So, during the past few days I was on a short vacation with my daughter to Yellowstone national park (if you haven't been there, GO RIGHT NOW!). At one point, while driving from geyser country to our lodge, I made the comment that we had been driving about 100 miles that day. To which Caley immediately answered: "How do you know that?"
YES! My daughter is getting the idea that whenever someone pronounces a truth, big or small, the best question you can ask is "how do you know?," or, in scientific terms, "what's the evidence?"
A few hours later I got my chance to use her same tactic on her. At dinner, she asked me to imitate some Marx Brothers routines (don't ask!), and one of her favorites is the scene from A Night at the Opera in which Groucho and Chico are arguing over the details of a contract. At one point, Groucho lists a standard clause, to which he refers to as the "sanity clause." Of course, Chico answers (approximately), "Oh no, you no fool me, there ain't no Sanity Clause."
Good, so that let me to ask Caley (who is 8) whether she still believes in Santa Claus, which she does. I then asked her the magical question: "well, how do you know he exists?" That led to a fascinating round of claim and counter-claim on the possible pertinent evidence ("he ate my cookies and milk"; "how do you know it was him who ate your cookies and milk?", etc.). At last, she ran out of reasonable "evidence" to butress her case (all of this, mind you, while laughing and joking -- she wasn't traumatized by the experience of having dinner with a skeptical daddy!). So, I repeated my initial question, "why, then, do you believe in Santa?" "Because I want to" was the frank answer, delivered with the most disarming smile. If only most adults were that clear on which of their beliefs are rational and which are just wishful thinking!
Rationally Speaking: an archived blog about science & philosophy, by Massimo Pigliucci
WHERE DO CONVICTIONS COME FROM?
ReplyDeleteThere too, skeptics are in essence no different than the rest of humanity. Actually, a skeptic could also unintentionally crush the hope of finding the facts on a given issue by ruling out elements of discourse that are part of something he himself would rather not entertain.
Convictions, secular or otherwise, inevitably come from somewhere. And if we are really honest about what it is “we want” we will know precisely where a particular set of convictions comes from. In the case of secularism, (skepticism) the “convictions” evolve out of self-interest. And it is clear to most thinking people that self-interest cannot be the optimal truth facilitator or method of ruling out myths or lies, for in this regard, the only rational basis for truth or ethics is what ‘self’ says about either truth or ethics.
-c
Great story, Massimo. I'm the father of two young girls and my wife and I try hard to instill critical thinking skills into our girls.
ReplyDeleteRecently, my wife showed my five-year-old a magic trick. It was a very simple trick where you take a dollar bill and fold it up and then when you unfold it it’s upside down. My daughter was stunned and asked how she did it. So my wife explained how she did it and showed her the secret of the trick. My daughter understood the trick and got this quizzical look on her face and asked, “Then why do you call it a magic trick?”. What an great question.
If only most adults were that clear on which of their beliefs are rational and which are just wishful thinking!
ReplyDeleteThat's kind of difficult since most adults typically make their most rational intepretations of evidence via the necessarily distorted bias of their ideological belief-system.
Anonymous, I think you make too broad a generalization. Yes, beliefs do come from somewhere, even skeptical beliefs. But: a) it is simply not true that all beliefs are created equal (their strength should depend on evidence or reason); and b) I take strong exception to the claim that secular people (which, btw, isn't the same as skeptics) are necessarily self-interested. Self-interest, as far as I can see, is a character trait almost uncorrelated with philosophical beliefs (I know very selfless libertarians and incredibly selfish Christians).
ReplyDeleteMassimo said:
ReplyDeletea) it is simply not true that all beliefs are created equal (their strength should depend on evidence or reason)
So what evidence and reason would you give to convince neo-darwinists that there acutally is purposeful design in nature?
The teeth of a tiger are clearly designed to efficiently cut into the flesh of its prey and therefore to promote survival and reproduction of tigers bearing such teeth.
Island, there ain't no evidence pointing to intelligent design in nature. The neo-Darwinists are right.
ReplyDeleteMassimo, I did not say anything about *intelligent* design. I am with you on this, and you should have picked up on that, rather that to leap to your erroneous assumption.
ReplyDeleteNormally, I would require someone to acknowledge what they had done after making pre-prejudice leap like that, but I think that you will believe me when I tell you that I agree with you. My only point is that evolution is guided toward efficiency.
That's just physics.
Sorry Island, I really misunderstood your comment (but re-reading it, surely you can see why!). At any rate, I don't see much evidence for efficiency in evolution, but rather for sufficiency: whatever works well enough (or better than whatever else is around) survives and reproduces. Also, even if natural selection were an efficient (as opposed to a sufficient) process, it surely wouldn't imply anything about "purpose." Again, sorry for the misunderstanding.
ReplyDeleteMassimo wrote somewhere that:
ReplyDeleteThe teeth of a tiger are clearly designed to efficiently cut...
... but guided toward sufficiency works well enough for me too, although, if evolution is guided toward survival, then that defines a purposeful goal of evolution.
The is evidence that human evolution has enabled us to become more entropically efficient, which supports that the second law of thermodynamics drives evolution to higher order for the higher level "goal" of enhancing the entropy of the universe.
So I'm back to how to use that logic and evidence to convince neo-darwinists that there acutally is purposeful design in nature...
ReplyDelete... becuase they immediately and automatically see god behind anything that isn't ultimately guided by insanity, so go into "auto-response" mode and can manage to find insanity in all that logic anyway, while denying that the evidence can even be construed in the manner that I have most certainly done within the framework of what science would "NORMALLY" recognize as a quite valid and logical natural design hypothesis, that's supported by given evidence.
So how do you get past the knee-jerk reactionism that's inherent to the politics of this issue?
"Self-interest, as far as I can see, is a character trait almost uncorrelated with philosophical beliefs (I know very selfless libertarians and incredibly selfish Christians)." - MP
ReplyDeleteOn the latter count, this is precisely true. But it has absolutely everything to do with personal philosophy. I'm wondering how one could actually ever separate the two from each other. ???
Interesting link here on the uselessness of ‘cultural Christianity, which I think you are referring to.
http://www.crossroad.to/charts/cultural-Christianity.html
Biblical versus Cultural Christianity
Not sure how to create a link on your site – sorry for the inconvenience.
-c
anonymous,
ReplyDeleteI still don't get your line of reasoning, are you implying that someone serching for truth though science has as much reason to believe as someone seeking god? Or that non-religious people cannot be moral outside "Enlightened self-interest"?
Neither proposition appears to hold much weight when examined critically. You seem to be searching for something to hold up YOUR convictions, but I can't quite tell what.
As for neo-darwinism...
The two main thrusts are that if there was intellegence why are there so many design flaws in us and other living things? Secondly you can have order and "beauty" without intellegence. Look at fractals, created and bounded they show us infinite patterns that are both beautiful and chaotic in the same areas ( you just have to look ). Nature is the same way, bounded by some simple rules, it has grown to extract every last excess that this world provides. Look at crystals, inorganic structures can be just as interesting as those created by human hand, but you would not say that there was intelligence.
Language is a dangerous weapon... Carefull ye lads!
ReplyDelete(specially me, who am not a native speaker of this thing...)
See, scientists use a lot of figures of speech, metafors and such monsters, when explaining concepts, specially for a lay audience. But we incur in such vices even when speaking among fellow scientists. So, speaking about teeth that are tailored to cut meat well is a bog pit that drags you and, all of a sudden, you can't see the causes for the effects and vice versa.
Sure the teeth seem tailored to do that, at least to us, who insist on analogies without end - if human-made devices show purpose for a function, whatever has a function must also have purpose... Now, people might be using "purpose" as a metafor, but be careful not to start believing it yourself if that's the case. If that's not the case (you really think there is purpose), then you must either study a little harder or redefine purpose.
Now, Island, I'm sorry but you seem to have committed some inacuracies there regarding your thermodynamics and all that. Or I didn't understand you. First, "entropically efficient" sounds a bit vague, if not downright nonsense. And by the way, could you point to the publication(s) where that evidence is, so I can try understanding what you're talking about?
And the second law of thermodynamics does not drive evolution to do anything, it just states that entropy IN A CLOSED SYSTEM (which biological entities are most definitely not, not even the whole Earth is) always increases.
Or, as Ilya Prigogine put it while preparing the terrain for his ideas in The end of certainty:
"This law is based on inequality: The entropy, S, of an isolated system increases monotonically until it reaches its maximum value at thermodynamic equilibrium.
And, for a living being, thermodynamic equilibrium (complete homogeneity) is just what it tries to avoid: it starts with death and from there it's all downhill. So if you are "entropically efficient" in the sense that you maximize entropy, you'll be in trouble soon.
Interestingly enough, entropy comes from the Greek word meaning evolution, but not the biological one...
J
Cal wrote:
ReplyDelete"Interesting link here on the uselessness of ‘cultural Christianity, which I think you are referring to.
http://www.crossroad.to/charts/
cultural-Christianity.html
Biblical versus Cultural Christianity"
The woman who runs that crossroad.to site, Berit Kjos, has one of the worst cases of black-helicopter conspiracy syndrome I've ever come across. She thinks that just about everything -- public education, the media, Wicca to name a few -- is part of some UN plot to take over the United States and ultimately the world. This to establish the much-feared one world government, which will be ruled by the Antichrist, of course. Of course!
Some of the articles on her site are worth reading just for their pure entertainment value. My favorite one explains how Harry Potter trains children to be good drones of the UN and the coming one world gov't.
"The woman who runs that crossroad.to site, Berit Kjos, has one of the worst cases of black-helicopter conspiracy syndrome I've ever come across."
ReplyDeleteI didn't see this comment of yours till recently.
Persons who have been close to human rights abuses, (Berit's father was part of the Norwegian Nazi resistance ) can tend to think that way.
I take it that some of her writing is definitely a matter of hypothesis and conjecture. And in a free society, that should be allowed. But I don't entirely dismiss all of her comments about gov. as not being true, either. She's an intelligent woman, far as I can tell.
cal
That's a great story, I really laughed out loud. It's good to see your doughter and you already getting into debates over the existance of Santa
ReplyDelete"She's an intelligent woman, far as I can tell."
ReplyDeleteIntelligent? Perhaps, but definitely paranoid and nutty as a loon. Kinda like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
--A
Intelligent? Perhaps, but definitely paranoid and nutty as a loon. Kinda like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.<
ReplyDeleteAlrighty then. But probably 'not just like' Ted, the Unabomber, Kaczynski.
I read and appreciate a lot of people/writers that I agree with partially or not at all. Um, what was the name of the guy who runs this blog again?
well anyway...
Guess some people grow up with the philosophy in their home that one can learn and grow from interaction with a variety of different people.
cal
Cal wrote:
ReplyDelete"I read and appreciate a lot of people/writers that I agree with partially or not at all...
Guess some people grow up with the philosophy in their home that one can learn and grow from interaction with a variety of different people."
What you're not getting, cal, is that it's not about appreciating people who disagree with you. I certainly appreciate and even respect some pundits, writers,politicians, etc. whom I disagree with.
But neither should I "appreciate" or respect every single person I happen to disagree with. I mean, I disagree with Louis Farrakhan that Jews are "bagel-eating vermin". What good would it do me to "appreciate" him, when he's proven himself to be a highly racist crackpot time and again?
Bottom line: not every kook who happens to disagree with you deserves to be appreciated or listened to or respected. Not every kook who happens to *agree* with you does either.
Massimo, the host of this blog, wrote a terrific column on just this subject, actually. I'd highly recommend reading it.
--Adrienne
I'm willing to bet that zero of the detainees abused at Abu Ghraib are worried that the UN Death Squads are going to take over the world.
ReplyDelete(digging around for some reynolds wrap to send cal)
-mjrmjr