Okay, so in the AM I am off to drizzly Melbourne, my old home town, to address a conference on the implications of the project of naturalising religion, especially in terms of evolution, to an audience that may, or may not be religious. So if you never hear from me again, I was probably burned at the stake. By the atheists...
Anyway, I get to meet Lawrence Krauss. Yes, that Lawrence Krauss. He's going to be a keynote speaker, as I am (preen, preen). So assuming they make me actually work for my meal, no blogging for a few days. No doubt something great will pop up in the interbugs while I'm there.
In the meantime, go read what the unicycling giraffe has to say about the albino silverback, and He Who Must Not Be Named. It might not be quite what you think... there's frivolling involved.
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Oh well, as you're off...
Bethnall Green
Wetwork Squad 16, I have a cleanup job for you in Helsinki. Make it look like a messy hit, as a warning; the messier the better.
FTA: You can choose not to believe in God, but that too is a matter of conviction and not scientific inquiry. Sorry, but that's bull. I can't choose to believe 2 + 2 = 5 anymore than I can choose to believe in God. What we believe, we believe to be true. If a theist provides something that convinces me that God is true (whatever that means) then I would believe in that god because I've been convince of the truth of those beliefs.
I have no problem with Dawkins ignoring the niceties of philosophy and calling the theory that explains the fact of evolution a fact. It's the best explanation we have, and until debunked or altered can be said to fit the facts of evolution. And bugger all laymen actually understand what science is and thus think that anything that isn't called a fact is therefore wrong. When they enroll in a science class they can learn how the method works.
Just a guess, but did you mean to post that comment in this thread, Brian?
High Street Kensington
Yes John, I did. You posted a link to that blog, so I assumed you agreed with it.
Anyway, enjoy Melbourne. I probably won't be anywhere near you, unless you're out near Latrobe Bundoora or RMIT Bundoora, but I'll have a beer in your honour and ponder my growing, probably erroneous, belief that you disdain interlopers into your fields of expertise (philosophers into history and scientists into philosophy) with an impressive fervor. I'm neither a philosopher nor scientist so I probably just annoy the crap out of you. As I do most folks.
Tschuss!
Brian English: I can't choose to believe 2 + 2 = 5 anymore than I can choose to believe in God.
HG: That's precisely my point. But you missed it.
I read a couple of lines of your post, Henry, and was not very impressed. To take a simple example: For religious people, the existence of God is true, in an absolute sense, and thats that.
Look, Henry, this blatant relativism is rather common among undergraduate students in humanities, but I do wonder how Wilkins could have been impressed. The phrase true for x is completely meaningless: I know what true means, and I know, in most cases, what x stands for. The question is what on earth the prepositional inflection for means in this context. Does p is true for x mean anything but x believes that p? Its hardly a surprise that religious people believe in the existence of God. That doesnt make it true. Being true is a property a subset of our beliefs manage to realize, and nothing can be true merely in virtue of being believed that is exactly misunderstanding the term truth.
Indeed, the popularity of nonsensical phrases like true for me seems really to be based on a very misplaced form of tolerance. It is a cowardly way of trying to dissolve (rather than resolve) a disagreement, by if you are saying that p and I am saying that not p instead of admitting that at least one of us is mistaken, trying to say that we are both correct, despite the blatant contradiction that would seem to be. And the method is purely linguistic: reformulate you believe that p and I believe that not p into the more honorable-sounding p is true for you and not p is true for me, thereby trying to obscure away the uncomfortable asymmetry between us.
I do, however, wish to hear what impressed Wilkins here. The rambling about scientific method and scientific knowledge would hardly have passed an undergrad course in the philosophy of science, and I would think this was an area Wilkins was familiar with.
G.D., you seem a little hostile there; let's back this up and start by giving Henry the benefit of the doubt. What he says is "Religion does make claim on absolute truth." Not that religion is true, or true for so and so; rather, it makes claims about absolute truth. Science, on the other hand, "...is at every stage provisional. Its claims, even about what one might assume to be 'facts', are always provisional, in that they should always be falsifiable." So, when he later says "For religious people, the existence of God is true, in an absolute sense, and that's that. You can choose not to believe in God, but that too is a matter of conviction and not scientific inquiry." it seems that the meaning is, if I may paraphrase, that religious people believe without need of proof or chance of falsification that God truly exists. The claim isn't that truth is different for some than for others; the claim seems to be that science shouldn't be bothering itself one way or another with an unfalsifiable premise. After all, so long as God/Gods/the-absence-of-God(s) doesn't change the laws of nature at any point, the question of existence/nonexistence is a scientific non-entity.
In other words: the problem is not one of 'does God exist' or 'is God true for X,' but 'should claims of untestable absolutes be included in science?' to which the answer ought to be 'no.'
I'm not sure what the problem is here. When a religious person says that the existence of God is entirely real, that makes it true, as far as they are concerned. You can choose to buy into this, or not. But there's no way that this 'truth' can be tested. If I may say so, GD, you are seeking to apply the standards and norms of science to matters of faith, and as I have said, I don't think this can be done. It would be nice if you could make these comments on my blog post. The ol' silverback gets quiet enough on his own account without my assistance.
Sigh.... I am annoyed that such a close event with at least two stars I am aware of is happening down the road and it is too late for me to attend.
Cliff
Walthamstow
The problem is exactly: "When a religious person says that the existence of God is entirely real, that makes it true, as far as they are concerned".
NO IT DOES NOT! Under no circumstance does just saying so make anything true. "The existence of God is entirely real" is a claim which can be either true or false. I think it's false. Other people thinks it's true. But the fact that they THINK it's true doesn't MAKE it true. Rather, the actual states of affairs in the world determine whether it's true or not.
I might, as Austin pointed out, have been a little rash here, for to some extent I seem to agree with you - I was maybe a little too caught up on the misuse of the word "true". In general, those are big and difficult questions you are asking, questions which have probably been the bane of whole forests.
You claim that the existence of God is a completely untestable hypothese. I am not totally sure about that (I do suspect that no matter how vapid you make the notion of "God", it'll still be internally inconsistent), but bar that for the moment. There is another urgent question here, one which doesn't require a lot of technical issues - and this is really a question to Wilkins as well based on some of his latest posts:
If the existence of God is unfalsifiable, it means that you can have no epistemic justification, in principle, for believing that He exists (why? because an unfalsifiable hypothesis is consistent with absolutely everything and can hence not figure in any explanation of any phenomena (which presumably would involve an account of why p is the case rather than not p)). Now, isn't there something MORALLY reprehensible about believing something without justification? Beliefs, regardless of their epistemic standing, have a tendency to lead to action. Isn't there something fundamentally irresponsible about acting upon beliefs for which you have absolutely no justification?
Oh, and a further point about truth: "[Science] is at every stage provisional. Its claims, even about what one might assume to be 'facts', are always provisional, in that they should always be falsifiable."
I think this is true, but that the comparison to religion making claims to "absolute truth" involves an equivocation. Science makes claims that are supposed to be absolutely true, nothing less. The whole point about those claims being provisional is a point about how much we adhere to them - the claims are provisional in the sense that we are at every stage (if we are acting like scientists) prepared to give them up in the face of evidence to the contrary. But that is NOT a point about what kinds of truths they are, that they are somehow a more ephemeral kind of truth than the "solid", "eternal" religious ones" - it is merely a point about our attitude towards them. There aren't different "kinds" of truth-statuses. A claim is either true, or it is false (or maybe neither), and that's all the alternatives there are - there is no "slightly true" or "true in a different way". The point you are making really reduces to this: Scientific inquiry is undogmatic. Religion is dogmatic. It is a difference in attitude, not in "kinds of truth". And I do think, in general, that there is something wrong and generally unhealthy about being dogmatic (it won't be too hard to assemble evidence for that claim)
Did you see this opinion piece in our good old Melb paper today? It makes me laugh...
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/without-spin-doctors-society-would-be-…
GD, I see where you're coming from, and yes, it might have something to do with what is meant by truth, but I still think that you are missing the point, or I havene't explained myself clearly.
When a religious person believes in the reality of God, they really do believe in the existence of God, as much as you and I might believe in the existence of anything we might see and touch. That religious person would look at you and say that your disbelief in God was not a consequence of God's existence being false, but because you haven't tried hard enough, or made yourself sufficiently receptive to the aetheric vibrations, or whatever. Falsifiability doesn't come into it.
Now, I am beginning to generate a nice little discussion over at my place
http://network.nature.com/people/henrygee/blog/2008/09/18/a-bagatelle-o…
and you're welcome to come join in. Anytime. Don't be shy.
Morningon Crescent!
I know precisely what the problem is.
Sorry, my keyboard decided to take matters into its own hands, and I lost control (as well as Ctrl). Anyway, to continue what I had intended to write, these discussions would all be much pleasanter if SciBlogs would allow commenters to post pictures of furry animals. It's been extensively shown in nature that this resolves disputes to everyone's satisfaction.
B O'H wrote:
if SciBlogs would allow commenters to post pictures of furry animals.
That's no problem!
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), after Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), says that no one knows what any object is separate from experience; all that is given is perception and thought. Karl Popper (1902-1994) stated that knowledge expresses theories of reality not reality in itself. These statements do not mean that the real world separate from our perceptions is illusion. Indeed only fools or sophists would deny its existence, but what is the real world? What is the real you? What is the real anything analysed, dissected, named, viewed under an electron microscope, blasted with x rays or gamma rays, painted by Monet?
Dictionary definitions of knowledge tend to be circular. Poppers association of knowledge with expectation is a breakthrough in clarity. Even animals and plants carry what can be defined as unconscious expectations. Our very genes carry expectationsit is chauvinism to say that expectations can only be conscious when most mental functioning is not. How much concentration does one apply to directing ones legs when one goes for a stroll?
Despite perceptual barriers, humans do seek truth and routinely test assumptions and ideals against facts. Truth corresponds with facts, but the degree of certainty of facts varies (Karl Popper).
Poppers attitude to the demarcation of science from other intellectual endeavours is that scientific enquiry is not about discovering absolute truth but rather about asking things about the universe in such a way that any answer is capable of being modified (indeed capable of being falsified) if better evidence appears. Every answer is provisional. He asserts that all our knowledge is uncertain. Scientism which declares positive truths is not science..."scientifically proven" is a nonsense phrase.
The world is roughly spherical even though our many of our forefathers espoused that it was flat. Evolution of life is a similarly robust concept even if mechanisms and fine details have varying certainty. Some theories seem to be less wrong than others, i.e. have higher verisimilitude, within the context of their application. The demarcation of science and non-science hinges on phrasing a claim in such a way that it can be proven wrong not turned into an accretion of supporting premises that is unbreakable simply because it is amorphous. On this point I would add that it does not matter how the claim is reached e.g. inspiration might occur in a reverie, but rather how it is expressed when presented to an audience. Most creationist argument is accretional rather than being open to challenge.
However, in another form of narrow conceit, many so-called skeptics and other dogmatists overlook the corollary to the unknowable nature of reality namely that, precisely because we cannot prove otherwise, there is always room for the unexpected. Humans seek passion and energy rather than meaning for its own sake (Joseph Campbell 1904-1987) although one must add that the search for meaning is one activity that we engage in passionately. Perhaps objective meaning can never be demonstrated in the deterministic (causal) world i.e. it is not found in Schopenhauer's "World as Representation" but rather in the unexpected, the magical, the coincidental, the "World as Will", Carl Jung's (1875-1961) synchronicity, knowledge felt. It is a hopeless and fanatical cause to try to bend the universe of phenomena into intelligent design, or conversely to deny the possibility of meaningful coincidence. An unintended result of the proselyting of so-called atheists has been the revulsion of tender minded souls with relapse to even more irrational fundamentalism.
Certainty about the basis of reality has been articulated in religions in the form of gods who behave like men. Is it possible for Narcissus to escape his own image? It is ironic that in Philip Pullmans trilogy, His Dark Materials, the Ancient of Days evaporates when exposed to a slight breeze. Too much certainty is bred from protesting too loudly. The universe is mysterious, we do not need to invent pseudo-mystery unless we want to couple spiritual sentiment to political power as did St Paul and Mohammed, not to mention Lenin and Mao. However Carl Jung, followed by Joseph Campbell, sensed that religious metaphors are not to be mocked but rather discerned with an eye to their function rather than their literal message. Even the prevailing metaphors in cosmology will have their used-by date.
Any statement of belief is a hypothesis that should be capable of being altered or indeed discarded if better evidence is available. On this basis one might logically accept the possibility of miracles (for want of a better word) if not their probability. Conversely, conspiracy theories and cults breed on the politically charged notion of a hidden but knowable reality the elusive other, utopia, hidden truth.
Honesty and piety go hand in hand. It takes courage and faith to let go of cynicism as well as dogma and actively engage the imagination. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
Karl Popper distinguished between tacit knowledge and objective knowledge. We know there is a physical world (World 1), we know there is a mental world (tacit, World 2), and we know there is a world of codes and descriptions and formulae (World 3). Even when people die, worlds 1 and 3 still exist. The Glass Bead Game continues, apologies to Hermann Hesse (1877-1962