Signs
A few more telling items from Science and Religion (Ferngren ed). Chapter 10, “Causation,” p 136 [“occasionalism” is the idea that god intervenes to keep the universe going from minute to minute as opposed to starting it and then leaving it alone]:
The fullest system of occasionalism was developed by Nicholas de Malebranche (1638-1715), who was driven by his own religious commitments to push Cartesianism in a theocentric direction.
Er…right. This is what we mean. This is the kind of thing. This is why there is an epistemic conflict. Those commitments that drive people to push things in a particular direction? That’s a problem.
A similar item on the next page. Al the great and Aquinas
undertook to interpret the whole of Aristotelian philosophy, correcting it where necessary, supplementing it from other sources where possible, and, in the process, attempting to define the proper relationship between the new learning and Christian theology.
Um…there it is again. That “proper relationship” thing – that’s one of those items that can drive people to push things here rather than there, for reasons that are extraneous to trying to figure out the truth.
In chapter 5, “Medieval Science and Religion,” there’s a real admission [p 57]:
The warfare thesis has retained a following throughout the twentieth century, at both a scholarly and a popular level, but it has also elicited strong opposition from scholars (some with a religious agenda)…
Aha! Just as I thought – helpful of David C Lindberg to spell it out.
You would think that irony was unfathomable for theologians. I mean, this very book and the interference of the Templeton Foundation is yet more evidence that there is a conflict: Science vs. Religion (as Grossman let slip and not Science and Religion).
Since this hostility can no longer continue, no wonder then that atheist scientists finally come out fighting, enough is enough. Religion and its abuses of power are on the defensive, and no longer has a right to exist in academia.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Signs http://dlvr.it/6xVy0 […]
I found this article by John Horgan ‘tainted’ by the Templeton Foundation pretty instructive (apologies if this has been posted before).
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/horgan06/horgan06_index.html
This is corruption plain and simple.
To be fair, occasionalism was a pretty implausible view even for theologians. Berkeley, who is a pitch-perfect example of someone who sang in favor of the Watchmaker God, thought that Malebranche was as batty as the skeptic (atheist). Unlike some of his colleagues, Berkeley was impressed by the importance of scientific developments to his worldview, though perhaps he was not a vivacious friend to the mathematicians. I suppose in retrospect that that’s why most of us in philosophy go out of our way to remember that Berkeley existed, and the same can’t be said for Malebranche.
though perhaps he was not a vivacious friend to the mathematicians
Wasn’t it that he rightly pointed out that the then new calculus didn’t have a firm footing? It was a while later that the notion of the limit came along and grounded calculus nicely.
I honestly don’t know the answer to that. Good question. Probably a bit of Googling could tell us.
Anyway, I was thinking of Berkeley’s various and sundry complaints in the New Theory of Vision when I made the above remark.
Not sure Ben. I was regurgitating something I read in Stewart’s ‘Taming the infinite’.
‘Objectors to this procedure, notably Bishop George Berkeley in his 1734 book The Analyst, a Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician, pointed out that it is illogical to divide numerator and denominator by o when o is set to 0. In effect, the procedure conceals the fact that the fraction is actually 0/0, which is well known to be meaningless…The mathematicians sought refuge in physical analogies – Leibniz referred to the ‘spirit of finesse’ as opposed to the ‘spirit of logic’ – but Berkeley was perfectly correct. It took more than a century to find a good answer to his objections, by defining the intuitive notion of ‘passing to a limit’ in a rigorous manner.‘[pp 117,118]
Cauchy and Gauss and others made calculus pretty rigorous, but Newton’s naive infinitesimals mostly worked, and non-standard analysis makes his approach retrospectively respectable, or so I’ve read.
Catholics are, as it were, contractually obligated to profess the teachings of Thomas and Aristotle. It’s as pointless to dispute them as it would have been for Galileo to essay a leaned refutation of Aristotle’s reasoning instead of simply demonstrating that his results were mistaken. They keep coming back, though.
Sure, not everyone who insists that we haven’t considered the best arguments for God are referring to this particular flavor of persiflage, a delectable collation of medieval bafflegab, but the Protestants offer a thinner soup. Plantinga doesn’t offer much more than “Perhaps we’re not wrong.” (Belief in God could be true and justified if God exists.)
Thinking about theology inclines me to embrace my pagan heritage and look forward to Halloween, even though it’s hard to wear a mask when you need glasses.
Catholics are, as it were, contractually obligated to profess the teachings of Thomas and Aristotle.
When nominally a Catholic, I did not know this, and the closest I came to it was when the wholly opaque concept of Transubstantiation was mentioned. I mean opaque in the sense that substance, essence, etc where never mentioned or discussed. Transubstantiation was just the ‘host’ becoming the body of Christ, and I even understood that to be metaphorical. I didn’t take it to mean that I was supposed to believe I was literally consuming the body of a deity in some religiously acceptable cannibalism. I learnt that I was apparently obligated to profess the teachings of Aquinas, the dude from Stagira, when I read it in Bertrand Russell’s history of western philosophy, something I took interest in because of good old strident Dick of Oxford’s book ‘the God Delusion’. I picked up the idea that transubstantiation was not metaphorical in that book I think. It’s probably good that I’m an atheist, because I wasn’t a good catholic (where the later good is to be understood as believing church dogma). I think that if one wishes to be a philosopher in a Catholic university or school then one is obliged to be a Thomist.
Egbert
I think I read the Horgan article some time back, and Dawkins has written of his regret at attending the event.
Re-reading Horgan’s piece, this bit struck me:
I’m always puzzled at the rationale for determining which ridiculous beliefs deserve ridicule and which don’t, according to moderate theists and accommodationists. I think we should be told!
@Mark Jones
I think they realised that Intelligent Design was refuted and therefore now distance themselves from it. That battle is lost, so they’re now attacking a new target, the conflict theory, by rewriting history. Since it’s history and not science, it is far more easily open to corruption.
The belief in the soul is at least as lacking in scientific substance (not Aristotelian substance) as intelligent design. Doesn’t seem to bother religious liberals who claim to accept the findings of science at all. As far as I can tell, neuroscience rules out the soul. It would seem that all religious believers who reject neuroscience, and claim we have souls, are science deniers.
Yes, that’s exactly what happens: Start with the premise that science and religion are compatible, and then work to make it so.
There are generally two ways of making compatibility happen:
Declare science that contradicts religion must be wrong. Just ignore this science (by claiming that it is biased, for instance).
Declare that religion that contradicts science must be wrong. Shoehorn religion into the gaps of science, or retreat into undefinedness.
So essentially, the way most common way to avoid the “warfare model”, is to declare one side to be the winner.
(As an aside: Oddly enough, people who use method 1 tend to be far more candid about putting faith above science, while those that use method 2 hardly ever admit that they put science above faith)
And don’t we have to go further and concede that belief in uncaused free will is also lacking in scientific evidence?
It seems as though our minds are so contrived that they naturally “push things in a particular direction” – in the direction of a belief in a unified conscious mind as causal agent.
IMO, the next big conflict is in the area of the science of responsibility for actions. ISM, for example, that the Canadian criminal law presupposes libertarian free will. This is going to get a whole lot more unfortunate as what all the psychologists (etc.) already know seeps into the courtroom and then the country (and world, where similar other laws no doubt exist …)
Law, in fact much of human culture requires a degree of the concept of ‘free will’ to function. It’s a built in fiction within our minds. Laws and cultural norms (for that matter actions in animals as well) depend on good results/bad results as a behavior modifier. Whether free will is actually uncaused (I strongly doubt it is) is really immaterial. You can, for example have a deterministic computer program that gradually learns ‘proper behavior’ by being exposed to negative and positive reinforcement. Even being fully deterministic does not prevent the program from learning.
This really is a key part of the development of brains, of all types. Animals learn were there is food, or no food, where enemies exist, how to get around, how to avoid getting trashed by the bigger and stronger members of the group… none of this pre-supposes uncaused free will.
I’m reading Drescher’s “Good and Real” after seeing Tom Clark’s review posted in Ophelia’s flashback section. In discussing the Everett Relative State interpretation of quantum physics, Drescher opines that the unnecessary and unsupported addition of the notion of wave collapse to explain why we can only observe one of the superpositions of a quantum particle, was the effect of “smuggling” into this field the mind’s innate bias that it is uncaused, and therefore not purely material. The more parsimonious explanation is that a purely material mind is also superposed, one each available to observe each superposition of the particle.
If Everett is right, that would be an enormously significant error he detected caused by a failure of mind to be fully aware of its own nature.
In fairness, the criteria seem to me to be relatively straightforward: One-off historical events are fair game, because you can always say science momentarily didn’t count, while still allowing that it counts most of the time.
Contrast the virgin birth with intelligent design: For ID to be true, Darwinian evolution must be false, and we have copious evidence of the latter. Now, we have copious evidence that all of the women giving birth today are not virgins — however, the virgin birth could still be true without the former being false. It’s still bad philosophy, because you are asking to suspend the strongest possible inductive reasoning for no good reason whatsoever… but it’s not “as bad” as ID, because you don’t have to reject anything which is demonstrably true.
FWIW. It’s still crazy.
@James Sweet
Yes, that sounds reasonable, on the unreasonable scale. A wall chart would be handy though.
So theists use science to gauge their own beliefs whilst rejecting it to varying degrees. Ironic. Thinking back, I suppose that’s how I thought about it when I believed.