BioLogos at Huffington Post
You can blame Jerry Coyne for pointing out Pete Enns. The damage is done, at any rate.
He’s a condescending bugger, I must say.
To say that God’s existence is detectable with certainty through reason, logic, and evidence is a belief because it makes some crucial assumptions. For one thing, it assumes that our intellectual faculties are the best, or only, ways of accessing God. This is an assumption that privileges Western ways of knowing and excludes other wholly human qualities like emotion and intuition.
See that? He’s calling “intellectual faculties” Western, which is a little bit of an insult to people who are not Western.
It is an old argument but a good one: any god worthy of the name is the source of all being, and therefore not one more being alongside all others subject to rational control. Any god like that isn’t God at all.
That’s a good argument? Saying that any god worthy of the name is the source of all being? Which amounts to saying that humans thought of this special word that is supposed to mean “the source of all being” plus it exists plus it’s not like anything else so ha – that’s a good argument? It’s not an argument at all. It’s a circle. God means the source of all being so it’s different from everything else so everything else can’t look at it or test it or say it isn’t there so it is there because being there makes it worthy of the name.
Why do people accept the principle of uniformity? Because it can be used to construct coherent scientific explanations of the universe, and that is a good reason to accept it. But this is not too far from what religious people say about their faith. Religious beliefs can be used to construct coherent explanations for things like why there is something rather than nothing.
No no! No no no! Sleight of hand alert. Scientific explanations of the universe are not just coherent, they are also based on evidence. Religious beliefs are not based on evidence. Makes a difference!
I just heard from the Greeks. They want their logos back.
Just what are these other ways of “knowing”? And how are they different from wishful thinking? That’s what I’d like to know.
So God is not accessible if you think about God – only if you don’t. No wonder these guys spend so little time thinking.
I’m always impressed by the way God can be so inaccessible, so beyond the ken of puny human brains, so utterly ineffable and yet so completely understood. Right down to his preferences for food, clothing and genital hygiene and his opinions about women, homosexuals and birth control and the like.
Handy that.
‘This is an assumption that privileges Western ways of knowing and excludes other wholly human qualities like emotion and intuition.’
Wait a minute – what about Western women? If postcolonial theory taught us anything at all, which it didn’t, it’s that Western women have all those squishy ‘ways of knowing’ too.
Rationality is the exclusive preserve of stern old men with mutton-chops and tweed waistcoats.
The message here is for all of the doubting believers: Even though you can find no rational basis for what you say you believe, it’s alright because….well, don’t worry if you can’t understand what i’ve written here, just understand that it’s intellectually valid for you to continue to say you believe.
This may seem pathetic to us, but we need to remember how many people have been indoctrinated from childhood to understand failure to believe as a serious – perhaps the most serious – moral failure.
That this sort of thing is needed is encouraging.
What about rational understanding? The use of “control” here is telling. Enns doesn’t say God is beyond rational understanding because he’s trying to make a rational argument that theism and nontheist science-based beliefs are on an equal footing. The argument fails if you grant that theistic beliefs lack the foundation that science bases its truth claims on, which the use of “understanding” or “scrutiny” makes clear.
The use of “control” here changes nothing, it’s just a substitution. And he doesn’t tell us what “source of all being” means and how not being subject to “control” gives us any reason to think that there’s a way to find out. So he tells us a god that could be “controlled”, by which he must mean known to exist. couldn’t be a god. He neglects to explain, however, how an uncontrolled god could be a god, or a necessary belief, which he says it is. He’s wrong about that. Such god beliefs aren’t necessary.
Enns is quoted as writing
OK then, just what is that explanation–a description of the how and when and identification of the relevant causal variables–and why should one give it any credence? Or really, given the multiplicity of mutually exclusive religious beliefs out there, perhaps the appropriate question is ‘Just what is that explanation, and why should one give it any credence relative to a so-called explanation produced by another of those mutually exclusive religious belief systems?’
Shoot, one can use the Ainulindalë to construct a coherent ‘explanation’ for why there is something rather than nothing. What (in Enns’ view) would make that a lesser explanation than, say, the Bible’s multiple mutually inconsistent ‘explanations?’
That’s one of my main bitches about religious knowledge claims: there is no mutually agreed and principled way of resolving disputes. Schism and/or suppression are it.
This was something I never understood in Sunday School, even at the age of five. We were taught that believing in one god was obviously way better than all those silly primitive people who believed in many gods. I could never grasp how this smirking condescension towards polytheism ever made any sense.
Actually, I think it should go the other way around. Polytheistic gods are usually very human — spiteful, capricious, and just plain nasty. Given the way of the world, that makes a lot more sense than the idea of an all-loving god. Really, that concept is just plain silly, and should be seen as such by anyone old enough to walk and talk.
There is a basic error here, that I see a lot in sophistic wank about how we should treat the God question differently from every other one we come across.
Emotion and intuition are part of our intellectual faculties. They are not in fact separate from our “intellectual faculties”.
So what this wanker is saying is that instead of tackling the issue with our full mental toolbox we should tackle it as though we were one spanner short of one.
“See that? He’s calling “intellectual faculties” Western, which is a little bit of an insult to people who are not Western.”
It’s classic Saidian Orientaalism, isn’t it? The idea that the people of the Other are soft, feminine, intuitive, manipulative, untrustworthy and irrational in contrast to the penetrating, masculine, forthright, rational West.
I am a bit surprised, reading the comments, that no one (aside from Ophelia) has addressed the main issue of Enns’ article. He says, as clearly as can be, that atheists are in no better condition than theists, because both of them base their world view on faith, one on faith in god or gods, the other on faith in the uniformity of nature. As the man says:
But is this true? It is true, apparently, that Newton believed in the uniformity of nature, but the interesting thing about the idea of the uniformity of nature is that it is really redundant, since, as Mill saw, uniformity is the claim that whatever is true in one situation, is the same in situations which are relevantly alike. But this means that the principle of uniformity itself is otiose. Sameness resides in the relevant similarity of situations, and this is an empirical question, not a question of ungrounded belief.
However, even if scientists did rely upon such a principle, it would only be so under the strictest constraints. If it turned out that nature was not uniform in the relevant respect, then obviously different conditions would apply, and this would be subject to experimental confirmation/disconfirmation. This is precisely why we have quantum mechanics, because things at the level of quanta act in very different ways to the way that things of a large scale behave. And in any event, this, of course, was the whole point behind Hume’s scepticism about causes. Things are contingently as they are, and if there is some regularity in the way things behave, this is not because of any hidden agents, but because they are observed to be so. Why should Enns think that scientists, whether theist or atheist, have suddenly given up on the scientific method and have resorted to faith?
Of course, the entire article is like this. It speaks about ‘some’ atheists who claim to ‘know’ that no god exists, and yet, to my knowledge, no thoughtful atheist has said this. The spectrum runs all the way from Dawkins’ conclusion that there is almost certainly no god, to Victor Stenger’s belief that science can provide a strong basis for the assertion that there is no god. But no one who adheres to scientific canons of critical reason asserts that they know in an apodictic sense that there is no god. Such knowledge is not available to us. Enns just wants an excuse for religious belief, which is held in the teeth of the evidence, and he tries to tar and feather atheists by accusing them of making a similar foolish leap of faith. There he is in the middle of his leap, looking down and recognising that there is nothing to keep him up. He thinks if others are trying to walk across a similar chasm he will be safe, but there is still no ground beneath his feet. He should simply mind how he goes.
What is relevant is the lawfulness of nature – in the sense that the universe apparently contains objective patterns of various kinds. This is what is denied by most religions yet presupposed (and confirmed by!) by scientific research.
Also, why does this guy think that there could have been nothing? Even the revision of Christianity and Judaism (for example) to make god the only thing at the begining doesn’t have to deal with that, since ex hypothesi there was something! I might add even if it is revised to mean “nothing other than god”, the naturalist is still not obligated to answer it for the aforementioned reason, and moreover, the historical version of the bible has matter (to speak anchronistically) coeternal with god, or at least so it seems: try to have a Christian or Jew explain what “the deep” is in Genesis.
Sorry, I shut off upon seeing the word “privileged”. Move along folks – nothing to see here!
Eric
Yeah, but we all focus on the bits that strike us.
To tackle his whole argument:
There is something odd with the “scientifically backed belief = faith” argument, in that it rests on the assumption that you don’t have to demonstrate you are right, merely on as firm ground as the people you hold to be wrong.
In an argument where you are struggling to make par, you have a serious problem.
Now overall the argument fails on several grounds. The first being the most obvious, our mental faculties pretty much sums up to using our minds to solve a problem. Where does Mr Enns think we get intuition from, our backsides?
The next is the issue of faith. There are multiple problems here. First of all, your scientific believer does not proclaim assent to be particularly a virtue – if you hold onto your beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence you aren’t praised in scientific circles, you are labeled at the very least unreliable.
Faith operates in a far different manner, with belief in the face of adversity being one of the highest virtues.
This alters the basic backing of any given belief. A scientific belief has to at the very least, conform of observed evidence.
It should further be noted, that in the case of scientific belief it needs a basis – otherwise we adopt the null hypothesis, which is not held tightly as some sort of life jacket as is faith, but instead accepted until it can be shown to be wrong.
What religion labels as being strong, science labels as being stupid, and rightly so. Examples of religious thinking applied in non-religious contexts demonstrate this amply. It is not that you will never get the right answer, dumb luck if nothing else should give you the right answer occasionally, it is that you will never get the less wrong one.
And it is important to note, that the vast majority of scientific thinking is in a non-religious context. It is informed by answering other questions, and finding the best means to answer those questions, that faith, has been shown to be more flaw than virtue.
Bruce, I didn’t mean my remark to sound like a criticism. Of course, we light on things that interest us, and the comments are interesting. However, the heart of Enns’ argument is not, as you put it, that “scientifically backed belief = faith”. It is that scientific observation (or backing) itself rests on a bedrock of faith in the uniformity of nature. And the simple response to this is that it does not.
Faith is essentially a matter of believing things for which we have either no or very weak evidence. But we all have good reasons for assuming that (to use AC Grayling’s example) if we walk out into the rain without an umbrella (or other protective gear) we will get wet. Certainly, this is not logically certain, so if I like, I can leave my umbrella home tomorrow, even though it is threatening rain. But if it rains I will almost certainly get wet if I walk outdoors.
The assumption that things will act the same way as they have in the past is massively based on experience; it does not derive from faith that nature is uniform, but from our experience that it is. If, in fact, it turned out that things did not behave the same in relevantly similar circumstances, then we would be in a bit of a pickle, but it is doubtful, too, whether life would be possible in a universe in which things occurred unpredictably with any frequency, or whether a universe itself would be possible in those circumstances. So, Enns is simply wrong, because science is not based on faith at all. And that’s all we need to answer Dr. Enns (notice the Ph.D. prominently displayed by his name!).
I did notice that “PhD” next to his name – what is that about?! There are lots of PhDs at BioLogos, why does he make a point of his?
Eric
I put it badly. Anyway
It is that scientific observation (or backing) itself rests on a bedrock of faith in the uniformity of nature.
Which I see as a roundabout way of getting to:
“scientifically backed belief = faith”.
But what I am trying to say is, that if nature is found to be non-uniform, if some data comes out that does not fit the prevailing theory, the prevailing theory is changed, that includes the scientific idea of the uniformity of nature. The uniformity of nature is neither bedrock to science, nor faith based, but instead accepted on the evidence for it as a scientifically backed belief.
Ending at the same point you put across –
The assumption that things will act the same way as they have in the past is massively based on experience; it does not derive from faith that nature is uniform, but from our experience that it is.
Ophelia,
You would put PhD after you name, if, after reading your article, you were sure no one would believe you had one.
When one wanders over to Biologos, one finds authors and commenters continually trying to cram scientific understanding into the biblical narrative or trying to interpret a Bible verse in light of current understanding. If Pete Enns really thinks revelation is a useful way of knowing, then why doesn’t he just ask his god to enlighten him? Either someone is not talking or someone is not listening.
The difference between faith in belief and faith in science comes down to the conditions of warrant. Scientists might have found that uniformity is not maintained under all conditions, and uniformity is also capable of question and investigation. We question even fundamental assumptions, as the history of scientific revolutions has shown.
A kind of probabilistic “faith” in the continuing regularities underlies our view of nature, and it’s hard to see how life could evolve if we couldn’t place bets on where food and shelter could be found. Living beings are probabilistic in this way and the trait has been passed down to us, taking conscious form so that we say “Hmm….it looks like rain, I’d better take my umbrella”.
That’s a form of faith, but treated in a different manner, subject to tests of its ability to generate fulfilled predictions. I can understand Eric’s point and why he doesn’t want to use the same word for such different ways of using it, but I think faith can be justifiably applied in both conditions, where warrant is strong as well as where it’s weak or absent.