And here we arrive at what the noes, whatever their numbers, really have now, and that is a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world. They have this monopoly for the same reason that computer manufacturers have an edge over crystal-ball makers: the advantages of having an actual explanation of things and processes are self-evident. What works wins. We know that men were not invented but slowly evolved from smaller animals; that the earth is not the center of the universe but one among a billion planets in a distant corner; and that, in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession with the laws of nature. We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain. A God can still be made in the face of all that absence, but he will always be chairman of the board, holding an office of fine title and limited powers.
This article seems to capsulize much of what we’ve been discussing. Everything from evolution and scientism to atheism and creationism.
Kant famously claimed that the most important topics of metaphysics were the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom of the will. Though we cannot know (he claimed) that these are true or that they are not, we must (he claimed) assume that they are true for practical life, and above all, for ethical behavior.
I think that we can say with some confidence that, today, the existence of God, freedom of will, and immortality of the soul play no role whatsoever in an empirically-grounded description of reality. So when it comes to metaphysics, science has won and theology has lost, period.
But that doesn’t mean that the human need to which theology was a response has gone away, and I do not think it can, or that it should. I think it would a true diminishment of the human spirit for that need to be extinguished.
On those grounds, I wholeheartedly agree with Gopnik when he writes, “the plausible opposite of ‘permanent scientific explanation’ is ‘singular poetic description,’ not ‘miraculous magical intercession.'”
Nietzsche is well-known for his famous pronouncement “God is dead”. I’m posting here three passages from The Gay Science (1882) in which Nietzsche develops this idea.
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108
New Struggles. After Buddha was dead people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave – an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow. And we – we have still to overcome his shadow!
109
Let us be on our Guard. Let us be on our guard against thinking that the world is a living being. Where could it extend itself? What could it nourish itself with? How could it grow and increase? We know tolerably well what the organic is; and we are to reinterpret the emphatically derivative, tardy, rare and accidental, which we only perceive on the crust of the earth, into the essential, universal and eternal, as those do who call the universe an organism? That disgusts me. Let us now be on our guard against believing that the universe is a machine; it is assuredly not constructed with a view to one end; we invest it with far too high an honor with the word “machine.”Let us be on our guard against supposing that anything so methodical as the cyclic motions of our neighboring stars obtains generally and throughout the universe; indeed a glance at the Milky Way induces doubt as to whether there are not many cruder and more contradictory motions there, and even stars with continuous, rectilinearly gravitating orbits, and the like. The astral arrangement in which we live is an exception; this arrangement, and the relatively long durability which is determined by it, has again made possible the exception of exceptions, the formation of organic life. The general character of the world, on the other hand, is to all eternity chaos; not by the absence of necessity, but in the sense of the absence of order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic humanities are called. Judged by our reason, the unlucky casts are far oftenest the rule, the exceptions are not the secret purpose; and the whole musical box repeats eternally its air, which can never be called a melody – and finally the very expression, “unlucky cast” is already an anthropomorphizing which involves blame. But how could we presume to blame or praise the universe? Let us be on our guard against ascribing to it heartlessness and unreason, or their opposites; it is neither perfect, nor beautiful, nor noble; nor does it seek to be anything of the kind, it does not at all attempt to imitate man! It is altogether unaffected by our aesthetic and moral judgments! Neither has it any self-preservative instinct, nor instinct at all; it also knows no law. Let us be on our guard against saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. When you know that there is no design, you know also that there is no chance: for it is only where there is a world of design that the word “chance” has a meaning. Let us be on our guard against saying that death is contrary to life. The living being is only a species of dead being, and if a very rare species. Let us be on our guard against thinking that the world eternally creates the new. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is just another such error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we be at an end with our foresight and precaution? When will all these shadows of God cease to obscure us? When shall we have nature entirely undeified? When shall we be permitted to naturalize ourselves by means of the pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?
125
The Madman. Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: “I seek God! I seek God!” As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why? is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea voyage? Has he emigrated? – the people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. “Where is God gone?” he called out. “I mean to tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? – for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife – who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event – and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!” Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. “I come too early,” e then said. “I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is traveling – it has not yet reached men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star – and yet they have done it themselves!” It is further stated that the madman made his way into different churches on the same day, and there intoned his Requiem aeternam deo. When led out and called to account, he always gave the reply: “What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?”
I don’t really think “capsulize” is the correct term for such a huge, rambling, rhetorical essay. It’s just another installment of culture war polemic – albeit more slick and sly than that which usually comes from the secular pulpit.
Imagine an X / Y chart, William.
The X axis is numbered from 0-10 and charts “upset”. The Y axis is numbered 0-10 and charts “Specifics”. Which general area of the the chart do you think most of your posts inhabit?
RH: I have no idea what you are asking me.
I can plot it for you, my pleasure
rate how ‘upset’ your posts are (this one and generally) from 0-10
then do the same with regard to ‘dealing with specifics’ (from 0-10)
Thanks in advance!
This is not a surprise to anyone.
And yet, Adam Gopnik’s essay is more intelligent, literate, and convincing than any work of any UDist ever.
Too bad you’ve allied yourself with an intellectual wasteland staffed by such oafs as Barry Arrington and Denyse Whatever-her-name-is.
Feel free to stuff yourself on the greasy oversalted meat and potatoes served by those sullen culture warriors. We’ll be in here, right through this doorway, enjoying the lovely banquet of farm fresh vegetables, grass-fed beef, artisanal bread and a dozen kinds of homemade relishes, served by men and women with clean hands and genuine smiles. Pavlova for dessert, I think. Something light and heavenly 🙂
C’mon over and enjoy, really, you’ll feel so much better if you do.
hotshoe,
I came for the intellectual conversation, but stayed for the tiramisu.
The title of the essay makes sense when I get to “page 3”:
Seriously, I’m almost speechless. What is there to add?
Perhaps someone smarter than me can figure out why the link in the OP doesn’t display as a link.
EDIT: fixed, I think.
Pretty much sums up the point that the gulf between IDists and anti-IDists is impenetrable, if anyone considers this mish-mash of polemic “convincing”.
It’s not even well thought out. We “know” there is no heaven? We “know” man evolved without a plan? Nobody with any intellectual honesty would make such irresponsible, unsupportable claims.
Dunno
Bigger Than Phil; When did faith start to fade?
Tee hee. I see you’re neither enjoying our banquet nor explaining why you don’t like the specific part I quoted, just spitting on the floor as usual.
Sounds to me like what our boy WIlliam objects to is a much better-phrased version of
SCIENCE.
It works, bitches.
http://xkcd.com/54/
Too bad for the sad sacks who still need some of that good ol’ crystal ball lovin’.
Edit – everything
A bit more about Nietzsche — I there’s pretty good evidence to show that nihilism emerges as a problem in Nietzsche’s work as a result of how he saw no way to reconcile normativity with naturalism (specifically, a Platonic conception of normativity and an Epicurean conception of naturalism). So long as we can’t reconcile normativity with naturalism, nihilism will result from taking naturalism seriously, and that’s intolerable.
I do think that it’s possible to undertake a shift from a Platonic conception of normativity to a pragmatic conception, so that we see reasons and norms as ‘things of this world’, as ‘human, all-too-human’.
And yet, I am uneasy. How does this pragmatist confidence in the complementarity of normativity and naturalism fare once we take on board all the natural-scientific facts that were unknown in Hegel’s time and barely glimpsed in Nietzsche’s — that us rational animals are but one of the 1.7 million extant species of animals and plants, that our species evolved by undirected evolutionary processes a scant 500,000 years ago (compared to the 3.6 billion years of terrestrial life and the 13.5 billion years of the cosmos), and that our ability to play the game of giving and asking for reasons is but one amongst trillions of adaptations?
I don’t have an answer to that, yet, and it’s the main thing that makes me wonder whether my version of pragmatism is sufficient to allay the worry that naturalism leads to nihilism.
William,
We “know” there is no Easter Bunny? We “know” that Santa doesn’t supernaturally slide down narrow chimneys? Nobody with any intellectual honesty would make such irresponsible, unsupportable claims.
Put some music on.
davehooke,
I’m reading Dewey and listening to the Beatles. It helps give me some perspective.
If “know” here means “what we have good reasons to accept as true in light of the results of our best available empirical inquiry”, then yes, we know these things.
The intellectual dishonesty lies in treating these as open questions and pretending that the past two hundred years of science are just someone’s opinions.
Poor Dewey couldn’t.
Be careful, Knaturalism+pragmatism+quasi-empiricism, those rails you’re flying on aren’t that thick. Ah, the great depth and breadth of contemporary secular USAmerican philosophy…a road leading to nihilism? The only ‘professional philosopher’ at TSZ.
No, that’s not what “know” means. “Having good reasons to accept something as true” describes how most people adopt beliefs.
No, the intellectual dishonesty is the idea that the past 200 years of science can only be interpreted towards an atheistic or materialist metaphysic. That’s certainly not the case. “Science works, so there is no god” is a non-sequitur. I can as easily (and probably better) make the case “science works, so there is a god”.
Please go ahead.
How do you know what you know, if anything, William?
Well, Merriam-Webster’s definition of “know” is
I have direct perception of my thoughts, emotions, sensations. That is my direct, personal experience. I know my experiences. The terminology I use to express and describe those direct perceptions, and the manner in which I interpret, organize and characterize them, is dependent upon the belief models and theories I employ. There’s simply no way that I know of to “know” that no god exists, or to “know” that man is not a designed entity. Those are beliefs.
Are you saying that you “know” nothing about what’s outside of your head?
Are you a solipsist?
It doesn’t take much effort to see that in the service of your rhetoric you’ve cherry-picked one of several definitions of “know” from Merriam-Webster:
Full Definition of KNOW
transitive verb:
to have (information of some kind) in your mind
: to understand (something) : to have a clear and complete idea of (something)
: to have learned (something, as a skill or a language)
….
a (1) : to perceive directly : have direct cognition of (2) : to have understanding of (3) : to recognize the nature of : discern
b (1) : to recognize as being the same as something previously known (2) : to be acquainted or familiar with (3) : to have experience of
2 a : to be aware of the truth or factuality of : be convinced or certain of
b : to have a practical understanding of
3 archaic : to have sexual intercourse with
intransitive verb
1: to have knowledge
2: to be or become cognizant —sometimes used interjectionally with you especially as a filler in informal speech
William,
Still awaiting your explanation of how Gopnik’s doubts about heaven and man’s purported divine origins are “irresponsible” and “unsupportable,” if doubts about the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus are not.
What’s outside of my mind, no. I know nothing about it.
From Merriam-Webster:
Since I do not belief that my self is the only existent thing, I am not a solipsist. I believe all sorts of things exist outside of my mind, but I cannot know such things exist. Like I said, it could all be a delusion. Or a dream.
If we’re going to apply all of those definitions of “know”, then to “know” that god doesn’t exist doesn’t really amount to much, does it? All I need is to be certain that no god exists, and thus I can claim to “know” it? Phhhht. It means nothing, then, of any consequence to say, as Gopnik does: “We know no god exists” or “We know humans were not designed”. (To paraphrase).
Thus, it is nothing but rhetoric.
You’ll be waiting a long time, seeing as I never said doubt was irresponsible or unsupportable.
Truer words were never spoken.
I certainly don’t claim to know there is a god. Does anyone here claim to know that there is no god?
If you think science disproves god, how is that? What scientific discovery, fact or principle disproves or counts as evidence against the existence of god?
Well, then, what are you ranting and raving about? Why on god’s green Earth would you care about some New Yorker throwaway line that “we know there’s no heaven”?
What’s the matter with you?
WJM:
Poor William, desperately trying to get off on a technicality.
Meanwhile the challenge remains. You wrote:
I responded:
Let’s hear you explain exactly why Gopnik’s claims are “irresponsible” and “unsupportable”, but not the claims of someone who denies the existence of Santa and the Easter Bunny .
William never learns:
The obvious response (to everyone but William):
I think it was Lizzie that first mentioned the placebo effect and religious belief somewhere in a comment. If it works for me, fine. If it works for you, fine. If it works for you and you insist I try it too, not fine. Secularism guarantees (or should do) freedom of thought – and expression – limited only where it impinges on the right of others to free thought and expression.
keiths,
I never asserted (by claiming that I know) that there is no Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. The author of the article made the assertion (by claiming “we know”) that there is no god. If you agree with him, it is upon you to support your assertion that you know there is no god.
Do you agree with the author, keiths? Do you know that there is no god?
Implying that God, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus are comparable by lumping them together in a question that assumes the comparison is valid is not a case against the existence of God. It’s just more rhetoric.
The author of that piece doesn’t make a sound logical argument. He presents no empirical evidence whatsoever against the proposition that god exists. He employs the queen’s “we” and “know” in order to create an emotional sense of intellectual superiority for those that agree with him. He does nothing more than weave emotionally laden, superficial stories and commentary together. It is obviously not a case against god, but a piece of culture war prose intended to more softly and subtly sell atheistic intellectual superiority.
And TSZ laps it up like “nothing more need be said”. It wasn’t that long ago that the denizens here insisted that atheism was not a claim that god did not exist (as in: “we know god doesn’t exist”), but rather only a statement about a lack of belief. If I had come in here accusing TSZ regulars of claiming to know that no god exists, there would have been nothing but resistance.
I wonder if I should start looking back through past posts here to see who admitted that it is possible that god exists? Or to find who said that they are not making the positive claim that god doesn’t exist?
If I had found a pro-god article where the author had characterized the atheist position as being that they claim to know god doesn’t exist, what would the response to that characterization have been?
Once again: does anyone here claim to know that there is no god, and that humans were not in some way designed?
I won’t speak for everyone else but I’m pretty sure everyone accepts there’s no scientific evidence for any god or gods, no scientific evidence that humans were designed, and lots of positive scientific evidence that such external entities weren’t needed.
How can such things be known? Don’t you know you can’t prove a negative?
If anything I claim to know these things by the lack of evidence for gods, and the lack of evidence for design. But I don’t know 100% that this is the case.
But what I do know is that if there is a god as described in the bible then that god is a fucking shit.
Likewise, if humans are designed then the designer is a fucking shit one when compared to the basic problems we’re aware of and are trying to fix with medical advances.
Of course it’s possible that something that I would call God exists. What % of the universe have I seen?
But it’s about as useful an idea as that teapot orbiting a planet is useful for making tea. Irrelevant and boring.
The real world is full of real things that are far more interesting the speculation if god exists or not.
Sure, go for it. You might stumble on all the questions you’ve fled from along the way.
I claim to know that the Christian God is a human construct. The evidence for that seems quite strong. Whether there is an actual God that matches some of the characteristics of that Christian God — that, I cannot tell.
As for design — of course, we are designed in some sense of the word. The processes of biological evolution are a very effective designer. Roughly speaking, biological evolution is a process whereby a population is continually redesigning itself. It’s a pragmatic design process — use trial and error experimentation, and then keep what works.
Trial and error design is exactly the process used by humans. The big difference us that humans are more adept at horizontal transfer. The process is the same; the sorce of variation differs.
There’s plenty of scientific evidence for both, such as the fine-tuning evidence and the existence of coding and translation systems in biology. Dismissing such evidence doesn’t change the fact that it is evidence.
As far as whether or not such entities were or are “needed”, one would require the metric anti-IDists claim doesn’t exist in order to make such a case, so there is no evidence to that point (that has been presented here) anti-IDists can bring up.
That’s not evidence. Those are facts that need to be explained.
But given that you, by your own admission, don’t understand the issues, who are you to judge evidence as scientific or otherwise anyway?
So any system that has “coding and translation” is designed, right?
Cancer is designed. Ergo your god is a fuckwitt.
Don’t you find it odd that despite all these things that are missing, ID is going nowhere fast and “Darwinism” is publishing dozens of papers a week?
So the lack of such a metric, that you claim is necessary, seems not to be holding anything back at all. Except of course it’s not disproving that ID is a potential explanation. Problem is that nobody cares about that, so your “problem” of a lack of such a metric is only a problem to you, nobody else.
I’m not absolutely certain there are no gods that exist in reality but I’m absolutely sure that all the gods so far described (and bear in mind that descriptions from human sources are all we have) are human works of the imagination. William’s personal god is a very good example of that. What interests me is why humans are so inventive, good at story telling and why are we (well, not me, unfortunately) so damn artistic as a species. Is there a story there? Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man’ was more about sexual selection than anything.
A propos design in Nature. I have been trying to get ‘environmental design’ to fly as a meme and substitute for natural selection with singular lack of success. 🙁
ETA clarity
Design in nature, I’ll agree with you and disagree with thorton. It’s design produced by environmental pressures otherwise described as natural selection.
But how do you justify “fine tuning” as evidence for gods? There’s a leap of imagination there that’s unwarranted. The observed universe appears (fill in blank) therefore gods. Don’t see it.
Facts that are interpreted (or explained) via a hypothesis or theory is what “evidence” means. The fact is that scores of force and material behavioral regularities set at very precise, interconnected values is apparently necessary to produce a stable, long-term universe where life can possibly exist. Physicists (including Hawking) admit that they appear to be deliberately fine-tuned (which is why they appeal to infinite universes to solve that problem).
If an intelligent agency was not a significant hypothesis to explain that fine-tuning, why bother with so much effort to rebut it by appealing to an Occam’s Razor-destroying infinite number of necessary entities (universes), a good section of which would produce a god that designs the universe from the beginning anyway?
*My emphasis
Always makes me smile when I note these admissions extracted from folks. Just out of curiosity, does William have a reference to Hawking “admitting” that fine tuning is a coherent argument for some god or other?