I don't really have time to post stuff today, but this post by Chad at Uncertain Principles is really good. It relates the failure to fully disprove Einstein's idea of Local Hidden Variables (read it and he will explain) to Richard Dawkins failure to fully address ontological arguments for the existence of God:
The point is, though, that those loopholes are still there. Any responsible treatment of the subject has to acknowledge them. And, more importantly, anyone who wants to design a new experiment to test Bell's theorem needs to account for those loopholes. Tightening the existing bounds is all very nice, and there are much more efficient ways to do the experiments these days than what Aspect did back in 1982, but those aren't breaking new ground. The loopholes that are left seem faintly ridiculous, which is why you don't find many people working at closing them, but they're there, and you need to deal with them.
And that's the analogy to Dawkins and the things Eagleton and Holt said about his book (I bet you were wondering whether I had forgotten about that...). The modern versions of the "ontological argument" for God may be awfully intricate, but they're not really any worse than the loopholes in experimental tests of Bell's theorem (in fact, divine intervention is probably about as credible an explanation of the results as some of the proposed loopholes). Ridiculous and complicated as they may seem, those are the arguments that need to be addressed, in the same way that a new Bell's theorem experiment would need to deal with the faintly absurd loopholes that remain in the existing experiments.
I don't personally find the various loopholes all that convincing-- when I lecture about them, I refer to the messages from detector to source as being carried by invisible quantum gremlins-- any more than I find the "ontological argument" credible. Intellectual honesty demands that those loopholes be addressed when discussing the results, though, and intellectual honesty demands that somebody writing a book that purports to dismantle the arguments for the existence of God deal with the strongest modern versions of the "ontological argument." If Dawkins does blow that off, as both Eagleton and Holt claim, then he's failed to meet his obligations as an author, and they're exactly right to call him on it in their reviews.
Read the whole thing.
Personally, I really agree. One of our jobs as scientists is to acknowledge when the burden of proof is on us to plug every loophole -- and to acknowledge when the loopholes go unplugged. I do not believe in God -- never have, probably never will. Further, of the many arguments I have heard, I find the ontological argument for the existence of God least convincing. However, I do not think that my beliefs are above substantiation and argument.
There is a common ground on which the religious and the areligious can meet, and it need not be a battleground where we merely shout the same old slogans at each other. It can be a genuine discussion of ideas, but for it to be we need to all be realistic and open about the limits of our arguments. Humility is a scientific virtue, and it is very much in order.
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Second the motion. Especially if one views science as an approach, a way of learning about reality, rather than any particular set of findings.
Ignoring the physics and going straight to the Dawkins analogy: I don't get it. Dawkins freely admits that he cannot disprove the existence of God. Therefore a possible loophole doesn't have any significance. Dawkins makes the point that there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of God. Burden of proof. Occam's razor. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And so on.
God, if he exists, is the smartest, most powerful, most abso-spectacu-lutely stupendous Being ever to exist. And we need to lower the hurdles for him? I don't get it.
Could you please do me a favor? I get the impression you haven't actually read Dawkins' book. Could you verify that for me? I think it's interesting that every ScienceBlogs post opposing Dawkins' book is by someone who has not read it.
Orzel at Uncertain Principles has not read the Dawkins book. He is basing his criticism on someone else's review of it. Orzel doesn't know ontological.
There are countless arguments claiming to prove the existance of God, and more are being concocted every day. All the ones I've seen are pathetically flimsy, however it would be absurd for me or anyone else to attempt to address them all or even to claim to have seen them all. Should you choose to point out the flaws in some of them, you are likely to be accused of singling out the weaker ones and ignoring the stronger ones, no matter which ones you choose.
mustafa, my review was mixed :-) but yes...i tend to agree that reading the book instead of people's characterizations would be best.
No, there really isn't. The only common ground (being carbon-based, being members of the same species, etc.) are irrelevant to the subject, and the two are incompatible on everything that IS relevant to the subject.
One method embraces what the other absolutely forbids. The standards for what counts as a valid argument differ. The standards for what counts as a valid position differ.
Two believers may have completely opposing religious doctrines, but they still have much more in common than either have with an areligionist on matters pertaining to religion.