The wisdom of Bellarmine
Anthony Grayling quotes Cardinal Bellarmine in 1615, in his reply to Steve Fuller’s reply to his review of Fuller’s Dissent Over Descent. Grayling quotes Bellarmine because ‘Fuller’s endeavour turns in important part on trying to show that science is the child of religion, that its styles of thought are religion’s styles, and that the very coherence of the scientific enterprise owes itself to the grand narrative of the religious world-view,’ and the Cardinal does quite a good job of showing why that is a ridiculous notion.
As you are aware, the Council of Trent forbids the interpretation of the Scriptures in a way contrary to the common opinion of the holy Fathers. Now if you will read, not merely the Fathers, but modern commentators on Genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua, you will discover that all agree in interpreting them literally as teaching that the Sun is in the heavens and revolves round the Earth with immense speed, and that the Earth is very distant from the heavens, at the centre of the universe, and motionless. Consider then, in your prudence, whether the Church can tolerate that the Scriptures should be interpreted in a manner contrary to that of the holy Fathers and of all modern commentators, both Latin and Greek.
If science is the child of that, then a rhinoceros can be the child of a fruit fly, a hummingbird can be the child of a grey whale, a snow leopard can be the child of a star fish. A way of thinking that ‘forbids’ something, and in particular that forbids anything ‘contrary to the common opinion’ of some guys called ‘the holy Fathers’ is not a scientific way of thinking. A way of thinking that points out what commentators on certain chapters of a particular very old book ‘agree in interpreting them literally as teaching’ what the sun is and does (and gets it dead wrong) and then points out (in a threatening manner) that ‘the Church’ isn’t going to tolerate contradiction of agreed interpretation by commentators on parts of a very old book – is also not a scientific way of thinking; it is of course not only the opposite of a scientific way of thinking, it is its deadly, violent, murderous enemy.
Like some others, Fuller wants to see religion…as giving us our idea of the odyssey, the quest, for truth and understanding (“salvation” secularised), a plumbing of mysteries and a searching out of hidden meanings, our errors and stumblings on the way justified by the faith that we can get there in the end. Thus one sees the trick: the infection of the argument by religious terminology to sacralise what is essentially so different from the static metaphysics, the unchanging and marmoreal already-revealed Truth of the faith, which requires not investigation and questioning – for that you die at the stake – but submission, acceptance, obedience, worship.
Just so, and as we’ve seen, more than once, that’s also what Martha Nussbaum does in her book on freedom of ‘conscience’ and religion: she talks repeatedly about a ‘quest for meaning’ when in fact what most religion delivers is not a quest at all but a settled dogma which reqires, indeed, not investigation and questioning but submission, acceptance, obedience, worship. There’s something really annoying about fans of religion pretending that religion is the source of quests for truth and understanding when for the most part it is the opposite and enemy of any such thing.
I found the exchange between Grayling and Fuller particularly satisfying, since Fuller makes such an ass of himself and Grayling is so composed and clear. But in your note this is what stood out for me:
“There’s something really annoying about fans of religion pretending that religion is the source of quests for truth and understanding when for the most part it is the opposite and enemy of any such thing.”
Bingo! That’s exactly the point. Religions have started to make this claim. They never did before. They were IT! Now, they’re on a quest. What for? For what they’ve already found! But if you can make it sound as though you’re on a quest, it fits neatly into the culture. Science does this too, doesn’t? Try to find out the truth? Well, then, join us, and we’ll lead you on a quest too! The Word is quicker than the mind!
Just so – but what is Martha Nussbaum doing helping them with that project? It always puzzles me, because she is no fool. Sentimental, I think, but certainly no fool.
A quest for meaning and a quest for truth are not necessarily the same thing. If I look for the meaning of my life, I’m looking for a story about my life that satisfies me, because strictly speaking, life has no meaning: words have meaning, sentences have meaning. Meaning is not a property that life can have; only a story about life can have meaning. Religion is a story about life. Stories are fictions, not truths.
True, quest for meaning and quest for truth are not the same. But Fuller (in this context) is talking about truth and understanding rather than meaning.
And religion may be a story about life, but most priests and imams don’t treat it as a story.
Martha N. certainly can distinguish between a quest for meaning and one for truth. However, most of us need to find meaning in life. There seem to be two possibilities. First, accept a prefabricated story, a dogma, generally a religious dogma, although vulgar Marxism-Leninism was an effective equivalent for many years. Second, create your own story: say, a story in which my life is a journey towards wisdom or is a Socratic questioning of all received bullshit. The problem with creating your own story is that unless your ability for self-deception is superior to the norm, you know that you made up the story yourself and that is fiction and hence, not the meaning of your life. Therefore, if you need to give meaning to your life, the pre-fab account, sanctified by tradition, your parents and a Holy Book, has some real advantages. The last possibility is to abandon the quest for meaning and open a bottle of wine. Cheers.
A historian of science has a guest post at Evolving Thoughts responding to Grayling’s original post.
http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2008/09/even_the_good_guys_get_it_wron.php
While he makes a good point about the reaction to the moons of Jupiter, I’m not sure if we are to interpret the response to Foscarini as another “friendly warning”??
About Nussbaum and why she accepts this “quest” thing: because many religious people go religion-hunting as part of a quest for truth. This is especially true for the kinds of religious people you’d meet in academia–intelligent, well-read, prone to playing with new ideas all the time.
Nussbaum is probably extrapolating straight from her own experiences with religious people rather than with the truth-claims of the religions themselves or from the fundamentalists who she (I’m guessing) wouldn’t have much chance to talk to. That would be my speculation, anyway.
Jenavir,
Continual self-justification of her personal “conversion narrative” might explain a lot…
You just need to look at the “settled science” of anthropomorphic global warming/climate change to see the parallels between science and religion. The people who are convinced of this “science” say that the science is settled, and “deniers” should be prosecuted. Why does the name Galileo come to mind…
Who says ‘deniers’ should be prosecuted? I don’t know of anyone who has said that, even among random partisans, much less among scientists. So I can’t tell you why the name ‘Galileo’ comes to mind, unless it’s merely because you’re trying to make a tendentious and unwarranted point.
amos, that’s not funny, it’s even less funny because it seems you were not at all joking. The whole blabla about the human condition leading to the need to feel part of a grand – preferably also intelligent – design is typically what the religious want us to cling onto in the moments they consider passing, the moments of disbelief. And to oppose it to relativist story-telling as one and only alternative is so typically po-mo you logically end up with nihilism.
It’s the kind of thing that´s normally coming just ahead of: “then I was born again”.
No, not funny, not funny at all. Let’s go for the third way: watch the movie!
Okay, two scientists have said that (though Suzuki apparently points out that he didn’t mean it literally). I said I didn’t know of any; now I do. They still of course don’t have quite the same coercive power that the 1615 Vatican had, so I still don’t think Galileo is entirely relevant, unless as a bit of hyperbole.
I would also add that the use of the word “denier” by the climate change activists is a clear attempt to link those who do not accept their arguments with people who deny that the Holacaust occurred.
I have over 20 years of experience in evaluating scientific models for nuclear power plants, and I must say that the “evidence” that I have seen for anthropomorphic global warming is not at all strong. This is a very difficult process to model, with many complex non-linear phenomena that are not at all well understood, and it is becoming clear that the modelers have been quite “creative” in the assumptions they use to describe the phenomena. I have quite a bit of experience in identifying “creativity” in scientific computer models, and the global warming advocats appear to be very “creative”. They develop models that produce the same results no matter what kind of input data is provided to them, they throw out data that is inconsistent with their hypotheses, they ignore important phenomena (such as solar radiation and clouds) that overwhelm their favorite focal point (CO2) and they try their hardest to not make the models open to public scutiny, in spite of the importance of this issue.
It is not a good picture, and it is going to give science a bad name when all is said and done.
amos: just because you make up a meaning for yourself doesn’t make it fiction. You can make it true by your actions.
Andy: I suspect her “personal conversion” narrative is a big part of it, yes. She judges religion as an entity by the people who seek out religion, and her model for what those people are like is based on HERSELF. Which doesn’t account for people like, say, Jerry Falwell.
The sad part here is that capital-S Science (i.e. institutional science) did adopt some of the forms of religion in order to give scientists some of the standing that priests had. There’s a reason why non-scientists are called “laymen.” The history behind that is fascinating…but I don’t trust Steve Fuller to look into it well.
Yes, denier is a silly word.
Part of the problem of course is that it’s not a purely scientific controversy. If the worst case scenarios are accurate and if humans can do anything to ameliorate things by acting now then one can understand why people would be desperate to persuade skeptics – in fact that still holds even if the believers simply think both ifs are true. That situation is a terrible one for doing disinterested science.
I suppose the same could apply to Bellarmine. He may have really thought that God would smite everyone if Galileo were not silenced.
The 11th Commandment is famously Christ’s ‘Golden Rule’ – actually to be found in much earlier thinkers such as Hillel. The 12th is actually the unwritten one underlying the whole theocratic project, namely ‘thou shalt not question’. If you wish to- beyond trifling issues – then find another mob to belong to. Either that, or if your questioning has been too much of a threat to the established edifice, then step up to this stake here.
Believing is a means to belonging, not the other way round. If you are going to belong, you are going to conform, End of story.
Climate change issues are interesting, having divided people into two camps, which we could label believers vs doubters, or accepters vs denialists on the specific issue of the role of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Climate Debate Daily (http://climatedebatedaily.com/) divides them into callers (to action) vs dissenters.
I maintain a skeptical view against both propositions: that there is something going wrong, and we can do something about it vs that there is nothing going wrong and we don’t need to do anything. However, observance of the Precautionary Principle tips one pretty quickly into the first camp.
Professor Tim Flannery while calling for urgent action against greenhouse gas emissions, has said ‘I would love to be proved wrong on this.’ I think that to be a very scientific attitude.
I only speak from my own experience. During my life-time, I’ve made up a number of stories about who I am, stories which give meaning to my life. I once saw myself as a crusader for social justice. I wrote my biography as I went from cause to cause. At one moment I realized that my life wasn’t a crusade for social justice, that actually, I spent more time wondering about dinner (to give an example) or about whether the wash was dry. Maybe the meaning of my life was checking to see if the wash was dry. My life just can’t be labeled. I can invent an infinite number of stories to describe it, but my life is always more than those stories (which may or may not have some descriptive reality), my life is more chaotic, less consistent and less coherent than any possible story. Now others may have more coherent lives. I speak only about myself. That’s not postmodernism, as I understand it. Postmodernism says that all descriptions, even scientific ones, are stories, fictions or interpretations. I only say that stories that people like me create to give meaning to their lives are fictions because life, as I experience it, resists classification. That doesn’t lead me to seek some kind of grand narrative imposed by tradition, religion, the media or political movements. I’m experimenting to see if I can live without writing my own biography as I go. I hope that this post makes sense.
OB: They still of course don’t have quite the same coercive power that the 1615 Vatican had, so I still don’t think Galileo is entirely relevant, unless as a bit of hyperbole.
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Well, Hansen is _the_ driving force behind this movement in the US, and he has accused the current administration of trying to stifle him, many times, so I would not say that he doesn’t have coercive power, because he is a senior manager in the US government, in control of large amount of research money.
The coercive power that is being exerted over scientists in this matter is control of resources. If you accept the AGM arguments, you can get all sorts of money to produce studies that show that the results will be terrible. If you do not agree, you get tarred and feathered, usually in public, and your funding dries up. This is just as harsh as what the Vatican did to Galileo, locking him up till he recanted. I guess they could have literally had him burned at the stake, or something, but charges by people like Hansen and Suzuki have charged up a LOT of people who are literally ready to burn deniers in some sort of non-carbon liberating bon-fire.
OB: Part of the problem of course is that it’s not a purely scientific controversy. If the worst case scenarios are accurate and if humans can do anything to ameliorate things by acting now then one can understand why people would be desperate to persuade skeptics – in fact that still holds even if the believers simply think both ifs are true. That situation is a terrible one for doing disinterested science.
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Worst-case scenario studies used to be my life’s work, evaluating nuclear power plants, but the problem is that that method cannot be applied to everything in life. We used to make “conservative assumptions”, and stack up the uncertainties in the worst possible way, to try to ensure that the safety systems in the plant had sufficient margin that they could accomodate unforseen situations, and overall, in the west, nuclear power plants have therefore demonstrated quite a bit of robustness.
However, it does not make sense to apply this same technique to an entire society with the intention of inducing wrenching change that is unlikely to be unnecessary. The AGM people are using their final conclusion (western society MUST change) to drive their analyses, and this is wrongheaded. OB is correct that this is not just a scientific argument – it is being driven by environmental zeal to re-shape society in their own image. This is why I claim that it is really not a scientific argument, and make the comparisons to Galileo. It is all about who will control the society – the true believers in the church of environmentalism, or heretics and blasphemers.
OB – you make your living with words, so you should recognize what is happening here.
Full Disclosure: I am fully retired, and work for no one any more (except my wife and cats), and receive a comfortable pension from the US govt which is not influenced by any fossil-fuel or nuclear industry entities. I now live in France, and my electricity is almost all nuclear.
amos – not really, no, but my interest in your biography is limited, sorry. I think you should read your prior post, it didn’t qualify as you qualify now – postmodernist philosophy is not really the issue, a postmodernist social cult is the issue & you seem to confirm the latter – even to the extreme of making what you say purely relative to you, & you alone, but all the same saying it, for reasons unfathomable.
On environmental worst-case scenarios, as a point of information, if the actual future situation even begins to approach any of the many worst-case-type possibilities, then civilisation as we know it is, basically, doomed.
All scenarios that support any kind of mitigation are inherently optimistic and non-extreme, because much of the data supports interpretations that would indicate such mitigation to be a waste of time, and we might as well all just party down, because it’s too late to make a difference.
Now THAT’S a worst-case scenario.
rxc – what is that ‘you make your living with words, so you should recognize what is happening here’ that you attribute to me and then reply to as if I’d addressed it to you? It’s not from this comment thread, so wherever I said it I obviously didn’t address it to you – and I wouldn’t have anyway, because I have no idea how you make your living.
And another thing. You quote me saying that Suzuki and Hansen don’t have quite the same coercive power that the 1615 Vatican had, and then reply that you ‘would not say that [Hansen] doesn’t have coercive power.’ Well, obviously, neither would I, I said he doesn’t have quite the same coercive power that the 1615 Vatican had – which is perfectly true – he can’t have people burned at the stake.
‘it is being driven by environmental zeal to re-shape society in their own image.’
I don’t think you know that, and I also don’t think it’s true. It may be true of some people, but I don’t know why anyone should believe that it’s true of everyone who’s worried about climate change.
JoB: I did not make what I say relative to myself alone. I simply said that I could only speak of my own experience. They are very different affirmations.
amos, If not relative to you alone see my first comment. If you only speak of your own experience, what did you want to imply for others?
JoB: We have a communications failure, me thinks. I’ll try to be clearer. Let me review my affirmations:
1. Life has no meaning, because meaning has to do with semantics. Words have meaning as do sentences, stories and non-verbal communication (a smile), etc. Meaning is not a property that life can have.
2. Stories about life have meaning. Those stories can either be the traditional ones, generally religious one or ones that a person creates to give a meaning to his or her life. For example, the fact that I am a doctor and heal others can give meaning to my life.
3. I then affirm that the stories that a person makes up have an inherent flaw: the person knows that the story is a fiction, that he or she invented it.
4. I then, as you notice, back-track and say that I will only speak from personal experience. Why? First of all, I admire people who successfully create a narrative for themselves and far be it from me, to subvert their narrative. That’s not my style. Second, I’ve never talked to many people about this subject, and so I genuinely don’t know what the experience of others is. What I label an inherent flaw may not be a problem for some or many others. There may be literature on the subject, but I’m not aware of it. Nietzsche certainly delves into it, but Nietzsche is hard to interpret. There is Camus’s idea of the absurd and the Sartre of The Nausea, who by the end of the book decides to give meaning to his meaningless life by writing a book. Thus, when I say that I only speak of my own experience, I’m not making an epistemological claim that I can know nothing but my experience. I’m making an empirical claim that I haven’t read enough about the subject or talked to enough other people, to speak of anything but my own experience. You say that biographies don’t interest you (at least not mine), so I will not ask you about your experience. However, I am in no way denying that it is possible for others to have the same experience as I do or to dialogue with others about our shared or non-shared experiences. What’s more, I would welcome a dialogue on the subject. My biographical sketch was simply an attempt to open a dialogue on the subject.
But amos, what does any of this have to do with the post? I did mention Nussbaum and her constant invocation of quests for ‘meaning,’ but I’m not sure that warrants this detailed pursuit – it wasn’t the central point of the post.
Sorry. We (or I) got side-tracked. Think of yourself as a host who starts such stimulating conversations that the guests forget where the conversation started.
The claim that science’s mode of enquiry is said to be rooted in the religious schism – Luther’s project to test the Church’s claims against the actual Bible, and reject the corruption and organisational bullshit that had been built.
This stance of skepticism to hierarchy and dogma, relying instead on tools like personal enquiry and reason, is said to have led to the liberation of thought that unchained science.
The religious reaction against the revelations of Geology and scientific biology was a few hundred years later, and the first premises (eg age of the earth) were found to need a few teensy adjustments from the literal scripture.
But obviously from the above, that history isn’t so and all religious thought is and was uniformly oppressive of reason.
OB, sorry about that inartful post. I was trying to say to you that you make your living with words. I was not trying to attribute that phrase to you.
Regarding the desire of environmentalists, of course I cannot prove that they all have a desire to transform society, but their leaders certainly believe it, as they say in their writings (see, e.g., Al Gore, “Earth in the Balance”). From what I read from environmentalists, those who write, really do believe that humans need to change their ways on this planet, and they intend to do their best to make that happen. I believe that this is what activism is all about, whatever the subject matter.
However, I realize that we are talking about different people – you are talking about people who are concerned about climate change, while I am talking about environmentalists, and the two groups are not necessarily congruent. I agree that there are people who are not environmentalists who are concerned about climate change, because of what they have heard/read about the subject. I believe that these people are generally well educated, mostly not in any scientific field, but with enough science to understand the arguments being made.
They need to hear the arguments from people who are skeptical, in order to be able to make a better informed decision about the subject. I don’t think the skeptical arguments are being presented as widely as the scare stories of the believers. And the people I quoted seem to be saying that the skeptical arguments should NOT be publicized, because they confuse the non-experts, and erode support for the believers’ position. I think there are parallels here to Galileo’s situation when he claimed that the earth revolved around the sun, in opposition to the Vatican’s position that the earth was at the center of the universe. In both situations, the believers do not want inconvenient facts to be brought up that challenge the positions that they have declared to be “settled”.
Science is all about challenging accepted positions, with new data and new models and new interprepations. When someone says that a phenomenon should not be questioned because it would challenge a “settled matter”, then the discussion is no longer “science”. This is what I am trying to say.
What if the “settled matter” is the generally vaguely spherical nature of the Earth? Or its habit of orbiting the Sun? Is it “science” to insist on questioning those? Or just bonkers?
amos, we’ll close this here & I’m sure it will be on-topic soon enough again. Just this: your numbered points are to me pomo points. Making a split between life & language is their basic error – an error that has been superseded by a couple of good authors who speak about just what you believe only Nietszche’s spoken about. It’s body-mind dualism & a fair amount of classical scepticism, & the bad thing about it isn’t so much that it’s wrong; the bad thing is that there is a po-mo social cult that grew out of it like a weed.
That’s better – make my name blue, I do not want to stress the B&W machines out of memory ;-)
Ian:”Professor Tim Flannery while calling for urgent action against greenhouse gas emissions, has said ‘I would love to be proved wrong on this.’ I think that to be a very scientific attitude.”
Tim Flannery seems to be a lovely guy, but being proved wrong in extreme claims is his forte.
The Precautionary Principle is not a principle of rationalism, but a conceit of activism. Real life requires people to act on incomplete knowledge.
Dave: What if the “settled matter” is the generally vaguely spherical nature of the Earth? Or its habit of orbiting the Sun? Is it “science” to insist on questioning those? Or just bonkers?
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Dave, if you have some basis for contesting these matters, then you should present them. They would fall under the category of “extraordinary claims that demand extraordinary proof”. About 100 years ago, Enstein’s thory of special relativity fell into that category, as did quantum mechanics later in the 20th century. LOTS of physicists had problems with them, and quantum mechanics still troubles just about everyone, because it involves phenomena that are at odds with all of our ordinary experience with human-scale objects. In both cases, the experimental data is what actually drove the new theories, and the theories made predictions that could be tested in a repeatable fashion by non-proponents of the theories. THIS is what makes it science. Just recently, a satellite provided some new confirmation of a phenomenon that was predicted by special relativity, 100 years ago. It took this long to develop the technology to test it, and the data is still consistent with SR.
If you have some basis for saying the earth is not generally spherical, or that it does not orbit the sun, then you should let us know, and show how it can be confirmed. Just asserting it is not science. And I will defend to the death your right to present your arguments.
You contradict yourself. There are indeed many alternative ‘sceptical’ hypotheses to explain the phenomena generally taken to be part of the anthropogenic global warming model. However, while it is the case that climatological activists go to great lengths to explain why such hypotheses do not fit the observed data as well as does the AGW model (see realclimate.org for literally hundreds of examples), new ‘sceptics’ keeping popping up, often with the same refuted hypotheses, or with mere handwaving.
It is not I who is by analogy trying and failing to come up with a plausible reason why we should reconsider the heliocentric model of the solar system, it is the AGW ‘sceptics’. And yet they continue.
Dave:
I’ve seen Kevin Trenberth say that the circulation models do not make predictions, so the models cannot be said “to fit” the observed data.
Gosh, and there you go again. Hundreds, nay thousands, of published papers, hundreds of thousands of person-hours of research and analysis, and a three-line comment blows it all to smoke. Guess the sun does orbit the earth after all…
Trenberth is an expert on this question. Address your objections to him please.
Yeah, and all the other guys farm chickens, and just do climatology at the weekends for fun…
“Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth is Head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. From New Zealand, he obtained his Sc. D. in meteorology in 1972 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Scientific Assessment of Climate Change. He recently served on the Scientific Steering Group for the Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) program and was co-Chair from 1995 to1999. He also served from 1999 to 2006 on the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and he chairs the WCRP Observation and Assimilation Panel. He has also served on many national committees. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the American Association for Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. In 2000 he received the Jule G. Charney award from the AMS and in 2003 he was given the NCAR Distinguished Achievement Award. He edited a 788 page book Climate System Modeling, published in 1992 by Cambridge University Press. He has published over 400 scientific articles or papers, including 40 books or book chapters, and over 175 refereed journal articles and has given many invited scientific talks as well as appearing in a number of television, radio programs and newspaper articles. He is listed among the top 20 authors in highest citations in all of geophysics. “
(from http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html)
It gets better:
from http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2007/06/predictions_of_climate.html
“Predictions of climate
Posted by Oliver Morton on behalf of Kevin E. Trenberth
I have often seen references to predictions of future climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), presumably through the IPCC assessments (the various chapters in the recently completedWorking Group I Fourth Assessment report ican be accessed through this listing). In fact, since the last report it is also often stated that the science is settled or done and now is the time for action.
In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been….
None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate..
“
Just a question. Has Mr Power @ D.Sc? It would seem he must from his capacity to judge the science involved.
I trust the likes of Dr. Trenberth to describe circulation models .
I know enough not to be impressed by the outputs of these models.