In response to the unwarranted flap over the education director of the Royal Society making comments that of course the media and the creationists spun to suit themselves, Richard Dawkins had this to say:
Although I disagree with Michael Reiss, what he actually said at the British Association is not obviously silly like creationism itself, nor is it a self-evidently inappropriate stance for the Royal Society to take. Scientists divide into two camps over this issue: the accommodationists, who 'respect' creationists while disagreeing with them; and the rest of us, who see no reason to respect ignorance or stupidity. The accommodationists include such godless luminaries as Eugenie Scott, whose National Center for Science Education is doing splendid work in fighting the creationist wingnuts in America. She and her fellow accommodationists bend over backwards to woo the relatively sensible minority among Christians, who accept evolution. Get the bishops and theologians on the side of science -- so the argument runs -- and they'll be valuable allies against the naive creationists (who include a worryingly high proportion of Christians and almost all Muslims, by the way). No politician could deny at least the superficial plausibility of this expedient, although it is disappointing how ineffective as allies the 'sensible' minority of Christians turn out to be. The official line of the US National Academy, the American equivalent of the Royal Society, is shamelessly accommodationist. They repeatedly plug the mantra that there is 'no conflict' between evolution and religion. Michael Reiss could argue that he is simply following the standard accommodationist line, and therefore doesn't deserve the censure now being heaped upon him.
Unfortunately for him as a would-be spokesman for the Royal Society, Michael Reiss is also an ordained minister. To call for his resignation on those grounds, as several Nobel-prizewinning Fellows are now doing, comes a little too close to a witch-hunt for my squeamish taste. Nevertheless -- it's regrettable but true -- the fact that he is a priest undermines him as an effective spokesman for accommodationism: "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he!" If the Royal Society wanted to attack creationism with all fists flying, as I would wish, an ordained priest might make a politically effective spokesman, however much we might deplore his inconsistency. This is the role that Kenneth Miller, not a priest but a devout Christian, plays in America, where he is arguably creationism's most formidable critic. But if the Society really wants to promote the accommodationist line, a clergyman is the very last advocate they should choose. Perhaps I was a little uncharitable to liken the appointment of a vicar as the Royal Society's Education Director to a Monty Python sketch. Nevertheless, thoughts of Trojan Horses are now disturbing many Fellows, already concerned as they are by the signals the Society recently sent out through its flirtation with the infamous Templeton Foundation.
Accommodationism is playing politics, while teetering on the brink of scientific dishonesty. I'd rather not play that kind of politics at all but, if the Royal Society is going to go down that devious road, they should at least be shrewd about it. Perhaps, rather than resign his job with the Royal Society, Professor Reiss might consider resigning his Orders?
Richard Dawkins FRS
Oxford
[See comment 41]
Let's look at the two comments I italicised.
Scientists divide into two camps over this issue: the accommodationists, who 'respect' creationists while disagreeing with them; and the rest of us, who see no reason to respect ignorance or stupidity.
Oh really? Accommodationists respect creationists? Strawman much again, Richard? Accommodationists do respect those who have religious beliefs that do not interfere with their science, the way one respects a male magistrate thinking his wife is pretty so long as it doesn't make any difference to the sentences handed down to ugly defendants. It doesn't follow that they think the wife is pretty.
Dawkins wants to set up a false dichotomy under which he and all his cobelievers are on the Good Side, the sensible side, the rational side. And yet, these rational brights can call all religion ignorant and stupid without needing to know or appreciate the religious views they deride. Yeah, I know, Courtier's Reply, etc. Fairyology. Blah blah. But this isn't about what you and your friends think of religion, Richard; this is about whether what they think causes them to do with science. And guess what? Most religious scientists do great science. Most religious science teachers teach great science. I have known these "accommodationists" for forty years, and honourable men and women they mostly are; just as honourable as the atheists among them.
The division isn't Accommodationists versus the rest of you. It's between Exclusionists versus the rest of us. You want to exclude any religion from human society, including scientific society. You are whistling against the wind here. Religion is a fact of human nature and isn't going away any time soon, so if you want a science based society, and we do, learn to live with them.
Accommodationism is playing politics, while teetering on the brink of scientific dishonesty.
Again, really? And dividing the world into the Rational Atheists and the Foolish and Stupid Agnostics, Theists and Craven Cowards isn't? In what way can science declare that all religious belief is ignorant and stupid? What's the assay for that? What's the experimental protocol? Show me the measurements and the stats. Let's make this a scientific debate.
You can't, because it isn't one. It's a philosophical debate and you have fallen into the mistake made by the logical positivists in philosophy. This was a group that held that any knowledge had to be verifiable by scientific means. This was called the Verification Principle. Critics pointed out that the Verification Principle is not verifiable by scientific means and is therefore not knowledge. Logical positivism was self-defeating (although the version later called logical empiricism survives with much to recommend it).
Dawkins' view is self-defeating. He wants all knowledge to be positively scientific, using a principle that is not, itself, scientific. Gods are not vulnerable to scientific demonstration, one way or the other (avoiding the falsification debate). To say there are no gods is to make a philosophical claim, and it is not ignorant nor stupid to make philosophical claims for or against deities that do not require belief in falsehoods that can be demonstrated scientifically. Does Zeus exist? Well, not on the physical Mount Olympus, but on some spiritual Mount Olympus, who can say? Certainly not Dawkins. His "science is all the knowledge there is" view is either not knowledge, or it is false. If it is not knowledge, then by his own standards he is saying something that must be ignorant and stupid.
This is called, in logic, the tu quoque, or the Peewee Herman Move ("You are!" "No, you are!"). The scientific dishonesty of Dawkins is that he is trying to sell the idea that if some belief isn't an outcome of science it must be ignorant and stupid; but this is something science cannot itself show to be true; Dawkins merely believes that. Or else, put up or shut up - show us the scientific research that proves, to scientific standards, that no gods exist. No inductive arguments - they are philosophical. Show me the actual data. Or allow people of good will to say to those who are religious, "If you don't screw with the science, welcome, no matter what you believe".
- Log in to post comments
But isn't the burden on the person making the positive statement? If you believe in something, and you want me to act as if it exists, your job is to provide the evidence. If the believers in Bigfoot support biology education and don't insist that Sasquatch is taught as a primate, they are useful. But, there is always going to be the nagging fear that they will want their pet belief treated as scientifically viable, and they will turn on you at the first opportunity.
While I love to read Dawkins, Myers and all them for science, often they just come across to me as just as insulting and immature and just a nasty as Ray, Adman, Gabriel and the other we see on Usenet. Snex is eve a better example of this, IMNSHO.
I just don't get how Dawkins, Myers and those like them think they can change other peoples' opinions by essentially yelling "Hey, moron! You're an idiot." Insulting the other side is only going to make them put up their shields and then you'll never convince them.
The people that Dawkins calls "Accomodationists" are really those that are willing to try and be polite and not engage in immature name calling.
A chance to blunder again! Oh goody!
Copita de nieve dixit:
Dawkins' view is self-defeating. He wants all knowledge to be positively scientific, using a principle that is not, itself, scientific.
I don't think this is true. I just think that if you can't justify this knowledge, invisible pink unicorns and all that, then how do you call it knowledge? Metaphysical flights of fancy may coincide with reality, but how could you justifiably claim this? You can't empirically test it, thus you have no evidence, there's no logical demonstration that fixes it as necessary, thus it's all in your own head and not to be treated as knowledge. I think.
The above assumes that knowledge is something that coincides with reality not by fluke, but by some understanding of reality. Of course, there are many believers who talk of other forms of knowledge, but these other forms of knowledge seem all to just boil down to an intuition based on previous religious commitments (i.e. Christians know that Jesus is talking to them or Muslims know that Muhammad was the best human that lived and the Quran is perfect. etc) and can hardly be verified in an intersubjective manner. I can't see how they know these things given the vagaries of the human mind and all that.....
Shoot me down. :)
And how is Dawkins position not a positive one? And, by the way, how is acting on a "nagging fear" either sensible or rational?
I don't mind insulting the professional creationists -- they really are ignorant or stupid or wicked. But it is far from obvious that the notion that there is only two sides is any better.
Right on, John!
And, by the way, how is acting on a "nagging fear" either sensible or rational? It may well be rational if it's based on previous experience. If religious people before have let their convictions get in the way of good science, then would it not be prudent to fear that this may again happen? It could be quite sensible and normal to have this nagging fear.
Quite apart from the justification that might lend to racism and the like, the rational response would be to endeavor to either confirm or deny the fear, not to attempt to oust someone from a position of trust before he or she had been shown to warrant the vague suspicion.
If religious people before have let their convictions get in the way of good science, then would it not be prudent to fear that this may again happen? It could be quite sensible and normal to have this nagging fear.
What, mistrust all religious people because of the actions of some? Mistrust Ken Miller because of Duane Gish? There's a word for that: bigotry. In this case, it stems from the perception that, because they have some common philosophical assumption, they will behave similarly in cases of interest to us. This is false: people in fact vary all over the map, and their actions depend on their presumed metaphysics a great deal less than one might expect.
I don't think that Myers or Dawkins have said that religious people are stupid. They do point out that they are ignorant, but that is not an insult. We are all ignorant, and ignorance is curable. Stupidity isn't.
Which was probably why respect was in scare quotes. Some people are more inclined to make courteous noises in the hope that they will not frighten away a potential ally, that's all.
I'm not really clear on what this has to do with, well, anything. Dawkins is on record esteeming authors and musicians and visual artists as much as any public intellectual is; perhaps I'm being too generous, but I doubt he'd be overeager to judge an aesthetic question with the tools of a scientific laboratory.
Perhaps this is true of the gods summoned in the dark rites of philosophy departments, whose sacraments are the blood of undergraduates. The one who bestrides the collective consciousness where I come from is a different breed. Otherwise, why would all the people I knew growing up feel so threatened by such humble things as fossils?
Indeed.
The God Delusion, pp. 52–54.
Did you miss the first italicised comment?
Well said, John, right on the money as usual.
For myself, I am both outraged and deeply disappointed at this shabby treatment of Professor Reiss. Outraged because, as Dawkins himself wrote:
and disappointed that men who have earned respect in other ways should have failed to stand up for the freedoms and principles on which science is partly based.
Did you miss the praise of Ken Miller, "arguably creationism's most formidable critic" in America?
This is probably where I should trot out my standard list of disagreements with Dawkins: I think his characterization of cosmologists in TGD does not fairly reflect the reason why they have not all rushed to embrace Smolin's proposal for the natural selection of universes; I wish he had run TGD by a colleague in the history department; I am not enthused by his wilder excesses of adaptationism; I found The Genius of Charles Darwin bedeviled with "textbook cardboard".
I could probably go on, but no one is listening. . . .
By "playing politics, while teetering on the brink of scientific dishonesty." Faint praise indeed.
And there is a lot I like about Dawkins. That doesn't mean he shouldn't be criticized when he's wrong.
Faint praise (and I won't argue that it's anything else) isn't equivalent to calling somebody "stupid".
Naturally. I'm just a little confused how exactly going off on a tangent about the Demarcation Problem, the difference between verificationism and falsificationism, and what flavour of tea Zeus is drinking out of Russell's Teapot as he orbits the Platosphere does any good in that regard.
Quite apart from the justification that might lend to racism and the like, the rational response would be to endeavor to either confirm or deny the fear, not to attempt to oust someone from a position of trust before he or she had been shown to warrant the vague suspicion. Racism is based on appearances, not expressed beliefs, so that's a non-sequitur. The rest of your argument I agree with. I never said to oust anyone, I said that if in your previous experience you've had trouble with people expressing certain beliefs, that it would be wise and prudent to worry about the next person expressing those beliefs. The way to allay those fears, which I never discussed, would be what you just said. Talk about jumping to conclusions.
What, mistrust all religious people because of the actions of some? Mistrust Ken Miller because of Duane Gish? There's a word for that: bigotry. Rubbish. People throw the word bigot around to silence views they disagree with. You'd be a liar if you said you didn't take peoples prior commitments into consideration when dealing with them, it's both rational and a good (but not fallible) way to avoid being screwed.
that was 'but not infallible' of course. Sorry, about that, but the people who created a strawman out of my comment got me in a hurry to post.
to Corey Albrecht - -
I (and hopefully you) have read The God Delusion, but I don't remember any "name-
calling" in it. Maybe its religious readers
just "feel" like idiots after Dawkins keeps
destroying their religious arguments that have
gone unchallenged for too long in polite
society.
At lunch I was thinking about John's comment regarding 'people of good will' and the thing that came to mind is that most theists hold that there is a soul, an entity that is unmeasurable or immaterial, but yet this entity interacts with the material (energy/matter). This violates the scientific principle of conservation of energy. This doesn't seem to create too many waves, but it's interesting that these people of good will hold, and surely some teach, something which violates a totally uncontroversial tenet of physics based on zilch but religion. I can understand why this gives some scientists the worries......
Brian English:
If you really want to tip over into paranoia, you can start fretting over whether future discoveries will push the people who today are defenders of science into a mystical camp. Science does not stand still! The more we learn about the brain, for example, the more Francis Collins might feel himself on edge.
Like I said, it's basic paranoia, and I certainly don't want to condemn anyone now for what they might hypothetically do in the future — but in the abstract, it might be worth mulling over.
Blake, that sort of plays into my point about the soul. Someone like Francis Collins must on some level believe the science incorrect or wrong when it comes to the soul or an interventionist god (god would need to violate the law of conservation of energy if he answers prayers, etc). I'm not doubting the biology he does, but when he tells someone the soul is real, or that it's a reasonable belief and not contrary to scientific knowledge or that science is wrong on this score then that would seem to me to be violating John's accomodationists whose "religious beliefs that do not interfere with their science". Though you could argue that because he's not a physicist, it's not a problem.
Anyway, I must be wired different from the majority here. If a person (or persons) who has previously expressed a viewpoint, and in acting on that viewpoint has caused difficulties beforehand, then the next person who espouses the same views would give me a moment of pause. Not that I wouldn't give that person a chance, as actions speak louder than words, but I think I'd be a fool to ignore it. It's hardly paranoia, forewarned is forearmed and all that.
Brian #20: a soul, an entity that is unmeasurable or immaterial, but yet this entity interacts with the material (energy/matter). This violates the scientific principle of conservation of energy. This doesn't seem to create too many waves, but it's interesting that these people of good will hold, and surely some teach, something which violates a totally uncontroversial tenet of physics based on zilch but religion.
That assumes that physicalism is a complete description of reality. The following is a line of reasoning why I suspect it may not be. This is not intended to be a proof of any kind, just a line of philosophical reasoning that might lead one to argue against physical completeness (actually, I wish someone would conclusively shoot it down, since the deterministic nature of physicalism is far more comforting than some possible unknown alternatives):
1. Everything that is known or can be known (science, math, philosophy, religion, history, art, logic, etc), is all a part of your first-person experience, and always has been (the realization of that is also first-person experience). What you perceive as reality in its totality (noumenal and phenomenal), has never actually been separated from that experience. Not ever.
2. If there is a noumenal reality, it follows naturally in view of #1, that one must ask, why this reality is being experienced (observed) by the particular physical individual you refer to as "me", from the perspective of that particular body, at its particular location in time and space, and in this particular universe (assuming a real multiverse). It is a completely arbitrary perspective. The experience of other minds (if real), is still always inferred by you, and is not direct experience like yours. That is simply what is being observed.
3. In the physicalist model, there are no preferred points in space and time (well, assuming block time). Nor is there a preferred universe (assuming a real multiverse).
4. Yet, there very obviously is a preferred point in the multiverse: where you are. That is simply what is being observed. Its perspective can be changed only through imagination, but not in reality.
5. If physicalism were a complete description of reality, i.e. no preferred locations, then this subjectity problem should not exist. We should be zombies. Hence, physicalism is not a complete description of reality.
(Actually, I could skip 2-4 and it would probably still work for me.)
There is also the problem of just what exactly defines a "conscious" physical system, and makes it self-aware, and the boundary problem - i.e. what keeps it from diffusing into other physical things. Neurons are changing and dying all the time, but awareness does not shift from one body to another or diffuse into other physical things, as far as we can tell. Therefore, physical identity and conscious identity are two very different things. As the pre-socratic philosopher Anaxagoras (456 B.C.E fragment 12) put it, in the language of his time:
"While all other things contain a portion of each thing, the Mind (Nous) is without bounds and self-determined - mixing with nothing else, but being alone by himself. For otherwise, were he not self-contained but mixed with anything else, he would be drawn into everything, since in all things there is a portion of any other thing, as I mentioned. Whatever intermingled with him would prevent him from continuing to have power over everything as he has now".
I'm sorry, but believing in the Big Man In The Sky is stupid and ignorant. No, saying that is not polite, it's not likely to win many friends, and it is likely to "alienate" people. So be it. It's true.
It's high time to take off the gloves and stop pretending that belief in a creator, or some sort of cosmic intelligence, is a respectable and defensible view. It's not. And no, John, I don't care if that upsets other well-meaning people who do believe in God, but fain to practice science in their other compartment. Yes, it's a direct insult to believers - I mean it to be. Yes, I know it will put off people who want to be "nicer" about the issue for practical or political reasons. I don't care. Enough is enough.
You know full well that there isn't any "sensible and rational" side to the religionists bleating about how they're "mistreated." You won't admit it (but you know you're not a believer, and you don't really "respect" them, no matter what you write in your blog), but you know they're full of it.
You carry on believing that "respecting" peoples' idiotic, ignorant, retrograde ideas makes you a good world citizen. It doesn't. Rationalists will carry on pointing out that "respecting" idiocy is a fool's bargain. And no, John, I'm not advocating being a big old nasty "meanie" just for the sake of it. I am advocating calling somebody a big bloody fool when they deserve it. While you go on ringing your hands about alienating people, irrational voters and citizens just clamor louder.
Actually, I'm even more astonished at your post, John, than I realized at first. Is this *really* just a philosophical game to you? Do you really think the average person makes decisions based on these philosophical niceties? Do you really think the average reader, or voter, is making the sort of decisions you describe?
*RING, RING* . . . CLUE PHONE: IT'S FOR JOHN - Mr. Wilkins, the average voter is calling for you. She's asking why she should vote for the candidate who can prove God does or doesn't exist. She's also asking why she should care about tax rates, womens' right to choose abortion, or why she should care that Republicans give her rich relatives tax breaks while she can't get unemployment.
Mr. Wilkins, she says she doesn't understand what this has to do with why she can't feed her kids. She says she believes in God, but she's a little bit confused about how this is going to help her family. . what should I tell her? Mr. Wilkins? What? Could you repeat that, Sir?
That assumes that physicalism is a complete description of reality. All I'm saying, given the assumptions that science approaches reality (which it seems to as it works), and that there is something that is material, an assumption that not too many question, is that the law of conservation of energy is, as our knowledge now stands, correct. Until it's shown to be in incorrect (law of conservation), any claim against it that offers no evidence or argumentation, except arguments to ignorance, e.g. you can't prove certain brain states are my thoughts yet, or arguments to incredulity, e.g. I can't believe it's all material and I need to believe in an immortal soul, is an unsupported claim against science. In fact, if the claim of soul never offers a positive argument or evidence, and only rests on incredulity or ignorance, then it is forever outside knowledge whether physicalism is correct or not. We are ignorant of so much about the universe, that doesn't mean we can claim that ignorance as positive evidence of things we feel must exist. It reminds me of people who can't believe of uncaused entities thus declaring that every effect must have a cause. Ignorance and incredulity, nothing more. I wasn't there at the big bang, I haven't seen everything being caused, I don't see the level of the quark or understand what it's like to travel at the speed of light, nor what gravity really is, thus I can't ever make concrete claims on these scientific facts of nature, unless they can be shown to be logically necessary and logical necessity can be shown to rule the universe and not just be a product of our evolved brain.
In short, lack of evidence and positive argumentation is lack of justification.
I understood Dawkins to have written
(emphasis added) in reference to creationism, not religion. Reiss (in what he said originally, whatever 'clarifications' came later) proposed accommodating creationism as a 'world view' in science classes - creationism, not religion. On that reading, this whole post and most of the comments have done no more than smoke out the hair-trigger Dawkins-haters. Read what Dawkins wrote again, and consider whether you got it wrong.
Dawkins makes it quite clear that "this issue" is this:
It's not about accommodating creationism; it's about accommodating religious believers per se. And it is bigotry.
To make this an issue about demarcation is beneath you John.
If you read the God delusion, you would see that Dawkins specifically takes on deities that have an impact on the physical world.
I am sure we agree that the physical world falls squarely within the realm accessible to science? Any deity that have an impact on the natural world is therefore open to falsification.
If your deity says the world is 6000 years old, it is wrong, and such a deity must be false.
Concerning "Does Zeus exist? Well, not on the physical Mount Olympus, but on some spiritual Mount Olympus, who can say? Certainly not Dawkins."
Well please read the god Delusion and you will see that Dawkins agrees with your position. Modern deities living in the halls of academia and in the minds of theologians, have excused themselves from making any falsifiable claims, and as Dawkins says, science can say nothing about them.
It can however say a lot about Dembski little meanspirited tinker deity, Ken Hams incompetent deity and other deities that necessarily must be false, since their narrative (which is the only thing identifying them) is falsified by science.
And it is a cop out to say, that perhaps my god didn't make the create the world 6000 years ago as it says it did, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Yes it does mean it doesn't exist. You can't define something as one thing, and then remove all definitions, just leaving the name, and then insist that you have been talking about the same thing all along.
Maths teachers don't make special allowances for a child who has a worldview that 2 2=5. It's flat wrong.
Likewise, creationism, irrespective of whether it is true or not, has no place in a science classroom. Creationism, and religiosity in general, are worldviews which are deeply unscientific.
This may not be an error of logic upon the child per se, but rather an error of indoctrination by the parents. However, while creationism v. evolution would be a fine topic to show how the scientific method works, it's only purpose in a science class should be for dissection, not instruction.
We should not, as Reiss suggested, try to teach them science DESPITE their worldview, within a science class we should be instructing them IN a worldview, a reality based, observation driven, evidentiary backed worldview.
"Belief" is itself not scientific in the sense that you have the suspend the normal "understanding" of quanta to fill in the void between such quanta. To know that quanta are connected without any element existing between them is to invoke a "belief" of element, however intangible and unknown. This has been the cause for argument between quantum theorists and super-string theorists.
If science is about evidence and rational argument, both this article and the comments bring shame on all of you.
Put to one side the point that appointing an ordained minister as head of education at the UK's flagship science club is strange. That's a separate issue.
Reiss is being attacked for what foaming-mouthed Science-Or-Nothing zealots want him to have said, not what he actually said. Engage Maximum Persecution Mode!
Reiss didn't advocate teaching creationism. He didn't suggest any sort of pandering to creationists. His point was to suggest that he thought it was appropriate for teachers to mention why creationism isn't science, especially if a student brings up the topic. That isn't pandering to any interest group or irrationality, it's called "education".
There will be religious kids in many classes. We don't burn them at the stake, literally or metaphorically.
Sam, I'm intrigued to know why you think my article brings shame to me. I said exactly what you just did. Perhaps you didn't read it carefully.
Re comment #28
The group the accommodationists court are:
Religious who believe in evolution (minority)
In the hope of combating:
Religious who believe in creationism (majority)
So you see that both groups are religious. So no it's not about bigotry, read your own post for heavens sake.
Dawkins disagrees with this strategy and he has explain why. It is not bigotry and to level that charge without even doing the man the courtesy of digesting his words does yourself a great disservice.
Brian English:
What I said was that a position that it is okay to suppose that simply because one or more people had done wrong in the past makes it wise and prudent to worry about the next person who shares some trait with those people lends support to racist thinking. For example, African Americans share a culture different than the racists who fear them. To those racists, those are different beliefs that are being expressed every day by thinking and acting differently than the racists. And some black people commit crimes and other bad acts.
If it is okay for society (in the person of schools and prestigeous scientific organizations) to lump people together and treat them as "the other" based solely on their sharing a "different" set of traits, why should the racist think what they are doing is wrong?
Besides, do you really think Ken Miller (or Reiss, for that matter) share the same beliefs as Duayne Gish or Ken Ham? That sounds more like an appeal to "appearances" than substance to me.
John's right, but I would add the following caveat: as long as your beliefs do not contradict established science, you should be "accommodated" (whatever that means). Maybe you entertain some wild or untestable scientific hypotheses (string theory, for example), but is that really so different from holding some wild or untestable metaphysical views? You have your own reasons for believing what you do. As long as your views are consistent with established science, you should be accommodated (that would not include hardcore creationism).
Strangely enough, from whatever is available on the internet, Reiss did NOT advise accomodation at all. Reiss said that if a student bring up questions along the creationist line, those questions should be answered and not relegated to the waste basket.
Richard Dawkins' tack on accomodation is therefore off-topic. It functions as a smokescreen to the actual issue,that Reiss is the subject of a witchhunt. The witchhunt might have as cause that as a CoE minister, Reiss is per definition distrusted by zealous atheists.
The honourable action for Richard Dawkins to take was to defend Reiss.
Heleen, that is my point about the flap being unwarranted. But as to ministers in science, a friend of mine is an ordained minister of the Anglican Church of Australia, and has a PhD in physics and another in the history and philosophy of science. His views on philosophy and theology do not - so far as I can tell - affect his views on physics or science in general. And it is not "accommodation" to accept and defend his place in scientific discourse simply in virtue of his being ordained and trained in theology.
I no more care if a scientist or scientific advisor is a theologically trained minister than I care if they are qualified flight instructors or know how to play chess. Nor should anyone else. And this is a witchhunt, all right.
Back to that magistrate for a minute. I would certainly respect his "belief" (opinion?) that his wife was pretty, but then, that's an aesthetic rather than a factual judgement. If he believed that his wife could fly ("I've never actually seen her airborne, of course, but I just KNOW that she can do it provided there's a bit of wind to help her take off") I would not treat that particular belief with much respect. I might however respect the magistrate for his other qualities, which basically sums up my attitude to people like Ken Miller and the Anglican clergyman with two PhDs. I think it's important to distinguish between respecting unjustified beliefs about the universe (bad idea) and respecting otherwise sensible people who might hold those beliefs (good idea).
With that said, I agree that Reiss is the victim of a witchhunt. Public opinion, at least in English-speaking countries, seems to get more vindictive and less forgiving of mistakes and misunderstandings with every passing year. It's depressing.
The accommodationist reference by Richard Dawkins is completely valid. And he explains why.
He also mentions that the whole affair smacks of a witch hunt.
He didn't spell out why Reiss is an accommodationist to be sure, but that's because he doesn't have to. Reiss is an accomodationist ... with himself!
Dawkins calls him inconsistent, and he must be if he holds the Christian faith AND be a true spokesman for the Royal Society � not the parts of science that are combatable with his beleif. The Archbishop himself said that he believes in Evolution, but that somehow God intervened and gave us souls. Can you have the Royal Society saying tripe like that? How about a spokesperson that actually believes it even if he doesn�t say it?
That is what people are worried about. Dawkins fears some have been overzealous, and I agree with him.
IMHO, it's worse than you think, Dr. Wilkins ...
Let's see now. If one feigns respect for creationists while disagreeing with them, one is in the former camp. However, one can pretend to respect people (or even respect them for real) without respecting all their beliefs, so those in the former camp can easily be in the latter camp as well. Dawkins then proposes to divide scientists into two camps which are supposed to be mutually exclusive ... except that they aren't. He can't even get his false dichotomies straight. We can suss out what he probably means, but he's not really talking sense.
Apologies for the duplication in my post.
I fixed it for you.
Sure, religious beliefs are consistent with science. Any belief is consistent with science. Young earth creationism is. For example, God could have made the universe in whatever state he wanted 6,000 years ago, in the same state that scientists *think* the world was in 6,000 years ago. So what?
One can find a way in which any chosen belief is not disproved by the facts. Scientific reasoning, or any honest reasoning about the world, is inductive. Not being disproved is not enough. At some point some claims get improbable enough that you can just say no, that's not true.
Sure, many scientists are religious and still do great science and great science advocacy. That doesn't make them right.
Thank you John.
Brendon, no one has said anythign about courting creationists. The accomodationists want to court religious evolutionists to combat creationists.
This doesn't sit well with many people, but it's not as devisive a strategy as it may seem because in the end both camps want the same thing (that population studies the science and holds evolution to be true), however they disagree on the best strategy.
Blast now I have made another mistake!
Meant to say JJ - not Brendon.
Sorry Brendon.
I think you have that backwards. To say there are no gods is simply to make a claim from within the physical world about the origins of a physical world. To sidestep the physical evidence, in favor of the gods, is a scientific claim.
Since one metaphysical being is as good, or real, as another, then you can also accuse all the world's religions of making contrary philosophical claims. This post-modernistic type of thinking has no boundaries, limits, or rules. And according to your logic, to hinder it in any way is to make a another philosophical claim.
Science is limited to the material world, while the study of the metaphysical is limited to the human imagination.
To proclaim the gods as nonexistent is a conclusion based on (and limited to) the material world, a conclusion which interferes with a presupposed and unverifiable metaphysical realm. It is the UNVERIFIABLE part that religion uses as a shield. I can neither prove nor disprove the monsters living under my bed. To entertain their possible existence is silly if there is no evidence for them, other than my imagination. I think this is all Dawkins is saying.
You are stretching Dawkins' argument in to a bigger target than it was intended to be. To say there are no gods is a claim about the material world (about a creation), based on material evidence. The fact that it infringes on amorphous theistic beliefs is the fault of religion, not science. Religion keeps moving the goal posts, and Mount Olympus keeps rising higher into the sky every time someone says they can't see it.
Can't a guy speak in an informal manner to get a point across? OK, OK, let's say there are 1000 camps. Do you feel better now John? Now for the sake of reading Dawkins' response try the mind experiment of dividing the 1000 camps into two large groups for 60 seconds. You talk of building bridges with creationists and you get you panties in a bunch over some semantics in a letter? Really?
Really?
A few questions:
1) What do you think the quotation marks around the word "respect" in Richard Dawkins' comment could mean and have you considered those when writing this entry?
2) Do you think there's much religious belief out there that does not contradict science, or interfere with people's actions and decisions?
3) Are you sure you're avoiding the falsification debate, or are you just making a statement that would avoid the debate, if there weren't many good reasons to question it?
4) What do you think Richard Dawkins means by saying "Scientists divide into two camps over this issue: the accommodationists, who 'respect' creationists while disagreeing with them" (particularly referring to my emphasis)? How would it apply to your analogy about the pretty or ugly wife?
5) Have you read "The God Delusion" (past the title)?
6) How do you think the words "creationist's most formidable critic" about Kenneth Miller and "Eugenie Scott, whose National Center for Science Education is doing splendid work in fighting the creationist wingnuts in America" relate to your claim that "Dawkins wants to set up a false dichotomy under which he and all his cobelievers are on the Good Side, the sensible side, the rational side"?
7) Do you honestly think "learn to live with it" is good advice? Will you also tell me to "learn to live" with homophobes because I happen to want to marry my girlfriend and they obviously won't go away any time soon because they're part of human society? Will you tell a child to "live with" bullies at their school because - let's face it - every school has its bullies. "Learn to live with x" is something you can say about your boss' quirks, your partner's untidiness or the mosquitos by the river in summer, but not about backdated ideas that have huge social and political influence.
#44 Bredon B
"Sure, many scientists are religious and still do great science and great science advocacy. That doesn't make them right."
If scientists do great science and great science advocacy, this should be sufficient to others. Whether anyone is religious at the same time is not for others to base their judgment on, definitely not is science matters.
Heleen-
"If scientists do great science and great science advocacy, this should be sufficient to others. Whether anyone is religious at the same time is not for others to base their judgment on, definitely not is science matters."
Whether or not they are religious is certainly a factor when the person in question is discussing the introduction of creationism into the science classroom, regardless of to what extent they are advocating that it be discussed. Their religious persuasion is likely to be a significant factor in their thinking in this regard, and thus cannot be simply dismissed as an irrelevancy.
Raiko:
It doesn't make much difference if Dawkins is saying that "accomodationists" respect creationists or only pretend to respect them. Neither statement is a good match to reality. For example, Duane Gish isn't getting much love from Eugenie Scott.
Why should it matter, unless you are suggesting that Dawkins' public statements, including those that don't refer to TGD at all, can only be criticized by those who read his book?
Because Dawkins' praise amounts to saying that Brutus is an honorable man.
There is a huge difference in saying that humans will probably always have some false or unverifiable supernatural beliefs--which can and will vary widely in content, and saying that humans will have a particular prejudice.
Why, yes, John has:
scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2006/10/what_is_an_agnostic.php
I won't speak for John, but I certainly do ... including in the person of some of the great names in science of the last century.
Why do I have this suspicion (hey, it's okay to base beliefs on suspiction, right?) that what you mean boils down to act differently and think differently than you do?
Do you mean the people Dawkins labeled the "Neville Chamberlain atheists" as opposed to the "Winston Churchill atheists"? No good side / bad side there!
John didn't say "learn to live with it" or imply in any way that people should accept creationism or not work against it. He said "live with them." And unless you think that mere reason (which has been practiced, as far as we can tell, from the dawn of our species) is likely to suddenly overcome religion (which has been practiced, as far as we can tell, from the dawn of our species), then the only alternative to learning to live with believers is for the "rationalist" to kill them off ... or vice versa.
Well, to quote John Wilkins...Strawman much? We aren't exclusionists. We just think society gives far too much credit to bogus ways of addressing problems, and it's past time to criticize and rebuke religious ways of thinking. They're simply wrong.I'm always hearing this strange claim that "religion is a fact of human nature". It's not part of my nature, or the nature of a good 10% of the population. Are we not human? Doesn't that suggest that religion is not intrinsic to our nature, but is instead a kind of imposed twist on our way of thinking, one that is entirely optional and that many of us can eliminate without pain or damage to our functioning?
This is how you rescue religion from irrelevance and inanity, by simply transferring any claims it makes about the real world to unevidenced, ineffectual fantasy domains? Come on. We're not talking about this naive scientific positivism that you're railing against. The real problem is that religious claims have no bounds -- you can just wave away any argument against them by inventing some silly rationale. Sure, let us posit some spiritual Mount Olympus, or metaphysical Mount Olympus, or 72nd Etheric Plane Mount Olympus, or the Holy Invisible Pink Mount Olympus -- it's all a shell game. It doesn't rescue religion at all, it just sends it hurtling deeper into empty inanity.
John, I believe Dawkins has never said that. I believe he takes the stand that if a belief contradicts known reality, it is then ignorant and stupid. Creationism contradicts known reality. So do most claims of religion (claims that make it religion).
So what percentage of human beings think scientifically? Does that imply that scientific reasoning is not intrinsic to our nature, but is instead a kind of imposed twist on our way of thinking, one that is entirely optional and that many of us can eliminate without pain or damage to our functioning? And yet people have been thinking scientifically (though, obviously, not under that name) as long as the species has been in existence. Isn't that reason enough to think that it is tied to our very nature?
Which inanity you detect by reference to a "real world" as determined by knowledge that has to be verifiable by scientific means. That's some serious irony.
Ok, I guess I have to ask - what exactly is a "spiritual Mount Olympus"? Seriously, wtf does "spiritual" even mean? How does it describe reality? Do you mean it is a mental construct, part of our imaginations, and therefore has no external reality, even though belief in such a thing can influence the way that they respond to the real world, perhaps passing "laws" in the UN (I forget the real term, but it isn't a law) that make it a crime to disrespect Zeus? Maybe the belief in this spiritual Olympus means that it is ok for a believing pharmacist to not sell birth control products, or help rape victims. Maybe this belief in Olympus merely annoys your friends when you talk about such delusions as their dog liking you because of your aura, or that you were friends in past lives, or other such garbage.
Of course, I'm probably bigoted since I've gotten tired of having people shove their un-evidenced illusions down my throat as reality, where people have fleeced millions with homeopathic garbage, fraudulent prayer-rugs, faith healings that are 100% faith and 0% healing...and the rest (cue Gilligan's music). Dawkins refers to the larger issue of fantasy vs reality, not just the evolution vs creation issue - everything I've read by him says as much. Evolution vs creationism is a smaller symptom of a larger ill, and he wants to vaccinate the world, with it's consent, which is what a lot of us have been trying to do. And, since it's goals are different, there will be conflicts as those indicated by the "accomidationists" bit.
But then...what do I know?
You don't rescue the idea that religious delusion is a natural human state by telling me that thinking scientifically is not a natural human state. Not only is it a non sequitur, but it's not even an argument I've ever made. We have brains that are shaped by our upbringing: they can be warped by religious error, or they can be brought up skeptical, inquiring, and open. Neither is natural, but I can be pretty confident about which one is better for the individual and for society.
And no, the inanity in religion is detected by the fact that there are no criteria for assessing the validity of religious assertions at all -- you are free to make up anything, such as a 'spiritual mount olympus' -- and we're just supposed to accept these claims as equivalently true. The reason isn't that you're just supposed to accept science as true, but that you ought to have some rational, consistent, epistemological method to what you accept as valid.
(Now I expect you'll complain that having a reasonable epistemology is another expectation of those damned scientism-preaching positivists. But then that admits that I'm right, and religion is inane.)
Interesting that you do not think that being competent at communicating your ideas is an important skill in a Director of Education for the Royal Society.
Or are you going to claim the misunderstandings were none of his fault ?
What's the point of the "[See comment 41]" appended to Dawkins's sig above?
J. J. Ramsey's post seems neither outstandingly good or bad, and the same applies to the formerly duplicated post by clatz apparently previously occupying that position.
Brian English @ # 22: ... god would need to violate the law of conservation of energy if he answers prayers ...
Not necessarily: if she answers your prayer by, say, causing a neuron to spark gratuitously, she might simultaneously inhibit one of mine. Y'know, that explains a lot...
The fact that individual humans vary widely from a norm hardly means that the norm doesn't exist.
Further, it's telling that as secularism has progressed, atheism hasn't progressed with it. Instead, organized religion is being displaced by an assortment of more loosely organized New-Agey stuff.
It's not how Wilkins rescues religion. That sort of shifting of beliefs is part of how religions themselves evolve. It's how in 2 Peter 3:8, we have the rationalization about a thousand years being like a day to God and vice versa, instead of Christianity falling apart as it became clear that Jesus wasn't returning Real Soon Now. It's why the whole idea of theistic evolution exists. As you yourself noted, "religious claims have no bounds." It would be nice, perhaps, if religions had well-defined belief systems and would poof away in a puff of logic if those belief systems were disproved. Instead, they are moving targets. Noticing this isn't an attempt to rescue anything.
"His "science is all the knowledge there is" view is either not knowledge, or it is false. "
I know Dawkins isn't any particularly deep philosopher or anything... but I don't think he has actually made this claim.
Anyway, I think this comic completely refutes your position with the most economy:
http://www.blacksunjournal.com/religion/1410_proof-burden-shifting_2008…
I read the Dawkins piece thinking "well, I think he's mostly right, if a little shrill and impolitic." Then I read what John S. Wilkins wrote about it and realized that Dawkins is a mild-tongued milquetoast by comparison.
PZ Myers wrote:
You could also have mentioned that religion has largely vanished as a powerful social force throughout much of Europe. There are even countries that are now majority atheist, but they have little trouble maintaining cohesive societies. Religion in some form will always be with us, but obviously it can be relegated to irrelevance without doing any harm to civilization. So much for the whistling against the wind argument.
Pierce R. Butler: "What's the point of the '[See comment 41]' appended to Dawkins's sig above?"
It's not my comment #41, but this comment #41 in the original posting on richarddawkins.net: http://richarddawkins.net/article,3108,Creationism-call-divides-Royal-S…
I think you can go further. Not only are those societies still cohesive, they are in fact MORE cohesive than most societies, and certainly more so than the US.
Then what are they? Spiritual? What is "not natural" in your account of the world?
Not without injecting values, which are themselves, not derivable from science. On a naturalistic account of the world, there are merely phenomena, which are neither good nor bad. The very best you might be able to do is to say is that phenomena A is more likely to result in differential reproductive success than phenomena B (assuming you posit that the success of the human species is somehow important). Based on the empiric evidence, is scientific thinking really outdoing religious thinking in the reproductive success of those who hold them? You may like western technological societies better but can you demonstrate scientific criteria for assessing the validity your preference? And if it is only a preference, how is that any more "real world" than religious beliefs?
Then you'd be wrong. What John was saying, and what you have yet to demonstrate, is that you have to have a reasonable and consistent epistemology in the first place.
Really? Then why are we discussing this at all?
In any event, how do you tell (scientifically, of course) whether that is a real change in human society or merely just another temporary change?
Jason Rosenhouse: "There are even countries that are now majority atheist, but they have little trouble maintaining cohesive societies."
Careful here. For example, in Estonia, only 16% percent said they believe there is a God, but 54% say that they believe that there is some sort of spirit or life force. One could call Estonia "majority atheist" based on that 16% figure, but it would be misleading.
I'm actually weirded out by both Dawkins and Michael Reiss. They should both know better; the UK education system does not work like that. Science education for a start is compulsory up to 16 even with the new diplomas. Secondly, the GCSE and A level curriculum stick to just that: what's on the curriculum spec. You're then tested in May/June or January on the modules you've learned which test your thinking skills within a framework that is purely factual. There isn't any time for discussion within the exams unless it's an A level module exam, which isn't really so much discussion as an amalgamation of everything learnt over every unit covered. You either learn about evolution/Big Bang/ or you fail that unit of the exam, pure and simple. Teachers are not prepared for that to happen in most cases and neither are pupils. If the question comes up, usually it's a matter of, 'Yeah, you can take that view, but you'll get marked down for a U (lowest fail grade) as you haven't demonstrated any knowledge to the examiner'. I was in top set for all my classes and there was discussion when there was time, but purely on scientific discussion relevant to what we were discussing. Most religious pupils took the same view as the teachers as well: there's no point in arguing or they had no personal issue with it. Many of those pupils are good friends of mine and are becoming scientists in all sorts of fields, as am I. I'm actually questioning Michael Reiss more on the basis of understanding a system that he ought to know rather than any religious qualms.
Dawkins' view is self-defeating. He wants all knowledge to be positively scientific, using a principle that is not, itself, scientific.
Hooray. Sometimes I think it's only me that thinks this way.
My objection to Dawkins has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with science. In short, I think he fails to understand what science is, how it works, and what it can achieve.
As I understand it, science, at least operationally, is all about testing ideas about the world, usually in a set of somewhat limited circumstances. After several iterations of this process one gets a reasonable view about the practical limits within which these ideas work. This view may be extended, modified or even overturned by other scientific work. Importantly, science is at every stage provisional. Its claims, even about what one might assume to be 'facts', are always provisional, in that they should always be falsifiable. I apologise if my characterization of science is naive, but that's how I understand it.
Crucially, science makes no claims on absolute knowledge, because such knowledge is not obtainable by the scientific method, not even in principle.
From this, it follows that science and religion are two different things. Religion does make claim on absolute truth. Creationism is plainly not science because it establishes the conclusions it wants a priori and selects the evidence it wants to support that conclusion.
This seems to me so simple that I wonder why people find it so problematic. One obstacle, it seems to me, is that some scientists do claim that science has access to absolute truth, or if they don't claim it, they act as if they do. Da ... Daw ... Dawk.... {Sorry, I can't bring myself to utter his name. Okay, how about this} He Who Must Not Be Named is an excellent example.
To make such claims is a grave mistake, because it exposes one to the ridiculous error of seeking to 'prove' or 'disprove' the existence of God as if this were a valid scientific hypothesis, when it quite plainly isn't. For religious people, the existence of God is true, in an absolute sense, and that's that. You can choose not to believe in God, but that too is a matter of conviction and not scientific inquiry.
Quite apart from this, this line of (misplaced) reasoning does science a grave disservice, by putting it on the same level as religion, as if they were both seeking to occupy the same spaces in peoples' outlooks on life. If that's the case there is no wonder that there is conflict.
The worst thing is that scientists who take this mistaken view then pull out their scientist credentials and claim superiority on the basis of holding such credentials.
Finally, I should just like to address the epicene nonsense expressed by the likes of Josh S and so on, that he feels that he should be free to insult religious people in any way they want. Excuse me, but it's reprehensible to insult anyone for any beliefs they may hold, just because you don't like them. As Isaac Asimov once said, violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Who let Henry Gee in ?
We were having a nice discussion and then the moron turns up.
I have come across Gee before, on PZ's blog. He was a cretin then, and I doubt he has improved much. Looking at what he has to say tells me as much.
I do not have much respect for someone who thinks blind faith is a good thing.
Hey! Henry's not a cretin! He's just wrong.
The problem isn't that scientists intrude on religious territory...it's that the religious never seem to hold much trust in their own beliefs. They really aren't content with keeping their gods and their rituals and their myths on good ol' Spiritual Mount Olympus — they aren't satisfied unless they've got a niche on real Mount Olympus, where they can meddle in real lives.
Henry Gee - Crucially, science makes no claims on absolute knowledge, because such knowledge is not obtainable by the scientific method, not even in principle.
What? WTF?
Sorry, I don't know what hole you crawled out of, but you certainly need some education on what scientific method is. It makes no claims to 'absolute' knowledge at all, which sounds very suspicious and seems to be creeping towards 'LOLZ YOU CAN'T PROVE GOD DOES/DOESN'T EXISTS!!!11'
What Henry said about absolute knowledge is pretty much standard thinking in science -- all scientific knowledge is provisional, subject to revision, and all we can do is make better and better approximations to the truth. And we can't prove gods don't or do exist (although a contributing factor there is the characteristic retreat into anodyne vacuousness by the religious when you try to pin them down to a testable notion of god).
You guys really shouldn't make me have to defend what Henry said when, like I say, he's wrong on other substantial points.
"One obstacle, it seems to me, is that some scientists do claim that science has access to absolute truth, or if they don't claim it, they act as if they do. "
The way I see it is that science doesn't have ALL the answers; it's just got all the GOOD ones.
Dawkins does not claim that science accesses the absolute truth. But he probably would claim (and I certainly do) that science gets far closer to absolute truth than anything else does.
PZ, I am sure you have had more dealing with Gee than I have.
The last time I had dealings with him was when I asked him why he believed in god. He seemed to think that telling me it was because of faith was a substitute for a meaningful answer. It did not make me think he was much of a thinker.
Ho hum. I try to have a reasoned argument on John's site, which is fairly reasonable, at things go at ScienceBlogs, and I get called a moron and a cretin. If that's the level of debate that's usual in atheist/scientist circles, then it's no wonder that the creationists seem to be hanging in there.
PZ Myers: "The problem isn't that scientists intrude on religious territory...it's that the religious never seem to hold much trust in their own beliefs. They really aren't content with keeping their gods and their rituals and their myths on good ol' Spiritual Mount Olympus � they aren't satisfied unless they've got a niche on real Mount Olympus, where they can meddle in real lives."
The religious? You write as if the religious were monolithic in their purported insistence on getting a "niche on real Mount Olympus."
Besides, do you really think Ken Miller (or Reiss, for that matter) share the same beliefs as Duayne Gish or Ken Ham? That sounds more like an appeal to "appearances" than substance to me.
No I do not John. I never said that, you came up with that misrepresentation. Please put a quote where I said Ken Miller, Reiss share the same beliefs as Gish et al. I don't like it when people put words in my mouth so the can defeat the misrepresentation of my words.
My point was that in a given situation it may be rational to have misgivings (not exclude, abuse, whatever) a person who professes the same beliefs that previous experience with professors of similar beliefs have lead to problems. As you've pointed out Miller doesn't profess that same beliefs as Ham (unless you go so general as to call all christian beliefs the same, which I wouldn't).
J J Ramsey wrote:
You can call them irreligious, though.
John Pieret wrote:
False dichotomy.
windy: "You can call them irreligious, though."
But that isn't really too helpful. Lumping those who believe that there is some sort of spirit or life force in with the out-and-out atheists is unhelpful at best, and intellectually dishonest at worst.
I was wrong to call you a cretin.
However you are in no position to complain about the standard of debate. A little while ago I asked you why you believed in god. You said faith, as though that was an answer to anything. You are clearly intelligent so I can understand why giving such a non-answer must be embarrassing for you.
May I suggest you act as you want others to ? If you want reasoned debate, stop giving stupid answers when asked why you believe in god.
"Does Zeus exist? Well, not on the physical Mount Olympus, but on some spiritual Mount Olympus, who can say?"
Anybody can SAY. And that's all.
Oh really? Jason made a misstatement "majority atheist" countries, but clearly the original issue was whether the influence of religion has diminished. As a Northern European myself I can tell you that the "spirit or life force" belief common in those parts is no religion. I could say that it's intellectually dishonest to try to move the goalposts of religion to vague supernatural beliefs in general.
Dawkins sees this as an issue of practical truth. No, you can't prove a negative but for all practical purposes it does not matter. Having religion touch science in any way is like letting medieval exorcism touch modern medicine.
He correctly stands against the principle that a compromise is always the superior solution.
Belief in mysticism is a moral issue. If we actually followed the moral system that mystics have preached for millennia, human kind would have gone under a long time ago. We did not because of rational people that refused to accept a fake reality and that knew that reason, not faith was a prerequisite for human survival. Mysticism is evil because it seek to corrupt your main tool of survival - your mind.
In questions of morality, there can't be compromise. If you compromise between good and evil, it is evil that will profit. Since human live in a real world that exists and follows consistent laws reason is good for a human as our minds are our primary tool for survival. Anything that seeks to destroy or corrupt it is evil.
You might now take Hume's objection and say that there can be no ought from is. That's true in the most general sense - in the same sense that you can't disprove a negative. In practice however it should be obvious to anyone that something is very wrong if you disconnect morality from reality. The flaw in Hume's argument is that "is" is not a static quantity. If a living being things it "ought" to kill itself, it will cease to be a living being. Thus life has to be the fundamental moral value for living beings, including humans. And that gives you a whole lot of "oughts" as survival is conditional on the actions you take in the real world.
I think that insult was for the paranoia and hysterics you have exhibited over at Pharyngula, not anything you said in this thread, so perhaps it isn't fair to judge you by your earlier remarks. That being said, your penchant for misrepresenting Dawkins seems to be intact:
contrast with Blake quoting the GD above:
If a religion makes truth claims about the physical world, it is insisting on such niche.
All religions (with the possible exception of Deism) make truth claims about the physical world.
Matt Penfold: I was wrong to call you a cretin.
HG: If that's an apology, I accept it.
MP: However you are in no position to complain about the standard of debate. A little while ago I asked you why you believed in god. You said faith, as though that was an answer to anything.
HG: I'm afraid my answer will be broadly the same and therefore unlikely to satisfy you. In my earlier comment I wrote that whereas science is a matter of provisionals, faith is a matter of absolutes. Either you believe in God, or you don't. You can't believe in God just a little bit, or when it suits you, or every second Wednesday provided that the sun is shining.
Crucially, faith is as it is, and a believer requires no justification whatsoever for holding the views they do. Sure, they might say things like 'Jesus came to me in the supermarket and I saw the light', but that is in itself no justification for holding a belief. You just do and that's that. Belief requires no scientific analysis, and it should not - indeed cannot be approached scientifically.
What tends to muddy the waters considerably is the fact that creationists actively do seek to justify their beliefs with physical evidence, which is every bit as wrong as the stance of scientists who claim that science can shed light on absolute truth.
In my view, a faith that requires the kind of strenuous physical justification creationists devote to it is not really worth very much, because faith should not require any sort of proof by definition. Conversely, to 'disprove' an article of faith is meaningless, which is the main reason why I found The God Delusion to be an unsatisfactory book.
Incidentally, my own faith has taken quite a few knocks lately, for complex reasons which I cannot articulate as yet. Part of the reason was having to read, for review, a most peculiar book called Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffmann. Kauffmann takes the view that the existence of systems (from economics to living organisms to the mind) whose properties cannot be explained by reductionist approaches causes us to wonder at the marvels of complexity, something he sees as 'sacred'. This struck me as a non-sequitur, so whereas Kauffmann had convinced me with every one of his arguments up to that point (except for his ideas about the mind), it made me think that even though God might be desirable as a cipher for something that fills a spiritual need, God certainly wasn't necessary.
This caused me to adopt an atheist viewpoint, simply by the application of logic (the intermediate limbo of agnosticism being ruled out, simply by that logic). Aha, you might say, my faith has been damaged by the application of reason. Well, possibly, but I don't think so. All I have concluded is that the existence of God isn't necessary, not that God does or does not exist. So, Gee, Officer Krupke, I'm confused. But I am too much of a scientist not to be comfortable with such internal confusion, and to be suspicious of anyone peddling absolutist answers to anything.
In the end, I have no problem with people believing what they want. I do object to creationism, though, which is transparently not based on faith, but is more a political and social movement that exploits the tendencies of people to be conservative, and plays on their fears about scientific developments of all kinds, not just evolution. And an absolutist response to creationism convinces no-one.
@ Windy (#86) about Pharyngula. Sure, I shouldn't have sunk to the low standard of debate in which Pharyngula regularly wallows. I think I was provooked, though. I had the sensation that everyone was standing back while a person called 'ichthyic' started hurling abuse, suggesting that the reason I didn't like Dawkins was that he's sold more books than I have. He has, but what's that to do with anything? At one point somebody else chimed in to say I shouldn't mind ichthyic's outrageous attacks on my Judaism, because s/he had laid into a Christian the week before, or something -- as if it made everything all wright.
I get the impression that Pharyngula is a rather rough bar where only people actively damaged by religion can hang out, so as to lick their wounds in company of their own choosing. What's sad is that these people seem to think that because they haven't had a good time, then nobody else is allowed to, either.
And I stand by my remarks about Dawkins. The 'probable existence of God' is not different from 'proof of non-existence' because bot presuppose that God's existence can be tested in some way. It can't.
windy: "I could say that it's intellectually dishonest to try to move the goalposts of religion to vague supernatural beliefs in general."
Depends on what the argument is. On the one hand, they aren't organized religion, to be sure. On the other hand, one can also view them as heavily anesthetized religious tendencies that could be roused by a dead baby sister or a New Age quack with a silver tongue. A pessimist could argue that the religious bent is asleep, not dead, and apparently not entirely killable.
Tulse: "If a religion makes truth claims about the physical world, it is insisting on such niche."
Only if those claims are practically falsifiable. That's true for creationists, but not necessarily for other kinds of religionists.
Why is practical falsifiability an out? The issue is whether a religion is insisting on laying a claim on reality, not whether such claim can be easily falsified. If I say there are fairies in my garden, I am insisting on laying a claim on reality, even if I say that such fairies are invisible and can't be detected by existing instruments. If the fairies aren't "allegorical" or "metaphorical", then saying they exist is a truth claim about the physical world.
Or, to use a different example, the Heaven's Gate cult made very clear claims about the physical nature of the comet Hale-Bopp (namely that a spaceship was hiding behind it). That claim was not easily falsifiable (especially if we allow religious-esque outs, such as perhaps the ship had cloaking technology), but it was nonetheless a claim about the physical world.
In any case, I'm not sure that one can reasonably argue that non-creationist religions do not make claims that are "practically" falsifiable, at least to the level that we would use for other supernatural claims. (In other words, if a text said a Bronze Age magician parted a large body of water, we would generally consider that historically untrue without supporting evidence, and I see no reason not to apply the same criteria to the analogous story in Exodus.)
Yes, I agree that Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers can argue in a simplistic and combative manner - then I re-read the Wedge Strategy and equally simplistic and combative comments of the theocrats - and I am glad that there are people like Richard and PZ who are willing to push back against those who would replace rationality with fantasy. So often the fantasy would magically (not really a pun) reflect the theocrats own opinions...
Accommodation and nuanced understanding are fine if everyone is prepared to rub along together. But if a few on one side have an oppotunistic agenda, then accommodation can easily become appeasement.
The Western world has mostly climbed out of the Dark Ages; the equivalent of the Dark Ages still exists in other parts of the world. Lets not go back there.
Brian English:
If I misunderstood you, I apologize. But how else should I understand the statement (in the context of this discussion):
"If religious people before have let their convictions get in the way of good science, then would it not be prudent to fear that this may again happen?"
Was the comment not supposed to be relevant to Reiss at all?
Or are you saying that people similar to Reiss have abused their positions in science education and let their convictions get in the way of good science? If so, why not lump them with Gish and Ham? If not, how can you say that someone who who does abuse science in the name of religion "professes the same beliefs" as someone like Reiss?
I'm just not getting which religious people you are talking about being similar enough to which other religious people to justify this suspicion.
Lucas @#85
And who has suggested that? Certainly not Professor Reiss or his supporters, although to judge by some of the abuse hurled by the keyboard heroes on Pharyngula and Dawkins' website you'd think Reiss wanted to open the doors of the science classrooms to full-blown Christian dominionism or something. The exorcism reference is close, though, as Reiss was certainly the victim of a witch-hunt.
Tulse: "Why is practical falsifiability an out?"
Come now, didn't you already know the answer to that question? Those who have beliefs that aren't falsifiable in practice aren't going to encounter evidence that contradicts their beliefs, so they have no interest in disputing or suppressing that evidence.
DiscoveredJoys: "Yes, I agree that Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers can argue in a simplistic and combative manner - then I re-read the Wedge Strategy and equally simplistic and combative comments of the theocrats ... Accommodation and nuanced understanding are fine if everyone is prepared to rub along together."
Don't mistake loudness for effectiveness. The accomodationists have been the heavy hitters against the Wedge Strategy, especially on the legal front. Myers and Dawkins have talked tough but haven't been as much in the fray.
You've all been very busy while I slept. Matt, watch your tone. This isn't Pharyngula where you can just say anything. See my comment policy.
PZ: Henry's right about everything (except the rightness of being Jewish, of course, which only matters if you're born to it, or desperately want to marry a Jew), including cladistics.
We have seen a number of fallacies of logic, including black and white fallacy, ad hominem, fallacies of composition and division, and so on, in this comment thread. I think I will ask my students to dissect them all, as an exercise.
As to where a spiritual Mount Olympus is, I think it's on the south island of New Zealand.
Well, according to several deconversion stories I've read in the comments to Pharyngula, it has worked several times.
The trick seems to be that the New Atheist Noise Machine™ doesn't "essentially yell" like you describe. What they really say is more like this: "Look at these morons! They haven't even understood that A, B, C, D, E, and, worst of all, F! LOL! ROTFL!"
I didn't expect it, but, apparently, confronting them with reality the hard way really does work for some people.
Sure, some people automatically switch off their brain when they detect an insult and completely lose the ability to read what is said. But so what. Not everyone needs to have hooks on their tentacles.
We are dealing with a culture shock here. Most of the First World today does believe in such a philosophical god. Most of the USA doesn't. Tens of millions of Americans believe in an utterly falsifiable god -- and believe they need to defend him.
Heisenberg's uncertainty relation?
That's called "theory of general relativity", not "physicalist model". It's a scientific theory, not a philosophical assumption.
Well, we have no reason to assume there's a preferred universe, so (assuming a multiverse) Ockham's Razor tells us we shouldn't assume one, but that's all. We can't look outside our universe.
You have changed your definition of "preferred"! First you talked about the term associated with the theory of relativity, which doesn't care where you are. The laws of nature are the same where you are as everywhere else, so you are not a preferred point according to this definition of "preferred". Then you switched to a completely different meaning.
This is even less sophisticated than St Anselm's inane word games with the meaning of "great".
Having made the mentioned switch, you bring neurology into the picture. Physics is only a complete description of reality in the sense that everything else can be derived from physics in hindsight.
Non sequitur. What if the mind is the sum of the activities of neurons that communicate with each other? Then we'd expect exactly what we see, no?
So you have completely failed to read the whole second paragraph of the Dawkins quote in the post?
That's not what the Bible says. YECs believe the world was in a completely different state 6000 years ago than it really was -- and that's inconsistent with science.
Wow. You must be remarkably misanthropic.
But here he isn't talking about atheists. Here he's talking about scientists and policymakers. An overlapping, but by no means congruent group. He's also talking about an overlapping, but by no means congruent debate.
The ability to do it is tied to our very nature.
Week? More like minute. When Ichthyic spots a creationist troll or someone else who is intellectually dishonest (even if only with, uh, themself), he plays "dance, trollboy, dance" -- his pattern recognition could be a little overactive, though.
Eh, that's not true. I have not been damaged, and neither has Scott Hatfield been. Yes, if you get sick if you're in the same room as an insult, Pharyngula is not for you, but otherwise, it's often quite interesting.
The existence of your god can't. The existence of Ken Ham's can.
So David, what about Michael Riess's god? Which is, after all, the basis of this discussion...
J. J. Ramsey:
Which religion do you think doesn't have any beliefs that are falsifiable in practice?
Henry Gee:
You can't? Oh well, there go the Anglicans, and most of the Catholics, and... most religious, except for the real fruitcakes. The Consistent Believers... [shudder]
No idea. Neither he nor Dawkins nor you ever mentioned that question.
(I'm told that making assumptions based on the fact that he's Anglican would run a surprisingly high risk of being wrong... that said, the god Catholic religion teachers in Austria believe in is almost or entirely unfalsifiable.)
David MarjanoviÄ:
So, are we to suppose he has a better opinion of theists who are scientists and policymakers than "Neville Chamberlain atheists"? If is is drawing an us/them distinction among atheists, isn't it likely he will also label theists as "them"?
Isn't it part of our nature as a species to express everything that is tied to our very nature?
There's a distinction between elite and popular religion here that is worth drawing - unfalsifiable gods are almost always elite god - the gods of the educated minority.
Almost always. A good many people who go under the rubric "Christian" or "Jewish" hold views that used to be the elite religious position. Sure, they are rarely the majority of a religion, but the same can be said of elite science views.
The philosophical issues apply to the elite beliefs that are now widespread. PZ and Dawkins do not think it is widespread, but most of the religious educated, including scientists, I have met hold to something very like the elite view that gets (unfairly here) called "deism".
Attacks on the popular forms of religion, while justified, do not affect the elite forms of belief held by those folk (including, I suspect, Reiss). So rejecting him because he is ordained is nothing less than bigotry and overgeneralisation (the two form a subset-proper set relation).
Richard Dawkins wrote:
Concerning resignations and witch-hunts I reminded of the hue and cry raised by Bill Donohue and his Catholic cronies over PZ's desecration of the Eucharist. If I remember correctly, both PZ and Richard Dawkins called on their supporters to write to the university president in protest against any attempt to have PZ fired. In common with many others, I wrote in defence of PZ's right to freedom of thought and expression even though I thought Crackergate was a juvenile stunt.
Imagine my chagrin then as I watched Myers and Dawkins stand aside and watch a fellow academic hounded out of his post at the Royal Society, apparently without lifting a finger to help.
And what were his crimes? Did he burn a copy of On the Origin of Species on camera? Did he denounce atheists as spawn of Satan? No, his appalling behaviour consisted of suggesting that since religion was unlikely to be eradicated any time soon, it makes sense to try and co-exist with what we cannot drive out. Even more shocking, apparently, was his recommendation that teachers be considerate when dealing with questions from their students. However, what places him totally beyond the pale, apparently, is his position as an ordained minister of the Church of England. Plainly, this reveals him as a rabid creationist who is utterly incapable of rational thought or scientific inquiry.
Sarcasm aside, this episode has done no credit to the Royal Society or the scientists involved - or uninvolved. I expected better.
Tulse: "Which religion do you think doesn't have any beliefs that are falsifiable in practice?"
Generally speaking, the non-fundamentalist versions of religions manage to avoid being falsifiable, in no small part because they work at doing just that. For example, with Christianity, once you find ways to avoid literally interpreting the creation and flood myths, one is pretty much safe from falsification. If you get into the details of biblical archaeology, things can get dicey, but most Christians don't deal with those details, and those that do can manage to kluge up rationalizations to fit the Bible to the facts or just not bother being inerrantists. Notice that this is still stuff that allows for miracles and wonders to have happened in the past. I'm not talking here about the kind of liberal religion that is difficult to distinguish from atheism.
Now I'm not claiming that these forms of religion are particularly elegant or that they don't still have internal inconsistencies. However, facts on the ground in and of themselves aren't enough to overturn them.
#98. Oh dear, dear, dear.
Still deterministic via probability skews, Borns rule, etc.
Did I say it was a philosophical assumption? (and what kind of phallusy is that?) It is an assumption held by physicalists. That's all that's important.
Precisely. So why this universe, and your body, and not another universe and/or another body? What's the physicalist explanation?
Ok, this is a fair point. The distinction being made is between first and third person experience. See premise #1 in my argument. Physicalism is a model of the universe that essentially ignores first-person experience, which I am provisionally asserting is more fundamental, simply on the basis of what is being observed, and because there is no knowledge of anything (including physicalism) without it. Third person experience (objective physics) is always reduceable to a model in the first persons mind. First person experience is always more direct, immediate, and real and has a preferred location that cannot be explained in physical terms (why you and not someone else?).
You're ignoring the basic premises #1, and #2 in my argument. Physicalism does not explain why reality is being experienced in the first person from the perspective of your particular body, when there are so many other alternatives - even in hindsight.
In addition, you are saying that physicalism is only a complete description of reality in hindsight(?) A rather odd position, but I won't dispute it yet.
Right, a potential fallacy of composition (as John alluded to). The functional layer is presumed independent of the implementation of it's parts. But that assumes you know what composes what, and how. Is the internet conscious? Is the milky way conscious? How about an individual neuron? Or a thermostat with feedback? Or an electron? Due to the closed first-person nature of consciousness, is it possible to know, even in principle? The assumption is that this functional layer is a coherent entity that is something more than the sum of it's parts. It's not clear how these parts give rise to first-person experience. That is the mysterious boundary between mechanism and experience (the so-called hard problem of consciousness).
In addition, even if you could identify how the functional layer is composed and separated from the rest of the universe, that does not explain why reality is being experienced from your perspective in the first place. That argument actually takes many forms - sometimes referred to as the argument from personal identity.
Well, there is a substantive difference, in that Meyers was doing something unconnected with his job, in his spare time, on his own, personal blog.
Reiss was speaking on behalf of a society, as part of his job. Had Reiss been right it wouldn't be an issue. The fact was he was advocating teachers to "teach around" difficult subjects, like evolution, rather than simply sticking to teaching the subject in hand.
The prevailing view is that it's me and everyone else, or are you a solipsist?
The atoms in your body are continually being replaced, yet you remain the same genetic individual your whole life, and only "diffuse" on very limited occasions. Therefore physical identity and genetic identity are two very different things.
Can I now conclude that physicalism is insufficient to explain genes, or is there an error in my reasoning somewhere?
...but not that prayer is at all effective, or that intercession works in any way, or that God has any effect on the world currently.
Are there Christians who actually believe that? If so, why do they bother being Christians? And are they really "religious", or do they just see religion as a social club?
The prevailing view is that it's me and everyone else, or are you a solipsist?
If I were a solipsist, why would I say that first person perspective was arbitrarily located, if I thought I was the only one? The reason I don't use "and" is because first person and third person experience are not equivalent (although I should have said "instead of" rather than "not"). One is direct and the others are inferred. There is a fundamental asymmetry. That is simply what is observed.
Can I now conclude that physicalism is insufficient to explain genes, or is there an error in my reasoning somewhere?
See the end of #107.
Archway
Not sure how to get the 'quoted' effect. To #107:
Note that I am not sure I completely understand your concept of 'physicalism'.
>Precisely. So why this universe, and your body, and not
>another universe and/or another body? What's the >physicalist explanation?
Isn't this what the anthropic principle addresses? And it extends to your concept of 'preferred' location.
But on second thought, there's an issue I'd like to address with your argument #1.
>1. Everything that is known or can be known (science,
>math, philosophy, religion, history, art, logic, etc), is
>all a part of your first-person experience, and always has
>been (the realization of that is also first-person
>experience). What you perceive as reality in its totality
>(noumenal and phenomenal), has never actually been
>separated from that experience. Not ever.
I've never been to Europe. I've never perceived it through my own senses (though I've seen pictures of what are purported to be Europe of places within Europe). Since Europe has not been part of my first-person experience, am I to conclude that it does not exist? Since I've never met you in person, am I to conclude that you do not exist?
Moreover, since I cannot perceive the multiverse, the multiverse does not exist; since my perception defines reality, then necessarily I am preferred.
Isn't this what the anthropic principle addresses? And it extends to your concept of 'preferred' location.
Not quite. The anthropic principle doesn't explain why reality is being directly experienced from your perspective instead of your neighbor's perspective.
It seems that I've really messed up the explanation of this problem. It pops up in several different forms. Let me state it much more concisely this way: In our physical system (and you can extend that to other universes, if you like), you have everything you need to construct any number of conscious brains that populate our reality - except for one item of information that's missing: which one of those brains is "you"? Where is that index information encoded in the physical system? It's missing. And it's not a trivial piece of information, either. Reality would be quite different if you were a dog, an advanced computer, an alien in another galaxy, or a being in another universe. If there is no physical explanation for this, then physicalism must be an incomplete description of reality.
Moreover, since I cannot perceive the multiverse, the multiverse does not exist; since my perception defines reality, then necessarily I am preferred.
Actually you're extending my epistemological claim to an ontological one - I didn't go quite that far. I said that everything that is *known* is from first-person experience, not necessarily everything that *exists*.
Upton Park
Since we are discussing the Hard Problem of Consciousness here and not the relationship between religion and science, allow me to interpolate:
This argument strikes me as playing with words. If subjective experience is merely the processing of a particular cognitive system, as the physicalist position posits, then the fact that a particular cognitive system has a location is no more inexplicable than my being able to take a photograph from a given location and show it to you. Nothing mysterious. Just a perspective, which is required by the physicalist hypothesis, and not, may I add, by the dualist or panpsychist one.
Oh and those who are considering a full on game of Mornington Crescent, I'm watching you. Via CCTV.
JW: Henry's right about everything
HG: Keep saying things like this, John. It does me the world of good.
JW: except the rightness of being Jewish, of course.
HG: We all have our crosses to bear.
Camden High Street.
John: Spoken like an objective thinker ;) There are basically two ways to view this: from the first person or the third person. You are imagining all this experience "objectively" from the third. Sure, you can setup a camera to take a picture automatically from another location if you like, but reality is still being experienced from your perspective, at your location, in the first person. Do you know any way to change that? I sure don't, and I've tried lots of drugs.
The question, "why is reality being directly experienced from my perspective" has a very curious property: it is only mysterious when asked directly in a first-person context, not when imagined "objectively" in the third-person. If you imagine someone else asking themself (or even imagine yourself in the third person asking yourself) "why is reality being experienced from my perspective, instead of someone else's perspective", it seems incredibly silly and obvious ("Of course it's being experienced from your perspective - you're asking yourself!"). But the question becomes much more mysterious and arbitrary when asked directly in the first-person. In the first person, there doesn't seem to be any physical reason why you alone should be the subject, and not someone or something else. So the question is: which is the right context, first or third? I maintain that it is the first-person. The first-person is immediate sensory perception and experience, and therefore a more fundamental and direct link to reality. The third person is always an image in the first person's mind - indirect and inferred.
We are playing a game of "spiritual" Mornington Crescent that is not detectable by science based technology such as CCTV.
Then how do you know where you are?
Allow me to return to the issue of Dawkins v.s. Religion. From what I've heard and read, it seems that Dawkins seems to see a "secular progress" in history, from multiple deities ( == multiple superstitious mistakes) to one single god ( == one single superstitious mistake). It seems to me as if he's saying something along these lines:
"Monotheism has already done with most deities, which is good. Most of the hard work has been done. Now we only one god left, which should be easy to get rid of".
There is a similar thinking in Karl Marks' (The Communist Manifesto): Before the rich industrialists took over, Marks says, society was layered into multiple classes. The industrialists have done with that layering almost entirely. They have created a society with only two classes left (proletariat and rich). No we are left with the "trivial" task of reducing this dual-layered society into a single-layered society. Should be easy enough, right?
Mediums
John Or are you saying that people similar to Reiss have abused their positions in science education and let their convictions get in the way of good science? If so, why not lump them with Gish and Ham?
No, I was speaking hypothetically. I'm sorry that I didn't make that more clearer. It's obvious that I didn't because you're now mentioning Reiss. Someone who I think has done nothing wrong. I tried to used 'may', 'would' etc to show the conditional/hypothetical nature of my comment. I was only saying that given certain experiences with certain sects one would be prudent to consider how one acts (or at least thats what I think as it's been over a day and I haven't slept much), I never meant to impune anyone, especially not good scientists. I have no problem with any scientist, whatever stripe, who does good science.
Actually, it does allow for that, provided that the believers in question aren't holding their breaths waiting for the prayer to take effect or the intercession to happen--and in practice, most of them aren't.
Brian:
And I thought that Reiss was the subject because he was the subject of Dawkins' piece, which had advanced the specter of people like Reiss being "Trojan Horses."
So, Never Mind and my apology stands.
This type of pap shows up time to time. That website is very active and as such the discussions get heated and if your skin is thin you may not like it. But as a whole the discussion is diverse and excellent.
In other words, as long as they don't think prayer and intercession actually works.
Good question. You can only know where you are relative to things that you already know. If someone where to show you a picture of the entire universe (vastly beyond your light cone), could you identify where you are in that picture?
Tulse: "In other words, as long as they don't think prayer and intercession actually works."
Not quite. They can accept in principle that they can work, yet still not expect to see them working, at least not in ways that couldn't be written off as coincidence or luck.
If they are indistinguishable from natural physical processes, then how are they miracles?
That doesn't really address my question. Did you abandon the argument that physical changes in the body are a problem for the concept of identity (conscious or genetic)?
Start with something easier: why do you have your memories, and not the memories of someone else? Could there be a physical reason?
Siilitie - Igelkottsvägen.
This is the Courtiers reply.
If a religion is unfalsifiable, then it makes no substantive claims about the measurable universe.
You are welcome to believe your invisible Unicorn is better looking than my invisible Unicorn, I just don't want people paid to teach about it during science lessons if it doesn't have measurable impact on the real world.
As an ordained minister Reiss is publically revealing his acceptance of the Nicene creed, I'm guessing those commenting on ordained minister will make that assumption unlike they have more detailed knowledge of the topic.
Tulse: "If they are indistinguishable from natural physical processes, then how are they miracles?"
Who said that prayer is necessarily supposed to be miraculous? For most Christians, "answers" to prayer are attributed to providence. Do you really think that a Christian who prays "God get me a job" (all the while sending out resumes or searching want ads ... :p) that he/she expects God to turn an employer's water to wine or something?
And why did you switch from talking about prayer to talking about miracles, anyway?
Prayers, at least as requests for something, are requests for miracles, that is, requests for supernatural intervention in the physical world. If you pray for your loved one to recover from a serious illness, or for your team to win a sporting event, or yes, for God to get you a job, you are requesting divine intervention. No, you may not be requesting that the HR manager's Evian turns into chardonnay, but you clearly are requesting that some sort of supernatural intervention into what would happen naturally, Why else would you pray for God's help -- what else could such praying mean?
And we were talking about practically falsifiable religious beliefs, which is why prayer/miracles are relevant -- if one believes that prayer is efficacious, one believes in miracles, and thus in principle has a falsifiable religious belief.
Henry Gee, #70:
.
Insults are equivalent to violence? "The likes of" me? Drama queen. It's "reprehensible to insult anyone for any beliefs they hold. . " ? Really Henry? In every case? It's reprehensible to insult, say a Klan member for beliefs they may hold? You may want to reconsider the universal principle you just proposed.
And no, it's not about insulting people "just because you don't like them." It's about insulting them for believing *and acting* on unsupported, ridiculous, retrograde, anti-educational views. And whether you approve of it or not, I am free - as is anyone - to insult anyone or their beliefs at any time. Please remember that at least in the US, draconian British libel laws don't exist to muzzle unpopular views or snotty tones of voice.
I'd offer you smelling salts to help you recover from your swoon, but I'm fresh out.
Libel laws have nothing to do with suppression, or not, of unpopular views or snotty tones of voice ...
... you ignoramus!
Tulse: "Prayers, at least as requests for something, are requests for miracles, that is, requests for supernatural intervention in the physical world."
Considering how broadly you've defined "supernatural intervention," your claim that supernatural intervention is the same as a miracle is false. In practice, unless one is being hyperbolic, a "miracle" refers to something that is normally utterly impossible: walking on water, changing water to wine, and so on. If circumstances happen to work out favorably on behalf of the one praying, that is not considered a miracle, and if a fancy religious label is slapped on such a thing, the label is "providence."
A cynical person might suggest that you are attempting the following fallacious argument:
1) Dilute the meaning of the word "miracle."
2) Argue based this diluted meaning, anyone who is praying is expecting a miracle.
3) Switch back to the real meaning of "miracle" and then act as if those who pray really expect to see something akin to water turning into wine.
Tulse: "if one believes that prayer is efficacious, one ... has a falsifiable religious belief."
Are you really so unfamiliar with religious believers that you haven't heard this long litany of excuses?:
* Sometimes God's answer is "No."
* God answers prayer in his time, not ours (which, not surprisingly, allows more time for an apparent answer to prayer just by the law of averages).
* God may give "spiritual" or emotional healing, rather than physical healing.
Nonsense -- a "miracle" is supernatural intervention in the physical world, period. Sure, there are more spectacular ones (like parting the Red Sea), but there are also more "mundane" ones as well ("They said the cancer was terminal, but now she's cured -- it's a miracle!"; "The car rolled over five times in the crash but I wasn't hurt -- it's a miracle!"). You may want to restrict the term "miracle" to more showy examples, and that's fine, but what we were talking about were falsifiable beliefs about intervention in the physical world, however you want to label it.
And no, the argument doesn't depend on showy "miracles" as you would label them. The beliefs don't have to involve water-into-wine level intervention, as any belief in divine intervention in the physical world has the potential for falsifiability.
I'm an ex-Catholic, so yes, I am familiar with those excuses. All those do is explain situations when intervention doesn't happen, but that doesn't rule out the examination of supposed positive instances of alleged intervention. If you believe a statue is miraculously bleeding, and I show that the fluid is not blood but simply a red pigment related to the paint, that would be a falsified belief. If you believe that, on average, patients whose health is prayed for should be better off than those who aren't, that is a falsified belief. We can set up any number of situations to test such beliefs (and some studies, like intercessory prayer for illness recovery, have been tested) -- this isn't rocket science. Generally, with enough examples, if prayer worked at all we should see the effects, regardless of failures in any one instance.
That's why I added the bit about "unless one is being hyperbolic." I'm well aware that "miracle" can be used loosely, but when someone is, for example, making an argument as to why miracle stories are nigh guaranteed to be false, those examples that you gave aren't going to be treated as miracles. It's telling that your hypothetical quotes could easily be said by someone who isn't a believer at all.
That's not all that they do. They also are used to keep Christians (and other believers) from getting their hopes up about their own prayers being answered.
True, but a deity is a heck of a lot less mechanistic than your example. No one expects deities to always do what they are asked, or to do only what they are asked. That provides a relatively easy "out" for prayer that a would-be miraculous bleeding statue doesn't offer.
Your mighty overload @#108
It may be a substantive difference but it makes no difference in this case.
In both cases an academic said or did something which offended others and prompted calls for resignation or dismissal. In both cases a careful examination of what was said and done does not reveal any justification for disciplinary action against either man. Myers was within his rights to what he did and nothing Reiss said departed from Royal Society policy or good teaching practice. Some may disagree with his approach but he was not demonstrably wrong. If there WAS any significant difference it was that Myers clearly INTENDED to give offence where Reiss did not.
The other obvious difference though, as I wrote before, was while a vigorous campaign of support for Professor Myers was mounted, Professor Reiss was basically hung out to dry. And the men who were so outspoken about defending the right to freedoms of belief and expression in one case basically stood aside and did nothing in the other. Apparently the fact that Reiss is a Church of England minister is enough render him eternally untrustworthy, regardless of what he might say or do.
I understand why he did it but I'm sorry that Reiss did the 'decent thing', the British thing, by resigning to spare his colleagues at the Royal Society any further unpleasantness. I would have preferred that he told his critics to go to hell, that having a Nobel prize does not make someone a god and demanded that they show him exactly what he had said that justified such campaign of vilification. A Dawkins or a Myers would have done it but unfortunately Church of England ministers are too decent for such uncouth behaviour.
Chalk Farm
To clarify what I said about how "when someone is, for example, making an argument as to why miracle stories are nigh guaranteed to be false, those examples that you gave aren't going to be treated as miracles," I point to Hume's own working definition in Of Miracles: "A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature." Hume goes on in a footnote:
Notice the caveats that Hume includes, which I have emphasized. In your own working definition of "miracle," you've glommed onto the part about "[S]ometimes an event may not, in itself, seem to be contrary to the laws of nature," but forgotten about the part about suspicion remaining "that the event and command concurred by accident." In practice, with mundane apparent answers to prayer, that suspicion to which Hume referred remains, and obviously so.
Now I can quibble about the "laws of nature" bit, but one can substitute "normally utterly impossible" for "violation of laws of nature" and still keep Hume's gist intact.
Anyway, ...
You've tried to come up with an example where the sort of non-fundamentalist believers that I've described would encounter evidence that falsifies their beliefs, namely their beliefs on prayer. Yet if we are talking the non-fundies, then we are talking about people who are familiar with the rationalizations of the phantom effectiveness of prayer and have adjusted their expectations accordingly. The results of the prayer studies that you've mentioned aren't that hard to explain away according to the standard-issue rationalizations or difficult to reconcile with the low expectations that the rationalizations encourage. You've tried to avoid keeping it from being a weak example by playing games with the word "miracle," but that doesn't really help.
In quoting Henry Gee ("Either you believe in God, or you don't. You can't believe in God just a little bit, or when it suits you, or every second Wednesday provided that the sun is shining."), John Scanlon (#101) wrote:
You can't? Oh well, there go the Anglicans, and most of the Catholics, and... most religious, except for the real fruitcakes. The Consistent Believers...
Correct me if I am wrong, but are you arguing that belief in God (in any deity, theistic quality, or whatever) is neccessarily coincidental with a strict doctrine? I would argue otherwise, if this is true.
As it is, a belief in a supernatural quality in the universe does not coincide with any doctrine, although it may. The issue I see, on both Dawkins' part and in Myers' defense of him and over at his own blog, is that these are connotated into the same argument. These are neccessarily two separate subjects: the application of a dogma, tenet, or doctrine to the real world can actually be tested, such as the argument about the sun standing still in the sky in the Bible; and the existence and/or nature of [a] God.
Perhaps Myers and Dawkins should spend their considerable energy on the former topic and not the latter; they would have a much firmer ground to walk this way. There would certainly be less vitriolic reactions this way. And speaking as a person who doesn't beleive in God, like me, this would hardly be considered accomodationist.
Jaime asked me
Er, no. I was being a little flippant, but making the serious point that many actual people who profess religious belief (including 'mainstream' religions, and I probably could have added Judaism) do not, in fact, consistently apply any logical implications of such belief on most days of their lives.
And sometimes I like to cut through philosophical arguments by pointing at actual objects and behaviour, the real things that philosophy wants to explain. From a third-person perspective, 'belief' is either just observable professed belief or a hypothesis about what someone really believes, deep down. Perhaps 'beliefs' don't really exist, deep down, any more than some other things that have names.
J. J., I really haven't tried to play games with the words I've used. As I've stated before, if you want to restrict the term "miracle" to only very spectacular violations of physical laws, that's your right, but it honestly doesn't make a difference to the argument I'm making, which is that all religions believe that physical laws can indeed be violated, and that such beliefs are falsifiable.
If prayer studies show no effects above chance, it is hard to argue that there is in fact any effect. I agree that one can perhaps rationalize away for individual cases (just as everyone has an example of an 95-year-old grandparent who smoked 3 packs a day), but if there is literally no objective statistically detectable effect over large numbers of cases, then that is as close as science gets to falsification. However capricious a deity is, the belief is that he/she/it does answer some prayers, and that claim is all we need to run this kind of test, to see if there is a prayer-answering signal in the noise. In other words, all the rationalizations only work in the end if prayer actually does nothing -- if God intervenes with any frequency in the world according to the prayed desires of believers, it is in principle possible to test that claim.
John: I don't know what this says about me, but this thread is the most fun I've had on the Internet in ages. I'd watch this on pay-per-view.
Blake: Believe it or not, I WAS paying attention. See, there was no mention of textbook reform or any arcana having to do with LaTex.
Henry: Pharyngula's not such a bad place. I'm afraid that when you rip off his bloodthirsty mask, Myers is a pretty genteel fellow, even willing to quaff a brew with the occasional theist.
PZ: There you go, sticking up for faithheads like Henry again, apparently due to that character flaw of decency where other human beings are concerned. I just don't know how you live with yourself. Why, you're practically an (gasp) accomodationist.
Oxford Circus
John Scanlon writes:
From a third-person perspective, 'belief' is either just observable professed belief or a hypothesis about what someone really believes, deep down. Perhaps 'beliefs' don't really exist, deep down, any more than some other things that have names.
I have a few things (and had) to say on belief. This link proposes that while belief has a strong relevance to relgious perceptions, it is in fact related to any conviction, including the process by which science affirms itself and keeps on going (a forward goal, if you will). I hear stories about WHY people get into science, and a lot of them have to do with their belief on the topic, and their desire for a goal. The means and the ends.
This is the tip of the non-philosophical iceberg. John, are you the John D. Scanlon of snake evolution? If you are, we can bring this argument into a material context about the approaches of the marine vs. subterranean mechanisms for snake origins, and how the two camps appear to approach the other's side as intrinsically false. This is not to say that there are unshakable truths to be fought over here, as during the Crusades between Leo II and Saladin. I note there are differences, but both are metaphysical in a way, simply because both have the same key elements to deal with yet infer differential mechanisms at play during each of their respective causal scenarios, and both seek to minimize the causal scenario of their opponent (as is true in any true debate).
The main difference here is that those who advocate science know when to stick to facts. It doesn't even matter if it is the religious who argue the facts, since the secular can also discount the facts based on their supposition of the strength of "their" facts.
(Incidentally, if you ARE that Scanlon, note that I am not taking sides on the issue, so this is not an argument against a position.)
Tulse: "if God intervenes with any frequency in the world according to the prayed desires of believers, it is in principle possible to test that claim."
Just because it is possible to test a claim doesn't mean that it is possible to construct a test that gets a conclusively negative result. In some cases, negating a claim is like nailing down jello, and that is especially true for claims with built-in hedges.
That sounds to me like special pleading. If I claim I am Donald Trump, you no doubt would argue that you could falsify that claim, by, for example, checking my fingerprints. If I say that my fingerprints have been switched out through surgery, you could then resort to DNA evidence. If I then say that my DNA has been transposed by aliens...well, at what point do you say that I am no longer making reasonable claims?
All I am arguing for is the same standards of falsifiability that we apply to other truth claims about the physical world. If believers reject those standards, then it is not that their claims aren't falsifiable by the reasonable criteria we use for all other instances, but rather that their psychology doesn't allow them to accept such falsification.
(I suppose you might argue that such was your point all along, but that makes the religious believer equivalent to the schizophrenic who thinks he's Donald Trump, and no amount of evidence of fingerprints and DNA can shift him. If that's the equivalence you're drawing, then I'd agree.)
Tulse: "That sounds to me like special pleading."
No, just an acknowledgment that some claims are much more slippery than others.
Tulse: "If I claim I am Donald Trump, you no doubt would argue that you could falsify that claim ..."
There's no hedging to that claim, though. There isn't much inherent "slushiness" to it. If you were to claim, on the other hand, that you had a weak telekinetic ability, but it comes and goes and often isn't available when you'd like it to be, I'd have a much tougher time testing the claim, since just about any apparent failure of the test could be attributed to the hedges built into the claim.
Tulse: "well, at what point do you say that I am no longer making reasonable claims?"
But I wasn't talking about reasonable claims, but about claims for which falsifying evidence is, realistically speaking, unlikely to be found. There is a big difference.
Tulse: "I suppose you might argue that such was your point all along, but that makes the religious believer equivalent to the schizophrenic who thinks he's Donald Trump, and no amount of evidence of fingerprints and DNA can shift him. If that's the equivalence you're drawing, then I'd agree."
No. I'm with Simon Blackburn here in that beliefs are contagious and that I can't consider someone insane for holding a widely held false belief. Rather, I'm arguing that in practice, moderate religious believers aren't prone to obstructing the search for truth because there is little threat that such a search will turn up anything too damning to their beliefs. It's telling that in an attempt to disprove this, you
(a) have stretched the meaning of the word "miracle" and
(b) have replaced a slushy claim with many caveats ("God answers prayer, but not always yes, in his own time, yadda yadda") with a concrete claim with little wiggle room ("I am Donald Trump").
Sure there is: "I'm Donald Trump, but you can't tell from my fingerprints or my DNA." How is that different from "God answers prayers, some of the time, if He feels like it"?
Boy, that's reading way too much into what I wrote. I wasn't saying that religious believers are "insane", just that their resistance to falsification of their beliefs are as irrational. That's a big difference. In any case, you didn't actually address the point being made, which is that to say religious beliefs aren't falsifiable is to do violence to the term, and to make allowances in the case of religious belief that we don't in any other cases.
you
(a) have stretched the meaning of the word "miracle"
I responded to that claim earlier -- as I noted then I think it is perfectly reasonable to use the term to address any violation of physical laws, which any divine intervention must involve, but that the term itself was not central to the argument being made. You didn't address that point -- do you disagree?
The "slushiness" of the prayer claim is no more so than the "slushiness" of the Trump claim when the various similar caveats are applied, caveats that would arise if such a claim were put to empirical test, as I outlined. That was the whole point of that example.
It appears we're now just talking past each other, and I doubt anyone else is following this exchange, so I will give you the last word.
That's why I spoke of built-in hedges. God is supposedly a sentient being with his own will and agenda, so the idea that he'll only sometimes answer requests is not in and of itself that ridiculous. By comparison, the caveats attached to the Donald Trump claim are obviously tacked on.
Jaime - yes, that's me, but this probably isn't the place; see you over at Tet Zoo or somewhere like that. But do you also not take sides on, for example, BAD vs. BAND (or MANIAC)? The contrast is more extreme in that case, but you see there, in the BAND side, commitment to particular historical facts (apparent, inferred strong belief), overriding any consistent adherence to principles of inference (belief in scientific method). It's possible to arrive at a 'true' result by false reasoning (e.g. leaps of faith), but it's not my preferred MO.
Lots of familiar strawman mischaracterizations of Dawkins' views, which makes the discussions about them moot (and, due to the familiarity, tiresomely repetitive).
To say there are no gods is to make a philosophical claim
There is no such category of claims. It's an ontological claim, and properly categorizing it as such belies the claim that it's necessarily beyond the scope of science.