Fri 21 Aug, 2009
Just published at BreakPoint: God and Science Do Mix, beginning,
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that is replete with unintended irony, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss says, “Science and God Don’t Mix.”
With all due respect for a man who has contributed significantly to what we know about the universe, on this point Krauss is wrong…
Sat 8 Nov, 2008
When Doug wrote this on the Discover Magazine blog, the magazine thought it was good enough to warrant printing it in their December issue:
“Because God said so” could be the answer for everything. While [sic] go to school anyway? Just teach our kids that phrase. No need to go to medical school, no need to study economics. Everything is because “God wants it that way,” so don’t bother thinking, questioning, challenging.
The problem with “because God said so” seems to be this: that if one can resort to it as an answer, then one no longer needs to think about interesting or difficult issues. One already has the answer. The better way instead is to continue thinking, questioning, challenging.
As one who believes in God as the ultimate explanation behind all other explanations, I find this ironic. Here’s why. First, it is highly, shall I say entirely, theoretical. It pays very little (shall I say none at all) attention to empirical reality. It’s the answer that “could be” the answer for everything. Is there any evidence that anybody in the history of the earth has actually taken it to be the answer for everything? Is there any evidence that this theory is borne out in reality; that people who believe God is the explanation behind all other explanations are any less curious about the way the physical world works?
The list of theists in science is enormously long. These are men and women who did not stop “thinking, questioning, challenging” on account of having “God said so” as part of their mental furniture. The list includes Bacon, Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Kelvin, van Leeuwenhoek, Faraday, Maxwell, Cuvier, Gregor Mendel, Gingerich, Collins, and many more.
On this, Doug (and by extension, the magazine that highlighted his comment) is long on theory and short on empirical evidence. It seems as if a theoretical pronouncement is enough to cut short any real investigation into the matter. Let’s phrase it this way. Is it wise or unwise for science to recognize even the possibility of a God? Doug would say no. Here’s why. It’s Because ‘”Because God said so’ could be the answer for everything.”
There are too many becauses there, though, so it’s a bit confusing. Let’s code it this way. We’ll replace
“‘Because God said so’ could be the answer for everything”
with simply
“B.”
Doug’s statement in this abbreviated form, not intending to change it at all, is
“B.” While go to school anyway? …
So the reason Doug would not want science to admit the possibility of a God in natural events is “Because ‘B.’”
Doug (and Discover) don’t know whether “B” is true in empirical fact; they seem to ignore the plain reality that it is in fact false. But on their view, it appears there’s no need to study this through available means like social research. There’s no need to explore whether God has any place in science; there’s no need to wonder whether God has any place in any individual scientist’s approach to reality. There’s a ready-made answer right at hand. There’s no need to bother thinking, challenging, questioning, because they can always just say “Because ‘B.’”
It’s a wimpy argument, self-referentially weak. Why?
Because (with respect to theism in science) “‘Because God said so’ could be the answer for everything” could be the answer for everything. Why go to school anyway? Just teach our kids that phrase. They’ll never have another reason to think about God, or about any evidence relative to God in nature, or about whether a scientist’s attitude toward God affects his or her professional work. Everything is because “‘Because God said so’ is the reason for everything,” so don’t bother thinking, questioning, challenging.
I know, the phrasing is a bit convoluted, but I hope you get the point. Doug has a nice catchphrase that he thinks shows the other side has an out from thinking things through; but his catchphrase seems itself to have been an out that kept him (and the magazine) from thinking his own theory through.
The final irony: there’s no evidence that “Because God said so” ever hindered anyone’s scientific curiosity. We do have evidence, though, that “Because ‘B’” actually causes people to believe they don’t need to think these things through. It’s right there in front of you.
P.S. Just for the sake of entertainment, please be sure to read the rest of Doug’s comment. I wonder how much thinking, questioning, or challenging he has subjected his own theories to. I wonder if he knows the hydraulic problems relating to the giraffe’s neck he has bypassed, for example; and how much he has questioned his own understanding of “creationism,” and how it relates to contemporary challenges to evolutionary theory.
Sat 2 Aug, 2008
Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at Warwick University, England, presents a provocative question in his article The Darwinian Delusion:
The next time you want to stop a conversation among the soi-disant enlightened, ask what has atheism ever done for science. It’s one thing to admit that religious dogmatism has periodically halted the march of scientific progress but quite another to argue that atheism has actually advanced science.
His own answer, in summary:
More generally, atheism has not figured as a force in the history of science not because it has been suppressed but because whenever it has been expressed, it has not encouraged the pursuit of science. The general metaphysical idea underlying Darwinism – that a morally indifferent nature selects from among a variety of organic possibilities – has many secular and religious precedents across the world. In each case, it has led to an ethic of equanimity and even resignation, certainly not a drive to remake the planet, if not the universe, to our own purposes. Yet, so far we have got pretty far on that drive. The longer we continue successfully, the stronger the evidence that at least human life cannot be fully explained in Darwinian terms.
Hat Tip: Post-Darwinist
Update 9/6/08: I have turned off threaded comments, as explained here. This will unfortunately jumble up the sequence of the comments on this post, for which I offer my apologies.
Thu 29 May, 2008
One of the podcasts I enjoy listening to is the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, a science-oriented, religiously skeptical discussion conducted out of the New England Skeptical Society. The shows run long, so I can’t listen to all of them, but I’ve heard a couple of them, featuring Michael Shermer and John Rennie. You can learn a lot of science and unlearn a lot of myth from these discussions.
When they wander onto religious territory, however, their skepticism tends to take a strange turn. I have noted in the past that Michael Shermer’s skepticism does not range as far as it ought. His magazine, The Skeptical Inquirer, approvingly cited a discredited article purporting to show that Christianity has negative social effects. He would have done well to treat that study with more caution.
In an article in current Touchstone magazine, titled ”The Skeptical Inquirer,” Edward Tingley takes this question of self-proclaimed skeptics’ skepticism to a far broader and deeper level. The article’s subtitle tells more than the title: it is, If Only Atheists Were the Skeptics They Think They Are. Tingley, a philosopher at Augustine College in Ottawa, launches a strong counter-assault on what he considers an erroneous conception: that today’s atheists and agnostics are the virtuous thinkers who never jump to conclusions ahead of the evidence.
He begins provocatively:
Unbelievers think that skepticism is their special virtue, the key virtue believers lack. Bolstered by bestselling authors, they see the skeptical and scientific mind as muscular thinking, which the believer has failed to develop. He could bulk up if he wished to, by thinking like a scientist, and wind up at the “agnosticism” of a Dawkins or the atheism of a Dennett—but that is just what he doesn’t want, so at every threat to his commitments he shuns science.
That story is almost exactly the opposite of the truth.
He continues in that tone for a few paragraphs, and then moves into providing real support for his claims. It’s drawn primarily from Blaise Pascal:
There are skeptical theists; Pascal was one….
“I have wished a hundred times over that, if there is a God supporting nature, [nature] should unequivocally proclaim him, and that, if the signs in nature are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether”—but nature prefers to tease, so she “presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt” (429). “We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty” (401). “We are . . . incapable of knowing . . . whether he is” (418). This is where the modern person usually starts in his assault on the question, Is God real or imaginary?
This is base camp, above the tree-line of convincing reasons and knock-down arguments, at the far edge of things we can kick and see, and it is all uphill from here. Thus, it is astounding how many Dawkinses and Dennetts, undecideds and skeptical nay-sayers—that sea of “progressive” folk who claim to “think critically” about religion and either “take theism on” or claim they are “still looking”—who have not reached the year 1660 in their thinking. They almost never pay attention to what the skeptic Pascal said about this enquiry.
Could it be that it is the atheists and agnostics who have rushed to judgment? Have they missed 350 years (or more) of good thinking on the question of God? In what ways was Pascal a model skeptic? He recognized–did not shrink back from–our inability to judge the existence of God by our senses. Translated: our inability to judge the existence of God through science. The modern atheist says, “well, then, there’s no scientific evidence for God; thus there’s no God.” Tingley suspects more than a little of a rush to judgment in there! For Pascal,
There is still the reasoning of the heart.
The scientist Pascal claims to know a route that will take us over the ice to convincing discovery. It is the refusal to test his thinking that betrays the faith of atheists and agnostics.
No no, they will say, point to something material on which to base belief and then I will look at it. “Give us solid evidence!” They insist that every belief about reality must be accepted on the basis of evidence (“experience or logic”). On what basis do they accept that? Evidence? But there is none.
There is no evidence, that is, for the idea that every belief must be accepted on the basis of “experience or logic.”
But atheists and agnostics pick. They commit in the absence of evidence.
I have quoted enough here. The argument is Tingley’s not mine, so I will borrow no more of it. Don’t evaluate it, please, on the basis of these short excerpts; I present them here merely to stimulate you to go to the source and read it for yourself. Then we can talk about it here.
Related: “Though It Is Not Impossible To See God…”
and Evidence of the Heart: The Sense of God
Thu 20 Mar, 2008
There have been a bewildering 170 comments so far in response to a post published here a week ago. The bewilderment, for me, has been that much of the discussion has been a debate on the Law of Noncontradiction. It’s hard for me to see how that could be controversial–or how controversy is even possible if the LNC is not an agreed principle–but it has been.
It started with the question whether there is such a thing as nonempirical knowledge. One commenter proposed this test:
“If you can’t check it (ie. test it), then even if it is true, you can never know that.”
This alone doesn’t assert that the test must be empirical (based on observation), but that’s the direction the discussion went. One example:
“I showed you a specific example of how logic is verified by observation. I’ll repeat: if the observations I laid out didn’t verify the logic, we wouldn’t believe in the logic, so the logic is directly dependent on those observations.”
All this time I’ve had a relevant resource in my list of waiting web pages–pages I saw when I did not have time study them, and bookmarked to return to later. A few weeks ago J.P. Moreland published a short article on Christianity and Non-Empirical Knowledge. Here’s a taste of it (he is using “see” as shorthand for “testing something with the five senses”):
First, truth (the relation of matching or correspondence between a thought/proposition and reality) is not something we can see, so if we are limited to our five senses, we can have no grasp of it. If I believe that a book I ordered is at the bookstore, and then go to the bookstore and see the book, I know that my belief about the book is true. I can see the book there, but I cannot see my belief that the book was there, nor can I see the correspondence relationship between the book’s being there and my belief that it was there.
(Emphasis added)
What does this have specifically to do with Christianity? I don’t know where Moreland is planning to go with it in his next article in this series. There is, though, a common belief that the only reliable form of knowledge is scientific knowledge, which is further believed to be all empirical. If this is true, then faith is excluded. Moreland shows that this is a false assumption.
Sat 15 Mar, 2008
I just came across this Modern Age article by Bryce Christensen: The cosmos as memento mori: the ultimate significance of modern science. He has a concern to express regarding science:
Prometheus, it would appear, has stumbled into a very dark and dreary place!
It’s not science’s successes that Christensen bemoans. He expresses a very deep appreciation for its
contact with “external permanency” [by which] science thus overthrows the fantasies of intellectuals who suppose that hermeneutic communities are entirely free to construct their own realities through imagination, interpretation, and dialogue.
He celebrates science’s objectivity, a challenge to “the solipsism and cultural relativism now widely prevalent in a truth-averse world.” You’ll find no complaint here in regard to technology, medicine, or deepening understanding of nature’s fundamentals. You will, however, find a condensed catalogue of ways in which science fails to fulfill anyone’s hope of it leading us to an empirical, objective, and complete encounter with every important truth:
The problem with taking science as a guide to hope, meaning, and morality is that the objective truths of modern science are utterly lacking in metaphysical content. Indeed, on its own terms, science cannot even give a satisfying account of human beings as seekers of truth.
That last sentence opens the first of several ways in which Christensen says science falls short on metaphysical issues, meanwhile showing that this really matters (as Deuce also said here this morning). Humans’ truth-seeking, morality, language, art, emotion, free will, meaning and purpose, consciousness: all of these “disappear in an exclusively scientific world view,” so that
A rigorous and probing investigation of science thus thoroughly dispels the optimism surrounding the scientific enterprise.
This article is not that “rigorous and probing investigation;” it is too brief for that purpose. Strong arguments in favor of these ideas can easily be found elsewhere (beginning in his footnotes), and Christensen does not attempt here to make those arguments. Rather, he is leading toward his central thesis:
One of the benefits of investigating science thoroughly and rigorously is thus the discovery of the profound human need for non-scientific truths.
This need is not just psychological or emotional; it is an ultimate kind of need, for if science cannot explain the human search for truth, or even language, then science cannot even explain itself. Yet as Christensen goes on to re-affirm the great value of science’s objectivity, he takes it in a direction many will not expect (emphasis added):
Nothing in all of religion–not the Enlightenment of Gautama Buddha, not the visions of Mohammed, not the hymns in the Hindu Samhitas, not the creation myths of Shinto–resonates with empirical expectations like the instruction the risen Jesus gives his perplexed disciples in order to verify the truth of his Resurrection: “Handle me and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39).
Judaism’s roots are in history, Christianity’s even more so, for God walked incarnate on real roads in a real place in real time. (I turn now from Christensen’s thoughts to share my own.) Jesus’ disciples, seeing Him resurrected from the dead, did not say, “This is great! But I still wonder if this is the one true religion.” No, they did the sensible thing and followed Him, their questions (and ours) having been answered.
We cannot relive that experience, for history has a stubborn way of happening just once. (“History repeats itself,” they say, but they’re talking about trends and principles, not events.) Thus there are frequent disputes over the Christianity’s historical truth. Compare our problem, though, with that of every other religion. Are there disputes over the historical truth of Hinduism? What could that possibly mean? Hinduism makes no historical claims to speak of. Buddhism? The claim is that Gautauma lived a holy life and left important teachings behind, but Buddhism is about its teachings, not its teacher, and as far as I know, nobody claims his life was proof of his teachings. They point to the teachings themselves. Islam centers about a person, but its revelation is not a revelation-within-history like Judaism’s or Christianity’s. There’s a world of difference between God revealing Himself in the flesh and God dictating revelation to a prophet, as the Qur’an is said to have been delivered. Is there any historical test that could prove or disprove Islam, even in principle?
Christianity, quite uniquely, lives both in heaven and on earth. Hinduism and Buddhism would prefer to have nothing to do with the earth; they are anxious to be rid of it. Islam’s “72 virgins” takes the earth too much into eternity–especially from the virgins’ perspective! The sexual inequality expressed there has its obvious reflection in Islamic cultures today. That other major world faith system, scientific naturalism, will have nothing to do with heaven, or indeed with transcendence of any kind.
Only the Jewish and Christian Scriptures–the Old Testament, as known by Christians–teach that God is good, and creation can be too. Only Christianity teaches that creation continues to be good (even if marred for a time by evil): Jesus Christ was resurrected in a body. The physical reality endures. Physical creativity is good and valuable. Science is transcended, yes, but never made irrelevant; and the earliest leaders of scientific Europe considered themselves to be studying God’s mind as they studied His work in creation.
Promethean optimism fails those who hope just in science. But that is not science failing: it is just what happens if we depend on that which is limited, to be the explanation for all.
Tue 26 Feb, 2008
A few days ago I confidently announced I was going to blog my way through J.P. Moreland’s Christianity and the Nature of Science: A Philosophical Investigation. What I failed to recognize was that the first chapter is considerably more “bloggable” than the rest. I’m scaling back my plans now.
Moreland’s book began with the difficulty of strictly defining what science is or is not. Within his set of reasons there was one easily extracted subset, from Judge Overton’s decision in a creation science trial. The conclusions Moreland drew were both significant and relatively uncontroversial, as witnessed by neo-Darwinist Michael Ruse’s general agreement. All this made it rather easy to blog.
I let myself think the rest of the book would be similarly easy to condense, but it isn’t. (I should have known better from the start.) Though it’s not my first time reading the book, it’s the first time I’ve done it with blogging in mind, and now I’ve recognized it won’t all summarize into this format.
There are some things I will come back to, like the misconceptions surrounding the “scientific method” we all learned in school: science doesn’t always use it, science doesn’t only use it (other disciplines employ many of the same methods). There’s some very fascinating stuff there to discuss.
But I’m backing off on my plans to cover it all. It won’t condense that way. That opens the door again, though, for me to make a strong recommendation: get yourself a copy and read it! Agree or disagree with what he has to say–either way, you’ll find a lot to learn in it.
