Fork
The Guardian gives us an extract from Dawkins’s new book, in which he talks about things I’ve been pondering myself for the past couple of days, I suppose prompted by that long discussion on ‘Explain’.
All Sagan’s books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same aspiration. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply religious man…Steven Weinberg made the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory: “Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe.'”…Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is “appropriate for us to worship”.
Since that generally is what people mean when they talk about ‘God’ – or maybe some of them mean something more ‘sophisticated’ but don’t say so in order not to affront or alarm the faithful – which comes to the same thing. Or some of them go back and forth between the two. Or some perhaps don’t know what the hell they mean, but the word is out there, after all, and people seem to understand something by it, so why not go on using it, however vaguely…
Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion.
And/or by failure to distinguish what can be called Biblical or personal or cozy or lovable God from sophisticated abstract distant first-cause God.
[Interjection. Oh look – how funny. There’s Julian. I wasn’t expecting to see him here. But there he is – ‘But philosophers use ‘naturalist’ in a very different sense, as the opposite of supernaturalist. Julian Baggini explains in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction the meaning of an atheist’s commitment to naturalism’ and then he quotes a bit. Heh – small world. (Wish he’d quote a bit of Why Truth Matters instead. Or in addition. Perhaps he did. Why Truth Matters quoted him.)]
Carl Sagan put it well: “… if by “God” one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying … it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”…I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.
That’s just it, it seems to me. The interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible and of clerics and of the newspapers and radio and discourse is a kind of person – a person with a lot of labels stuck on such as omnipotent and omniscient, but still a kind of person, who does person-like things, who loves us and pities us and helps and protects us, so that it makes sense to love it and worship it. The other god, the one that created the whole of the universe – can’t possibly be like that. No matter how many labels you stick on it, it still just can’t be like that. It can’t be both transcendent and immanent, it can’t be both outside the universe and our loving parent. It’s an either-or thing, not a both-and thing. It’s a fork. You can call it Benson’s fork if you want to; I don’t mind. Either God is a local human-like god that humans can sensibly love and pray to (in which case one wonders where exactly it is) or it’s something so far away and so strange that as far as we’re concerned it might as well not exist at all. But it’s a cheat to pretend it can be both.
Why can’t a Deity be both transcendent and immanent? Any theology asserting the universe is a part of, but not the whole of, God is positing one.
I’ll modestly submit that the utility of Benson’s fork (“it’s either A or B”) has arisen out of a perceived contradiction within the position “it’s both A and B” and that the principle would have never been arrived at without a previous attempt to reconcile A and B. Merlijn’s Blender ;-)?
Because just asserting things about God is easy. It costs nothing. But really: explain to me how a god – how anything – can be both personal and personish and like us and worth loving and praying to, and the creator of the universe. I don’t mean by just saying so, I mean really explaining. I submit that we can’t even love a god that created this one galaxy; how could we love (or understand or know anything about or have any meaningful connection of any kind to) one that created the whole shebang? I think when people say things like that they’re just mouthing words, they’re not really saying anything.
A transcendent “god” would not, of course, be detectable, because he/she/it/they would be “outside this material, natural universe.
An immanent god, a “personal” god will be detectable.
No results so far, after 4.5 thousand million years, and counting …….
As I type this the brain dead/washed “Potters House” xtian nutters are assembling in the road to go to church and have their purses emptied……
Well, yes I can understand – and empathise with someone who says something akin to:
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
But I have no time for the bearded loon sitting up on a cloud lobbing thunderbolts at people who dare to eat the wrong kind of cheese, or whatever.
“explain to me how a god – how anything – can be both personal and personish and like us and worth loving and praying to, and the creator of the universe.”
This is one of the criticisms we make in our Do It Yourself Deity game:
“We are finding it hard to understand how one can have a personal relationship with a God that has many of the characteristics of a deity constructed on the template of the Abrahamic God.
Personal relationships appear to depend on a number of things. Sufficient similarity between the persons in the relationship is one. Another is that both are persons, or are, at least, person-like, as some higher primates, for example, appear to be. The problem is that in our universe there seem to be no genuine personal relationships between things of great difference. And a God which is all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing, the creator and sustainer of all things, or infinite is vastly different from human beings.
People can have feelings for things which are similar to those they have towards people. Affection or love for places or objects, for example, is common. But this is not the same as having a personal relationship with them. In a similar way, people have relationships with animals, maybe a cat. But this does not seem to be the same as a personal relationship, because of the great difference in the way the person relates to the animal and the way the animal relates to the person. Is this the kind of thing envisaged by those who claim we can have a relationship with God?”
But I must admit, I don’t think it is decisve.
GT: Other way around. A transcendent God could conceivably be detectable to the extent that She would mess around with stuff. An immanent God which would pervade the universe itself would not be detectable, because we could not distinguish Her from the phenomenal universe.
And I think both are strictly irrelevant as to whether God is _personal_. But an immanent God who is omniscient, and omnipresent, could be thought to relate to us and sparrows and raindrops and little hermit crabs. One could even imagine a God who experiences the unfolding, temporal universe through the eyes of living creatures. Mind you, we’re talking about _imaginable_ Deities here, not actual ones.
The bigger problem would be the other side of the relationship: how would we relate to a Deity? A Christian might answer that God made this relationship possible by becoming incarnate in Christ – and that this signified a change from the authoritarian, vindictive God of the Old Testament to a God who shares our fates. This is all very conjectural, of course, and my attempts at “making sense” of things are quite feeble, I’m all too sure. My personal answer to OB’s question might be that, if (as I like to think) God is immanent, and if the universe is part of Her rather than an object to Her, then our relationship with God should be primarily rooted in our relationship with other people and living creatures. In other words, it is through the ears of another person that God (might be) listening, rather than a voice/ear in the sky.
But (your definition of) an immanent god which pervades the universe is like the “Luminiferous Aether”, which I/we discussed a couple of posts back.
And that one is so undetectable, that there is no point in bothering AT ALL, is there?
Oh, that’s interesting – that stuff from the Deity Game is exactly what I’ve been puzzling about. I’d forgotten it was in there – I haven’t played the Deity Game in years.
I don’t know if I think it’s exactly decisive, either, but I do think it’s a considerable stumbling block.
Merlijn,
I hate to sound philistine, but I have to admit I don’t entirely see the point. I can see the point of it as a kind of speculation, as with possible worlds and so on, but not as ‘faith’. The issue for me is ‘faith’ – assertions, truth claims, non-tentative religion. That’s another fork, I suppose.
Also – I agree with David about the Hopkins poem. Same here; my version of that is Wordsworth. But one can (and does) have that feeling without a deity to address it to.
Ronald Aronson wrote a terrific essay about that for TPM. I wonder if it’s online still…
Yes, it’s here.
OB – it is speculation, of course. I think the whole point of the exercise was possible worlds – is this thing imaginable/possible, rather than: do I believe in it/is it real. I regarded your application of Benson’s fork in this instance as the same. As for faith: I’m not good at it.
GT – I already answered your argument about the luminiferous aether. Concepts such as the luminiferous aether should be eliminated from the ontology posited by physical science to the extent that their existence is based on physical science, and subject to its laws and only to its laws. The same objections do not fly against God, not even an immanent one. Unless you make physics stand in for the world as a whole and everything in it.
Merlijn – Ah, well, that’s a different story then. I like speculation. Mind you, I think imaginable and possible are much too different to be joined by a slash. There are comparatively few limits on what’s imaginable, but what’s possible is a whole different thing. I agree that it’s easy to imagine a god that created the universe and is our personal protector – but I also think that if one actually thinks about that, it quickly becomes apparent how impossible it must be. (But you were probably using ‘possible’ in the ‘possible worlds’ sense. Which causes me to realize I don’t actually know how ‘possible’ is used in that phrase – what kinds of questions are asked about what would make the worlds possible.)
“Unless you make physics stand in for the world as a whole and everything in it.”
But what if one makes physics stand in for what humans can know about the world as a whole and everything in it? Isn’t that the point? Not that anyone knows for certain that physics is all there is, but that physics is the only reliable way we know to find out what there is?
“physics is the only reliable way we know to find out what there is?”
Exactly, which is why metaphysics at its best is only pure speculation and at its worse gobbeldygook and bunk.
OB – Good comment on the imaginable/possible distinction.
“But what if one makes physics stand in for what humans can know about the world as a whole and everything in it? Isn’t that the point? Not that anyone knows for certain that physics is all there is, but that physics is the only reliable way we know to find out what there is?”
I couldn’t do so in an intellectually sincere fashion, as it would make my own intellectual (history and language history) pursuits null and void. I guess the same would go for the mathematicians, the philosophers, etc. There’s a strong argument that reduction of the human sciences to physics is practically impossible (as spatiotemporal events in the human world are unique, so any general laws to cover them would be so specific as to be untestable). It’s nonetheless possible to retain physicalism as a metaphysical standpoint – but that’s exactly what it is.
(I could also have answered that regarding physics as a way to find things out assumes there’s something out there to find out, which does not follow from physics – but that’s a bit of a cheap shot. Belief in a real world is pretty much the basis of everything we do.)
“I couldn’t do so in an intellectually sincere fashion, as it would make my own intellectual (history and language history) pursuits null and void.”
No it wouldn’t. Because those pursuits find out things other than what there is. That’s a valid (and fair) distinction isn’t it? I think it is. Physics is the starting point, but there’s plenty more to do after that – but physics still sets limits to what we can find out there is. History and language history start with physics (that is, start with physical beings that have physical causes in a physical world) but that’s only the start. It’s not necessary to reduce the human sciences to physics in order to grant that they do start there, is it?
Good point. It depends on what reality we accord to things such as “concepts” and “reasons” and even “language” (which does not exist physically – at least not as language). I meant to include such things within “the world and everything in it” but was unclear. But yes, it would be possible to study such things on their own terms within a metaphysical framework such as emergent materialism. Which I don’t have any problems with.
Yes, well, you have the world and everything in it, which is physical, and then you have the relations between them, which are physically caused (I would say; perhaps you wouldn’t) but not themselves physical. And those relations between them tend to be raaaaaather interesting and engrossing and rewarding to study and investigate and think about. And I certainly agree that human ones are far too complicated and peculiar to study as one would physics. I’m a liberal arts type myself, so I would…
“Unless you make physics stand in for the world as a whole and everything in it.
| Merlijn de Smit | “
So Merlijn, you are suggesting there are realities that are NOT measureable or quantifiyable in this real, physical world?
Really?
Would you kindly produce the tooth fairy/teapot counter-orbiting Earth/god – or other supernatural object RIGHT NOW, or alternatively get off this discussion with completely insane remarks like the one you have just made.
Seriously, you MUST produce some evidence that will stand up in court, or the empirical courts of the physical sciences.
Otherwise the “discussion” is a complete waste of time.
Cannot you see (perhaps you can’t) – and this is the problem – I get this from the xtian brain-dead around the corner “Jesus loves you” (repeat until terminally bored …. OR “La il’aha, illa’lah Mohammedan rasul Allah.” (repeat until explolsion)….
Either a thing is sunbect to normal physical laws and constraints and is naturalistic, and can be examined, or it isn’t, and isn’t, and as far as can be detected, doesn’t exist in the first place, and is the product of a fevered and irrational imagination.
GT, I just had a thought that what you’ve stated is wrong. I assert that my thought is real, but I doubt if I, or anyone else, can measure or quantify my thought.
Are you denying the reality of my thought?
Goodness, yes, Alex Heyworth stated it perfectly. Of course there are things that are _real_ but not measurable physically and quantifiably. Some of these have a very clear physical basis but nonetheless cannot be made sense of as such (art, literature, language). Others (thoughts, concepts, qualia) are even more ephemeral.
Or mathematics. Is there anything physical, measurable, quantifiable in the real world that tells us 2+2=4? Or the value of pi? Don’t think so. Can we study the physical worlds without these concepts? Nope.
But I think I’ve made you state what I’ve been wanting you to state for some time now. You turn physics into metaphysics without being actually aware of it. Which means you are, in your answers to DSquared and me, constantly using background assumptions that remain hidden. Which means your criticisms tend to lack relevance as our background assumptions on what is _real_ in the world (matter and mind, or only matter, or matter and mind as an emergent property) may be entirely different.
Alex said: “I just had a thought that what you’ve stated is wrong. I assert that my thought is real, but I doubt if I, or anyone else, can measure or quantify my thought.
Are you denying the reality of my thought?”
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Thoughts (thinking) are detectable with very sensitive scanning and electromagnetic equipment, though, at present, all that can be detected are the areas in which brain activity is taking place, and sometimes, the general area of the subject. It is a very difficult scientific/technical discipline, but, as usual… “We’re working on it!”
It IS possible to give people “false” religious experiences by getting experimental volunteers to wear apropriate helmets that send correctly-tailored signals to the appropriate brain areas. Only last week, a report was made of an artificially-simulated “ghost” apparition, in a laboratory, with the correct stimulation(s) of the brain.
Both Merlijn and Alex are effectively bragging about a “God of the gaps” – which, of course gets progressively smaller and less significant, as time, and a lot of scientific work passes.
Merlijn’s statement about 2=2 =4 is flat wrong. There is a substantial literature on the subject.
I believe both Russel and COnway have had things to do with this …..
Ditto Pi. I’m suprised he didn’t invoke “e” or “i” (called “j” by the elctrical engineers, just to confuse people.
And of course the supemely mystical statement that: e^(i*pi)=1.
This is pseudo-mystical claptrap.
I find it hard to believe that any correspondents to this site are in favour of mysticism, because that is what it looks like, as opposed to knowledge.
Normally I’m just a lurker here, so just a quick aside – I find the discussions very interesting and I learn a lot from them.
Alex said: “GT, I just had a thought that what you’ve stated is wrong. I assert that my thought is real, but I doubt if I, or anyone else, can measure or quantify my thought.”
I don’t disagree with this, but there seems to be a word missing from the end – “yet”. Given that my assertion is correct, the difference is crucial.
A few short years ago, we might have used empathy as an example for this discussion, and yet neuroscience recently came up with “mirror neurons”, and now empathy is measurable (in some way.) I think the point GT is making is not whether everything that is real is measurable NOW, but is in some way measurable at all.
Asimov said, “To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.” I humbly suggest that you try not to make that mistake.
G Tingey –
I’m not at all arguing in favour of a God of the Gaps here. I’m arguing against a hopelessly simplistic philosophy of science and knowledge. The existence or non-existence of a Deity is irrelevant to this.
To recap, the statement that I was arguing against was that you found my point that there are things that are not quantifiable and measurable in the physical world “insane”, comparable to the tooth fairy, teapot circling Uranus, and some such.
I pointed out that there are subjects of study which are by definition not measurable, quantifiable parts of physics.
Take language. We’ve had a whole generation of linguists suffering from acute physics-envy, embracing the philosophy of positivism, and declaring that they were going to study language as one would study physics. What did this result in? Zilch. Nothing. Nada. Because the only way they were gaining any knowledge of language was to involve their own, subjective, intuitive knowledge of grammar and pretending they were doing empirical research. The work they did was valuable. But it was done by stubbornly ignoring the philosophy of science they declared allegiance towards.
Let me spell this out. Language has a physical basis, of acoustic or visual signals. But studied purely as physics the only thing we have is blots on paper, or disturbances of the air. Even studying them as signals crucially involves subjective knowledge of those signals.
Suppose I am a physicist studying say Supatrons. I want to test a theory from which I have deduced the hypothesis that Supatrons only jump up and down. It’s clear that the moment I find Supatrons that also twirl around, my hypothesis is falsified, and in as far as the hypothesis is deduced from the theory, so is the theory.
Now suppose I am writing a theoretical grammar of the English language. Such a grammar would involve the rule that articles precede the noun, which is (hopefully) deduced from a deeper, more general rule. Suppose I meet a speaker who says “house the”. Would I conclude that my theoretical grammar is falsified? Of course I wouldn’t. Because no matter how many native speakers I may use, my grammar is always crucially based on internalized, subjectively known rules and norms. It’s impossible to study a language without at the same time internalizing at least part of the language, without becoming part of the socially shared system of rules that the language actually is. Norms can’t be verified or falsified. They can only be correct or incorrect.
What I mean to say with this is that even if language is based on the transmitting of physical signals, we can only gain substantive knowledge of language by studying it as something very much different than physics.
This is not a particularly radical statement, mind you. It does not imply idealism, or even dualism. As I mentioned to OB, it would be quite compatible with a philosophy of emergent materialism. So I can’t see where your hyperbolic statements about me being “insane”, or indulging in “mysticism” or talking about tooth-fairies or teapots circling Uranus come from.
Particularly as what you are rallying in support of this hyperbolic noise you are making is the existence of correlations between brain activity and thinking. I hope I don’t need to explain to you that this is still quite a long way from explaining thought and subjective experience. Not even to speak of reducing thought to physical/neurological activity. We have your assurance that “we’re working on it”. Sure. And perhaps one day we will have a reductionist theory of mind. But at the moment, we have not and the only way to gain knowledge about mental and cultural affairs is by studying them on their own terms. Not by studying physics.
I’m a philosophical Theist of some kind, which sets me apart a lot from most of the commenters here. But I am also quite clear of what parts of my thinking are based on science, what parts of them are based on more-or-less solid metaphysics, and what parts are purely speculative. I have no need of certainty – certainty is rather dull. But the vehemence with which you defend an, at least at this moment, speculative philosophical viewpoint (though respectable as such, mind you) as not only science/knowledge but the only thing possible apart from indulging into mysticism and belief in tooth-fairies, indicates to me that you do.
I had some sympathy for Merlijn’s position right up to the point where he used the phrase “I hope I don’t need to explain to you…” which is straight out of the academic genteel abuse phrase book, rather undercutting the straw man he was so carefully assembling. Surely the study of language analogy only works if the existence of the subject matter cannot be established? A better analogy to theology might perhaps be the extensive literature written about Sherlock Holmes. Holmesians discuss the precise location of Watson’s war wound,and their arguments can get very sophisticated (and previous comments seem to suggest sophistication is a good thing irrespective of what one is being sophisticated about) but Watson does not have to actually exist for the arguments to have merit. Yet you can write all the secondary literature you like and Watson will still not actually exist.
But Ken, I’m not arguing in favour of theology here. That’s beside the point. I’m arguing against G. Tingey finding the thought that there might be other things in the world than physical stuff “insane”. The reason I mentioned language here is that it’s the area I’m most familiar with and that its existence can be established. There is no intended analogy here: I mean exactly what I am saying.
There’s physical stuff, and then there’s what physical stuff does. Once you throw sentience into the mix, things get complicated; then when you add some intelligence, things get so complicated that the intelligent entities themselves can’t possibly come up with predictive laws for all of it. But they can make efforts to do all sorts of things short of that: and the arts, humanities, social sciences, conversation, gossip, and reality tv are born.
It’s interesting that everything most humans find most engrossing, entertaining, interesting, puzzling go on in that area. Physics is basic but there aren’t huge numbers of physicists, while there are lots of gossips and novelists and soap-watchers. If it were all law-like and predictable of course we wouldn’t be as compelled. Funny – the more intelligent the entity is, the harder it is to predict what the entity will do, and the more interested the entity becomes in its own doings. It’s as if it were Meant.
I think physics is quite engrossing, too. But otherwise I would agree. An a priori problem for any kind of predictive theory of mental states and behaviour (physicalist or not) would seem to be that subjective experiences are unique – which would seem to make verification a real problem.
But there’s something else that’s bothering me. And I can’t quite verbalize what it is – it’s been at the back of my mind all day but keeps slipping out of reach. Suppose we had a theory linking mental states, and thereby, human actions, with physics (brain chemistry and the like) in a predictive, deterministic fashion. There seems to me to be something fishy about a scientific theory subsuming as explananda the very criteria (rationality, logical thought etc.) by which it is measured. But I can’t point my finger on it, yet.
What I mean to say with this is that even if language is based on the transmitting of physical signals, we can only gain substantive knowledge of language by studying it as something very much different than physics.
But we gain substantive knowledge of it by studying it, by application of the scientific method, not through divine revelation. And this study has not revealed anything that contradicts physics. It’s part of a tower: quantum nonsense -er- mechanics, particle physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, neurolinguistics, linguistics, sociolinguistics (or whatever). Linguistics is a product of a physical system, a physically explicable system. Language cannot use sounds that the human voicebox cannot make, cannot use symbols that the human mind cannot contain. Its systems are generally hardcoded into the neurons of your brain.
That hardcoding is of a general system. This confuses people because they expect either a blank slate where language is aquired by an impossibly general intelligence or they expect children born speaking Hebrew. But that general system is a neurological reality and is physically explicable. It just makes sense to talk about brain regions rather than individual quarks by the time you’ve worked your way up to that point. Or grammars and phonetics (or whatever), which are still rule-based systems, when you get above it.
Language is a case of “no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in”. Poetic use of language, evolution of language, is still language and still has rules and causes.
Subjectivity is nice, but it is a product of a physical system.
The study of language has not found anything that contradicts physics, to be sure – or the other way around. But language is not a physical system. It cannot be studied as such, e.g. without “agent’s knowledge”. Linguistic change for instance can only be explained by referring to unpredictable, goal-directed speaker actions. In other words, the causes and rules governing either the evolution of language or its poetic usage (both rooted in the same thing, with regards to the importance of metaphor in linguistic change) are nothing like the regularity and causality found in physics.
(I’m somewhat sceptical about the hard-coding of language in the brain. In as far as language reflects general cognitive structures, yes. Language as grammar – I doubt it)
[So Merlijn, you are suggesting there are realities that are NOT measureable or quantifiyable in this real, physical world?]
The subjective experience of, for example, looking at a red book. Either this doesn’t exist (Dennett’s position) or it is not a physical entity.
Also, the basic mathematical entities have to be considered to exist unless you are going to end up saying some very controversial things in philosophy of mathematics. If there are two stones, then there is also a set of two stones (and two sets of one stone, and an empty set), and this is an entity distinct from its members.
On the subject of how a deity can simultaneously be a creator of worlds but also a human, there is a quite good book called “The New Testament”.
‘there is a quite good book called “The New Testament”.’
Oh, gee, that’s a thought. Good point. And of course it does answer all those questions, thoroughly and convincingly and unarguably. Thanks so much for reminding me. Problem solved! Questions answered! Hooray, now I can think about other things.
On the subject of how “god” (or at least god’s messengers) can threaten and blackmail people into being good little submissive beleivers, and oppress women, there is this compilation into a book called “The New Testament”.
The relevant sections are called the book of revelation, and the two epistles of Paul to Timothy, in case you were wondering.
See also my post into an older thread (either the “Dawkins” or the “Explain” one) about why I dislike christianity, in response to someoene elses’ very stupid question.
On second thoughts, I’ll find it, and re-post, just below here…..
Christainity is a religion.
It is based on branze-age myths and obscurantism. It has killed millions, over the years, in the name of its’ “holy truths”, and is still killing (Think “Mother Theresa”, or no condoms in Africa, or no birth-control anywhere, or Northern Ireland, or abortion doctors being killed in the USA.
Christians are deliberately peddling lies to children in this country – see…
http://www.truthinscience.org.uk
http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/site/content/category/18/52/65/
Why should I respect this load of lies, if comes into the public arena?
What consenting adults do in private (including religion) is their business.
On the street, I’m going to trash it, if I can, because it is lies.
See… WTM, by the way.
Well come on, Ophelia, it was you that wrote:
[Either God is a local human-like god that humans can sensibly love and pray to (in which case one wonders where exactly it is) or it’s something so far away and so strange that as far as we’re concerned it might as well not exist at all. But it’s a cheat to pretend it can be both.]
as if it was something that Christians might not have thought of. Since it is a fundamental principle of a major world religion that such a dual nature is possible, simply gainsaying it as impossible isn’t really an argument.
“Since it is a fundamental principle of a major world religion that such a dual nature is possible, simply gainsaying it as impossible isn’t really an argument.”
Sorry, I don’t understand the meaning of that “Since”. Is the idea that no fundamental principle of a major world religion can simply be obviously impossible? If so, why would that be? Do all major world religions have a system for screening their own fundamental principles and rejecting those that were made with the knowledge available in (say) 3000 BCE or 70 CE or 610 CE and turn out to be wide of the mark?
daquared has done it again – I’m not sure his brain is switched on.
He said: “Since it is a fundamental principle of a major world religion that such a dual nature is possible, simply gainsaying it as impossible isn’t really an argument.”
BUT, if this “god” thing is both these things, and has a dual (or even trinitarian!) nature, then ….
At least PART of the “god” thing will be physically in the real world, and thus be detectable.
Oops.
That does not follow at all. It could be that part of a dual or triune God is indeed “in” physical nature, and is yet not detectable. Namely, if it makes up either the whole or the implicit regularities of physical nature.
As to Dsquared and OB’s point: what I think Dsquared is arguing (in this and the other thread) is that there is no a priori inconsistency and incoherence in a personal creator God: an omnipresent and omnipotent God can be imagined to relate to us without limit, at every moment. And that’s the whole point: imagining such a Deity is quite different from imagining it being evening on the surface of the sun (which is obviously impossible).
The whole question is whether such a conception can be attacked on internal logical/consistency grounds – and I don’t think it can. So you would need to argue that the actual existence of such a Deity is highly unlikely considering the features of our actual universe, as you have done elsewhere. But they’re very different lines of argument.
Nah – this Carl Sagan stuff is just really Deism, which historically folded into atheism – although it’s interesting that for some it seems to be going the other way now. I don’t think it’s quite right to say believing in a god who is both transcendent and immanent is a cheat, exactly. Conventional monotheism does not see god abstracted from the world deistically, nor intimately involved in it pantheistically. It’s not a ‘cheat’ – you should just say you find this inconceivable. But that’s just another way of saying you don’t believe in god – and we knew that anyway.
Perhaps “there is no a priori inconsistency and incoherence in a personal creator God: an omnipresent and omnipotent God can be imagined to relate to us without limit, at every moment.”
So what? An infinity of such entities could be conceived of, but what does that really contribute in trying to fathom the way the universe actually is? The fact that something can be imagined, and then made logically consistent by means of the introduction of various ad-hoc elements gives us no reason whatsoever to think that it is actually true. In order to get beyond mere armchair metaphysics, we need the scientific method.
It’s worth quoting Richard Carrier at length here on this subject, as, in my opinion, a few people on this forum are getting rather confused about what the scientific method is, what constitutes evidence, and why it is necessary:
“Long ago, people could make up any theories they wanted. As long as their theory fit the evidence, it was thought credible. But an infinite number of incompatible theories can fit the evidence. We can design a zillion religions that fit all the evidence, yet entail Christianity is false. And we can design a zillion secular worldviews that do the same. We could all be brains in a vat. Buddha could have been right. Allah may be the One True God. And so on, ad infinitum. But since only one of these countless theories can be true, it follows that the odds are effectively infinity to one against any theory being true that is merely compatible with the evidence. In other words, not a chance in hell. Therefore, we cannot believe a theory simply because it can be made to fit all the evidence. To do so would effectively guarantee our belief will be false.”
Merlijn spouted this noinsense: “That does not follow at all. It could be that part of a dual or triune God is indeed “in” physical nature, and is yet not detectable. Namely, if it makes up either the whole or the implicit regularities of physical nature.”
Bollocks.
This is hand-waving meaningless drivel.
If by the whole or the implicit regularities… you mean the space-time metric, then that is, and has bee, and is being measured.
[Is the idea that no fundamental principle of a major world religion can simply be obviously impossible?]
Yes, in a word. It is the simple and empirical claim that it is limitingly unlikely that something which could be seen to be obviously contradictory by a simple one sentence assertion could nevertheless be the subject of more than a thousand years of philosophical analysis by some of the greatest minds in history, without any of them ever having noticed that there was such a simple one-sentence refutation.
When people come in from outside the literature with theories named after themselves which pupport to overthrow the central and most important principles of a discipline in the scientific field, we tend to call them cranks. We gently explain to them that while it is not logically contradictory and therefore in some sense “possible” that everyone in history has got things wrong and that they are the world-historical genius who has, in the space of half a page, shown all the rest to be fallacious, it is in fact very unlikely and that they should not expect to be taken very seriously.
I wrote a reply to Nick on the other thread.
GT: You can’t test the hypotheses (physical) science is based on, such that laws of nature are not local or spatiotemporal, with physical science itself. That would be internally contradictory. Because the whole enterprise is based on the repeatability of spatiotemporal occurrences. Which is why miracles – a presumed one-time breaking of laws of nature – are scientifically unfalsifiable and indeed untestable.
If I were to make the statement that the whole of physical nature is part of a dual God, with some kind of Platonic world of concepts and ideas as the other part, my God hypothesis would still leave nothing to be physically tested or observed.
“the subject of more than a thousand years of philosophical analysis by some of the greatest minds in history”
So you’re saying that the kinds of mushy claims made by newspaper columnists and radio burblers have been the subject of more than a thousand years of philosophical analysis by some of the greatest minds in history? I don’t think that’s true. I don’t believe it. I think newspaper columnists and radio burblers are just making it up as they go along. I am (as surely you realize, however insistently you pretend not to) talking about this public discourse religion. I’m not (obviously) offering a theory named after myself which purports “to overthrow the central and most important principles of a discipline in the scientific field” – I’m questioning the woolly rhetorical assertive made-up theistic bullshit that gets endlessly recycled in the public discourse. Your argument seems to be that Aquinas was a clever guy, therefore I can’t say Madeleine Bunting is talking crap.
Nick – Sorry, but I had to cut the Richard Carrier passage drastically, for copyright reasons. Is it online, can you give us a link to it? Or perhaps you’d like to post it on your blog. I have to be strict and legalistic here because of TPM.
[So you’re saying that the kinds of mushy claims made by newspaper columnists and radio burblers ]
Newspaper columnists tend to talk a hell of a lot of rubbish about evolution, sociology and quantum physics too, whenever given the chance. This generally means that they haven’t understood what they’re talking about, which is a flaw in them rather than in what they’re talking about. Also, your original post was about “God of the Bible and of clerics” as well – it certainly read as if you had a general argument against the possibility of a personal God.
Whenever I see someone like Pinker or Dawkins talking the most unbelievable rubbish about evolutionary psychology, for example, I tend to believe that there is something called “evolution” and something called “psychology”, and Dawkins and Pinker are talking rubbish about it. Not that there is something called “Pinker’s Evolutionary Psychology” which Pinker is accurately describing but which is intrinsically implausible and flawed. Different ways of describing the same thing perhaps, but my way keeps things clear and it seems to me to be a more scientific approach.
I see what you mean with the last one. I think it’s important though that the dichotomy between them should not be too strict. Science and religion are both attempts at making sense of the world (in your opinion, conflicting ones. In mine, at least potentially complementary ones). Which means that laymen also have an interest in finding out what kind of stuff is found in the universe and where all of it is going, etc. And likewise scientists may have an interest in debunking Creationist nonsense, or self-help Quantum Theory weightwatching books. So I think the analogy DSquared drew is at least partially correct.
“Which means that laymen also have an interest in finding out what kind of stuff is found in the universe and where all of it is going, etc.”
Ye-es…but there is no investigation in religion, no research, no testing, no experimentation, no real inquiry. That’s one of the irritating (to an outsider) things about it. It’s all assertion. The assertion may be more generally trusted or respected if offered by a cleric rather than a layperson, but that’s a credential rather than a form of expertise or technical knowledge. So, sure, lay people have an interest in finding out about the universe, but mere assertion cuts a good deal less ice. Science and religion may both be attempts at making sense of the world, but they use such different methods that I don’t think the analogy does work.
Yes and no. Whether there is inquiry in religion depends on the religion. Seventh-Day Adventism – preciously little. Anglicanism, Catholicism, etc. – there is, because Scripture and tradition are regarded as interpretanda rather than as givens. Which means the whole thing has to conform to certain philosophical/philological standards. Someone claiming that God created the world in six 24-hour days can be answered by pointing out that with the modern-day science-based view of the universe, the statement makes no sense at all. But back in the 5th century, he could be answered by referring to St. Augustine’s pointing out the inherent contradictions in such an idea.
So, I would state that religion as a body of knowledge is a mixed bag of inquiry and revealed truths/assertions – and the proportions of the mix depend on the religion. With theology comprising the inquiry parts (not all religions have a theology).
Hmmmmm. I’m not sure that sounds like real inquiry. It sounds more like trying to fit prior religious and/or theological commitments into a body of existing knowledge that it has become too difficult (epistemically and socially) to ignore. Religion (Anglicanism, Catholicism) doesn’t itself inquire into the nature of the universe in the manner of physics, for instance; it looks at physics and tries to adapt the religion to (sort of) fit.
It’s not really inquiry to the extent that the main goal is saving the religious commitments. That’s pseudo-inquiry.