http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(15)00743-5.pdf
Seems to fit in with recent threads.
His latest book, Faith Versus Fact, is
intended not to pile on the arguments
for atheism but to advance the debate
into its next round. It is a brief against the
faitheists — scientists and religionists
alike — who advocate a make-nice
accommodation between science and
religion. As with Michael Corleone’s offer
to Nevada Senator Pat Geary in The
Godfather Part II, Coyne’s offer to religion
on the part of science is this: Nothing.
This sounds more imperialistic and
scientistic than it really is, because Coyne
defi nes ‘science’ broadly, to encompass
any system of belief grounded by reason
and evidence, rather than faith. On
this defi nition, many of the humanities,
such as history and philosophy, count
as ‘science’, not just the traditional
physical and social sciences.
Coyne quotes several historical and
recent writers, particularly Carl Sagan
and the philosophers Yonatan Fishman
and Maarten Boudry, while adding some
examples of his own, to show how the
existence of the God of scripture is a
testable empirical hypothesis. The Bible’s
historical accounts could have been
corroborated by archaeology, genetics
and philology. It could have contained
uncannily prescient truths such as “thou
shalt not travel faster than light” or “two
strands entwined is the secret of life.” A
bright light might appear in the heavens
one day and a man clad in white robe and
sandals, supported by winged angels,
could descend from the sky, give sight
to the blind, and resurrect the dead. We
might discover that intercessory prayer
can restore hearing or re-grow amputated
limbs, or that anyone who speaks the
Prophet Mohammed’s name in vain is
immediately struck down by lightning,
while those who pray to Allah five times a
day are free from disease and misfortune.
I wonder who needs this book. The old claim is that science answers “how” but not “why,” but of course it’s not clear that religion answers either one at all satisfactorily.
Yet the “why” (in the sense meant–science typically answers the only “why” that can have an answer) is what the religious tend to want “answered,” and only a religious-type “answer” will do. It’s an old claim by Dawkins that shooting down the Biblical God is all that’s necessary to do, which hardly true, because even when people believe in the Bible’s “God” they do so at least in part because they think it makes sense for why there’s “something rather than nothing.” Just push the believer in the Biblical God, and pretty soon they’re asking questions for which there are no answers, but for which they consider “God” to be a good answer.
So fine, the Bible’s God doesn’t make sense, but that’s been basically true forever. Porphyry argued against it adequately. The philosopher’s God is a waste of thought, but remains the God of last resort for many who won’t take science (writ large) for the answers that are possible. One can rehash all of that yet again (this forum plus many others), but you’re certainly not going to say anything either new or particularly hard to find.
Glen Davidson
I thought the best part of the review was the first part. He makes the important distinction that is often missed, between falsifiable theistic propositions (i.e. specific things that people believe in connection with their proposed God, e.g YEC, and the more spectacular kind of miracle) and unfalsifiable but harmless, and possibly even beneficial “sophisticated” belief systems, as well as folk beliefs that “promote altruism and social cohesion”, even if nobody really takes them literally.
It’s a major source of equivocation, in my view – between falsifiable theistic propositions and unfalsifiable theistic beliefs.
Perhaps someone could take a shot at unpacking the following kind of argument:
Faith supports morality and social cohesion, which are desirable things.
My question is, if these are good and desirable things, and their goodness and desirability justifies faith, then they are good and desirable in and of themselves.
If you’re suggesting there’s a circle there, I don’t think so.
The reason is that the “supports” in the first premise is really a causal thing. The claim, that is, is that those who are religious tend to be better people as a result. That’s an empirical, testable claim: I have no idea if it’s true or not.
The “justification” in your conclusion (“Being good justifies faith”) is not a causal term. That one is not empirical.
In a word, there’s “support” and “support.”
OTOH, I agree with you that social cohesion and morality are desirable things with or without religion.
By support I intended bring about or strengthen.
I’ve seen the claim that religion brings about or strengthens moral behavior. (As said, I have no idea if it’s true, but I suspect it might be because of the ‘God is watching even if your wife or policeman isn’t’ biz..) OTOH, I’ve not seen the claim that moral behavior brings about or strengthens religion (which doesn’t mean that nobody’s ever made it.)
There’s no reason for religion to “make nice” with science. Any religion that is true is not going to come into conflict with reality.
And there’s no reason for science to “make nice” with religion.
But isn’t there a place right here for philosophy? (Not your kind of philosophy walto, I am talking real philosophy.)
The scientific method is not the only way to gain knowledge. It may not even be the most common way or the best way to gain knowledge.
But that doesn’t stop atheists from spouting off in “popular” books written for 11 year old atheist wannabes..
Well in that case my religion qualifies as science!
Not only do atheists like Coyne want to be entitled to their own opinions, they want to be entitled to their own facts, and even their own definitions. I define religion ‘broadly’ as the effort to determine what is real. Oh look, science is religion!
Isn’t this fun!
There’s always room for bad science, supported by bad evidence and bad reasoning.
This Pinker has no credibility intellectually for me. He’s a crackpot and I don’t see any accomplishment to stand the test of time.
Its dumb having books attacking God or Christianity, especially by non Christian Jews, by those who know nothing about it.
They should try to prove tghe bible wrong by evolution stuff.
How are they doing? Or rather do they have more impact on general opinion if they didn’t do anything. Europe is fine with evolution and probably India but no thanks to evolution writers.
Does these people have any biological scientific evidence for evolution to justify its great claims and so a scientific theory???
Whats their top three great knockout points.?? or top one and no dumb things. Lokoking at you Pinker!!!
Mung,
Yeah, why bother doing that when you religionists can benefit greatly from science while you continue to bash science (thanks to the freedom of speech you’re allowed by a secular government), feed your insecurities and ego with made up crap, ruin children by forcing your made up crap on them, give money to preaching con artists who are smarter than you or take money from suckers who are dumber than you, and push your theocratic agenda. The last thing you’d want to do is “make nice” with science (i.e. accept reality) and put an end to all that.
Then since all religions come into conflict with reality, they are all not true.
True.
Are you saying that your religion isn’t religion and is instead philosophy? How about all the other religions, are they religions, or philosophy? And what difference does it make what label you put on it when your beliefs and assertions are ridiculous?
What, exactly, is “real philosophy”?
Yeah, sitting around imagining ridiculous crap and absorbing and worshiping ridiculous crap that ancient, ignorant goat herders and authoritarian god wannabes imagined is a far better way to gain knowledge, eh?
Everyone should be instead reading, swallowing, and spouting off the ridiculous, horrid spouting off that was written for 2 year olds (mentally) in the “popular” book called the bible and other “popular [Christian] books” like it, eh Mung?
What do you think of the koran, Mung? It’s a “popular book”, and it’s about the same imagined god that you worship. Would you recommend the koran to 11 year olds and everyone else over Coyne’s book and others like it?
Mung,
In my experience, 11 year old atheists tend to get there using their own intellects.
It seems logical that if any religion were to be true there would be only one of them that could be true.
How do you know your religion is the “true” one?
The difference is people listen to Coyne and nobody listens to you. So define what you want how you want, it does not matter!
Mung, you’re right not to be interested in the kind of philosophy I do (or try to). The philosophy you want is result-oriented philosophy, anything that might help support views you seem to want desperately to be true. My youthful Spinozism was like that. I tried really hard to find more and better arguments to support a picture of the world I found very attractive and comforting. That’s the Plantinga and Van Inwagen method too. I recommend them both to you. Extremely smart and sophisticated philosophers, and also Dutch Calvinists who will follow arguments only if they take them to places consistent with those beautiful places their parents told them about when they were five.
That’s the kind of philosophy you’re looking for.
Once you realize — at whatever age — that there are dozens of conflicting religions, and that they cannot all simultaneously be true, skipticism is the only rational position. Once you take a skeptical stance, the gregorys and kariosfocuses and mungs of the world label you an atheist.
I reject labels. I disbelieve. I do not believe mung or anyone else on the existence or non-existence of god. I do not accept Coyne simply because he says something. I think his position on determinism is silly. He could be wrong on many things.
I do nonpositively deny religion. I deny that the history presented in various scriptures makes good sense in its entirety. I see no convincing evidence that miracle stories should be taken at face value., and I see lots of reasons to think they are either fabrications or
… continued…
Misapprehensions. I say this because miracle stories continue into the present time. I have heard them told to me by witnesses. The only difference is that the pepole telling them were not charismatic and did not start religions.
In a 2010 paper (pdf), Haidt quotes research that says religious people in the US give more to charity. He explains this fact by claiming that religions lead to moral communities and “participation in a moral community that explicitly values charity and selflessness increases charitable behavior”.
(ETA: that is an explanation from social psychology, not biological evolution)
BruceS,
I’d think peer pressure might also play a role there.
When you discount donations made directly to churches, the statistics are reversed.
Are you implying churches are not charities?
I don’t know social psychology, but, ignoring my ignorance, maybe “peer pressure” can be reduced somehow in the social psychology theory of communities.
ETA: Sorry, this was meant to reply to walto….
Yes indeed.
The problem, however, that the only religions that don’t come into conflict with reality are those that are nice and vague and unfalsifiable.
Which is fine. But that leaves plenty that do.
How can one assess the difference between coming into conflict with reality, and coming into conflict with one’s perception of reality?
EL said:
One would have to know what reality is in order for this claim to be valid. Depending on what reality actually is, “falsifiability” may simply be an artifact of a particular perceptual construct.
Any “reality” that doesn’t support falsifiability is as personal and idiosyncratic as the religion that claims to be part of it.
In other words, you can keep it if you like, but don’t try to apply it to anyone else.
llanitedave said:
Unless “falsifiability” isn’t actually an aspect of reality, but rather only of particular perceptions of reality.
I believe we can understand this difference, but we can’t stand outside of all categorial or conceptual frameworks to get a “God’s eye view” of reality. So we treat our world as if it’s “the world” and take such things as contradictions, lack of explanatory power, inelegance, etc. as evidence of “conflicts”–i.e. as indicating that our conception is not great. But we can’t PROVE that those bases are the best ones, or are even legitmate.
That’s the human condition. We will always be fallible. But the scientific method is very good at satisfying the criteria listed above. Religious worldviews satisfy such criteria as provision of comfort. Most people would deny that’s really an important determinant of the way the world really is, but…..to each her own.
William J. Murray,
Experiment. Of course, the experimental results themselves may be perceptual artefacts rather than real, but it provides independent input. There comes a point where it becomes silly to keep saying “yeah, but is there really such a thing as soup?”. If it’s all a simulation or illusion, someone is going to such an awful lot of trouble to generate it, seems churlish not to go along with it. And foolish. Perceptual rocks hurt. Fact.
Allan Miller said:
Independent of what? In what way?
It depends on the circumstances and what it is in reference to. It also depends on one’s perspective and experience. It may be silly for you, but for someone who has a different experiential/perceptual framework, it may be a very important and relevant question. It all depends on what reality actually is.
Or, perhaps it’s just the natural state of affairs that reality is actually something utterly different from what our common perception interprets it as. Thus, it may be that no one is going to any trouble whatsoever.
Rocks in dreams hurt as well. It may be that “not going along with it” could yield usable, interesting information. But, it’s not for everyone.
William J. Murray,
Independent of the first obseravtion – the observation that may or may not be erroneous. People on psychoactive substances experiencing hallucinations can’t usually touch the thing as well as see it. It’s not usually still there when they look away and look back. Scientific experiments are a little more sophisticated, but the same kind of thing is going on. You try to get other observers to repeat your methodology, or try to find other ways of looking at the ‘it’ using a different methodology. It’s all about increasing confidence in the ‘reality’.
We have no way of knowing. We can only pretend we know. So it doesn’t seem to ‘depend on’ anything particularly accessible. Is there really such a thing as soup? I think so.
Indeed. You don’t ‘do’ light-hearted, do you?
No they don’t. Not in mine, anyway. I experience emotions, visual and aural patterns, but not pain. I can also experiment with the world, and soon discover it’s a dream, if it occurs to me to wonder. Usually when I’m half way up a cliff and I have no recollection of how I got there.
There was a very silly thread at UD of dreams and how much computing power it would take to generate them.
Very deep stuff if you imagine brains as like desktop computers in architecture.
Same for waking dreams and misapprehensions. William should investigate research on the reliability of eyewitnesses. There are party games that cost nothing and can disabuse a reasonable person of faith in eyewitness.
Coyne does go to some effort to stress such things as intersubjective validation, accuracy of predictions, and the cumulative nature of experimental perceptions. That is, if A is perceived, it becomes part of a model that predicts B, which in turn becomes part of the next model. This approach is qualitatively different from religious disputes where first principles cannot be resolved and schism replaces experiments.
In science, as Gould said, observations and explanations can be confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent. In religion, this degree is reached by the expedient of evicting everyone who does not accept assertions (falsifiable, or falsified, or not) on the basis of trusted authority. Certainty is hostage to continued trust in that authority. Reality is not the arbiter of religious “truth”.
Yes, it basically is. Sensu Coyne’s definition of the scientific way of knowing, it is.
At least, outside of some formal deductive systems (like mathematics).
When you sit at home and get a strong feeling about something else happening in the world and you think god is causing that (or you think you have some other sort of “source of knowledge” outside the empirical), you haven’t actually increased your knowledge. You have just added a belief.
You might sit there think that your belief about some proposition’s truth constitutes you knowing it is true, but it isn’t. It’s just you having a belief that you know something, a belief held for a bad reason. Until you actually go out and investigate it, in the real world outside your head, it isn’t knowledge, it’s just a belief.
You can’t. It’s a foundational assumption in epistemology that your senses somewhat accurately, at least some of the time, give useful information about an external world. Without this assumption you must be a solipsist.
Are you a solipsist?
Yeah, reality is that external world we are assuming our senses tell us about.
What do you mean by this? Even if the assumed-to-be external world we experience with out senses, in actual fact is just some elaborate halluscination invented by our subconscious minds, surely there would still be some facts about this internal mind-world to be discovered? And even if those facts were to change constantly, in so far as they are facts at any particular moment in time, they are potentially discoverable for a small window of time.
And one way to separate true from false propositions about this internal mind-world could be to explore it with our senses and discover them (as in, for example you could get the idea that no life exists in this mind-world, but then experiencing another living entity would falsify that proposition).
I don’t see what it means to say that falsifiability is “an artifact of some mental construct”. It is an incoherent statement.
Do you really think so? FWIW, that’s a bit more positivistic than my own view of this. So I’m curious, do you, e.g., think that the objective probability of 1/6 that a fair die comes up two is inductive or formal? Or, what about the claim that no physical object can be both red and green all over or that while I might have been blonde, I could not have been (to (mis)quote Dr. Seuss) three baked potatoes? My own take is that those are neither inductive nor formal.
Also that pleasure is good and pain is bad. Those, again, seem to me neither analytic nor discoverable by scientific means.
Not to be too pedantic, but an object can be simultaneously red and green.
Whether we can perceive it as red and green simultaneously is another matter.
To be pedantic, an object cannot be red or green.
You could even argue that it cannot be an object.
Do you think the the view that there could not be objects is something you got from induction? Or is–as I think–scientism on the march, I.e. A function of your choice of categories?
So many deniers of tables and chairs here! Your microscopes and colliders aren’t real either then, you know?
I just noticed that on another on-going thread, keiths wrote this:
I completely agree with this comment, and want to point out that reality also wins the first round every morning with scientism. We can’t but start with “medium sized dry goods.” We can try to take them up to Valhalla or down to quarks, but if, during our travels, we ever deny that the tables and chairs we started with are real, (a) we’ve removed the ladder we were standing on; and (b) nobody will believe us because they’ll know, just as keiths does of William, that we don’t really believe it either.
For my money, any soi-disant “way of knowing” which doesn’t provide any way to tell when you’re wrong is, in fact, not any kind of “way of knowing” at all, but, rather, a “way of making shit up”. Science definitely has a way to tell when you’re wrong… but thus far, I have never yet run across any other “way of knowing” which does that. You say religion is a “way of knowing”? Okay, fine. The Xtian faith tells us that Jesus Christ is the Savior; the Jewish faith tells us that whatever else this Jesus guy may have been or not been, he couldn’t have been the Savior, because the Savior hasn’t showed up yet.
That is, we got two claims which absolutely contradict each other, hence at least one of these two claims must be wrong. So if you happen to be a person who thinks that religion is a “way of knowing”, tell me: How does religion determine which of these two claims is wrong?
We are talking knowledge, as in epistemology, not ontology. It’s not positivistic if I’m not making claims of absolute truth. I’m talking about what knowledge is and how we gain knowledge, what it means to say that we know something.
I think there are examples of both. You can have formal concepts of probability, and you can observe facts about how probabilistic systems behave.
That one is empirically demonstrably false, since an object can in fact simultaneously emit both red and green light. Perhaps what you mean to say is that you cannot simultaneously experience the same surface to appear red and green at the same time.
This last one simply doesn’t make sense.
Are they? It seems to me you just made that up.
For example, if you say to me that this is how things are to you, then I have empirically discovered this fact and now I know it, because I have gotten this knowledge through my senses.
I don’t really know what you mean here. I don’t think the positivists made claims about “absolute truth” (whatever that might be). What they said was that to be meaningful, a statement must be verifiable. That claims that were not verifiable–at least in principle–were nonsense. I can’t tell for sure whether you are saying the same thing here or not, but I have the sense that the positivistic claim was epistemological rather than ontological as you are using those terms above.
I’m confused enough about colors and the topic is controversial enough, that I don’t want to get into that here. But that the claim that, e.g., red just is the emission of light in a certain range of wave lengths is just one of a myriad of sophisticated views of the matter can be gleaned from this Adam Pautz review of
Jonathan Cohen’s recent book on color.
Again, that seems like a positivist claim to me. I mean, we seem to know what all the words mean, so what makes it senseless–other than the fact that one might claim that it is unverifiable in principle (actually I’m not even sure that that’s the case).
You’re right that I didn’t perceive it or deduce it. But the claim that those are the only ways to get knowledge of any kind seems to me question-begging.
FWIW, I actually think you also know that pleasure is better than pain.
You’ve gotten something through your senses, definitely, but can your senses alone get you all the way to walto thinks that things are such and such a way?
I certainly agree however, that without the input from our senses, nobody would or could know anything.
ETA: here’s the link to the Pautz review:
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24305-the-red-and-the-real-an-essay-on-color-ontology/
So does evidence against spontaneous OOL and Universal Common Ancestry (UCA) and Darwinism count as evidence in favor of the God of the Bible?
Does evidence for life and Earth being a privileged and unlikely phenomenon count as evidence in favor of the God of the Bible?
Note: I did not use the phrase “proof”, I used the phrase “count as evidence” as in, “is it supportive or favorable”.
No, it doesn’t. Glad you asked.
Science is a good way, indeed the best way, of confirming and disconfirming empirical propositions, certainly. But, IMO, not all propositions ARE empirical (take, e.g., “Science is a good way of confirming or disconfirming empirical propositions”) or the Principle of Non-Contradiction, or the other examples I gave above. And science isn’t infallible even in its domain. It’s constantly revising. It’s just better than any other method for getting to empirical truths. Neither any perception nor any method of empirical confirmation of any perception is infallible: there’s just steadily increasing probability of correctness.
So, it’s the best there is at doing what it does.
Note that this isn’t intended as a defense of religious claims. I just don’t like the baby being thrown out with the bathwater. I think I might not be as worried about or as sensitive to religious shenanigans as many of the regulars here. Maybe I should be more so, considering the harm that the promulgation of religious views continues to incite all around the world. But I (probably naively) continue to think it’s largely a pond of silly stories that human beings will eventually grow out of. I don’t feel the same way about logical principles or geometric axioms or….
Following up on Sal’s privileged planet question. Earth no longer looks particularly rare or priveleged. I happen to believe humans might be unique, but then so might be ichneumons.
We’re SOOOOO not unique on Star Trek.