By Mathew Goldstein
In his New York Times opinion article, "Citing Chapter and Verse: Which Scripture Is the Right One?", Stanley Fish, professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, argues that all "original authorities" choices are equally parochial, equally tribal, equally partisan, equally ideological, and equally arbitrary. Stanley Fish has his own beliefs, and he views himself as one of many other equally parochial, tribal, partisan, ideological advocates. What is important, in his view, is that while we hold and advocate for our beliefs, we simultaneously recognize that all competing beliefs have equally valid foundations. He criticizes modern atheists for placing "the tenets of materialist scientific inquiry" above other equally valid authorities, such as "revelation and conversion".
He points out that any defense of empiricism is circular because "the reasons undergirding that belief [in empiricism] are not independent of it." Such circularity is necessarily true of any possible method of belief justification (what Stanley Fish calls "original authorities") that is uniquely correct and successful. If there is only one method that reliably works then the only way to justify that method is to utilize that method to justify itself. But that doesn't mean all methods of justifying belief are equally valid. There is a way to compare the methods to each other. Consider the hypothetical: What would happen if we did not rely on this method?
Let's start with abandoning the methods of religious revelation and conversion, because those were the only two other methods Stanley Fish mentioned, and rely on empiricism (what Stanley Fish refers to as "education" or "materialist scientific inquiry"). What would happen? Well, generally speaking, people who convert from one religion to another other religion, or to or from no religion, and people who cite one religion based revelation as against another revelation, or no revelation, do equally well, more or less. So, for the sake of argument, lets just say that without relying on revelation and conversion people can, and do, proceed with living their lives as modern atheists (or, if you prefer, as "scientists") without major negative or positive impact.
Now let's try abandoning empiricism. Without empiricism we ignore our senses of smell, touch, hearing, and sight. We can stay perfectly still and within about one week we starve to death for lack of water sitting or lying in our urine and feces. Or maybe we move around, cut ourselves, break our bones smashing ourselves into things, burn ourselves, bleed to death, get run over by a car, walk over a cliff. The details don't matter, there are lots of possibilities, most of them leading to death within a few days.
Of course, outcomes are evidence, and we learn of these outcomes through the "original authority" that Stanley Fish refers to as "education", not from "revelation and conversion". So pointing to outcomes is an empirical way of defending empiricism. Stanley Fish thinks that makes the justification for empiricism circular, and he is right. But he is foolish, not just wrong, to claim that therefore empiricism is no better than any other authority for justifying beliefs. It is foolish because outcomes matter. The only method that reliably works is empiricism. Unlike all other ineffective methods, our lives literally depend on this one method, no one can survive as an independent person without many beliefs that are empirically justified. Everyone, even dependent young children, even dependent adults in adult care institutions, relies on empiricism to navigate our world.
There is no other method of belief justification that has any record of success whatsoever for distinguishing what is true from what is false. The reason that people who rely on revelation and conversion survive at all is that they are inconsistent. Religious people invariably rely on empiricism when they face important decisions that risk their health and welfare, such as whether to walk on water. These same religious people then arbitrarily rely on revelation and conversion when they make decisions that are relatively unimportant, such as whether to spend some time each weekend in a house of worship. Many religious people don't seem to recognize how inconsistent they are and fail to acknowledge the complete failure of revelation and conversion as methods for distinguishing what is true from what is false. Those religious people who really do follow revelation and conversion over education when making health decisions, also known as faith healing, such as Christian Scientists, sacrifice their, and their children's, health and welfare as a result.
At least one professor of humanities and law, maybe thinking he is being sophisticated by being non-judgmental, tragically appears to be unwilling to publicly acknowledge this substantial and important difference. Stanley Fish himself probably relies on medical doctors, not on faith healers, when it really matters to maintain his health, even though the medical knowledge database is obtained indirectly through second hand education that requires some trust in the sources of that information. He argues that because empirical evidence is often obtained second-hand, it is is no better than any other method. But almost all group activities require trust, such as the market economic system and democracy. It doesn't follow that a mixed market and command economic system and republican democracy are no better than North Korea's strictly command economic and political model. It is by inter-person and inter-generational sharing of empirically obtained knowledge that we continuously build up our knowledge base for better outcomes in the future than we had in the past. Yet according to Stanley Fish's relativistic argument, anyone with real and serious injuries who seeks assistance from faith healers instead of medical doctors has acted on equally valid evidence, and for equally good reason, as everyone who opts for medical doctors. The post-modern relativism that Stanley Fish is peddling is foolish nonsense on stilts.
Showing posts with label Empiricism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Empiricism. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Atheism is not scientism
By Mathew Goldstein
Philip Kitcher, John Dewey professor of philosophy at Columbia University, in his recent New York Times article titled "Science is Unbelieving", identifies "scientism" as a major flaw in modern atheism. He defines scientism as "this conviction that science can resolve all questions known" including "questions about morality, purpose, and consciousness" and places this label, which he acknowledges is intended to be pejorative, on Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
He then elaborates that scientism "rests on three principal ideas. The facts of microphysics determine everything under the sun (beyond it, too); Darwinian natural selection explains human behavior; and brilliant work in the still-young brain sciences shows us as we really are." However, none of these three assertions, neither individually nor in combination, imply that science can resolve all questions known. Everyone with any common sense, including modern atheists, recognizes that science is a human endeavor, that humans are limited to operating within the confines and limits of their location and time and abilities, and that humans never have, and never will, have access to all evidence about everything, everywhere, over all time, past and future. Accordingly, science does not, and will not, resolve all questions known. Indeed, all questions do not have answers because many questions have no relevance to what is true or false or are incoherent. The issue of what questions should be asked is itself an issue that can only be reliably resolved by following the available evidence.
And when we follow the evidence, as all rational people are obliged to do, the assertions that physics is “the whole truth about reality”, that we should achieve “a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans”, and that neuroscience makes the abandonment of illusions “inescapable", are not scientism, as Philip Kitcher asserts, they are simply the conclusions that arguably are most consistent with the available evidence. Those are short quotes that Philip Kitcher excerpted from a book by one particular atheist ("The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions" by Alex Rosenberg). He is using his critical review of that book as his launching pad for his more general attack against modern atheism. I have not read that book, but taking short phrases like that out of context is not conducive to fair criticism of the author's argument. I can imagine such short phrases appearing in paragraphs whose context gives them a more nuanced interpretation than Philip Kitcher appears to be trying to attribute to this author. Philip Kitcher clearly dislikes these sorts of conclusions, but his mislabeling these conclusions as scientism fails to demonstrated that they are "premature".
It is true that "very little physics and chemistry can actually be done with its fundamental concepts and methods, and using it to explain life, human behavior or human society is a greater challenge still. Many informed scholars doubt the possibility, even in principle, of understanding, say, economic transactions as complex interactions of subatomic particles.". But again, science is a human activity, and humans are limited in many ways. So none of these limitations in science as a human activity counter the conclusion that physics underlies the whole truth about reality. Quantum indeterminacy, the necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system, is one of the characteristics of the universe as understood by modern physics. So even if some predictions are impossible "in principle", it still doesn't follow that it is mistaken to conclude that physics underlies the whole truth about reality. What Philip Kitcher derides as "imperial physics" makes complete access to the future forever inaccessible to us. Furthermore, nothing in basic physics requires that the properties of complex systems be identical to the collection of the properties of that system's constituent parts. It is well established in physics that entirely new properties sometimes appear in complex systems. Nothing about this emergent properties phenomena supports the conclusion that god exists. Philip Kitcher may not like that physics rules over us and the universe, but that doesn't make the evidence that it does any less convincing.
Philip Kitcher then disparages the generalizing from evidence to conclusions "unfettered by methodological cautions that students of human evolution have learned". Indeed, atheism is a generalization, not a conclusion of science. Generalizing from the evidence is something we all do. It is a basis for sound philosophy, so it seems kind of odd to hear a philosopher criticize such activity in such general terms. We need to make decisions on the basis of the available evidence, and since the available evidence often falls short of being complete in the context of answering the questions relevant to making our decisions, we generalize on the evidence. Shame on atheists for being like everyone else in this regard!?
Philip Kitcher then points out that "others hold the equally staunch position that some questions are so profound that they must forever lie beyond the scope of natural science. Faith in God, or a conviction that free will exists, or that life has meaning are not subject to revision in the light of empirical evidence." The first two questions are existence questions and the only reliable basis for answering such questions is by matching the answer against the available evidence, not on faith or conviction. The evidence disfavors both, and the people who argue that empirical evidence can have no relevance when trying to answer those questions are no less mistaken for being adamant. The last question is an attitude question. But even human attitudes, to be properly sustained, need to be anchored in facts and therefore should be built on a foundation of evidence, not on counter-evidenced possibilities such as God and free will. And what in the world does the measure of profundity have to do with a question being beyond the scope of natural science? Profundity is irrelevant here. Questions are either inside or outside the scope of natural science primarily in relation to the availability of evidence.
Not surprisingly, Philip Kitcher tries to divorce his attack against "scientism" from disrespect for natural science. He notes that "The natural sciences command admiration through the striking successes ....". But "... the natural sciences have no monopoly on inferential rigor. Linguists and religious scholars make connections among languages and among sacred texts, employing the same methods of inference evolutionary biologists use to reconstruct life’s history. Attending to achievements like these offers many alternatives to scientism." With that last sentence, Philip Kitcher appears to be implying that modern atheism (a.k.a "scientism") is inconsistent with "employing the same methods of inference evolutionary biologists use to reconstruct life’s history" in contexts beyond the natural sciences. This is nonsense. Modern atheists very much support and favor "employing the same methods of inference" on the empirical evidence beyond the confines of the natural sciences. Inferring from the evidence is what we are doing when we observe that the available evidences favor the conclusion that gods are human created fictions.
Philip Kitcher then asserts "Instead of forcing the present-day natural sciences to supply All the Answers, you might value other forms of investigation — at least until physics, biology and neuroscience have advanced." But that is what atheists are doing. Atheists look to psychology, to anthropology, to sociology, to history, to evidence grounded philosophy, etc., and the evidences available from all sources that relates to this particular question is consistent in its direction wherever we look. That is why we are atheists. This has nothing to do with natural sciences supplying "All the Answers", it is about the best fit with the overall evidence answer to a particular question. There are human tendencies that explain the common bias against accepting the evidences that our universe is all space-time and matter-energy, such as the tendency to internalize the beliefs of the people around us during childhood. Maybe in the future we will have evidence that our universe consists of something more than space-time and matter-energy, or maybe not, but it is a mistake to insist that there is also a god without the evidence.
Philip Kitcher, John Dewey professor of philosophy at Columbia University, in his recent New York Times article titled "Science is Unbelieving", identifies "scientism" as a major flaw in modern atheism. He defines scientism as "this conviction that science can resolve all questions known" including "questions about morality, purpose, and consciousness" and places this label, which he acknowledges is intended to be pejorative, on Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
He then elaborates that scientism "rests on three principal ideas. The facts of microphysics determine everything under the sun (beyond it, too); Darwinian natural selection explains human behavior; and brilliant work in the still-young brain sciences shows us as we really are." However, none of these three assertions, neither individually nor in combination, imply that science can resolve all questions known. Everyone with any common sense, including modern atheists, recognizes that science is a human endeavor, that humans are limited to operating within the confines and limits of their location and time and abilities, and that humans never have, and never will, have access to all evidence about everything, everywhere, over all time, past and future. Accordingly, science does not, and will not, resolve all questions known. Indeed, all questions do not have answers because many questions have no relevance to what is true or false or are incoherent. The issue of what questions should be asked is itself an issue that can only be reliably resolved by following the available evidence.
And when we follow the evidence, as all rational people are obliged to do, the assertions that physics is “the whole truth about reality”, that we should achieve “a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans”, and that neuroscience makes the abandonment of illusions “inescapable", are not scientism, as Philip Kitcher asserts, they are simply the conclusions that arguably are most consistent with the available evidence. Those are short quotes that Philip Kitcher excerpted from a book by one particular atheist ("The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions" by Alex Rosenberg). He is using his critical review of that book as his launching pad for his more general attack against modern atheism. I have not read that book, but taking short phrases like that out of context is not conducive to fair criticism of the author's argument. I can imagine such short phrases appearing in paragraphs whose context gives them a more nuanced interpretation than Philip Kitcher appears to be trying to attribute to this author. Philip Kitcher clearly dislikes these sorts of conclusions, but his mislabeling these conclusions as scientism fails to demonstrated that they are "premature".
It is true that "very little physics and chemistry can actually be done with its fundamental concepts and methods, and using it to explain life, human behavior or human society is a greater challenge still. Many informed scholars doubt the possibility, even in principle, of understanding, say, economic transactions as complex interactions of subatomic particles.". But again, science is a human activity, and humans are limited in many ways. So none of these limitations in science as a human activity counter the conclusion that physics underlies the whole truth about reality. Quantum indeterminacy, the necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system, is one of the characteristics of the universe as understood by modern physics. So even if some predictions are impossible "in principle", it still doesn't follow that it is mistaken to conclude that physics underlies the whole truth about reality. What Philip Kitcher derides as "imperial physics" makes complete access to the future forever inaccessible to us. Furthermore, nothing in basic physics requires that the properties of complex systems be identical to the collection of the properties of that system's constituent parts. It is well established in physics that entirely new properties sometimes appear in complex systems. Nothing about this emergent properties phenomena supports the conclusion that god exists. Philip Kitcher may not like that physics rules over us and the universe, but that doesn't make the evidence that it does any less convincing.
Philip Kitcher then disparages the generalizing from evidence to conclusions "unfettered by methodological cautions that students of human evolution have learned". Indeed, atheism is a generalization, not a conclusion of science. Generalizing from the evidence is something we all do. It is a basis for sound philosophy, so it seems kind of odd to hear a philosopher criticize such activity in such general terms. We need to make decisions on the basis of the available evidence, and since the available evidence often falls short of being complete in the context of answering the questions relevant to making our decisions, we generalize on the evidence. Shame on atheists for being like everyone else in this regard!?
Philip Kitcher then points out that "others hold the equally staunch position that some questions are so profound that they must forever lie beyond the scope of natural science. Faith in God, or a conviction that free will exists, or that life has meaning are not subject to revision in the light of empirical evidence." The first two questions are existence questions and the only reliable basis for answering such questions is by matching the answer against the available evidence, not on faith or conviction. The evidence disfavors both, and the people who argue that empirical evidence can have no relevance when trying to answer those questions are no less mistaken for being adamant. The last question is an attitude question. But even human attitudes, to be properly sustained, need to be anchored in facts and therefore should be built on a foundation of evidence, not on counter-evidenced possibilities such as God and free will. And what in the world does the measure of profundity have to do with a question being beyond the scope of natural science? Profundity is irrelevant here. Questions are either inside or outside the scope of natural science primarily in relation to the availability of evidence.
Not surprisingly, Philip Kitcher tries to divorce his attack against "scientism" from disrespect for natural science. He notes that "The natural sciences command admiration through the striking successes ....". But "... the natural sciences have no monopoly on inferential rigor. Linguists and religious scholars make connections among languages and among sacred texts, employing the same methods of inference evolutionary biologists use to reconstruct life’s history. Attending to achievements like these offers many alternatives to scientism." With that last sentence, Philip Kitcher appears to be implying that modern atheism (a.k.a "scientism") is inconsistent with "employing the same methods of inference evolutionary biologists use to reconstruct life’s history" in contexts beyond the natural sciences. This is nonsense. Modern atheists very much support and favor "employing the same methods of inference" on the empirical evidence beyond the confines of the natural sciences. Inferring from the evidence is what we are doing when we observe that the available evidences favor the conclusion that gods are human created fictions.
Philip Kitcher then asserts "Instead of forcing the present-day natural sciences to supply All the Answers, you might value other forms of investigation — at least until physics, biology and neuroscience have advanced." But that is what atheists are doing. Atheists look to psychology, to anthropology, to sociology, to history, to evidence grounded philosophy, etc., and the evidences available from all sources that relates to this particular question is consistent in its direction wherever we look. That is why we are atheists. This has nothing to do with natural sciences supplying "All the Answers", it is about the best fit with the overall evidence answer to a particular question. There are human tendencies that explain the common bias against accepting the evidences that our universe is all space-time and matter-energy, such as the tendency to internalize the beliefs of the people around us during childhood. Maybe in the future we will have evidence that our universe consists of something more than space-time and matter-energy, or maybe not, but it is a mistake to insist that there is also a god without the evidence.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Simple Help to Understand Difficult Issues and its Argumentation
Gary Berg-Cross
The recent arguments on this Blog about supporting language-based charter schools in DC raised some fundamental issues about argumentation and bias in my mind. It starts from the obvious observation that there are usual many sides to an issue like this. But our experiences, values and broad stances often frames what we consider good arguments. Facts are certainly important in an argument. So the fact that “there are Christian Arabs” is one of many facts that can be cited to support an argument. They may be used to support or oppose principles and thus provide a coherent argument. But since there may be so many relevant facts it is often hard to focus down to critical facts and arguments can quickly become so complex they are difficult to follow, especially when the various sides of an issues have a large history and many interacting factors. In addition to heaps of facts in an argument one may cite such things as:
· Principles (schools should serve broad student bodies)
· Hidden agenda and motivation (Christian evangelical kids learning Hebrew so that they can proselytize in Israel) Again facts may be used to expose or distract from agendas ,
· Ideology and values (English is our official language or Charter movement is said to have shifted into an effort to privatize education and attack teachers' unions,) but (we shouldn’t have publish money going into religious schools and “Two yet-to-be-opened Hebrew charter schools in New Jersey each received federal grants of $200,000”)
· Backers & group associations (Some Charter schools have ties to religious groups ), and a variety of other factors that go into human situations and our understanding of them.
· Uncomfortable trends (Religious Charter Schools are proliferating)
Some of these as well as supporting facts I may have only a small knowledge of for example who is in back of language-based charter schools. I may have a general sense of how is in back of charter schools and wonder if this is a camel’s nose under the tent strategy. I may connect this to larger, religious agendas such as abortion control or teaching creationism is schools that work tirelessly to nibble away at resistance to their broader agenda. In such grey areas I may be in conflict because I can see a goal that has potential good, but may afford and opportunity for some downside too. If I hear that New Gingrich favors Hebrew language charter schools for DC and these are getting funds from Sheldon Adelstein, who is know to fund Independent Jewish schools, I might worry that there is an agenda here, although it is a loose chain of reasoning.
How do we assess all these f
actors and role them into a judgment on issues that are complex like this and where only limited facts are know and the environment is not transparent enough to be sure? One may ask how humans reach a reasoned judgment when there are so many factors. Learning a language, for example, is good while supporting schools that are anti-union is bad. It’s all more than a direct calculating and adding up of all supporting and opposing factors in some type of vast numerical calculation. Critical thinking & reducing complexity by analysis that breaks things down a bit helps. I’ve done just a bit of this in my bullets. Using argument maps to explore what has been said can be useful. Argument maps allow us to clarify the thoughts and look at various parts of an argument. But it takes time and training so it is a selective improvement.
This is now well enough researched in Cognitive Psychology and Decision Science to offer some insights. But it itself is complex enough that only a gesture to the full story is attempted here.
So how do we reach judgment under such complex situation? Our mind often shortcuts the complexity. One factor are frames that influence what we believe are facts and have much to do with our arguments on complex issues helping us simplify them down to what seems like a coherent argument. But another is active filtering and biases. We choose to seek out and accept the information that fits our existing mental model or viewpoint, instead of all information available. And so yes this often involves biases in our reasoning process.
One big factor in such judgments is a confirmatory bias - a tendency for us to favor information that confirms ou
r beliefs, hypotheses or even our identities. So if we already hold a belief that teaching Hebrew is good (proselytize in Israel or maybe the tourist trade is good for the Israeli state) you can you can find data to support this and even the general notion that learning any new language is good confirms your belief. In other words, our judgment may be biased by seeking information which confirms an existing viewpoint. This simplifies things. We don’t have to worry about competing ideas such as, “well learning a new language is good, but why learn Arabic and not Spanish (with a growing population) or Italian (a nice place to visit)?”
What about new data? Well frames and a confirmatory bias helps direct interpretation of new “facts. ” It can be as simple as ignoring or downplaying information that doesn’t fit our concepts. But it can be active as new information is reinterpreted to match expectations and preconceptions. In controlled studies even if two people observed the same events, their interpretation can be completely different and influenced by preconceptions (shades of ideological thinking!).
So how do we g
et beyond things like confirmatory biases to understand what going on? Well being aware of the bias is a start. Critical thinking and a skeptical attitude helps. No matter what side you are on there are some general ideas such sharing your arguments with other critical thinkers. Since we are weak in finding flaws in our own reasoning other people may see the biases and fallacies. It can be hard on the ego though. Exposing arguments on a Blog like this is a way to do that, but one has to be open to personal progress and not rigid.
As to methods 2400 years ago or so Socrates came up with a dialogue method to help us get unstuck from our pre-judgments. It takes extended discussion that is less of one advocate clashing with another like 2 lawyers representing clients. It is more like a cooperative search for the truth.
We also have the rational, empirical scientific method which values challenging but testable hypotheses, questions data and has a way of converging on hypothesis that are supported by validated facts through systematic observation. Being more like a scientist and less like a lawyer just sounds better to me.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Why gravity is real but god is not
Christian Platt, in his recent article "Atheism: A Null Hypothesis on God", admits that "I have tried in vain over the years to understand atheism.". He then goes on to make various analogies for acquiring knowledge of various phenomena empirically, such as our seeing things from reflected light, and our verifying gravity by its effects, with his claims of witnessing god by god's reflections and effects. He, and other people like him, will continue to have difficulty understanding atheism because he is not understanding the difference between arguments based on empirical evidence and his arguments for god. This distinction is not difficult to grasp, and after understanding this distinction, he may come closer to his positive goal of "getting" atheism.
But first, lets dispell the unbalanced notion, which Christian Platt mistakenly promotes, that agnosticism is consistent with Christian theism but inconsistent with atheism. He appears to confuse uncertainity that god exists with faith that god exists, and since atheists don't have faith that god exists he concludes atheists are not agnostic. But all agnostics do not have faith that god exists. Not having perfect and direct knowledge that something exists does not equate with faith that it does exist.
Christian Platt is correct that everyone should be agnostic because humans are not omniscient. But he is incorrect to say that atheism precludes agnosticism. Richard Dawkins, for example, has acknowledged that he has such uncertainty. All atheists who are thoughtful acknowledge agnosticism. He also claims that atheism 'implies the same kind of certitude that a religious fundamentalist might claim is arguing they "know without any doubt that God exists."'. Some atheists may say that, but in my experience most atheists either say they don't believe and stop there, or say they believe there is no god, instead of saying they "know without any doubt". This notion of disbelief isn't difficult, and there is no good reason for intelligent people to have difficulty with this concept of disbelief in the singular context of god belief when everyone disbelieves lots of things. The real issue here isn't whether someone has any particular conviction, nor whether that conviction is definite or indefinite, nor whether the conviction is in the middle, or towards one end, of a true versus false spectrum line. The real issue is whether the belief, or disbelief, is well justified and held in proper proportion to the evidence.
Christian Platt then approvingly quotes John D. Caputo for his argument that God belief "insists, so that the rest of creation might exist.". This sounds like an argument that the universe must have a creator. That is a dubious assumption. For example, insects exist, but they do not have a creator. Insects exist because of abiogenesis and evolution. Some cosmologists think that the universe was spontaneously created, or self-created, and most cosmologists think that a self created or spontaneously created universe is consistent with all of the known laws of physics. While the notion of a creator is intuitive, we know from the very long list of non-intuitive and counter-intuitive conclusions found within modern knowledge, that intuition is not a good guide to, let alone a good source of, knowledge.
Christian Platt then declares: 'God is the impetus, the spark, the divine breath, the "inspiration," if you will from which all the rest of creation finds meaning.' I think this is silly, and I will try to explain why. Meaning is found in our experiencing and living our lives. Merely declaring otherwise does not constitute a justification for claiming otherwise, let alone constitute a compelling argument for a god. The notion of creation finding meaning makes no sense. There is no meaning to be had outside the context of minds capable of contemplating the concept, and all such minds that are known to exist reside in physical brains that are attached to physical bodies of animals. Saying that "creation finds" a concept or sentiment, such as meaning, is a category error. This is poetic language, but evidence and argument is not found in poetry. If it were then we would go to poets instead of medical doctors for our annual medical health checks.
Christian Platt then argues that God is found "conspiring with the physical world to create something that makes sense." Here is where he indulges the flawed analogy with seeing an object indirectly as "the result of the interaction between the light and the observed object.". Light is a physical entity that is measurable, it has amplitude and wavelength, it is empirically observed and evidenced. This is very different from the assertion about the vague concepts "something that makes sense" and "conspiring". This analogy doesn't work at all, since the foundation of our knowledge in the second case is precisely the empirical evidence that is completely absent in the first case.
Christian Platt then tries to argue that empirical evidence is not necessary because in the past we didn't know about atomic particles, or dark matter. He appears to be confusing what we know, a.k.a. ontology, with how we know, a.k.a. epistemology. It would be nice if we could just eliminate the effort and time needed to acquire knowledge and magically skip to having knowledge through some unspecified direct mechanism to this particular truth claim (god). However, such magical and instant capability to directly possess knowledge has not demonstrated much success as a non-empirical, alternative method for acquiring knowledge. There is a time sequence constraint here that applies to everyone. Time travels in a single direction from past to present to future. Before we can have knowledge about what is true we must first obtain the evidence to justify the conclusion that it is true. The latter achievement precedes the former achievement in time, we cannot properly leap directly to a conclusion without the evidence needed to justify the conclusion.
Christian Platt cites gravity a second time, saying it 'cannot be directly observed: only measured as it affects other objects. It's not a "thing" that can be pinned down.'. Gravity is due to curvature in space-time, and space-time curvature is a thing that can be, and is, predicted and indirectly measured. It is true that all empirical measurements and observations and knowledge can be said to be indirectly acquired. But the critical and essential attribute of evidence is that it is repeatedly measureable and observable, attributes that are entirely missing from poetic "evidences", if we can call them that, for god. Even if it is true that everything that is empirically evidenced is evidenced indirectly, it doesn't follow that everything that is argued for indirectly is therefore also properly evidenced.
Christian Platt then asserts "to say that even science is entirely constrained by the scientific method is to ignore the creative imagination required to stretch the boundaries, to imagine what might be, beyond what is now understood to be. It's this kind of imagination that pushes humanity to create new tools that have allowed us to observe things we never knew existed before.". The notion that atheists define the scientific method so narrowly as to preclude a role for imagination is false. Imagination, when married with empiricism, can be an important contributor to getting productive ideas. But imagination is no substitute for grounding existence claims in empirical evidence. Undiscplined imagination unfettered by empiricism has been a path to much fictional fantasy falsely claiming to be knowledge. There is excellent reason to think that imagination by itself is a source of fiction only.
Christian Platt then argues "making room for those possibilities, seem, to me, to be at the heart of science as much as the rigorous processes defined by the scientific method.". If by "those possibilities" he means all of the possibilities that have no empirical support then the fact is that the scientific method does not endorse, and cannot arbitrarily endorse, any such possibilities. But the issue here is not "scientific method". The issue is the need for empirical evidence in support of existence claims to justify the corresponding existence beliefs.
The article concludes with this comment: "However, to leap from that to certitude of God's non-existence is to violate the principles of the scientific method, isn't it?". Explicit atheism is not a conclusion of science. It is a belief based on an assessment that the overall direction and weight of the available evidence favors the conclusion that there are no non-material actors with non-material super intelligent minds that created the universe or that take some special interest in humans or that intervene, monitor, or oversee human affairs on earth, nor that humans continue to live forever as material or non-material entities after they die under circumstances dictated by such a god, nor anything of this sort. Instead, the available evidences best fits the conclusion that all god stories are human created fictions that have no relationship to anything that is true.
But first, lets dispell the unbalanced notion, which Christian Platt mistakenly promotes, that agnosticism is consistent with Christian theism but inconsistent with atheism. He appears to confuse uncertainity that god exists with faith that god exists, and since atheists don't have faith that god exists he concludes atheists are not agnostic. But all agnostics do not have faith that god exists. Not having perfect and direct knowledge that something exists does not equate with faith that it does exist.
Christian Platt is correct that everyone should be agnostic because humans are not omniscient. But he is incorrect to say that atheism precludes agnosticism. Richard Dawkins, for example, has acknowledged that he has such uncertainty. All atheists who are thoughtful acknowledge agnosticism. He also claims that atheism 'implies the same kind of certitude that a religious fundamentalist might claim is arguing they "know without any doubt that God exists."'. Some atheists may say that, but in my experience most atheists either say they don't believe and stop there, or say they believe there is no god, instead of saying they "know without any doubt". This notion of disbelief isn't difficult, and there is no good reason for intelligent people to have difficulty with this concept of disbelief in the singular context of god belief when everyone disbelieves lots of things. The real issue here isn't whether someone has any particular conviction, nor whether that conviction is definite or indefinite, nor whether the conviction is in the middle, or towards one end, of a true versus false spectrum line. The real issue is whether the belief, or disbelief, is well justified and held in proper proportion to the evidence.
Christian Platt then approvingly quotes John D. Caputo for his argument that God belief "insists, so that the rest of creation might exist.". This sounds like an argument that the universe must have a creator. That is a dubious assumption. For example, insects exist, but they do not have a creator. Insects exist because of abiogenesis and evolution. Some cosmologists think that the universe was spontaneously created, or self-created, and most cosmologists think that a self created or spontaneously created universe is consistent with all of the known laws of physics. While the notion of a creator is intuitive, we know from the very long list of non-intuitive and counter-intuitive conclusions found within modern knowledge, that intuition is not a good guide to, let alone a good source of, knowledge.
Christian Platt then declares: 'God is the impetus, the spark, the divine breath, the "inspiration," if you will from which all the rest of creation finds meaning.' I think this is silly, and I will try to explain why. Meaning is found in our experiencing and living our lives. Merely declaring otherwise does not constitute a justification for claiming otherwise, let alone constitute a compelling argument for a god. The notion of creation finding meaning makes no sense. There is no meaning to be had outside the context of minds capable of contemplating the concept, and all such minds that are known to exist reside in physical brains that are attached to physical bodies of animals. Saying that "creation finds" a concept or sentiment, such as meaning, is a category error. This is poetic language, but evidence and argument is not found in poetry. If it were then we would go to poets instead of medical doctors for our annual medical health checks.
Christian Platt then argues that God is found "conspiring with the physical world to create something that makes sense." Here is where he indulges the flawed analogy with seeing an object indirectly as "the result of the interaction between the light and the observed object.". Light is a physical entity that is measurable, it has amplitude and wavelength, it is empirically observed and evidenced. This is very different from the assertion about the vague concepts "something that makes sense" and "conspiring". This analogy doesn't work at all, since the foundation of our knowledge in the second case is precisely the empirical evidence that is completely absent in the first case.
Christian Platt then tries to argue that empirical evidence is not necessary because in the past we didn't know about atomic particles, or dark matter. He appears to be confusing what we know, a.k.a. ontology, with how we know, a.k.a. epistemology. It would be nice if we could just eliminate the effort and time needed to acquire knowledge and magically skip to having knowledge through some unspecified direct mechanism to this particular truth claim (god). However, such magical and instant capability to directly possess knowledge has not demonstrated much success as a non-empirical, alternative method for acquiring knowledge. There is a time sequence constraint here that applies to everyone. Time travels in a single direction from past to present to future. Before we can have knowledge about what is true we must first obtain the evidence to justify the conclusion that it is true. The latter achievement precedes the former achievement in time, we cannot properly leap directly to a conclusion without the evidence needed to justify the conclusion.
Christian Platt cites gravity a second time, saying it 'cannot be directly observed: only measured as it affects other objects. It's not a "thing" that can be pinned down.'. Gravity is due to curvature in space-time, and space-time curvature is a thing that can be, and is, predicted and indirectly measured. It is true that all empirical measurements and observations and knowledge can be said to be indirectly acquired. But the critical and essential attribute of evidence is that it is repeatedly measureable and observable, attributes that are entirely missing from poetic "evidences", if we can call them that, for god. Even if it is true that everything that is empirically evidenced is evidenced indirectly, it doesn't follow that everything that is argued for indirectly is therefore also properly evidenced.
Christian Platt then asserts "to say that even science is entirely constrained by the scientific method is to ignore the creative imagination required to stretch the boundaries, to imagine what might be, beyond what is now understood to be. It's this kind of imagination that pushes humanity to create new tools that have allowed us to observe things we never knew existed before.". The notion that atheists define the scientific method so narrowly as to preclude a role for imagination is false. Imagination, when married with empiricism, can be an important contributor to getting productive ideas. But imagination is no substitute for grounding existence claims in empirical evidence. Undiscplined imagination unfettered by empiricism has been a path to much fictional fantasy falsely claiming to be knowledge. There is excellent reason to think that imagination by itself is a source of fiction only.
Christian Platt then argues "making room for those possibilities, seem, to me, to be at the heart of science as much as the rigorous processes defined by the scientific method.". If by "those possibilities" he means all of the possibilities that have no empirical support then the fact is that the scientific method does not endorse, and cannot arbitrarily endorse, any such possibilities. But the issue here is not "scientific method". The issue is the need for empirical evidence in support of existence claims to justify the corresponding existence beliefs.
The article concludes with this comment: "However, to leap from that to certitude of God's non-existence is to violate the principles of the scientific method, isn't it?". Explicit atheism is not a conclusion of science. It is a belief based on an assessment that the overall direction and weight of the available evidence favors the conclusion that there are no non-material actors with non-material super intelligent minds that created the universe or that take some special interest in humans or that intervene, monitor, or oversee human affairs on earth, nor that humans continue to live forever as material or non-material entities after they die under circumstances dictated by such a god, nor anything of this sort. Instead, the available evidences best fits the conclusion that all god stories are human created fictions that have no relationship to anything that is true.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Belief in God Boils Down to Intuition
I have recently posted several articles here asserting that theism is a product of adopting an intuitive way of understanding our world and that human intuition is a very poor substitute to an overall weight of the available evidence method of understanding our world which favors atheism over theism. I further argue that the well-established, true facts about how our world functions are mostly non-intuitive, and even counter-intuitive, and that an empirical, overall weight of the available evidence method is the only method that we have any reason to think works for reliably finding accurate answers to questions about how our world functions.
An article by Stephanie Pappas published in LiveScience.com titled Belief in God Boils Down to a Gut Feeling reports on the results of a new study by researcher Amitai Shenhav of Harvard University and his colleagues, published Sept. 19 online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (also, another copy can be found here), about a difference in how non-theists and theists justify their beliefs. The study attempts to determine whether beliefs are influenced by how much an individual relies on their natural intuitions versus making the additional effort required to better understand the problem and find the correct, non-intuitive answer. People who incorrectly went with their intuition on a math test were found to be one-and-a-half times more likely to believe in God than those who got all the answers right. The results held even when taking factors such as education and income into account.
The researchers then initiated a second study to see if they could encourage people to be more theistic by encouraging them to adopt an intuitive focus. 373 participants were told to write a paragraph about either successfully using their intuition or successfully reasoning their way to an answer. Those who wrote about the intuitive experience were more likely to say they were convinced of God's existence after the experiment, suggesting that triggering intuitive thinking boosts belief.
However, contrary to what I argue, the researcher David Rand of Harvard claimed "It's not that one way is better than the other, intuitions are important and reflection is important, and you want some balance of the two. Where you are on that spectrum affects how you come out in terms of belief in God."
Of course, intuition has a proper role. Intuition is arguably the best method when evidence is unavailable, contradictory, or otherwise does not provide direction to answering a question that needs to be answered. But relying primarily on intuition to answer mathematics questions isn't balanced. That so many people turn to intuition in inappropriate contexts such as a mathematics quiz is a symptom of a counter-productive overtendency to rely far too much on intuition and far too little on going beyond intuition to reflect on the nature of the problem and how the available evidence favors some answers over others. David Rand is being too non-judgemental in his characterization of the spectrum. One way is better than the other in these contexts. Reflection takes first place, intuitition should only be our second method and only in those contexts where reflection is not viable due to lack of time or evidence constraints.
An article by Stephanie Pappas published in LiveScience.com titled Belief in God Boils Down to a Gut Feeling reports on the results of a new study by researcher Amitai Shenhav of Harvard University and his colleagues, published Sept. 19 online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (also, another copy can be found here), about a difference in how non-theists and theists justify their beliefs. The study attempts to determine whether beliefs are influenced by how much an individual relies on their natural intuitions versus making the additional effort required to better understand the problem and find the correct, non-intuitive answer. People who incorrectly went with their intuition on a math test were found to be one-and-a-half times more likely to believe in God than those who got all the answers right. The results held even when taking factors such as education and income into account.
The researchers then initiated a second study to see if they could encourage people to be more theistic by encouraging them to adopt an intuitive focus. 373 participants were told to write a paragraph about either successfully using their intuition or successfully reasoning their way to an answer. Those who wrote about the intuitive experience were more likely to say they were convinced of God's existence after the experiment, suggesting that triggering intuitive thinking boosts belief.
However, contrary to what I argue, the researcher David Rand of Harvard claimed "It's not that one way is better than the other, intuitions are important and reflection is important, and you want some balance of the two. Where you are on that spectrum affects how you come out in terms of belief in God."
Of course, intuition has a proper role. Intuition is arguably the best method when evidence is unavailable, contradictory, or otherwise does not provide direction to answering a question that needs to be answered. But relying primarily on intuition to answer mathematics questions isn't balanced. That so many people turn to intuition in inappropriate contexts such as a mathematics quiz is a symptom of a counter-productive overtendency to rely far too much on intuition and far too little on going beyond intuition to reflect on the nature of the problem and how the available evidence favors some answers over others. David Rand is being too non-judgemental in his characterization of the spectrum. One way is better than the other in these contexts. Reflection takes first place, intuitition should only be our second method and only in those contexts where reflection is not viable due to lack of time or evidence constraints.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Not all Free Books are Free Thinking
By Gary Berg-Cross
The other day
I got a free copy of Darwin’s On The Origins of Species from my daughter-in-law.
"An atheist is someone who believes that nothing made everything. He will deny that through gritted teeth, because it is an intellectual embarrassment. But if he says of his Toyota that he has no belief that there was a maker, then he thinks that nothing made it (it just happened), which is a scientific impossibility. So, to remain credible, he falls back on something made everything, but he just doesn’t know what that something was. So he’s not an atheist--he believes in an initial cause." from http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/
But luckily there are many good, critical analyses and fact checking of Comforts Intro. One example, that real Scientists note, is that 
Comfort sneers at the fossil evidence for transitional forms such as seen in the terrestrial ancestry of whales and the dinosaur ancestry of birds. These turn out to bad examples since are good and growing fossils of dinosaurs that have feathers and of whales that have legs, sometimes with proto feet. Just recently Exceptionally well preserved dinosaur fossils uncovered in north-eastern China display the earliest known feathers. These creatures are all more than 150 million years old
Darwin biographer and science writer David Quammen characterized the Intro this way:
Comfort's confused polemic, disguised as an informational Introduction but full of mistakes, half truths, untruths, muddled logic, old creationist arguments, misleadingly excerpted quotations, and ill-framed analogies — plus a good dose of fire and brimstone at the end — will do a severe disservice to anyone who takes it for an entryway to Darwin's great book.
Back in November of 2009 LA-based creationist Ray Comfort launched an effort to distribute thousands of free copies of Darwin's On the Origin of Species to students at the "100 top U.S. universities." The effort was thwarted by my responses including a wonderfully coordinated campaign by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) that reached to colleges across the U.S. in an effort to “put the record straight”. You can see great material and NCSE alert on their site including resources, that provide a:
“ blow-by-blo
w analysis of the Comfort introduction, a one page flier ("Why Ray Comfort is Wrong"), the NCSE Safety Bookmark (for use with Comfort's edition of Origin), details on the best web sites and books devoted to evolutionary science, and a Public Service film about the dangers of certain book introductions.”
Thanks to such efforts the attempt to give out a planned 100,000 out on college campuses was not a total success. He probably didn't help himself in later debates where he argued that the banana was designed for humans. They did apparently give away the first print run of 30,000. But now they seem to be at it again at State and County Summer Fairs. Comfort recently reported they had placed an order for 175,000 more books. As Ray explains:
“ My name will be on the cover (for those who think that we are somehow being deceptive). In one day, 170,000 future doctors, lawyers and politicians will freely get information about Intelligent Design (and the gospel) placed directly into their hands!”
http://www.livingwaters.com/index.php?id=383&option=com_content&task=view
So we may need another campaign to knock down Comfort's silly attempts again. They are especially dangerous in these times that mix conservative politics and conservative religion.
And it is deeply troubling to see an ideological group hijack quality works, such as Darwin’s for their own pu
rposes. Ray Comfort, of course, describes his mission benignly as providing "world-weary Christians the refreshing opportunity to dive deeper into God's Word". But you can see his anti-freethinking strategy in books such as "You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence But You Can't Make Him Think," . Indeed this book and the free Origins seems to be part of a roll-out of a campaign. It is also preparation for the Deeper Conference, scheduled for Oct. 14-15 at Calvary Community Church in Westlake Village, Calif. The conference has the same tone as Rick Perry’s Texas event calling on God to get us out the mess we’ve created:
"While much of this world gets itself deeper into debt," says Comfort, "we want to see you set aside such concerns and, for two days, dive deeper into God and His Word."
It perhaps prefigures a witches brew of Religion and Politics we'll see in 2011-12.
As extra motivation Comfort notes an alarming trend – a survey showed 61 percent of U.S. professors in biology or psychology said they were atheists or agnostics. Moreover,
"Atheism has doubled in the last 20 years among 19 to 25 year olds. So young people are being brainwashed by this stuff," he said. "All we want to do is give an alternative."
"So many young people are being convinced that atheism is right, that evolution is right, there's no god, there are no moral absolutes," he said. "Who cares if you marry a dog? What's the big deal? And that's what atheism believes, too. It's very sad, and we're going to do our best to fight back."
Yes, and I imagine many atheists, agnostics, secular humanists and biology teachers will too. It is just that we’ll use different tools, such as real Science, Empiricism, Skepticism and Critical Thinking.
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