About Rationally Speaking


Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Massimo’s Picks

By Massimo Pigliucci

* Americans think that we are fighting a losing war in Afghanistan, but apparently that’s not really that important.
* PZ Myers continues his disagreement with Jerry Coyne, claiming that no scientific evidence for gods can ever be produced. Yup.
* Philosophy Talk on what it means to have a digital self. And check out this hilarious song about dating avatars...
* Scientific American publishes a negative review of Sam Harris’ new book.
* You thought existentialism was just abut Sartre and Nausea? Think again.
* For all the talk about The Social Network, Robert Wright claims that Mark Zuckerberg is a non-evil non-genius. Perhaps, but that wouldn’t have made for a good movie, no?
* The latest Rationally Speaking podcast features guest Brendan Nyhan talking about why false beliefs just refuse to die.
* Insightful piece by philosopher David Sosa on the concept of happiness. Find out why you may actually be wrong about whether you are happy or not.

45 comments:

  1. Horgan's argument is a pretty weak one. Unless Horgan is claiming that science has been in the business of establishing moral codes (when did this happen?), there is a hollow ring to his observation that atrocities have been committed by folks who happen to be scientists (but have really been getting their moral directives from elsewhere). Nazi doctors did what they did because they were Nazis, not because they were doctors. Horgan seems to be arguing, unwittingly, in favour of Harris' proposal. Perhaps scientists aught to take up moral judgement; look what happens when they don't.

    Horgan's argument is equivalent to saying that cooking is a morally questionable occupation because cannibal's cook their favourite delicacy.

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  2. Sosa's argument about happiness misinterprets the lesson of Nozick's experience-machine example. All the example illustrates is the now-commonplace that people's decisional utility and their experiential utility are not always the same things. It was a radical thought back in the 70s, when decisional rational choice was in its heyday and game theory was still new. Taking it to mean something about happiness' definition exactly misses the point. He doesn't provide a reason to think of happiness as always reflecting our decisional ordering - it's like he forgets the basic point is that we don't always want what will make us happy. There's no reason to redefine the term so it's always only just what we want.

    As for Sam Harris, he needs to take a logic class. The is-ought gap is simply a theorem of operator logics.

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  3. James,

    on the contrary, I think the argument is right on target. It is Harris who claims that science can provide answers to moral questions, so it is perfectly appropriate to bring up disastrous examples of unethical misuse of science, no?

    Timothy,

    you may be reading too much into the essay. The point is simply that sometimes we can be mistaken about things of which most people are certain, like what makes us happy. Aristotle proposed it, modern cognitive science confirms it.

    ianpollock,

    this is were I honestly do think you and others' arguments about the nature of science go bunk. Really? A shaman now is doing science? Seriously? NSF should consider funding research on demons as possible mechanisms for herbal medicine? (I know you didn't say the latter, but it seems to follow from your position.)

    Again I ask: why this urge to expand science to encompass all of rationality, and even quite a bit of irrationality? What drives scientism?

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  4. Massimo,

    Nope, it's not. Harris is trying to argue that scientific methodology can be used to determine the truth value of ethical claims. Whether or not scientists personally tend to behave ethically has nothing to do with the issue. If every physicist in the world beat his wife, that would not change the validity of their findings at all.

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  5. Ritchie,

    but the point is the eugenic scientists were absolutely convinced that it was their science that told them how to make humanity better. On what ground could science test the truth claim of ethics, since ethical judgments / values are not empirical facts?

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  6. Massimo,

    There are no grounds upon which science can test the truth claims of ethics. Harris is wrong about that. But the fact that some scientists have had false beliefs about what science told them about ethics doesn't help in arguing for this point. Scientists have also had false beliefs about what science told them about the nature of matter. That doesn't mean that science can't be used to determine the nature of matter, it just means that a process of refinement is necessary in approaching truth.

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  7. "... it is perfectly appropriate to bring up disastrous examples of unethical misuse of science, no?" - Massimo

    Only if the ethical justifications for those actions were arrived at through science. If a doctor, for example, justifies recommending that his patients who have HIV-AIDS not use condoms on the grounds that his Catholicism advices him to make that recommendation, we can hardly blame that decision on the science of medicine.

    Have scientists done all sorts of unethical things? Absolutely. Usually (perhaps always) because they were taking ethical instruction from elsewhere, or denied that there moral truths at all.

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  8. I mean, what Ritchie the Bear said.:P

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  9. James, Ritchie,

    good points, and we do agree on the more substantive claim that Harris is wrong on his basic argument. I think what the author of the essay was trying to articulate is that scientists have been arrogant in the past about knowing what's best for humanity, sometimes with spectacularly disastrous results. Which is an indirect argument that no single category of people (scientists, philosophers, or otherwise) should be in charge of telling the rest of us what our values ought to be.

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  10. Massimo,

    My problem with Horgan's approach is that it is philosophically lightweight, like many attempts to argue against Harris. Harris is wrong, but the incorrectness of his approach cannot be addressed without critical examinations of moral terminology and the concept of happiness. If people aren't going to bring these issues up when arguing against Harris, they're going to get nowhere, because if one blindly accepts Harris' ideas about moral terminology and the concept of happiness, he's right that science can, in theory, be used to assess ethical claims.

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  11. PZ's arguments are usually too bully and aggressive to my taste, but in this discussion he is right on the point.

    Even with today Hollywood technology presenting all this decorations on film should be a piece of cake. Non-magical restoring of limbs is probably not too far from us either.

    The only relatively coherent definition of god is "the first mover-sustainer". The only in my opinion valid, even not-comprehensive proof would be for god to stop moving-sustaining. Too bad nobody will be there to witness.

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  12. Sorry, I saw that you are moving the discussion here only after posting in the old thread. As for your reply to ianpollock:

    If we did not already have a huge pile of data that gives us an utterly negligible prior probability of finding demons and gods, then the NSF would do well to fund explorations into them. This is also the mistake that PZ Myers makes in the post you link to, or let us say, the problem why he and Coyne are talking past each other.

    PZ essentially says, because of what I know of the world now, it is more plausible to assume brain damage as the explanation instead of divine intervention. And I agree: god is a piece that simply does not fit into the puzzle that science has assembled so far. The puzzle representing our universe is not entirely finished, but the god piece is definitely all the wrong shape and colour, and we can already extrapolate that it must come from a different box.

    But Coyne answers, and I think that is what our discussion here is really about: it could have been different. When humanity started doing science, it could have found that the puzzle we are assembling needs that god piece to be finished. I also agree with him that it is unscientific (not to say irrational) to say that you cannot be convinced of something no matter what evidence is found for it, and I think you will agree.

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  13. Yes, what AlexSL said. The fact that appeal to the supernatural is a spectacularly lousy idea, is something we had to discover about the world. It was not knowable a priori. If natural disasters reliably only happened to murderers, we would have come to a much different understanding. (Not logically necessary that the conclusion be theism, but it certainly increases the odds).

    Research on demons does *not* follow from my position, because demons have a stupidly low prior. Once again, if every time somebody had an epileptic fit, a little guy with horns was seen to giggle hysterically and run away, the NSF absolutely should fund such research. :)

    It seems inescapable: it logically *could have been true* that gods ruled over the universe. Why are we atheists? Because we don't think this is true? Or because it's somehow a priori excluded?

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  14. "Timothy, you may be reading too much into the essay. The point is simply that sometimes we can be mistaken about things of which most people are certain, like what makes us happy. Aristotle proposed it, modern cognitive science confirms it." -Massimo

    I don't mean to belabor the point, but I feel Sosa uses the Nozick example to motivate his position that happiness is not experiential utility, but it misses the point of Nozick's hypo and ultimately just amounts to a semantic move, a redefinition. I think he wants to redefine the term because his alternative definition fits his Aristotelian position more smoothly, but since it's a linguistic move I think he should have had linguistic arguments.

    I agree he has a substantive position that people can be mistaken as you say, but his argument for that position is that people can be mistaken about what makes them happy, an argument that exploited his redefinition. I think he could have offered a cleaner, more direct argument that wouldn't have made unnecessary, unintuitive changes to the language (but then there would have been little left of the column, in my reading anyway).

    Also, in your comment you replied to me, you also appear to reply to ianpollock but I can't see his earlier comment? (Sorry if this is the wrong place to make such a note.) I'm just trying to follow the convo since I'm uncertain how I feel in the philosophical atheism vs. scientific atheism debates.

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  15. Timothy,

    well, you make good points, but I still don't think Sosa's argument was linguistic in nature, it was substantial. I guess I am sympathetic to his point of view myself, since I find virtue ethics appealing.

    As for my response to ianpollock, I have kind of lost track of what was being said in reply to what, sorry. But I'm about to post another reply to the latest round by Ian and Alex, so stay tuned...

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  16. Alex, Ian (part I),

    once again, thanks for the thoughtful responses, I appreciate the opportunity to sharpen my own thinking on this. So, about the latest round, beginning with Alex's comments:

    > We kill biological diversity off faster than we can even document it because what you call natural history is so unmodern and not sparkly enough, so it does not get sufficient funding. <

    This is actually ironic, since when I was a biologist I fought with NSF (and with my department) precisely to keep this kind of research funded. But I still think that it has value when embedded in a theory, in this case about extinction and biodiversity, so it's not a problem for my view of science.

    > hypothesis testing without all the other ingredients of my wider definition of science is of no use whatsoever, because even after eliminating a lot of wrong hypotheses you would still have a literally infinite number left that is experimentally indistinguishable <

    But this is a clear straw man, my friend. When did I ever say that science begins and ends with hypothesis testing? I simply claimed that theoretical structures and mechanisms are a fundamental part of science - like the engine in your car analogy - not that they *are* science.

    > without those non-empirically derived criteria like parsimony, predictive power, likelihood, etc., science would not even be able to decide between two entirely non-supernatural ideas such as two possible phylogenetic histories for the same group of organisms. <

    Indeed, but do I dare say "straw man" again? My point in that case was that science itself has to rely on non-empirically justifiable assumptions, and that some of those are better understood as philosophical in nature. It was, if I recall, in response to Julia's suggestion that "if ain't empirical it ain't meaningful" (I'm paraphrasing), which is part of what I see as her logical-positivist view of the world.

    > with those criteria seen as part of what science is, all that falls under your definition of supernatural is automatically out, because it is not part of the most parsimonious explanation, making a contentious sentence such as "religious faith is incompatible with science" trivially true. <

    Only if you think of the supernatural as a coherent / intelligible hypothesis / theory of the world, which makes no sense to me.

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  17. (part II)

    > If that shaman, who probably has drawn his gods-conclusion based on a very limited understanding of the world, considers his inference only a tentative explanation to be revised if additional evidence comes forth, and perhaps even makes additional tests himself, then yes, I am again at a loss to understand how that differs from science. <

    I honestly think that if you or Coyne were presented with the shaman example in a different context, say by a practitioner of alternative medicine railing against western science, you would be dismissing the example as completely unhelpful. Again, if you expand science that much, than I suppose almost everything human beings do become science (including plumbing, according to Coyne), which means that the term loses meaning.

    > If we did not already have a huge pile of data that gives us an utterly negligible prior probability of finding demons and gods, then the NSF would do well to fund explorations into them. <

    We have no such data because demons and gods are not theoretical entities of the kind that science considers, which is why NSF does very well to ignore them.

    > When humanity started doing science, it could have found that the puzzle we are assembling needs that god piece to be finished. <

    "God did it" is not an explanation, so it can't possibly help complete any puzzle. Julia's example of a hypothetical universe where the rules of D&D apply misses the point: that would be a perfectly regular universe where there would be laws (the rules) that could be discovered empirically. Why on earth would you call that magic?

    > I also agree with him that it is unscientific (not to say irrational) to say that you cannot be convinced of something no matter what evidence is found for it, and I think you will agree. <

    Ah, see, your parenthetical comment gets to the crux of the matter: yes, it would be irrational; no, it wouldn't be scientific. Coyne needs to quit equating the two: science is a sub-set of rational discourse, not its entirety.

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  18. (part III)

    > if every time somebody had an epileptic fit, a little guy with horns was seen to giggle hysterically and run away, the NSF absolutely should fund such research. <

    See my comment above. If "magic" believes according to laws, then of course one can do science of it. But why call it magic? I know you two think I'm making up the definition of science (but I noticed that Alex artfully avoided commenting on my Darwin quote above) and of supernatural. But if you ask most theologians and laypeople they will insist that the whole idea of the supernatural is that it can break laws of nature at will, for no particular reason, and using no intelligible mechanism - which puts it out of the reach of science.

    Let me be clear about the latter, however: this being out of the reach of science is not because the supernatural is "beyond" science, whatever that means. It's because it isn't even coherent enough to qualify as an object of scientific investigation. I'm paying no compliments to supernaturalism here.

    > Why are we atheists? Because we don't think this is true? Or because it's somehow a priori excluded? <

    Because *reason* (see my comment above about it being broader than science) tells us that it is silly to entertain the notion of supernaturalism.

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  19. ""God did it" is not an explanation, so it can't possibly help complete any puzzle. Julia's example of a hypothetical universe where the rules of D&D apply misses the point: that would be a perfectly regular universe where there would be laws (the rules) that could be discovered empirically. Why on earth would you call that magic?" -- Massimo

    Because the people who study it are called Magi?[semi-joking]

    Names stick due to historical accidents. Atoms are not atomic in the ancient Greek sense but we still call them atoms because the concept happened to resemble it at some point in the past.

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  20. "I'm paying no compliments to supernaturalism here."

    Oh, never fear, I'm not implying otherwise! The worst-case disagreement between us here is whether theism is
    (a) about as incoherent as a square circle, or
    (b) about as unlikely as a cup of tea spontaneously freezing.
    Needless to say, neither of these is much of a compliment. :)

    I get your point, believe me. I can switch back and forth between the "incoherent" and "unlikely" viewpoints, just like in that old "two faces & a vase" picture.

    I actually 100% agree with your argument when it comes to magic. It is true that magic is not a hypothesis, because any magic that, y'know, actually works, is not going to be considered real magic. So, nolle prosequi on the magic front.

    Gods and other supernatural critters are a little bit different though. To the extent that a theist is willing to make truth claims about their god that impinge on the physical world, evidence against a particular claim (say, oh I don't know, a worldwide flood) is evidence against that god.

    Yes, you and I both know that in practice the next step is often going to be some not-even-wrong modification of the idea, so as to avoid falsification. In that sense gods are compatible with any & all observations. But that is just a fault of human psychology, not of the original hypothesis. If Christianity says "flood," and there was no flood, that there is evidence against Christianity. That's humdrum, run-of-the-mill Bayesian reasoning.

    (And I think almost all historical Christians would have agreed; it's only modern theists who have desperately retreated to incoherence in their headlong rush to avoid falsification.)

    So if a theist goes straight to a god-concept divorced from empirical facts, then yes, let's talk about reason in general (starting with what the hell it means for an entity to be "inherently complicated").

    But if they make empirical truth claims, great! Then I can say: "Look, I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I actually privileged the hypothesis in even considering your claim. And it still doesn't look good."

    If we reject an empirical claim out of hand merely because it's religious... well, then the theists can (legitimately in my view) cry foul.

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  21. "Again I ask: why this urge to expand science to encompass all of rationality, and even quite a bit of irrationality? What drives scientism?"

    I think this is a facet of a deeper question: What drives all 100-percent mentalities? This is a phenomenon seen in a lot of things outside of scientism. What impulse compels a position that a given way of viewing the world must be all-encompassing and naively consistent, or else wrong? This is seen in not only scientism, but also a variety of other ideological positions, from modern conservatism in America, libertarianism, and fundamentalism of all strips, religious or otherwise. What causes an adherent to want to hyper-extend a position? What is it about the modern world that seems to favor such hyper-extension (as it does seem to be more predominant in the modern world, and it is a fact that fundamentalism is really a very young stance)?

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  22. ian,

    glad to see we actually agree on most issues (this is true for Alex too, as I remarked above).

    > Gods and other supernatural critters are a little bit different though. To the extent that a theist is willing to make truth claims about their god that impinge on the physical world, evidence against a particular claim (say, oh I don't know, a worldwide flood) is evidence against that god <

    I think this captures the heart of our disagreement. I do think we can reject their empirical claims (e.g., young earth creationism), and of course any reasonable person ought to at least pause about a god conception that leads one to make such bizarre statements about the world. But as I said in a previous post, it doesn't follow that the rejection of an empirical claim is evidence against that god because the god hypothesis is so vague and flexible that one is shooting at a cloud of gas.

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  23. Just very quickly, so perhaps not as well thought through as it should be, because I go on a field trip today:

    I agree completely with the supernatural as you define it being incoherent. My point there is simply that it is silly to say a scientist is arrogantly scientistic for disregarding incoherent claims as a scientist. Partly because, again, supernatural claims are not the only ones that are incoherent, and a science that does not automatically reject nonsense does not work as science.

    And just like I still fail to see any reason for giving the supernatural nonsense special science-defeating status here, so I still fail to see why you give a god / demon / magic claim inferior hypothesis character there, as long as it is a tentative claim to be reevaluated as soon as there is a better alternative, because no scientific claim is ever more than that, and because "objects attract each other, don't know why" is no more profound than "sacrificing blood and praying in Mayan to Tlaloc causes rainfall, don't know why".

    If it follows rules, it can be made a scientific rule (and then it is not supernatural anymore - we are agreed). If it does not follow any rules, it cannot be understood with any means whatsoever, be it science or not.

    Mel, I see no mean absolutism here. I consider science to be that part of rational inquiry that is tasked to examine empirical data, ALL empirical data - what phenomena and objects exist in the universe, and ALL of them. Everything that exists. That still leaves a lot of stuff to do for logic, math, philosophy, etc., namely those truths that are true no matter what the empirical nature of our specific universe.

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  24. Alex,

    While I do see some absolutism in your stance, I didn't have you in mind when I made that comment. Scientism in general strikes me as a part of a broader modern tendency to make things ideological and then push them not only as far as they can go, but ALL THE WAY, even to the point of the absurd. I was reacting to Massimo's question of the motivations of scientism. I think it is a good question, and I think it is part of a broader question - why push things to the extreme? And what has made this a major current in the modern world? I wasn't pointing my question at you.

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  25. Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay that is linked in Horgan's review is a much better critique of Harris' book. Harris is vulnerable to all arguments against Utilitarianism. However, Massimo, neither of them seems to be making your point about morality, which, if I'm not mistaken, is about the non-overlapping magisteria of "is" and "aught." But if you feel that way, why do you find it useful to do fMRIs of people contemplating "trolley problems"?

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  26. OneDay,

    Because I make a distinction between learning how we deploy moral judgment and what sort of moral judgment to deploy. It's interesting to discover which parts of the brain are involved in mathematical reasoning, but that doesn't mean you can arrive at a theorem by staring at an fMRI scan, right?

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  27. "" But as I said in a previous post, it doesn't follow that the rejection of an empirical claim is evidence against that god because the god hypothesis is so vague and flexible that one is shooting at a cloud of gas."" -- Massimo

    Yes but you're turning a descriptive statement into a normative one. If today's types of string theory are unfalsifiabile it doesn't mean all string theory all types of string theory are unfalsifiable forever.

    Equally, if the usual catholic conception of god is ambiguous is doesn't mean all past, present, future and fictional conceptions of god are ambiguous.

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  28. downquark,

    > If today's types of string theory are unfalsifiabile it doesn't mean all string theory all types of string theory are unfalsifiable forever. Equally, if the usual catholic conception of god is ambiguous is doesn't mean all past, present, future and fictional conceptions of god are ambiguous. <

    See, it's when I hear this type of example (or Alex's example about shamanism) that I begin to doubt that this is a serious discussion and/or that someone is trying to push an ideological point. Really? String theory and Catholic gods in the same league? (Or, equally, shamanism and medical research?)

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  29. What ideological point could I be pushing? I'm arguing for the agnostic position (i.e. they are too ill defined and plastic to say one way or the other).

    Why do you cry scientism just because some people disagree about whether science can be excluded from one subject? I'm very cautious of Sam Harris' moral landscape, I doubt whether a physical theory of everything is possible.

    Honestly, just because person A believe science can go an inch further than person B, it doesn't warrant "scientism".

    And can we drop the pretence of social and psychological detachment. As a philosopher of science you are at least as attached to the subject as a scientist (if not more so).

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  30. downquark,

    > What ideological point could I be pushing? I'm arguing for the agnostic position (i.e. they are too ill defined and plastic to say one way or the other). <

    Then we have no substantial disagreement.

    > just because person A believe science can go an inch further than person B, it doesn't warrant "scientism". <

    Of course not, but when a person wants to push the boundaries of science to take over other fields or areas of discourse (as, say, Coyne does) then the suspicion is warranted.

    > nd can we drop the pretence of social and psychological detachment. As a philosopher of science you are at least as attached to the subject as a scientist (if not more so). <

    I don't have any such pretense. I think total objectivity is a myth. However, that doesn't mean that detachment or emotional involvement don't come in a wide range of degrees.

    Besides, you may be forgetting that I am both a scientist and a philosopher, so it is harder to accuse me of having an anti-science or pro-philosophy agenda, I think.

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  31. ""Of course not, but when a person wants to push the boundaries of science to take over other fields or areas of discourse (as, say, Coyne does) then the suspicion is warranted."" -- Massimo

    Could you expand on this, I find it interesting why philosophers get so upset about this. Obviously science should try and explain as much as it "can", if it pushes into something it cannot explain it will fail, or at least get declared a pseudoscience (ala parapsychology, cold fusion etc).

    Financial limitations and irritated philosophers aside what is the downside?

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  32. downquark,

    > Could you expand on this, I find it interesting why philosophers get so upset about this. Obviously science should try and explain as much as it "can", if it pushes into something it cannot explain it will fail, or at least get declared a pseudoscience (ala parapsychology, cold fusion etc). Financial limitations and irritated philosophers aside what is the downside? <

    I have posted several times on this already, and expanded in a number of comments and counter-comments. The downside is a loss of credibility for science with the general public, not to mention creating permanent irritation by scholars in a number of other disciplines. We are not talking cold fusion or parapsychology (which are legitimate fields of scientific inquiry), we are talking gods, morality, art, etc.

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  33. See, it's when I hear this type of example (or Alex's example about shamanism) that I begin to doubt that this is a serious discussion and/or that someone is trying to push an ideological point. Really? String theory and Catholic gods in the same league? (Or, equally, shamanism and medical research?)

    Yeah, well, if anybody could ever actually tell me where the great difference is between mechanistic descriptions of reality involving prayer-healing or rain dances (if they would work, of course) and those involving other physical or chemical processes? Was an early chemist who theoretized atoms but had absolutely no inkling of quarks or quantum less a scientist because he could not answer where atoms come from or what they are made of, nor had any technology to find it out? And if he isn't, then why, please why, is somebody who could demonstrate faith healing or rain making to work not a scientist, just because more details about the divine force you can call for help are currently as much beyond their reach as quarks were beyond the reach of that chemist?

    In addition, you, and in particular PZ Myers, argue as if it was clear right from the beginning of proto-science that there would be no gods and demons. (In your case probably because you would consider a god that has to follow any rules at all not a god, no matter how stupendously powerful, I presume?) But when you put yourself into a position - thought experiment, bear with me here - of being plopped down into a completely alien, unknown universe, and you want to understand its empirical reality, could you really afford starting to do this not even under the assumption, but with the certainty that the universe is not created, and is absolutely guaranteed not to contain some higher powers beyond human ken, and that you do not have an immortal soul? How would you know that? When you start out, before you do science to it, you do not even know whether your universe follows the laws of thermodynamics!

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  34. "See, it's when I hear this type of example (or Alex's example about shamanism) that I begin to doubt that this is a serious discussion and/or that someone is trying to push an ideological point. Really? String theory and Catholic gods in the same league?"

    In principle, science (even if defined as *only* empirical) can deal with anything that has a causal interaction with the physical world - anything that has empirical consequences. SOME god-concepts do have well-defined empirical consequences. Excluding these (admittedly few) concepts a priori because they're in the wrong literary genre or the people who propose them wear funny hats is special pleading.

    However, since these proposals nearly always (1) privilege the hypothesis, (2) have grossly unfavourable priors, and (3) can produce little favourable evidence, we have plenty of grounds to never bother with them.

    But as a general rule, lady Science doesn't care if you're wearing a white coat or not.

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  35. Ian,

    I agree completely except with the "admittedly few". If one's god does not have any well-defined empirical consequences, then why bother worshiping it? The only people who promote a god concept without empirical consequences are a vanishingly tiny handful of "sophisticated" theologians.

    But I do not understand Massimo to reject the applicability of science based on no empirical consequences grounds. What he seems to mean is that a priest is allowed to say that his claims cannot be tested because god is capricious, while everybody else is not allowed to say that their Yetis, UFOs or water memories cannot be tested because they are capricious.

    I still have not been able to grasp how that is not special pleading too, but it is of a different kind than the one you see.

    Well, at least I hope that this my understanding is correct by now...

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  36. "If one's god does not have any well-defined empirical consequences, then why bother worshiping it? "

    Why not go and ask someone who holds such a theology? You have formed a hypothesis regarding them, so why not test it?

    "The only people who promote a god concept without empirical consequences are a vanishingly tiny handful of "sophisticated" theologians."

    And how do you know this? I attend a Unitarian church, and there are a good number of the congregates whose god concept might be described as such. From conversations with those who attend other UU churches as well as people who attend churches of liberal Christian denominations, such individuals seem to be widely distributed. So it would appear that you are incorrect in your assertion just by my experience. I am not making a statement about how widely distributed such individuals might be, you might note, as a broader conclusion beyond their existence is not warranted by the data at hand. Alex, you might try to be a little less ideological, and a little more scientific. It is clear that you really, really don't like religion of any sort, but that distaste should not justify sweeping generalizations that are unsupported by either your arguments or your data.

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  37. Mel,

    We do not have Unitarians in Germany, or at least not enough for me to ever meet one.
    If I ever encountered somebody in my daily life who believed in a lazy, hidden god without any use or effect whatsoever, I would ask them why they bother, but the only people I have ever heard of who actually (pretend to?) do that are the likes of Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton*. And I don't know them personally and so cannot ask them over a coffee break or a beer.

    My actual experience (my data) is that I met a lot of people who say that their god is so awesomely mystical that science no go there, and maybe you answer aha, okay then. And then you see them turn around and make all manner of empirical claims, all of them already rendered impossible or extremely unlikely by what we know about the world: we have a soul that survives death; praying influences things; morals come from god; god created the universe; god guided evolution, etc.

    And that is my beef with Massimo's claim that the god concept is too fuzzy. It isn't really, you simply should not take professional apologists by their well meaning but ultimately insincere words. Maybe our data should not be based on asking believers "do you think your god can be examined by science?" but on asking them "what do you believe god does?", because then you will get a much more candid answer.

    *) And even the latter apparently makes positive claims like god feeling love towards the universe when he thinks nobody is looking. If god is really so mysteriously inaccessible, how does he know? It is called wanting to have it both ways.

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  38. Alex,

    So you are admitting that you made a broad, sweeping generalization based on a small, biased sample. How is that scientific? I understand that you have a given experience with religious believers - everyone does. What I fail to understand is how you do not see that you are making unsupported and unjustified claims that are ultimately just as dogmatic as any hard core religious fundamentalist. You have a set understanding, and you seem to neither question nor examine it. Moreover, your pronouncements seem to carry a great deal of emotional load that would seem to indicate that your certainty regarding your position is supported by that emotional load - if this is correct, your position is not a reasoned one, but an emotionally-driven ideological one. That is not scientific. You need to calm down and take a reasoned look at your positions and rethink how and if you really know what you think you know about this entire issue. At least calm down enough to try to be a little more civil toward Massimo and more considerate toward his position (which, if you do a little research, is very much mainstream in both philosophy and science - which is very much not the case for your position, but then most don't seem to proceed from the ideological position that one of the core functions of science is to attack religion of all sorts). I am not meaning to be condescending at all, so please don't take this that way, but, really, calm down.

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  39. Sorry, I noticed neither incivility nor in-temperateness in my writing. Could you point out where I have been angry or insulting? Maybe I am in fact unaware of what I am writing, but please note that "disagreeing with the blog author" is, on its own, generally not considered offensive outside of fundamentalist or creationist blogs.

    I extrapolate from my sample of religious people, just like you apparently do. Do you, however, think that the further we go away from Europe and the US, the believers we will encounter will on average be closer to your model or to mine? Do you really think that even only a substantial minority of believers on this planet worships a god that is not expected to actually do anything? To paraphrase a commenter elsewhere: Would it not be fun if modern theologians explained their views of god to a gathering of Southern Baptists, rural Bavarian Catholics or Pakistani Sunni? He went on to advise them to keep the car running outside...

    the ideological position that one of the core functions of science is to attack religion of all sorts

    That must be a misunderstanding. I do not think that science intends to attack religion. It intends to find out empirical truths about the world. It just so happens that all religions (except one that is for all practical purposes indistinguishable from atheism plus community organizing) also make empirical truth claims about the world. And it turns out religious claims are nearly always false, and even if one of them should be true purely by accident, it would still be unfounded as it was not arrived at through examination of evidence, but through dogma and blind faith. (Just like "unicorns exist, therefore the earth has one moon" has, by accident, a true conclusion, but it does not follow from the premise.)

    As for me being in the minority position: apart from that being neither here nor there (bandwagon fallacy), my difference from the majority position seems to be simply what we call science. Many people, for example, would not call history a science, although it deals with empirical data. I would, precisely because of that.

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  40. Alex,

    For one example, you regularly accuse Massimo of special pleading in his position, which is a loaded term, the use of which would generally be considered uncivil. You are free to look over your posts to see for yourself other examples. It is fine to disagree, but you seem to tend toward letting your emotions get the better of you, and the result is language that at least appears uncivil. Remember, to carry out reasoned discourse, it is important that you try to wring inflammatory language from your arguments, lest you retard the possibility for coming to a reasoned understanding. And, more to the point, it is fine to disagree with Massimo. I don't agree with him on everything, either. However, you seem to get hot and accusatory toward him, and that really bothers me given that there is no obligation on his part to have this sort of public outreach. I appreciate that he does this. That he does this does not obligate everyone to agree with him, but there does seem to be some implied need for a polite attitude toward him.

    I fully accept that you proceed based on your sample of religious individuals you have met. However, you did not have any caveat to the generalization I called you on. You are aware that there is a religious position that holds that there are conceptions of god that are in no way empirically verifiable, but you have never met persons with whom you have discoursed who hold that position. It is illegitimate to jump from that sample to the conclusion that no such persons exist. It is shoddy reasoning, and even shoddier hypothesis testing. This goes also for your assertions that a deistic conception of god is useless and stupid and so on. This seems to imply that you hold that a god concept must fulfill a particular function, or else be useless, but that cannot be the case, or there would be no deists. This implies that your hypothesis regarding god concepts is incorrect. When faced with the reality, however, that your hypothesis is incorrect, you did not modify your hypothesis, but instead insisted that reality was incorrect. That is a dogmatic attitude, and not a reasoned, scientific one.
    (And no, I am not trying to argue in favor of any religious position, but I am trying to get you to realize that, for whatever reason, you are using really shoddy reasoning, and holding your pronouncements against religion to a lower standard than I would hope you do scientific findings or ideas. You really hurt your position when you do that)

    I apologize if I was a bit obtuse about your position being out of step. Your position on science is out of the mainstream. It is on an extreme end. That is simply a fact. If that is reasonably arrived at, fine, but you seem to have done little research into understanding the mainstream view. I don't understand that. When I have had time when I have found myself holding a view contrary to the mainstream view in science or philosophy (more the former than the latter, given that I am a biologist), I have done a good bit of study to figure out what the mainstream view is, if my understanding of it is correct, or where I might have been incorrect in formulating my view. You seem unwilling to do this. Instead, your pattern has been to make your argument, and then remake it, and remake it, and remake it, and remake it, without ever really trying to figure out the arguments against it. I apologize if I have you incorrect on this, but that is my impression from your writings here.

    And no, most people would not call the vast majority of history science. Again, you are in a very minority position on that. Can you understand why?

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  41. Alex,

    One other thing - even had I not had personal experience that exposed me to deists, I would have done some work to verify that they don't exist before making the categorical statement that they don't. I have never met a Jain, and yet I am pretty well sure from casual research that there are a couple million of them in the world. You have some interesting ideas, and I look forward to them when I come here, but I just wish you would stop being so sloppy.

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  42. Mel,

    We must be living in very different universes. In the one where I live, it is impossible to tell people that you disagree with them without telling them that you disagree with them, and why. And this necessarily includes pointing out that you consider one of their arguments special pleading, or whatever fallacy you consider they have made or whatever premises you consider faulty. That is a statement of opinion, and not an insult. If it were one, then reasoned discourse would be impossible, and you would just have insulted me (you haven't).

    I also have never claimed that there are absolutely no deists. I have claimed and continue to claim that they are a vanishingly small minority. If you want evidence for that you just have to open a newspaper, but part of the argument is indeed that none of the people I have ever met who made the claim that their god or spirituality is impervious to scientific examination ever failed to follow up with empirical claims that very clearly aren't. All were just deluding themselves about not being in contradiction to scientific evidence. Combine that with the, yes, fairly obvious pointlessness of worshiping a god that never does anything for you, does not care about being worshiped, and could, if the deists were to be honest to themselves, not even be characterized in any way whatsoever, and it seem rational to conclude that most likely the same goes for many other self-described deists. Once I meet a whole sect that actually follows through with believing in a truly deist god - i.e. answering every question about this deity or their actualy beliefs with "I cannot know, it is all a mystery" instead of "it has created the world" or "it does not want us to wear the colour blue" -, I will gladly revise my perception.

    As for the circumscription of science, I would not know whether my position is so fringe. Firstly, I am surrounded by colleagues all of whom operate happily under the (from your view) delusion that they are scientists while they are just doing biodiversity assessments or taxonomy. They are fine with being the tires instead of the engine of science, but I guess they would take the same dim view as I do of Massimo's claim that engine = car, and a tire is no part of it. Secondly, in Germany, the humanities are called Geisteswissenschaften (~mind sciences). Sociology is called Sozialwissenschaften (~social sciences), and a faculty of history would formally be called that of Geschichtswissenschaften (~historical sciences). The list goes on, but you get the point. Thirdly, when somebody says "science can examine the god question", and I repeat myself, what they actually mean is "the sum of rational discourse using any empirical evidence whatsoever can examine any god claim that is distinguishable from a non-existent god". Science is just shorthand for this rather tiresome phrase, and it is so for many people - many would even include engineering into science, which I consider rather too much, unless you are doing research into how to solve a specific engineering problem in general terms. You may be able to point towards a textbook here and there that uses a different definition, but I am fairly certain that I have actual numbers of actual people around us on my side as far as the everyday usage of that word goes.

    The same for supernatural, by the way. I dare you to ask believers in magic or exorcism, who very obviously believe in fairly strict rules guiding their practices, if they consider these phenomena to suddenly stop being supernatural just because they are not considered to be entirely capricious and non-understandable. This is just not how people use the word supernatural.

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  43. Alex, you really missed my point, didn't you? Now I understand how Massimo must feel. Read back over what I wrote. You are responding to things that were nowhere near my point.

    If you are now agreeing that deists exist, then good! You actually addressed one of my points! Congratulations!

    "yes, fairly obvious pointlessness of worshiping a god that never does anything for you, does not care about being worshiped..."

    And yet deists seem to get something out of it, indicating that your hypothesis regarding the utility of god concepts is incorrect. Why then persist in holding an incorrect view of the world? If you really don't understand what deists get out of their beliefs, ask them. Don't just hold them in contempt out of prejudice and ignorance, as you clearly do. You don't have to agree with someone to respectfully try to understand their position. This is true of people of differing religious positions than yours, as well those of different scientific positions, as well as those of different philosophical positions. It is not an admission of weakness to ask a question respectfully in order to understand another's position. As one of our Supreme Court justices has pointed out many times, disagreement should never be seen as precluding understanding; indeed, one can't disagree honestly without first understanding what you are disagreeing with.

    And if you think this exchange has been about deism, you have really missed the point.

    As to science, well, it sounds like you need to do some more study into the nature of science. And I really don't know any natural historians who would be insulted or even bothered by it being pointed out to them that natural history and science (sensu stricto) are different, though intimately related enterprises. Perhaps people are different in Germany.

    Well, this has been frustrating. A bit fun, but frustrating just the same.

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  44. Mel, I can give the same right back to you: if you believe that I only now agreed that deists exist, at all, on this planet, then you have clearly not understood my position, at all. Nor do I believe that many people hold god views that they do not get anything out of.

    Again with feeling: I think that most people who claim to believe in a (deist) god compatible with science do not actually do that. And I think that most people believing in what they call supernatural do not actually consider it capricious and non-understandable. They only claim to when somebody annoys them by asking for actual evidence; they want to have it both ways.

    You can consider that position insulting towards the people in question, fine, but it matches with my experience, it would elegantly explain why self-proclaimed deists do bother with worship, and it is not the slightest bit more insulting than when we are discussing the presumed motivations or internal ideological contradictions underlying communists, tea partiers, global warming denialists or libertarians.

    And sorry, I do not need to study the nature of science. For starters, I am a career scientist, who by the way sometimes wonders why there are no philosophers of carpentry to tell the carpenters how they are doing it all wrong.

    More importantly, I have read the arguments of both sides (and there are two, it is not me against the world) and remain, after careful attempts at understanding and long, long discussions, entirely unconvinced that the argument "science may not reject the supernatural if there is no evidence for it, because supernatural claims of capriciousness are special in comparison to cryptozoological or conspiracy theoretical claims of capriciousness" is anything more than special pleading. Not because I have not listened or tried to understand, but simply because to the best of my understanding there was never any argument or explanation hidden in those discussions, but just assertion, or redefinition of terms to be right by default.

    I am sorry to be so blunt, as I agree with Massimo on well over 95% of all that he posts, and I get a lot of intellectual stimulus out of this blog, but on this issue we simply disagree.

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  45. Alex,

    I'll take 95% agreement, thanks!

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