Religion and science are like totally the same
Mark Vernon has his own special brand of wool. I do not admire it. It is too unctuous.
Is science closer to religion than is typically assumed? Is religion closer to science? Might rational enquiry, based on evidence, share similarities with faith? These questions were raised by Charles Taylor, the distinguished Canadian philosopher, speaking at a Cambridge University symposium (pdf). He suspects that in the modern world we’ve bought into an illusion, one that posits a radical split between reason and revelation. Today, given the tension and violence that arises from misunderstandings about both, is a good time to examine them again.
It is annoying, and unctuous, that Vernon doesn’t mention that that ‘symposium’ was sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. Allow me to correct his omission: that ‘symposium’ was sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. It was called ‘Faith, Rationality, and the Passions.’ It kicked off with Templeton Prize-winner Charles Taylor. It looks to have been a very templetonian symposium.
Vernon summarizes Taylor explaining that it’s all an illusion, because ‘when you examine the way science actually works you see that there’s a third factor’ which is intuition. You know what’s coming next, of course, even if you haven’t already read Jerry Coyne’s take, or indeed the Vernon article itself – you know that up next is Kuhn and the paradigm shift and normal science, and so they all are. Therefore, Vernon (apparently via Taylor) sums up, religion and science are both faith so ha.
…the neat distinction between science and religion unravels, for religion involves commitments made on faith too. You might protest: revelation purports to come from God and is untestable, two characteristics that the scientist would certainly reject. Except that regardless of its source, a revelation can only make an impact if it makes sense to people, which is to say that they test it against their lives…
Therefore, revelation really is tested, just the way science is, because people ‘test it against their lives,’ whatever the fuck that means, therefore there is no ‘neat’ distinction between science and religion, therefore we can just forget all about all this poxy modernity and reason and science and testing (except for ‘testing it against our lives,’ which is way easy and painless and you can do it while you sleep) and live happily ever after. All shall come first! All shall have prizes! Though probably not Templeton Prizes.
Jesus. This is really unattractive thinking. And that so-called third factor? In my line of work we call it hard-won knowledge and experience that is well organized and rapidly retrieved when confronted with a problem, familiar, unfamiliar, well-formed or badly-formed.
I don’t need no stinkin’ intuition. I know shit and I notice patterns, thanks to a long evolutionary line of big-brained species. It’s just plain crap to pretend there is anything third-factory about it. They don’t deserve any prizes for their magical thinking.
I like Taylor, and I’d be surprised and disappointed if what he’s saying in that latest big long book of his turned out to amount to nothing more than “religion and science are both faith so ha,” which is indeed annoying and more typical of Dinesh D’Souza or some such prat. I was actually surprised that Templeton fingered Taylor for their prize. My first reaction to that was that maybe they’re not so bad after all. (Maybe.)
Popper – Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
Everyone knows that creativity plays an important part in science, it is the testing against empirical data that makes it unique.
“Testing it against our lives”? is that equivalent to “It is good if it works for you?” or “do what thou whilst shall be the whole of the law?”.
Self referential link alert (where the pdf should be)
Intuition and faith are both leaps. But with faith you never land. Or if you do, it’s messy.
Of course, if he really thinks there is no distinction between religion and science, he has just thrown NOMA out with the bathwater. I wonder if we’ll hear any criticism from the accommodationists…
“they test it against their lives”
In double-blind trials?
Dirigible. What a great way of putting it. But there are empirical checks for scientific intutitions. There are no empirical checks for religious beliefs, and saying that they are cashed in in terms of one’s life is really to say no more than that religious people think, or perhaps better, have a vague feeling, that their religious beliefs are somehow confirmed in experience. (William James once more into the breach.)
I’m just reading Chris Frith’s book Making up the Mind, a brilliant piece of popular cognitive science. And one of the things that he points out is that imagination is boring – and here he’s not talking about cultural experience, but imagining actions, movements, etc., when not actually acting or moving. The problem is that there are no errors, so the mind doesn’t learn anything. That’s what religious beliefs are like. They don’t really become part of the repertoire of ordinary life. They may be cashed in in terms of ritual, etc., but this is a completely different thing, and does not, as a rule, mesh with the rest of life. That’s why it’s something separated from ordinary life, or, as the religious say, holy.
Charles Taylor is not a distinguished Canadian philosopher. His book, The Secular Age, is a long exercise in special pleading. Just read the introduction, if you don’t want to waste time on more of it. It’s a sad example of what religion can do to the human mind. It may have won him the Templeton prize. It should not win him readers. The problem is exactly as Dirigible says: with religion you never land, and if you do, it’s messy.
Mark Vernon is becoming lighter and ligher all the time, flying off into the Empyrean. Pathetic. He hasn’t noticed, and neither has Taylor, that they don’t even get off the ground.
Benjamin – holy crap, my rug just turned into a walrus. No, wait, its an elephant seal. Phew, no paradigm shift required.
Carl Sagan has a section in ‘The Demon Haunted World’ that deals with this very question.
“In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast. This was a time when people stood up, made a toast, and then selected someone to respond. Nobody knew what toast they’d be asked to reply to, so it was a challenge for the quick-witted. In this case the toast was: “To physics and metaphysics.” Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy — truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and … the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.
The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory. “
I think this story can be applied to science as a whole – with one proviso – that we are defining science, not as a collection of ‘facts’ but as a method to learn the truth.
In fact science as a method doesn’t actually tell us the ‘truth’ per se, what it does is provides a method to figure out if a particular idea is incorrect. Those ideas can come from any source – religious stories, empirical scientific predictions, drug or alcohol induced dreams, poems, novels or songs etc but science alone provides the way we figure out if these ideas are incorrect (does the moon actually produce light? do humans come from a clot of blood? etc) It is by gradually removing the incorrect ideas that we get closer and closer to some sort of objective truth (although we can never be quite sure we’ve reached it).
Oops. Sorry about link. It’s not really self-referential, it’s just the default thing that happens when I mess up a link somehow. It was late in the day…
Intuition is based on fact. It is lightning-fast, unconscious perceptions of fact, and it gets better with experience. It is highly valuable, and not remotely the same thing as a commitment to faith.
That’s a good point. The word has at least two meanings, doesn’t it? At least in common usage? And that sows confusion? In cognitive science it means what Jenavir said but in ordinary discussion it means something more like ‘mysterious inward knowledge that no one can explain’ – right? The two are basically opposite, so discussions of this kind are just hopelessly misleading. Often, no doubt, on purpose.
Dammit – I must have deleted a couple by accident while deleting spam. Sorry. Re-insert it if you remember what it was.
Equivocation is not the last refuge of the scoundrel, but the first. Here, it’s “intuition” and “faith” that are used interchangeably even though at least two different and mutually incompatible definitions are actually in play. Elsewhere in the blather of twits like Vernon, it’s the word “God” that slips and slides in definition throughout, often from one clause to the next in the very same sentence. The question isn’t whether this slipperiness is deliberate dishonesty or not: I don’t really care. The question is why anyone dignifies the words of perpetual equivocators with the slightest attention at all.
If I see Mark Vernon on a byline, I won’t read the drivel that follows. If I see that someone has won a Templeton Prize, I add them to the growing list of people beneath my notice (unless I want some casual, low-effort fallacy-spotting practice).
In cognitive science it means what Jenavir said but in ordinary discussion it means something more like ‘mysterious inward knowledge that no one can explain’ – right?
In ordinary discussion, I think it means both what you said and what I said. Which heightens the confusion!
I think the only solution is for people to clarify what exactly they mean by these terms when they use them. “Faith” can also mean a variety of things.
The thing with intuition is that it’s rapidly changing, always adjusting to new perceptions. And faith, at least in according to some of the faithful, is supposed to be constant.
Ignorance, stupidity and prejudice are things people ‘test against their lives’ every day. More thoughtful people tend to find these wanting, and move on to better ideas.
‘Testing revelation against my life’ seems a fancy way of saying ‘my views are 50 to 500 years out of date and I’m very proud of them’.
Huh, where’d my comment go?
See above! 4 comments up. It was an accident – byproduct of spam deletion. Very sorry and please restore it if you remember it – or send it to me if you want me to insert it back where it was so that it will be in the right order.
I think I just made the same point G Felis would make later on, that intuition and faith are entirely distinct. I said something about rugs turning into walruses, the problem of induction, and the ubiquity of faith, but I don’t remember why, except to stretch my Hume-bone.
However, and more importantly I think, I also pointed out that Vernon is just acting like your average analytic philosopher by adopting an uncritical attitude towards the role of intuitions in the process of justification (though the analytic philosophers confine the role to the method of cases). I think this is a point against analytic philosophy, but in fairness I need to make clear that Vernon is saying the kinds of things that aren’t idiosyncratic. They’re contentious, but not idiosyncratic.
I might add, sort of in defence of Jenavir, that Gigerenzer’s work in social psychology claims that intuitions are more reliable than the critical philosopher assumes. (His work was grist for Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book “Blink”.) I’ve read his viewpoint, and I didn’t find that his evidence warranted any interesting general claim, though obviously more research into the area needs to be done.
I’ve been reading Pascal Boyer and he gives a pretty precise account of what intuition is – it’s inaccessible to introspection but that’s different from unreliable. A lot of intuitions are very reliable. If I’ve understood and remembered it correctly it’s more a matter of unconscious processing than it is of a mysterious ineffable inner wisdom.
It’s like my library card number. I always remember it without effort when I type it, but if I try to remember it without typing it I’m unsure about one place. (Is it 3 88 or 8 33?) It’s gone subconscious now – as if my fingers know it but my brain doesn’t. I know it better if I don’t think about it than if I do.
That’s interesting. I use the term “intuition” to talk about information that is at least sometimes accessible to introspection. Persistent gut hunches would be one species of intuition, for instance, and persistent gut hunches are surely accessed introspectively.
I take it that the key feature of intuition is an inclination to believe in the acceptability of some judgment, and deciding whether or not we believe a thing (or are inclined to believe a thing) can be established in various ways: i.e., through introspection, or through inference about our implicit judgments from our persistent natural behaviors. Your library card example might fall under the latter category, because you infer that you have an intuition from the way your fingers move when you’re putting in the code. But that shouldn’t mean that we make an error when we talk about persistent gut hunches as intuitions in other contexts.
Another important point is that there seems to be a distinction between mere representations and intuitions concerning representations. Your library code example might not be best described as an intuition at all — rather, it might better described as a representation in memory (which is kind of like knowing-how). At no point is there any need to posit that you implicitly believe your library code is the way it is, or (to say the same thing) that you’ve made an implicit judgment about it. (You, of course, explicitly believe that your code is whatever your fingers will point to, but that’s a different matter.) For instead, there’s just the context and the reaction, the stimulus and response, and we don’t need to posit any higher-order processing beyond mere retrieval from memory. So, supposing we go along with the formulation of intuition as “inclination to believe”, all the while understanding that belief is concerned with judgment, then we don’t need to attribute an intuition to be behind the cleverness of your fingers when in the vicinity of the library.
“Instinct” would probably be a better way of talking about those “know-how” representations. If that was our subject, then we might just be differing on semantics. But I don’t think it is. For Boyer wants to talk about an intuition in the supernatural, and that’s surely belief-apt. But it’s also intuition of the worst kind! We can’t go about recommending the reliability of intuitions with his canonical example, which is about as unreliable as it comes.