Straightening out the kinks
Chad Orzel said a strange thing the other day.
OK, fine, as a formal philosophical matter, I agree that it’s basically impossible to reconcile the religious worldview with the scientific worldview. Of course, as a formal philosophical matter, it’s kind of difficult to show that motion is possible. We don’t live in a formal philosophical world, though, and the vast majority of humans are not philosophers (and that’s a good thing, because if we did, it would take forever to get to work in the morning). Humans in the real world happily accept all sorts of logical contradictions that would drive philosophers batty. And that includes accepting both science and religion at the same time.
That’s very blithe – hey ho, we believe all sorts of things that are completely incoherent and that’s just fine, in fact if we didn’t we would be unable to move. That’s not really right, actually – sorting out things that are incoherent is generally useful, and it’s a good deal too glib to just shrug them off as purely formal and of interest to no one but philosophers.
Sean Carroll is much better.
In the real world, scientists have different stances toward religion. Some of us think that science and religion are (for conventional definitions of science and religion) incompatible. Others find them perfectly consistent with each other. (It’s worth pointing out that “X is true” and “People exist who believe X is true” are not actually the same statement, despite what Chad and Chris and others would have you believe. I’ve tried to emphasize that distinction over and over, to little avail.)
Yes so have I; I tried so over and over on Chris’s posts that I got banned from commenting there (and also from commenting at Talking Philosophy); also to little avail. Chris does seem to have grasped the point now, but he hasn’t said ‘Oh right, oops, my mistake, sorry for all that name-calling’; instead he just pretends we disagree with him that there are scientists who are also religious. We don’t. It would be to little avail to try to get Chris to acknowledge that though.
And there are some scientists — quite a few of us, actually — who straightforwardly believe that science and religion are incompatible. There are absolutely those who disagree, no doubt about that. But establishing the truth is a prior question to performing honest and effective advocacy, not one we can simply brush under the rug when it’s inconvenient or doesn’t make for the best sales pitch. Which is why it’s worth going over these tiresome science/religion debates over and over, even in the face of repeated blatant misrepresentation of one’s views. If science and religion are truly incompatible, then it would be dishonest and irresponsible to pretend otherwise, even if doing so would soothe a few worried souls. And if you want to argue that science and religion are actually compatible (not just that there exist people who think so), by all means make that argument — it’s a worthy discussion to have. But it’s simply wrong to take the stance that it doesn’t matter whether science and religion are compatible, we still need to pretend they are so as not to hurt people’s feelings. That’s not being honest.
Quite.
Oh for pity’s sake sir. Quine:
(Sorry for the weird blockquote.)
(Also, obviously that was directed at Chad, not Ophelia.)
I think you are giving Chad far too much leeway on this one. He has occasionally passed comment on the religion question on his blog but never exactly seemed to give it much thought (his most notable contribution to date has been to label those on the anti-accomodationist side as “screechy-monkeys”).
As for his current entry into the debate I think its safe to say he’s following the Mooney-Kirshenbaum protocol;
1. Have a book to promote
2. Disparage anti-accomodationist scientists to drum up hits on blog
3. Ignore all valid points posted on blog by claiming you are too busy promoting the book to be able to reply
Benjamin Nelson,
Do you have any good examples of supposed dialethseia?
It seems that whenever people advocate dialetheism they start off saying there are loads of examples and they’re really easy to find, but then they never deliver the goods. Graham Priest is particularly bad for this: he often admits that all of his examples of dialetheia are flawed then goes “ah well, it doesn’t matter because it’s not hard to come up with valid ones.”
You were banned from Talking Philosophy?? When did that happen, and how did I miss it??
Where exactly did it happen, is there any of it left to see?
Thanks to dirigible for his eloquent response.
Tea. I don’t think there’s any archeological evidence left. It’s all been edited away. I think I was there at the time, and, while not banned, my posts were removed as well. So the tracks have been all erased.
What I don’t understand about the religious/science compatibility dispute is that, in order for there to be compatibility there has to be something that has a short odds chance of being true. Religion doesn’t deliver this. As Simon Blackburn says, the odds against any particular religious story being true are vanishingly small. So what is there left to compatibilise?
Stanley Fish reviews a book in today’s NYT. The column is entitled “Must there be a bottom line?” And the book is by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and it is called Natural Reflections: Human Cognition and the Nexus of Science and Religion. The kernel of the story is this:
But this is, really, nonsense. Science may presuppose (in the dim recesses of its unconscious) that there is some limit at which scientific knowledge and world will be in some sort of one to one correspondence, but meanwhile it’s a matter of closer and closer approximations, by way of theories or models that are held open to further refinement or falsification, to the way things, in some sense, ‘really are’. But what has religion got to contribute to this project? If there is (in what Fish considers a ‘wonderful phrase’) an underneath-it-all-status, in what way is religion plausibly thought to contribute to this in the way that science almost certainly does (in any way in which underneath-it-all-status can be reasonably understood)? I haven’t read the book, but where is the nexus? Where could it be? Isn’t Smith’s point (at least so far as I can understand it from Fish’s brief review) just another way of putting the postmodernist thesis that there is no Grand Narrative, so that religion and science, and perhaps astrology and Tarot card reading, all have something to contribute to … what, exactly?
The answer to Fish’s question – Must there be a bottom line? – is probably yes and no. There is something we approximate to more and more, but in the end, perhaps, we have to be satisfied with closer and closer approximations. But if you’re going to speak about a nexus between one way of approximating and another, between science and religion, you must show how – in this case – religion contributes to this process, how there is any plausible religious epistemology which can reasonably distinguish between true and false claims in religion, and how these are related to the undoubted findings of science. So far I can think of none.
As for Bejamin’s love affair with Parmenides and Zeno, I’m not sure how this slots in with the question of the compatibility of science and religion, despite Chad Orzel’s idea that if we were all philosophers no one would go to work of a Monday morning.
Meant to say, Ophelia: Great interview with Maia Caron! Thanks.
Thanks Eric!
I’m beginning to think that people like Chad and Chris are knowingly and deliberately distorting the facts for their own purposes. You don’t have to be a philosopher to see that “Some scientists believe both science and religion” is not the same thing as “Science and religion are compatible.” Even if they are so dense that they missed the distinction, it has been pointed out to them so many time that they cannot claim ignorance at this point.
Maybe that’s why Chris never answers such comments on his blog – so that he can retain plausible deniability!
Jakob, I just mean typical vagueness examples, and argue that their sentence meaning is best expressed as admitting contradictory readings. Take a sentence like “The man is in the room” (when he’s on the threshold). It’s proper to say that he is in the room, and it’s proper to say he isn’t, and to assert both simultaneously as readings of the sentence. And while it might be correct to protest that these readings are not dealing with the same proposition, this will fail to get at the puzzle. For the question has to do with to the truth-conditions of the sentence, not the relationship among its readings. If this helps, think of supervaluationism, but instead of truth-value gaps, there are both values assigned to the sentence.
Eric, the upshot is that I put myself in the Prisoner’s Box along with Chad. The burden of proof is on people like us to justify our friendly attitude towards some contradictions (or, in Chad’s case, a sophomoric apathy towards all of them). And whatever we say, it will probably not include reference to the mystery and wonder of Zeno.
More importantly, it will have to give us a way of talking about some contradictions that are absurd, some some that are benign. The contradiction between the juiciest of the religious and scientific sentences will surely be absurd.
so that religion and science, and perhaps astrology and Tarot card reading, all have something to contribute to … what, exactly?
A layered and messy understanding of the world? A readiness to switch between perspectives, when different situations call for different lenses? These are good things, in my book. I think postmodernism is actually right in its skepticism towards “totalizing” narratives, even if it’s wrong about a lot of other things.
Benjamin, I think you’re right about this. To a degree what Chad is saying might make sense, but really I think he just doesn’t like the New Atheists and doesn’t like talking or thinking about religion much. The latter is fair, but then…he shouldn’t talk about it.
Benjamin,
I have never found that example particularly convincing.
It is not obvious that being in the room and also being outside the room constitutes a contradiction because being outside the room is not synonymous with not being in it. That is only the case if we assume that being in the room and being outside it are mutually exclusive, but in that case there is no contradiction either because the man is in the room and can’t be said to be outside it – or vice versa.
To me that seems a bit like saying that “the sky is blue” is a contradiction because the sky is not sad. It is simply a case of a sentence which can stand for two different propositions.
I don’t really understand why dialetheists opt for the far more complicated and, I find, less convincing explanation of such cases.
Jakob, as usual with the kind of thing, it’s a long romantic story. But the upshot is that after considering the alternatives, I’ve found dialetheism far more satisfying. I feel relieved to arrive at this point.
The problem arises from our treatment of precisifications of the sentence. In and of themselves, two precisifications are not contradictory (since, as you put it, we might want to assume that they’re separate propositions). But what is it about the case itself and its grasped meaning that justifies this assumption? Usually, people say that they must be distinct because otherwise it would be contradictory, but that’s just foot-stomping. More seriously, people say that they want to avoid logical explosion — rightly, since if anything follows anything then the very idea of logic is bankrupt. But obviously that need not happen if we weaken our rules of inference.
I think the motivation arises from a kind of heroic intellectual project. Many of us want a genuinely explanatory semantic analysis that is based on more than just prior foot-stomping about proper rules of usage (and hence begging the question). We want to explain the heartbreaking and overwhelming similarities between these two ostensibly different propositions. In my view, the commitment arises straight from cognitive science. We want to maintain an intellectually honest project that we can at least pretend to be allied with empirical domains.
But of course we also want to explain these cases in a way that treats these phenomena as the banalities that they are. If things turn too exotic, then the project would have to be abandoned and we’d have to go back and hide in the spooky caverns of the a priori.
It seems, Jenavir, that we are fated to disagree! Of course, I made it very clear that I did not see science as a master narrative or a totalising point of view, because it proceeds, quite messily enough, by approximations and revisions. However, I don’t see how religion or Tarot cards have anything to add to this many layered messiness except misdirection. For to intersect meaningfully with science, religions must have some epistemological bona fides and achievements to offer, but, so far as I can tell, they don’t. (The problem lies in the plural.)
Don’t get me wrong – or so many other unbelievers either – and suppose that science is all that there is. Of course it’s not. There is art and music, literature and drama, and other meaningful human activities and pursuits, all of which add to the complexity and many-layered messiness of life, but all of them, in some way, rooted in empirical reality. And that’s just where religion, except insofar as it is understood strictly as a purely human creation, and meaning-providing human activity, is unrooted. It finds it almost impossible not to go swanning off into some never never land of might have been. I might be willing to see that it has, or could have, benefits, in enriching human experience, except that, because it uses language in a referring way, it seems unable to avoid making ontological – and therefore epistemological – claims, which cannot be fulfilled, and which cause so many problems when one religious vocabulary is stacked up face to face with a different one. Then we have sparks, because, as they exist, religions put up obstacles to respectful community, obstacles comprised of claims to knowledge and truth. Only when religions have decided what they are about, and then only if they can give some reasons, compelling to those who do not now share their beliefs, for thinking those beliefs both beneficial and true, will they have something to contribute to the kind of intersection of religion and science that Fish was speaking about in his review of Smith’s book, Natural Reflections, a book which is misnamed until religions can provide their epistemological credentials.
But so long as religions pretend to know something, or to refer to something which transcends ordinary human awareness and experience, they are simply a menace to full human life and living, and putting them face à face with science is meaningless. There is no common measure to which both are committed, and there is no known way in which religions can justify their truth claims. This makes life not only messy, but nonsensical, and that is why the compatibilist argument is doomed to failure.
“A layered and messy understanding of the world? A readiness to switch between perspectives, when different situations call for different lenses?”
You can’t get that without religion and astrology and Tarot cards? You can’t get that with literature and music and nature and aesthetic pleasure of all kinds, and fantasy and daydreams and gossip and romance and story-telling and all sorts of things that don’t try to fool people?
Oh lordy, Eric already said it, I blabbed my answer before reading his. Never mind.
(Mind you, I can see taking a literary sort of interest in religion and astrology and Tarot – but I took Eric to mean the literalist version of all three.)
Oh, to be clear, I don’t think astrology or Tarot cards contributes much (if at all) to a layered understanding of the world either! The only contribution they make is telling us something about human psychology–or, as OB said, providing some literary interest.
I was thinking of stuff that isn’t science, but also isn’t counterfactual: art, music, poetry, history, philosophy, etc. Which I suspect isn’t something anyone here would disagree with.
Well sure.
Mind you history is decidedly empirical – and philosophy is at least constrained in various ways. Art, music, poetry, story-telling etc are what one could call ‘free’ and history and philosophy operate within constraints.