My favorite philosophical conundrum has been back in the news lately, thanks to a recent interview with British actor Stephen Fry:
Asked by the interviewer what he would say to God were he to discover, after his death, that He existed, Fry replied:
I'd say, bone cancer in children? What's that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world where there is such misery that is not our fault. It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God, who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain? That's what I'd say.
Skipping ahead a bit he adds:
Atheism is not just about not believing there is a God, but, on the assumption that there is one, what kind of God is He? It's perfectly apparent that He's monstrous, utterly monstrous, and deserves no respect whatsoever. The moment you banish Him your life becomes simpler, purer, cleaner and more worth living in my opinion.
That's all very well said, both in tone and substance. There is, of course, a voluminous philosophical literature trying to explain away the problem of evil, and it's all very scholarly and erudite. But Fry's simple anger is a useful reminder that it is also all very tawdry and unseemly. The various proposals theists make for absolving God are so unequal to the magnitude of the problem that it reflects poorly on them for putting them forward at all.
Moreover, when treated as an abstract philosophical problem we generally assume that we are discussing a tri-Omni God. That is, God is assumed to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. We should keep in mind, though, that something a good deal less than omnibenevolence is needed for the problem to go through. We need only assume that God has some sort of conscience to have a serious problem of evil. Humans are not omnibenevolent, after all, but most of us regard it as obvious that you don't allow children to suffer from dread diseases if you have the power to stop it.
Predictably, Fry's answer provoked a great deal of response. Much of it was flatly stupid, such as this essay by Tim Stanley in the British newspaper The Telegraph. He writes:
Not only has theology dedicated itself for thousands of years to unpicking that problem but the answer to it is there in the very Bible itself. Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, we've been living in a fallen world full of pain. God granted us free will not only to do bad things but also good things – like finding a cure for cancer or caring for those dying from it.
Terrible things happen because of a) random acts of nature, b) the intervention of the Devil or c) the corruption of man. I'm not saying anyone has to believe what I write, but please don't act like it's never been said before or that the answer to Fry's facile question doesn't exist. Dear Stephen imagines that he's the first person in history to wonder why folks suffer. He's not. He is, however, strangely upset about something that he doesn't even believe in. Who gets angry about an imaginary conversation?
At what point, exactly, did Fry pretend he's the first person to wonder why folks suffer?
I suspect all those theologians referred to in the first paragraph are wishing Stanley would stop helping them. In explaining evil by reference to Adam and Eve, Stanley is throwing his hat in with the young-Earth creationists. Once you accept evolution and the antiquity of life, you realize that this explanation simply doesn't work. Evil and suffering long predate the appearance of human beings, after all. Stanley's other off-the-cuff suggestions for resolving the problem fare no better, making it clear that it is not Fry who is being facile.
Perhaps fearing that his previous remarks were insufficiently stupid, Stanley dials it up a notch with his closing sentences. He is pretending, for some reason, not to understand the concept of a hypothetical question. Having decided that the evidence is against God's existence, Stanley now thinks atheists are barred even from imagining how we might react were we shown to be wrong. His logic is murky, to put it kindly.
A more serious response came from Vincent Torley over at Uncommon Descent:
You're accusing God of wrongful creation – making a world in which suffering can occur, and then populating it with people. But by the same token, you would have to say that two parents who chose to bring a child into the world, knowing that it was liable to inherit a life-threatening form of cancer, would be wronging that child, simply by procreating it. And to that I say: how dare you tell someone that they have no right to create a human being? Whether it be short or long, life, in itself, is a good thing.
“I've got another question for you. Suppose instead that the parents in the hypothetical scenario above were told by their doctor that while any child they chose to bring into the world would probably get cancer, the cancer would not be terminal. Suppose that it could be treated over the course of several months, by a very painful course of chemotherapy, but that after that, their child would enjoy a full and happy life. Surely even you would concede that it would be morally justifiable for the parents to bring a child into the world, in this case. Now suppose, hypothetically, that the child's full and happy life turned out to be an indefinitely long one, because scientists had recently discovered a way to make people live forever. In that case, no-one would say that the prospect of getting bone cancer would constitute a valid reason not to create a child: it would be a treatable illness. All right, then. Heaven is forever. How, then, can you accuse God of being unjust?”
Unlike Stanley, Torley at least attempts a thoughtful response to Fry's question. His reply does not work, however.
The most serious flaw in Torley's argument is that is non-responsive to Fry's question. Speculating about possible moral dilemmas faced by human parents does nothing to explain why God allows suffering and evil. God is omnipotent, after all, but human beings are not. If the question is, “Why would God create a world with horrible suffering, cruelty, and evil?” the answer is not, “It might be ethical for humans to bring children into the world even knowing that those children will suffer.” The questions confronting the parents in Torley's analogies are just entirely different from the one that is being put to God in the problem of evil.
So, even if Torley's analysis of his analogies was correct, his response to Fry would still be entirely inadequate. As it happens, though, his analysis is not correct.
With regard to the first analogy, his assertion that, “Whether it be short or long, life, in itself, is a good thing,” is so absurd, and so monstrous in its consequences, that it is hard to believe he is serious. There are afflictions out there far worse even than bone cancer. Let us imagine a child born with maladies so severe that his life, in its entirety, will consist of a few months of suffering, hooked up to machines, before inevitable death. How can you possibly say there is something inherently good about that child's life? If would-be parents somehow knew ahead of time that their decision to have a child would unavoidably lead to that, how could you not judge them harshly for going through with it anyway?
Torley acts as though the decision to bring a child into the world is always morally praiseworthy. As he tells it, if you think that certain people should not become parents you are, necessarily, being morally obtuse. But this is all just absurd. A person who signed a contract knowing they were unable to fulfill its terms would be commonly thought to have done something unethical. But there is a tacit contract in every decision to bring a child into the world. That contract says, among other things, that you will tend to that child's emotional and physical needs. In fact, you will place those needs before your own. If you know you are unable to provide for those needs, (and, let's be honest, many parents are not) then it is absolutely unethical for you to bring a child into the world. An awful lot of social dysfunction is the direct result of irresponsible people bringing children into the world they are unable to raise. I don't understand why Torley finds those people morally admirable.
His second analogy is scarcely better. If you punch someone in the nose for no reason, and then later give him a lollipop, you have not absolved yourself of the wrong that you did. If someone asks you, “Why did you wrong that person?” you can never plausibly answer, “I was nice to him later.” Using heaven as an answer to the Problem of Evil commits precisely this fallacy. If we ask of God, “Why do you allow children to suffer from bone cancer,” we would not accept as an answer, “Later I allow those children to have eternal life in heaven.”
Parents know that their children will experience hard times in their life. Unlike God, they have no control over that. For them the decision is whether or not the good in their life will outweigh the bad. That is not at all the decision faced by God in creating the world. That is why most philosophers who address the problem of evil take an entirely different approach from the one Torley has chosen. They try to explain why God in fact must allow great suffering as the price for achieving some greater good. I don't think they are successful in that project, but they, unlike Torley, understand what needs to be done.
Enough of that. There was one further response to Fry that I found especially interesting. Since this post has gotten rather long, we shall save it for another time.
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Michael @ #497,
Wow! That's really persuasive evidence you provide to back up your naked assertions.
Or were you there, and this is actually first-hand testimony?
"Drawing from focus groups held with 35 teacher-trainees at four universities in the Pennsylvania, they find that future science teachers often lack the knowledge, conviction, and role models needed to teach evolution with confidence. One problem, the researchers say: breaking the "cycle of ignorance," in which teaching students lack good role models for teaching evolution because they weren't taught the subject well in high school or college."
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6226/1054.summary
Indeed. You have to start early, and special tactics are necessary.
What if I was? Can you prove I wasn't there?
The only thing we have is science to go on and I would bet based on the geologic column that dirt when the OT was written is damn near the same as it is now. It is mostly quartz, feldspar, and mica, with some aragonite. Science - something you think you understand, but you don't.
Telling article Phil, great find.
"You have to start early,"
yes, it is horrible to expect people who are going to teach a topic to understand it. Good lord phil you are a loser.
If one read the actual paper in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science March 2015 vol. 658 no. 1 253-270, one would find that the teacher fears stem from at least 3 misconceptions: 1) science of evolution is controversial, 2) to be fair, “both sides” must be taught, and 3) religion and science are incompatible.
1) is of course nonsense - it is a manufactured controversy having nothing to do with science. 2) is also. Science courses present only one version of almost every other topic. A non-scientific explanation has no basis for being in science courses or for preventing science from being taught. 3) is where the crux lies - individuals are conflicted because they have been told that if the Bible is true, evolution is false and if evolution is true, the Bible is false. This is the opinion of narrow minds who are clueless about science. People do not need to make a choice between one or the other. A literal creation story is not required to believe in God or Jesus and the truth of evolution doesn't disprove God. People are so mixed up about the roles of science and religion and how they work. It really is the is/ought divide. Is comes from science and ought has traditionally come from religion, as a part of ethics and moral philosophy. There are people overreaching from both sides. The problem is authoritarians trying to tell people what to think rather than teaching them to think for themselves. We know that in the US God is drilled into our heads from a very young age and when this is coupled with Biblical literacy - science is in trouble.
Michael, part of the problem is that the focus of the debate is shifting away from things like fossils, geology and evolutionary trees. Since the genome project, people are waking up. Research is straining the mutations/selection paradigm.
Michael, it is hopeless. Phil and his cohorts are so accustomed to lying and mistaking science, making assertions that have no basis in fact, that it is impossible to keep up: they can spew so many lies quickly the time to point them out doesn't exist.
In one sense phi has made a correct statement: there does seem to be a group working against the best interest s and advancement of the country: that group includes him and the other anti education and science loons.
Phil, there is no debate about whether evolution is true (mechanisms yes). ID was dead before it started. Genomics only makes the case for evolution stronger. That you can't understand this is not surprising when you only read creationist propaganda. So what if mutation/selection is being refined - it doesn't have any affect on the truth of common ancestry. This is what you can't seem to get - genomics shows common ancestry even more strongly than fossils and biogeography ever could.
"genomics shows common ancestry"
No, genomics shows common genes, and you don’t have a realistic mechanism for the countless bridges that supposedly link genomes together. You just can’t seem to digest the fact that everything you believe depends on chance and coincidence. You have absolutely nothing else to appeal to.
More research is only revealing more complexity, and things that are hyper-organized and hyper-functional are your worst enemies. There are limits on what accidents can accomplish, and things like genes coding for multiple proteins exceed those limits. It just doesn’t happen. And you can’t throw billions of years at it and make it work. There are limits on that as well.
I think you will be increasingly exasperated as time passes, as more data comes in. The generation behind you might not share your devotion.
Unlike you Phil, I won't be exasperated because whatever science finds out it will be exciting, interesting verifiable. You say there are limits, but you don't know that. You only want limits so your religious beliefs will be true. It has nothing to do with science or evidence.
Why would common genes and common gene networks mean anything, but common ancestry? ID doesn't predict either - it doesn't and can't predict anything. Complexity is easily explained in terms of modularity - built into every organism from the very beginning. You would be surprised what chance and trials will do - trial and error, practice makes perfect - its intuition all over and descent with modification in a nutshell.
You are the only one who will be crying - no matter what happens in the future of scientific discovery - it won't be intelligent design and certainly won't match anything in Genesis. Dead ideas 100s of years ago.
"And you can’t throw billions of years at it and make it work."
This makes me think happy thoughts:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ynXwAo9V_pY
“You say there are limits, but you don’t know that”
Of course I do. The limitations are hard, reliable, proven facts. There is absolutely no evidence of any kind for any inanimate assemblies leading up to biological life.
Let’s try this again, and see if science can help you distinguish between empirical knowledge and materialist tosh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome :
“The ribosome is a large and complex molecular machine, found within all living cells, that serves as the site of biological protein synthesis”
Did you catch it this time? I’m thinking you probably didn’t…again. So let’s review what it takes to synthesize this machine:
“In bacterial cells, ribosomes are synthesized in the cytoplasm through the transcription of multiple ribosome gene operons. In eukaryotes, the process takes place both in the cell cytoplasm and in the nucleolus, which is a region within the cell nucleus. The assembly process involves the coordinated function of over 200 proteins in the synthesis and processing of the four rRNAs, as well as assembly of those rRNAs with the ribosomal proteins.”
So, if proteins are the site for protein synthesis, and ribosome synthesis is dependent on the coordinated function of proteins, you have a chicken/egg problem bigger than China, but more complex.
And your response? Don’t tell me, let me guess:
“The necessary proteins and the ribosome machine were gradually fashioned over billions of years by random events, for no reason at all, from simpler, non-functioning, uncoordinated assemblies, and eventually found each other by happenstance"
How’s that? Let me further illustrate limits according to materialism:
“Given enough time, and enough trials and errors, it is essentially inevitable that chickens will fly to Jupiter, weather permitting”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein#Synthesis
Once again, Phil, you are less than honest. Your claim that "proteins are only synthesized in living cells" is patently false.
Michale @ #504,
Its an ugly world out there Michael. These days we have college professors like Dean who pass their students irrespective of what answers they put down on their tests. Assuming they bother testing them at all.
So of course I was able to graduate with an Engineering degree from one of the top colleges in the country without understanding any Science at all.
In a world with no absolutes, you will find that Science crumbles right along with everything else. The only absolute left is how silly you guys sound.
Phil,
The lack of inanimate assembly (even if true)- doesn't affect evolution. Wrong as usual.
As for your ribosome nonsense - why wouldn't all ribosomes be exactly alike - if they all do the same thing? Why the nest hierarchy of gene sequences? I am sure you read Jim V's earlier comment on watches and design, but it didn't fit your silly worldview so you ignored it. You might want to think occasionally for yourself. What would the world look like if it were designed?
Gordon, it is amazing that you were able to graduate and still know so little. I am a little surprised. I get the feeling that it is difficult to get into engineering school, but once you are there the schools coddle you and stroke your egos so you will give them money after you graduate. Not to mention that the curriculum is so full of math and science courses that you will never get near humanities or philosophy and we know you never took biology.
The statement that I don't test students is, of course, monumentally false. But that is not a surprise, since essentially nothing you've ever said has been true. Since engineering is incredibly light on exposure to statistics your ignorance is almost understandable.
assuming you did somehow get an engineering degree, it is worth pointing out that engineering is not science. It's not
Michael,
You and Dean miss the real distinction. And I'm sure that Jason and Dean do not share your contempt for the integrity of college education.
Engineers are taught how to make stuff that actually works. And then we get hired to make stuff that actually works. So we have little time for that exercise in pure speculation that you all pass off as "science".
And we can all sleep well at night knowing that Jason and Dean are not going to be applying any such speculation to their math textbook for next term. They save their imagination for forums such as this.
Phil,
"The lack of inanimate assembly (even if true)- doesn’t affect evolution."
Of course it doesn't. As I just pointed out, when you leave science behind, and start drawing from the well of imagination, there are no limits. Everything is possible. You don’t even have to click your heels together.
"A slower molecular clock worked well to harmonize genetic and archaeological estimates for dates of key events in human evolution, such as migrations out of Africa and around the rest of the world1. But calculations using the slow clock gave nonsensical results when extended further back in time — positing, for example, that the most recent common ancestor of apes and monkeys could have encountered dinosaurs. Reluctant to abandon the older numbers completely, many researchers have started hedging their bets in papers, presenting multiple dates for evolutionary events depending on whether mutation is assumed to be fast, slow or somewhere in between."
http://www.nature.com/news/dna-mutation-clock-proves-tough-to-set-1.170…
Well, I guess they need wide latitude with so many different cartoons to caption.
"Engineers are taught how to make stuff that actually works. And then we get hired to make stuff that actually works. So we have little time for that exercise in pure speculation that you all pass off as “science”."
Of course, why don't scientists realize that they are wasting their time on "speculation" when they could be making things with Legos.
If the fact that science (and statistics, and mathematics) involves a great deal of speculation, you have no right to expect your comments to be taken seriously when you dismiss scientific explanations for observed facts.
"You don’t even have to click your heels together."
So your imaginary god didn't have to click his heels when he said his magic words?
So Phil if I give your designer one cell to start, will you agree that everything else is a result of descent with modification? That is all you are asking for with your limits. I still think abiogenesis is not a problem, but it is not important for biodiversity. I more than willing to let your creationism slide if you accept that.
How exactly could you tell the difference between an intelligently designed gene and one that wasn't? What extra something is found in a intelligently designed gene or genome? How could a designer make a gene better than a mutational trial and error? It will still be nucleotides either way. We know Dembski's design filter couldn't distinguish between an arse and a hole in the ground and that Behe's irreducible complexity was laughed off the witness stand at Dover. So what do you have as an alternative?
So Gordon, you now admit that you don't understand science? I know that most scientists never reflect on what they do or why they do it. They don't know the history of anything. That's fine, it is not required under most circumstances. You can be perfectly good engineer or biologist or whatever - just don't try to tell others you know something that you obviously don't. We all have limits to our knowledge - we just need to be self-aware enough to know what those limits are. It is called meta-cognition.
"Not to mention that the curriculum is so full of math and science courses"
engineering programs aren't really full of math and science: they reach the "plug and chug" level of math majors and minors take mid-term, and don't go past. Lots of mastery of algorithms, no work on generalization and theory. Even so, I wouldn't bet gordon actually understood any of the ideas, even that that level.
Of course it is all "plug and chug" type stuff (boring as hell), but it is much more than most people take in college. I am sure Gordon was good at memorizing equations without knowing any underlying theory. I see so many students who think science is a matter of regurgitating facts as if everything is already known - it gets you through high school and maybe some intro college courses. I have found biology graduate students who couldn't do a Punnett square or interpret a graph - if they don't learn to learn on their own they don't last long. I have even seen professors who never learned anything new after their undergraduate courses - unable to incorporate new ideas without an authority to tell them what to think.
One does have to admire the scattergun approach of Phil - shooting out paper after paper - none of which he has actually read for understanding because he hasn't the context to integrate the information - always hoping beyond hope that this one will be the magic bullet that slays evolution. The recycling of the old ones like "accidents can generate novelty" is a more than a bit tedious.
Well yes, there is that, yes,
It is amazing. As I said somewhere else, it is essentially identical to the tactic the rabid anti-vaccination people here in West Michigan (and elsewhere, I assume) do.
I do have to say the vaccination stuff is the most common anti-science stuff we run into in our stat courses, because those folks have to "demonstrate" the statistics are wrong. I don't remember encountering a group where each person says so much of modern science is wrong, the way gordon, phil, and sn do. Scary really.
And yet claiming both that they are not anti-science and understand how science works perfectly because they once took a science course.
Michael and Dean,
How hard is it for you guys to distinguish between settled science and wishful thinking?
To make things work, you have to use a wide array of scientifically established principles. I.e. you use precisely those things that have been tested and repeated, and have produced the same results every time. That is the benefit of Science. It gives us certainty that we can base our own designs on.
And yes, settled Science is pretty hum-drum stuff. Pretty boring to have to pull into the gas station every few days and fill up your car with that same old tired, predictable liquid that makes it run.
Now, those chemists working in laboratories using their imagination to come up with a replacement for gasoline are engaged in real Science. But if you left your car in the garage waiting for them to provide that better alternative, you would not have driven anywhere for the past 100 years. Fuel technology has remained essentially unchanged since the invention of the automobile.
Meanwhile, Engineers have designed thousands of different models of automobiles, and changed many, many aspects of them. But so far as the internal combustion engine goes, we have stuck with ones that run on gasoline because no one has demonstrated a superior fuel to replace it.
So it is the hum-drum Engineers who have revolutionized transportation in the past 100 years, while the Chemists in charge of fuel research have improved our lives very little. Not to put down the importance of their research, but you obviously need assistance in recognizing which side your bread is buttered on.
While I had the mind capable of pursuing a degree in theoretical mathematics, I chose not to. Completing my school's 5 terms of Calculus and one term of Differential Equations was more than enough math for me. And once I had used that to pass the advanced Electrical Engineering courses, I have never used it since. Math at this level simply has no application in everyday life.
I went into computers, and so never had to worry about where the 5 and 12 volts DC was coming from. Instead, I had to learn how to think in both Binary and Hexadecimal number bases so that I could program computers. There is nothing amazing about this. It is all rather hum-drum indeed. It just seems amazing to those who don't understand it, which is the overwhelming majority of the population.
Unlike you, I had completed four different, working designs involving computers by the time I graduated from college. Two of them were creative and involved my imagination, but no speculation. I determined what I wanted to build, and I built it. And the other two of them were put to practical use, one in the manufacturing plant of a major corporation.
None of this is possible to achieve by speculation. Even the two that were imaginative relied entirely upon established rules. I dreamed them up, and then built them simply to prove to myself that it could be done. I didn't care that no one else would ever use them.
I did care about the grade I received for one of them. I don't know if you guys are old enough to appreciate just how amazing it actually was to hear The Great Gate at Kiev being played poly-phonically out of computer chips in a day when PCs only went "Beep". My professor gave me an "A" right there on the spot. He could have cared less about the schematic diagram or the coding that was necessary to achieve it.
Engineers achieve this sort of stuff by spending zero time on wishful thinking. We love the hum-drum explanations that actually give us predictable results. That is the very DEFINITION of the scientific method. Testable, repeatable, hum-drum. We love Science.
So while we are vaguely aware of people working away in the background looking for better explanations for stuff, we stick with the hum-drum answers that already work. And since we are designers ourselves, we intuitively recognize the work of other designers. And we respect it. We don't place some over-rated value on wild speculation that has yet to lead to a useful conclusion, and then turn around and dismiss the designs all around us that make our life what it is.
I have had people level your ridiculous assertion that I reject Science, and follow it up by saying that I should not use computers, since they are the product of Science. These idiots are completely unaware that I understand ALL that is necessary to make a computer work, whereas they haven't got the first clue! The truth is in fact the exact opposite to their blind assertion.
Dean, I don't doubt that you understand math at a theoretical level that goes beyond anything I have ever learned or will learn. But I would also bet that your bread and butter is teaching Calculus and other such hum-drum courses that never change. Remove those and you would not have a job. If you did not enjoy the certainty that this provides to you, then you would have quit your job long ago.
Michael, you are correct that I did not have to take Biology in college. There was this committee of clowns who came up with a test called the "Advanced Placement" test, and I took that test. Then there was this second committee of clowns at my college who decided that my score on the AP test was high enough for them to conclude that I had been sufficiently brainwashed in High School. So they gave me college level credit in that subject without my having to take the course! Pathetic, I know. Education in this country really is going to the dogs.
People who master standardized testing can get away with just about anything. Operating systems practically write themselves. Computer automation drops out of the sky. Heck, this stuff is so easy for them, they start believing that God did it all.
Interesting article review - using science to eat hypotheses - imagine that.
http://www.nature.com/news/complex-societies-evolved-without-belief-in-…