A big thinker at Big Think engages in Small Think about religion

One would think that at the Big Think they would know how to do it a little better than this. But this is always the thing with atheists (or skeptics or rationalists or whatever else they call themselves): they don't actually engage in rational thought or discourse; rather, they strike a rationalist pose.

I just want to know when we're going to see these great rational atheistic thoughts we're always being promised instead of the disappointingly vague and logically questionable pronouncements we keep getting.

Derek Beres, one of the resident Big Thinkers, in his "Is Religion the Problem?", writes about the role of the religious mindset in the recent Baton Rouge police shootings:

In many ways, religion is born out of this idea: the soul is what really matters; eschew the physical and focus on the moral prescriptions arising from your prophet (or the ‘voice’ inside your own head).

Well maybe some religions do this, but strangely enough, the most major major world religion, Christianity, is certainly not born out of this idea. Apparently Beres forgot that part about the resurrection of the body and the new Heaven and earth.

But somehow, in some vague sense never actually identified by Beres, the belief in an afterlife constitutes an "ideology" that has some bad influence on people:

... a body is necessary for consciousness to occur. While it is not only our brain producing it, without a body what we term ‘consciousness’ does not exist. Neuroscientists and researchers quibble over what that term actually defines. They do not argue about an ethereal version of it ‘out there’ invading what is ‘in here.’

How could he possibly know that a body is necessary for consciousness? Because all the consciousnesses he knows inhabit bodies? If there was a consciousness that existed outside a body, how could he know it? This reminds me of C.S. Lewis' dialog in which one of the characters asks another how a scientist could possibly know anything about what or whether anything existed outside of nature, given the fact that the only thing scientists study is nature. How can you pretend to know anything about something you, by definition, do not study?

There is also the problem that anyone who denies the existence of anything metaphysical has to have a physical account of consciousness. Well, good luck with that. We're still waiting for some clever materialist to come up with a purely physicalist account of something that is, by definition, not physical.

Don't hold your breath.

He says:

A metaphysical philosophy on what we are always ends in disappointment and, too often these days, violence. The meat and bones of our being is the reality of the planet we share.

Umhmm. Is there, like, any evidence that metaphysical systems are any more conducive of disappointment or violence than non-metaphysical systems? If so, does this evidence include Marxism and Nazism?

And I'm not exactly sure of what we're talking about when we start using expressions like the "meat and bones of our being" being the "reality of the planet." It's not a bad metaphor, but it's not exactly clear what it means. It sounds like some sort of attempt to talk about being (a metaphysical concept) in some physicalist way, but unfortunately, the thought is stillborn.

Is science based on faith?

Once again a scientist has wandered into the Land of Philosophy, thinking he knows his way around, and has instead become disoriented and confused. And not only that, but the person doing this is a repeat offender.

In a recent post, Jerry Coyne criticized Matt Emerson, whose essay "At it's heart, science is faith-based too," was recently published in the Wall Street Journal. 

Coyne is best know for his book Why Evolution is True. But he also frequently makes forays outside his field of expertise, some of which have proved embarrassing. His new book is Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. There have been several great take-downs of this book by people who actually know what they are talking about, one of which is Ed Feser's review of the book in the most recent issue of First Things magazine.

In his criticism of Emerson, Coyne employs the same fallacious reasoning that characterizes his books and that has become a fixture of his blog.

To Emerson's assertion that scientists have "faith in reason," Coyne responds by quoting his piece in Slate magazine:

Scientists don’t have “faith in reason.” As I noted in Slate:

What about faith in reason? Wrong again. Reason—the habit of being critical, logical, and of learning from experience—is not an a priori assumption but a tool that’s been shown to work. It’s what produced antibiotics, computers, and our ability to sequence DNA. We don’t have faith in reason; we use reason because, unlike revelation, it produces results and understanding.

Sorry, but this is just nonsense.

It's not completely clear what Coyne even means by the term "reason," but I'm going to take leap in the dark and assume he means something like logic in particular and rational thought in general. To say that reason in this sense is not a priori and that we only accept it because it "works" is just ignorant.

All reason in this sense is based on two axioms: the Law of Identity and the Law of Non-contradiction. To say that a belief is a priori (meaning, literally, "from the prior") means that you accept it without any prior reasoning or evidence. Maybe Coyne would like to explain what evidence or prior reasoning supports the Law of Identity and the Law of Non-Contradiction. 

In fact, there is no evidence for them. That's why they are axioms. We accept them purely on the basis of intuition: They make sense that's all. That's the problem with any system of thinking: it is based on beliefs which cannot themselves be proven. All we can conclude about a scientist who says he accepts reason because it "works" is that the scientist saying that doesn't know what he is talking about.

Science too is based on reasoning that is based on a priori assumptions. If it is based on deductive reasoning, then you have the two assumptions (and a few others) above. If it is based on inductive reasoning, there is another a priori assumption. As the philosopher David Hume pointed out, all inductive reasoning involves the premise that the future must be similar to the past. If copper repeatedly and uniformly conducts electricity in repeated experiments, then we conclude--on the basis of the assumption that the future will always be like the past--that it will always do this. But although we believe that the future will be like the past, we have no rational basis for believing it. Again, it's intuitive: It just makes sense.

In other words, at bottom, science too, insofar as it makes logical inferences, is a priori, since its fundamental tools of inference are based on a priori assumptions. 

The only question left is whether this is equivalent to faith. Coyne himself seems to think it is, since he responds to Emerson's claim that scientists have "faith in reason" by claiming (erroneously) that science is not a priori, a claim made more ironic when consider the additional assumptions science makes, in addition to its purely rational assumptions, about the reliability of our own senses.

In fact, Coyne is just proving, once again, that he needs full time philosophical care.

Dr. John Lennox explains why science & faith are not in conflict

Dr. John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, explains why science and faith are not in conflict:

God no more conflicts with science as an explanation for the universe than Henry Ford conflicts with the laws of the internal combustion engine as an explanation for the motorcar. The existence of mechanisms and laws is not an argument for the absence of an agent who set those laws and mechanisms in place. On the contrary, their very sophistication, down to the fine tuning of the universe, is evidence for the Creator’s genius.

His article is the feature article in Knowing and Doing, a publication of the C. S. Lewis Institute. Read the rest here.

We interrupt the propagation of anti-religious historical falsehoods for the following important announcement

Even otherwise intelligent atheists commonly can be commonly found portraying the Galileo affair as a confrontation between religion and science. This myth has been refuted repeatedly, but that doesn't stop them from repeating it again, and again, ...

Most people understand the trial of Galileo Galilei as a key example of religious bigotry clashing with the advance of science and the textbook case of "Medieval" ignorance and superstition being superseded by reason and science.  In fact, the whole rather complex affair was not the black-and-white "science vs religion" fable of popular imagination and the positions of both Galileo and of the various churchmen involved were varied and complex. 

... and again.

Read more here.

Bureau for Better Atheists issues advisory on Jerry Coyne

Once again, we here at the Bureau for Better Atheists (BBA) are having to set aside our other important work (such as trying to find Richard Dawkins a competent barber) to deal with Jerry Coyne.

As we have mentioned before, the BBA is devoted to improving the quality of atheists by dealing with a problem that is reaching crisis proportions: the increasing intellectual deterioration of atheists. An increasing number of atheists are questioning basic historical facts and setting out in the apparently unfamiliar terrain of philosophy.

Our file on Coyne, a prominent evolutionary biologist, now occupies a whole cabinet. In fact, we are thinking of hiring a full-time staff member devoted solely to Coyniana. It is atheists like Coyne who make opposition to atheism that much more tedious and unchallenging.

Anyway, Coyne is now contesting the idea that religion had a prominent role in the rise and development of science. This is just one of the eccentric views being promulgated by modern atheists who either a) don't know the history of science; b) have issues with truth generally; or c) are functionally illiterate.

Coyne says:

All progress in science, whether ancient or modern, came from ignoring or rejecting the idea of divine intervention. Even if theories were inspired by thoughts of God, they were substantiated or disproven by tacitly assuming a godless universe—that is, by employing methodological naturalism. 

Ah, methodological naturalism. Does he mean the methodological naturalism that originated in the 12th century with Adelard of Bath, who believed that reason did not in any way conflict with Christian faith? That methodological naturalism? If you want to maintain the discredited theory of the inherent conflict between religion and science, it's probably not a good idea to use an idea developed by someone who completely disagreed with that theory.

Coyne continues:

Religion has of course also repressed the search for knowledge. Not only do we have the cases of Galileo and Bruno, but also the active discouragement of the use of reason by many church fathers, especially Martin Luther, who made statements like this: “Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.” And freethinkers like Spinoza were regularly persecuted by religion (Judaism in his case.)

Yes, and governments have repressed knowledge. Is government, then, inherently anti-science? And what about males? Most of those who have repressed science have been males. What is it about these males that makes them so anti-science? In fact, now that I think about it, human beings seem to be the culprits. Have you ever noticed how many of the people who have hampered the progress of science are human beings?

And since when is Martin Luther a "church father"? I don't know anyone, including Luther fans, who call him a "church father." "Protestant reformer" yes, but no one even remotely familiar with history calls Luther a "church father."

In addition, Coyne apparently forget (or never knew) that both Galileo and Bruno were Christians. And why is the Church how tried to hold Galileo to the standards of proof a bad guy? Galileo didn't have adequate proof of his theory (which wasn't completely correct anyway, since it presumed the circular orbit of planets, which Kepler had already shown to be false, among other things). The Church (which Galileo was a voluntarily member of) didn't allow Galileo to assert that his theory was true because he hadn't proved it. The Church had no problem with the propagation of Copernicus' theory as a possible explanation of the data and, in fact, most of the Church was accepting of some heliocentric view.

He goes on:

The major achievements of science, including relativity, evolution, and modern molecular biology, were achieved by non-theists.

I have only one thing to say: Gregor Mendel (Augustinian friar. Mendelian genetics named after. Salvaged evolutionary theory from sole reliance on natural selection. Check it out.)

Are science and religion incompatible? More stupid atheist tricks

It's so hard to be an atheist. It involves so terribly much faith that you have to believe with so awfully much fervor.

In his recent post being touted over at Project Reason, Sean Carroll, an atheist physicist, reiterates the fact that he does not take money from the Templeton Foundation because Templeton believes that science and religion can be reconciled. Why science and religion need to be "reconciled" (I'm not sure if this is Templeton's term or Carroll's) is a little mysterious.

Things only need be reconciled when they are at odds. But since science and religion are not at odds, they have no need to be reconciled.

What would we think if someone asked whether history and economics could be "reconciled?" Or mathematics and sociology? Or literature and physics?

Carroll asks questions like this because he is an atheist and he sees his scientific work through the lens of his scientific materialism. In fact, much of what you hear from the New Athiests (of which Carroll is one) is the product of this central equivocation between science and scientism. Atheists like Carroll think they are one and the same despite the fact that, well, they aren't.

In his post, he reiterates the same assertion he has made before:

Think of it this way. The kinds of questions I think about—origin of the universe, fundamental laws of physics, that kind of thing—for the most part have no direct impact on how ordinary people live their lives. No jet packs are forthcoming, as the saying goes. But there is one exception to this, so obvious that it goes unnoticed: belief in God. Due to the efforts of many smart people over the course of many years, scholars who are experts in the fundamental nature of reality have by a wide majority concluded that God does not exist. We have better explanations for how things work. The shift in perspective from theism to atheism is arguably the single most important bit of progress in fundamental ontology over the last 500 years. And it matters to people … a lot.

Did you get the argument here? A "wide majority" of "scholars" have "concluded" that "God does not exist." Seriously. This is what New Atheists consider a competent argument.

Do we really determine the answers to important questions like this by taking a head count? A question is settled by majority vote? A majority of whom? Contemporary scholars? 21st century scholars? Scholars over the last 100 years? The total number of scholars who have ever existed?

Who is he talking about? How does he know this? Is there a study that has shown this? Who did it include? When was it done? Who conducted it?

Carroll clearly doesn't know the first thing about how science and religion relate to one another. A link from this post takes us to one of his previous posts where he argues that because religions make miracle claims: "And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility."

Huh? Where has "science" shown that, say, the Resurrection (one of the miracles he mentions) is not true? What study has shown this? Who conducted it and when was it conducted? What piece of evidence is there that militates against it?

The only reason atheists like Carroll aren't laughed out of civilized discourse is because so many people are philosophically naive--that and the mere utterance of the word "science" has an incantational effect.

If I were Templeton, I wouldn't worry about Carroll not taking my money for scholarship on this question. If this is the level of discourse at which he operates, it would be embarrassing to be associated with him at all.

The "God particle" and the new Religion of Science

Our prayers have been answered. The "God particle" has been discovered. What The New York Times is calling the "Holy Grail" of physics has finally been found.

Sort of.

Scientists at the "Large Haldron Collider" announced that they had finally discovered the "Higgs Boson" particle, a particle that gives the particles that make up atoms their mass (One of the things about being a "God particle" is that you have to go to mass). 

"The God particle has been found," blared the headlines, although the fine print revealed that they only "may have" discovered it. They definitely discovered it, only they really didn't. The particle was found "probably": They had "gathered enough evidence" to show that it "looks like" a Higgs Boson. It was "newly discovered" but scientists "stopped just shy" of "claiming outright that it is the Higgs Boson itself."

They "believed" they "gathered enough evidence" to demonstrate that they had "probably" discovered a particle whose "characteristics match" what "could be" the Higgs Boson with "99 percent certainty." Or was that "99.99 percent" certainty? Or maybe "99.9936 percent" certainty?

We're not certain.

The only thing that is certain, we are told, is that in order to get "5 sigma level" certainty (that's the certainty you must have in order to say your certainly certain), one must have 99.99995 percent certainty. Otherwise, your left at the 4 sigma level, which is sort of like .

So here we have a bunch of scientists making this big announcement and they've only got 4 sigma level certainty? Are you kidding?! We all got excited some 4 sigma level nonsense? What is this? Geraldo Rivera opening up Al Capone's safe?

Well, at least it's better than the original Holy Grail, which they never found, meaning it had a certainly level of only 1 sigma.

This whole thing is just the most recent example of the media going into a swoon over the latest pronouncement of what they implicitly view as the equivalent of a religious declaration. The only question involved here is whether the announcement of the quasi-discovery of the Higgs Boson particle is like, say, a Papal bull (which, would be, what? a 4 sigma?) or an ex cathedra Papal directive--definitely a 5 sigma.

I will stop just shy of saying outright that white laboratory smocks are the modern equivalent of horse hair robes. I think I have gathered enough evidence that men in materialist mitres now tell us things the vast majority of us have no way of confirming beyond just trusting them. The characteristics of science look a lot like what many of the people who practice it call "superstition." Science is now practically indistinguishable from magic, and mathematicians are our new magicians.

And I say this with 99.9994 percent certainty.

Are science and religion incompatible?

Essays lauding the superiority of science over religion are not uncommon, and Julian Baggini, atheist editor of Philosopher's Magazine, gives us another one in the Guardian. Biologist Jerry Coyne, of course, is much impressed, as he is with any such pronouncement, no matter the quality of them.

Baggini acknowledges that science is focused on how questions, and religion on why questions, but contests the non-overlapping magisteria view of the late Stephen J. Gould--that religion and science deal with two completely different kinds of questions that do not impinge on one another--and correctly so. This is, in fact, one of the places in which the New Atheists are correct: you can't place religion and science in two hermetically sealed compartments and expect them never to get mixed:

This means that if someone asks why things are as they are, what their meaning and purpose is, and puts God in the answer, they are almost inevitably going to make an at least implicit claim about the how: God has set things up in some way, or intervened in some way, to make sure that purpose is achieved or meaning realised. The neat division between scientific “how” and religious “why” questions therefore turns out to be unsustainable.

So far, so good. There are claims made by Christianity that are empirically testable: That Christ was born without a human father, lived at a particular time, spent his life in particular place as a member of particular tribe who performed specific miracles, was executed on a particular mountain under the reign of a specific governor of Judea, and was raised after a specified number of days from the dead and seen afterwards by hundreds of people. And that his disciples went around afterwards preaching and baptizing and performing some of the same miracles as Jesus did in His name.

Now you can believe those claims or not, but they are the claims Christianity makes (in fact, its central claims) and they are "scientific" in the broad sense of being explicitly empirical and subject to proof or disproof by the methods of whatever empirical discipline would apply to them, which, in this case, happens to be history. Some are only empirical in theory and are not practically verifiable, but others of them are subject to at least some empirical scrutiny.

There are also philosophical or metaphysical claims made by Christians (but not necessarily by Christianity per se) who are operating in the realm of natural theology that are subject to proof or disproof. Examples of this would be the traditional proofs for the existence of God. These arguments can philosophically prove particular theistic beliefs, such as the existence of God, but if someone were to disprove any one of them, it would not affect the central claims of Christianity itself--it would only prove that some particular Christians (St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, etc.) were mistaken.

Despite the fact that he is a philosopher, Baggini says nothing about these metaphysical issues which are neither strictly theological nor empirical. In fact, Baggini seems to somewhat confuse the two when he speaks of "an evidence-led, rational examination of a view." A view could be "evidence-led" and not rational, or rational and non "evidence-led." The traditional proofs for the existence of God (or for that matter certain theorems in mathematics) are rational, but not "evidence-led," at least in the sense of being empirically testable.

But the main problem with Baggini's piece is that he seems to see every case in which religion makes an empirical claim as a case in which science and religion are in conflict:

[H]ow easily science and religion can rub on together depends very much on what kind of religion we're talking about. If it is a kind that seeks to explain the hows of the universe, or ends up doing so by stealth, then it is competing with science. In such contests science always wins, hands down, and the only way out is to claim a priority for faith over evidence, or the Bible over the lab.

Coyne too chimes in too, shaking his pom-poms:

This, of course, is just another take on something many of us have long maintained: any theistic religion—that is, one that posits a God who is active in the universe—must perforce make claims that can in principle be empirically examined or tested. And that is a “how” question. On the level ground where science and faith must compete to answer such questions, religion always loses, and always will.

The fact that two approaches may happen to focus on the same subject does not automatically put them into conflict. Conflict only comes when one approach says one thing about it and another approach says something contradictory. If historians say that historical records show that there was a comet in the sky in 627 B.C. and astronomers say there wasn't, that's a conflict. But if they both approaches conclude there was a comet in the sky at that time, then there is not conflict. The two are perfectly compatible.

If science is "incompatible" with theology because they arrive at truth through different methodologies, then science is also incompatible with history, and with ethics--and with philosophy, Baggini's own discipline.

There is really no sense in talking about whether whether science and religion are compatible. If they look at the same alleged fact and come to differing conclusions about it, then so be it. Let it be decided using the methodology that is appropriate.

If the subject is the chemical makeup of something, then apply science. But if it is the existence of God, then science is going to have to bow to philosophy; if it is the genuineness of a historical event, then it's going to have to bow to history; and if it is the nature of the doctrine of justification, then it's going to have to bow to theology.

From the earliest times, Christianity has made empirical claims as evidence of its truth--largely having to do with miracle and prophecy. If scientists like Baggini and Coyne want to dispute them then let them have at it.

But so far they not only don't seem to have refuted them: they're too busy talking about whether magisteria are overlapping to even try.

Were Adam and Eve real? Another case of atheist scientists jumping the gun and failing to make important distinctions

When my youngest son was about eight, he would assault his 16 year old brother by simply rushing him, while my oldest son would calmly put out one arm, catching him by the head and just hold him him there as my youngest son's arms would just flail about in the air, not harming anybody. Undaunted, my eight year old son would simply repeat the same method of attack--getting the same ineffective result. But even though he never got anywhere by doing this, I admired his spunk. He is now 16 himself and trains in mixed martial arts and his technique has improved dramatically.

This is the image that came to mind seeing the most recent exchange between atheist biologist Jerry Coyne (the eight year-old in this saga) and Christian philosopher Edward Feser. Jerry rushes at Ed, all arms flailing, Ed holds hand out, stopping the charge, calmly pointing out to Jerry that his facts are wrong, his arguments are invalid, that he is completely missing the point, or that he has failed to make a crucial distinction, at which point Jerry, in seeming ignorance of the points Ed has made, just keeps repeating the same futile procedure over and over and over again.

But if you can't appreciate his logic (and he makes it very difficult), you at least gotta admire his spunk.

In the most recent episode, the issue is whether there could have been a literal Adam and Eve. It is a debate, Christianity Today magazine asserted, that constitutes "a groundbreaking science-and-Scripture dispute, a 21st-century equivalent of the once disturbing proof that the Earth orbits the sun." While it is not quite equivalent to the issue of whether Jesus actually rose from the dead, a literal claim without which there would literally be no Christianity, the Apostle Paul does clearly assume a literal Adam, making it a truth claim the disproof of which would seriously cripple the philosophical and theological integrity of Christianity, particularly the doctrine of original sin, which asserts that, in the words of the old New England Primer, "In Adam's fall, we fell all."

There are Christians, of course, who try to fudge on this issue, claiming that one could believe in a figurative Adam and Eve (i.e., that Paul was mistaken) and still be an orthodox Christian. Former head of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins and his colleague Karl Giberson attempt this position. But it's not a terribly convincing.

The Catholic Church has long taken the position that the origin of the human body--whether it comes from "pre-existent and living matter"--is not the material issue. One can take the position that the human body was the result of biological development as long as one did not deny that "souls are immediately created by God." Leo XII's statement on this issue in his encyclical Humani Generis also states that polygenism (that we are descended from multiple parents rather than one particular set) is not a belief that is reconcilable with orthodox Christianity. In addition, he said, such a belief would conflict with the belief in original sin.

Protestants are not limited by any particular theological authority other than their own personal interpretive inclinations, a fact that has resulted in a riot of diverse schools of thought on such issues, but the Catholic teaching is clear and unambiguous. We are descended from two original human parents. So the questioning of this dogma is important indeed.

Enter Coyne, who declared recently on his blog, "[T]he scientific evidence shows that Adam and Eve could not have existed, at least in the way they’re portrayed in the Bible."

And, lest his assertion was not clear, he added, "Unlike the case of Jesus’s virgin birth and resurrection, we can dismiss a physical Adam and Eve with near scientific certainty."

And, just in case there was still any doubt about what he meant, he concluded, "[T]he genetic data show unequivocally that humanity did not descend from a single pair that lived in the genus Homo."

Coyne tries to base his claim on genetic research that ironically derives in part from the person whose appointment to head the Human Genome Project he adamantly opposed on the grounds that he was an evangelical Christian: Francis Collins. Collins wrote, in a 2006 book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, that, as Christianity Today put it, "humans emerged from primate ancestors perhaps 100,000 years ago—long before the apparent Genesis time frame—and originated with a population that numbered something like 10,000, not two individuals."

Richard Ostling, writing in Christianity Today, recounts the position of Dennis R. Venema, a biology chairman at Trinity Western University and a fellow at Biologos, an organization with which Coyne has shown little but scorn because of their "accommodationist" (i.e., that science and religion are consistent approaches to truth):

Over the past decade, researchers have attempted to use the genetic diversity within modern humans to estimate primordial population sizes. According to a consensus drawn from three independent avenues of research, he states, the history of human ancestry involved a population "bottleneck" around 150,000 years ago—and from this tiny group of hominids came everyone living today. But the size of the group was far larger than a lonely couple: it consisted of several thousand individuals at minimum, say the geneticists.

So Coyne, armed with evidence uncovered in part by an evangelical Christian who only several years earlier he proclaimed could not be trusted on such issues--and flailing away, announces that there were no Adam and Eve. Coyne then goes on to catalog various evangelical rationalizations of the problem, all of which he finds wanting, at which point he does his end zone dance.

But it was all effective enough to convince John Farrell to write a piece in Forbes magazine where he unaccountably finds Coyne convincing on this issue, quotes him, and expands on Coyne's points (misstating the Eastern Orthodox view on original sin in the process), and challenging the Catholic Church to renounce its "silence" on the "challenge of genomics."

Apparently the continuous public witness of the Church over the course of centuries to the truth of the Aristotelian-Thomist position, which articulates a full view of man as a physical and spiritual creature that bears only partial resemblance to the being Farrell, Coyne and others discuss in their arguments, and making clear public statements which are easily available to anyone who is serious about wanting to know the Church's position are just not sufficient.

Despite this, Coyne accuses theists "of rationalizing, post facto, hopes and ideas that one pulls out of thin air."  Statements like this serve as atheist like a sort of spell to keep .

But just in case anyone needed to be reminded, Catholic philosopher Ed Feser enters the fray. Feser, who is fast becoming the go-to guy when it comes to defending the Ancient Faith against its less than intellectually impressive detractors (and who you can just imagine sighing once again and shaking his head), then pointed out a few uncomfortable facts to Jerry (and John), among which is that, in his post on this issue, Coyne didn't even bother taking into account the view of the Christian institution that has been around the longest, an institution that has made an implicit distinction between the concept of homo sapiens as a biological category and the concept of rational animals as a physical and theological category.

In other words, the biological condition of homo sapiens is a necessary condition for being a humans as we know them now, but it is not sufficient. The philosophical distinction of man as a "rational animal" (Aristotle's definition) is also necessary to the full definition of human being. Men are indeed homo sapiens, biologically speaking. But they are something far more than this: they are creatures who can apprehend abstract concepts in a way in which other animals do not even remotely approximate. He points in his response to an article by Kenneth W. Kemp ("Science, Theology, and Monogenesis"), which goes into gory detail about the Catholic position on this and why it is completely consistence with a bottleneck of however many thousand homo sapiens.

But Coyne, who apparently didn't actually read Feser's article but someone else's summary, does what he seems to do every time he has to deal with Feser: he fires wildly while running for cover. In this case, he criticizes Feser using an argument that Kemp's article, to which Feser had linked to, had already refuted--and then goes and hides behind Jason Rosenhouse. "I needn’t go over all the problems that Jason finds with this."

Yeah. Right.

It's hard work acting as second for someone who, every time he show up for the duel, runs off, but Rosenhouse, a mathematician who blogs at EvolutionBlog, holds forth manfully. But Rosenhouse seems to have no better ability to manage careful distinctions than Coyne.

He argues first that "the Bible does not teach anything remotely like what Feser is describing." Rosenhouse manages this criticism by assuming that Feser is somehow obligated to give Genesis a fundamentalist reading, which it is kind of hard for Feser to do since, like, he's a Catholic. As Feser himself pointed out, while it would be very convenient for atheists if all Christians took a fundamentalist position, they probably need to get used to the fact that all Christians are not fundamentalists, and that it would probably help their case (not to mention make for a more productive discussion) to actually address the arguments of Christians who, like Feser, don't match up with the stereotypes atheists are always invoking.

Rosenhouse then questions Feser's point that human being are not exhausted by their physical attributes, to which Rosenhouse responds, "we should note that Catholic theologians have not the slightest basis for saying that our nature is simply not exhausted by our physical attributes." Back to Feser:

Hear that? Not “a highly controversial basis.” Not “a basis that I, Jason Rosenhouse, find unconvincing.” No, not the slightest basis. Now, forget about my own arguments for the intellect’s immateriality (though Rosenhouse says nothing in response to them). A great many more important Catholic philosophers and theologians have also presented serious arguments for it, as have non-Catholic Christians and pagan thinkers in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. Secular writers like Karl Popper and David Chalmers have endorsed forms of dualism. Secular writers like Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, and Galen Strawson, while they do not embrace dualism, nevertheless reject physicalism. Yet others, like Thomas Nagel, Jerry Fodor, and Joseph Levine, have argued that there are at least serious difficulties facing physicalism which have yet to be answered. And many materialists who think these difficulties can be answered at least acknowledge that the difficulties are indeed serious ones raised by critics in good faith. Then there are secular non-dualists like Tyler Burge, John Searle, and William Lycan, who (as I have noted before) have expressed the opinion that the dominance of materialism in contemporary philosophy of mind owes less to the quality of the arguments in its favor than to ideological thinking.

But for Rosenhouse, it seems, none of these thinkers has the slightest basis for his views. It’s all just transparently feeble religious apologetics, apparently even with the many secularists among them. No doubt that’s because Rosenhouse read a materialist philosophy of mind book once back in college which he thinks “refuted” all the objections to materialism once and for all.

In other words, let's all pretend that these argument have never been made so we can go on arguing with our fundamentalist caricatures.

Finally, Rosenhouse says, "Intelligence and rationality appear to be things that come in degrees." He then goes on to list all the intelligent qualities animals have the men also possess, all of which are apparently supposed to add up to the qualities that men have that animals do not possess, namely, as Feser points out, "conceptual thought" that "can have a determinate, unambiguous content and a universality of reference that sensations, mental imagery, and material symbols cannot have even in principle."

Rosenhouse says that Feser's account "creates some very difficult theological problems." The problem is that none of the "theological problems" Rosenhouse identifies are actually theological problems. In fact, all they amount to is Rosenhouse saying that he doesn't understand why God would have done it that way. So saying you don't understand someone's motivations for doing something some kind of refutation of the fact that they did it?

"Also," Rosenhouse adds, "the idea of a Chosen People is itself theologically problematic. Among Jews, a very common understanding of the notion is that the Jews are unique only in their willingness to accept a covenant with God. Which is to say, it is the Jews who chose God and not the other way around." Wait, Rosenhouse was only just earlier seen arguing that Feser wasn't following the Biblical account, and now Rosenhouse is arguing this? One thing that comes through loud and clear in those accounts is that the covenant is completely unilateral in its initiation. Maybe Rosenhouse could explain how he derives Abraham's willingness out of the Biblical accounts which don't mention what Abraham thought about it at all.

Memo to New Atheists: Don't debate Feser. Go back to your caracatures. And theists? They don't need caricatures. They've got Rosenhouse and Coyne.

Rick Perry: 1, NCSE: 0: National Center for Science Education official flubs his science history in critique of Rick Perry

In last night's Republican candidates debate at the Reagan library, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested that climate science was still unsettled on the issue of human-induced global warming. In his answer to a media panelist's question, he compared the current question of whether humans are unquestionably causing global warming to Galileo's situation in relation to the scientific community and the Church of the 17th century: "'Just because you have a group of scientists that stood up and said, this is the fact'," said Perry, "… Galileo got outvoted for a spell."

You just knew Scientoids would be all over this. Sure enough, here they come. And in the battle to preserve the myths of scientific history, who should be the first to show up for duty but the National Center for Science Education's Josh Rosenau, who claims Perry got it wrong:

His opening passage, like his comments on evolution, seem to forthrightly endorse the legitimacy of letting religious and political authority suppress ("outvote," in his words) scientific results. By the time Galileo was publishing on heliocentrism, the idea was already circulating and widely accepted in scientific circles, including Jesuits. He wasn't outvoted by scientists, he was outvoted by the political and religious leadership of his country. [Emphasis in original]

Not only did Perry not get it wrong, he got it more right that Rosenau.

For one thing, was Perry necessarily saying that the majority rules in science? If he was (which, I'm sorry, just isn't clear here), then he would be in no worse a position than defenders of Darwinist dogmatism and Meteorological End Times like Rosenau, who regularly point to the level of support among those working in their fields as evidence that their beliefs are true. If there's something wrong with Perry doing it, then why isn't there something wrong with scientists doing it?

Secondly, let's look at Josh's claim about Galileo. For one thing, he assumes that the issue of the Galileo episode was the truth of the heliocentrism. Where is my wrong answer buzzer? Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with what happened between Galileo and the Church (as opposed to the historical myths about it) knows that this was not the issue. The issue was the epistemological status of the theory--whether it was a legitimate hypothesis or a proven fact. At the time of the controversy, it was not a proven fact and there were a number of unanswered problems with it--a fact acknowledged by both scientists (such as they were) and Church officials.

Galileo was, by all accounts, a reckless and arrogant controversialist who demanded that others accept his theories before he had adequately documented them, and demanded that his theological views be acknowledged as legitimate despite his demonstrable lack of expertise in the field. In fact, he was so reckless and arrogant, he managed even to alienate his friends.

So when we come to Josh's final point that "He wasn't outvoted by scientists, he was outvoted by the political and religious leadership of his country," we are taken from a complete misunderstanding of history to a complete misrepresentation of it: The political and religious leadership of Galileo's day opposed heliocentrism.

Really?

In reality most of the scientists of the time opposed it, since most of the university scholars working in what was then natural philosophy (it wasn't even called "science" until the 19th century) believed in a version of Aristotelian teaching that precluded Copernicanism. Church officials of the time largely accepted Copernicus' theory as better fitting the data than the Ptolemaic theory, but were content to let the scholars duke it out. And a number of high Church officials not only didn't oppose Galileo's heliocentrism, but encouraged his writings on the issue, include a future pope.

One of the ironies here is that one of the things the Church was defending was proper scientific methodology: you have to actually prove your theories, and until they are proven, you need to keep your powder dry.

Next thing you know, Josh will be passing along the historical canard that Galileo was tortured for his beliefs and burned at the stake.

The NCSE gets a booby prize here. Score the win for Perry.

Rah Rah Science, care of the Discovery Channel

As I was watching the discussion following last night's Discovery broadcast of "Curiosity," a program which, among its other problems (like being basically a cheerleading session for atheism), portrayed Hawking's views as agreed upon, settled science, physicist Sean Carroll voiced a belief that has become a common meme among a certain variety of atheist scientist: that if religious truth claims have effects in the objective, physical world, then they come within the purview of scientific analysis.

This belief is fine as far as it goes. But what ends up happening with secularists like Carroll is that it is only negative conclusions about religion and the supernatural that are admitted into the scientific discussion; positive conclusions need not apply. Not only that, but, using their methodology, negative conclusions are assured. Just go back to Carroll's recent discussion of the immortality of the soul:

If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

In other words, any supernatural entity must comply with exclusively natural criteria, in which case, well, it wouldn't be supernatural any more, would it? So, under Carroll's method of verifying supernatural entities, a negative outcome is the only outcome possible. The game is fixed from the beginning.

This also means, ironically, that naturalism, under this methodology, is unfalsifiable--the favorite demarcation criterion of secularists between science and non science. In other words, under their own definition, this kind of naturalism is not science, since it is not falsifiable.

It's a crazy world.

Arguing in the Void: What's wrong with Coyne and Carroll's arguments against the immortality of the soul

... Meanwhile biologist Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution is True has been voicing his Amens and Halleluiahs over Sean Carroll's scientistic attempt to dissect the issue of the immortality of the soul:

Those who specify the existence of souls and afterlives in this scientific era must do more than issue fuzzy-minded gobbledygook. They must specify more precisely what they’re talking about, and how it’s supposed to work. If we’re supposed to survive after death, what part of us survives, and how? And what is this soul, exactly? We’re no longer in the Middle Ages, so theologians who make empirical claims must be empirically specific.

Well, I'm not sure what counts as bona fide "fuzzy-minded gobbledygook," but Coyne's definition apparently does not include treating non-scientific questions as if they were scientific ones.

But, as I pointed out in my post on Carroll's original article, the major problem is simply that the scientific materialists who leave their discipline and start prognosticating on philosophical and theological topics are simply unfamiliar with the history of the discussions on the subjects on which they are opining. This causes them not only to make a hash of the whole thing, but to think that the questions they are asking have never been adequately answers.

In the present case, the discussion goes back to the pre-Socratic philosophers, through Plato and Aristotle, continuing on to St. Thomas Aquinas and into modern times--a fact about which Carroll and Coyne seem completely unaware. It's as if a philosopher had attempted to speak on the issue, say, of DNA, but had never heard of Watson and Crick.

In fact, we can go back almost 700 years and find St. Thomas Aquinas dealing with essentially the same issues, which he attributes to philosophers living over a thousand years before his own time:

The philosophers of old, not being able to rise above their imagination, supposed that the principle of these actions [knowledge and movement] was something corporeal: for they asserted that only bodies were real things; and that what is not corporeal is nothing: hence they maintained that the soul is something corporeal. (Summa Theologica, Question 75, Article I)

The materialism of Coyne and Carroll is not, as you can see, a new thing.

In fact, the questions Coyne asks were answered by Aquinas and others. But he acts as if he knows nothing about them. Has he gone back and read Question 75 of the Summa Theologica? Has he bothered to consult Book II of the Summa Contra Gentiles? Maybe he wouldn't agree with Aquinas. Maybe he would think the arguments invalid. Maybe he would even think Aquinas' entire way of addressing the questions is outdated. But the problem is Coyne and Carroll are clearly not even aware of them.

They also seem unaware of the discussions in Plato's Phaedo, in Moses Mendelssohn's Phädon, in Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Pascal--or in Hegel and Spinoza. At least the philosophers who dissented from the view that the soul is immortal (and immaterial), like Lucretius, Hobbes, and Hume, knew what they were criticizing.

But what does Coyne do instead of actually looking to see how Christian thinkers and other philosophers have answered these questions? He makes things up:

Of course theologians will respond to all of the above like this, “We don’t have to tell you what souls are, or in what form you survive after death. We just know it’s true because we just know that there’s a God and that he allows these things.”

This is not what Christian thinkers have argued and it is not what philosophers have argued. This is just silliness--coming, ironically, from someone who presumes to lecture other people on intellectual integrity.

This is a consistent problem with the New Atheists: they just simply ignore the best arguments against their positions and instead either cherry pick the worst arguments or simply make stuff up.

Another physicist performing philosophy without a license: Sean Carroll on life after death

A physicist has trained his scientific instruments on the question of the immortality of the soul and is not getting the right readings and he has therefore concluded that there is no such thing.

Sean Carroll claims that "there is clearly no way for the soul to survive death." Carroll makes this claim in a recent post on his blog Cosmic Variance. There is no reason to believe that Carroll is not a competent scientist, but he has now produced a pretty good reason why we might want to question his competence as a philosopher:

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

These kinds of statements make me wonder what I would say if my plumber told me that the interior decoration scheme in my home was all wrong on the basis of his knowledge of pipes, or if my barber tried to explain how he had detected psychological problems with a previous customer based on what he knew about cutting hair.

Carroll is partly responding to Adam Frank, who thinks rightly that science can have nothing to say about the question of the immortality of the soul since there since it is not a scientific question, a position Carroll glibly compares to the position that we can't really know whether the moon is made of green cheese:

Adam claims that “simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information” regarding life after death. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese ... So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted.

There's just one minor difference here: the composition of the moon is an actual scientific question with a definite scientific answer--whether you have to tools to determine it now or not. It is exactly the kind of question science is designed to answer. Whether the soul is immortal is not. That Carroll thinks it is is a measure of his lack of understanding of the issue before him.

Once again, we have a scientist performing philosophy without a license, thinking that his scientific qualifications fit him for the task when they don't.

C. S. Lewis once noted that there is very little you could know about what was outside nature by what was inside nature:

"But science has shown that there's no such thing [something that exists outside nature]."
"Really," said I. "Which of the sciences?"
"Oh, well, that's a matter of detail," said my friend. "I can't give you chapter and verse from memory."
"But don't you see," said I, "that science never could show anything of the sort?"
"Why on earth not?"
"Because science studies Nature. And the question is whether anything besides Nature exists--anything 'outside'. How could you find that out by studying simply Nature?"

Carroll's argument seems to run something like this:

No reality can exist that does not abide by the laws of physics
A supernatural reality could not abide by the laws of physics
Therefore a supernatural reality cannot exist.

That first premise is a doozy. No wonder he never states it outright in his argument. It simply lurks there in the background throughout the whole article unargued for, unanalyzed, and unacknowledged. How exactly does he know this? In fact, isn't this precisely one of the points at issue between scientific materialists like Carroll and religious thinkers?

Why would we expect that the soul would retain information after we die? Why would anyone belief that it consists of particles? Why would we think there would be physical laws holding it together?

Why would anyone ask questions like this unless they were simply unaware that the question of the immortality of the soul is not a scientific question. I'm sure accountants have a hard time making accounting sense of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I imagine economists have some trouble making economic sense of Beethoven's Symphony Number 3 in E-flat Major. And I've got to believe that the Empire State Building is somewhat impervious to the analysis of a professional psychologist.

Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.

Well, the absurdity of the task--and of asking these particular scientific questions about a non-scientific issue--has apparently not been brought home with sufficient force to Carroll to prevent him from engaging in it. Maybe the reason believers in life after death don't ask scientific questions about it know something Carroll apparently doesn't: that it isn't a scientific question.

But somehow we're supposed to believe that a physicist, by plying his particular craft, can resolve the question of the immortality of the soul. I wonder how Carroll would react if a theologian began analyzing problems in science according the principles of religious dogma.
In fact, we already know the answer to that question. Just go look at Carroll's response to creationism! But don't ask Carroll to observe the same limitations that he asks others to observe.

Carroll sets forth the formula that "tells us how electrons behave" [genuflect here]:

He then states:

If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?)

Um, well, no you don't. At least no more than you would need such a thing to happen in the process of affirming the above statement. Such an affirmation would involve a free will decision by Carroll in his conscious mind. In fact, this is one of the problems with the philosophical solvent Carroll wants to apply here: it would not only explain the immortality of the soul away, but consciousness, free will, love--and rational validity itself.

If nothing can be accepted as real if it cannot be encompassed in a mathematical equation, and these things cannot be encompassed in mathematical equations, then these things cannot be accepted as real. What is the formula for consciousness? (a subject Carroll mentions later, as if he'll be able to make any more sense of that) What equation explains free will? By what calculus can you prove love?

And what about life itself? Carroll talks on as if science really understood life, but does it? What is the equation for life? What physical thing is absent from a dead body? Can science even create life? If science cannot explain life itself, by what authority does is pretend to speak on the afterlife?

Aristotle, wiser even in physics than his successors, says that the soul is "the form of the body." The form of a thing is not a material aspect of it. In fact, Carroll is just one of the many philosophically ignorant scientists who gets his formal and material causes mixed up. Modern scientists of Carroll's bent accept material causation, but reject formal causation. But instead of going on their merry way and simply interpreting the world without taking formal causation into account, they either try to make material causes do the work of formal causes or they want to keep formal causation and pretend it is material causation--or (more commonly) both.

In demanding that scientific criteria be applied to the question of whether the soul is immortal, Carroll commits the first of these errors. In not applying it to consciousness, free will, and the process of rational justification, he also commits the second. In both cases, he is committing a category error.

The extent of Carroll's confusion is evidenced by the fact that he doesn't even know he is confused.

Hawking thinks he is a computer, is unafraid to be turned off

Maybe it is easier for someone like physicist Stephen Hawking, who suffers from Lou Gerhig's Disease and is almost completely dependent on technology for everything--including his ability to speak, to think that he actually is a computer. Hawking has recently announced that he thinks he is little more than a computer and, seemingly because of this, is unafraid to die:

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Those of us who are still under the impression that we are humans can be excused for being a little skeptical of the assertion from someone who thinks his brain is actually a pre-programmed machine that he doesn't believe in a programmer. This is the second time in recent months that Hawking has stepped outside his field of expertise (physics) to make proclamations about issues on which he is a mere amateur (religious and philosophy). And his second attempt at it is little better than the first.

For the creature who created the computer to announce that he actually is the very thing he created seems on the face of it to lack basic plausibility. What if a famous painter suddenly announced that men were merely portraits? How would we react if a prominent sculptor all of a sudden issued a statement saying he thought men were really just statues? And I wonder what we would say if an accountant decided that we were all just entries on a spreadsheet.

In fact, if you look at the kinds of things most people do, they very seldom seem to come to these kinds of conclusions. A farmer seldom decides, based on raising animals his whole life, that men are basically cows or sheep. And funeral directors rarely come to the decision that all people are really just nicely dressed corpses.

Why is it that some scientists, then, are so prone to making these broad reductionist claims? How can the practitioners of such a great discipline go so terribly wrong about the world outside their own field of study? It sometimes seems as if the clarity of the their thought on things outside science varied in inverse proportion to their knowledge of the things that are the subject of science.

John Lennox collapses Stephen Hawking's Universe

The best takedown of Stephen Hawking's new book The Grand Design I have yet heard is by John Lennox, a mathematician and philosopher of science at Oxford. He points out a number of shortcomings in Hawking's case against both God and philosophy, partly by pointing out that Hawking's scientific arguments don't establish what he claims they establish, and partly by point out that his philosophical arguments against philosophy are not only bad but self-contradictory.

His article in the Daily Mail several weeks back is itself excellent:

But, as both a scientist and a Christian, I would say that Hawking's claim is misguided. He asks us to choose between God and the laws of physics, as if they were necessarily in mutual conflict.

But contrary to what Hawking claims, physical laws can never provide a complete explanation of the universe. Laws themselves do not create anything, they are merely a description of what happens under certain conditions.

What Hawking appears to have done is to confuse law with agency. His call on us to choose between God and physics is a bit like someone demanding that we choose between aeronautical engineer Sir Frank Whittle and the laws of physics to explain the jet engine.

But it his speech at the University of Dundee in Scotland in which his mastery of both science and philosophy that makes him the best qualified person to address Hawking is on full display. It is an example of Christian apologetics at its best.

Plus he's got a really cool Irish accent.

You can see the video here. Just scroll to the bottom of the page. The audio was not good at the very beginning of the mp3 version I have, but they fix it just a few minutes from the beginning and it's excellent from there

Is philosophy really dead? Ed Feser responds to Stephen Hawking

I have always wondered what it be like if some fisherman, gloating over his catch, were to be standing next to the giant great white shark he had just landed, and, while cameras were flashing, the thing just turned and swallowed him in one bite and then flopped back into the water. This is sort of what has happened to Stephen Hawking and and Leonard Mlodinow, whose book The Grand Design, declares that philosophy has become a casualty of modern physics, and that, because of this, we know God did not create the world (much less exist).

But reviewers on both sides of the philosophy/science divide have found much wanting in The Grand Design, perhaps because, as the reviewer for the Economist put it, after summarily declaring philosophy dead, they then go on to acknowledge its significant contribution to the discussion of laws of nature, and then make an attempt to engage in it for a good part of the book. "It soon becomes evident," says the reviewer, "that Professor Hawking and Mr. Mlodinow regard a philosophical problem as something you knock off over a quick cup of tea after you have run out of Sudoku puzzles."

The scientists who have reviewed the book seem to largely think that what Hawking and Mlodinow have to say about physics is not particularly new, and anyway is not as widely accepted as they seem to suggest. The philosophers likewise have not been impressed, pointing out that, despite their dismissal of philosophy, the two scientists don't seem to even understand what they are condemning, and demonstrate their ignorance of what they purport to have rendered irrelevant by their own sloppy and confused attempts to treat philosophical issues.

And by the way, why is it that when someone makes bold public statements about science, they are asked for their credentials, but any random person off the street is allowed to make philosophical proclamations unmolested?

In fact, a cursory review of the reviews of the book reveals an interesting thing: the less qualified the reviewer is in either field (physics or philosophy), the more positive his review. I wonder what that suggests.

The philosopher Edward Feser points out that Stephen Hawking's assertion--in his new book, The Grand Design--that "philosophy is dead" is not true simply by virtue of Hawking trying to kill it by doing it badly:

The English philosopher C. D. Broad once noted that “the nonsense written by philosophers on scientific matters is exceeded only by the nonsense written by scientists on philosophy.” You might think there could be no better illustration of Broad’s dictum than Richard Dawkins’s unhappy forays into the philosophy of religion. If so, you should take a look at the latest volume from Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

To be sure, the bulk of The Grand Design is devoted to a fairly lucid exposition of the central theories of modern physics. Had Hawking and Mlodinow stuck to science, there would have been little to object to. (Though also little reason to take notice. Did we really need yet another popular account of relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory?) But they have grander ambitions: a new philosophy of science, in the service of a new theory of the origins of the universe, one that will forever put paid to the claims of natural theology. “Philosophy is dead,” Hawking and Mlodinow assure us, for science can now do what philosophers have tried to do, only better. Unfortunately, their attempt at one-upmanship proves only that Cicero’s famous quip about philosophers may have been misdirected; for The Grand Design demonstrates conclusively that there is nothing so absurd but some scientist has said it

Before nemesis comes hubris, and in the case of Hawking and Mlodinow, that means a basic failure to grasp the philosophical ideas they airily dismiss. Like the village atheist whose knowledge of theology derives from what he saw last Sunday on The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast, our authors assume that when philosophers have argued for God as cause of the world, what they mean is that the universe had a beginning, that God caused that beginning, and that to rebut their position it suffices to ask “What caused God?” But from Aristotle to Aquinas to Leibniz to the present day, most versions of the First Cause argument have not supposed that the universe had a beginning in time, and none of them is open to so simple a refutation. Their claim is rather that even if the universe were infinitely old, it is still the sort of thing that might in principle not have existed at all. That it does exist therefore requires explanation, and this explanation cannot lie in some other thing that might in principle have failed to exist, since that would just raise the same problem again. Accordingly, the explanation can be found only in something that could not have failed to exist even in principle — something that not only does not have a cause, but couldn’t have had one, precisely because (unlike the universe) it couldn’t in theory have failed to exist in the first place. In short, any contingent reality, like the universe, must depend upon a necessary being, and this necessary being is what defenders of the First Cause argument mean by “God” ...

You can read the rest in National Review.

Michael Shermer, Pretend Skeptic: Why scientific reductionism doesn't work

Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, seems to be skeptical of all things but one: science. Somehow, the power of the skeptical criteria he applies to everything else is strangely extinguished when he encounters his own preferred belief system.

In a recent article published at Big Questions Online, Shermer says:

It would certainly seem so if you are reading these words online, but in fact you are not actually “seeing” the computer screen in front of you. What you see are photons of light bouncing off the screen (and generated by the internal electronics of the screen itself), which pass through the hole in the iris of your eye, through the liquid medium inside your eye, wending their way through the bipolar and ganglion cells to strike the rods and cones at the back of your retina ...

His account of the act of seeing continues for several excruciatingly detailed paragraphs in which we are taken on a tour of the brain that we can easily imagine being narrated by Ben Stein and in which we expect at any minute to be asked to stay outside the rope and not to touch the exhibits.

This process proceeds until, says Shermer, we reach the neuron level, where particular neurons fire in particular circumstances. Shermer points out that several neuroscientists have even "found a single neuron that fires when the subject is shown a photograph of Bill Clinton and no one else!"

Unfortunately, this neuron frequently gives long boring policy speeches and attempts to mess around with other nearby female neurons and can create extremely embarrassing situations, so scientists have decided it's best not to study this one too closely.

But we finally arrive at this little gem:

The models generated by biochemical process in our brains constitute "reality." None of us can ever be completely sure that the world really is at it appears.

Shermer calls this idea "belief-dependent realism," about which he promises to enlighten us in a future book, where, presumably, we will be treated to a series of letters, words, and sentences the perception of which will be routed through a long, involved neuroscientific process that will take us back to the neurons which his book will argue don't have any necessary connection with reality.

So one wonders why we should believe him.

This is the problem will all such accounts of experience that try to reduce conscious experiences to physiological processes: they undercut the very arguments used to support them, since the thoughts that produced the arguments and the thoughts that resulted from reading or hearing them are the very things the arguments have attempted to show aren't really real.

The way we derive a truth, in other words, is the truth itself. But if this is so, then isn't the truth "the way we derive a truth is the truth itself" only its own arbitrary derivation? And if so, how can we believe it's true?

Shermer, in fact, seems to be aware of this:

I claim that the only escape from this epistemological trap is science. Flawed as it may be because it is conducted by scientists who have their own set of beliefs determining their reality, science itself has a set of methods to bypass the cognitive biases that so cripple our grasp of the reality that really does exist out there.

"Is there a way around this epistemological trap?" he asks later. "There is. It's called science."

In other words, we must be skeptical of everything--except scientific skepticism. But why does science get a pass? Science is a cognitive process like any other, and must therefore suffer from the same solopsistic fate. Why are scientific thoughts not "models generated by biochemical processes" that "none of us can ever be completely sure" about just like the ones Shermer finds around him so ready at hand?

Once you believe in scientific reductionism, you can't believe it anymore. If you accept it, you must therefore reject it. Once you accept its presuppositions, you are forced in short order to abandon them. It is Chesterton's "thought that stops all thought," a universal intellectual solvent which, despite its pretensions to rationality, is the most anti-rational of all theories.

Anyone who decides to accept Shermer's argument passes under a sign that reads: "Abandon all truth, ye who enter here." But Shermer himself just averts his gaze whenever he encounters the admonition.

In fact, Shermer can't even get through is own article without having to assume the opposite of what he's just told us:

Even when two models appear to be equally supported by observations, over time we accumulate more precise observations that tell us which model more closely matches reality.

Whoah. Hold on there. Weren't we just told that reality was only a model in our brain? How, then, can we use it to assess the models in our brain?

Chesterton had already refuted Shermer as long ago as 1908:

That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H. G. Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument." [the early 20th century equivalent of Shermer's The Believing Brain] In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason ... For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

Shermer takes note that he himself is more optimistic about the effects of drinking the reductionist Kool-Aid than is Stephen Hawking, who at least has the decency to keel over from the philosophical concoction and admit that scientific reductionism leads to an epistemological dilemma from which there is no escape: all facts are theory-laden, and there are cases where no observation can prove one model necessarily right or another wrong.

So what does Shermer propose as the way out of the trap he has set for himself? He has none. In the final analysis, we find him being slain in the Scientific Spirit:

[E]ven though there is no Archimedean point outside of our brains, I believe there is a real reality, and that we can come close to knowing it through the lens of science — despite the indelible imperfection of our brains, our models, and our theories.

So this is where he ends up: swinging from the chandeliers at the scientistic version of a Holy Ghost Revival, crying, "I believe!" Which, of course, is very unbecoming for a scientist.

Sam Harris on Morality: More pronouncements from the Englishmen.

I have said before that there is a hierarchy of positions on the issue of how (and whether) moral beliefs can be justified. On the top of the scale is classical religious thought, a scheme of belief in which morality makes complete sense. On the next level down is existentialism, which rightly concludes that if you reject God, then you must also reject morality. And since they reject God, they realize they must reject morality too. It is a mistaken position, but it's at least intellectually consistent.

On the bottom of this hierarchy is the New Atheism, which simply plays pretend and clings, despite no rational justification of its position, that, despite there being no God, there is still morality. The existentialists, being philosophically sophisticated, basically laugh at this position. Nietzsche calls the people who hold it "Englishmen" because he saw the Victorian culture of 19th century Britain doing exactly this.

And how ironic is that? That the New Atheists are essentially recapitulating the Victorian view on morality?

This latter position has now been taken up by people like Sam Harris, the author of Letter to a Christian Nation. I have not read Harris' new book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, and I hope to review it soon. However, his comments describing his argument in the book don't look terribly promising.

Harris first tries to recast the concept of morality in what he calls "flourishing,"and flourishing, he says, "depends on the way the universe is." Therefore (apparently), morality depends on the way the universe is. He argues that because questions of right and wrong are about human and animal well-being, and that human and animal well being depend on certain things in the world that we can study scientifically, that therefore morality can be studied scientifically.

In my book I argue that we can view all possible experience on a kind of landscape, where peaks correspond to the heights of well-being and the valleys correspond to the lowest depths of suffering. The first thing to notice is that there may be many equivalent peaks on this landscape - there may be many different ways for people to thrive. But there will be many more ways not to thrive.

In fact, what he seems to be doing is simply redefining morality, which cannot be scientifically studied, by repackaging it in something called "flourishing," which he defines in such a way that it can be scientifically studied. He then concludes that morality can be scientifically studied. It's sort of a shell game where the pea somehow gets removed from the shell it was originally under.

There are two fallacies that people like Harris commit over and over when they discuss morality, as if committing them enough times somehow made them go away. The first is that think they can cross back and forth over the "is/ought" divide as if it didn't exist, and they never explain how they get from an is to an ought. As David Hume pointed out in the 18th century, you simply can't do it. To conclude anything about what should be on the basis of what is is to commit what other philosophers have since called a "category mistake." It's like saying that 2 + 2 = 4 is purple, or that my appreciation of a song I heard today is three feet tall.

This, by the way, is not a problem for classical morality (i.e., Aristotelian Thomism), since classical morality presupposes formal and final causes. If you believe that things (such as human beings) have a definitive nature and purpose, and that acting in accordance with that nature is what is good, and acting in defiance of that nature is bad, then everything makes sense. But the New Atheists, adopting the modern view deriving from the Englightenment that there are no formal or final causes, have left themselves at the mercy of what has been called "Hume's Guillotine."

The second fallacy Harris and his fellow New Atheists repeatedly commit is the Naturalistic Fallacy, which consists of asserting that you can explain ethics by simply describing the conditions that accompany the quality of goodness. If, for example, pleasure always accompanies virtuous acts, then virtue and pleasure must be the same thing. G. E. Moore articulated the problem with this fallacy in his Principia Ethica in the early 20th century.

It is important to note that Hume and Moore are not Christians or even traditional thinkers: Hume was a British empircist Philosopher (and religious skeptic) and Moore was a modern analytic philosopher.

The more fundamental problem, however, is that the New Atheists are mostly philosophically ignorant and don't even seem to be familiar with the fact that these are problems in the first place. I have yet to hear one of them actually address the is/ought problem or explain how their position on morality avoids the Naturalistic Fallacy. You would think they had never heard of Hume or Moore.

I'm sure Harris is more specific in his book, but it will be interesting to find out whether he tackles these problems head on--or whether he simply ignores them as he has done in all the public statements from him I've seen so far.

Historical Doubts Concerning P. Z. Myers

Atheist P. Z. Myers has recently articulated the position that there is no way he could ever even conceivably be convinced that God exists. His position is disputed by another atheistic biologist, Jerry Coyne. Myers position is that there is, by definition, no evidence that does or could count for God's existence; Coyne's position is that there is evidence that could count for God's existence, but that, in fact, there isn't any.

Here is Myers summarizing his case:

The nature of this god is always vague and undefined and most annoyingly, plastic — suggest a test and it is always redefined safely away from the risk. Furthermore, any evidence of a deity will be natural, repeatable, measurable, and even observable…properties which god is exempted from by the believers' own definitions, so there can be no evidence for it. And any being who did suddenly manifest in some way — a 900 foot tall Jesus, for instance — would not fit any existing theology, so such a creature would not fit the claims of any religion, but the existence of any phenomenon that science cannot explain would not discomfit science at all, since we know there is much we don't understand already, and adding one more mystery to the multitude will not faze us in the slightest.
So yes, I agree. There is no valid god hypothesis, so there can be no god evidence, so let's stop pretending the believers have a shot at persuading us.

Okay, so his first point is that religious beliefs are stated in such a way as to be non-falsifiable. I dealt yesterday with the similar position of Jerry Coyne, who claims that even the Resurrection is not falsifiable for the strange reason that believers (he asserts) do not defend this claim with reason or evidence. My response was that a) it wouldn't matter to the claim's actual falsifiability how its defenders defended it; and b) that his assertion is false, since there are plenty of defenses of the Resurrection based on reason and evidence. The Resurrection is a falsifiable claim, and waving one's hand and casually dismissing it does not count as a legitimate refutation.

Secondly, Myers says that any evidence for God would have to be "natural, repeatable, measurable, and even observable." The problem with setting the bar so high should be evident. Indeed, under these criteria, something like the Resurrection could not count as evidence for God. The problem is that the Resurrection would not be the only thing that could not be proven under these criteria.

In fact, along with the Resurrection, one would have to reject every other historical fact, even the ones everyone accepts. The assassination of Julius Ceasar is natural, but it is not repeatable, measurable, or even, given that it happened in the past, observable. The Norman Conquest of England is likewise not repeatable, measurable, nor observable. Nor is the existence of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The case of Napoleon has particular historical interest in this regard. When David Hume articulated his influential argument against miracles in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Bishop Richard Whately responded in a book entitled Doubts Concerning the Existence of Napoleon Bonaparte by taking all of the criteria Hume said a miracle would have to meet and applied them to the existence of Napoleon and concluded, tongue firmly planted in cheek, that Napoleon did not exist. Problem was, Napoleon was actually living on the island of Elba, in exile, when Whately wrote the book.

One could perform an equally damning reductio ad absurdum on Myer's criteria. In fact, if we took Myer's criteria and applied them to what he had for breakfast this morning, we would have to say the event never happened. In fact, under Myer's criteria, no event ever happened. The only events that can be accepted are events that are happening, since they are the only ones that are actually observable. Anything that happened in the past must be rejected under this view.

Finally, Myers responds to Coyne by admitting that Coyne's imaginary case of a 900 foot tall Jesus appearing now for all to see would fit the criteria but that no religion actually makes such a claim. He's right, of course. He could have added that it would be hard to say what such an event would actually prove. It doesn't address the central problem of human existence: death. Nor does it prove that there is life after death as does the claim that Christianity does, in fact, make.

And, actually, even that event wouldn't meet Myer's criteria, since it wouldn't be repeatable, and after it had happened and wasn't happening any more it wouldn't be observable either.

If Myers actually had any philosophical sophistication in him, he would make an argument more similar to Gottlieb Lessing, who argued that the contingent truths of history cannot imply anything about the necessary truths of religion. Known as "Lessing's ditch," the argument, fallacious as it was, at least had prima facie plausibility. Myer's ditch on the other hand, is embarrassingly shallow in comparison.

Someone get the man a good shovel.

Jerry Coyne blows it on the Resurrection

Biologist Jerry Coyne, in his recent USA Today editorial, claims that there is what he elsewhere terms a "fundamental distinction" between the truth claims of science and the truth claims of religion. The problem with religious truth claims, he says, is that, unlike scientific truth claims, there is no way to know whether they are true. The claims of science, he argues, are testable--more particularly, falsifiable--while the claims of religion are not. The "biggest problem with religious 'truth,'" he says, is that "[t]here's no way of knowing whether it's true."

But then, unaccountably, he turns around and acknowledges the opposite:

Note that almost all religions make specific claims about the world involving matters such as the existence of miracles, answered prayers wonder-working saints and divine cures, virgin births, annunciations and resurrections. These factual claims, whose truth is a bedrock of belief, bring religion within the realm of scientific study.

How can these two things--that religious belief us unfalsifiable and that is "within the realm of scientific study" both be true? Coyne continues:

But rather than relying on reason and evidence to support them, faith relies on revelation, dogma and authority.

Now the first thing to say about this is that is shouldn't matter what "faith relies" on. The claims are either falsifiable or they are not--and whether those who claim them think they are within some special realm of "faith" is simply irrelevant. They are in the realm of history (something he himself admits) and can be analyzed according to its principles.

But the second thing to say about it is that it is completely false. It is simply not true to say that Christians do not rely on reason and evidence to support the Resurrection. All Coyne need have done was to conduct a Google search. He could simply have typed the words "evidence for the resurrection" and come up with what Google says is "about 300,000 results."

So whatever we want to say about whether the Resurrection is true or false, we know one thing: Coyne's claim that those who believe in it do not offer reason and evidence for it is demonstrably false. In fact, this is a staple of Christian apologetics (the reasoned defense of the Faith) and has been since the first century. The early Christian writers appealed directly to evidence, talking about how many people had seen the risen Christ. There's no better evidence than a witness.

And Coyne digs himself in deeper by making another claim:

I've never met a Christian, for instance, who has been able to tell me what observations about the universe would make him abandon his beliefs in God and Jesus.

Coyne must not get out much. Any Christian believer who knew anything about his faith would readily say that, if the Resurrection was conclusively proven wrong, they would have to abandon their faith. They would have to, since that is the central claim upon which their faith is based. If there are some who don't do this, then they are fideists who do not understand the central claim of their religion. In fact, if Coyne is going to make statements like this, he needs to actually do a little research. Not any kind of complicated historical research, just some basic reading. If he had done this, he would have discovered the following statement:

Now if Christ is preached that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty.

This doesn't come from just any Christian: it's the words of the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. He says that if the Resurrection didn't happen, then it's all over. We can all go home. Did Coyne just miss this? He could have found this by the simple expedient of actually knowing what he was talking about. But he clearly doesn't.

Now I can just hear the peanut gallery on this blog turning out in force and demanding what the evidence for the Resurrection is. "C'mon, Martin, tell us what it is." I'm glad to have that conversation, but let's not confuse it with this point: Coyne is wrong when he says that reason and evidence have not been offered for this claim. It's just false. And whether or not the Resurrection is a historically legitimate claim (it is) is irrelevant to that point.

Coyne blew it.

You can say the claim for the Resurrection is or is not falsifiable, but Coyne's claim is definitely falsifiable. In fact, it's false.