If you haven’t yet, please read Sub-sub-librarian’s comment on my Islamophobia post. This post is a response to Subsub’s insightful contribution, but hopefully not the final word… put on your thinking cap and join in! You don’t even have to know all the names of all the people, or all the meanings to all the words. God knows I don’t! [That last sentence becomes potentially ironic as you read further.]
Subsub,
Thank you so much for your generous and thoughtful comment. I appreciate the honest and moderate nature of your critique of Eagleton's argument. I confess that I too have some reading to do regarding the New Atheist conversation, more so than you.
Meanwhile, I especially appreciate your differentiation between the New Atheists, such as Dawkins and Hitchens, and the novelists Rushdie and Amis. It is certainly necessary to distinguish between the differing agendas represented by each of these individuals.
This deviates from the point of your comment, but I have a thought that was sparked by, “…can you blame [anyone] for having a beef with [any religion] what with [the multitude of irrational injustices it has conjured up] and all”. Indeed no. No one should be blamed for the personal ways that they take issue with institutions that have caused them harm. I do think, however, that one must be careful when taking issue with a religion as a whole, especially in the public sphere. Taking issue with the broad entity of "Islam", for example, is different from taking issue with the more specific entity of a particular political or extremist expression of "Islam". The very nature of religion today is complex and multi-representative -- one religion can represent an array of individuals and agendas. This isn't necessarily a good thing, but it is the reality.
Therefore, one of the primary tasks of INTer-religious dialog is to explore and catalog the myriad of religious expressions; perhaps going so far as to dismiss as inaccurate the manifestations of religion that do not align with the seeds of mutuality and compassion that can be found within religious texts, rituals, and traditions. And one of the primary tasks of INNer-religious dialog is for representatives of a particular religion to explore and account for the expressions of that religion, and where necessary labor to transform and redeem harmful expressions.
Returning to your comment regarding theology, you are right that it is not an empirical science. I think a distinction between theology and apologetics would be helpful, with theology being the logos/study of theos/God, and apologetics being the apologia/defense of God. The former is the establishment of an ongoing discourse and the latter is an attempt to provide some sort of empirical proof of the existence of God.
Traditionally Christian theology has included apologetics as one of its offspring. But perhaps the apple in this case has fallen a bit too far from the tree. There are representatives from both sides of the New Atheist debate that approach theology as if it is a verifiable science. Apologists do this, and so do some proponents of atheism. The debate then becomes about whether or not theology is a viable verifiable science. But in fact theology is a conceptual endeavor. To enter into theological study in the first place, whether for or against the concept of God, one must surrender the compulsion to attempt proving or disproving God’s existence.
Theology isn’t about whether or not there is a God, but about what kind of God there is if there is one.
One should approach the subject of the debate (God) by way of the more tangible conduits of divine experience. Human beings. We need to move away from a debate about whether or not God exists, and toward an effort to understand the ways in which divine experience (supposed or actual) affect our social and relational interactions. How does God (whether or not God is real) influence the way people live and act? Can people who believe in God and people who don’t do so in a way that motivates them to live mutually beneficial lives?
There are concepts of God that do need to be discontinued, because of the hostile and sometimes fatal affect that they have in the world. Science can contribute to this task, religion is by no means off limits to any kind of scientific inquiry, but ultimately the task must be accomplished by a discipline that is suitable to the subject, by theology.
I just added, “Breaking the Spell” (by: Daniel Dennett, for those interested) to my Amazon wish list, I anticipate it being a valuable contribution to my exploration of religion as the multi-faceted phenomenon that is it.
Thanks again. You are most erudite.
I agree with your assessment of theology, what it is, what it should be used for. Which is why it makes no sense to criticize Dawkins on the grounds that he doesn't really deal with centuries of theological debate in the Judao-Christian tradition. His book is entirely about whether or not God exists. Later in the interview, Eagleton brings up Aquinas and says he actually considered the possibility that the universe was infinite in its age. So, there you go. Dawkins isn't giving theology props... Is Eagleton serious? Some guy sitting in an armchair in the middle ages spouting off speculations about the nature of the universe is a poor source of information if you want to find out what the truth is about the universe. And Eagleton is supposed to be this well respected literary critic. You would think a guy like that would know how to read a book and give a fair assessment of the kind of book it is. I give him a C- for reading comprehension. Dawkins isn't writing a history of theology, or a history of ideas. He's writing as a scientist about a matter of scientific inquiry.
ReplyDeleteHere's the premise of Dawkins' book: the existence of God is a scientific question. Science can't prove something with certainty, but we can make inferences and continue to check the validity of our inferences against empirical facts. Science gives us a substantial amount of evidence to infer that there is no God. At least a "God" in the traditional sense, as a being with a personality who interacts with the world.
The second part of his book follows the first premise. Dawkins comes to the conclusion that, if we take science seriously and believe there is no God, then we should seriously criticize religion in the world, especially where it exists in its fundamentalist form.
We can do without religion, he's saying, but not only that. We shouldn't allow the religious to have this special clout that they enjoy. You can criticize someone for having a false belief, and everyone thinks it's perfectly fine to do this. Call someone out on their belief in telepathy and its reasonable. Call those people quacks, and everyone nods their heads. But call a person who believes in a 6,000 year old earth a quack who has no business telling biology teachers what should be taught in the class room, and you've gone too far. That's rude. And mean. And you have no right to be mean about another person's religious beliefs. Well, that's part of the calculation among the New Atheists. They are blunt, and rude. And that's the reason. To knock religion off the pedestal.
Now, there's plenty of room for criticism of Dawkins here. Eagleton calls *The God Delusion* simplistic, and it is. But any single book is simplistic, I'd say. Dawkins is making a valid critique of religion, and it's fair to say in response that there is more to religion than fundamentalism. But it won't do to just dismiss Dawkins as a bigot who should quote Aquinas more. If the Templeton Foundation thinks this is some great propaganda to counter Dawkins, I'm not impressed.
Interesting...
ReplyDelete"Here's the premise of Dawkins' book: the existence of God is a scientific question."
How does methodological materialism investigate the existence or non-existence of an immaterial entity?
you use really big words
ReplyDelete"How does methodological materialism investigate the existence or non-existence of an immaterial entity?"
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point, Anonymous. It's not as if you can set up an experiment with controls and prove the existence or non-existence of God. What Dawkins would say (and by the way, I'm giving an account of his views based on reading his book more than two years ago, so keep that in mind) is that it's not accurate to say that science is neutral on the question of God. You can't set up an experiment to prove the existence or non-existence of the Christian god, or Yahweh, or Allah, for the same reason you can't set up an experiment for the existence or non-existence of Zeus or Osiris or Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or [enter fantastical belief that no one has any empirical evidence for]. But science, "methodological materialism", is based upon the premise that there is no immaterial entity that enters into the material world and messes with the laws of physics. It assumes that the universe operates on a small number of natural laws, and there are no violations. So far it's been very successful. Meaning, there has been no evidence to question the premise that natural laws aren't violated. And with Darwinian natural selection, we have an explanation for biological life. We don't need God to explain how things got to be the way they are, and we don't find any real evidence for God's intervention in the world. (A deistic type of God might be compatible with science, which, by the way, is what Einstein meant whenever he said "God". He merely meant the Laws of Physics.)
Now, is it possible that there is a God? Yes. Is it possible that God goes around breaking the rules of physics when no one's looking, or when no scientist is looking? Yes. But it's a mistake to claim, as some do, that science can say nothing about the existence of God. This is the two separate "magisteria" argument that Stephen Jay Gould promoted. Science does its thing with the material world, and religion does its thing with the spiritual world. You can't use one to talk about the other. Dawkins doesn't buy this, and neither do I. Science is not neutral on the question of God. If you look at the evidence and are forced to come to a conclusion entirely based on science, the answer is clearly that there is no God. Not that there certainly is no God. Again, it's possible. It is just extremely unlikely.
Now, Dawkins would go on to say that you must be irrational if you deny what science implies about the existence of God. I wouldn't say that. Religious people are not irrational. They just give a different weight to scientific explanations. And that's the key issue in my mind. Which explains why you can have scientists who are good at what they do and well respected in their field who are at the same time devout believers in a religion. That doesn't mean that religion and science are compatible, in the sense that a scientist can legitimately say that their scientific work and discoveries justify a belief in God. It just means that people can believe two different things that are conceptually incompatible.
Yes, Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" ("NOMA" as he called it, if I recall correctly) appears to be self-refuting, since there must be a first principle on which the NOMA-principle itself is based, and that principle would overlap both magisteria and would have to be either scientific or religious in the nature of the way he has framed the whole philosophy... meaning that there has to be overlap. Dawkins would have science "overlap" religion to the point that religion ceases to exist (at least as it's classically defined). Certain fringes of religious fundamentalism would prefer the opposite.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your (and Dawkins') assessment that "it's not accurate to say that science is neutral on the question of God." This is the problem of arguments surrounding the existence of a necessary being (e.g. God). If God (in the Judeo-Christian sense) exists then nothing is neutral, it is all related to God by virtue of being a Creator. If God does not exist, it could still be posited that nothing is neutral since "something" must exist necessarily.
However, I think Dawkins' leap from God as "highly improbable" to "certainly non-existent" which leaves some rather monumental gaps in argumentation.
You've said that science "assumes that the universe operates on a small number of natural laws, and there are no violations." But don't we find many currently irresolvable issues in contemporary physics? The classic "paradox" being light traveling as both particle and wave?
Also, you've said that "'methodological materialism'" is based upon the premise that there is no immaterial entity that enters into the material world and messes with the laws of physics." It would seem that this is a bit of an overstatement, at least to my understanding. I thought that MM was based on the uniformity of nature. How does one discern if nature is uniform because "no immaterial entity... enters into the material world and messes with the laws of physics" or because an immaterial entity created and sustains nature in a uniform manner, from which natural laws can be perceived?
I'd be interested to know if you think there could be any viable defeaters for Darwinism as an explanation for biological life, such as Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism?
Also, how do you resolve the problem of personality? Is the universe ultimately personal or impersonal? If impersonal, how does personality come to be? And what is it?
Thank you for your time and thoughts. I appreciate your answers.
To Aram's post:
ReplyDelete"We need to move away from a debate about whether or not God exists, and toward an effort to understand the ways in which divine experience (supposed or actual) affect our social and relational interactions. How does God (whether or not God is real) influence the way people live and act? Can people who believe in God and people who don’t do so in a way that motivates them to live mutually beneficial lives?"
I agree. This is what I've been trying to think through on my "Working Title" blog, http://sub-sub-librarian-workingtitle.blogspot.com/. Though I haven't been able to do much with it lately.
Also, a few weeks ago I heard an interesting interview with Harvey Cox on NPR: http://wamu.org/programs/dr/09/09/21.php#27929. His book is called The Future of Faith, and he seems to be saying something very similar to what you're saying. Haven't read it yet. It's on my list.
I also heard the excellent Harvey Cox interview. I wonder if there is an important reminder here for us to remember to our human condition and the forward momentum of our present day culture. When boiled down, the discord between philosophers of faith and philosophers who are atheists or agnostic is simply another fight. Community leaders today are becoming more interested in exploring the unique story that every individual has, rather than fueling fights within and between people groups. I applaud the conversation and look forward to less debate and more questions without answers (scientific or other).
ReplyDeleteAn excerpt from a past post (june 11, 09 - "follow up part one" - some of which I would write differently if I were to write it after the informative interactions taking place here)...
ReplyDeleteWe could try to do away with science, but we'd be cutting out an important innovative and inventive portion of our nature as humans.
We could try to do away with religion, but we'd be severing ourselves (if not personally then collectively) from a part of us that is thoughtful, feeling, and imaginative.
These two are not at odds within us, neither do they need to be at odds externally. Rather than going to the extreme of ridding ourselves completely of one of these important elements in the human story, or trying to marry two things that are not meant to be married (though they make great friends), we'd do well to commit our energies to a couple of other tasks.
One: being rid of the corrupt forms of religious expression that manifest themselves either ridiculously (best case scenario) or violently (worst case scenario).
Two: refraining from the contemporary compulsion to deify our rational abilities at the cost of sacrificing our emotional abilities, which has the potential to (best case scenario) lead to a biting skepticism and (worst case scenario) create a context for... you guessed it, violence.
subsub thanks for the harvey cox lead... on it!
ReplyDelete[I realize that I'm continuing the discussion about the existence of God. I think there is a difference between the "debate about whether or not God exists" and taking the time to explain why I believe what I believe. My experience has been that many Christians here in the midwest have only assumptions about why atheists believe what they believe. It's important to be able to understand why another person would *reasonably* believe something different than yourself.]
ReplyDeleteAnonymous--
You say that Dawkins makes the leap from God being improbable to God certainly not existing. That seemed right to me at first. That sounds like the sort of thing he'd do. I'm a bit more careful with the word "certainly" myself. There are one, maybe two things, that I'm *certain* of. Everything else is a matter of possibility, and where that possibility lies on the spectrum of probability.
But actually, I don't think Dawkins goes as far as saying God certainly doesn't exist. That was the point of the section of his book on the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Dawkins admits that you can't positively prove the non-existence of something. Like the Christian God, or Zeus, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster (google this, if you haven't heard of it...). Anyone can come up with any fantastic creation they want, claim that it's real but out of the realm of science's ability to disprove it, and you've got yourself a religion (Dawkins is saying this). Which is the point of the Pastafarian parody.
As far as there being "irresolvable issues in contemporary physics", I think there is a difference between physics being weird at the quantum level and claiming that this weirdness means the laws of physics are not consistent and are not relatively few in number. Yes, it's weird that light (photons, and electrons for that matter) behaves with what seem to be wave properties in certain conditions, and at other times behaves with what seem to be particle properties. However, at this point, we know what these circumstances are, and given the circumstance we can predict, without exception, how the photon or electron is going to behave. Another aspect of the weirdness is that they behave in a way that can only be described statistically. It is no longer a clockwork universe. But the statistical behavior is very well known, and we never find photons and electrons misbehavin'.
You write, "How does one discern if nature is uniform because 'no immaterial entity... enters into the material world and messes with the laws of physics' or because an immaterial entity created and sustains nature in a uniform manner, from which natural laws can be perceived?"
You can't. This is why I've said that science could be compatible with a sort of deistic God. Einsteins God, or Spinoza's. But if this God never interacts in the world, then it's so far removed from what most people mean by the word "God" we might as well just call it Nature or Natural Law.
As far as Plantinga's argument against naturalism goes, I think it's very clever. My take on it is that it's great comfort for intellectually geared theists, and it throws atheists and agnostics into conniptions. But it doesn't change anyone's mind. (Maybe it has, I don't know, but I haven't heard of anyone rejecting naturalism because of it.) The reason is that naturalism requires certain assumptions, as theism does, and the assumptions are based on a working knowledge of the natural world. And this working (pragmatic) knowledge is going to trump the sort of argument Plantinga uses.
ReplyDeletePlantinga's argument (if I remember it correctly) is that there is no reason to think that organisms, like ourselves, will be selected for because of true beliefs. Natural selection only "sees" behavior, and it's possible to imagine an animal having false beliefs and still being selected because of the behaviors exhibited in association with false beliefs (it doesn't even have to be associated, really--we could just have false beliefs and be selected based on behavior that has nothing to do with our beliefs). Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that we could exist as we do, with our true beliefs and all. Naturalism can't produce anything like us, or if it did it would be entirely a fluke, i.e., not a result of natural selection. And, based on such a low probability for beings with true beliefs, it would be "irrational" to believe in naturalism. [So, if I understand Plantinga, it's not a defeater for "Darwinism as an explanation for biological life." It's supposedly a defeater for Darwinism as an explanation for conscious animals with true beliefs. It actually assumes that Darwinism, natural selection, can create biological life of considerable complexity.]
Like I said, naturalism requires certain assumptions. As a naturalist, I assume that scientific inquiry is my best bet for finding out how the world works. Scientists have provided us with overwhelming evidence that the earth is very old, that all of life seems to share a common ancestor, and that natural selection can explain modification and speciation. Plantinga comes along and says you can't possibly believe this, because it's so astronomically unlikely that you would even be able to have this "true" naturalistic belief. My response, as a typical naturalist, is to say, "Well that's a clever argument. But it's obviously false." What makes the argument obviously false is that I am in fact here, my existence can be explained by natural selection, and I do in fact have true beliefs. Of course I'm begging the question, but this is how the argument is met with in the naturalism camp. No one really takes it seriously. No scientist does anyway. And this goes back to my comment about rationality. We each have our preference for the types of explanations we'll accept.
If I'm backed against the wall, my answer to Plantinga is that his argument depends on a misunderstanding of probability. So, he grants that natural selection can explain complexity in the universe, it just can't explain true beliefs. He says it's very unlikely. Well, all I need to know is if it is possible. And it is. And given enough time, even events with low probabilities are very likely to happen somewhere at some time. For instance, lets say the probability of getting struck by lightning in the US is 1/280,000. About 1000 people get struck by lightning a year. What's the likelihood that I get struck by lightning this year? Very low. What's the likelihood *someone* will get struck by lightning this year? Very high. Given enough time, unlikely events become almost a sure thing. And here we are, surprised that we exist and have true beliefs. (This is along the lines of the Anthropic Principle.)
As far as personality goes, Anonymous, I'm not sure what you mean by, "Is the universe ultimately personal or impersonal." The universe contains persons, so personality is compatible with our universe. I assume that you are driving at the existence of consciousness. How do you get conscious beings in a material universe?
ReplyDeleteI think natural selection can explain the existence of organisms with complex brains, no problem. It does seem to be a mystery how our brains produce consciousness. But there isn't any question that what happens in our brain corresponds to what happens in the mind. However, you can't confidently conclude that correlation means causation. You can't say with absolute confidence that a brain state X causes mental state Y, just because it happens to be the case that every time you have X you have Y, and vice versa. What's missing is an idea of how X causes Y. What's the mechanism? We just don't know yet.
I've heard, and read, theists assert that this is a fatal blow to naturalism. In other words, people argue that, because there is this conspicuous gap in naturalism, you should discard naturalism and come to the conclusion that God is the only explanation for the correspondence between brain states and mental states.
Again, this is the sort of strategy that won't make much sense to people who favor naturalism. Correlation does not prove causation, but it's a pretty good indication that something is going on there. And that something will some day have a natural explanation. This is a God of the Gaps argument, in my opinion, and it will go the way of all the other gaps in science. It will close.
In case you're wondering, I consider arguments for the existence of God (or, at least, for the falsity of naturalism) that are based on the "miraculous" existence of consciousness, morality, or any other complex/mysterious phenomenon, as a God of the Gaps argument. Someone who is convinced that naturalism is a better explanation for stuff will not be impressed with the claim that, since science hasn't explained something yet, science never will explain that thing.
You’re right, Dawkins’ never goes so far as to say that there “certainly” isn’t any entity to which we can ascribe the term “God,” apart from a meme, (are you familiar with his rather ascientific theory of “mimetics”?) but that anything classically defined as “God” is so improbable that atheism is the only rational position... and he certainly doesn’t write about atheism from a position of uncertainty. :)
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting how little time philosophers of science spend in a laboratory and how little time scientists spend investigating the preconditions for their craft. I’ve never understood that. Dawkins appears to have little more than a foggy, sophomoric understanding of the entire Enlightenment edifice upon which his naive continental empiricism rests (but, in his defense, he is an accomplished measurement-taker).
Regarding both “quantum weirdness” and “God of the gaps theories,” my point wasn’t so much that anything for which we don’t yet have “naturalistic explanations” is a basis for belief in God (our knowledge will continue to grow in some areas, we’re wrong in others, some things may be entirely beyond us, none of which ever could be the basis for a belief in God), but that the entire concept of naturalism has to be established before it can be an explanation of anything. And the philosophers tend to find the scientists’ appeals to pragmatics to be rather narrowly self-referencing, a sort of “alternate faith” rather than the “hard fact” it is so often presented as. An illustration could be drawn from this discussion. You said, “This is a God of the Gaps argument, in my opinion, and it will go the way of all the other gaps in science. It will close. “ This is a faith-based statement regarding the future of the world, made from within your naturalistic framework. Within that framework it is functionally analogous to the fundamentalist asserting that “Jesus will return and judge the earth.” I bring this up because you already seem to be aware of this, so I’d be interested to understand how you came to adopt the assumptions of naturalism in a self-aware and rational manner (assuming that might have been the case).
My original point in asking, however, had less to do with “the gaps” and more to do with the worldview in which the gaps are interpreted; less to do with the “the facts” and more to do with a philosophy of fact. To reiterate the question above, how did you go about adopting your naturalistic faith-system over and against your formerly religious faith-system?
Moving along, the problem on both sides is how to get from description to purpose or prescription. We note that a photon moves in such a way under such conditions, but why? And to what end? In some ways, it could be boiled down to the problem of induction, I guess (if you’re familiar with that). What are the necessary preconditions for the uniformity of nature?
ReplyDeleteIn light of your agreement with Dawkins’ argument for God’s extreme improbability making God’s existence or non-existence functionally unimportant, I found this statement puzzling: “And given enough time, even events with low probabilities are very likely to happen somewhere at some time.” Is the “existence of God” included in the category of “events” here? If not, why not?
This was another interesting statement which gave me pause for thought: “As a naturalist, I assume that scientific inquiry is my best bet for finding out how the world works. Scientists have provided us with overwhelming evidence that the earth is very old, that all of life seems to share a common ancestor, and that natural selection can explain modification and speciation.”
I’m sure you’re aware (as you’ve read Gould) that uniformitarian philosophies of geology are behind contemporary theories of the age of the geological age of the earth, and they assume that the earth is very old; the “overwhelming evidence” produced by a framework which assumes the earth is very old in order to prove that it is very old is, again, very narrowly self-referencing. Circular, to be exact. That’s just one of several problems which Gould’s (highly unpopular) punctuated equilibrium theory was intended to resolve.
On a different note, I feel that it might seem unfair to you that I’m posting lots of questions from a nominally critical perspective while remaining anonymous. This is largely because conversations about the existence of God tend to involve far more rhetoric than reason, IMHO. Having somewhat recently undergone a Kuhnian “paradigm shift” regarding my own philosophy of science (which resulted in the adoption of a theistic view), I’m interested in discussing these sorts of things, and am always glad to hear honest, open and forthright answers to questions (as you’ve provided) rather than the usual uncritical “party lines,” etc.
Thank you for your time and thoughts, as always.
Anonymous, you're quite right to say that over-enthusiastic scientists and atheists present naturalism as a hard fact that cannot rationally be denied. My take on this is that people who espouse naturalism should give up the supposed monopoly on rationality, and the religious should give up the claim that all belief systems are "faith-based."
ReplyDeleteAs I said before, I think that there are one or two things I know for certain. The rest of my knowledge is best described as a *belief*. Forgive my obsession with probability, but I like to think of every proposition as having a probability value between 0 and 100. The things I'm certain of get 100. Very few of those. The things I'm certain do not exist (or are not true) get 0. Very few of those. Everything else is in between. At this point in my life, I favor scientific explanations for assigning these probabilities. It's also possible to use religious experience to assign a probability. In the end, we have different reasons for believing what we believe, and there are very few certainties.
Now, many religious people want to say, "Well see, that means there's no difference between religious faith and scientific belief. Scientists have faith in what they believe too. So we should call it scientific faith." I think there's more rhetoric than substance to this. I used to be a Christian, and I know how the word "faith" is used in religious circles. It has various meanings. It can mean *hope*; it can simply mean *belief* as I've described it; but it can also mean *trust* in a very vulnerable sense. It's the faith in things unseen, it's Kierkegaard's faith, fideism. And this is actually an anti-rationalism that is very real within the Christian tradition. It doesn't dominate it, but it's there. This is the faith that scientists think of when they hear that they have "faith" in science. And they are correct to insist on the distinction. It's not accurate to say that scientists use faith, and just leave it at that. My opinion is that the religious should give up using the *faith* label in such a sloppy way. *Belief* works just fine.
How did I adopt a "naturalistic faith-system over and against [my] formerly religious faith-system"? Mini-autobiography:
I was raised in what I would call a fundamentalist evangelical church and home. I was taught that evolution was not true, that everything was created in six days. I actually went to a Christian school for elementary and junior high, and had a creationism class. No, really I did. (And I think it was actually supposed to be a science class!)
I went to a Christian college in Indiana (Huntington) where I spent 3 years on an English major. This was my first real introduction to an intellectual life, and I was still very much a traditional Christian.
Took 4 years off, worked at tool and die shop and did a lot of reading on my own. While at work. It was great. I ran computer aided machines, got them going, sat back and read very widely. Classical literature, modern literature, history, philosophy, popular science, and made my first acquaintance with Dennett, Dawkins, and Darwin.
When I went back to school full time at a university in Indianapolis, I had come to realize that what I had been taught about the origin of the earth and biological life was completely wrong. The Christianity that I was raised in mislead me, and I became wary of any and all Christian teachings. I felt I couldn't trust them if they couldn't get this straight.
I finished with a Biology undergraduate degree, and was close to minoring in math, chemistry, and physics. I also finished that English degree. By the end, I realized that I couldn't really believe in the existence of God, but I thought that if I gave up God I would become a corrupt, depraved heathen. Because God is the source of morality and moral behavior, right? But I ended up meeting and befriending several atheists and realized that they were every bit as moral as my Christian friends. More so, in some cases. The idea that morality is based on a belief in God, or that morality couldn't exist without a God, was another...error (I wanted to write "lie" but that's a bit harsh).
ReplyDeleteSo, I gave up trying to believe in God. I think the Christian life is very satisfying. It's got a lot going for it. But ultimately, I don't think it's based on the truth, and that's extremely important to me. I'd rather embrace what I believe to be the truth, and it turns out that I am living a very satisfied, meaningful, *moral* life without religion.
If I had to, I would describe my position as a soft-scientism. I believe that science is the final arbiter for questions about the truth of reality. But I'm still a big fan of the humanities. I'm much more comfortable in the library than in the lab. The humanities provide us with a framework for talking about what it means to be a human being, what it means to live a good life. But this should always be grounded in the picture of what science is telling us about reality.
As for holding these beliefs "in a self-aware and rational manner," I guess that came about after becoming an atheist and trying out the whole "I'm rational and religious people aren't" thing. I tried to think down to the bottom of rationality, and I couldn't justify what I was saying. My conclusion is that rationality is reason based thinking. If you think and behave based on clearly stated reasons, then you are being rational. Now, we can have our opinion about what are good reasons and what are bad reasons. I think religion can offer some decent reasons to back up some religious tenets. But ultimately, I believe religious reasons are flawed and untrustworthy. Again, science is our best bet when it comes to describing the world accurately.
And to your paragraph on description vs prescription, again it's a matter of preference. The problem of induction is supposedly the 'scandal of philosophy', and it may well have been when Hume laid it out. But that was during the great transition in natural philosophy. From a teleological understanding of the world to a non-teleological. What do you gain with teleology? A prescriptive view, a purpose. But that view didn't produce much description. Or, it didn't produce what we would now consider a very accurate description. Since natural philosophers have discarded teleology and investigated nature from a non-teleological view (this is one way to look at the morphing of "natural philosophers" into "scientists"), we've had great success with description. We've lost prescription, and that was disturbing to a lot of people, but today it's not such a scandal anymore, is it? Maybe it is in philosophy classes, but biologists and physicists and chemists go on their merry way, contently oblivious of such a scandal. I can't say that I'm that disturbed by it either. It just seems to be the state that we find ourselves in.
Now, when I wrote "given enough time, even events with low probabilities are very likely to happen somewhere at some time" I was not thinking about the possibility of God's existence. Your comment actually made me laugh, because it's a very good point and no one has pointed it out to me before. My answer would be that the events that I'm thinking of are events that could happen within this universe, or a universe very similar to ours. My understanding of what could happen in universes dissimilar to ours is limited by my imagination. In any case, the existence of the Christian God of classical theology doesn't seem to be the kind of thing that *happens* within the space/time of a universe, right? It's supposed to be infinite, timeless, and outside the universe somehow. I have admitted that it's possible for such a thing to exist, but I'm unable to even conceive of how to determine the probability of its existence as an *event* in the same way I speak of getting hit by lightning as an event. When I talk about the existence of something like the Christian God being "very unlikely", I'm referring to empirical evidence that I might base a belief on.
ReplyDeleteAs for the circular reasoning within geology, I haven't done much reading on that. My understanding is that sometimes geologists use previously identified fossils as a sort of short-hand for identifying the age of a particular layer. But the evidence for an old earth is the age of the universe (an expanding universe that seems to have begun at a central location quite a while ago) and radiometric dating of minerals, some of which are older than 4 billion years. Geologists use radiometric dating to establish the age of strata, and it should be seen as an indication of how consistent fossils are found in the rock strata that geologists are comfortable using them as shorthand. What is the point to doing expensive radiometry every time you want to know the age of a particular strata? It may be lazy, and it may be philosophically sloppy, but it's not a serious objection to a belief in an old earth.
And I agree with you about the God debate being full of rhetoric at times. I'm also curious about how you might have come to a theistic view by a shift in your philosophy of science.
I apologize for taking a few days to respond to you. Duty is always calling. :)
ReplyDeleteWhile I might disagree a bit about the semantic range and particular uses of the term "faith," I think your points in your first three paragraphs of your latest response are possibly the most reasonable I've interacted with regarding the nature of the debate between "science" and "religion." I was glad to read that. It's probably attributable to what appears to be the wide background of reading you've done.
Anyway, it's always interesting to see the similarities and differences between my own "story" and others'. I went to a Christian school at a young age which had a creation-science class as well (though I was sent there because I was a bit of a delinquent and it was one step shy of the military school I was eventually sent to, ha ha). I started out as an English major in college, though I never finished in that program and wound up doubling up in math and anthropology with a focus in linguistics. (On a side note, it's funny that you mention thinking of probabilities in terms of 0-100; I've always thought of them in terms of 0-1 with decimal places in between... maybe that just means I'm more "narrow minded" than you are, ha ha). I had a period of belligerent atheism (Dawkins being my hero during that time), but as I began to study further into the theory I started seeing rather large holes in what I had been led to believe was an air-tight hypothesis. Not to bore you with the details, but it seems to me to be quite clear that Darwin's theory and the varied neo-Darwinian syntheses (such as Gould's "punk eek") are mathematically untenable (there just isn't enough matter in the universe, much less on our planet, to allow for the variety of species to result from natural selection which we see in existence today).
This led me into a bit of a crisis, where I began to spend less time in the lab and more in the library reading philosophy (I was in the lab for some science classes as pre-requisites for medical school). So I also eventually became more comfortable in the library than the lab.
As both Huxley and Dawkins recognized, however, the only real alternative to atheism is... well, theism. (There's some mind-bending logic for you.) I could probably say more, but I don't want to over-do it. Sometimes I get nauseous if I talk about myself too much.
But enough story-telling for now. I'm interested to know what it means for you to be "living a very satisfied, meaningful, *moral* life without religion" in a "non-telelogical" world?
It would seem to me that the term "meaningful" would be meaningless, given the "discarding of teleology," as you put it. And I would think of morality as the pinnacle of teleology. If all we have is description, what basis can there be for any prescription? This appears to me to be contradictory.
Regarding God's existence as an "event," I'm also interested in knowing how you calculate the probability of the existence of God. Roger Penrose (Stephen Hawking's erstwhile companion) asserted that the probability of a universe like ours existing is one in a number as large as the subatomic particles in that universe. Yet, here we are. Why should the existence of God be so immensely more improbable than our own existence?
Anonymous--
ReplyDeleteI should also apologize for my delay. And actually, I won't be able to address everything you raised in your last comment right now. Hopefully I'll be able to later in the week.
Regarding your comment about "meaningful" being "meaningless" if we discarded teleology, I think that if we say, "Do you find 'meaning' in your life?" we could be getting at a few things. I think the two broad possibilities are as follows: Do you find your life to be satisfying; and, Do you find that your life is somehow a reference to something else beyond yourself? The first question has to do with being happy or unhappy. The second question has to do with the more, how should we put it, semiotic nature of our existence. We live in the world as conscious beings because we use language, which is a system of symbols that operates by referring to something beyond the symbols, i.e. meaning.
As I see it, I can honestly say that I think I have a 'meaningful' life in both of these senses, as an atheist. And neither requires a teleological understanding of the universe.
It is possible to live a happy life without believing that the universe was created by some divine being, or that life has some ultimate 'purpose' beyond what we understand descriptively about the material world. That is something I would just claim as a fact of my experience. It no longer makes any sense to me that someone would try to deny this fact about my own experience. And going back to our discussion of what naturalism can explain and what it assumes, I think that science can explain the existence of animals that are happy, assuming that naturalism is valid (which I do). The existence of happy animals isn't a contradiction within naturalism.
I also believe that it's possible for animals with consciousness to exist in this world, without extra teleological help. What we need are animals with complex brains that are then selected for based on their ability to communicate. We find all kinds of communication in nature, from molecular signals to audible bird-songs and chimpanzee grunts. Natural selection is clearly an excellent explanation for the proliferation of this strategy. And we have begun to put a few pieces together in our investigation into the origin of human language (e.g., the FOXP2 gene). Consciousness is a product of human language, which is a product of natural selection. Meaning is a part of human language. We experience it when we use language, by referring to objects not present, and we experience it when we feel strong emotions such as longing for the unattainable and grief for the dead. These are powerful experiences that humanity has been coping with for thousands of years. We've developed and passed down various cultural coping mechanisms, and religion is one of them. This does not, in my opinion, say anything about the truth of religion. The story I just told was a naturalistic one, and I believe it is sufficient to explain why we often speak of "meaning" in a religious, teleological way, asserting that it could be thought of in no other terms. In my opinion, this is a mistake. "Meaning" can exist without teleology and without God. (For an interesting discussion of "meaning" at the molecular level, see Stuart Kauffman's *Reinventing the Sacred*.)
I'd like to write more about morality, but for now I'll just point you toward a thread on my Working Title blog called "What is Morality?": http://sub-sub-librarian-workingtitle.blogspot.com/2009/06/what-is-morality.html. That's actually a lot of reading, so I'll try to sum it up here soon.
I'd like to say a bit about how I *find* meaning in my life without God. As I said, the concept of meaning has a natural explanation, and as a human being I can experience life by directing my thoughts and actions outwards, towards others. I find meaning in treating people decently, the way they would want me to be treated. I find meaning in my marriage, in having to forgo selfishness sometimes, in romance, in sexual love, in making a home with someone else. I find meaning in my profession, environmental management, in thinking about the consequences of our actions in the natural world, in mitigating the consequences of bad choices we all make concerning natural resources. I find meaning in doing volunteer work, doing food prep at a local community kitchen that provides food to people in need. I find meaning in experiencing and creating art. And, to be honest, I find meaning in being an atheist, in considering the world as a place that can be understood, that operates by natural laws, where life has come into being, flourished beautifully with conscious human beings, and will some day be gone. I find meaning in being a part of that flourishing, standing at this point in history, where human beings have come before me, and I am an inheritor of knowledge and culture and the state of this planet. I find meaning by believing that there is no God to appeal to, no divine savior, no supernatural comfort to rest in, but only common sense and hard work that is called for.
ReplyDeleteSo, morality. What is it and how could it exist in a world without God, a world with no teleology?
ReplyDeleteFirst there is the question of moral behavior. There are lots of good books out there on the natural explanation of altruism. *The Origins of Virtue* by Ridley is a good one for that. It's not that difficult to see how altruistic behavior can be selected for in social animals. We can see that moral behavior is a good strategy for surviving in groups.
Second, morality is something we *know*. In fact, it seems to be something that, by-and-large, all human beings are hard-wired to know. There are various levels of moral relativism, for sure, but all cultures have at least a few rules that are universal: don't kill, don't lie, and maybe a few others that are variation on a narrow theme. My main source for this is Marc Hauser's *Moral Minds*. He likens it to what we know about human language. All human languages seem to have an underlying universal grammar, and all human beings seem to know this grammar innately. It isn't taught. What is taught is the particular language that a child is raised with. Hauser suggests that there is a similar sort of universal moral grammar that we all share innately, whereas the particulars of our own cultural values are filled in by our upbringing. (Again, see Hauser for the empirical evidence that backs this up.)
However, morality isn't just something we do and know, it also has a special 'umph' to it. This is how Richard Joyce puts it in *The Evolution of Morality*. It's not just that we know we should do some things and not do others. There is a special clout surrounding moral rules. Think of a non-moral cultural rule, like table manners. You shouldn't chew with your mouth open. If we break this rule it's no big deal. But if we break a moral rule, there is shame and castigation. So why do we have moral rules as opposed to just a desire to do what the rules say we should? Joyce's explanation is that there are advantages to having rules that are followed most of the time (the 'umph' part), but that can be changed if the circumstances called for it (the moral relativism part). It's advantageous that moral rules are *flexible*. (If you want an example of this, read the third comment in the thread I mentioned above, "What is Morality").
So, that covers the natural explanation of moral behavior, moral knowledge, and moral clout. But there is the problem that we seem to understand moral knowledge as referring to something that does not come into the naturalistic picture here. It is about moral badness and moral goodness. If we say that it is 'wrong' to do something, we seem to be saying something like, "That action has the property of 'wrongness' and that's why you shouldn't do it." Do moral badness and goodness exist? My current position on this is that they exist, they just aren't what most people think they are. Joyce, on the other hand, says that they do not exist.
My brother-in-law (who's a philosophy professor, and theist by the way) likens it to the question of whether or not witches exist. One could say, "No, there's obviously no such thing as witches who perform magic and fly on brooms and whatnot" (Joyce). Or, one could say, "Yes, there are witches, they are called Wiccans and they dress in funny clothes and 'cast spells', but really they're harmless" (me). I think that morality evolved in such a way that it was possible for us to develop an innate 'knowledge' of moral badness and goodness, without there actually being any objects to which this knowledge referred. And, at this point, morality is a function of the human mind and human behavior to such a degree that we will go on referring to moral badness and goodness. Even though they are merely *functional* terms and do not exist in a way that religious doctrine or folk psychology would describe it. So moral knowledge and moral behavior serve a very important role in human life, and it makes sense to me to accept moral badness and moral goodness as functional concepts within that context.
ReplyDeleteMorality, then, is something that I believe can exist without God, without teleology, and is something that I can experience and embrace as a part of living as a human being.
Well, I know this thing is dead. I've just been waiting to put another comment here because I've posted the last four. But I want to make sure I address every issue Anonymous raised.
ReplyDeleteHow do I calculate the probability of God's existence? At this point, it would be based on my personal experiences. As I said before, I can't look at it as an "event", so I have to look at my life and see if there's anything that couldn't have a reasonable natural explanation. Evidence for God would be personal experience of the supernatural. So, again, I'm starting with an assumption of naturalism, and I don't accept testimony from another person. There can be no "historical" evidence for miracles. I cannot accept the "word" of someone who tells me they saw Jesus walk on Lake Michigan, or witnessed Coca-Cola miraculously changed into Pepsi.
How many experiences have I had where there are no reasonable natural explanations? Zero. I have no empirical evidence for the existence of God. Based on this, all I can say is that it is very unlikely that God exists.
As for this question about low probabilities, I think you might have a misunderstanding concerning chemical and biological evolution. You say there isn't enough matter on the planet, or the universe, "for the variety of species to result from natural selection which we see in existence today." This makes me suspect that you think chemical evolution, which would entirely rely on chance, is the same as biological evolution, which does not entirely rely on chance. Natural selection, as Dawkins is fond of saying, is the opposite of chance (I don't know if it's the opposite, but it's something like that). So I would just disagree that there is a serious issue concerning low probability and biological evolution.
But there is still the issue of chemical evolution. What does it mean to say, The probability of the chemical evolution of life on planet earth is very low, therefor there must be a God--? I'll go back to my example of being struck by lightning. Let's say we're considering the chances of getting hit by lightning on planet earth. And let's keep the number of people hit by lightning per year at 1,000, with a global population of 6 billion. What's the probability that I get hit by lightning this year? Very low. That anyone gets hit? Very high.
Now, let's say I actually do get hit and survive. I could sit and think that something special must have happened. It was so unlikely that I got hit, there must be a God or at least some evil being out there who wants to do me in. But, from the perspective of everyone else who didn't get hit by lightning, my conclusion is obviously suspect. I'm just a statistic. Why would I think that I'm special?
This is the sort of thing that Bacon would call an Idol of the Tribe. It seems to be a common natural/psychological response, that we would think something special must be going on if we witness, or are a part of, an unlikely event. But it's a fallacy to draw a conclusion from that and say, because the unlikely event occurred (to me of all people!) then something supernatural must be going on.
We, as a species here on planet Earth, have been struck by lighting. So what? Life happened here, on our planet. So what? We are conscious beings, unlike any other animals on Earth. So what? Unlikely events are just that--unlikely. They happen, and it should be no surprise. (In fact, the claim that they are *unlikely* events is based on empirical evidence. If we assign the probability based on this empirical evidence, and conclude low likelihood, how can we go back to the low likelihood and say "LOOK! This is very unlikely, and yet it happened! God must have done it!" This is a slight of hand based on a tautology.)
Oh, I forgot. To wrap this up, I need to say why I come to different conclusions about chemical/biological evolution and the existence of God when I say they both have a low probability. The difference is, I see life here on planet earth. I understand chemistry. I understand how biology works. There are no serious gaps in my experience, and my understanding of the story of life here on Earth by evolution via natural selection.
ReplyDeleteI do not see God. I do not understand how God works. It's possible that God exists, but there is no God around, as far as I can tell. It's that simple.