology into a philosophy of life. You were right when you said "Scientists are defined by the performance of science." A scientist is a person actually doing science. Now you want to turn it around and say that it is the nature of science that defines who qualifies as a scientist -- that scientists have to make some sort of commitment to only apply science to anything and everything that falls within what (you define?) as "objective truth," even if they have no intention of claiming their beliefs as scientific results. In short, you are saying their intent is irrelevant and, therefore, their performance is irrelevant.
There are whole libraries written about that. David Hull's Science as a Process is particularly good. Suffice it to say that simple "demarcation criteria," such as yours, died after Popper.
Look up "sorites problem." There are a lot of things that we cannot exactly define that we can tolerably share ideas about and discuss. Add to that the problem that the set of things that are included in "science" change over time (so the practice of science also changes) and there is no essentialist definition of "science." Interestingly,see my post (hopefully, I can get away with one link) re Hull's description of how essentialism led philosophers of science such as John Stuart Mill and William Whewell astray -- particularly citing your example of the definition of triangles.
Well, there were some alchemists at the time of the rise of chemistry who did act like scientists (Madison Smartt Bell's Lavoisier in the Year One has a pretty good account) and while they acted like scientists they were scientists in the only sense that matters.
But really ... that was a great waste of time dealing with a view of science that, as far as I can tell, only one person in the whole world holds.
Russell Blackford: "Just what is the standard supposed to be for robust, aggressive argument against ideas that you consider wrong, dangerous, frequently absurd, and often cruel?"
The standard should be this: If you can't say something nice, do your best to say something accurate.
What an utterly absurd question! Natural law doesn't need to be enforced, and reality doesn't need personal entities to function.
You've repeatedly conflated two very different things: social construction of relationships between sound/text patterns and concepts, and the interactions of concepts.
So it's the community of scientists that determines who the scientists are?
Fine. How do we identify this community, so that we can query it as to the definition of 'scientist'?
It seems you've defined a locked box that contains its only key. We can't identify the 'community of scientists' without having a working definition first, and we can't establish even a working definition without asking the community. So nothing can be said about science, no analysis conducted, no meaning expressed, because you want to set up a circular definition that can't be broken into. Fan-tastic.
Then the issue lies in the definition of science - which you'll probably paper over as "demarcation problem, demarcation problem". Except that you already have a working definition of what is and isn't science if you've made intelligible statements on the subject. Assuming, of course, that you have.
I can follow a path for a period of time, then not-follow that path for a period of time. Overall, across all of the time involved, I cannot be said to have followed the path.
If some of my behavior is compatible with the strictures of science, and some of it isn't, overall my behavior cannot be said to be compatible with the strictures of science. This is elementary, John.
Wrong. They can only break the method if, while not using the method, they produce statements that they claim are justified. Claims to justification are often implied instead of explicit, but there's always there.
I can go through the motions of calculating an astrological horoscope for amusement, if I wish. That doesn't violate the scientific method. Claiming that the horoscope has objective implications for someone's life, however, DOES violate the scientific method, given that vast amount of information that shows horoscopes to be meaningless.
Ah, equivocation. Where would philosophers be without you?
Is this scientist making a claim about objective reality, or merely expressing an opinion that superficially resembles an objective-truth claim? Because if it's an objective truth, that scientist had better have explicit and communicable standards for what makes "the greatest baseball player", and the data to support his contention that Babe Ruth is that player.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, not their own facts. If the statement concerns facts, not opinions, then the requirements of science apply.
Ah, I begin to see where you've become confused - you've interpreted a prior statement of mine incorrectly. No, I'm not "turning around" anything. 'Science' is the concept held constant here, and 'scientist' defined in terms of it. It IS the nature of science that determines who qualifies as a scientist. Science isn't determined by looking at the people referred to as 'scientists' and calling whatever they do 'science'. Violate the nature of science, and you're no longer a scientist.
You say that my first statement is correct, but then you take another statement logically equivalent to the first, and call it wrong.
You've missed the point. Without a functional working definition, you can't say anything about the subject.
'Tolerably' is subjective. 'Usefully' is a more appropriate term - and you're incorrect. Without having a functional definition, we can't share ideas and discuss anything. Many of our definitions are implicit, encoded in our neural networks and not available for explicit, conscious analysis. But they're still there.
Without shared terms, there can be no communication.
Wrong - your argument would actually reach the conclusion that the essentialist definition of science would have to include historical principles to be properly stated. You still have a fundamental and essential definition, because without it, you couldn't identify 'science' to make any claims about.
WRONG. If they weren't following the method, it is irrelevant whether their behavior over a span of time happened to be similar to that the method required.
As a field, alchemy was fundamentally unscientific. We have a word for the people who took the findings of alchemy and applied the process of science to them - it's 'chemists'.
It is irrelevant how many people assert a claim. What matters is whether the claim is justifiable, and whether it's true.
Having clear and specific definitions of terms used is the first requirement of all reasoning, and most especially for science.
When terms aren't defined precisely, human beings tend to make errors - such as John's self-defeating definition of 'scientist' above - and it is no longer possible to derive meaningful conclusions from statements.
Caledonian, there is one big fat problem with your definition of "scientist." The whole point of scientific practices like testing of hypotheses, peer review, duplication of results, and so on, is to take human biases into account and try to work around them. The people who actually practice science and call themselves scientists are expected to be fallible and even irrational at times--which according to you would make them not scientists at all.
Give a clear specific and indisputable definition of the concepts 'science' and 'scientist'. If you manage to do this you will do something that has never ever been done before in the entire history of the human race and please don't fall back on your usual cheap trick of claiming that you have already done so, because you most certainly have not. Also please avoid Caledonian trick number two of saying that you are not prepared to do other peoples thinking for them, it is you who is claiming that such a definition is possible so put up or shut up.
Indisputable? Any point can be disputed.
I think that possibly you mean to suggest rationally indisputable.
No, you're not grasping my point - or perhaps I'm not expressing it properly.
People can be fallible and irrational, and still be scientists. They CANNOT claim that error and irrationality is valid or justified. A person who does this is actively conflicting with the nature of science, and cannot be said to be a scientist.
Newton may have been a scientist early in his career, although his rationally-unsupportable beliefs about deity would seem to preclude this. But there's no doubt that he abandoned science in favor of mysticism later in his career.
It is worth noting the differences between his early career, in which he discovered some of the most basic aspects of physics and pioneered calculus, and the achievements of his later career - approximately a hundred thousand pages on which nothing important to our understanding of the universe appear.
A scientist cannot exclude by fiat phenomena that could affect the nature of observations that he is trying to explain. If you believe that there is an extraordinarily-powerful being capable of intervening in everyday affairs, you cannot conduct experiments without attempting to account and control for that influence. The people, like Ken Miller, who John claims are scientists, may indeed be excluding their religious beliefs from their examination of the universe.
That does not make them scientists. It makes them liars at worst, and compartmentalists at best. They violate both their claims of faith and their claims of scientific rationality by doing so.
Whilst it is true that Newton wrote considerably more words on each of the subjects of theology, alchemy, history and chronology than he ever did on physics, mathematics or astronomy he never and I repeat never wrote on numerology or mysticism. I can name all of the relevant academic sources to back up what I am saying because its what I do i.e. I am a historian of science who amongst other things has spent a fair chunk of his life studying the live and work of Isaac Newton. Your claims on numerology and mysticism are just plain wrong and I challange you to prove otherwise. Once again put up or shut up.
***
Newton studied numerology, specifically Biblical numerology, although he also applied it to more common things - he was the one to put 'indigo' in the spectrum, for example, because he wanted there to be seven colors. He was big on sacred geometry, and was deeply engrossed in Hermeticism.
I don't think you know what you're talking about, Thony C.
A fundamental historical truth that all too often gets ignored.
Triangles have three sides because that is how they are defined! In Euclidian geometry a triangle is a closed plane figure that is bounded by three straight lines. In spherical geometry a triangle is a closed figure on the surface of a sphere bounded by three arcs of great circles of that sphere and so on and so on.... Its just a mater of definition.
If we tried to change the definition, but keep the referents of 'triangle' otherwise the same, could we do so?
...incidentally, I learnt the meaning of "triangle" in the usual way, via family resemblances. So I think, for example, that /\ is a bit triangular, even though it has no sides, but is rather two lines; and is it not really the case that triangles have 3 angles in much the way that Dartmouth lies at the mouth of the river Dart? (although mostly I'm wondering what the 500,000th commenter wins:)
Quoth JJ Ramsey: "We have an insistence--based more on intuition than actual evidence--that moderates abet extremists."
I would be most grateful if you could point to empirical evidence for either side of this argument, as I have been unable to locate any myself. Admittedly I do level this charge often and loudly, but it seems to logically follow that the fringes of any position do not exist without the agreement (implicit or otherwise) of the majority. In politics, for example, we see moderate Republicans distancing themselves from the excesses of the right wing, yet this same right wing gained power when that same base of moderates failed to use their numeric superiority to quash intolerant and religion-based platform positions and stave off the move towards evangelical hijack. In this same way I see the silence of moderate Christians contributing to the legitimacy of the radical fringes.
Also quoth JJ Ramsey: "Let's see now, we have the recently-coined playground insult "faith-head," we have theistic evolutionists being likened to a Hitler-like menace.... Being critical of religion is one thing. Throwing around "Christard" is being a bigot."
I cannot disagree with this. I can only point to the fact that the word atheist itself is still overwhelmingly seen (in the US) to denote an amoral person of decidedly anti-social intent, and the notion of rationality or intellect is sold to the general public as something to be wary of rather that something to pursue. This is not intended to be an excuse, merely an explanation.
I have no idea which tertiary source you are quoting but who ever it is, is misusing the word numerology and is certainly not basing his/her quote on the secondary sources that he/she gives at the end of the quote. If all you have read is very crappy tertiary sources please don't display your ignorance by quoting them here. Wanting to have seven colours in the rainbow is Pythagorean harmony theory (and not numerology which is a wholly different kettle of fish) of which Newton like Kepler and Tycho was a big fan. Yes Newton also applied Pythagorean harmony theory (your so called 'sacred geometry' a totally modern and therefore anachronistic name) to Solomon's Temple again not numerology.His numerical interest in the Bible was biblical chronology and not numerology. What do you thing Hermeticism is? The Hermeticism that Newton practiced is his alchemy!
Also your chronology of Newton's life is completely wrong. He studied/practiced alchemy six months of each year from 1666 (age 24) till 1696 (age 54), his theology and historical studies started around the same time and continued all of his life. Principia was written between 1684 and 1687 when it was published by which time (in case you can't count) he had been a practicing alchemist for 21 years. His second major scientific book The Opticks was first published in 1704 eight year after he had stopped the active practice of alchemy. The second expanded edition of Principia was published in 1712, the Latin edition of The Opticks 1706 by which time Newton was already 64 years old, there followed two further English editions. From 1696 till his death in 1727 Newton�s main occupation was running the Royal Mint, which he did with great enthusiasm and energy, in this period he did his work in chemistry and metallurgy. The claim that he worked as a scientist as a young man and then in old age turned to Hermeticism is totally wrong.
Hardly old age. But his scientific work stopped dead, and not only did he never made another major contribution, he never made any minor ones, either. The mysticisms that he'd dabbled in before expanded to become his sole focus. (I think we need a clarification as to what qualifies as 'numerology'.)
He also didn't do much in the House of Lords after he gained a position in it, which makes some people think that he may have developed mercury poisoning.
The point remains, however: when he excluded his religious beliefs from his work, he changed the world; when he included them, he produced nothing worth being concerned with.
This is what bothers me about the "angry athiest" movement. (someone really needs to come up with a name for you guys with a neutral connotation) Let's say you achieve your goal and, in the future, 80% of the population is athiest. Won't we then have fringe athiest groups and a corrupt politial party pushing athiest agendas? PZ Myers says that athiests aren't pushing for intolerance, but I can't help but wonder if that would still be true if atheists come into power and can get away with it.
This is why I can't get behind your movement until you can convince me that religion is the sole, or at least major, force behind world problems. Getting people to stop going to church is not going to change human nature. (see: that episode of South Park where Cartman goes to the future) It seems to me that the best way to eliminate religious persecution is to have no clear majority, so a politician cannot pander to one group without alienating a significant portion of the population. I'm not quite sure how we would do that, though.
As I have written in detail above, Newton at no point excluded his religious beliefs from his work, they were always the central and dominating driving force for everything that he undertook.
How many mathematicians make major contributions after the age of 64? How many mathematicians have made a contribution to science that comes anywhere near equalling that of Newton's? Archimedes, Gaus ... the list is very very short. I repeat again that Newton never ever induldged in mysticism it was, given his religious beliefs. anathema to him.Your problem is that in your self-declared crusade for rationalism and your rejection of anything that for you is not rational, you do not take the trouble to find out what the various concepts used in the occult actually mean or how they are defined. Mysticism is the belief that one can achieve direct union or oneness with god, the godhead or the universe a concept against which Newton would have and did protest. Newton's God was an old testement God whom he served and with whom the concept of mystical union was unthinkable.
Again as I have already written Newton's old age was occupied with his work at the Royal Mint as well as presiding over the meetings of the Royal Society and holding court to an ever growing circle of young brilliant mathematicians who were allowed to learn the secrets of his mathematical discoveries from his private manuscripts most of which were never published in his lifetime.
Your problem is that in your self-declared crusade for rationalism and your rejection of anything that for you is not rational, you do not take the trouble to find out what the various concepts used in the occult actually mean or how they are defined. Mysticism is the belief that one can achieve direct union or oneness with god, the godhead or the universe a concept against which Newton would have and did protest. Newton's God was an old testement God whom he served and with whom the concept of mystical union was unthinkable.
Newton was never ennobled and so never sat in the House of Lords. He was knighted in 1705 in an attempt to boost his chances of winning the election as Member of Parliament for Cambridge University. It didn't help, he lost. A knight is not entitled to sit in the Lords. He represented the University of Cambridge in the House of Commons a couple of times in the previous century but was not very active as a politician.
The incident in his life that might or might not have been mercury poisoning occurred in 1693 towards the end of his time in Cambridge.
It is fairly obvious Caledonian that you, at some point, have half-read a badly written popular biography of Newton (there are unfortunately many of them out there) and are now pontificating on the basis of half remembered myths and falsehoods.
You'll have to point out where Newton includes a factor to represent God's influence in his derivation of his theory of gravitation. Strangely, I don't recall where any invocation of deity was involved in his scientific work.
What was shocking was how very quickly his contributions ended, not that they ended.
Except for all of the cases where he thought ancient knowledge was hidden in symbolic relationships and numerical codes buried in ancient scriptures... nope, no mysticism there.
It would be more accurate to say that it's the belief that knowledge and/or power can be gained through subjective contemplation.
Point taken about the House of Lords vs. Commons. I can never get those straight.
PuckishOne: "I would be most grateful if you could point to empirical evidence for either side of this argument [that moderates abet extremists]"
Take your own line of argument, for example:
"it seems to logically follow that the fringes of any position do not exist without the agreement (implicit or otherwise) of the majority."
Why should this follow at all? It isn't as if the majority is necessarily in a position to keep the fringe elements from meeting together, pooling their resources, disseminating their propaganda, etc. If the fringe elements are relying on, say, deception, or a "frog boiling" approach where they pursue their agenda piecemeal and covertly, then permission from the majority is hardly necessary. Indeed, the point of such methods is to work around the disapproval that the majority would have if the fringers were more forthcoming
"In this same way I see the silence of moderate Christians contributing to the legitimacy of the radical fringes."
What makes you think the moderates have been silent? Did you know, for example, that Sojourners had a campaign to spread the message "God is not a Republican (or a Democrat)"? Jim Wallis' book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It came out as late as in 2005. See also the Christians who have worked with Hemant Mehta, a.k.a. the "Friendly Atheist." I remember back when I was a Christian that my pastor had denounced Fred Phelps of "God Hates Fags" infamy, and this was in front of a church that believed in the purported accuracy if not the inerrancy of the Bible. The moderates have not been silent, they just haven't been heard that loudly.
I can't say offhand that I have seen anyone argue better than you have for the position that moderates enable extremists.
PuckishOne: "I cannot disagree with this. I can only point to the fact that the word atheist itself is still overwhelmingly seen (in the US) to denote an amoral person of decidedly anti-social intent, and the notion of rationality or intellect is sold to the general public as something to be wary of rather that something to pursue."
Which is all the more reason not to fall into the trap of acting the way that too many people think that atheists act. If anything, the goal should be to create a dissonance between what people think atheists are like and how the atheists that people see actually behave.
A belief that Newton never ever held in his life, all of his 'knowledge' was obtained by strict logical methodology even if the premises are not ones that you or I would even consider as being remotely scientific. Newton was only concerned with obtaining 'objective', 'verifiable' truth and would have and did virulently reject all claims to knowledge based on intuition, revelation, subjective contemplation or the like. However many of the 'facts' that he accepted or the 'proofs' that he used appear to us to be totally ridiculous when viewed from our standpoint.
If you actual read Principia you will be amazed how often God turns up in the middle of scientific arguments but if you want the real deal read the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, Clarke was merely Newton's mouthpiece, which is on one level a scientific debate on absolute time and space contra relativity (yes that relativity two hundred years before Einstein!) and on another a heated theological debate on the role of God in Newton's theory of gravitation. Liebniz argued that Newton's system made God superfluous and would therefore lead to Deism, an anathema for Newton, and Clarke/Newton explaining why God is 'logically' necessary in Newton's system.
You want a quote? The following is from the General Scholium to the second edition of Principia:
Oh? Where did he get those premises? How did he, for example, logically determine that the biblical ancients possessed extensive knowledge of the workings of nature that were hidden in allegory and symbolism within the Old Testament?
Oh, I know how frequently God was mentioned. The issue is how frequently God was cited to explain something.
It wasn't actually very common, especially given how much the deity was supposed to be responsible for. Claiming that an all-powerful being is what's causing the stuff you don't know how to explain otherwise isn't actually a very effective way to generate explanations.
It's a matter of statistics. Get any group of things together, and measure some characteristic of those things. Most of the things will hover around the average, but a few will be unusually high or unusually low. For example, get a bunch of apples and line them up by weight. Most of the apples will be around average weight, but some will be larger than normal and a couple of them will be massive. In a nation with hundreds of millions of religious people, there will inevitably be some fringe groups. There is no way around this, and it has nothing to do with religion itself. Eliminating religion entirely is probably the only way of getting rid of fringe groups. However, religion fills a void for many people, so it would have to be replaced with something, and we'll have fringe groups of that instead.
Yeah, this kind of talk annoys me as well. Go through American history. Make a list of all the people that brought about Earth-shattering steps in social progress. While there are many who didn't belong to an established religion, the only athiest that comes to mind is Abraham Lincoln. Our founding fathers, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, and all the politicians that brought forth great change? Vast majority of them believed in some sort of deity. Anybody who says that moderates aren't loud enough is either stretching for an argument or thinks that not being loud enough equates to not dedicating your life to completely and permanently eliminating fundamentalism.
Actually, most of the Founding Fathers were Deists.
Deism is just atheism with the delusion of being a religion.
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
It must be so easy winning arguments when you get to redefine everything, eh?
PuckishOne: "it seems to logically follow that the fringes of any position do not exist without the agreement (implicit or otherwise) of the majority."
Me: "Why should this follow at all?"
Brandon: "It's a matter of statistics. Get any group of things together, and measure some characteristic of those things. Most of the things will hover around the average, but a few will be unusually high or unusually low."
That would be an explanation of why fringe groups exist at all, but it hardly upholds the claim that the majority has a tacit agreement with the fringe to allow it to exist. If anything, it implies that there will be a fringe regardless of what the majority wants.
The fringe exists because the majority exists. The only way for the majority to eliminate the fringe is to destroy itself, which obviously the majority refuses to do. By simply existing, the moderates allow the fringe to exist. If what we know as the fringe disappear, then "moderate" and "fringe" will just be redefined a bit to the left. (As much of a jerk Pat Robertson is, would you rather have Tomás de Torquemada?)
The Deists believed a deity created "the universe", then left forever, never again interacting with any aspects of its creation.
Face it - that's atheism with a just-so story tacked onto the front of it.
JJ, by that standard I'd say that the New Atheist crew are far more tolerant than most people who take part in public debate. In any event, it is an odd standard for tolerance.
Russell Blackford: "it is an odd standard for tolerance."
I think we were talking a bit past each other. You were asking what the standard should be for "the standard supposed to be for robust, aggressive argument" should be, were you not? "If you can't say something nice, do your best to say something accurate" is certainly a not an odd standard for argument. Come to think of it, though, accuracy and tolerance are related here. If the New Atheists had striven to be accurate, the picture of theists that would emerge would be less cartoonish and for the most part more sympathetic than the broad-brush picture from the rhetoric about delusion, faith-heads, and Chamberlains that we currently have.
I have been thinking alot about this issue - the 'militant' atheists versus the 'moderates.' As an aspiring educator, I tend to frown on name-calling and insults, especially when it's well-educated and smart people talking down to those without the benefit of good schooling, or the natural gift of intelligence. I feel we should be educating the ignorant, not alienating them or enjoying jokes at their expense.
For example, I perused through the recent winning essays submitted to the AiG contest. All I could think was how sad it was for these young and motivated learners to be manipulated so expertly by the authority figures that they are biologically predisposed to respect and emulate. These children do not need to be insulted. They need to be educated. Kids like them grow up into adults who still need to be educated, but have been alienated by condescending Darwinists and sneering atheists. And then the cycle continues...
But then again, I lose my temper and find it very hard to tolerate the self-serving liars who use so many people like the children who entered the AiG contest as pawns, to service a right wing political agenda. These people deserve the very worst that Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris can dish out and more.
I read a wonderful blog that seemed to summarize my feelings on the matter very well. I urge everyone to take a look. If you ask me, we could use as many people as possible in the moderate group, acting as informed and polite ambassadors on behalf of science.
All definitions of triangles are dependent on the mathematical properties of triangles so every definition that is sufficient to unambiguously define triangles is automatical logically equivalent to all other such definitions.
Do you actually read the things that other people post?
If you take "religion" in the widest sense, so that it includes secular ideologies like communism and nationalism, the argument does have a point.
David Marjanović: "If you take 'religion' in the widest sense, so that it includes secular ideologies like communism and nationalism ..."
I think that would be cheating, though.
You're confusing the term and the referent, again.
Could we change the definition of 'triangle', if we wished?
kristen in montreal: "I read a wonderful blog that seemed to summarize my feelings on the matter very well. I urge everyone to take a look."
That blog, by PZ Myers' daughter Skatje, BTW, has sometimes been part of the problem as well as the solution:
"Next idea for a blog post is 'Why I don�t believe in god.' I suddenly realised how necessary it is for me to condense my beliefs and reasoning in retard-friendly format. This format is important for the audience I am targeting with it"
To be fair to her, after I pointed out the obvious implication of those words, she did say after the fact that the audience in question was, in her words, "the especially stupid high school people who can't seem to understand anything I say and completely miss the point in almost every reply to me."
(Unfortunately, I had already rubbed that quote of hers in PZ Myers' face with a hefty dollop of sarcasm, which cost me the ability to post at Pharyngula, and temporarily cost PZ the ability to count. He seems to have thought I did multiple times what I only did once. It was that event that led Skatje to say that she was only talking about her high school peers.)
I still don't think Skatje quite gets it. She almost gets it when she writes about militant atheism,
"I don�t think it's doing much good of de-converting theists or teaching them to use scientific thought in everyday life. Who wants to listen to what someone says after being slapped in the face?"
but then writes that the militant atheists help rally other atheists, which is only half-true. "Moderate" atheists like me look at what Dawkins and company are doing and think, "Oh, wonderful, if I come out as an atheist, I'm going to get associated with those public atheists that are calling theists 'faith-heads.' Gee, thanks." That's not exactly an attitude that encourages me to rallying to these militant atheists.
Yes, do you? The god-talk is just that - talk. Newton's equations don't actually include divine intervention, and the condition of the solar system doesn't require it. I'm sure he wanted his models to imply the existence of an extraordinarily powerful being responsible for the condition of our everyday lives, but they simply don't.
And again, in trying to make the case that his work showed what he wanted it to show, he stepped outside of the scientific method and generated invalid conclusions.
kristen inn Montreal wrote:
This is an excellent point. It has been made many times before and will probably have to be made many more times before some people will actually listen. But a truth does not become less true by repetition.
You do not arouse interest in a topic and a desire to learn more by calling potential students 'ignorant' or 'idiots' and imply they are irredeemably stupid for not knowing it already. I - and, I suspect, others here - understand that all too well from the prolonged torment of mathematics classes.
The usual counter to this argument from the zealots is to appeal to precendents such as the women's suffrage and civil rights movements where, it is claimed, significant progress was only achieved by their more militant members.
But was it really that simple?
Could it not be that tiny minorities, however outrageous, lack the power, on their own, to overcome huge cultural inertia. If they work, it is by pecking away at the "body politick" until they find a point sensitive enough to arouse a response. Having attracted that attention, however, it has to be exploited effectively by convincing this new audience that what is being demanded is not a threat, not the destruction of all they hold dear, but real progress from which all will ultimately benefit. That is where the moderates come in.
Persuade enough of the audience of the merits of a case and "tipping-point' is reached where resistance weakens and eventually buckles under sustained pressure. The trick is to undermine resistance not to strengthen it by appearing to be too much of a threat. Militants are threatening, moderates are not.
J. J. Ramsey wrote:
"Faith-head" was a bad choice of insult because it echoes the racist slur of "rag-head" as applied to anyone thought to be Arab.
The hard fact is, though, that sometimes people will only pay attention if you shout loudly and become obnoxious, rather like the fact that we often only notice some injury or illness when the pain becomes too intense to ignore.
Ian H Spedding FCD: "The hard fact is, though, that sometimes people will only pay attention if you shout loudly and become obnoxious"
Shouting loudly can be necessary, yes. If one is using the dictionary meaning of "obnoxious," that is, "odiously or disgustingly objectionable," that is far more questionable. The phrase I hope that you are really looking for is "in-your-face." It would take a racist to call the marches and boycotts led by MLK disgustingly objectionable, but I think we can all agree that MLK was in people's faces.
Furthermore, there are some tactics that are just hypocritical for a rationalist to use. Using an epithet like "faith-head" is one. The analogy with "rag-head" is more apt than you might think. "Rag-head" is nominally a synonym for "Arab," but it also implies a picture of negative stereotypes of Arabs. The same can be said for other words that are nominal synonyms of more neutral words but are meant as terms of abuse: "Hun" for Germans in the World Wars, "Jap" for the Japanese in WWII, and the N-bomb for blacks up to the present day. All of these words call to mind negative stereotypes. "Faith-head" or "theistard" or "Christard" aren't just expressions of contempt, but also a rhetorical trick to bring up stereotypes about the religious and imply that they are being stupid and/or deluded. In short, using those words isn't just mean, it's dishonest.
But the religious are being delusional - and frequently, stupid. It isn't a stereotype.
Caledonian: "But the religious are being delusional - and frequently, stupid."
The religious can easily be described as mistaken, but the word "delusion" has too much baggage from its usage as a clinical term for it to be a good descriptor of most religious people, unless you really want to imply that the religious generally belong in loony bins. But then, maybe you do want to imply that.
As for stupidity, that varies quite a bit among religious people, and implying that they are stupid in general is inaccurate.
Quoth JJ Ramsey: "Why should this follow at all? It isn't as if the majority is necessarily in a position to keep the fringe elements from meeting together, pooling their resources, disseminating their propaganda, etc."
I have to respectfully disagree to this. To my knowledge, no mainline denomination has issued any public statements condemning the actions of their extremist believers. Why would it be out of the question for, say, the Presbyterian Church to issue a press release on the order of "No, really, we're a peaceful, inclusive religion and these people most certainly do not speak for us"? The silence of the majority lends legitimacy to the extremist crusades, in my opinion, much the same way that Michael Behe's academic credentials lends support to the ID crusade. People unaccustomed to questioning authority will take the silence of the majority for tacit endorsement - and isn't it these very people we wish to speak to? This is what I am looking for when I say that the moderate Christians (Muslims, et al) need to find their collective voices, although I do appreciate your pointing to those examples, none of which I was aware of.
"The moderates have not been silent, they just haven't been heard that loudly."
This is why I wish to see the organized religious leadership speaking out...no louder voices exist in the world of man as far as the congregations are concerned.
I can't say offhand that I have seen anyone argue better than you have for the position that moderates enable extremists.
I thank you for the compliment, and at the same time cringe at the thought that I'm the A-game on this front.
Which is all the more reason not to fall into the trap of acting the way that too many people think that atheists act. If anything, the goal should be to create a dissonance between what people think atheists are like and how the atheists that people see actually behave.
For myself, I do agree very much with leading by example and do everything I can to promote the very dissonance you mention. However, such subtlety gets lost in our short-attention-span society, and while I choose this method for myself, I also understand why others choose the noisier route. Philosophical consistency and silent protests are wonderful, but they get lost in the clatter, and, if we want to be seen and heard on a large scale, some noise will be a necessary evil.
I greatly appreciated this post, John. Thank you.
PuckishOne: "To my knowledge, no mainline denomination has issued any public statements condemning the actions of their extremist believers."
With all due respect, you are shifting the goalposts. Earlier, you complained about the supposed silence of moderates. When it was pointed out that they had not been silent, you then added two arbitrary restrictions, first, that it be from a mainline denomination, which would exclude many left-leaning evangelicals, and second, that it be in the form of a public statement, which would exclude the controversial ad from the United Church of Christ that contrasted the inclusiveness of this denomination with the exclusiveness of other churches.
In general? They're stupid in the one thing that unites them as a category. Who cares about 'general'?
JJ: I apologize for not being more clear earlier, and in that light you're correct - it does look like I'm shifting the goalposts. I'm not, really; what I've been after all along (and, in hindsight, have poorly stated) is exactly what I mentioned in that last comment. Of course I appreciate the words of the moderates who have written articles and blogs and generally included atheists in their realm of tolerance, and this is in no way meant to belittle their actions. However, I believe that it requires the pronouncement on that grander scale to have any true effect society-wide. This was in no way meant to shift the requirements whatsoever; basically it's just me clarifying my argument on the fly, and again, I apologize for not having had it properly sorted to begin with.
By the way, the UCC ad was not aired on any of the major networks, and I am unaware of any equivalent print ad that was run in major publications (though I'd love to see one). Had it been aired, however, I would be applauding UCC as the only denomination with the courage to publicly confront fundamentalist exclusion and maybe - just maybe - my argument would have come off a bit better from the first. ;)
Caledonian you are of course naturally aware of the fact that most of the scientist world view that you preach so fervently was created by 'deluded stupid' religious believers.
PuckishOne: "However, I believe that it requires the pronouncement on that grander scale to have any true effect society-wide."
True, but that has more to do with the media's foibles than the moderates. For example, the UCC commercials were barred from airplay by gun-shy networks.
PuckishOne: "This was in no way meant to shift the requirements whatsoever; basically it's just me clarifying my argument on the fly, and again, I apologize for not having had it properly sorted to begin with."
Fair enough. Apology accepted.
Thony C., you are of course aware that those religious believers had to compartmentalize away their beliefs and exclude them from their thinking to get anything done.
Excluding a phenomenon with real effects from attempts to describe the behavior of the world is madness. Why, then, is it necessary to do so to accomplish scientific work?
When you would claim they were acting as scientists, they weren't acting in ways compatible with the beliefs they claim to hold. When they were acting in a way compatible with their supposed beliefs, they weren't being scientists.
They weren't actually good scientists, and they weren't good believers. They switched from one mode of thought to the other, depending on what was most convenient.
Science doesn't permit that.
Caledonian: "[The religious are] stupid in the one thing that unites them as a category. Who cares about 'general'?"
Being mistaken is not the same as being stupid.
When the mistake in question is painfully obvious, there are only a few possibilities.
1) The person isn't intelligent enough to go through the process of analysis and discover the error
2) The person hasn't bothered to go through the process of analysis and discover the error
In either case, the person is stupid - although for very different reasons.
Science is not a set of beliefs, it's a set of techniques for acquiring knowledge. Someone applying those techniques is, at that point, acting as a scientist. The fact that at other times the same person may act in other roles doesn't detract from the science he does "on the job". Saying that believers can't be scientists is a ridiculous thing, and I don't anyone other than Caledonian has said otherwise.
I think that there is a philosophical problem with compartmentalization, and that is just that it is difficult to know where to draw the line. What I would like to see in practice is a separation between pragmatic beliefs and techniques used for day-to-day problem solving, and the more esoteric beliefs about the nature of existence, morality, blah blah blah. Regardless of whether one believes in God or in reincarnation or whatever, one can believe in the internal combusion engine, the laws of thermodynamics, Maxwell's equations, etc. So there is common ground between people of diverse beliefs. You can believe whatever you like on your own time, but when it comes to public policy, the arguments must be presented in pragmatic terms of evidence and rationality.
That's why I feel it is so important to consider the scientific method to be neutral with regard to metaphysical claims. Only a neutral methodology can serve as the trusted final arbiter between different camps.
And someone not applying those techniques is, at that point, not acting as a scientist.
The key is recognizing that science doesn't permit other techniques to be used. It's not just a matter of what a person is doing at any single moment, but what they do across time. People who violate the rules of science aren't scientists, even if their behavior happens to be compatible with those rules at specific instances.
John Wilkins, can you block Caledonian? He's ruining an otherwise pleasant discussion and I don't think he's going to stop anytime soon.
PuckishOne, I know for a fact that although Judaism isn't organized under one big tent like Catholicism, many Jewish temples have spoken out with support for gay rights and condemned our more violent Israeli cousins. And forty years ago, the Jewish community was almost unilaterally in support of the civil rights movement. Also, many Muslim religious leaders have issued fatwahs against terrorism.
What tends to happen, when religious moderates are fed up with their organization, is not to start a coup, but to split off and start their own religion. The Christians did it to the Jews 2000 years ago, the Protestants did it to the Catholics 500 years ago, and the Unitarians and Episcopalians did it recently. People are ultimately going to do whatever is easiest on their community. And it's much less stressful to start your own group then to try to fight the group you're in. Every time I see a new Christian sect pop up, I consider that the moderates condemning their fundamentalist brethren.
Science is a system of standards that determines when truth claims can be considered valid. If you hold standards incompatible with those of science, and call things valid that it doesn't permit, or call things invalid that it does permit, it makes absolutely no difference whether you're obviously violating science at any given moment in time.
If you call scientifically-invalid reasoning valid, you are incompatible with science, even if whatever argument or investigation you're involved with isn't.
This isn't a difficult point to grasp, and its correctness is obvious.
Caledonian: "When the mistake in question is painfully obvious ..."
But we aren't dealing with something painfully obvious, especially not to someone steeped in a religious culture. Furthermore, the arguments against God tend to be indirect, circumstantial, and cumulative. It's not as if there is a nice, neat naked emperor at which one can just point, the conceit of the "Courtier's Reply" notwithstanding.
BTW, Brandon, I would not call the early Christians or the Protestants moderates. They were extreme in their own ways. I don't think your recounting of the history of the Unitarians and Episcopals is all that accurate either.
J. J. Ramsey: Furthermore, the arguments against God tend to be indirect, circumstantial, and cumulative.
You must be confusing the arguments against a god with arguments for a god.
2 minutes later:
There are two differences between 'Everyone has toxic views' and 'most people aren't reasonable' :
(a) The second makes an exception for a minority.
(b) The second does not necessarily imply that 'not reasonable' is equivalent to 'toxic' - but Caledonian's past posts are surely more consistent with the view that 'not reasonable' is equivalent to 'toxic' .
You ignore the furor over Linus Pauling, Nobel-prize winning chemist, wrote some of the greatest chemistry textbooks ever. Then he started promoting all sorts odd ideas about Vitamin C - few of which were supported by the available evidence. Lynn Margulis on AIDS, Penn Jillette (not a scientists, but certainly an avid promoter of skepticism) on smoking, Micheal Shermer (pre 2004) on global warming ... I could go on and on. The real world ignores such clean and convenient demarcations.
There are many objects which are easily defined as 'alive' or 'not alive' . But there are also prions and viruses.
It's interesting that you use the strongly pejorative phrase 'loony bins' to refer to places which in modern times, are devoted to helping people cope with mental diseases. As for whether religious people could benefit from such treatment, I will only observe that every week, Orac brings up an example of some unfortunate who has made a devastatingly bad decision about their health due to religion.
Of course we are!
What are the criteria for being alive? If prions and viruses meet all of the criteria, they're alive. If they lack even one, they're not. It's that simple.
The problem is that most people do not possess explicit criteria for judging whether something is alive, and they lack insight into the implicit (and highly complex) criteria their minds actually use to make that judgement.
People can apply the scientific method equally consistently, yet possess different stores of information, and come to different conclusions, so the mere fact that the people llewelly mentioned espouse positions that don't match generally-accepted ones doesn't in itself tell us anything about whether they are scientists. What matters is the consistency of their method for deciding which conclusions are valid and which are invalid.
If they have departed from the standards of science - if they claim as valid the scientifically invalid, or invalid the scientifically valid - then they are not scientists. The scientific standards of validity/invalidity are clear, explicit, and objective. Do they follow them or not?
Caledonian wrote:
Quite the opposite.
If someone investigates of some aspect of the universe through the methodological tools of science, then they are doing science. If they do so on a regular basis then they are entitled to be considered a scientist. If they do so as a job then they are a professional scientist.
But I doubt that any scientist has ever applied the scientific method to every aspect of their lives every waking minute. Was Richard Feynman not a scientist because he played bongo drums and picked locks for a hobby?
Science is also a process and a communal activity even if that community is dispersed through space and time. What counts is the honesty and integrity of the research. It doesn't even matter if religious beliefs influence what is done as long as it it reported accurately and openly so that others can study the data and test the reasoning. That's what counts.
I very strongly suspect that Feynman approached playing drums and picking locks the same way he approached physics. Science is fairly commonsensical - it can be as easily applied to determining why a car won't start as to how stars die.
If you can demonstrate that Feynman accepted as valid arguments that violated the principles of the scientific method, I will agree that Feynman wasn't a scientist - and the status that people accord him will be irrelevant.
Accurate and open reporting of one's actions are necessary, but not sufficient, for science.
llewelly: "It's interesting that you use the strongly pejorative phrase 'loony bins' to refer to places which in modern times, are devoted to helping people cope with mental diseases."
The implication of "delusion" is usually strongly pejorative as well, and the people who use it as a pejorative are probably thinking of a caricature of mental illness rather than the serious reality. "Loony bin" seems more suited to that caricature than the more serious "mental hospital."
llewelly: "As for whether religious people could benefit from such treatment, I will only observe that every week, Orac brings up an example of some unfortunate who has made a devastatingly bad decision about their health due to religion."
Which on its own doesn't say whether it is accurate to describe the religious in general as deluded.
Me: Furthermore, the arguments against God tend to be indirect, circumstantial, and cumulative.
matthew: You must be confusing the arguments against a god with arguments for a god.
Not at all. Bear in mind that arguing against a god implies discrediting what people think is evidence for the god, and this is non-trivial.
So, Caledonian, as our resident Platonist:
If that happens, do you throw out all of Feynman's work too? Should the "real" scientists stop using his results? If not, how do you account for a non-scientist being able to do valuable scientific work? How do you justify calling someone who other "real" scientists rely on for their own work not a scientist? If there is an essence to being a scientist, why isn't there an essence to the results that person produces?
JJ: You are a gentleman and a scholar. I'm glad that this hasn't deteriorated into a big "well, f*ck you too" contest like I've seen on some of the other blogs. I agree that the popular media exacerbate the problem, by refusing to air material such as the UCC ad and instead featuring pointless "debates" between the sides that are really just well-staged carnival sideshows. But, like any other provider of a product, the media provide what its customers demand, and that speaks to a larger portion of the population that very likely must include moderates of all stripes, religious and otherwise.
Brandon: You may have hit upon a big reason that I came into this debate unprepared, as it were. Having been raised nominally Catholic, I am far more familiar with that religious tradition than others, so this is likely why I tend to look at it from a "big tent" organizational standpoint. I am aware of the longstanding Jewish tradition of support for civil rights and secular government, and I applaud it and support it wholeheartedly.
As to the notion of a fatwah against Islamic fundamentalists, that seems to me to be a contradiction: "We are opposed to the extremists' misrepresentation of our faith as a violent one (which includes the extremists' issuing of fatwahs against westerners, Jews and Christians) by...issuing a fatwah"? However, I'm not well-read on Islam and its history, so that reaction may be a function of that ignorance.
Additionally, the idea of Protestant religions simply breaking into new sects to protest extremism seems to me to be an addition to the problem rather than a solution. Aren't the Assemblies of God and Pentecostal sects (the major fundamentalist churches in my area) examples of such breakaway groups from the mainstream? What about the deep schism within the Baptist church that's resulted in the creation of at least one major new breakaway group? The sects that divorce themselves from the mainstream tend to be the extremists rather than the moderates, from what I have seen.
But what do you do if reality has a liberal bias? If science endorses one of the sides in this debate, that's their problem, not that of science.
-------------------------
Concerning comment 103, it's not so much cheating as a slippery slope. National Socialism, Maoism, Stalinism, and Kimilsungism have everything of a religion, except the afterlife, which only Kim Il-Sung has (he's still the president of North Korea, I kid you not). Do all religions have an afterlife...?
I agree. The difference between the truest of Scotsmen and the rest of the world seems to be that (consistent as he always is)...
...apparently he draws the lines through continua always at one extreme, never anywhere between the extremes, and never at the one that is conventionally prefixed with "not". In that, Caledonian, you are unique as far as I can tell. So don't go around implying it's a fact that "[i]f they lack even one, they're not", because, you see, I can turn it around: if they have even one of the criteria, they aren't "dead"... I think you've fallen into a linguistic trap.
Ha! That's funny! You're very funny, John.
However, you are also mistaken. I'm not a Platonist, and nothing I've said reasonably leads to the conclusion that I am.
Were his arguments valid, or invalid? If there were invalidities in his work, his conclusions weren't justified.
Compartmentalization.
We've been over that already.
Essence? No such thing. There is the essential, though - the necessary and sufficient requirements. It's a matter of categorization.
If there isn't an essence to being a "scientist" then why isn't the word a simple descriptor of "a person who does science" -- compartmentalized or not? What other element is needed to describe a "scientist" and why is that other element not an essence?
I'd like to say something about that fallacy - the No True Scotsman. Most people don't understand what is actually is.
The fallacy isn't about 'defining a concept through explicit criteria' being wrong. It's about refusing to acknowledge that you either granted a label in error, or were wrong about the criteria, when confronted with contradictory evidence.
If you don't believe that it's possible to categorize things, then why would you care whether people 'adjusted' their definitions on the fly or refused to acknowledge commonly-accepted definitions without openly stating so?
Brandon, Caledonian, whose views I find offensive and as some have noted essentialistic, has done or said nothing bannable. If people find him hard to stomach, stop discussing with him. If he gets onto invective, then he will be banned, but so far his views are within the pale.
At the very least he is a living example of the point I was trying to make.
We've been over that before, too.
"A person who does science" is the definition I'm using for 'scientist', just as you are. The problem - as should be perfectly clear by now - is that we have radically different understandings of what "doing science" involves.
A person can fail to practice science not only by rejecting the rules of science, but by going beyond them - by inclusion as easily as exclusion.
For example, a person might hold a complex set of beliefs that applied rules in certain contexts and contradictory rules in others - which would be an example of what we call 'compartmentalization'. I'm confident that Ken Miller believes that he can both believe in miracles in the context of certain religious doctrines he's picked up and disbelieve in them in the context of his professional work, and in a sense, he's correct. But he's violated the practice of science in the process by making an exception to its rules. Since he doesn't practice science - he practices a more complex method that permits things science rejects - he is therefore not a scientist.
How many more times do we have to go over this?
Seconded ... for what its worth. Being a pain should not be grounds for exile.
Really? Producing valuable scientific work isn't "doing science"?
There is the "essence" you claim. According to you, science isn't an activity that humans engage in at times in their lives and not at other times, it is a thing, an entity, that has an existence in and of itself that can be 'gone beyond' even when you aren't intending to do science at all.
re the Scotsman:
Since you admit that no one else holds to your definition of "scientist" and since it results in people who everyone agrees are great scientists (such as Newton and Kepler and Dobzhansky and myriad others) being labeled "non-scientists," can we agree that yours is not only not the commonly-accepted one but is a truly eccentric definition?
I hope you aren't under the impression that I'm doing this for you. I'm just making sure that anyone who might innocently wander in here doesn't accidently get the impression that you know what you are talking about.
Of course it's a thing and an entity - as are all abstractions.
And of course science is an activity that humans can engage in at some times and not at others. But they can't not-engage in it some of the time, and be accorded the status of one-who-engages-in-science. If you make claims about the nature of validity other than those made by science, you can't be said to be practicing it.
Look at the Ken Miller example, again. The concept of miracles - that is, violations of the nature of things - is one that science rejects fundamentally: if something happens, that event is described by the fundamental rules of existence, by definition. Yet miracles are a major aspect of the doctrine of Miller's religion, and presumably (as he claims) he believes in that doctrine.
Given those points, what can be said about whether Miller follows science?
Alchemists made a lot of discoveries and developed a lot of techniques that were vitally important for the science of chemistry. Does that make the alchemists scientists?
That Miller is a scientist when he is doing science, an art lover when he is unscientifically asserting the beauty of some painting, a theist when he is engaged in his religion and that your points are obviously wrong, since they result in obviously wrong conclusions, such as that Newton, Keppler and Dobzhansky weren't scientists.
When and for as long as they acted like scientists, (i.e. did "valuable scientific work," the criteria we were talking about before you tried to change the subject), as in repeating and confirming their techniques and carefully recording the results, sure they were, even though the term wasn't in use then. Otherwise, there must be some other essence to being a scientist than just "doing science."
But that's the point - because he believes an exception can be made to the rules of science, a possibility science forbids, he's never practicing science. He's instead practicing something else that looks like science some of the time.
If you play a game you call 'chess', but you play it by different rules than what is understood by that name, you're not a chessplayer - no matter how much you fiddle with knights and pawns and rooks.
Oh? And what standard for 'scientist' are you using? It's not "one who practices science", since science as we understand it today hadn't yet been formalized and they didn't follow those rules anyway?
It's one thing to decide that an argument must be wrong, because it leads to a conclusion you know is wrong. But if you can't actually identify an error in the argument, you have to consider the possibility that what you 'know' just isn't so. That doesn't seem to be what you're doing - you just keep insisting that those people are scientists.
Ah, that's just the point. They did work that was later valuable to science, but they never 'acted like scientists' because they didn't follow the method.
You don't seem to be grasping the idea that just because you behave for a short period of time in a way consistent with a method, doesn't mean you're following that method. Science isn't only about what you do, it's about why you do it and what you claim about it. Alchemists may have done a few things in the same way that the chemists would later do them, but they didn't do them for the same reasons, and they certainly didn't make the same claims about them. They weren't scientists because they weren't practicing science.
How many times are we going to have to go over this?
Let me just pick up this bit that I missed:
If it is a human abstraction (forget for the moment whether abstractions are "things"), then its meaning is controlled by the understanding of humans. Human understanding is more than overwhelmingly that Newton, Keppler and Dobzhansky, et al. are scientists. There is no ambiguity here that you can appeal to -- no one agrees with your definition of the abstraction. As such, your understanding of the abstraction is flat-out wrong if it is a human abstraction.
The only way you can argue that everyone else is wrong and you are right is if there is some essence outside of humans and their understanding that you can appeal to -- Plato's divine realities outside the cave, whose shadow you, and you alone, have correctly interpreted.
Thus, you are appealing to an essence or are just wrong, take your pick.
Wrong. The understanding of humans is controlled by its meaning. Do you think that chemical interactions didn't exist until humans developed an understanding of chemistry?
Ah, appeals to popular opinion. Fantastic.
Among various other things, what you're doing here is holding the popular judgement about whether various people were scientists constant, and letting the nature of science vary - and so you conclude that 'science' must include their actions.
I, on the other hand, are leaving the status of those people up for grabs, and holding the nature of science constant - and so I am forced to conclude that those people were not practicing the scientific method.
The key issue, then, is which concept is more fundamental: 'scientist' or 'science'. I say that 'scientist' can only be defined in terms of 'science', and science is the basic concept. If you treat popular opinion as veridical, it's no wonder you've abandoned conceptual consistency.
We call that 'reality', not 'essence'. But whatever floats your boat.
So anyone who doesn't do science exactly as we understand it today isn't a scientist? Then there is no reason to believe anyone today is a scientist because tomorrow the method may (and, given our experience, almost certainly will) change again. This is just squirming.
But Newton, Keppler and Dobzhansky did act like scientists many times and in many ways and often followed the methods we use now, though not always, anymore than scientists today follow the method all the time in everything they do.
(Sigh) As long as you keep pretending to know what your talking about, I suppose.
Oh bullcrap! You claim that science is an "abstraction" one moment and "reality" the next. I'm just trying to keep up with the ever changing story you are trying to sell.
If it is an abstraction, a human concept, then it it is determined by humans and a definition that cannot explain nor justify why it deviates from the account not just of the general populace but every expert in science and the philosophy of science is either a bad definition or an appeal to an essence outside human knowledge and practice.
If your definition is somehow "real" outside of human understanding, then you are, in Plato's sense, appealing to an essence. No amount of lipstick is ever going to make your pig prettier.
No, anyone who doesn't follow the scientific method.
No, John. Conventions change. Confidence levels, standardized measures - they change. The concepts that make up science haven't changed, nor will they, regardless of what people may eventually stick the label on. A rose by any other name...
It's what is done, why it's done, and what we claim about it that defines science. Just because some other method partially shares one of those things with the scientific doesn't make it the scientific.
You didn't understand the question: how many times do we have to go over this before you understand the argument I'm making and can begin to evaluate it?
Abstractions exist in reality, John.
See, this is part of the problem - you seem to have a very unusual sense of what certain words indicate. They don't mean what you think they do.
Do you also believe that the chemical elements didn't exist until people came up with the concept of them? Their understanding adapted to correspond to the real phenomena that took place long before we thought about them.
Please try to respond to the argument that's actually being made, and not some vaguely similar one you already know is wrong. (Although, given your reliance on social construction, you might want to reconsider the stuff you 'know' once in a while.)
Wow John, 154 comments. I'm just adding a gratuitous one to get my name on the ScienceBlogs prize list.
Am currently reading Hitchens' latest. More to my liking than Dawkins' latest (in content and structure), although his pomposity is a bit painful.
Sorry, I didn't want to imply that you had committed that fallacy. I agree you haven't. I was just trying to make some fun of your "name". Have you chosen it in reference to the No True Scotsman fallacy?
OK, my summary of the ongoing word game:
- If you use the scientific method some of the time (e. g. in the lab) and don't use it some of the time (e. g. "when unscientifically asserting the beauty of some painting"), Caledonian doesn't call you a scientist. To qualify as a scientist under Caledonian's definition, you have to apply the scientific method to everything, and that 24/7.
- Nobody else seems to be using that definition.
- No wonder nobody agrees with him: when people don't agree on the definitions, they can't agree on what follows from the correct definitions, obviously.
Now, Caledonian, why aren't you an agnostic on everything that's untestable and outside the scope of Ockham's Razor?
So you think "science" exists separate and apart from human beings and is a "thing" as real as matter? Now I think you are going even beyond essentialism and slopping over into idealism but it's hard to tell because your story keeps changing.
But just a few posts ago, you were saying that the practices of science were only "formalized" since the time of Newton. By whom and from what? Are you saying that the concepts of science existed before people existed?
And, since you are the only one to hold this view of science, are we to take it that you are the person who has "formalized" the rules of science?
I'll state clearly (unlike some people) what I think (based on some little reading of philosophy of science, unlike some people): Science is a human activity. It is like baseball, which is played, as it must be, within the rules of nature (gravity, inertia, etc.), but which has rules that do not exist outside the collective assent of the participants. We strive to maximize the concurrence of science's results with the results of nature and, therefore, the rules are not capricious (but neither are baseball's completely). But those rules have and will continue to change as our understanding and abilities change.
No one need play baseball all the time, even if gravity and inertia operate all the time. Baseball-like activities -- such as cricket -- are permitted and all anyone need do to play one rather than another is to announce which rules they are going to apply. The only "error" is to try to play cricket by the rules of baseball or vice versa. So too with science. Someone can announce that s/he is going to do science today and then, the next day, announce that s/he is going to do religion. The only "sin" is to confuse which one you are doing at any one time and try to play one by the rules of the other.
It's real hard to do that while the "argumaent" keeps changing so much.
Caledonian would you please be so kind and finally define in clear simple terms what the concepts 'science', 'scientist' and 'scientific method' are. You keep stating that such clear, unambiguous and rationally (your term, and while your about you could maybe explain what the term rational means to you?) indisputable definitions exists so could you please explicate them now, so that all the rest of us can share in your infinite wisdom. Above all I am curious as to what exactly this 'scientific method', the practice of which make somebody to a 'scientist', really is.
Do the Julia sets exist separate and apart from human beings and are "things" as real as matter?
Do not characterize your failure to comprehend as inconsistency on my part, please.
What, do you think that concepts didn't exist before people recognized and described them, that people created them from nothing and somehow caused the universe to be compatible with them? You seem to be confusing the descriptions with what is being described.
The only one here. I guess you don't get out much.
I'd quibble with your wording, but so far, so good.
We strive to maximize the concurrence of science's results with the results of nature and, therefore, the rules are not capricious (but neither are baseball's completely)
Wrong. Science's rules depend upon the definition of rationally justified conclusion-drawing. They are not capricious at all.
Even with an arbitrary collection of rules - such as baseball - only some of the rules have been linked with the label, which is why people can have different positions on, say, the infield fly rule, and put those differences into practice, and still be playing the game. Those basic rules define what is meant by 'baseball' and are what separate the game from others, like basketball and golf.
No. Do not confuse our understanding and the underlying reality.
Science involves claims about the validity of claims. You cannot hold that a different system also produces valid results without contradicting science, nor can you stop practicing science and be consistent with it.
Nope. That person is violating the claims about what sorts of arguments are scientifically valid. You can't say you're a Roman Catholic one day, and a Hindu the next, and say that you're a practicing Roman Catholic. If you even think that you *could* validly claim to be a Hindu, you're not a practicing Roman Catholic.
This is becoming tiresome.
JJ: as far as I was following the discussion, we were focused on this question: "At what point does robust, aggressive argument (which we all agree to be legitimate) become unacceptable on the basis that it is something more than that ... i.e., (in some impermissible sense) intolerant?"
My point is that Dawkins etc are quite prepared to tolerate all sorts of things they don't like. They're not calling for fire and the sword ... not even against religious indoctrination of children, which they despise. Contrast all those religionists who do, in fact, call for fire and the sword to stop abortion, stem cell research, and many other things that they dislike. They haven't had too much success in Western countries of late, but as an exception have a look at what's been happening with reproductive laws in Italy. Indeed, in many parts of the world fire and the sword are still brought against atheists. The tendency seems to be inherent in religious belief. That's another reason why we need a new Enlightenment.
Sounds really impressive Cal but what is the "definition of rationally justified conclusion-drawing"? I particularly like the hyphenated "conclusion-drawing" it really creates the impression that you actually know what you are talking about instead of just blowing hot air. While you're about it you could also define the rest of the 'scientific method' that you keep on evoking but still refuse to elucidate.
To be fair, if his definition of "scientist" is narrower than most others' here, his definition of "science" is closer to something that could also be defined as "rational thought" (YMMV). So one does not need to run around in a lab coat performing experiments 24/7, but one needs to have the same standards of evaluating claims. Or something like that.
In the same vein, looking at a painting can be "science" since in a way you are "measuring" something and evaluating it. I have to confess to some sympathy for this argument, because the other way lies the insufferable "other ways of knowing" crapola. There's nothing unscientific or orthogonal to science about saying "this painting is beautiful", as long as you mean "I find this painting beautiful" and not "this painting adheres to a universal standard of beauty surpassing human preference".
The mathematical concept of the algorithm doesn't exist outside human beings, though what we may make using the numerical relationships described by the algorithm can be as real as matter.
Yes, I think idealism is wrong. The concepts we have about nature are not what is real; it is nature that is real and our concepts of it are (more and/or less accurate) attempts to model nature. Those models did not and do not exist separate and apart from humans (excluding consideration of some similarly oriented aliens who thought them first). Certainly our concept of science is not real in any sense that matter is real.
Name one other person whose definition of "scientist" excludes Newton, Keppler and Dobzhansky!
On what scientific grounds do you say that that there is an underlying "reality" to our concepts of science, as opposed to the reality of the things that our concepts are about? Aren't you claiming that all truth claims have to be scientific claims? What empiric evidence do you have for the existence of these concepts outside the human brain?
Yes, we know you keep reciting this like a mantra but you have yet to justify it. The empiric evidence goes against it. As even you admitted, people can and, in fact, do hold to different systems of thought and produce "valuable scientific work." Asserting the opposite of what the empiric evidence shows doesn't sound very scientific to me.
Oh, trust me, Caledonian, it was tiresome long before people started to try to get you banned. But I'll give you credit ... you've never let being wrong stand in the way of your being tiresome.
Caledonian @ #145:
Ah, yes, reification. Didn't you condemn me roundly for that? Tsk.
If you believed in God, you would be the type of person who believed (the way most 13-year-olds seem to, in my experience) that God opened up your skull and dumped all knowledge of the True Nature of Reality directly in there, so that of course you have all the answers, and anyone who disagrees with you merely does so because they are sadly deluded idiots. In this respect, I find you no different from the majority of creationists. As it stands you do not ascribe your Vast and Inerrant Understanding Of The True Nature Of Reality to anything outside your own supposed intelligence, but that doesn't make it any more accurate or any more charming.
You seem to claim to have the final word on who is or is not a scientist. Until and unless you become the ultimate world authority to whom everyone else MUST defer, this is merely tiresome. The common, consensus definition of a scientist is simply someone who does science; who produces and/or communicates scientific work. That leaves all the rest of their actions and beliefs out of it entirely. So, you don't get to redefine what everyone else thinks at will, much as I know you would enjoy that. Get over yourself.
Re: the original post. John Wilkins, thank you.
The people who think that
"Religion is based on received wisdom and faith, not on careful examination of evidence in order to reach a conclusion, and in fact it often requires that contradictory evidence be ignored. Thus, it is not a good tool for understanding the world, and it is CERTAINLY not a good tool on which to base public policy."
and
"Everyone who believes in God is a deluded idiot."
...are equal and functionally equivalent statements, are not dealing with the real world. The first statement is not "pandering" or "giving religion a special pass." But it isn't calling a lot of normal, middle-of-the-road people names, either, and the two statements will not elicit the same kind of debate response...except with the extremists on both sides.
For those who want to make politics and policy more "reality based", it would be a good start to stop believing in the fairy-tale utopia where religion gets shouted down and goes away. It won't. And in reality, attacking a belief and attacking the people who hold that belief are also very different things, frequently (not always, but frequently) getting you different results. The fact is, people often firm up their beliefs and settle in defensive roadblocks when faced with personal attacks, no matter how justified those attacks may be -- or how justified the attacker feels them to be, anyway. A visit or three to the Social Sciences Index for psychology papers on how belief is defended would probably go a long way towards illuminating this.
PuckishOne @ #112:
I can't speak for the US, but here in the UK, Muslim groups have been issuing statements like that on a regular basis, and many Protestant/Presbyterian groups have issued statements condemning extremist stances on specific issues like the condemnation of gays or the teaching of creationism in schools. It may simply be that these statements don't get the press time, because they are not as loud and interesting as the extremists.
Luna_the_cat: That is wonderful to hear - it's an excellent start, even if it is on the Other Side of the Pond. As I mentioned before, I do see the media's reluctance to air the moderate views as a major issue; however, if moderates & atheists called their local TV stations to protest the lack of moderate views in the same numbers that fundamentalists do against "liberal" views, we might just see a change.
Yes! Consistency is the whole point - without consistent standards for the sorts of arguments that count as valid, you can't practice science.
Yes!
You could also claim that the painting adheres to a universal standard - but you'd better be able to support and evaluate that claim. Making the claim but not supporting it, or insisting that it doesn't need to be supported, is contrary to science.
Thank you, windy. You made my mid-afternoon.
Russell Blackford: "JJ: as far as I was following the discussion, we were focused on this question: 'At what point does robust, aggressive argument (which we all agree to be legitimate) become unacceptable on the basis that it is something more than that ... i.e., (in some impermissible sense) intolerant?'"
I'd say it tends to happen when the argument stops being about rational debate and starts being about demonizing the opposition, playing to prejudices, slander, and so on. And we've already had a brush with this. For example, there was the "appeaser" rhetoric is used to paint those who take a pragmatic approach like Eugenie Scott's as moral cowards. It could get worse. Imagine a scenario where pointing out bad arguments against religion is routinely shouted down with content-free ridicule, accusations that one is an "apologist," etc. The New Atheists are more prone to encouraging such an environment, since there is so much emphasis on who is in the in-group and far less concern about correctness.
JJ, and now we are back with my original position, right?
Gee, SEED should run more of these comment competitions. 169 in one thread. I'll be getting delusions of PZhood next.
[Tugging at forelock}
Our services were satisfactory, M'Lud?
It'll do, Pieret. Pour yerself a brandy.
John the silverback wrote:
John the other silverback replied
Why be satisfied with a mere 170? Its only a short stretch to a double century!
I'm still waiting for Caledonian to deliver a definition for the scientific method. For several days he has repeatedly insisted that real science can only be produced by true scientists and that such legendary historical figures as Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton are just pretenders, hoaxers, snake oil salesmen in the true world of science because not all of the judgements that they made in their lives and that they claimed to be valid were obtained by using the scientific method. This according to the Gospel of Caledonian is the definition of a true scientist, the only person capable of producing real science i.e. that all of his/her judgements that he/she claims to be valid were obtained using the scientific method. This is all well and good but what exactly is the scientific method?
Now those of you who read Mr Wilkins' excellent blog might be wondering why I keep repeating this apparently trivial question after all we all know what the scientific method is don't we? However those of you like Mr Wilkins or the equally excellent Mr Pieret who have spent any time and effort seriously studying the philosophy of science will know that this question is anything other than trivial and that a precise definition of the scientific method is actually very, very difficult if not impossible. We all have a rough idea what we mean when we use this expression; it involves the presentation of a hypothesis, the checking of that hypothesis against the facts, if necessary the reformulation of said hypothesis in order to be able to subject it to tests, the evaluation of those tests and the comparison of the results that we have thereby obtained with the facts and so on and so on...
However the devil is, as they say, in the details. I am not going to present here, a full analysis of the results of subjecting the scientific method to thorough analysis, first of all it would take too long and secondly an inter-net comment column is not the right place to do so. I will however mention a few of the main problem areas with which some philosophers of science occupy their working lives. The first and most obvious one, is one that Mr Wilkins has brought up several times on this blog namely how and where do we obtain the hypotheses that we subject to the scientific method? If you can give an answer to this question that at least temporarily satisfies the scientific community you could become the next Thomas Kuhn (or, substitute your star philosopher of science of choice). Second problem is what constitutes an adequate test and how many such tests must a hypothesis survive in order to be considered a scientific theory? An adequate answer to this problem will bring you a guaranteed fifteen minutes of fame and the title as the next... (see above).
Both of these question make the assumption that the scientific method actually exist i.e. that there can only be one scientific method. Now some thinkers are heretical enough as to suggest that different scientific disciplines have differing methodologies some even go so far as to claim that different areas within the same discipline have differing methodologies. The horror, the horror a multitude of scientific methods how can Caledonian's poor true scientist possibly know, which one he has to apply to make a valid judgement?
Then of course there are the little niggardly questions with which one doesn't really want to occupy ones time but which keep coming back like a swarm of flies at a summer picnic. Which 'facts' are relevant to the explanatory scope of a given hypothesis? Which facts are relevant for the validation of a given test? If one or more facts appear to fall within the scope of a given hypothesis but are not explained by it can one afford to ignore them for the time being? Does a given test actually validate the hypothesis in the way that the tester claims or does another better explanation of the test results exist?
I could go on but I think I have said enough to show why I consider the question that I had presented three times to Caledonian is anything but trivial and that his wonderful definitions of science and of the scientist both of which rely on something that he refers to as the scientific method are actually built on sand and desperately need a new set of foundations.
With the usual apologies to Mr Wilkins for having taken up so much space on his comments column and also this time for having poached on his territory (after all he's the resident philosopher of science around here) and lastly to anybody, other than Caledonian, who has taken the trouble to read this, for being so long winded.
This might be going off on a tangent, but it seems to me that science doesn't actually require any beliefs at all, not in God, nor in evolution, nor in quantum mechanics. One can work out the consequences of various theories, and perform experiments to test them, without actually committing oneself to believing any of them.
Of course, when it comes time to make a decision, such as whether to vaccinate your children or whether to risk flying on the Space Shuttle, you have to take evidence into account, but it doesn't have to be in the form of: We will do whatever the "best" theory says is best. Instead, one can simultaneously take into account multiple possible theories, weighted by their Bayesian posterior likelihoods. In some cases, a theory may be so well-supported that in practice it is easier to just treat it as "true", but that's just a pragmatic decision based on convenience.
The desire to have an all-encompassing theory of life, the universe and everything is a great motivator for science, but it isn't strictly necessary.
The check is in the mail.
I must confess that raising the issue also crossed my mind but the thought of discussing it in the clumsy forum of blog comments with Caledonian was just too painful to contemplate. You are a braver man than I am, Gunga C.
Snakes. They all come from snakes.
Comment 175 is spot-on.
As explanation of "scientific method", let me suggest: As long as you keep asking yourself "if I were wrong, how would I know?", and stay able to answer that question in some affirmative way, you're doing science.
Ockham's Razor is included.
"One can work out the consequences of various theories, and perform experiments to test them, without actually committing oneself to believing any of them."
That pretty much describes the philosophy of science known as 'instrumentalism'. It works well if you're a physicist tackling the latest wierd outcome of quantum mechanics, but less well in other fields. ("My theory that these bones we keep finding are those of large reptiles has so far passed every test -- however, these posited 'dinosaurs' are merely a convenient model that links separate observations of large reptile bones together and should not be taken as representing reality," is a statement that'll cause massive hilarity amongst palaeontologists, for example.)
Fools rush in where catsharks fear to swim.
To quote Oscar Wilde; "I wish I had said that"
lorwerth Thomas writes:
And I suppose that they would be laughing at you, not with you.
Wrong.
"If I were wrong about the existence of Great Cthulhu, how would I know? Why, the Invisible Pink Unicorn and Flying Spaghetti Monster would tell me so, of course."
Caledonian, I think you need to start your own blog. Your wasting a lot of good stuff in comment boxes that IMHO merits individual postings.
For what it's worth, coming from me. But I'd be among your subscribers if you ever do.
:)
Daryl McCullough wrote:
Well clearly, you have to accept the underlying principle that the universe (or, maybe, "a" universe) behaves in a fashion that lends itself to predictive models. If the universe is chaotic, where there are no universal laws or constants, then the whole underlying premise of science becomes very shaky.
I have actually seen this argument used (by my brother-in-law, of all people) to state why science isn't all that useful. Sure, electrons behave in a fashion now that allows us to watch TV and use computers, but maybe they didn't ten thousand years ago, and maybe they won't tomorrow.
For anyone that holds that sort of belief, science, or gaining any knowledge, is pretty damned pointless.
If it's possible to analyze the statement "If the universe is chaotic, where there are no universal laws or constants" and produce the result then the whole underlying premise of science becomes very shaky, the premises of the argument are wrong.
Caledonian wrote:
Of course its wrong! On a formal level its wonderfully, gloriously and totally wrong but in the real everyday world its actually the way that most real scientists proceed.
Wrong again. That standard is necessary, but not sufficient. It was offered as a sufficient standard, which is incorrect.
Wilkins notes - correctly - in the most recent post to this blog that science excludes the supernatural. The previously-mentioned standard does not imply that restriction.
And if you were wrong about that assertion?
If you can't do it all the way down, it isn't science. :-)
It doesn't need to imply it. Instead, said standard follows from it.
You asked the question "If I were wrong about the existence of Great Cthulhu, how would I know?" and answered it with the following assertion: "Why, the Invisible Pink Unicorn and Flying Spaghetti Monster would tell me so, of course." Now you must repeat the process. If you were wrong about your assertion and the IPU and FSM would in fact not tell you, how would you know that?
With nature, this regress always ends at an experiment that you can repeat ad infinitum vel nauseam. With the ineffable, it ends just so. This is why appeals to the ineffable are not science.
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I have no problem with saying that "those supposed 'dinosaurs'" are to be taken as representing reality as far as we understand it today. Hey, it's not even possible to disprove solipsism. But I would add that the evidence is quite overwhelming.
WHY DID THE CALEDONIAN CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?
TO AVOID THE DEFINITION!
1) No one can do it "all the way down". If we accepted your claim, we would be forced to conclude that 'science' is impossible.
2) If you can use garbage responses to 'answer' the questions, questioning one's beliefs doesn't accomplish much. Questioning alone isn't sufficient.
A conclusion reach in one form or another by several major western thinkers during the last thousand years.
So there are no scientists, then?
Strange that you would have reacted so strongly to my assertion that certain famous figures weren't scientists... and then you turn around and say that NO ONE is a scientist.
Caledonian wrote:
I responded:
Caledonian replied:
Caledonian for somebody who claims to only think rationally (whatever that may mean) and to be consistently logically in his thought processes, you sometimes make some very strange deductions from other peoples postings.
Although I have claimed to be many things in my life and as big headed, arrogant and loud mouthed as I am I have never ever claimed to be "a major western thinker", so the statement of mine that you quote above does not reflect my own personal opinion on the possibility or non-possibility of science. Now it could be that you took an unjustified step in your thought processes and inferred that although not a "major western thinker" myself I am in agreement with one or more of the gentlemen referred to and therefore personally do not think that science is possible. If this should be the case I must hastily disillusion you and point out that such an inference is both unwarranted and incorrect. I was thinking, when I wrote the above, of three famous European philosophers each of whom rejected the possibility of science, in each case based on a particular and, in each case different, definition of science. As I do not hold any of the three definitions to be correct I natural do not consider any of the three rejections to be a valid rejection of the possibility of science. As to whether science is possible according to your definition of science we will apparently never know as you are obviously not prepared to enlighten us as to what your definition is.
Another excellent article.
It even had the faux scot in the comments, sometimes interesting to read what he writes. Not enlightening but interesting to come upon someone with such strong and wrong opinions.
You posted it for a reason. Presumably that reason supports your position - although as an argument, it would seem to have some deficiencies.
Caledonian sometimes your thought processes are really extraordinary at other times they are simply unfathomable. From DM's posting you drew, probably incorrectly, the conclusion that his suggestion would make science impossible, a thought that seemed to shock you. I merely pointed out that the impossibility of science had been postulated fairly often in the history of western thought and therefore by inference should not really appear so shocking.
You seem now to be arguing that people can only utter statements that they hold to be true and to represent their point of view, a very strange standpoint if I may say so. Does this mean that if in a discussion on the history of religious belief I utter the statement "Satanists believe..." that I am automatically a Satanist? What occurs then when I follow up with the statement that "modern liberal Christians do not believe in Satan", does that make me a "modern liberal Christian"? Having uttered both sentences in the same discussion, am I then a "modern liberal Christian Satanist"? Trying to follow your logic can be very confusing, maybe you should start with a few definitions?
Peculiar... I find your responses incomprehensible.
Three of these "greatest minds" supposedly produced three separate definitions, each of which led the people who made them to conclude that 'science' was impossible.
The first point suggests that they aren't three of the world's greatest minds, after all. The second, that none of them did what some of you say is necessary: derive definitions from what 'scientists' do.
I try and I try to extract a coherent point from this set of assertions, but it seems to be merely a non sequitur.
"The only way you can argue that everyone else is wrong and you are right is if there is some essence outside of humans and their understanding that you can appeal to."
Wow. How dare you talk about "the only way" when you reject essentialiasm. Dont treat philosophy like a game!!
So, basically, Caledonian's definition of "science" is something that nobody actually does. Because nobody is perfectly consistent and nobody even aims for perfect consistency--such an aim is incompatible with living in a messy and inconsistent world.
Given this absurd definition, what the hell is the use of the category "science"? Why should we care about being "scientific"?
Congratulations Mr Wilkins on an excellent double century! I would say its an innings worthy of the Don but as you are the strangest of creatures, an Australian who is not interested in sport the allusion would be wasted
Lanoire, I suspect that Caledonian is really only interested in being able to claim that s/he is the only "true" scientist and has knowledge of "Truth". Assuming that s/he believes that everything they ever did is reasoned and can be backed up by peer reviewed articles s/he agrees with.
Then again s/he may just like to argue. :o)
Thanks Thony. It's a team effort. I couldn't have done it without you all. Really.