Cosmic variance
What I keep saying! But Sean Carrol says it a lot better in a review of Eagleton’s review of Dawkins.
Okay, very good. God, in this conception, is not some thing out there in the world (or even outside the world), available to be poked and prodded and have his beard tugged upon…The previous excerpt, which defined God as “the condition of possibility,” seemed to be warning against the dangers of anthropomorphizing the deity, ascribing to it features that we would normally associate with conscious individual beings such as ourselves…But – inevitably – Eagleton does go ahead and burden this innocent-seeming concept with all sorts of anthropomorphic baggage. God created the universe “out of love,” is capable of “regret,” and “is an artist.” That’s crazy talk. What could it possibly mean to say that “The condition of possibility is an artist, capable of regret”? Nothing at all…And once you start attributing to God the possibility of being interested in some way about the world and the people in it, you open the door to all of the nonsensical rules and regulations governing real human behavior that tend to accompany any particular manifestation of religious belief, from criminalizing abortion to hiding women’s faces to closing down the liquor stores on Sunday.
This is (she enunciated with quiet intensity) what I keep saying. You can’t do both.
The problematic nature of this transition – from God as ineffable, essentially static and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth – is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of “sophisticated theology.” It’s a millenia-old problem, inherited from the very earliest attempts to reconcile two fundamentally distinct notions of monotheism: the Unmoved Mover of ancient Greek philosophy, and the personal/tribal God of Biblical Judaism. Attempts to fit this square peg into a manifestly round hole lead us smack into all of the classical theological dilemmas: “Can God microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself cannot eat it?” The reason why problems such as this are so vexing is not because our limited human capacities fail to measure up when confronted with the divine; it’s because they are legitimately unanswerable questions, arising from a set of mutually inconsistent assumptions.
That’s exactly it. Takes a cosmologist to say it so clearly. It’s not just a minor bump, it’s a deal-breaker. So Eagleton’s blithe one minute having God be ineffable and not like Gore or an octopus or his foot and the next minute having it be all kinds of specific and particular and just so and not otherwise – won’t work, and makes him look silly. Pick one and stick to it, but don’t pretend it can be both.
OB 
John M 
G. tingey 
Merlijn de Smit 
Don 
Stewart 
As a literary critic, Terry Eagleton is well aware that *all* language, by virtue of being humanly generated, is inescapably anthropomorphic. To attack him by distinguishing the conceptual from the metaphoric on this basis makes no sense – the two ways of speaking complement each other by referring to different dimensions of the same intrinsic issue. In the case of God, Eagleton uses conceptual categories to remind us that we are not talking about an object within a series of objects, but a reality (or otherwise) that necessarily defies such objectification. And he uses metaphoric categories for affirmations which are phenomenological, descriptions of how God, as nonobjectifiable, is perceived and understood (or not) within the realm of experiencing inter-subjectivity. So he’s said nothing silly. He’s just pointed out that only naive believers or non-believers try to wrap God up in metaphysics, no doubt to the chagrin of ideologues in both camps.
When was the last time you anthropomorphised an electron? Or attributed “love” to a nebula? Do geologists speak of the “regret” of rocks?
If any god is in any sense whatsoever “real” then he/she/it/they will be really detectable.
And he (etc) is/are not.
Unless, and until proved otherwise, of course.
Which I do not expect to happen any time soon, at all ……
“If any god is in any sense whatsoever “real” then he/she/it/they will be really detectable.”
And, of course, any millions of believers will tell you that they detect the presence of god with utter reliability every day.
Simon – read Sean’s article again. The point is that Eagleton wants to have his cake and eat it – to define a God outside description and then use words like ‘love’ that are well within our parameters of understanding. You simply can’t have it both ways and to pretend you can is, I’m afraid, silly.
Ditto what Chris said. Eagleton writes some things that are definite statements about what god did, why he did it, what kind of nature he has, etc. I’d like to know how he comes by that knowledge. Is that an unreasonable request? How many possibilities are there? Are his statements based on observation? On an existing text? On a process of deduction? Did he just use his imagination? I happen to think those are damned legitimate questions, especially considering that his statements are expressed in criticism of statements that are better explained made by someone else.
If any god is in any sense whatsoever “real” then he/she/it/they will be really detectable
Even as a hard-fired lightening-proof ceramic atheist this line of reasoning irritates the hell out of me, not least because it conflates ‘real’ with detectable’. It is possible to imagine, for example, a God who is entirely ‘real’ but who continually recreates the world according to His will is a way that ensures He is never detected.
(Plus, of course, as John M points out maybe God is detectable and we’re just not on the email list.)
The lack of detectability may imply there is no positive reason to postulate the existence of a god (insert Invisible Pink Unicorn/ Lunar-Orbital Teapot reference here), but it is clearly untrue that it necessarily refutes the existence of a God.
C’mon, this is basic stuff GT. Get with the programme:)
outeast I agree. I was annoyed when the philosopher’s magazine quiz marked me down for answering that God could do physically impossible things or something like that (He can, he’s God, He defines physical possibility) for example. But when we do the full loop we find that each answer to each objection only makes God more unlikely. Theology’s “buts” only tie the theologian up in further knots, as the burrito example shows.
… which is another way of saying Ockham only has a razor if there’s no god…
… so… if there is a god, the question of whether or not he has a beard may remain unanswered, but we know for sure that Ockham has one…
Oh, did you get done for ‘biting a bullet’ in saying God could make a square triangle? (I think that was what I got done for.) That annoyed me – as though He could not simply recreate existence with wholly different physical parameters, ho ho ho! C’mon, dat’s what de man does! (Largely to annoy the naysayers, I suspect.)
My point wasn’t about the probability of God. Ultimately, that’s a binary question: he is, or he ain’t, and probability has fuckall to do with it. All I’m saying is that the dilemma GT seems to think is so final is no problemo, dude, when it comes to apologetics.
Once you go with the concept of God almost anything can be explained away. Apologetics is good like that. I never get those who lose their faith over some personal loss or crisis (how could a just God let this happen? etc). To me, the critical problem is thereis no reason to get on the board in the first place. God is a redundant hypothesis.
Yes. And people love forgetting that everyone is born an atheist. It is unarguably the default position.
Axiom: there is no such thing as ‘unarguable’. Want me to try? :))
“Oh, did you get done for ‘biting a bullet’ in saying God could make a square triangle? (I think that was what I got done for.)”
Ah yes the “square triangle”. You don’t even have to be The Lord in order to be able to do that, mere mortals can use non-Euclidian geometries.
“That annoyed me – as though He could not simply recreate existence with wholly different physical parameters, ho ho ho! C’mon, dat’s what de man does! (Largely to annoy the naysayers, I suspect.)”
Well exactly. But this has its own problems…
A few further thoughts…
Dave – Your examples assume that only metaphoric language is anthropomorphic. I’m reminding you that this is simply not so. The point is, we have no option but to approach and mediate non-human realities through the human facility of language with its undissolvable (though changing) interests, perspectives and affections. If we are not alert to the impact of this, we are in danger of simply importing ourselves into what we talk about and then coming to the conclusion either that there is nothing more to it than that -or that we somehow control what we investigate. (My own experience is that this is probably nowhere more dangerously obvious than in religion, and nowhere more dangerously un-obvious than in the natural and human sciences)
Let’s take your rocks, so to speak! Both forensic and figurative descriptions of rocks may aid our understanding of them. In some cases they will point to different aspects of the same reality and in other instances to similar aspects in different ways. When I describe a rock as hard, I am approaching it through its relation to myself as a softer thing. Because a rock is an object that gives itself for investigation within a world of objects, this category of hardness can be measured and compared (relatively) across objects. But it is still something that emerges from the core of my sense-world. If I was made of something infinitely harder than a rock I would be equally right in designating it as soft, for the same kind of reasons. In this way my investigation is inescapably relational, knows of no absolute boundary between the forensic and the figurative, and reveals that I do not have at my disposal assignable categories which are ever less than human in orientation. This doesn’t make them unreliable – unless I do not know what I am doing and confuse different levels or means of description/reference. This is a well known problem in science. And in theology, as the next example illustrates.
John M writes ‘If any god is in any sense whatsoever “real” then he/she/it/they will be really detectable.’ This takes for granted (among many other things) that God is a member of a category of probe-able things called ‘gods’ and that ‘reality’ *cannot* exist outside the sphere of what is detectable to the senses of creatures such as ourselves. The first assumption is the elementary category mistake which Eagleton is averting to (God is *not* like a rock in the forensic descriptive sense!), and the second is as unfalsifiable within the terms of engagement it assumes as anything it is supposed to refute. It would also pose massive problems for theoretical physics in principle – not that theoretical physics doesn’t enjoy it’s fair share of problems, of course.
Chris W: ‘The point is that Eagleton wants to have his cake and eat it – to define a God outside description and then use words like ‘love’ that are well within our parameters of understanding.’
No, he is simply appreciating and holding to the appropriate distinction between description and reference, as between the objectifiable and the non-objectifiable. To talk of God in a validly conceptual way is to refer to God *by saying what God is not and cannot be* – because, not being God, we do not know what ‘godness’ is in its essence, but we do know (if we are wise) that we are not God. To talk of God affectively (as ‘love’, say) is, consequently, to talk phenomenologically of the perceived impact of transcendence. It is to talk about a human experience – mediated through an activity such as prayer or gift exchange, say – in relation to the wholly dispossessive and non-manipulative reality God is held to be *precisely by virtue of not being identifiable as part of that competitive world of relationships whereby objects and persons gain their identity by claiming space or shape over and against an ‘other’.*
In other words, refusing description and opting for affection – which is to refer in two ways and at two levels to God as ‘no thing’ – are not contradictory but complementary speech forms. Of course most ‘religious’ people do not use them with any precision or awareness (the source of many problems, some of which Dawkins describes well), but that is a distinct issue.
Also, I certainly do not find that “words like ‘love’ that are well within our parameters of understanding”. Love seems well beyond my ken most of the time, but very worthwhile – even though it is clearly not ‘detectable’ in the way that a rock is! If love may in some way be called ‘disposessive interestedness in the other’ (as I would argue that it can) then it clearly makes sense that love is *not* pin-downable, because only in this way can it avoid becoming part of our manipulative attempts to jockey for position. Instead, love invites us to a way of being and relating which is qualitatively different to what we assume we are stuck with. Much the same, in my view, can be said about God – in full recognition that anything thereby said will be referential not descriptive, metaphorical not forensic, and inescapably anthropomorphic. None of which enables us to say with certainty that it is ‘true’ or ‘untrue’. This is the kind of stuff that has to be lived into not just argued about, it seems to me. But that’s a longer story.
My substantial point is this. Whatever the excesses of his rhetoric, Terry Eagleton (who knows a thing or two about how to use words) is pointing out that, regrettably, when Richard Dawkins says *all* religion is dumb and dangerous, he himself is often being palpably dumb. Which is a shame, because in other areas he is not at all dumb, and because the war of extremes he is engaged in risks bombing the large area of ground where sensible people of both ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ commitments can and should seek ways of reinstating civility and reason. But only if we spend more time trying to understand each other’s ways of thinking and speaking, and less time launching ad hominem attacks or getting over-preoccupied with proving ourselves right.
Well, that’s more than my pennyworth. I’ll leave you to flame me in peace from your unassailable citadels ;-)
Very best wishes, Simon
Simon, that was very thoughtful, and I see your point entirely. However, as an historian, I try to approach these things from the point of view of what makes sense to me. What makes sense to me is an historical account of religion in which, so far as we can tell, more and more sophisticatedly philosophical visions of what ‘God’ might be have been grafted onto originally profoundly anthropomorphic deities, by very clever people who are good at all the philosophical stuff, but never manage to dissociate themselves from the cultural power and institutional resources that come with a far more literal-minded and authoritarian use of scriptures and doctrines in which the anthropomorphic nature of ‘God[s]’ is insisted on again and again.
Therefore, from my historically-attuned perspective, it doesn’t really matter how clever the argument is about the ineffable whatsit of the doodad, because all those clever arguments have spent most of their time being used as mental gymnastics by people whose power and prestige rested on obliging other people to believe far simpler versions of ‘Godness’, and to pay for the privilege.
Which I know is some sort of huge philosophical category-error, possibly the vastest ad hominem of all time, but I think it is, so far as we can tell, the historical ‘reality’, which is not altered by the possibility of it being not ‘good’ as argument-per-se.
And meantime, every advance in scientific knowledge we have of the world and the universe has served to contradict that scriptural story, on which the essential authority of the notion of a ‘God’ has been based. So I honestly, really, don’t see the point in not just setting all that stuff aside, if we can.
Whether or not Dawkins is a good *politician* in arguing the way he does, we can discuss, and I might agree he is often, and perhaps increasingly, impolitic. But that, again, relates to the qualities of the historical environment, not his argument per se.
I really hate snide comments like ‘I’ll leave you to flame me in peace’ – they’re a really cheap way of dismissing any criticism before it has even been made. Look to your own unassailable citadel, Mr Barrow!
Anyway, to take issue with one of two things you said…
This is the kind of stuff that has to be lived into not just argued about, it seems to me.
This is valid as it pertains to love, which is after all a human emotion; as an emotion love is by definition real if it is felt. In this it is similar to belief, but not (as you seem to be suggesting) to God. Belief is something that attains reality through being felt, but God either exists or he does not – and in that sense, He is indeed like a rock. (Yes, I realize He need not be like a rock in the made-up-of-atoms-whizzing-about sense.)
To talk of God affectively (as ‘love’, say) is, consequently, to talk phenomenologically of the perceived impact of transcendence.
Sorry to say it, but I’ve read this bit several times and it still sounds like waffle. Impressive-sounding waffle, but waffle nonetheless – especially given that the way Eagleton uses the word ‘love’ is clearly humanizing and personifying (God ‘wants simply to be allowed to love us’, for example – so Eagleton’s God has ‘wants’, too!).
‘Love’ is of its nature human: it is something we feel, something which depends upon and is the product of these corporeal husks which frame our every perception. Far from ‘invit[ing] us to a way of being and relating which is qualitatively different to what we assume we are stuck with’, love is part and parcel of what we are stuck with. Why should God’s love have anything in common with what we know as love? To deny God a fleshly, made-up-of-atoms-whizzing-about existence is to deny Him our experience of the world, including ‘love’ as we experience it.(Of course, God is capable of all, and thus must be capable of human-recognizeable love – but that argument gives no special place to love over any other emotional sensation, and there is no reason to suppose that He indulges His ability to feel as do we weak and crawling creations of His!)
Mind you, all this is just waffle too as we have (and Eagleton has!) no grounds whatever for believing that a God exists, still less for claiming know what (even if!) He feels…
“more and more sophisticatedly philosophical visions of what ‘God’ might be have been grafted onto originally profoundly anthropomorphic deities”
And it’s the profoundly anthropomorphic deities and their followers who are still (or again) running things, and working as hard as they can to run more and more things. The people who want to tell everyone what to do on the basis of their deity don’t have sophisticatedly philosophical visions of what ‘God’ might be, they have unsophisticated visions of a bigger stronger male person who shares every one of their moral prejudices and will punish people who don’t agree. Don’t use condoms; homosexuality is a sin; women are wives and mothers and nothing else; taxes are a tool of Satan; gun control is demonic; God gave Israel to the Jews; uncovered women are catmeat; yadda yadda.
The philosophically sophisticated waffle is more or less irrelevant. The more sophisticated it is, the less difference it seems to make to anything, and a good thing too – but that’s not where the argument is.
NO it ISN’t basic and outeast, is I’m afraid wrong.
If we stick with scientific methodological naturalism, then if god exists then “BigG” will be detectable.
The argument… “a God who is entirely ‘real’ but who continually recreates the world according to His will is a way that ensures He is never detected”
Is just another way of saying:
“I know I’ve got pretty fairies at the bottom of my garden, even if YOU can’t see them, nyaah, nyaah!”
Given the amazingly diifcult-to-“see” things we have detected, starting with, say the various forms of neutrino, then something like “BigG” should be easy to spot, surely, unless of course “he” is just a figment – oops.
And, of course, it is entirely possible that an undetectable god exists, BUT…
If BigG is undetectable, then we needn’t bother.
Look, there was this problem in Physics, near the end of the 19th Century – how did light (e-m radiation) travel through the vacuum?
There had to be a medium for it, so the “luminiferous AEther was postulated.
Until the mIchelson-Morley experiment trashed the idea.
In the end, the problem was resolved by uncle Albert (One-stone) who said, simply”The AEther is not detectable”.
Within 10 years, no-one bothered with it any more.
Now this is EXACTLY analagous to the argument about BigG.
If BigG is not detectable, even if he/she/it/they exist, then why bother?
End of problem.
Contrariwise, the believers had better start busting their guts to detect BigG….
And it doesn’t matter whether you are talking about an anthropomorpic presonal god, or the ineffable, mysterious umnoved mover, because the same arument applies.
C’mon chaps, iI have done some physics, and I’ve read a little philosophy (principally Socrates and Hume) so don’t just dismiss the argument because you don’t like it, or its’ conclusions. Because that is why the believers and the fence-sitters are deperately trying to rubbish Dawkins’ latest.
Making all sortds of strw-man accusations, tha lokk plausible for 15 seconds, but have no real content at all.
Incidentally, I’m with Tipler on the content-value of theology.
G. Tingey – you are confusing methodological naturalism (which is the idea that natural phenomena and events – which excludes unlimited categories such as ‘the universe’ and metaphysical categories such as ‘existence’ – have natural causes) and metaphysical naturalism (the idea that everything there is consists of such natural phenomena).
Viewpoints such as the latter cannot be falsified or verified by observations made in the world. As a matter of principle. That does not mean they are wrong; or that they cannot be sensibly argued for or against. It just mean that you are engaging in a category mistake by applying scientific method to philosophical viewpoints.
No, I’m not.
But if there are such things as the “unlimited categories” you mention above, then how is anyone to get a handle on them?
And since they cannot be sensibly argued for or against, they are, by definition (your definition) non-sense.
Qualia without a measuring stick.
Which is complete and utter bullshit.
I can’t see any of the religious crap-pushers admitting to the definition you’ve given, since that would then condemn their “message” to the realms of fantasy – which is where they belong anyway.
So they have to either say there is a real, present, personal “god” – which fails under the detectablity rule.
Or there is some mystic non-personal “god” who/which – oh, erm oops ….
Come now, scientists (or good ones at least) have to adopt philosophical viewpoints, and they have to be very careful about it.
Do we know that we are measuring the right set of variables?
Are there any mistakes or hiddden assumptions in our observations and measurements?
Are our eyes or our measuring instruments decieveing us?
Have we missed something?
Are there hidden variables?
etc.
Yes you are.
Your position seems to be that anything which cannot be detected or measured in some kind of empirical fashion does not exist, and that therefore arguing about it is meaningless drivel or some such. I don’t particularly agree with that position, but I suppose it’s a defensible philosophical position. The point here being that it’s a philosophical position, not a scientific one. Because it includes a priori answers to issues science hasn’t solved yet, such as the mind-body problem, etc.
Your analogy between God and the luminiferous aether fails, as I’ve pointed out before somewhere. The luminiferous aether was presumably thought to be subject to the ultimate laws of physics and in that sense to be “limited” if spatiotemporally unlimited. It was also proposed as an explanation of a more or less restricted phenomenon in space and time. Neither of these two are applicable to (transcendent) Deities.
But the point here is that your philosophical starting position excludes such entities as Deities a priori. Again, fair enough. But the bad move is then subsequently demanding that a Deity be detectable according to the methods of science, and regarding its undetectability as a sign of its non-existence. Because that simply doesn’t follow.
Merlijn: Your argument is why I remain (alas) an “agnostic.” I’m not quite so willing to say “there is not” because I can’t see, test, or even conceive of it.
That doesn’t mean I necessarily disagree with OB’s other points, and I remain very skeptical about “religion’s” truth claims, but…there are more things in this world than ever dreamed of by yourm philosophy (mangled quote) :)
Brian,
I find this defence of agnosticism a little peculiar (though it’s common enough). Absent a positive reason to postulate a God, why do so? I’m quite aware of the philosophical possibility of the existence of a being (shall we say) outside our ken, but I seen no reason to declare myself an agnostic because of that.
Ultimately, absent a reason for hypothesizing such a being non-belief (atheism) is the logical position. There is literally no difference between the unnecessary postulation of God and the unnecessary postulation of any other comparably unfalsifiable being (such as the undetectable invisible pink unicorns of just renown). Would you declare yourself ‘agnostic’ as to the existence of the latter? If not, why do you assign God to a special category? And conversely, if so then what is the difference between your agnosticism and my atheism?
A long time ago, it seems, John M wrote “any millions of believers will tell you that they detect the presence of god with utter reliability every day. ” They then inexplicably abandon this harmonious accord and fall into many many antagonistic groups who disagree fundamentally on the nature of the god they detect. Hindus even think there is not one god but rather millions of them. This is IMHO rather fatal to the reliability of the detection mechanism in question. And this is before we being to consider the lessons of psychology thaty show clearly and repeatedly that we are constantly making mistakes of perception and reasoning.
“Transcendent” deities is just a cop-out.
You deliberatly define the subject so that it is not ameneable to scientific investigation.
OK, fine by me, now go and play with the faires at the bottom of your garden.
And, no there is NO difference bteween the fairies and “god”, is there, now?
GT
You deliberatly define the subject so that it is not ameneable to scientific investigation.
Neither Merlin nor I are doing so: that is precisely how the subject is framed. That’s the essence of the debate. That’s the damn point. It’s you tat is attempting to redefine the subject, by redefining God in terms in which no theologist and few believers would recognize.
There is a difference between God and fairies: fairies were believed to exist in a physically real way (tthey drank milk left out for them, for example). However, if you read, say, my comment to Brian Miller above then you would see that I do not think God has a reality status or believability status different from any other unfalisifiable, undetectable being. That does not prevent us from engaging in discussion of the philosophical construct of ‘God’ – and in this context, a mere lack of detectability cannot be equated with a lack of existence. Frankly, if you can’t get your head round this then you’ve little place in a discussion of religious philosophy – which, of course, is the (deserved or undeserved) plaint being levelled at Dawkins.
That is fine as an intellectual exercise, but it is also what is meant by fiddling with the plans of the penthouse when the building lacks a foundation. It would probably be a lot of fun to engage in if masses of people who take their various scriptures literally were not hellbent on forcing their ideas on the rest of us. Fairies may drink milk, but this website would probably never have been considered necessary by those who set it up if nobody in the 21st century believed that god wreaks real, physical miracles in our everyday lives (remember the reactions to the tsunami?). For many of those folks, fairies are just a nice fiction, but god is absolutely real. Were religious faith, in practice, a strictly private affair, neither Dawkins nor anyone here would feel the need to comment, let alone criticise or (counter-)attack.
“I do not think God has a reality status or believability status different from any other unfalisifiable, undetectable being. That does not prevent us from engaging in discussion of the philosophical construct of ‘God'”
Of course it doesn’t. Some of us are, however, then curious to know exactly why this particular unfalsifiable. undetectable being gets to hog centre-stage all the time. The reasons, I suspect, are not purely philosophical. It’s easy to have a quick laugh at FSMism (oops, sorry, Pastafarianism), but we all know nobody has yet committed mass murder in its name. LDS and Scientology are almost as new as FSM, on the religious timescale, and look how many people take them seriously. If your philosophical discussion is serious, you can’t afford not to take the question “why god instead of another unfalsifiable, undetectable being?” just as seriously. It can be discussed ad nauseum, but what does it all really mean prior to the point at which that question is seriously addressed?
Or, much more pertinently, any unfalsifiable, undetectable being? See, you even had me going. Why discuss the attributes of something imaginary for which there’s no evidence? A great answer is because billions of people believe such a being exists, but investigating that tends to leave philosophy rather far behind. That’s one good reason Dawkins doesn’t concern himself with it.
outeast: “Absent a positive reason to postulate a God, why do so?”
Amen. Er…
“a mere lack of detectability cannot be equated with a lack of existence”
String theory is a bit weak. ;-)
Stewart: “Some of us are, however, then curious to know exactly why this particular unfalsifiable. undetectable being gets to hog centre-stage all the time.”
Quite.
The problem remains that the ineffable God of modern theology is very different from the personal chum of ordinary believers, and is frankly a negative product of science. Yet ordinary believers have spoken directly to God and seen His miracles and felt His grace.
I don’t deny your points, Stewart: I concur, and in fact that is precisely the critical issue when it comes to belief.
The reasons ‘this particular unfalsifiable, undetectable being gets to hog centre-stage all the time’ are (surely that’s obvious?) historical. This is where I think those that deny science a role in the discussion of religion get it wrong: science cannot disprove God’s existence, but God’s cultural centrality arises from a heritage of belief with its roots in a need for explanations of physical phenomena… and as science explains these materialistically, the basis upon which the God edifice was constructed is washed away. (Likewise, the texts themselves can be subjected to analysis and their divine roots pretty effectively disproved.)
Dawkins is perhaps fairly criticized for failing to realize that the obvious problems in the upper storeys of God’s mansion have been pretty well patched; just because his concerns about the plaster are misplaced, though, doesn’t stop him being right in pointing out that the foundations were washed away a while ago.
As an unavoidable part of our cultural baggage which may at times also have conferred certain benefits, religion is a fact. That science explains an awful lot that used to be dumped on religion to account for is also an acceptable fact. I’m not at all sure it’s accurate to say that “upper storey” problems have been solved or patched (patching isn’t always solving either). What we ought not to forget is that it can’t matter much if they have been either solved or patched; if there are no foundations, surely no upper storeys exist. That’s where I think that kind of criticism of Dawkins is misplaced. He could also have left it at saying there’s no evidence for god and he wouldn’t have needed a book; an SMS would have sufficed (there was no evidence for god back when science had no answers but the various religious establishments were so powerful then that few dared point it out; the fact that ignorance of the workings of nature used to be considered god-necessitating was not more justified then than it is now, but too few people knew any better). Dawkins wrote a book and not an SMS, because his aim, as he openly states, was to change believing readers into atheists. For any who might chance to read his book, he wished to convince, by leaving as few gaps or hiding places as possible in which belief in god could survive (and god is extraordinarily deft in running for cover when his existence is being argued against). That meant covering as many bases as reasonably possible, even the otherwise unnecessary upper storeys of the non-existent building, at least to a limited extent. One of the things I think some people hate about Dawkins is that he gives religion no quarter, but one of his aims is to demonstrate that it is positively dangerous to do so. It is clear that some attack Dawkins’ methods because they cannot stomach his intention, not vice versa, as they would have one believe.
Sure. But has any believer been deconverted by Dawkins? Unlikely.
He could also have left it at saying there’s no evidence for god and he wouldn’t have needed a book
OK, Dawkins decided to go beyond this – which is fine. But that’s where he encroached on the turf – sorry, deep-shag if rather worn carpets – of people considerably better-informed than him about the upper storeys. He decided to leave the inspection of the rotten supports and venture into the rooms above – all those people above are living in a house with no foundations, but they do know their way around the rooms in a way Dawkins does not. He’s trying to persuade the tour groups to go down and check out the basement, but the way he keeps walking into the doorframes upstairs just leaves the full-time guides in a position where they can dismiss him.
I say, I think this metaphor’s done rather more milage than it ought, don’t you think…?
It is clear that some attack Dawkins’ methods because they cannot stomach his intention, not vice versa, as they would have one believe.
Hm, from what I’ve read it seems to be the liberal atheists and agnostics that decry method over intention. The Xtian contingewnt are perfectly happy to castigate him as a Xtian-hating atheist, method be buggered:)
‘Hm, from what I’ve read it seems to be the liberal atheists and agnostics that decry method over intention. The Xtian contingewnt are perfectly happy to castigate him as a Xtian-hating atheist, method be buggered:)’
Yes, I think that is right. To the believers Dawkins is a complete non-entity. If anything he will reinorce the message about the sinfulness of non-belief for those who wish to manipulate the young: ‘you see what those atheists says about mum and dad, how they accuse them of stupidity and evil, and parody their most cherished beliefs? Why waste time listening to what they might have to say.’
I just don’t beleive the philosophical hand-waving crap that some of the correspondents here are coming out with.
So god/imaginary fairies are not physically real and present, and they may be “transcendent”.
So what?
How can we interact with them, except through the medium of our sensorium, and the devices we have developed to detect other things not directly perceptible, but which are real, nonetheless. (Since I’m typing this on a computer, how about the electron as an example?)
Someone mentioned string theory – well, I am personally expecting that one to go belly-up fairly soon.
Another triumph for the scientific method(ology).
In the meantime, if any god/fairy exists, and people interact with it them, then the message(s) must MUST MUST be accessible to our sensoria.
And therefore detectable.
Remember, also the post-Persig experiments, where voices/visions/gods can be artificially summuned up from the abyssal depths of our brains, by controlled stimuli. And the analagous cases of people hearing “voices” and having “visions”. Or just being off their rockers, even.
Right, get on with it: detect “god”.
Put up or shut up.
There is NO escape, because if people can sense “god” and they keep claiming they can, then those sensations will be a detectable message-event, accessible to madern equipment.
Come on, this isn’t even second-year university-level physics or electronics, and it is certainly no more difficult than philosophy 101 ……
I just don’t beleive the philosophical hand-waving crap that some of the correspondents here are coming out with.
Not hand-waving, but elementary careful thinking. And as Outeast and others demonstrated, one doesn’t have to be a theist to see the point.
In the meantime, if any god/fairy exists, and people interact with it them, then the message(s) must MUST MUST be accessible to our sensoria.
And therefore detectable.
This is another assumption that simply doesn’t follow from the premisses. The validity of 2+2=4 and of modus ponens reasoning does not correspond with any sensory experience. Yet, it can be “experienced”. But it cannot be “detected” in any kind of fashion analogous to the detection of molecules or electrons.
An omnipresent Deity might be real, yet undetectable, in the same way as the validity of logic is. One can even imagine an omnipresent Deity interacting with our own consciousness in a non-detectable way, if our omnipresent Deity somehow involves our own consciousness.
I’m not saying that the above is true, mind you. I’m just saying that if it isn’t, it’s not for the reasons you think it is.
Merlijn,
I finally found the time to write down a few thoughts related to one of our earlier discussions (and which are relevent to your last post). It’s too long to post here, so I put it onto my blog.
If you’re interested, see the minimal god hypothesis here –
http://freethinkingblog.blogspot.com/
“Sure. But has any believer been deconverted by Dawkins? Unlikely.”
I don’t think that’s true. I think it underestimates the variety (and size) of the readership – of the available pool of believers. Some of them just won’t have thought about it before; for some Dawkins’s book will be the first atheist argument they’ve ever read; some will already be waverers, or lukewarm; some will have serious gnawing worries, about god’s cruelty and so on; some will have been pondering contradictions for a long time.
Julia Sweeney is not a bad example, it seems to me. She ‘rededicated herself to the church’ and got serious, took a bible class, and – didn’t like what she found. She went through a whole extended process. People do that; it happens. So I don’t think it is inherently unlikely that any believer has been deconverted by Dawkins.
In fact, actually, if we’re talking about Dawkins career-wide, we know that’s wrong: The Selfish Gene did deconvert plenty of believers; some have said so.
So children, if I place two apples on the table and there were already two there, how many apples are there?
Three! Five!
Can’t you see how many apples are on the table?
But miss, “The validity of 2+2=4 and of modus ponens reasoning does not correspond with any sensory experience.” I read it on a blog.
‘The Selfish Gene’ converted me from someone who had stopped believing in god into a conscious atheist.
It wasn’t too difficult for a reasonably bright thirteen year old to conclude that the Abrahamic god I’d been raised with was too grotesque a bogey-man to be plausible, but where do you go from there? Natural history (via Darwin and the late, wonderful, Stephen Jay Gould) helped, but it was as an undergraduate reading Dawkins that I found a possible foundation.
Scared the crap out me first time I read it, though.
Nick: I’ll get to it tomorrow (in the pub now).
Ken: surely you don’t want to argue that the validity of mathematics and logic is established in some kind of inductive fashion? We can conceive of a universe in which gravity works just a bit differently, in which some other kind of empirically, inductively established fact is different than we thought it was – the whole idea of falsifiability depends on this. But I daresay we’d have difficulty conceiving of a universe in which modus ponens is invalid, or where 2+2=5!
Merlijn de Smit: “An omnipresent Deity might be real, yet undetectable…One can even imagine an omnipresent Deity interacting with our own consciousness in a non-detectable way, if our omnipresent Deity somehow involves our own consciousness.”
We could imagine a “deity” like this but such imagining does not show that that such a being could or does exist.
Further, if we could imagine one such “deity”, we could also imagine two or three or twenty.
Since all, by definition, are undetectable, it is difficult to see where such fevered imagining gets us.
We have concepts (such as the idea of “number” in mathematics), sensations (such as love) which exists only internally to certain creatures, and objects in the physical world (such as atoms). Does this cover everything ?
God is not a concept nor a sensation. It is part of the physical world. Therefore it can, in principle, be detected using the apparatus of science.
Whether or not I can imagine something is a fact about me, not about the world. Perhaps we just mean some different by the word “validity”?
‘Now Merlijn, are you arguing for the sake of it, or do you actually beleive this crap?’
GT, you don’t seem to realise that Merlijn is simply right about this. It is just logic. You don’t have to agree with the conclusions that some people draw from it in terms of how the world is but the arguments are sound. The fact that you have not been able to refute any of them should give you the clue.
Ken: the validity of, say, the periodic table is a fact about the physical world. But the validity of modus ponens reasoning is, I would argue, a fact about both us and the physical world: reasoning is internalized to an extent chemical knowledge isn’t. Which was what my “imagine” comments were getting at.
My brain is quite engaged, Mr. Tingey, thank you. And again, your conclusions follow from your premisses quite well: if we assume that our consciousness depends on the kind of neurochemical signalling you mention and only that, then the conclusion that any transfer of information between a Deity and a human being must follow the same pathways is warranted. But I again insist that you are basing yourself here on a worldview (physicalism with a concomitant mind-matter relationship) which is philosophical, not scientific. A theist simply would not share the premisses you base your argument on.
Modus ponens has nothing to do with logic. It’s just an obfuscatory way of stating that most (all?) human languages can express the idea that if A applies, B will too. Moreover, in real languages, if is a leaky concept. “If I let go of this brick, it will fall on your foot.” No it won’t, an eagle might swoop down and catch it.
If A, then B. A. Therefore, B. Nothing to do with logic? Really? Besides, the fact that in practical life, its application may be problematic says nothing about the validity of the inference.
If I drop this stone, it will fall on your foot.
I drop this stone.
It will fall on your foot.
By arguing for an eagle swooping down, you are arguing against the (empirical) validity of the premiss, but not against the (logical) validity of the reasoning.
But now you might say that the whole deduction is somewhat tautological when considered in the abstract. Which is a similar point to where I was getting at earlier: that we may conceive of worlds where all kinds of empirical facts are different than they are, but we have serious difficulty, to say the least, to conceive of the non-validity of deductive reasoning, or of 2+2 being 5.
I think we’ll have to agree to differ on this one – I always had a problem with the whole idea of logical necessity, as it seems to elevate the power of the human imagination into a too important role. A case could perhaps be made that since we evolved to operate in the world as it is then perhaps what we can or cannot imagine may in some way reflect facts about the nature of the world we inhabit at the scale we experience it. Perhaps also the argument from personal incredulity has been made in so many inappropriate contexts that one becomes suspicious of it automatically. I find the formulation “both us and the physical world” hard to follow – I have been a materialist for most of my life, so I have the same problems following mystical theological style arguments as the theologians have following Dawkins, so you will have to bear with me. Yes I would assert that we derive our notions of what works and what does not work from observing the world. In the absence of divine revelation what else do we have?
Merlijn: You are WRONG.
We can ONLY observe the universe through our own sensoria. There isn’t anything else for us to use, at all.
We know how those sensoria work – see current special issue of “Scientific American”, incidentally.
We can augment our sensoria with our modern sophisticated instrunmentation.
But it all still depends on the naturalistic physical reality.
Ther isn’t anything else at all – or at least, that statement can be made with 99.999….9% certainty.
Paul Power siad this: “God is not a concept nor a sensation. It is part of the physical world. Therefore it can, in principle, be detected using the apparatus of science.”
Which I tend to agree with, very strongly.
There is a faint possibility that “god” is a concept, but that would lead to other problems wouldn’t it?
Oh, and again, I am not making elementary philosophical mistakes, it’s just that some people are rfusing, usually by evasion, to answer the points that I, and others are putting.
Lets’ just, for tha ske of argument (only, because I think it’s crap) take Merlijn’s suggestion:
” if we assume that our consciousness depends on the kind of neurochemical signalling you mention and only that, then the conclusion that any transfer of information between a Deity and a human being must follow the same pathways is warranted. But I again insist that you are basing yourself here on a worldview (physicalism with a concomitant mind-matter relationship) which is philosophical, not scientific.”
OK, what basis would you suggest as an alternative? This basis MUST be practical in the real world, and a “god-of-the-gaps” is not allowed – the theists don’t like that one anyway.
So, what basis are you going to propose?
Hmmmmm… I don’t think a rationalist (as opposed to empiricist) view on logic and the like necessarily refutes materialism. It would potentially place limits on our ability to explain ourselves and our own place in the world by making logic an a priori condition for any knowledge – but not exclude a physicalist view on people, mentality etc. Views on logic, etc. as necessarily involving ourselves as well as the world around us don’t necessarily flow into theology and mysticism: one could view logic, reason etc. as normative systems which we cannot “get outside of” but which nonetheless may have arisen naturally.
This said, for my non-materialism, these are important arguments. But not decisive ones, and nothing which a thoughtful materialist can’t get around (if I had a decisive argument, I would make sure OB could hear my jeering and gloating across the Atlantic ;-)). The context I was making the point here in was that G. Tingey insisted that anything real must be physical, detectable etc. – so I used it as an example of something very real, yet not detectable in the same way atoms are. This does not invalidate materialism or physicalism as a philosophy. It however stresses (to me) that they cannot be accepted with the same level of certainty as the periodic table or scepticism towards the existence of fairies at the bottom of my garden.
Anyway, I don’t think that rejecting an empiricist or inductivist account on the validity of logic or mathematics necessarily commits you to divine revelation.
G. Tingey – if I am wrong, which is quite conceivable, it is not for the reasons you stated. I’ll gladly accept that we know, to a certain extent, how sensoria work – but I insist that if the emergence of consciousness from neurochemistry has indeed been explained and is indeed well-known to scientists, this fact has bypassed quite a few philosophers of mind (including some atheist and materialist ones) so I’d not be the only one in trouble here.
Again, you are restating a philosophical position here. But you are treating it with a kind of certainty according to which not accepting it is akin to believing in leprechauns. That our only knowledge about the universe comes through our sensoria is exactly what I have been questioning. Logical truth, mathematical truth and the like may ultimately be based on sensory experience, but to me, it is not immediately obvious that it does. It is definitely not a matter of scientific (let alone philosophical) consensus that it does.
Look, if everything real does consist of detectable, measurable physical “stuff”, and if all mentality including reason itself is either emergent upon or reducible to the workings of physics, then God does not exist – as God is by definition not-physical, all-encompassing etc. The fact that perhaps some crazies who play around with snakes and speak in tongues may indeed have a concept of God as a bearded guy sitting on a cloud does not change the fact that the God whose existence has been debated, argued for and against in a philosophically interesting manner is not.
All that is quite correct, but only relevant within the limits set by the premises. But it’s not going to impress someone who is a Platonic realist about logic and mathematics, or a dualist or panpsychist about the mind-matter relationship, or indeed any kind of theist because they would not accept the premises you set. As your conclusion about God-as-physical-and-detectable is implied by those premises, your argument has little force against a theistic position.
Let’s just suppose that we get inputs from other than our sensoria, as you suggest.
OK – where is/are those inputs coming from, and how do we sense them?
Oh, and as I beleive the terms are used here, I’m not a pure rationalist.
As one who is science-trained, I am, of course an empiricist, with astrong rational bias resting on top of that empiricism.
Esxperimental disproof of a theory (falsification) trumps all other arguments (in my opinion) thus weknow that geocentrism, phlogiston, and Lamarckism are WRONG….
And, we do not yet understand conciousness properly, it is very much a work in progress, though it is clear that is an emergent property, and probably strongly dependant upon the complexity of the brain-wirings.
And WHATR is your proposed “theistic” position anyway – couild you (re?) state it please.
So that we can be clear.
I did not state that we get input from anything else than our sensoria, I stated that “that our only knowledge about the universe comes through our sensoria is exactly what I have been questioning.”. There’s a difference. Using the term “input” already implies some kind of sensory input.
I’m not all that sure that consciousness is clearly an emergent property, as opposed to a phenomenon reducible to matter (as I understand the Churchlands claim), or a fundamental property of matter at the most basic level (Whitehead and Chalmers), or as something the understanding of which will be forever out of our grasp (McGinn, maybe Nagel?). The emergentist position seems sympathetic to me in that it salvages both materialism and mentality as something to be studied on its own terms. But perhaps I should be a bit suspicious for that very reason.
I already stated my own basic position two times recently. I may do so again, but I should be off to Nick’s new blog to give him some feedback first.
GT:
As I understand you, one of your objections is that if there is a God who is truly undetectable it must perforce mean he is non-interventionist, since a God that intervenes and makes changes to the world as it is would be detectable – at least if anyone was in the right place at the right time to observe and record the phenomenon. Your corollary is that if God is undetectable and non-interventionist he might as well not exist, right?
That’s fine, as far as it goes (though I question your leap to necessarily does not exist).
However:
Even accepting a purely materialist view of the world (which I do, incidentally) there remains the potential for an undetecable yet interventionist, active God. This not a God that makes the simple changes to which I refer above but a God who moment-by-moment recreates the universe so that His will is done.
Such a God would not – for example – turn aside the arrow destined for the saint’s throat, as this would be measurable and detectable; He would not speak to His saints, as this, again, might (theoretically) be measurable and detectable. Instead, he would recreate the world so that a chain of entirely natural circumstances would mean that the archer would simply miss; he would arrange matters so that all history led to His chosen saint having the right experiences to lead him or her to act in His chosen way. Such a God would clearly be active and interventionist yet would not be detectable.
No, I’m not saying such a God exists (still less that this is the God whom believers worship, though if He did exist it might be that He led his prophets to arrive at a true vision of Him…). This is by way of a thought experiment to demonstrate that your materialistic arguments against the possibility of God do not hold water.
Tingey, I think what Merlijn is trying to get at here is more along the lines of: true, we do get everything from some kind of sensorial input, but we also have equipment that processes it, which might, at least theoretically (practically is pretty unlikely) function in its absence. One may legitimately say it’s pointless to wonder what that equipment might come up with in the absence of input, but it is at least possible to conjecture what might then go on. Feel free to correct if I’ve completely missed the mark.
outeast & others.
Your first para. is entirely correct – even if god exists, but is undetectable, then we needn’t bother.
Your second argument is possible. It fails W. Ockham’s test, of course, since it is incredibly complicated.
And, lets’ face it those who are arguing for for “religion and the mother country” ( Should I say “Gott mit uns” ? ) don’t believe anything as sophist (not to say sophisticated) as that.
They beleive in an interventionist god, who speaks directly to Geo. W. Shrub and his fellow-madman Ahmenidjad.
Which fails on the detectability case.
Ockham’s Razor is not an arbiter of reality, just a useful rule of thumb for evaluating the plausibility of hypotheses. I think I’ve repeastedly said I don’t believe in the God I described – I’m just indulging in thought experiments to explore the possibilities of God. It’s fun!
A few more things, though:
The Gods that people believe in are only less sophisticated than this God I posit because most believers do not have the knowledge of the physical world to necessitate so sophisaticated a God.
Also, I like my vision of God because it has a certain elegance; but it is possible to imagine a God who simply evades detection by intervening in each case where he is sought by the unpious (say, by skewing scientific tests of visions to make it seem that those visions are merely a physical aberration). This God is quite popular, and though inelegant (a God who’s always forced onto his back leg by human advancement? Pathetic!) is irrefutable and thus hypothetically possible.
Finally, there’s the question of whether God really does ‘fail on the detectability case’: for all we know, a scan of George’s brain wold show it all a-pop and a-fizzle with divine inspiration. Possibly God has never been detected by science scientists have never actually looked in the right place. Again, a lumpen, inelegant solution – but one which is not falsifiable and which is popular.
Two less sophisticated solutions to the ‘disproof of God’ problem:)
Bizarre that in all this high theoretical musing on God it’s still consistently called ‘he’ or even ‘He’. Strange combination of unworldly and of the earth earthy; the speculative and the conspicuously limited.
I use “he” mainly because I don’t think gender is vitally important for someone who almost certainly doesn’t exist and the texts we’re most familiar with cast him as male (wouldn’t he have treated women a bit better if he were female?).
I’ve been using He (with all appropriate capitalizations) as a deliberate ironic nod to the conventions of Christian theology… I appreciate that in-jokes in which only me, myself, and I can share is a bit sad, but there you go.
I considered using ‘ve’ and ‘ver’, but thought that would be a bit obscure. Foolish me! I should have realized there would be