A Couple of Reviews
PZ comments on ‘The Root of All Evil’ at Pharyngula.
Nobody should ever call Dawkins arrogant. On the scale established by American televangelists, by Christians in general, he is a timid model of bashful humility. Pit a man who works for his knowledge, who willingly tests and reviews it continually, against a mob who trusts in revealed knowledge dogmatically, and I’ll tell you who the arrogant ones are.
Well exactly. How it did irritate me, listening to that smug unctuous man telling Dawkins he is arrogant. What a joke! But it works, you know. It works all the time. The Limbaughs and O’Reillys never get enough of that (well they wouldn’t, would they – it works) ploy, calling any failure to submit to religious dogma ‘elitist’ and an ‘attack of people of faith’. So however upside down and backward it is, it just keeps going on and on and on.
There is a review-synopsis of the first show at this new blog, which I see some of you have already found via Pharyngula. I meant to link to it yesterday but [voice rises to shriek] I’ve been busy! But there it is now – with its name derived from Pope, just as (indirectly) B&W’s is.
The naming things is an issue for those that don’t believe there actually is a God or Gods but who don’t want to be seen as going beyond evidence and logic and claiming that there definitely isn’t a God or Gods (if only people would stop thinking atheism means this!), and the arrogance this is seen to entail (for a good little book on atheism, have a look at Julian Baggini’s ‘Atheism: A Very Short Introduction’; it’s cheap and easy to read quickly).
Same here. B&W is cheap and easy to read quickly. I take a lot of pride in that.
Maybe you need a way to charge… the fact of putting money in the plate in church is an act of committment to the ‘shoulds’ of beign in the church. That sense of committment builds and builds.
We have a way to charge – demanding that people buy the book(s). That’s the equivalent of passing the plate. (Only you get a book out of the deal!)
There is a problem with attacking faith as “non-thinking” in the name of science and reason – both require faith.
It is simply believed by scientists that the physical universe can be completely described by scientific laws and theories, but this cannot be proved in theory nor demonstrated in the absence of laws and theories for every phenomenon.
Similarly, it is a matter of faith that these laws and theories are amenable to reason, for instance by being logically consistent and complete.
As Hume pointed out with his “scandal of induction”, we can never show that because things have been a certain way until now, they will always be that way. We have to have faith
Paul
We’ve been through this before; what you describe is ‘belief’ not ‘faith’; two completely different things. I’ll let Ophelia give you the links…
The difference between science’s faith in reason and regularities like induction is that this is a faith we all subscribe to – it is the basis if rational discourse.
Religion has faith in things that contradict these shared rational values. You can reject these shared rational values if you like, but then no one else will give your claims any credence because you have stepped outside the realm of normal discourse. Why should I care about the truth claims of someone who rejects causality or logic?
GT, I’m afraid there is a tedious argument about the circularity of induction, and the deductive tests you suggest are eventually dependent on induction in the broadest sense (i.e. the result of an experiment now will apply to events in the future).
Paul –
“It is simply believed by scientists that the physical universe can be completely described by scientific laws and theories”. Is it? I was taught that we were only learning a ‘description’ of phenomena which would be fine until a better one came along. I was also taught that in science there is the known, unknown and unknowable. Science approaches these three conditions differently to religion – for one at least, acknowledging the existence of the unknowable in the universe.
Yes – isn’t that more of a working assumption? That the laws of nature are consistent throughout the universe? It’s not so much believed as adopted as a working starting point – isn’t it?
We do not lack good reason for thinking inductively. The principle of induction resolves into the principle of identity – A is A and will ever remain A so long as all the factors contributing to A being A remain the same. Where is the problem in accepting that a thing is what it is and will remain so unless changed? Hence the uniformity of nature.
_
Twas a good programme. A couple of cheaps shots, though from D: The reference to Nuremberg, talking about the Pentecostal meetings. And I though the Pastor and the former-secular-Jew-now radical Muslim were to too easy. The Pentecostal movement is largely an American, and fairly recent development. It is being exported and deserves challenging but is not representative of Protestentalism. More a part of show-business, it seems to me. The other guy will probably be a scientologist next year.
I hope in the second episode that D talks to an intelligent English vicar (they do exist and they do mostly accept evolution). It would be a better debate..
Discalimer: I am not a Believer and certainly supprt rational argument. I just want to see a fair fight.
Ken – I thought that the danger Dawkins was exposing was how much influence these extreme boneheaded dogmatists have; the fact that religion is a house of cards is all the more scary when you consider that the Evangelist and his ilk has the ear of Bush, and that Islamists such as that converted Jew in Jerusalem have deep political influence too. Doesn’t matter if they appear barbarically dumb, or prehistorically stupid, to an educated liberal, they have influence, and it can feel more so than the electorate. Problematic and ripe for discussion.
Secondly, there is no point knocking over a nice, trendy, intelligent and widely read Bishop. There is every point – for instance – raising concern about the spread of Aids, and the Catholic Church’s utterly malign influence on this matter. The fact that it’s edict is based on a bunch of nonsensical rituals, arbitrary texts, and arcane unaccountable hierarchy rather then say, the pillage of diamonds, or ethnic superiority, should not become an alibi. It should be attacked with full vigour.
The argument as I read it is about how, because of its very unverifiability and unaccountability, because it rests on non-logic, then how much evil that organised religion can bring to the world when it is hijacked by unaccountable dogmatists, who always have and always will hijack it. It’s within the very tenets of the Just F@cking Do It (JFDI) principle that is religion that it will be hijacked. (The argument is also that science does not follow JFDI rules. It follows Please-Prove-Me-Wrong rules (PPMW))
And before anyone else jumps in about Pol Pot, Stalin and other atheists – fine. We have been talking about how evil they were long and hard for a very long time, quite openly, and rightly educating our children accordingly. We are being discouraged from doing this about the even the worst effects of religion currently, for mealy-mouthed, counter-productive, political reasons. Thousands of hours are spent broadcasting ‘faith-based’ crap in the UK each year, this programmers lasts two hours in total.
Nick: my comment was mostly about D’d claim (in the programme and elsewhere) that religion is the root of all evil. I don’t think it is.
Like most human activity and beliefs, sometimes it causes evil, sometimes good.
I think there are some pretty nasty (and irrational) exponents about now but they will pass.
They certainly deserve challenge but I have trouble accepting (and always have) D’s case that the world would be a better place if relios belief dissappeared.
Unfortunately, I have returned from a trip to UK so won’t see the second epidode. For a while, anyway.
Ken – “I think there are some pretty nasty (and irrational) exponents about now but they will pass.”
I don’t think they will pass, maybe that’s the trouble. And I do think the world would be improved without religion, at least the ones that have the ‘because I say so’ bit written in stone, which is most of them. I’ll of course concede that religion is not the root of all evil, but it’s an eye-catcher to some arguments that get pitful airtime these days…
Even taking the instrumentalist view of science that it provides only a usable set of concepts for dealing with the physical universe, rather than a realist view that what is “out there” is what our best theories require to exist, you still end up with the scandal of induction: whatever ideas you have, no matter how successful so far, may be invalidated tomorrow. This applies both to scientific theories and to what we may call the philosophical assumptions underpinning them, such as that the laws of the universe are eternal and universal.
I was hoping someone was going to show me an essential difference between faith that science will always work and faith in God. My claim is as follows: All faith requires a leap in the dark. No one can say that one such leap is greater than any other, because by definition no one knows the extent of the unknown.
It may seem that the leap in the case of science is the smaller, because of science’s successes so far. But there are two fatal objections to this:
1) From history we know that confidence in the validity of any scientific theory can be misplaced and that it may have to be replaced by something contradictory. Perhaps the most famous instance comes from a talk given by the great physicist Lord Kelvin about 100 years ago, in which he said, very roughly, that physics was finished, that we had all the laws and theories we needed to explain all physical phenomena. He admitted that blackbody radiation and the Michaelson-Morley experiment had proven difficult to explain so far but he was confident they would not resist explanation for long more.
Unfortunately for him, blackbody radiation overthrew one of the two main planks of the physics of the day and the Michaelson-Morley experiment overthrew the other. Quantum physics in the first case and relativity in the second not only replaced their predecessors, they directly contradicted them. Physicists went from claiming that light was pure wave to saying that it has some particle properties, and from saying that time is absolute to saying that it is relative to the observer (among other changes). Here is the nub: how can anyone have confidence in whatever scientific theory holds sway today without the sort of faith exhibited by Kelvin?
2) If the knowable in two different fields is infinite then no matter how much is known in one field and how little in the other, the unknowns are equal in size. (This is a consequence of mathematical ideas about infinity introduced by Cantor. For example, the number of positive integers starting at 1 is the same as the number of positive integers starting at 2.). By definition we cannot say that the knowable is not infinite so we cannot get past this objection.
At what point did this become an undergraduate philosophy class?
Ooh, ooh, I’ve got one. How do you know that your reasoning is actually valid and not riddled with contradictions? Hah, you don’t, not without circularity, therefore your belief in the invalidity of induction is undermined. Hah hah hah, I win the philosophical race to the bottom.
“It depends on a belief, in the face of evidence, that a centrally planned society is workable.”
We’ll have to disagree there. Soviet Russia and Communist China -worked- to a greater or lesser extent. Whether it was desirable is an entirely different issue.
PM: yep, let’s let it drop.
Otherwise I think we’ll be debating the meaning of “worked”.
Paul, you are not paying attention: there is no scandal of induction – only the scandal of the so-called scandal. Translation in time (or space) is irrelevant – it is only the configuration of contributory factors that constitutes cause. A thing is what it is until a change in its factors cause it to cease being what it was. Accepting uniformity is no leap of faith and is more basic than a matter of error-prone habit – it is the recognition of identity, equivalence, and cause.
_
No better than the godbotherers
||I was hoping someone was going to show me an essential difference between faith that science will always work and faith in God. My claim is as follows: All faith requires a leap in the dark|| Paul Powers
So, here and now; thus, there and then – and in so far as conditions differ, so also the result. We are all liable to error, but can the ability to judge as equivalent be classed as faith – “a leap in the dark” – or be thought a scandal?
_
“A thing is what it is until a change in its factors cause it to cease being what it was”
This is a claim that requires justification. How do you know that change is not one of these “factors”, whatever they are?
“How do you know that your reasoning is actually valid and not riddled with contradictions”. I don’t. In fact, as a trained physicist I would hope there is some mistake, but I cannot see one. Science is superior to religion but not because it does not require a leap of faith.
“I don’t. In fact, as a trained physicist I would hope there is some mistake, but I cannot see one.”
Oh for the love of god, you really didn’t get what I was saying.
PM: you are correct. Now could you kindly spell it out? Please remember this story: in 1992 there was an attack by speculators led by George Soros on the European Exchange Mechanism. Currencies were picked off one by one, most spectacularly Sterling, leading to “Black Wednesday” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday). One of the currencies besieged was the Irish punt: when asked if the government would devalue the currency, a government minister replied that they would not devalue it, “neither today nor tomorrow”. This means, to every Paddy , “never”. Unfortunately, to the assembled international journalists it meant “the day after tomorrow it will be devalued”, and the speculators attacked.
As another famous Irishman put it, the UK and the US are “divided by a common language”. In short, what may be very clear to you can be incomprehensible to another, even where you both share the same language.
I was pointing out that your radical skepticism was just the start of a philosophical race to the bottom.
Thanks, PM.
Unfortunately I do not see what is all that radical about it.
PM “Soviet Russia and Communist China -worked- to a greater or lesser extent.”
If it Soviet Russia had worked then there ought to be at leats the beginning of a thriving democracy there now, as its governance, infrastructure, beaurocracy and agencies changed hands. Witness by comparison India’s miraculously succesful deployment of democracy between 1949 and 1959, following the withdrawal of the British.
Russia is a basket case, and there is a reasonable argument to suggest that in twenty years it will look like a perma-frost version of Africa. That is not the legacy of a succesful geo-economy.
Nick S, that is a very strange claim – you seem to arguing that the failures of post-communist Russia are all due to communism, I’m sure a pretty convincing argument could be advanced that it is in such a state due to the imposition of a capitalist economy.
I really don’t think thsi kind of comparative economics works, for every succesful capitalist economy in the rich industrialised west there is a screwed up third world economy. In comparative economics all things are not equal.
Paul, it is radical because it differs in almost no way from my argument that your reasoning could be completely flawed and thus your argument rubbish. Or me claiming I don’t know you mean the same things by your words as I mean, nor do I have any reason to believe you exist, or that anything exists. The problem is that instead of cleverly proving that science is also based on faith in a similar way to religion, you have started down a slope, at the bottom of which there can be no rational discourse. All you have shown is that science relies on the kind of faith that bothers almost no one (I still go to work and eat because although I can’t prove I’ll exist tomorrow, I’m pretty sure I will, and so is everyone else) – whereas religion relies on the kind of faith which puts aside normal evidential standards, the kinds of standards we require in every other sphere of life.
[incidentally, this argument is wrong:
“2) If the knowable in two different fields is infinite then no matter how much is known in one field and how little in the other, the unknowns are equal in size.”
because not all infinite sets are equal, for instance, the set of integers and the set of real numbers (due to Cantor I believe)]
PM Nah, fair cop – I know, the comparative thing is a bit second rate I’ll admit. But a lot of the people running Russian federation are the same old bastards who were trying to defeat the west in the 80s (and this is NO defense of reaganomics BTW) – but in what ways can we say soviet communism ‘worked’ ? 48% of annual budget spent on arms ? (A position which led to the Soviet Bloc’s demise). Appalling shortages of basic foodstuff ‘worked’? Jail if you said so ‘worked’ ? Communism was on a systemic downward spiral as soon as Lenin snuffed it if you ask me. I don’t beleive Chinese Communism ‘works’ either – not when they have a human rights record that makes the entire current ‘western’ world’s shenanigans – look like Woodstock by comparison… they can’t keep up that level of oppression for anothere generation, not when their middle classes are starting to get hungry for white goods and donuts…
in reverse order:
If what is knowable in one field is infinite, and the knowable in another is also infinite, then it may be that the two infinities are of different types but that has to be demonstrated. All I was pointing out is that Dawkins’ argument requires this to be true and that we have no way to decide the question.
On the major point, I have stopped well short of solipism and stayed at the same level of skepticism as Dawkins. In the second of his programs, he chatted to someone involved in running the new-fangled “faith schools” in Britain ,who told him that when he had been at school he had been taught that the moon was gouged out of the earth. As this is no longer what science teaches, the man was able to claim that even at the low level of what science is taught in school, there are no guarantees that what science now teaches is the last word. In which case, we are to infer, why trust the answers science gives? Science might discover tomorrow that the entire world was indeed once flooded as told in the Biblical story of Noah (which was included in the “science” textbooks used in this “school”). The thing is, there are two sorts of knowledge in science: the first sort is the kind that says that the moon is not made of cheese and the second is the kind that says the universe came into existence so many billions of years ago. The latter requires far more support from theory and is not as reliable as the former. But, and this is crucial, science does not distinguish between the two. It decides all questions with the same methodology.
This is a hopelessly crude excuse for a rule of thumb and I don’t pretend to have researched it, but, in discussing regimes that have or haven’t worked, it is interesting to recall that there were (and are) countries people risked their lives to leave because it was either very difficult or just plain forbidden. There are also countries that, say what you like about them and their governments, don’t have to worry about a mass exit of citizens; on the contrary, some are very picky about conditions of entry for long-term or permanent stays. Freedom in general seems to have a lot to do with this.
On the other point (the moon etc.), it’s absolutely true that science errs and corrects itself (remember me mentioning protoplasm in a quote from one of my childhood books a few weeks ago?; Dawkins mentions that somewhere as well). But, as Judge Jones pointed out, no point against science automatically translates into a point for religion. And science is trying to get things as right as it can; religion has had all the answers written down in the same unchanging books for centuries. What’s even to compare, other than that both sides think they’re right? One has a case for such a claim and the other doesn’t. The unevidenced claim does not – ever – get stronger by disproof of the claim which based itself on something. If that’s how things worked, wouldn’t all science have to be considered true (even without research and experimentation) because there is no evidence for any truth in religion? If religion were even as good as guesswork… but it’s not. It’s a convoluted dogma that you might say is based on the guesswork of our most primitive articulate ancestors… and it’s good enough for a majority of mankind to live by today. Frankly, I’d much rather not believe in that depressing fact than in god, but I play by other rules in which what I’d like to believe in doesn’t hold sway.
Maybe in the next incarnation…
Re: ‘worked’, I believe we were discussing centrally planned economies – hence the references to Russia and China – so questions about dubious political activities, or even arms races, do not apply.
“If what is knowable in one field is infinite, and the knowable in another is also infinite, then it may be that the two infinities are of different types but that has to be demonstrated.”
Not really, you claimed that the unknowable in the two fields was infinite and the same. Surely it is up to you to justify that they are (a) infinite, and (b) the same order.
“I have stopped well short of solipism and stayed at the same level of skepticism as Dawkins”
Only if you stick with your points about the impermanence of science, rather than your claims about the scandal of induction. The former is a claim within normal discourse, the latter a form of metaphysical scepticism.
“there are no guarantees that what science now teaches is the last word. In which case, we are to infer, why trust the answers science gives?”
Well basically what stewart says. Science makes claims based on the best available evidence, religion just claims something based on tradition. While science’s view on something may change with new evidence, it is still consistent with the current evidence, evidence that religion is mostly already inconsistent with. Also, science very rarely proves things completely wrong that it once thought were true anymore…it is much more likely to refine things, which means that the previous view was broadly right, but wrong on some details – I don’t think that position should give religious adherents much comfort.
Or, if I ask a believer and a scientist to tell me why each stands by the views he holds, I can expect to hear about observation and experiment from the latter and authority and revelation from the former. Wasn’t it Behe who, in the Dover trial, admitted that ID holds up better for believers? There are things here that are so cut and dried that it is incomprehensible why so many people just can’t see it.
OB has already posted the Vedic take on things; here is the garbage readers of the Jerusalem Post are subjected to. The man has no idea what he’s talking about, but brings just a few carefully chosen quotes that makes it sound like Darwin’s supporters know they don’t actually have a leg to stand on. So what then? Does he mean we all know that god has to exist and we’re just denying him because we’re evil? A great example of the insanity of an existence free of doubt:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1136361067333&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
‘”If what is knowable in one field is infinite, and the knowable in another is also infinite, then it may be that the two infinities are of different types but that has to be demonstrated.”
Not really, you claimed that the unknowable in the two fields was infinite and the same. Surely it is up to you to justify that they are (a) infinite, and (b) the same order.’
It’s funny how often this happens in complicated discussions. To recap: Dawkins attacked religion because it is based on a leap of faith but I pointed out that so is science. I then noted a comeback- that the leaps of faith are of different sizes – but pointed out that this assumes things about the extent of the knowable that cannot be proven. In particular I started mentioning Cantor. The nub is that it is Dawkins’ argument that has requirements on the unknown – all the attacker needs is the possibility that they are not fulfilled.
“science very rarely proves things completely wrong “. How often does not matter, that it can happen and is considered an integral part of science, indeed one of its greatest strengths, makes some of its claims about the physical universe weaker.
“Only if you stick with your points about the impermanence of science, rather than your claims about the scandal of induction. The former is a claim within normal discourse, the latter a form of metaphysical scepticism.” Normal discourse for whom? You earlier wrote “All you have shown is that science relies on the kind of faith that bothers almost no one (I still go to work and eat because although I can’t prove I’ll exist tomorrow, I’m pretty sure I will, and so is everyone else) – whereas religion relies on the kind of faith which puts aside normal evidential standards, the kinds of standards we require in every other sphere of life”. This has the same problem. I do not believe that people demand any kind of standards. As Russell said, “Most people would sooner die than think. In fact many do”. Worse, people can be highly irrational even when they have been highly trained to be rational in their profession. There is a great book on this subject (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140167269/qid%3D1137681107/026-2577675-4431640) that will frighten you to death with tales of the irrationality of doctors practising medecine. Anyway, to stop babbling, whatever standards we are arguing about, they reside in a very small region of a very wide spectrum.
“Dawkins attacked religion because it is based on a leap of faith but I pointed out that so is science. I then noted a comeback- that the leaps of faith are of different sizes – but pointed out that this assumes things about the extent of the knowable that cannot be proven. In particular I started mentioning Cantor.”
I don’t buy this. The leaps of faith are different because the religious believer is simply choosing something to believe and hoping that it’ll all turn out all right in the end – the faith is based in the rejection of ay requirement for evidence or concepts of the unknown. The scientist tries to come to the best conclusion based on the evidence. Those two things really are two different kinds of faith, the latter metaphysical (i.e. all that business about induction), the former an explicit rejection of the rational. Your argument still depends on the metaphysical rather than everyday sceptical move – and thus leads down a slippery slope you don’t want to go down.
[actually, I think I’ll concede that the two types of unknowing are equivalent, because on reflection it seems that surely the domain of knowledge pertinent to the question is exactly the same domain of knowledge for science and religion – the very domain that religion has decided to ignore while science sifts it through to try and find an answer]
The only way to make the distinction between the two types of faith meaningless is your attempt to directly undermine science by an appeal to the infinite nature of potential knowledge (arguing on the rational plane, not the skeptical one), and thus to try and make the finite knowledge of science equivalent to religion’s complete lack of consideration of evidence, by essentially calling both infinitessimal (i.e. (some knowledge)/(infinite potential knowledge) is as good as no knowledge at all).
Now I don’t really see how this infinite knowledge business works as an argument (and it’s been raised before, it’s not just you). Firstly I’m not convinced you can establish that there is really an infinite field of knowledge pertinent to this particular problem, in what way is knowledge particulate? Arguments based on the productive and combinatorial nature of language have always seemed a bit rubbish to me. Secondly, even if there were an infinite possible field of knowledge, if it was of the form of the integers (i.e. entirely capturable in simpler regular rules) or the real numbers (where the infinite detail between the integers might be unnecessary for the bigger picture) I still don’t think it would make science fruitless. So that is why the burden of proof is on you to establish that the realm of knowledge is infinite in a relevant way. Obviously there is potentially some new knowledge that would refute the scientific view and support the religious view, but this is because the religious view evolves in a regressive manner (i.e. everytime a new piece of evidence is found contrary to what they’d predict, god must’ve put it there, probably to test us the sly bastard) or it starts out as essentially empty (‘there exists a god’, ‘nope that’s it, I’m not committing myself any further for fear of making falsifiable predictions or being contradictory’).
“The nub is that it is Dawkins’ argument that has requirements on the unknown – all the attacker needs is the possibility that they are not fulfilled.”
But all the radical sceptic needs is any argument, and he can ‘refute it’ in the same childish way. Therefore you need more than just a possibility to move away from radical scepticism, you need some reason. The conditional nature of scientific knowledge is not reason enough, many many pages ago you rejected instrumentalism with radical philosophical scepticism, now that you’ve backed away from it and re-engaged with rational debate, I’m afraid instrumentalism is back.
Sorry PM: pressures of work have prevented me from responding on this. I will have a long thing about how express myself clearly and succintly