You might learn something
Gosh, that was a lively discussion. It was sometimes rather…cryptic, though. When Dan L asked Michael, “where’s the dividing line? Where does philosophy stop and science start?” Michael said it was a tough question, and rather than answer it himself, pasted in a long excerpt from a post by Massimo Pigliucci at Rationally Speaking last November. It wasn’t the most helpful excerpt from that post that he could have chosen – there’s a more relevant one later on, for instance:
So when some commentators for instance defend the Dawkins- and Coyne-style (scientistic) take on atheism, i.e., that science can mount an attack on all religious beliefs, they are granting too much to science and too little to philosophy. Yes, science can empirically test specific religious claims (intercessory prayer, age of the earth, etc.), but the best objections against the concept of, say, an omnibenevolent and onmnipowerful god, are philosophical in nature (e.g., the argument from evil). Why, then, not admit that by far the most effective way to reject religious nonsense is by combining science and philosophy, rather than trying to arrogate to either more epistemological power than each separate discipline actually possesses?
Do Dawkins and Coyne say anything so crude and stupid as “science can mount an attack on all religious beliefs”? No. They both know perfectly well, and say, that there are religious beliefs that are nebulous and internal enough to be immune from criticism, and they also don’t talk about “mounting attacks” as if they were Vikings. And is there some place where either of them refuses to admit that the most effective way to reject religious nonsense is by combining science and philosophy? Not that I know of, and I thought both of them did just that.
Massimo is very angry with Dawkins and Coyne, for some reason, and he says hostile and exaggerated things about them as a result. He said rude things to Coyne on the earlier thread. I wish he would stop doing that, and be reasonable, instead.
Update: I did a post on that post of Massimo’s at the time – last November. Another round of useful comments.
I like how the same conversation has multiple iterations. It’s kind of like a video game, where you get multiple lives. Mess up the first time and we can always wait half a year for the same conversation to happen all over again.
That’s the most cheerful interpretation, Ben! Much more positive than my ruminating about how this is all like being stuck in the movie Groundhog Day. :)
Oh, and I forgot, Ben:
1-Up
The Pharyngula crowd would mock you as a tone troll for this kind of statement there.
No, I don’t think “they” would (Pharyngula readers are not a hive mind, despite the propaganda to that effect). The aversion to tone trollery there is, well, an aversion to tone trollery: complaining about the way someone makes an argument, rather than being concerned with the substance of the argument. Complaining about tone because one doesn’t like (or doesn’t want to acknowledge) the content of an opponent’s argument.
Do things get out of hand there sometimes? You bet. Many commenters there are on a hair trigger about “tone” complaints, because they’re so ubiquitous and sleazily deployed. So, sometimes they go too far in the other direction. But not always.
Yes, either Groundhog Day or one of those mind-bending Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. Like when the starship explodes over and over because there’s an evil time vortex from the past, and the Enterprise keeps repeating the same awkward day over and over, until they program their resident android with the number 3 and then he saves the ship and then Kelsey Grammar shows up in uniform and thanks them for being helpful.
So um, it really is a glass half full sort of thing, I guess.
Reading this post reminded me that I had a chat with Richard Carrier some time ago about Pigliucci’s comments on this matter, and he sent me the text of a letter that he had sent to American Atheist magazine. It may be of some interest, so I’ll paste it below.
“…I disagree with Pigliucci when he claims (in effect) that arguments from parsimony and prior probability are not scientific. The God hypothesis can be refuted scientifically the same way faeries, demon possession, gremlins, alchemy, and magic have been refuted scientifically. Just because someone can say “well, invisible demons change the course of all the photons to make it look like the earth is round when it’s really flat” does not render the claim “the earth is not flat” unscientific, nor does it result in science’s inability to refute the theory that the earth is flat. “The earth is flat” remains “a scientific question” even in the face of such absurdist explanations of the evidence against it. And so, too, the God hypothesis. The scientist would rightly say that there is no evidence supporting the addition of photon-bending demons and thus parsimony does away with the theory, and that the existence of such demons (creatures with such amazing and unprecedented interests and powers of stealth) is so improbable given the accumulated database of scientific facts about the contents of the world that it can be dismissed on prior probability alone. Both are scientific arguments.For example, “gremlins cause plane crashes” is scientifically refuted right now by all the scientific evidence to the contrary, and by all the scientific evidence establishing that such things as gremlins either don’t exist or are too rare to posit. To respond that “well, the gremlins always hide, so that’s why you never find anything like them,” is simply an illegitimate argument. Since there can never be any rational ground to believe in gremlins that you can never even in principle have any evidence of, and when even the evidence you claim there to be (plane crashes) already has perfectly sound and unchallengeable explanations, it would be quite wrong of Pigliuci to dismiss the gremlin hypothesis as “not a scientific question” simply because some idiot can come up with a stupid way to defend the theory. Scientific facts refute any reasonable belief in the gremlin hypothesis, as well as the demons-bending-photons flat earth theory. So, too, the God hypothesis. You can only go on to maintain these hypotheses by rejecting science and the logic on which it is founded.
But only idiots make such arguments anyway. Most defenders of the God hypothesis would find the “God planted all the evidence” defense just as absurd as Pigliucci does. Dawkins is no doubt talking about the hypothesis that is most actually defended, which is not the unfalsifiable nonsense Pigliucci builds a straw man of, but the very hypothesis that the defenders claim is verified by the evidence of design in nature. If there is no evidence of design in nature, then their hypothesis is falsified, scientifically. They are the ones who opened themselves up to this: by claiming certain facts would verify their theory, when those facts are scientifically shown not to exist, they must accept defeat. The ether was not found, nor N-Rays, nor psi, and now not even God. This is indeed a scientific question. And the God hypothesis has consistently failed every test its proponents have proposed for it, just as N-Rays did, or the ether, or psi. Dawkins is not wrong to say so.”
Nick, that’s a quite a quote. Two things, 1) I like it, and 2) from the few interactions I’ve had with Massimo Pigliugi, inductive reasoning, he’ll not take any notice. It’s personal with him and to misquote the greatest philosopher ‘reason is and always will be slave to passion’. So, what can you do?
I have no business commenting on this site after my classless behaviour last year. Anyway, I’ll leave by excusing myself by saying the birth of my son has prompted me to take more interest in the outside world and that this site rocks. Thus I find it too hard to resist reading it because of the intellectual horsepower that is unleashed here.
Gosh! I wish I hadn’t missed out on all the fun of the “lively discussion,” but I was actually busy reading a book (something which following an internet conversation makes more and more difficult). I breezed over the lively discussion, and the main problem seems to be to answer the question where does science end and other forms of critical thought begin, and, in any event, whether religion can be approached critically.
Massimo seems to think that philosophy and science together will make a killer combination, and that too much weight has been put into the science end of the criticism of religion. He calls this scientism, but he doesn’t make very clear what he means by that, nor does he make clear that scientism itself would be a philosophical position, and certainly not a scientific one. What is more, as Ophelia and others have pointed out, Massimo hasn’t shown that Coyne, Dawkins, et al., have taken up a scientistic position on the criticism of religion. (‘Scientism’ is really a swear word, you know. It’s much more like saying ‘Fuck!’ than Massimo is willing to grant.)
I have expressed before my wonderment at the really acute philosophical things that critics of religion like Coyne, Myers, Dawkins, and others have said about religion and its defenders, and I am surprised that Massimo hasn’t noticed. In fact, if you read some of the things that Myers has said about Plantinga’s anti-naturalist argument, or what Jerry Coyne has said about theology, they are clearly subtle, thoroughly philosophical (sometimes even acutely theological), and in many cases, decisive answers to religion’s defenders which don’t even have a hint of so-called scientism, and so I wonder what Massimo has been reading to allow him to say such outrageous things about them.
One thing that is important to notice, I think, is that science poses serious difficulties for religion. The Biologos Institute, and other attempts to establish an entente cordiale between reigion and science, are often the most scientistic approaches to religion of all, if they don’t just use the escape hatch of suggesting that religious belief and scientific practice can exist side by side in the same mind. Take Francisco Ayala, 2009 winner of the Templeton Prize. (Apparently, the Templeton Prize is supposed to be a richer prize than a Nobel Prize. The one thing that seems to be missing is some clear understanding of what prize winners have achieved. The prize itself seems to be the important thing. Just giving that much money away makes it look as though something has been achieved, but, whereas the Nobel Prize is given for something, the Templeton Prize seems to be given to make a more general statement about the importance of religion.) Anyway, after that digression, take Francisco Ayala. He thinks that evolution is a perfectly good solution to the problem of evil. We can’t blame god if in fact god can’t do anything about it. God chose evolution as the method of creating, and, having done that, can scarcely intervene in a process chosen by she/him/it. (Religious language is intrusive. It’s hard to say what you want to say without personifying the religious entity, because intentional language seems to be required. As I said a few threads back, this is one of the insights of the ontological argument.) But, if evolution is god’s chosen way of acting, then god is responsible, because god chose it. So all the horrors that result from this very wasteful, though terrifically ingenious method of “creating” life, would be god’s responsibility, if that is the way god chose to do it, and it is ludicrous of Ayala to keep using this as a way of declawing the problem of evil. Why isn’t making a virtue of necessity in this way taken to be a form of scientism? It’s an attempt to escape the consequences for religious belief of our knowledge of the world, by attributing to god the processes that are discovered by science. This is arguably much more “scientistic” than pointing out that religious beliefs do not seem to be confirmed by anything happening in the world.
It also puts religious beliefs beyond criticism, and therefore renders them empty of significant content. Once Ayala has done this, he has really said that god cannot do the usual work of comfort and consolation because, after all, god’s the one responsible for the sufferings from which people seek some kind of shelter and answering compassion in god. The truth seems to be, as Darwin relunctantly saw, that once evolution is shown to be the way that life came to be, god’s religious role is threatened, because god, not satan or some chaotic force in the universe, becomes the immediate cause of people’s distress. And this, surely, is as good a scientific reason for doubting the existence of god as any other we might name. It was in fact On the Origin of Species that made it clear to me, back in the days when I was still trying to make religious sense of the problem of evil, that twigged me to the basic incompatibility of religion and science, and the impossibility of creating religious meaning in the light of what we know about the evolution of life.
Religion is more than a system of belief. It is also a refuge from the storms of life. Call this religion’s “religious” function. From Leibniz onwards, the world that has been revealed to us by scientific discovery is in direct conflict with the “religious” function of religion. Up until Leibniz it was just possible to suggest that we simply did not know enough, and so we could hide god behind our ignorance. After Lebiniz this became impossible. Leibniz may still have thought it wasn’t, but anyone who has read his Theodicy cannot fail to notice the coming storm. Before Leibniz we could simply say that it is not possible to know why we suffer so much, but that god in his wisdom knows, and we can take comfort from that. Like Paul we could say that god would never give us more suffering than we could bear — which is so obviously false it’s a wonder people didn’t revolt against it sooner.
But now we know. We don’t need to wonder anymore. Suffering has got nothing to do with god’s immediate choice or purpose. There is no plan for our lives, no ultimate purpose that each life has in the scheme of things. It is the random working out of the method of creation that god has chosen (which surely makes talk of god or gods a bit strained). Meaning in life is not something we find, but something that we impose upon ourselves, and attributing it to a god is a lame way of escaping responsibility for ourselves. Of course, we have all sorts of cultural aids in doing this, but religion is perhaps the least helpful one, though still being defended by those who think they will be shipwrecked if they can’t appeal to something transcendent. The real problem, of course, is that they are shipwrecked, and now, on an alien shore, they are trying to build up the same kinds of rickety structures that drove them onto the rocks in the first place. Science may not have the answer to human meaning, but it does set the parameters, and one of the parameters is that religion cannot be re-established on the same basis as before, and any attempt to do so is rendered null by scientific discovery. Any attempt to pack science into the forms of religion is bound to fail. The gaps continue to be filled up. This does not mean, of course, that science has disproved god. It just means that as science progresses, there is less and less for god to do, and in the end god cannot do the one thing for which gods are important: to give comfort in suffering and meaning in contingency.
Professor Coyne keeps claiming that science is philosophically superior to religion (for example, here). But when asked what that philosophy actually is, the silence is deafening.
I have nothing to contribute; just wanted to note that #9 is a beautiful bit of writing.
I don’t think Eric knows how to write badly.
He should learn. Might get him a well-paid gig with the DI.
I’m sorry, Signal, I can’t find the claim that science is philosophically superior to religion at the place linked in your note. However, just to venture a few remarks of my own. If the intention of philosophy is to find out what is true about life and the world, then it looks very much as though science is superior to religion philosophically, since it is arguably the case that science, as Hawking says, works, whereas religion, in this respect, anyway — that is, in achieving the truth about life and the world — doesn’t.
Does this mean that science is the only source of knowledge about life and the world? No, of course not, as long as we are not restricting science to the Naturwissenschaften, that is, sciences of the natural world, because there are also the Geisteswissenschaften, or, if you like, the human sciences, like history, philosophy, social and political sciences (and even, dare I say, in its original meaning, theology?), and such like, which also seek to provide empirical and checkable knowledge about the world. Then there are the formal sciences like logic and mathematics, as well as art and architecture, music and theatre, poetry and prose literature, etc. etc., all of which help us to understand and know ourselves better.
But it is really offensive when people like Massimo accuse scientists like Coyne, Dawkins, Myers, et alium, of scientism, because every one of them makes a point of stressing other sources of understanding. And I daresay that, as a form of imaginative understanding of what it means to be human, theology might qualify here as well, if it were not so deeply infected by the idea that it speaks about a form of objective being (whether existence or not) of which we can have knowledge. Freud, although in many respects not a scientist at all, certainly had an imaginative grasp of certain aspects of being human. The problem with Freud is that he pretends to be a scientist. The same problem crops up with religion as well. Certainly, in some respects, theology has an imaginative grasp of some of the depths of what it means to be human, but it has the same problem as Freudianism, because it pretends to be speaking about a realm of reality or being for which there is simply no evidence. Thus, science is unquestionably philosophically superior to religion. I think that Dr. Coyne might say something similar, but I speak only for myself, of course.
By the way, is anyone here on Facebook? I can’t stop thinking about that awful group “My Guardian Knows What’s Best For Me” by that Saudi woman. If anybody here is on Facebook (I’m not) and cares to start a group called “Women Don’t Need Guardians” I would be glad to spread the word. We need to counteract this nonsense.
One can, of course, argue that science works better, depending upon what one means by works. But practitioners of religion effectly claim otherwise by “voting with their feet.” Surely, at least at some level, religion works for them. You may think they’re wrong — nuts even — but you have no objective basis upon which to claim that to have demonstrated some type of superiority. Perhaps more importantly, you still don’t provide any content to this philosophy beyond what it isn’t. You can make a good case that science does a good job finding out about the world, but life (in the sense of how we should live) is another matter entirely. Science does a good job telling us what is but is silent with respect to what ought to be.
Signal, this is an entirely different question. As a way of achieving truth about reality, about the world, about what exists objectively, science is clearly superior. Simply counting up the different religions and their conflicting beliefs is enough to show that. This applies, as well, by the way, to the morality taught by religions. Indeed, it is not at all clear that religions offer a superior way of accounting for value than science does. That would take some demonstrating. Let us acknowledge, then, that value is, as such, something about which neither religion nor science can speak with authority, and that it is a study distinct from both. Yet, even in this case, science has more to contribute, because science can actually tell us about the world, and about what the effects of our actions are or will be, whilst religion cannot do this at all. We are be far better off with science, philosophy, art, music and literature, than we are with religion, since religion, though it claims to tell us what we ought to do and how we ought to live, is in fact a medley of disputing voices, none of which has any intrinsic authority. But, as I say, this is a different question altogether, and not the one that you addressed first, when you said that Dr. Coyne claimed science to be philosophically superior to religion. And, in any respect in which it may be said that either religion or science speaks the truth, science always comes away the winner, because it works, and it works for the simple reason that it speaks the truth about the world, whereas religion, except by accident, does not.
Oh, my, language is not a strong suit: “We are be far better off with science, philosophy, art, music and literature,” should read, We would be far better off….. etc.
Signal, that was not the question as originally stated by you:
As to questions of value. Yes, there are disagreements. No, religion does not speak with special authority. To see why read Plato’s Eythyphro. Science is more helpful here than religion because it actually does have ways of distinguishing truth from falsehood. Religions do not. There is no basis in religion for value claims. The Bible is not an authority (thank goodness), nor is the Qu’ran (thank goodness, thank goodness), nor any other religious text. They sediment various past systems of value, but have no probative force today when we are faced with value questions. This does not mean that there will not be disagreements, but if we were to prescind from irrelevant intrusions by religion into issues of value today there would be far less disagreement, in my opinion, and we would be far more likely to achieve some sort of consensus. Religion is, on most issues, irrelevant to making reasonable decisions. If you disagree with that, perhaps you could show how religion can make suggestions as to reasonable and humane resolutions to current moral disagreements. But this is still an entirely different issue than the one you broached at first, and over which you were prepared to pillory Dr. Coyne.
Good stuff, Eric, but I wanted to mention that the truth of this paragraph rather depends on the structure of one’s personal ontology, and as the last thread seemed to suggest, Coyne, Blackford, Myers, and others taking the line that Pigliucci characterizes as “scientism” seem to have a somewhat less structured ontology for (using Blackford’s phrase) “rational inquiry.”
For example, I don’t think that the fact that there are long German words for two categories actually demonstrates that they’re discontinuous domains of inquiry, and I really do see continuity between the physical sciences and social sciences. (I wouldn’t call mathematics and logic “formal science” either.)
Despite Signal’s bluster, biological science has important implications for social science which has important implications for human decisions about values. Certainly, a criminal justice system is in some sense a crystallization of a society’s values into formalized rules, but Kathryn Lofton’s work on false and implanted memory, and in particular, spurious eyewitness identification (it falls into the social science side, but there’s obviously a biological basis for it — and it’s rigorously scientific and peer reviewed) obviously has deep implications for the proper goals and methodologies of a criminal justice system.
But again, this perspective comes from a more open, sociological and historical view of science and rational inquiry in general.
Whether religious or not, we necessarily base our values, ethics and morals upon presumed assumptions.
Signal, this is another reason to think you’re a troll. I just read that post of Jerry Coyne’s that you linked to pretending it illustrates your claim that Coyne “keeps claiming that science is philosophically superior to religion.” It doesn’t; it doesn’t even come close. That’s not honest commentary. You’re on very thin ice here. Your new blog looks to be yet another vendetta against Dawkins and other “new” atheists and (cough) me. It looks very like another almost-new blog with the identical vendetta. You’re hiding your identity. Thin ice.
Signal, I think you’re arguing a line that many folks here have agreed with in other contexts. Ophelia, if I recall correctly, could not reconcile her views with that of Harris. And Harris appears to be your primary opponent.
I am slightly more sympathetic to Harris than most. In fact, I think you’ve given the game away when you point out that all inquiry begins with assumptions, and yet also agree that social science and biology can have vital implications for ethics.
Suppose that we fess up to the obvious fact that social science (the science of social actions and their consequences) and biology (the science of human nature) are necessary, indispensable assumptions for all forms of ethical inquiry. We might insist that there’s a weak distinction between ethics and science of some kind or other — fine. But it would also mean that the considerate philosopher must revise their priors when given scientific reason to do so — and that these revisions can, in effect, have a massive overhaul of our conception of the way things ought to be.
The fact is that we ground our oughts in our is’es. That doesn’t mean that our is’es exhaust our oughts, but it does mean that the magesteria overlap significantly. Put in the crudest terms, the kingdom of Ought is just a principality of the land of Is.
There’s and interesting take on the science religion conflict from a 1941 lecture by Albert Einstein:
“To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself.”
Interestingly all of you will know of another quote from the same lecture –
“science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
– a quote that is frequently used to justify the compatibility of the two systems, yet if you look at it in the context of the paragraph that contains it you will see that Einstein means something very different.
“But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
What he means, therefore, is: ‘science without an aspiration for truth and understanding is lame’ (I’ll let you make up your own mind about the second half).
Signal, you have entirely misinterpreted, and if you really can’t see any other way to read that passage, your reading skills are seriously deficient. Or perhaps it’s just that they’re damaged by your pre-existing dislike of Coyne.
‘The Wisdom of the Ages’? I daresay some of our (ignorant) ancestors could learn a thing or two from contemporary lucid and informed thinking.
Ben @25
Well said! And sorry about getting maybe a little too heated in our last…erm…discussion.
‘Apples and oranges. Whether religious or not, we necessarily base our values, ethics and morals upon presumed assumptions.’
There’s a difference between ‘presumed assumptions’ about the needs and welfare of fellow human beings, which are verifiable, and assumptions about the whims of supernatural beings for whom there is not a shred of evidence for their existence.
Dianne @ 28
A key point well made.
Ben @ 25
Love the final sentence <i>the kingdom of Ought is just a principality of the land of Is.</i> Mind if I use that? I don’t think it’s crude at all.
Eric, (specifically @ 9) not only does reading your comments allow me to expand my vocabulary, it is a pleasure. Thank you for your effort.
Dan, no worries. :)
Tildeb, by all means. Also, I have drawn a very important map.
Though I should acknowledge with gratitude that this is a view that I had to be goaded into after long discussion with George Felis and Eric late last year. (I think I was arguing something about how ways of knowing demanded different logics at the time. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve gotten over that phase in my intellectual development.)
While I have come to be convinced that, precisely speaking, it is philosophy rather than science that allows us to reject arguments of the form “Satan put all the fossil evidence there to trick us!”, I must say, I think it is silly to get so hung up on that as to criticize a commentator simply for failing to acknowledge the role philosophy plays there. Yes, it is true that philosophy helps us pinpoint exactly what is wrong with the Satanic trick claim, using big words (for most people) like “arguments from parsimony and prior probability”, and I must admit that I personally find all that stuff rather interesting… but really — your average person either already knows intuitively that the Satan Trick Hypothesis is absurd, or else they are so obstinate/ignorant/stupid that there’s little hope they will understand the technical philosophical problems with it anyway. It’s a minor part of the argument at best.
It’s useful for philosophers and those interested in philosophy to understand why the scientific method alone cannot defeat the Satan Trick Hypothesis, but for popular polemics? Please. Spelling it out is unnecessary. At best all that is needed is a link to this video.
Can we at least concede that this is a matter of definitions? I can think of very good reasons for including both arguments by parsimony and arguments by prior probabilities as scientific principles — not least because they’re both consistently used in formulating scientific hypotheses and theories.
In other words, to say it’s philosophy rather than science implies that one thing cannot simultaneously be science and philosophy. And I disagree with that notion.
Speaking as a union rep, this is looking rather like a demarcation dispute.
<blockquote><blockquote>While I have come to be convinced that, precisely speaking, it is philosophy rather than science</blockquote>
Can we at least concede that this is a matter of definitions?</blockquote>
Yeah. I was careful to say “I have come to be convinced,” because I’m still not thinking this so strongly that I want to really attempt convincing anyone else :) Also, re-reading it, I regret saying “philosophy rather than science” — because it is <i>philosophy of science</i> that allows us to reject the Satan’s A Dick hypothesis, just as you imply in your last paragraph. What I think I really meant is that it’s not part of the scientific method per se. Or maybe that’s still not it…
But yeah, definitions. And as I say, even if we agreed on definitions, this is hair-splitting that is totally irrelevant to the polemical point. In debating whether science allows the possibility of a personal God, there are no serious participants who need explaining as to the invalidity of the Satan’s A Dick hypothesis. Depending on our definitions, you and I might disagree about Pigliucci’s premise, but I think we wholeheartedly agree that his conclusion — that Dawkins et al are dissing philosophy by failing to explain the flaws in the Satan’s A Dick hypothesis — is demanding a level of unwavering pedantry that is simply ludicrous.
One last point on definitions — it’s been pointeed out to me before that you can rather get around that issue if you just say “reason” instead of “science”…
Signal (32), sorry I missed your reply. I’ll only respond to the first bit at the moment because otherwise I’d be forced to write an essay, complete with argumentative twists and turns, but that almost never works in blog form. And as it stands, the reply is going to be long anyway. Prompt me to continue with your other remarks and I will.
The responsible thing for us to do at this point is analyse the difference between “ground” and “inform”. By “ground”, I mean, able to answer “Why-questions” about the justification of your values that go beyond mere biography. By “inform”, we might mean something weaker than that, like answering questions only by examining your personal experiences.
Suppose I ask, “Why do you believe in freedom?”. You are not likely going to just say “it’s a sui generis concept, it just is, I value it, there is no why”. That would be boring and dogmatic and probably a dishonest description of your mental life anyway.
Instead, you might just answer the question in terms of your biography — what facts inform your norms. In that case, though, you’re evading the issue by answering a very similar, but actually quite different question (namely, “What brought you to believe in freedom?”). The kind of question that I posed in the third paragraph is asking for answers that have normative weight, while the kind of question posed in the previous sentence is asking for answers that are descriptive, the kind of question you would tell a psychiatrist.
When asked this question, you’re probably going to give a story about how a) human freedom improves human flourishing, b) how it protects and respects innocent inquirers, and c) how inquiry is inevitable in the human species. When you provide these reasons, you’re doing more than just saying, “These were the thoughts that passed through my head when I considered the matter in the past”. You would be saying: “I adhere to these reasons as good ones.” But these reasons — at least, a) and c) — appear to be descriptive claims. However, they are descriptive claims that matter to you. They are grounds.
To answer your question. Freedom as a value derives in part from a presumption that agency is a fact about us, and agency is essential to our contemporary understanding of how to fill out the human picture. We are so stuck in this conception of human nature that our intuitions are going to be unreliable and unhelpful if we’re forced to think about what it would be like to live in a world that would disprove my view, i.e., where humans had no sense of agency. That intuitive difficulty is predicted by my point about how we ground oughts in is’es. And supposing that we do conduct that thought-experiment anyway, and (as I predict) deny that freedom is or ought to be valuable to the denizens of the agent-free world, we risk saying nothing about the real world.
James Sweet @ 37
Yeah, I think I may start using Russell Blackford’s phrase “rational inquiry” more consistently.
In this case, however, Pigliucci is criticizing Dawkins for using scientific arguments and ignoring philosophical arguments. The reason I keep using the word “science” is because I specifically want to know how Pigliucci goes about dividing arguments into the categories “science” and “philosophy.” I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive; in fact, and maybe this is a little archaic of me, I literally think of science as “natural philosophy,” a proper subdomain of philosophy, so that there is no scientific argument that is not also a philosophical argument (for example, a scientific argument will take along philosophical principles like parsimony and prior probablities as premises; a scientist need not explicitly state this because they are part and parcel to scientific arguments).
No prob. It was held up in moderation for a good while but (I think) placed back where it should have been if posted immediately and, consequently, was easy to miss.
At the risk of missing other interesting points, I’m going to focus here because it’s point I particularly care about. My belief in human agency is a crucial basis for my belief in God. As I see it, without God or something God-like, human agency is impossible. Cause and effect are relentless. As Penn biologist Anthony Cashmore put it, “[n]either religious beliefs, nor a belief in free will, comply with the laws of the physical world.” If you’re right about our lack of agency, then freedom is indeed a mistaken value. In fact, without ageny, there can really be no oughts, only is’es. Yet, I doubt whether anyone *really* believes determinism to be true in the sense that I’m pretty sure that everyone — even those who express a belief that determinism is true — goes through what we at least conceive of as a decision-making process as if we had volition. I even suspect that if anyone *really* believed in determinism and acted accordingly, s/he would likely go insane. Moreover, since science is utterly dependent upon our perceptions and our perceptions all tell us that we have volition, if we don’t, science itself is necessarily incoherent simply because our perceptions are so flawed.
“Signal”
You made a slip on your shiny new blog, thus confirming that you are what I suspected you were all along. So: you’re anonymous, you’re pretending to be someone and something other than what you are, you are not admitting to being someone and something that you are (and in fact you have explicitly denied it), and you have a hidden agenda.
So I doubt that I’ll be allowing you to comment here any more.
“Shit-stirring” is the absolute opposite of my intentions. Treating people with reasoned arguments is a way of unstirring shit.
Please, before I drop this — try to see things from my perspective. I don’t have access to whatever knowledge you’ve got. There’s this guy, he says some interesting things, slightly glib things, so I respond. I don’t have control over you; that’s just a fact. As you point out, it’s your blog. That’s not being mouthy or hostile to you. It’s acknowledging my isolated place in the discussion.
All I know for a fact is that this guy is a right-winger of some sort, and that you’re hostile to him. Maybe with good grounds, maybe not, I don’t know. Until shown reasons why I should be hostile, I’m absolutely not going to apologize for being civil and responding with reasoned refutations. I’ll stop them now, because you asked — of course. But I did no wrong, and I resent being treated as if I had.