The cover of Time magazine highlights the current struggle: it's God vs. Science, or as I'd prefer to put it, fantasy vs. reality. I have mixed feelings about the story; on the one hand, it presents the theological sound in such a godawful stupid way that it gives me some hope, but on the other, stupid seems to win the day far too often. It sure seems to have won over the editors of Time.
The lead article covers a debate between the forces of reason and dogma. They picked two debaters and pitted them against each other, and on our side, we have Richard Dawkins. Dawkins talked to us a bit about this on our visit, since he'd just recently gotten back from a quick flight to NY to do this. Time says they'd had to consider a number of possibilities for this argument: Marc Hauser, Lewis Wolpert, Victor Stenger, and Ann Druyan (speaking for Carl Sagan, who has a posthumous book on religion coming out), so they had a competent collection on one side, and they just needed to find a good representative for the other. Unfortunately, here's how Time characterized the search.
Dawkins and his army have a swarm of articulate theological opponents, of course. But the most ardent of these don't really care very much about science, and an argument in which one party stands immovable on Scripture and the other immobile on the periodic table doesn't get anyone very far. Most Americans occupy the middle ground: we want it all. We want to cheer on science's strides and still humble ourselves on the Sabbath. We want access to both mris and miracles. We want debates about issues like stem cells without conceding that the positions are so intrinsically inimical as to make discussion fruitless. And to balance formidable standard bearers like Dawkins, we seek those who possess religious conviction but also scientific achievements to credibly argue the widespread hope that science and God are in harmony--that, indeed, science is of God.
Who is "we," kemosabe? What gives these editors the privilege to speak for what Americans want? It's nice of them to so starkly dichotomize the positions, at least: Scripture vs. the periodic table. Woo hoo, I know which one I'm rootin' for!
Then the real surprise. They're wondering who they should get to argue with Dawkins, and apparently the "swarm of articulate theological opponents" is as nebulous and undefinable as god himself, so they consider Roughgarden (I haven't read her new book, so I can't judge that one) and EO Wilson. Wilson would be an excellent choice. They'd have to overlook the fact that he's openly atheist, but really, I'd love to sit in on an argument between Wilson and Dawkins; it would dispense with the god nonsense right away, ground itself in reality, and turn immediately to the difficult and important job of working out strategies. I think they'd disagree vigorously with one another, too. What great fun! That would be a worthwhile interview!
But no. They don't say why, but they turn instead to another champion for religion, and oh, my…their decision is disappointing.
Francis Collins.
Yeesh. This recent book of his, that established him as the face of religious scientists, is awful. Illogical, incoherent, a mess of assertions and rationalizations that make no sense, all in defense of narrow sectarian Christianity. Why, Time, why? Is there no one sensible on the side of religion?
For instance, Collins suggests that evolution is not incompatible with God designing it (yeah, he's an intelligent design creationist, apparently), and is asked when God's intervention would have occurred. Here's his answer.
COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.
Ah, yes, the "God can do everything and has no limitations" argument. I remember this one from grade school, but there it was usually a discussion about Superman's powers. Same thing. Same degree of basis in reality.
I want to know two things. If God can give us "spirit" and "free will" (two mysterious and undefined intangibles that I can't measure or see), why couldn't he have also given me a few million dollars so I could carry out my own desires? And don't tell me he doesn't work that way: he seems to have given Paris Hilton a buttload of cash, and look at what she's doing with it. Secondly, how can he claim we have free will, and at the same time claim God could predict his conversation? Does that mean Francis Collins' mom did not have the freedom to refuse sex on the day he was conceived? After all, if she'd felt like playing Parcheesi that night, there'd be no Francis to have the conversation.
Throughout the interview, Collins keeps on replying with remarkable inanity.
DAWKINS: I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.
COLLINS: My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else. God is the answer to all of those "How must it have come to be" questions.
Dawkins has the right answer.
DAWKINS: I think that's the mother and father of all cop-outs. It's an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now Dr. Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this." Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don't do that. Scientists say, "We're working on it. We're struggling to understand."
Collins just makes these grand assertions about the nature of an invisible, undetectable being as if they actually represent evidence—they don't. They are science-stoppers. Saying that an omniscient, omnipotent being who is aware of and cares about the fate of Francis Collins is a radically improbable suggestion, and just calling it "God" and insisting that he doesn't need explanation is a non-answer.
TIME: But to the extent that a person argues on the basis of faith or Scripture rather than reason, how can scientists respond?
COLLINS: Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation. So such discussions between scientists and believers happen quite readily. But neither scientists nor believers always embody the principles precisely. Scientists can have their judgment clouded by their professional aspirations. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of as this clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes the benevolent principles of faith can get distorted as positions are hardened.
Gah, what crap. Revelation is irrational and unreasonable. You can't do science, collect data, and then decide, "Well, God has revealed to me that the correct answer is 2 grams heavier". You don't get to mix flour, sugar, milk, and eggs, and then dump in a pound of fecal matter, and call the resulting baked product a delicious cake. That's precisely what Collins wants to do, and he admits it: he wants to add in anti-scientific beliefs and pretend he is still talking about science.
This is not an article anyone needs to read. You also don't need to read their shorter survey of four "select" people on the subject—it includes Collins (again?), Behe, Pinker, and Mohler—unless you really want to laugh yourself silly at Mohler, a young earth creationist. Comparing Behe and Collins is amusing, too—there isn't anything of substance to distinguish them.
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Collins can keep his "pure truth of faith," and I'll just settle for the "really real reality" of science and reason.
Collins can keep his "pure truth of faith," and I'll just settle for the "really real reality" of science and reason.
I must be out to screw up every blog I touch today with accidental double posts and typos, including my own! Sorry.
I couldn't read past the first page of that article. I was honestly surprised that a Time cover story could be so poorly written and inane.
I recently read the new Roughgarden book and it didn't have very much to offer, except some unintended laughs at the end. Her discussion of evolution is pretty dry and elementary, but her dissection of the Bible at the end is pretty laughable. One of her arguments is that the Bible actually says God created people "male and female", not meaning man and women, but that the first people were androgenous or hermaphrodites or some odd combination of the two. I don't agree with the fundamentalist stands on homosexuality at all, but Roughgarden's attempt to twist the Bible is in much the same spirit of people like Hugh Ross - their intentions may be "good" but it makes no sense at all.
As someone who was steeped in a Roman Catholic childhood, I think I may have a glimmer of what Francis Collins is groping for. When you start with a set of God-based assumptions (for whatever reason) and then begin adducing the consequences of your assumptions, it feels like rigorous reasoning. That what Aquinas was famous for (a "Doctor of the Church") with all that Summa theologica business. Of course, if your assumptions are all stuff and nonsense, so are the closely reasoned theorems you derive from them. The Catholic Church is particularly fond of this process because of two thousand years of practice. I still enjoy it as a mind game ("axiomatic Catholicism"). Although I am entirely lapsed, I've bandied words with Protestant acquaintances who want to argue "sola scriptura" and other non-Biblical doctrines. It bugs believers to be fought to a standstill (or even bested) by someone of no religious faith.
Collins is just hanging on to his security blanket, thinking he's reconciled faith and reason by building an elaborate structure of the latter on a rickety foundation of the former. But those topple over, even if they do it slowly.
Faith:
Collins shot himself in the face in the very first paragraph of his very first statement. He screwed up the meaning of 'faith'.
It's just my opinion, but, trying to define "faith" in a scientific manner is akin to trying to understand how and why we humans find butterflies "pretty" by stuffing them into a blender, and then centrifuging the whole mess before running it through electrophoreisis.
I want to challenge obsessions with science, trends and behavior in argument over the natures of religion and science, to intuitively reflect(if you'll excuse the pun), that the world is nothing but a process-procession from past to present of things rebounding and reflecting light from one event to the next: cause and reaction, reaction and reaction. Sense of some events can be found if they are regular (in path) short enough in period that a series of causes and reactions can be discerned, postulated and tested theoretically. However we can never know the exact beginning-origin, only intermediate points(from which we define a start) in the chain of events, for the applications of our science. Any state of affairs can have more than one plausible history, is most likely restricted to at least two -as rebound and reflection have two components (emitter and reflector), one can not know the exact past, it is cast upon his perception and breath , the real path to any time is unique: in the void, dark area's of this reasoning , we are always left with all wrong answers, at least two alternatives, in our science fact(absolute fact) seeking unless our correct assumptions are stated/ included, which I think are always arguable in terms of a hypothesis and antithesis-at least two other alternate routes(if the real route is unknowable-we were not present -all the facts are never known). Belief beyond test, then, derived of intuition, cannot be included with the categories of thesis and antithesis-it has to do with a correct but unknowable path. A valid religious belief is beyond test regardless of what ever revelations can or do occur. Science then always has only an abbreviated view and assumption(of regularity, period, duration etc), in fact anything observed has an unknowable history/path. We all know this as common sense, but a very great meticulousness has evolved in our thinking and especially applied mathematics. I think this is related to a disease like disturbance involving this issue that is so in grained that we are not levelly aware of, or forgot in nature of where we started, of the roots-beginning of this questioning, which are not unknowable, they are inherent with curiosity of the world and a partly known history of the ideas reflected to us from the past(though never completely knowable/understandable as none of us were actually present in the communications of the past. Thus though have a commonality with the present-assumed life long duration. If not unknowable, this then is a topic of science-The mass of an electron or its' path which includes many assumptions in derived theory, leaving the subject still in a vast darkness without the assumptions clearly known and stated to lend a correct name and classification to the theory, is a lesser category.
In discussion of religion and science, a good scientist does not make judgement, take sides in an issue. he learns, studys the fact of the existence of. Here again the matter is reduce a matter of nomenclature, title and topic of communications, not whether a god exists or not. In essence the discussion ,though understandable in the weaving and reflection, tossing of thoughts around on a topic to its' resolution, healthy, is still a little lower than standard and mature behavior, reflected as if in threat of succumbing to the studied conflict itself. It(the topic) has an illness of some kind-of action and reaction, that we should find a greater peace in searching this out.
For example, in this weeks issue of Nature an article about a very old virus found common to the human species-fragments embedded throughout the genome(I personally think the problem is of something swallowed of bacterial size or larger.)
I might be accused of trying to change the topic, am not attempting to suppress it, but believe that the real issue is an unencompassed medical pathology and that we need to sort all of our science evidences and activities in this direction so that we do not exceed its real limits, become causers rather than curers.
I firmly believe that any part of the world presented to us by nature, automatically (by virtue of the progression of past to present)includes, within our reaches, an absolute satiating resolution that would be automatically recognized when found, regardless of the unknowable, as they(unknowable-unattainable) reduce to a supeflousness -secondary or as unimportant in nature for instance, in example, to the period of traffic light that on one day might be paramount to ones particular travels, and on the next irrelevant. I think that revelations to this nature of things for our physical, and mental health, guidance, are of the highest, number uno, priority for our education and intellectual pursuits, that we reflect on and better define and name our problems, mental activities, and endeavors. If the pursuit of a potentially ubiquitous infection was not on the original agenda, a reorganization and reorientation, re-sorting might be difficult (especially if mistakes are already made with respect to our hands upon mother nature , but not impossible. It is only our spiritual strength, acceptance of and courage, as the initial, base root, and final determinant , not assumed science fact, that constructs a prognosis. Some things are innately unknowable, untranscendable by science facts and deduction, less we harm ourselves in a very indirect way, as things are presented to us and arranged in nature, and have not ascertained, in lesson, that this is not impossible.
http://www.marvinekirsh.com
http://www.authorsden.com/marvinelikirsh
I once worked in a cafeteria at my college.
Upon noticing that much the entirety of the food was on the bland side, I asked the cook why that was. He explained that they had to make food that everyone was capable of eating- essentially that it was necessary to pander to the lowest common denominator of food tastes, the person who thinks ketchup is spicy, etc.
Setting aside their tendency to avoid stepping on the toes of other large corporations, the mainstream media largely avoids being too clear, organized or pointed in their writing. No foot notes, no end notes, at best vague references.
Most people don't want the truth, they just want their delusional picture of reality supported/validated in some way so they can make it through the day without having to think about the cold hard truth of life and having to die some day.
Expecting Time magazine to produce something focused, true, innovative or meaningful is a lot like expecting my college cafeteria to serve kimchee fried rice, doro wat, aloo gobi, and shrimp gumbo. Not going to happen, because, like it or not, the planet currently revolves for the dullards in the world, not the thinkers.
Dang. Now I am hungry for K2 Kebab, just down the street. Mmmmm.
Amazing. I can't see how can Collins call himself a scientist. He believes in an interventionist God, but doesn't think that something that interacts with the universe requires a scientific explanation? He doesn't believe that readily observable phenomena like altruism have scientific explanations? Just visit a library, or look it up on the net. Presumably he would respond like Behe when confronted with 50+ sources - "not good enough".
"Comparing Behe and Collins is amusing, too--there isn't anything of substance to distinguish them."
PZ, I don't think that this a very accurate assement of the Time, survey you linked to. Behe states
Whereas Collins says
You don't see any substantial difference in opinion here? It seems pretty big to me. On the one hand you've got one guy, Behe, saying that natural mechanisms are insufficient to explain the diversity of life and God must be invoked as an explanation. And on ther other hand, you've got another guy, Collins, who says that these natural are sufficient and that the God of the Gaps argument should not be used.
Now, I realize that Collins doesn't take his own advise about the God of the Gaps argument when it comes to the human soul/mind/consciousness/whatever question, and that no atheist (including me) is going to agree with him on that issue, but even so, to say that there is no substantial difference between the positions of Collins and Behe on the topic of evolution (which is what that "survey" is about) based upon seems to me to be both uncharitable and inaccurate.
Collins' statements about the gaps argument contradict what his actions reveal he truly believes. There really isn't any distinction between his position and Behe's, because his gaps statements do not represent his position. They're just a smokescreen he throws up to disguise his position.
PZ is being both accurate, by making a correct comparison, and extremely charitable, by not comparing Collins and Behe to prion-infected livestock.
PZ:
(1) Saying that God is outside of time and space is not saying "God can do anything and has no limitations". I think Collins is just making the sensible point that God doesn't have to be seen as intervening at some specific point in the process of evolution, in order to be understood as "involved" in evolution -- since God's relation as Creator is not to some particular moment in the history of the universe, but to the whole spatio-temporally continuous universe. (Please note: I am not arguing for this, but pointing out what Collins meant, and that it was not what PZ criticized.)
(2) The claim that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with free will is a very old one and as you probably know there have been many answers to it. Here's at least a start: I'm sure you sometimes find yourself in a position where you know what someone is going to say before they say it. When this happens, does it follow that they had no choice about what to say? Not at all. (This is part of Augustine's answer in his dialogue "On Free Choice of the Will" -- only about 1600 years ago.)
(3) Dawkins asks Collins to explain his improbable God, and Collins responds that he doesn't think his God is improbable. You say Dawkins has the right response, but his response just reiterates that God *is* improbable, and so needs explanation. I don't see *that* as advancing the debate. Dawkins assumes that Collins's God must be some super-complex giant brain. I don't think that's how Collins thinks of God. I grant that there is a real debate to be had here over whether we can attribute qualities like "intelligence" to God without modeling them on known manifestations of intelligence in a way that makes God into something requiring explanation. But that debate isn't really entered into by Dawkins.
(4) On baking cakes: You can bake a cake out of flour, sugar, milk, and eggs -- I'd recommend adding vanilla at least -- and get a pretty nice result. But it will be a much better cake if you then spread some nice smooth chocolate icing on top. That's how I'd prefer to take your analogy.
(5) I haven't been able to read the Time piece yet as I am not a subscriber. But I agree Collins was not the best choice here. I'd have much preferred that they asked John Polkinghorne or Stephen Barr.
If there was a god, Marvin E.Kirsh would not be able to use the cut- and- paste funtion on his pc...
Ah, but he also says that God exists and intervenes within both time and space. The context of this statement, and the nature of the rest of his statements, clearly show that he will not accept that any properties assigned to God, even the ones he puts there himself, limit God in any sense.
What I find odd about Collins posistion, is that he says evolution got 'activated', implying that it isn't a consequence of the standard natural laws (that according to him, God created).
Caledonian -- he may say those things in the article -- as I said, I'm not a subscriber and haven't seen it yet. But he doesn't say them in the passage that PZ quotes. And the point he's making in that passage is a different one.
You don't need to be a subscriber to read the article. And the point he's making is a logically incoherent one.
No wonder you can't detect the fallacy - it requires the reader to be capable of producing valid syllogisms.
Is there no one sensible on the side of religion?
Is there no one sensible on the side of God/Xenu/Thor/Leprechauns/Unicorns/reincarnated warrior princesses from Atlantis?
Carl Sagan, who has a posthumous book on religion coming out...
With Billions and Billions, that makes two. Sagan has eight more to go before catching up with Isaac Asimov's posthumous output.
Caledonian: Thanks, I hadn't noticed that I could read it for the cost of watching an ad. (I'm kinda busy today...) So, I'll read it. I don't expect too much from it, however.
They'd have to overlook the fact that he's openly atheist, but really, I'd love to sit in on an argument between Wilson and Dawkins; it would dispense with the god nonsense right away, ground itself in reality, and turn immediately to the difficult and important job of working out strategies. I think they'd disagree vigorously with one another, too. What great fun! That would be a worthwhile interview!
Honestly, PZ, would you be happy with anybody on the other side of the debate who didn't immediately fall to your point of view, and change the terms of the debate? I find it difficult to imagine you looking at any argument for a treatment of religion other than immediate dismissal, and seeing any value whatsoever in it.
What you're really saying -- and indeed you say this openly-- is that you think this is a bad topic for a debate/discussion, since you already know the answer and think it's a waste of time to honestly engage (except via mockery) anybody on another side.
-Rob
Hello all,
Here's my two bits on this ongoing discussion. Perhaps a little more discernment is what the doctor ordered...
Analyzing the Creator Debate
Did you ever consider that atheism arose because certain people saw that religious characterizations about the nature of an omnipotent "God" were seriously flawed and then concluded that religion and the Creator were the same things? This is the exact same conclusion at the base of religious beliefs; namely that the Creator and religion are inseparable. Consequently, both atheists and religious followers are arguing over a flawed assumption without considering that other possibilities negate the common core conclusion of both groups. These arguments are actually over religion and whether it represents a reliable model of reality. The answer to this question is of course not. Religion is not only flawed, it is purposely deceptive! Though atheists are certainly sincere in their conclusions, the fact remains that they and religious followers are locked in a debate that cannot be won by either side because both base their positions upon whether the same flawed premise is the truth. In order for this debate to conclude with a truthful answer, a greater level of discernment is required.
One apt clarifying question is, if someone tells lies about you, does that negate you or make you a liar or a lie? Certainly, the image cast about you would be a false one, but that is their image, not the real you. Consequently, faulty religious assertions about the Creator of this universe do not negate the existence of a Creator. Considering the possibility that this universe is not by chance leaves the door open to how it arose, which leads us to seek what could have created and maintained it. Since neither religion nor science has yet adequately answered this question, it is safe to conclude that those who argue about the Creator based on either are most certainly wrong about one or more aspects. Therefore, another point of view and additional knowledge are required.
Read More...
Re Kremer
How about Ken Miller on the theological side? He and Dawkins just love to face off against each other.
Yes, Rob, I know. I'm supposed to be so respectful of idiot ideas if they're labeled "religion". I just can't bring myself that low.
Excuse me, but no one mentioned that "reincarnated warrior princesses from Atlantis" could be an option.
This changes everything.
It is such irony that people like Collins imply one moment about how one should not have a scientific view of everything, and the next takes his own advice and spews out infantile nonsense as a result. I personally will be happy to take the claims that there are "other ways of knowing" more seriously when someone who does so produces something that actually produces some insights.
The periodic table beats the bible hands down. The prediction of the existence of Ekaboron, Ekaaluminium, Ekamanganese and Ekasilicon and their properties outclasses any prophecy the Bible has to offer.
Yeah, PZ, Time bobbled this debate because they didn't agree with everything YOU say. Der de der de derpety doo.
"I'd love to sit in on an argument between Wilson and Dawkins; it would dispense with the god nonsense right away, ground itself in reality, and turn immediately to the difficult and important job of working out strategies."
Hey!
--You (PZ) apparently have THE scienceblog.
--You have strong connections with Seed.
--You have at least some connections with Dawkins now.
Why NOT set up this interview? I bet Seed would love it, no?
Like every other mass media outlet in the universal prostitution that is capitalism, TIME simply figures out what people want to read and prints it.
"at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out"
This is in the light of modern science such a weak argument that it is astonishing it is still used, let alone by persons discussing how science enlightens religion.
If one looks at the quantum picture first, ever since the inception of quantum mechanics it seems clear that the randomness and uncertainty displayed as aspects of nature are fundamental - no one can know all observables fully or predict particular outcomes of observations, there is no local hidden variables that can do this.
The alternative is gods who manage nature nonlocally, either directly or by setting up some parallel supernatural hidden universe mechanisms. Either way it is theologically and scientifically problematical. It is arguing for Cosmic Cheater gods - why should they fool us that nature is simple? It is also arguing that our current science is wrong, and that the simplest working theory should not be used.
And even in an old classical picture, it is a large problem. While quantum system develops linearly, classical system may develop exponentially which gives certain system chaos. So allknowing entities would need to resolve and store infinitely detailed initial conditions - which is impossible in any form of structure, even being "outside of time and space".
Marvin:
Amongst other things you discuss the world as a process. That is a fine world view, but you should know that the narrowly useful concept of causes is superceeded by causality, which in turn is a secondary and derived concept precisely from processes in physics. If you are interested in making process models compatible with physics, I recommend this paper: http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/nd-paper.html .
This also applies to your argument on origin based on Aristotle's philosophy. It has no connection to modern physics. In fact, we don't know yet whether or not we will learn the corresponding initial conditions for our universe - in some feasible cosmologies we can do this.
"For example, in this weeks issue of Nature an article about a very old virus found common to the human species-fragments embedded throughout the genome(I personally think the problem is of something swallowed of bacterial size or larger.)"
Here is another jumble of half-known facts. I'm not a biologist, but AFAIK about half our genome is from reverse transcription viruses. These viruses frequently infects cells and insert transcriptions of their genetic material (RNA or sometimes DNA) into the cell genome. About 90 - 100 000 infections have come to be fixated in germline cells. You can try search The Loom blog here at scienceblogs, IIRC it has posts describing this.
Wait a minute....Francis Collins calls himself a SCIENTIST?!
(thud)
Michael:
Shame they did not choose Ted Haggard, he could have at least given us a first hand version of what it is like to sin.
Shalini -
As a recipient of a Ph.D in physical chemistry, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (which is part of the National Institute of Health), and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, what exactly is inaccurate or surprising about Francis Collins calling himself a scientist? I disagree with many of Collins' conclusions and find his reasons for believing in Christianity to be very uncompelling, but that does seem to be a valid basis to question his qualifications as an active scientist.
About E O Wilson, Science and the strategyy he advocates toward religion, there is a Seed article:
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/10/the_synthesizer.php
PZ-
What the christ is up with the Panda's Thumb coverage of this Time interview? Did someone hack that page or what?
No, it's not hacked. It's PvM's point of view...one I disagree with 100%, of course.
Is there a limit to the number of morons eliminated by grease monkey? I fear I may have to one day choose the biggest morons, and that will present a difficulty, but for now, I am still happy.
Oh, if only Time could put the "science-and-God" debate into an impenetrable stasis field.
[question his qualifications as an active scientist]
I'm not questioning his QUALIFICATIONS as an active scientist, I'm merely wondering how a scientist in his position could cling on to an unscientific belief purely motivated by religious bias.
Francis Crick: The C. S. Lewis of the 21st century.
Well at the very least I'm deleting my bookmark to that site. He posts a lot, and he's got no credentials or bio listed. Page after page of "No seriously, are unicorns hollow?" is too much to ask anyone to waste their time on.
Nothing lasts forever, I guess.
Not looking forward to the day when the guy who owns Domino's Pizza buys Seed and replaces all this with his crack-addled meanderings about Catholic-only towns and probably PvM's "Some shit I imagine happening before the Big Bang is scientific, unverifiable, without evidence, and totally worth wasting my Sundays on!"
Shalini -
Fair enough--I don't how Collins clings to his beliefs, either. It just seemed (to me, at least) from your comment that you were questioning the basis for Collins calling himself a scientist.
How stupid do you need to make yourself before you can accept cop-outs like "God is outside of time and space"?
Did the great minds at Time review the list of Templeton laureates before settling on Collins as the anti-Dawkins?
Gee, why not?
The epistemological & ideological nuances of even Collins's flimsy cosmology would be over the heads of every working "journalist" except Bill Moyers, even if Time's editors had time to indulge in such pursuits. He was probably picked because he was already in their Rolodexes.
As head of a major federal project, de facto Beltway player, & proven sound bite provider, Collins had a head start on Time's short-list; having a god book in print probably clinched the choice in five minutes.
One gets the impression that some of you are piqued because *you* weren't consulted, or because you think TIME is presumptous in editorially speaking on behalf of the general populace. Please. The depth of outrage here seems far in excess of what is warranted.
Of *course* Time is going to choose the most highly visible "spokesperson", rather than the one best able to make the case in the public eye. Of *course* they are going to pick the combative Dawkins, England's 'most pious atheist', over Dennett. Of *course* they are going to choose Frances Collins, a high-ranking scientist with a book out, over somebody else with more nuanced views---though of course the shortage of such characters is actually a plus in you fellows' favor....
I also think that many of you are so blinded by your prior commitments that you misread his arguments and you miss an opportunity thereby. Collins is not making a scientific argument; he is showing how one can interpret data from the natural world in a fashion that is consonant with his views. Is it a 'God of the gaps' argument? Sure, but Collins isn't really arguing that the existence of gaps *proves* deity, but that there is room for a deity in this limited conception of the universe.
I might add that the only people likely to nod their heads in assent with Collins are those who already share his beliefs or who fervently want to have a reason to do so. His arguments are emotional and appeal to intuition, rather than evidence. You guys are spinning your wheels bewailing what you perceive as incoherent; he didn't adopt these beliefs with an idea at parsing some syllogism, but out of deeply-felt psychological need.
Besides, as far as the practice of science is concerned, the private beliefs of Frances Collins do not appear to have any impact whatsoever, including the scientific work associated with Collins. His views may be irrational, but his conduct as a scientist appears as data-driven and evidence-based as the rest of us.
And, if this were *really* about God and science, rather than the clash of two non-scientific worldviews, that should be all that matters. Both Dawkins and Collins are informed by their personal experience doing science, it seems, but neither one of them is really *doing* science in the context of the article.
Speaking of which, TIME appears determined to produce pieces of 'journalism' whose main purpose seems to be to stoke a controversy, then say just enough comforting things to avoid the appearance of endorsing either side. I don't subscribe, myself. They have an annoying habit of pairing relatively well-written articles (Michael Lemonick is pretty skilled) with misleading sidebars and pun-hungry captions that tend to distort the science for the sake of a little color. I still haven't recovered from their cover blurb a few years back, 'How Apes Became Human.'...SH
Caledonian:
If one believes string theorists, there are plenty of things out there outside of our four-dimensional space-time continuum. I have a hard time buying string theory myself, but I wouldn't make the mistake of saying that Edward Witten is stupid just because he thinks that there are seven additional dimensions, or that Leonard Susskind is stupid because he thinks that an infinity of other universes in these dimensions essentially undercuts the anthropic principle.
In that context, to aver that something called 'God' might also be out there in-between the 'branes' might not be scientific, but it seems a stretch to dismiss it with mere invective. That 'seamless garment' of logical consistency that you regularly model for the rest of us seems a little tight, frankly.....SH
Yes, precisely. However, you're skipping over the relevant point: Collins claims his feelings are evidence, and implies that his status at NIH translates into some kind of acceptance of all of his religious ideas as scientific.
Again, you're making excuses for the wrong thing. I admit that a god among the branes is a possibility. Dawkins says so, too, in the interview. The problem is that people like Collins make the positive claim that there is, that they have evidence for it (when they don't), and that it is specifically the god of the Bible.There's a line between extravagant imagination and crazy. Collins, in this subject, is far on the paisley-colored jitterbugging psycho side of that line.
Paul,
Do you believe in "free will"? Rather what does the term mean to you?
PZ wrote: "Collins claims his feelings are evidence, and implies that his status at NIH translates into some kind of acceptance of all of his religious ideas as scientific."
I haven't seen that first claim made rigorously, though I agree it could be implied in the title of his book. I haven't read the entire book, and much of my knowledge of his views is based on a rather lengthy talk that Collins gave at a meeting of the ASA. Collins obviously has never attempted to make either claim in a scientific paper. If, in fact, Collins has really made the latter claim, I'd give him the old horselaugh.
PZ also wrote: "Again, you're making excuses for the wrong thing. I admit that a god among the branes is a possibility. Dawkins says so, too, in the interview.."
Hey, PZ, I knew that! I was posting in response to Caledonian's rhetorical overkill on that one, not to any specific claims made in the article. You and I are on the 'side of the angels' on that one.
Thanks for taking the time to write..SH
[How stupid do you need to make yourself before you can accept cop-outs like "God is outside of time and space"?]
As stupid as Francis Collins' theological opinions, perhaps?
If one believes string theorists, there are plenty of things out there outside of our four-dimensional space-time continuum.
Yes, and those things can be described using scientific models.
String theories are certainly not outside of time, like Crick's version of God is (except when he isn't). And string theory (really m-theory, since it's not limited to strings anymore), while very hard to swallow, is a product of mathematics and observation, constrained by established physics. If a string theory predicts the existence of tachyons or magnetic monopoles, it's tossed out.
How do we limit the God hypotheses? Is God omnipotent, and, if so, what kind of omnipotence are we talking about? Is omnipotence limited by logic, or not?
Assuming they're spheres, how many angels can we pack into an 11-dimensional pinhead? Please show your work, and no peeking at the back of the book!
Why does the God outside time, space and ever possible dimension that human beings could possibly grasp through math/science/(rational) philosophy always crop up with the religious?
Yes there certainly is something beyond our existence, there are probably dimensions we cannot concieve of (yet) but if God were a personal God, then he would have to leave all those dimensions, enter the mortal realm we inhibit; and we should be able to observe this and test it beyond doubt.
Whenever I read the word "revelation," I reach for my little parable about Jerry Garcia's space helmet...
Im am on PZ's side. However, I don't blame Collins because one just has to accept that human beings can stand quite some degree of conflicting ideas. It may appear illogical or crazy for an observer but that's how the human brain works.
Saying "God is outside of time and space" should not be controversial; it is a fairly fundamental aspect of the concept of God. We can all agree that "God", if it means anything, means something super-natural, outside nature in some sense.
The controversy should be whether this means anything or not. There are plenty of other immaterial concepts (like those from mathematics) that seem to mean something and are useful. Pi is outside of time and space but seems awfully real. Does pi exist?
None of this is meant to defend the Big Daddy conception of God, which seems like a projection of infantile wishes. But maybe it's a projection onto something else that can be talked about sensibly.
CCP -
I'm not familiar with that paricular parable, but I admit to being intrigued. Care to share?
>>How stupid do you need to make yourself before you can accept cop-outs like "God is outside of time and space"?
This one always makes me laugh. I can't help but wonder how the God-outside-of-time-and-space interacts with time and space. Via some sort of cosmic pineal gland, perhaps?
Imagine our universe is a computer simulation somewhere, with God as the entity running the program. Such a SimGod might still be in some time and space, but it would be outside of *our* time and space, and we wouldn't be able to infer anything about SimGod's time and space. The existence of such a being is unsupported but not ridiculous.
That such a being would care more about our masturbation than in curing us of diseases, *that's* ridiculous.
Izzy wrote: "...but if God were a personal God, then he would have to leave all those dimensions, enter the mortal realm we inhibit; and we should be able to observe this and test it beyond doubt"
Question #1: If there is a being able to cross dimensions, why does it follow that such a being would have to *leave* other dimensions in order to enter our realm? A hypercube doesn't have to abandon its dimensions of length and width in order to move through time (and neither do we, for that matter).
Question #2: If we can't enter or directly observe the n-dimensional space "above" us, then how could we test any manifestation that allegedly comes into our space?
Question #3: (just in good fun) Do you think there's any truth to the Freudian slip that we 'inhibit' the mortal realm in which we dwell?
Jocularly...SH
John C wrote: "I can't help but wonder how the God-outside-of-time-and-space interacts with time and space."
Perhaps through dimensions other than time and space? After all, length and width interact with each other. You wouldn't want to dwell on this too closely; after all, 'other dimensions' is sort of cheesy sci-fi wash for the unknowable. Still, it's fair to ask if we would recognize an 11-dimensional being by only four of His/Her/They/Its aspects. Perhaps Eddington was right and the universe is 'queerer than we *can* suppose.'
Faith: DEFINED as beleif without evidence.
Well, Collins?
Do you use faith when trying to settle a scientific question?
blah blah dimensions blah blah string theory.
dawkins, and as far as i know no one, is claiming knowledge that a supernatural undetectable being beyond our current comprehension does not exist, all bundled up into a few of the weirder dimensions of string space.
the strong (and correct) atheist argument is simply that there is no reason to think that one exists. in particular, there is no support at all for the existence of gods, generally or particularly, or for the validity of any particular religious magical stories. the infuriating illogical leap of the religious is always the following: you can't disprove god, so I can claim my personal revelatory expperiences in christianity/islam/satanism are True. this leaves our side of the "debate" going "wuh..? uh..? umm...no. are we having the same conversation?"
It's intellectual tennis with the net down (to quote Dennett)... no point in playing. There is no rational discourse possible on the subject, because religious beliefs are excluded from rational discourse by their very nature. But for some reason we are constantly subjected to clumsy attempts, like this Time article.
Collins is odious because he is (consciously, purposefully) faking rational discourse, and his credentials make people who can't tell the difference believe that he's actually making logical arguments.
Personally. I believe views like the ones Collins has should please us; they are but the retreat trumpets of a broken, defeated army.
A god that is outside time and space, yet interacts with time and space in some inconceivable way, who set everything in motion at the beginning of time and stopped meddling, and yet is still behind every seemingly random event, down to the quantum level... All these vague and contradicting notions are but the willing retreat of religion to the realm of myth, along with elves and dragons: Just an admission that they cannot play in the field of reality anymore.
It's a bit like Hume's Omphalos theories: He tried to reconcile Christianity with what he called "the geological knot", producing an absurd and unfalsifiable point, and in the end, all he (unwillingly) proved was that there is no way to argue effectively against an old earth, and the bible's story of creation had to be moved to the land of allegory (read: fantasy).
Call me optimistic, but I think it's relatively OK that views like the ones Collins has are heard, and we shouldn't worry much if more people prefer them over the 'theories' of whackos like Ham and Hovind; See them as signs that reality is becoming harder and harder to deny, and reason is slowly, but irreversibly, winning.
Michael Kremer wrote:
"Here's at least a start: I'm sure you sometimes find yourself in a position where you know what someone is going to say before they say it. When this happens, does it follow that they had no choice about what to say? Not at all. (This is part of Augustine's answer in his dialogue "On Free Choice of the Will" -- only about 1600 years ago.)"
Did Augustine offer the following observations as well?...
I knew what someone was going to say before they said it because...
1. I come from the same society, and saw the same incident, so I thought of the same reponse (How many people say D'oh! when they do something stupid?)
2. This person always responds in the same way in this sort of incident.
3. Actually I didn't, but because of the brain's self reinforcing model, I forget all the instances where I got it wrong, and only remember when I got it right (did Augustine do statistically valid studies on this?)
So God can predict everything in the world down to the utmost detail yet still allow us to have free will, and we know this by analogy with humans ability to predict what someone says. Sometimes. Perhaps.
Let's face it. Augustine has been superseeded by modern statistics, brain science and simple logic.
"I'm sure you sometimes find yourself in a position where you know what someone is going to say before they say it. When this happens, does it follow that they had no choice about what to say?"
No, because sometimes you're wrong. If it was inpossible for you to be wrong about what someone was about to say, then it WOULD follow that they had no choice in what they said.
It's just my opinion, but, trying to define "faith" in a scientific manner is akin to trying to understand how and why we humans find butterflies "pretty" by stuffing them into a blender, and then centrifuging the whole mess before running it through electrophoreisis.
strangely enough, although you posited it as ridiculous, putting a butterfly in a blender might have actually resulted, if you sorted the mess out under a microscope, in a realization that the colors are produced by an arrangement of clear scales that reflect certain wavelengths of light. That actually goes some way in explaining why the butterfly appears to have so many colors, and as to the idea that "pretty" is entirely subjective, it would be easy enough to study that too.
have you ever seen the work done on why humans think baby faces are "cute"?
there are decent studies on the "how" of that, as well as the "why" from an evolutionary perspective.
we didn't even need to put the babies in a blender to figure that one out.
oh, i think cognitive and social psychologists and physiologists might have a great deal to say on the analysis of what "faith" means. Even evolutionary biologists have thrown in some testable ideas from time to time.
to assume that something is untestable purely because of an entirely subjective perception of the nature of that thing, is nothing more than exactly what Collins does when he claims God "beyond time and space".
there's no justification for it, beyond wishful thinking.
PZ wrote in response to Pim's presentation:
No, it's not hacked. It's PvM's point of view...one I disagree with 100%, of course.
looking at the recent (last few months) of Pim's posts on PT (especially after Allen MacNeill finished his course at Cornell on ID/evo), it at appears Pim may be dealing with some severe cognitive dissonance.
either that, or he's trying out some new "strategy" that's already jumped the shark, according to many regular PT readers.
either way, it's been very difficult to wade through Pim's thought processes (contributions) of late.
Well, if you want to think of God as a physical entity within the Universe, subject to its rules, fine. I certainly find that more sensible than appeals to the supernatural. But what you describe is not 'outside time and space.' It's merely outside our little corner of time and space, which is a very different thing.
Let's say I accept the premise that intelligence can only exist in a universe where the universal constants are extremely finely tuned.
Then how can God, apparently some type of massive intelligence, exist "outside space and time" where the universal constants either
-are different, and intelligence/life is impossible?
-are the same, and intelligence needs to evolve from scratch?
-don't apply, and intelligent beings can just pop into existence fully formed? (thus falsifying our premise, btw.)
Brian,
Roughgarden didn't come up with this herself; some Jewish mystics in the middle ages believed this. More specifically, they believed the adam was created in the form of a man and a women joined back to back, and later split in two. (That business with the "rib"). The Greeks had a similar myth about primordial humans, but I don't know when, or who originated the myth. As for God, well his outermost sphere is composed of a female hemisphere and a male hemisphere. (As far as I know the other spheres are neuter).
Now just because this interpretation is old doesn't mean it's not silly. But interestingly, the Pentateuch does occasionally use feminine grammar forms for God (and even plural!). If you want to know more I'm afraid you'll have to do your own research, I've just hit the limits of my knowledge.
But both the simulation and the hypothetical simulator are part of the same universe, within the same time and space, and whether the simulator ever intentionally intervenes or not, no accurate model of the simulation can be made without including everything in the external world.
In short: you're wrong.
Thanks for the information Andrew. I had never heard the claims before, but it's interesting to see where the roots of Roughgarden's argument lie.
PZ wrote, way the heck up there:
I just wanted to sound my agreement with this. Hear, hear.
I must say that I find this discussion utterly utterly depressing. Here we are, tens of thousand of years of climbing our evolutionary branch to what one might hope would by now be some place of rational existence, but instead we're still living much of our intellectual lives in the caves of the stone age, arguing whether "our creator" is male or female.
Please, Scotty, beam me up. Any place gotta be better than this.
The debate was supposed to be "God vs. Science." Dawkins seems a reasonable representative of science. I guess this God fellow never showed up though; that must be why they had to scrape to get Francis Collins to fill in.
MartinM wrote: "Well, if you want to think of God as a physical entity within the Universe, subject to its rules, fine. I certainly find that more sensible than appeals to the supernatural. But what you describe is not 'outside time and space.' It's merely outside our little corner of time and space, which is a very different thing."
In fact, I lean precisely that way. If any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Arthur C. Clarke), it seems that any sufficiently powerful natural entity would be indistinguishable from a supernatural entity. Would such a being be outside all time and space? Perhaps not, but such a being would arguably transcend our 'little corner', and there's nothing 'mere' about that.
Could such a being ever be the personal God of the believer, or would this be ruled out by the constraints of natural law? Like Einstein, we might wonder if 'the good Lord' had any choice in the matter or if this conception merely reduces to the Universe as we know it.
My intuition (there is nothing scientific about it) is toward the former. Constraints can not be said to rule out the possibility of alternatives if you have the power to change the initial conditions. Just ask the guys on the NFL Rules Committee....SH
In regard to god and free will. General relativity tells us that time is a dimension of the Universe, so wouldn't a creator of the Universe have to craft all of time. It seems a Universe with a Christian god and free will would have to have absolute time and our Universe doesn't appear to have that quality.
Ahhh but which one and how could you determine which you are actually believing in?
the Must-Be-Santa Hypothesis:
"COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable"
Iteratively augmented Time Slogan: Read TIME and UNDER-understand
Zeno: Another way to put your point is to tell the story of Kurt Gödel, who probably accidentally reasoned himself into a horrible position and died almost literally because of his ability to do logic independent of subject matter. Also, it is interesting to note that the Talmud seems to contain a similar sort of result as your axiomatic Catholicism, but in another religion. People drawing all kinds of (correct, more or less) conclusions from some pretty weird premisses.
Grumpy: (Pardon me if I reuse an old joke) And yet neither of them have written a book on the afterlife yet! I wonder why? :)
Scott Hatfield wrote: "Collins is not making a scientific argument; he is showing how one can interpret data from the natural world in a fashion that is consonant with his views" I wouldn't mind if he were doing just that. But he's not - as I said on the last FC thread, he's distorting science to do so. (I think he may also distort his own religious tradition, but that's his own problem, not ours.)
mtraven: I know that I lose the mathematicians when I say this, but yes, pi is fictional.
Andrew Wade: "Elohim" is grammatically plural. I don't know what words are grammatically feminine ...
It's a little cheeky for a scientific non-entity like PZ (when was your last peer-reviewed paper PZ?) to imply that Collins (a director of the Human Genome Project) isn't quite a 'proper' scientist. Stop being such a whiney little bitch of a Dawkins wannabe.
Now I disagree with Collins' rather odd metaphysical views but it doesn't seems to have stopped him doing good things in science. What about other believers like Robert Pennock, John Barrow, and Simon Conway-Morris; are they all not quite 'proper' scientists? The last two are professors at Cambridge University when I last checked. Of course religious people are a minority of scientists but I for one don't despise my religious colleagues if they come up with the "scientific goods", I simple admire their scientific contribution.
And from an interview on Irish radio I understood that Dawkins' isn't interested in 'free will' nor I guess the philosophical and scientific questions surrounding consciousness.
The whole problem with this God thing is that one can make up anything one wants to. In reality one can neither prove nor disprove the existence of anything like a God, a soul or "life after death". Note that all accounts of the afterlife come from people who are still breathing!
So how can one argue or debate on a subject where anything goes, anything can be "made up" and nothing concrete can be pointed at let alone proven? I would think it to be almost immpossible!
Please...directing the HGP does not make Collins a great scientist, just a good-enough administrator.
The Free Will meme is based on the belief that something could take it away or determine your future if it wished. Which is complete and utter bullshit. There's not such thing a "free will".
Geeze. I mangled that nicely.
There is no such thing as free will.
Or fate.
Michael Kremer wrote:
What Collins meant was he accepts the claims of his NIV that his god made the universe and knows everything and he rejects the claims of his NIV about his god specially creating living things out of stuff like dust and ribs.
You and con artists like John Edward know what they'll say because you or a situation has limited what they will say, right? In both this case and the case of a god with the ability to know all future events from setting up an infinite accuracy of symmetry breaking in a big bang (or whatever other nonsense one wants to make up) free will is only an illusion.
I supposed one could argue the Christian NIV quoting Collins has a concept of a god that completely contradicts the god in his NIV...
"Furthermore, as God is not limited by natural laws, he on occasion has performed miracles which science is unable to judge, since they fall outside the natural realm. Those miracles include many signs and wonders in Old Testament days. But most importantly to my Christian faith is the literal and historical resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, which is the absolute cornerstone of what I believe." (Collins, "Faith and the Human Genome")
Collins doesn't accept the woman from a rib or global flood miracles, but accepts the pregnant virgin and dead human coming back to life miracles in his NIV. Yes, debating religious hypocrites is useless.
Now I disagree with Collins' rather odd metaphysical views but it doesn't seems to have stopped him doing good things in science.
Like clockwork, the concern troll pops in with his puffy strawman ready for beating.
Did anyone claim that Collins had not done good things in science? Did anyone claim that one could not do good things in science and simultaneously be a believer in Jebu Cripes? Nope.
So take your strawman and shove it where the sun don't shine. Thanks.
I just *love* it when some well-read, well-spoken skeptic trenchantly declares that free will is an illusion. After all, if we're all just robots, what's the point of this conversation?
More seriously, I prefer to think of our selves as emergent properties of a system, heavily constrained by both natural law and our own history, but within those parameters entirely free to act.....SH
Now I disagree with Collins' rather odd metaphysical views but it doesn't seems to have stopped him doing good things in science.
Like clockwork, the concern troll pops in with his puffy strawman ready for beating.
Did anyone claim that Collins had not done good things in science? Did anyone claim that one could not do good things in science and simultaneously be a believer in Jebu Cripes? Nope.
So take your strawman and shove it where the sun don't shine. Thanks.
I'm speaking of the concept of Free Will being a gift of god... in terms of sin and evil.
Of course we are free to make our own decisions, or own choices, but it has nothing to do with a suprmeme being allowing us to make those choices... and make "bad" ones according to it's law.
Speaking of which, don't you have a Kenner action figure of Princess Leia in her Bespin gown shoved up your nethers?
No. You wedged your doll up into Todd's buttcrack, as I recall. Not mine.
An echoing troll. The bridge he lives under my be a large one.
(I'm not exactly sure which orifice it is, but the content issuing forth is the same regardless.)
Nominee for Lamest Putdown of the Year.
Ahhh.... PZ got around to blocking him. Nicely done.
Scott Hatfield wrote: "Collins is not making a scientific argument; he is showing how one can interpret data from the natural world in a fashion that is consonant with his views" I wouldn't mind if he were doing just that. But he's not - as I said on the last FC thread, he's distorting science to do so. (I think he may also distort his own religious tradition, but that's his own problem, not ours.)
indeed, not only is he distorting (horribly) certain aspects of science to feed his "special creation" postulate, but he conveniently ignores entire fields of endeavor in doing so, like the fields of behavioral ecology and psychology.
It's like he does a mind blank on the hundreds of studies regarding altruism in animals, and even recent studies of higher order behaviors in elephants and apes.
moreover, if he wants to claim that things like empathy and altruism are not natural, but somehow special endowments, how would he explain physical abberations that cuase the measurable loss of aspects of "morality" in humans, like the loss of empathy in those who suffer from Narccisstic Personality Disorder, for example.
it's obvious the blinders are on for Collins when he considers these questions, and i can think of no better explanation than pure cognitive dissonance.
To have the conversation known by a god that fine-tuned some initial conditions so precisely he knew this conversation would take place some 15 billion years later?
I think my parameters are more constrained than Ted Haggard's...
To: Torbjörn Larsson . I am refering to the discussion in terms of "search for God" with reference to the fact fact I beleive and seems amenable to logical argument that the actual path of things past is unknowable -light refelcts and rebound from past to present in an exact analogy. I wanted to combine this -if you wish to call it a process-evolution-witnan alos argueable fact that in this "process of rebounding and reflection -any disturbances -life troubles woul dhave to reveal themselves in some form for solution to the present or evolution from the past cound not have continued..I believe all of our theories are overly complicated. We have light movement and energy
marvin
Alienward: "...I think my parameters are more constrained than Ted Haggard's..."
OK, you made my day with that post, especially after all the previous nastiness on this thread. Appreciatively...SH
Ichthyic: You know, I remember reading E.O. Wilson's 'On Human Nature' as a college freshman and being properly horrified at the notion that altruism could be a product of natural selection.
These days, I'm likely to spend the end of the year in my high school biology classes doing a combination of sex ed, comparative primatology and evolutionary psychology, etc. Let's just say that my views have changed a lot since then!
Obviously, I'm not too impressed with Collins' argument from the moral sense, since it's clear from reading his gloss that he really isn't all that familiar with work on the evolutionary basis of altruism. I'm inclined (wishful thinking?) to attribute his views to ignorance rather than a deliberate misrepresentation of science.
Some on this thread obviously disagree, though, and I'm going to make it my business to scour his writings more throughly. With that in mind, a challenge to anyone listening: perhaps someone who is au courant and has access to the man could pin him down on a few key points?
Any suggestions? I think it would be a service to the scientific community to focus on the credibility of his argument from the moral sense in light of current research, rather than to dither endlessly about 'God vs. science', which is a non-starter with the general public.
SH
I for one cannot believe I just read this 'argument' on this blog.
Thisis perhaps the most clueless tripe I have seen produced. You never actually 'know' what someone else is going to say. You are making a guess and perhaps a guess based on the knowledge of the person your talking with and their thinking style but this is simply an informed prediction not KNOWING in any real sense what is about to be said.
What a weak, weak statement and I can't believe people actually buy into such vacuous ideas.
I'm inclined (wishful thinking?) to attribute his views to ignorance rather than a deliberate misrepresentation of science.
I too have nothing but wishful thinking to go on to figure out where Collins is coming from on these issues.
It's hard for me to believe that someone who spent so much time analyzing the evolutionary roots of genomes could be entirely ignorant of whole field of biology.
the rest of his book, aside from the morality stuff, seems quite well written for the most part.
again, my contention is a form of denial arising out of congnitive dissonance, but I guess that's a pretty "old school" way of looking at it.
I agree that any references that would clarify Collins' background on these issues would be welcome.
as to recent researches on animal behavior that are relevant, there is one in the current issue of PNAS that hits right on target, and here's a little blurb about it:
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=133007INHI5O
Empathic Elephants?
According to Reiss, the research, published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that elephants share high-order behaviors with humans, even though we've evolved along different paths.
Among those traits is empathy, or the capacity to distinguish others' emotions, which in turn is tied to the capacity to distinguish oneself from others.
"This is true for great apes, dolphins, and elephants," said Reiss. "They have large, complex brains, complex social organization, and they show these social traits of altruism and empathy, which really involve care-giving and helping behavior."
Reiss also said that dolphins, which have no frontal lobes, still display such traits, despite the fact the frontal lobes are believed to be the seat of empathy in humans.
"This is a very nice case of cognitive convergence," said Reiss.
there were also relatively recent studies on apes using similar techniques, and then there are the many studies on kin selection and reciprocal altruism that bear on the issue as well. Vampire bats always come to mind.
True, but I didn't create that person and--as a consequence of knowing what that person would say before I created him--that person's conversation.
I had no idea that Hedwig and the Angry Inch incorporated so much mythology.
"I'd love to sit in on an argument between Wilson and Dawkins; it would dispense with the god nonsense right away, ground itself in reality, and turn immediately to the difficult and important job of working out strategies."
I see consilience as part of the misunderstandings that comes from seeing the method of science as inductive instead of hypothesis testing - deductive - falsifiable. Emergence doesn't mean conflation and unfalsifiability. But Wilson has done other great stuff, and I would certainly sit in on the argument too.
"If a string theory predicts the existence of tachyons or magnetic monopoles, it's tossed out."
Correct, except that it predicts plenty tachyons, as imaginary mass states on strings. But when on closed strings not as stable particles, but as decaying signals of topological instabilities. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyons )
"Pi is outside of time and space but seems awfully real."
A platonist, pi-ous to boot. ;-)
"Imagine our universe is a computer simulation somewhere, with God as the entity running the program."
Nobody likes Cosmic Cheaters. But a Cosmic Player I could like. What bets does he take?
"If there is a being able to cross dimensions, why does it follow that such a being would have to *leave* other dimensions in order to enter our realm?"
Leave here means that some observable interaction happens with our spacetime.
"If we can't enter or directly observe the n-dimensional space "above" us, then how could we test any manifestation that allegedly comes into our space?"
That is what you have to answer, to enable us to conclude that ideas of such beings aren't vacuous. The theories we build of n-dimensional space must be testable to avoid exactly this problem.
"Constraints can not be said to rule out the possibility of alternatives if you have the power to change the initial conditions."
Constraints constrain possibilities, so of course they can. More specifically, no funny initial conditions can rule out probability or energy conservation.
"I just *love* it when some well-read, well-spoken skeptic trenchantly declares that free will is an illusion."
Free will is convenient folk psychology. No neuroscientist has found a correlate yet - on the contrary, it seems we can explain brain function without it.
Selfawareness is on the other hand common, seen in humans, apes, dolphins and now latest in elephants.
Actually, that song ("Origin of Love") really is based on a scene from Plato's Symposium, where [some guy who's name I forget] tells a story about everybody originally being two people stuck together until Zeus gets mad and blasts them all in half. And ever since, we've all been looking for our "missing halves". Awww.
TL: Not to rain on your parade, but people do tend to report the sensation of being a unitary 'self' that seems free to act. How do you propose to uncouple that sensation, phantasm or no, from the trivial fact of self-awareness?
And, even if we can do so, does determinism follow---and, if so, why? Freely....SH
Scott:
"Not to rain on your parade, but people do tend to report the sensation of being a unitary 'self' that seems free to act."
I believe this is what folk psychology means. "Folk psychology (sometimes called naïve psychology or common sense psychology) is the set of background assumptions, socially-conditioned prejudices and convictions that are implicit in our everyday descriptions of others' behavior and in our ascriptions of their mental states.
...
Others claim that what we actually do when we attempt to mentally describe and explain other's behavior is simulate the behavior and the mental states of the other person within our own mind. On this view, folk psychology is not an explicit theory, but rather a practice based on this ability to simulate." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_psychology )
I believe I have seen neuroscientists that are unsatisfied with such ad hoc theories, and presumably tries to get at the phenomena itself.
In any case I would call these ideas and feelings, of others or own behaviour, representations that our brains process. And as such emergent part of the software, not fundamental parts of the hardware. I don't think it says anything deep about nature. (Instead it says quite a lot about the human condition.)
"How do you propose to uncouple that sensation, phantasm or no, from the trivial fact of self-awareness?"
I wouldn't call selfawareness trivial since it isn't seen in all animals, nor the fact it took quite a while to come up with a correlate (experimental method).
Hello, Pharyngula Readers-Thinkers, Everybody, Mind, and Spirit! :)
Specifically, Dr. PZ Myers, I finally had a chance of scrutinizing the Time article in print.
Briefly, I thought, in the Dawkins-Collins debate: Collins performed superbly and rationally--especially in defending his personal faith, and his public Science, which is Genetics, or The Language of God as he titled his 2006 self-revelatory book; whereas Dawkins--as usual whenever he is cornered by his own naïvete intellectualism--lost his "cool," by resorting to name calling his opponents being "stupid"!
Furthermore, in the matters of Mind, Religion, Morality, Altruism: Dawkins again reduced himself emotionlessly, mindlessly, to the defense of his irrelevant Evolutionism of sexual copulation, replication, kin-selection, etc, as the Scientism that he has had been propagating in his first book The Selfish Gene since 1976; and now extending his pseudo Darwinism as anti-Religionism into The God Delusion (2006), which I've had commented elsewhere, A little more on Eagleton (ScienceBlogsUSA; October 24) as indefensible in all human conditions--whether intellectually or spiritually; empathically or compassionately; scientifically or religiously; epistemologically or rationally--all conditions as related to our human existence on Earth that Dawkins is obviously ignorant therein and thereof!
Thus, I must disagree with all your hypes and biased analysis of the Time article above.
Thank you all for your kind attention and cooperation in this matter--just a food for thought, from a self-introspective Darwinist evolutionist perspective. Happy reading, thinking, scrutinizing, and enlightening! :)
Best wishes, Mong 11/7/6usct1:32p; author Gods, Genes, Conscience and Gods, Genes, Conscience: Global Dialogues Now; a cyberspace hermit-philosopher of Modern Mind, whose works are based on the current advances in interdisciplinary science and integrative psychology of Science and Religion worldwide; ethically, morally; metacognitively, and objectively.
Mong, there you go again with the non sequiturs. Look, I'm a believer myself and I would love to have a few more arrows in my quiver for debating Dr. Dawkins, but your arguments are lamentably weak.
The fact that Collins is gracious and affable and Dawkins has (ahem) a more pit-bull like quality doesn't make the latter's arguments less meritorious.
Similiarly, while I agree that Dawkins present work is not science per se, mere debunking of religion does not qualify as scientism. Much of 'The God Delusion' does not refer to scientific evidence, but consists of various rational but non-scientific arguments to that effect.
Further, there is nothing 'pseudo-Darwinist' about considering the possibility of an evolutionary account for religion and belief, which is essentially a naturalistic account. It's not 'scientism' to refer to that possibility, but it would be a bit of a letdown for a scientist to pretend that such evidence (and thus, such arguments) don't exist, right? ....SH
Mong H Tan wrote:
Collins blew it in the very first statement out of his mouth in the interview:
Since his god is at least partially contained within nature, it IS open to scientific investigation. The attempts to call things like virgin births and dead men rising miracles just because they supposedly happened around a bunch of illiterates a long time ago just don't cut it. Maybe we can get some Jesus DNA somehow and Collins can show us how he didn't have a biological father. And the guy is supposed to come back to the planet, isn't he? They'll be a lot of us waiting for Collins to show us it's really Jesus and not another wacko power tripping evangelist on meth.
Alienward, in the above post I took Mong to task for his poor arguments. Now you get the same treatment.
You're right in claiming that there may be testable consequences in nature as to Collins' account of God. But, should you identify one and succeed in falsifying an expected prediction made in that account, you still haven't falsified the general account/intuition/claim (however you want to put it) of God's existence.
Take the virgin birth as an example. Suppose you had a sample of Jesus's DNA. Let's ignore the question of how you would determine such a thing, let's just assume that you could. Let's further assume that you looked at it and determined this Jesus had two human parents. Ask yourself this question: would you have falsified the virgin birth as a doctrine, or just the specific prediction that his DNA should have some exceptional quality that rules out a human father?
If you think about it, you'll realize it's the former. General supernatural claims are not usually amenable to scientific test, because believers can always invoke 'multiple outs' to explain negative findings which appeal to non-falsifiable causes. The best you can do is test specific predicted consequences of belief systems, and then decide for yourself what meaning it has for the truth/intelligibility etc. of the belief in question.
An equal-opportunity offender...SH
Yes, theists are always looking for multiple outs. Are you saying that if Collins discovered the Jesus DNA did show Jesus did not have a biological father (as I said in the first place), Collins would just look for an out and say something like "Nope, that doesn't support either the virgin birth or the Jesus is God claims - could be some humans just have this kind of DNA."?
I mangled my earlier post, sorry, I meant to say 'the latter' on the last clause. But with respect to your question, alienward, that's pretty much what I'm saying. Even if Collins didn't reply as you suggest, some other believer doubtless would....SH
I see, so when some Christians nuke Jerusalem to start Armageddon and a bearded dude comes floating down in a beam of light from the top of the mushroom cloud, and Collins checks him out he discovers he's got some kind of orange spirit juice instead of blood, Collins might say "Yep, this is Jesus.", and some believers doubtless will be saying, "Nope, that's not Jesus."
SH, f y'r blvr, y mght hv knwn tht n th lxcn f Gd: "Gd" s nly "bty" n th ys f th bhldr (r blvr). Wtht fr r fvr, n tw ndvdls wld dfn r blv n th sm xct mgry f Gd r Gds nywhr n rth; tht's why w hv hd ll knds f Rlgn rnd n th wrld. Dn't y gr?--pls s Gds, Gns, Cnscnc; Chptr 5 Th rgns f Gds; Chptr 6 Th Mnng f Lf; nd Chptr 15 Th nvrsl Thry f Mnd.
Spcfclly, n Cllns' cs: hs dscrptn f Gd s n tht xsts n hs fth, s n n Chrstnty, tht hs hd ndd nsprd hm t d gd wrk, Mdcl Scnc n gnrl nd Hmn Gntcs n prtclr, s s t ndrstnd th Lngg f Gd, s h's hd pt t--mtphrclly, f crs--lthgh n wld prfr pt t s vltn, frm pr scntfc pnt f vw.
s sch, lnwrd, Cllns ddn't blw t: h ws jst bng hnst nd slf-crcmspct, s nstn dd nd mntnd n nd thrght hs ntllctl lf, snc thy bth ddn't lt thr prsnl blfs cld thr lftm scntfc chvmnts nd wrk. ndd, Cllns hs hd bn s fr tr Drwnst--whs wrk s bsd n mprcl Scnc--wh hppns t b cmmttd Chrstn s wll. S, n hrm dn, whthr scntfclly, ntllctlly, sprtlly, mtnlly, psychlgclly, r thrws, s n th nstn's cs nlgy bv!
n Dwkns' cs: h dsn't vn ndrstnd th mdrn mnng f Gd (prtclrly n r crtv mgntv Mnd); bt smply drgs th mdvl mgry f shmnc Gd s hs nw fnd nt-Rlgnsm strw mn; shwng th fct tht h rlly dsn't ndrstnd th vltn f Gd n nd thrght r hmnty snc th ztgsts f th Rnssnc, Rfrmtn, nlghtnmnt, Scnc nd Rsn, nt th 21st cntry tdy nd bynd--pls s Gds, Gns, Cnscnc; whs sbttl s slf-xplntry: <> sc-ntllctl srvy f r dynmc mnd, lf, ll crtns n btwn nd bynd, n rth; r crtcl rdr's thry f vrythng: pst, prsnt, ftr; n cntnm, d nfntm, n cs y ll mght b ntrstd n scrtnzng t, t yr cnvnnc, f crs; whrs t tk m bt 15 yrs t rsrch, wrt, nd pblsh t nln!
Thrfr, Dwkns' psd-Drwnst rgmnt gnst Gd--bsd n hs mgntns nd spcltns--s smck n th ntllgnc (ncldng mtn, cnscnc, tc) f ll hmnknd, ncldng hs wn nïvt ntllct--spclly hs spcltns f Gntc Dtrmnsm, vltnsm, Mmtcs, tc--tht h hs hd mscncvd snc th 1976 pblctn f Th Slfsh Gn; nd strm f Scntsm thrftr--dspt hs wrtng n th slly prvctv prs, wrdply; bt jst lckng n Scnc--tht h hs hd vntlly clmntd n ll-cncvng Th Gd Dlsn (2006), s xplnd bv nd mr blw.
Hstrclly, nd psychlgclly, Rlgn s mttr f Mnd nd mtn, tht hs hd nsprd r ncstrl srvvrshp, cmpssn, mrlty, ltrsm, tc n tms f hrdshps n nd thrght r hmnty wrldwd. Drwn ndrstd nd mpthzd ths; bt h nly lst hs blf r fth n Gd, prmrly d t hs prsnl trgdy--th lss f hs tn-yr ld dghtr d t llnss--nd ws nt nt-Rlgnsm pr s. Whrs Dwkns smply jst dsn't--nd/r wn't--ndrstnd ths, prbbly d t hs dtrmndly skng fr prsnl vndtt gnst th crtnsts-rlgnsts--snc hs 1997 fc-lsng "bttl f wts" ntrvw wth th crtnsts--s nlyzd bfr hr, < hrf="http://scncblgs.cm/phryngl/2006/10/_lttl_mr_n_gltn.php#cmmnt-247001" rl="nfllw"> lttl mr n gltn (ScncBlgsS; ctbr 24).
Cnsqntly, Dwkns hs hd bcm n thst wtht cnscnc; nd nt Drwn's pt-bll r Rttwlr. n fct, hs psd-Drwnsm (spclly Th Slfsh Gn) hs hd sprkd nd nsprd th nt-Drwnsm mvmnt f th ntllgnt Dsgn ncrtnsts snc th 1991 pblctn f th S crtnst lwyr Phllp Jhnsn's bk, Drwn n Trl. nd nw, hs lzy-ncmptnt schlrshp n Th Gd Dlsn, hs hd ndd bcm th Dwknsn Scntsm t hs bst; mkng ths Dwkns lk chckn rnnng rnd wtht hd, s t spk, nt th mdrn ztgst f th 21st cntry! Dn't y gr, SH? :)
Thnk y ll fr yr knd ttntn nd cprtn n ths mttr--jst fd fr thght, frm slf-ntrspctv Drwnst vltnst prspctv. Hppy rdng, thnkng, scrtnzng, nd nlghtnng! :)
Bst wshs, Mng 11/8/6sct12:46p; thr < hrf="http://www.nvrs.cm/bkstr/bk_dtl.sp?sbn=0595379907" rl="nfllw nfllw nfllw">Gds, Gns, Cnscnc nd < hrf="http://www.gdsgnscnscnc.blgspt.cm/" rl="nfllw nfllw nfllw">Gds, Gns, Cnscnc: Glbl Dlgs Nw; cybrspc hrmt-phlsphr f Mdrn Mnd, whs wrks r bsd n th crrnt dvncs n ntrdscplnry scnc nd ntgrtv psychlgy f Scnc nd Rlgn wrldwd; thclly, mrlly; mtcgntvly, nd bjctvly.
[hmmm. I think it makes more sense now.]
You're Deist god does not exist Mong.
Mong, mong, mong. "If I'm a believer"? First non sequiturs, now poisoning the well with an implication that I'm not who I say I am? Tsk!
Tell you what. Since you've been (um) redacted here, if you want to continue this exchange privately, then (gulp) you can write me at the following address:
epigene13@hotmail.com
(That is, if you're really interested in talking this out rather than promoting yourself, which is why I suspect you've been disemvoweled.)
The title of this debate was "God vs. Science" not christianity vs. science, in this context why can God not represent the un-imaginable force of universal constants instead of just being a fundamentalist rejection of good common sense. Why must atheists retaliate to all claims of faith or proposals of design with arrogance and irreverance when your explanations of the unknown are quite often just as vauge. Scientists very generally speak about the breakdown of physical law that would allow for unexplained phenomena, of course there is a scientific explanation we just don't have the proof yet. Well guess what the answers to some of these questions will have to be left up to your "faith" in our understanding of mathematics that is assuming that mathematics and physical law are constant in every concievable situation, and if so then you already have your answers, why debate in the absence of good common sense to prove something that can't be unproven... hey wait a minute whose side am I on anyway?