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.
If we start to pick up radio signals from civilisations all around the galaxy, will that count as evidence against the God of the Bible?
No, of course it won’t as your god can do anything. You just want to have it both ways – heads god did it, tails god did it too.
petrushka,
Thanks for your response, but what would count as evidence?
The OP quoted:
Agree? Disagree?
Would a vision from God convince you? If you had such a vision, would you think you were hallucinating?
If no evidence would convince you. I respect that, but it would be helpful to know what if anything might convince you.
stcordova,
Here are a few suggestions: All and only Christians getting their wishes granted (as demonstrated by methodologically pure experiment/observation). All and only Christians living long, happy, healthy lives. All and only Christians being kind, charitable, honest people. Christian nations winning all their wars and losing none. All the prophecies of the Bible being unambiguously fulfilled. Various miracles being regularly performed in front of scientific observers (and Randi) as a result of the claimed assistance of Jesus. Etc.
There’s no shortage of methods. Only a shortage of verifiable performances. Why is that, exactly?
And what would convince YOU that it’s all fairy stories?
Experimental demonstrations of Spontaneous Generation of life or machines as complex as life.
>Various miracles being regularly performed
So God of the gaps would be a legitimate evidence of God?
Regular performance by the way would be indicative of a law of nature rather than a miracle. 🙂
I wonder how close we are to the point where machines can start designing improvements to machines. Aren’t we most of the way there already? Some kinds of software can produce machine designs clearly superior to what any human designer can do — using evolutionary algorithms! I think Sal’s criterion is already met.
So the next step is to start playing with the definitioin of “complex”. I predict that the defnition is going to be very simple: more complex than the current state of the art, forever.
No, I was referring to Pasteur type experiments, not things already made by intelligent agencies like humans!
Oh, no. It’s not all fairy stories.
The people who write fairy stories know that they are playing “make believe”. The people who write theology mostly don’t know that (though I wonder about Ken Ham).
I respect your skepticism for the reasons I laid out here:
If you view the shortage of possible demonstrations as evidence against God, I respect that. That is reasonable.
But, I point out however, appealing to miraculous demonstrations as evidence of God is a God-of-the-Gap argument. Given that life exists and if it were shown something as complex as life spontaneously arising from a primordial chemical soup is such an unexpected event statistically it would be indistinguishable from a miracle, would that be a valid argument for the existence of God?
If you’re complaint is you just want more real time fireworks from God, hey, I’m with you. But I’m just pointing out, you seem to agree God-of-the-gaps would be a legitimate argument for God.
How would you control for undetectable divine intervention in the experimental spontaneous generation of life?
Rumraket said:
No. I believe something exists outside of my mind, but I’m open to the idea that that something may not be what most people think it is. My experience indicates that mainstream view to be incorrect in very significant ways.
Thus, “reality” is really only a model we construct when incoming sensory information is interpreted by both physical (sensory receptors) and mental (logic/intuition/emotion) procedures. We already know that what we call “reality” exists in different ways at different levels of observation; we also know it acts differently in different situations with different types of observational parameters. At the psychological level, we know that what we as individuals observe can widely vary from one person to the next (not to mention how we interpret what we see).
There are all sorts of known cognitive biases and issues – some of which can entirely re-write what a person observes in real time in coincide with some necessary or valued norm. The question is about the nature of what is “out there”, and if we are all actually experiencing a same “one thing” that is reducible to a single, universally intersubjective set of experiential facts.
There is a view from quantum physics where “reality” branches out from every possible variance, not a single space-time continuum.
Then, as I said, “falsifiability” would be an artifact of a certain perceptual location or construct, either by an individual or a group, or from one observational location (in space or time) but perhaps not in another.
And yet, you described it very well.
Those both seem irrelevant to me, at best.
I indicated what I would require–even gave you lots of choices. I’m thinking of Christians walking on air and the like. We already know that the emergence of life from “primordial soups” are subject to lots of explanations–theistic and non-theistic.
I’m trying to help resolve these matters, not just repeat the disputes.
Exactly. That seems to me one of the worst ways imaginable of settling this.
ETA: Besides, we’re trying to find confirmations/disconfirmations of the Christian divinity specifically. That’s why the tests should have to do with specifically Christian success stories rather than non-sectarian soup.
Sal, what if it turned out that all and only Rama worshipers could get their wishes granted, perform miracles (such as bringing the dead back to life), were more honest, kinder and charitable than all others, etc.
Would you convert?
Theology?
Are you using “theology” to include things like the Quran, the Mahabharata and the Bible? Those sorts of writings are what I’m terming fairy stories, not stuff like the writings of Leibniz (even if the latter are equally false and weird). I don’t usually think of the Quran, etc. as theology.
As Keiths drilled into me at some cost, the God is scripture absolutely does not exist. A significant number of historical claims in the Bible are verifiable rubbish.
And some information about the location of cities, some names and dates, appear to to either accurate, or at least in the ballpark. Jerico, for example, exists as a ruin, but it was destroyed and rebuilt many times. Some hits, some misses.
But a large percentage of believers seem to think most biblical history is true, and that’s rather unlikely. More to the point, significant portions of the Jesus story should be verifiable from Roman records, and isn’t.
I’d be tempted, that’s fer sure.
And yet, when people are protected by vaccines, but not by prayer, you remain convinced of bullshit.
Jesus allegedly healed the blind.
I recently participated in a scientific miracle. I, and 50 other people, spent an average of 15 minutes being cured of blindness. A routine Wednesday at one clinic out of thousands.
So I should stop being a materialist?
Okay, then we were talking past each other but thanks for the clarification, my use of epistemological vs ontological then did not apply to your question.
With respect to the term positivism as you use it, I do not see how I’m making positivist statements, because I do not claim that not-knowledge is automatically nonsensical or without meaning. I’m simply saying it doesn’t qualify as knowledge.
For example, I would argue, that you can believe something to be true, without knowing it to be true. And merely because you don’t know it to be true does not mean the subject of your belief, or the belief itself, is nonsensical.
I could believe, without claiming to know (and therefore I would not claim to have knowledge about) there exists life elsewhere in the universe. Does that make it nonsensical merely because I hypothetically believe it, even though I have not empirically verified it? I think we can pretty uncontroversially say no to that.
Fair enough
Again with respect to positivism, I do not consider myself aligned with positivism as I understand your usage of the term. I do not claim that beliefs, concepts or propositions are necessarily incoherent or nonsensical, merely because they have not been empirically verified.
I guess in the strict sense that I cannot claim to know without being all-knowing, that there is no other way of knowing than science, you are right. But my claim would then be that we, or at the very least me and many others like me, do not know of any other way of knowing and I have seen no convincing examples by anyone.
I don’t know that. It depends on the situation, and what you mean by better.
No I don’t think they can, but then again, just because some idea or concept has not been reached entirely through empirical verification does not mean I claim it to be incoherent or invalid in some way. It just means I don’t think it constitutes knowledge.
For example the idea that pain is bad and pleasure is good. Is that knowledge? I think when we look at human beings, many of them will agree with the statement. But then what we can claim to know there is what humans think about pleasure and pain, we have not discovered some intrinsic property of pleasure and pain.
Thank you, I will look in to that.
Me too. And you know why? That’s actual evidence. You asked what would constitute evidence: that kind of stuff. The thing is, you don’t have any of that. You want to talk about soup instead.
No. In a proper bayesian analysis, evidence for bible-god requires that you have actual evidence that is either exclusive to, or more probable on bible-god, than any other hypothesis.
Unless of course we are talking about a true dichotomy. But we aren’t, they aren’t the only two options. So evidence against certain naturalistic propositions aren’t autmatically evidence in favor of bible-god, any more than they are evidence in favor of some other religion that rejects naturalism.
Rumraket,
I think there’s still a bit of a disconnect between us here. The positivism I’m talking about doesn’t make whatever is not known/verified nonsense. It makes only whatever could not in principle be verified (by scientific means) nonsense. So, on that view, if there’s no conceivable scientific experiment that could ever be constructed that would either confirm or disconfirm P at least to some extent, P is meaningless.
I think that view is false myself, and I thought you might be endorsing it in one of your earlier posts.
I think I’ve witnessed prayers answered miraculously. Mom was in an accident with a drunk driver. Doctors said she would never walk again. There are several doctors and nurses are in our family, so we knew what the deal was…
A minister prayed for her and that day she got movement in her leg from nerves that were injured. Coincidence? I suppose it is formally possible, but I’d rather not take the chance of offending the Deity that may have healed her…
Vaccines are a gift from God, if some refuse God’s gifts in the material universe, they pay the consequences.
No. I’m a closet materialist myself. I sometimes wish becoming a better engineer would provide eternal life and everything I want…
I believe science, medical technology, and engineering are a gift from God whether humans acknowledge it as such. But materialism does not offer any ultimate hope or meaning. Doesn’t necessarily make materialism false of course, but I do pray in the name of Jesus.
I’m not hopeful prayers offered in the name of Charles Darwin have any chance of being heard, much less answered.
I don’t think the origin of life is an ordinary event, but an extraordinary one. At some point an extraordinary event or a privileged event start to become indistinguishable from miracles.
Nothing said at skeptical zone, Jerry Coyne, or anyone else has made a convincing case the origin of life is the ordinary or expected trajectory of lifeless chemicals.
You all haven’t convinced me betting on Darwin is a better wager, otherwise I’d be worshiping in the materialist temple. If you believe there is no ultimate purpose for reality, I respect that. But it’s not for me.
Lots of stories, but for every prayer “answered” at least a half-dozen not. Why? If it wasn’t a coincidence, what made you a lucky one? Are you or your mother or that minister better Christians than all those who pray in vain?
And, anyhow, why can’t these results be verified in a nice professionally devised study? It would seem pretty easy to show that this kind of thing wasn’t just a coincidence by separating Christians and non-Christians and having them all pray/wish for a bunch of stuff to happen that everybody agrees is highly unlikely.
Yes, coincidence.
Your God does not seem to take offense. And Christians seem to understand that. They put a lot of effort into taking offense, to make up for their God failing to do so.
I don’t know of anyone who offers prayers in the name of Darwin (except as a joke).
That kind of “answered-prayer” story makes me want to punch walls.
If it were really a response to prayer for Sal’s mom to recover nerve function, why would it ever have been part of god’s plan for the accident and the nerve damage to begin with?
Why not an accident but no serious injuries? Or no accident at all? Why not a true miracle and an entire year with no traffic accidents for the entire city?
Whatever happened prior, when that was god’s plan, why would a minister’s prayer – however sincere – suddenly derail the previous plan and inspire god to begin to heal what it otherwise hadn’t planned to? Did god just need a little prayer as a reminder that it has healing powers? Is god ignorant or absent-minded? Did god just want a little ego-boost in the form of “we believe in you oh lord” before it stretched out its hand to help?
Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled for Sal’s mother recovering from a serious accident. Sure, her and the family sincerely believe that God is Great because it chose to help heal that one particular petitioner. I don’t think that exact moment of happiness, when it looks as if there’s a “miraculous” recovery in progress, is the necessary moment to do some soul-searching about why prayer almost always appears to fail. Of course it’s appropriate to be joyful when your mom gets back function which the doctors didn’t expect.
But afterwards, calm down and think about it, really think. Why would an omnipotent and omniscient god allow itself to be swayed by the prayer of one minister amongst 7.3 billion human voices?
A god who would allow itself to be swayed by a few desperate petitions and ministerial flattery is not any god worthy of worship.
All of this is what I think of as the “you can’t prove me wrong” argument for any gods at all. Close your eyes, spin around until dizzy, point at random and say “my god did THAT, prove me wrong!” And nobody can, so your god is as real as any other, QED.
I do like the claim that science itself is a gift from Sal’s god. A true miracle, along with all of observable reality. Prove me wrong!
Would it could as evidence for intelligent design? Probably not.
LoL. There’s not a real skeptic to be found in these here parts. You are in the midst of a bunch of know-it-alls. Sort of the exact opposite of skepticism.
LoL. Well, you win today’s prize for stating the blazingly obvious! That which is not knowledge doesn’t qualify as knowledge. Who ever thought it did?
btw, how do you know that?
Perhaps it’s a mere intuition?
🙂
Everyone please offer up your opinion on what would constitute a “true miracle” and not merely a “pseudo-miracle.”
Here’s mine: The earth rotates in the opposite direction for exactly three hours and sixteen minutes on June 3rd beginning on the third minute of the 16th hour GMT in 2016 with the words “For God so loved the World” appearing in the clouds where everyone can see them.
Anything other than that is not a true miracle.
I think you’ve asked the wrong question. The question is why would a lone woman allow herself to be swayed by faith.
I’m very latitudinarian about miracles myself. Let’s just call anything widely agreed to be a highly unlikely occurrence a miracle.* Now simply show that Christians are more likely to bring those about through prayer than atheists are by wishing hard. I (who am actually much more of a skeptic than you are, mung) would consider that evidence that should be looked into further. But you don’t have that.
OTOH, you DO have a team that you’re extremely faithful to. That’s something. But such dogged loyalty, attractive as it may be in some respects,** will not bring converts–except perhaps from people who are looking for a team and don’t care nearly as much about evidence or good arguments.
*See the McKinnon paper I linked earlier for a fun argument about why nothing can actually be proved about the supernatural from so-called miracles in any case.
**Though not to me. I’m an anti-homer. I root against the Red Sox, the Patriots, etc. It’s perverse no doubt, but it’s also the case that winning fans are obnoxious, losing teams have cheaper tickets, and people get hurt (and traffic gets snarled) at victory parades. I think I’m just anti-authoritarian generally (you can ask my wife or my bosses, or Gregory); an old hippie, a pain in the ass, a skeptic.
Sorry walto, but a true skeptic could not possibly know that he is a skeptic.
Meanwhile, in other news:
Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
Of course not. That would be absurd!
The moon is made of cheese. That’s not incoherent or nonsensical. Let’s just fly there and find out. Right?
But you do claim that in order for something to be known it must have been empirically verified. How do you know this?
Where are you going to fly to in your magic spaceship to verify your belief, using the methods of empiricism, such that it can then be said to be knowledge?
Perhaps you just believe it because you wish to.
Atheists 2. Theists 0.
Hence:
Good thing objectivity has nothing to do with whether or not objects really exist!
Meanwhile, the object of Elizabeth’s studies recedes quietly into the mytht.
Well, no – it just means that we have to accept that acquisition of knowledge about the world is an iterative, re-entrant process, in which we ourselves are part of the models we create and test.
We transmit radio signals now. Are they evidence of “intelligent design”?
That’s right, because people like you want to use “intelligent design” in many different ways. When *you* decide what “intelligent design” is then we can go look for it. Until then people like you will conflate the many meanings in an attempt to do, well, whatever the hell is people like you think you are achieving.
It’s a matter of definition, obviously. How do we define knowledge, what do we think qualifies? We define the terms. It’s that simple.
I agree, which is why I do not claim that propositions that aren’t known to be true, aren’t therefore automatically nonsensical.
Notice that I am not a positivist.
Or we can just look at the spectra of reflected light and get it’s composition that way. Not actually required for us to go there. That’s how we know distant stars are made of them same atoms our sun is, and since the absorption and emission spectra of their light follow from quantum physical principles, we can directly see that even at the other end of the universe, the same physical laws are in effect.
I don’t, it is a matter of definition. That proposition in itself isn’t knowledge and I don’t claim it is. It’s a foundational premise I use.
Mung, if you can’t follow the discussion just refrain from commenting. Okay?
The foundational premises in epistemology cannot themselves be said to be knowledge, by definition. Otherwise the theory of knowledge you are operating under would be guilty of circular reasoning. We simply have to openly admit and state, that we are forced to use some assumptions to begin with, to get started with trying to gain knowledge.
One of those is that we define we mean by knowledge, what it means to say that we know something, and how we gain knowledge. These are a matter of definitions, they cannot be “proven” with knowledge. They have to be assumed in all epistemological theories.
What we can then do subsequently to laying this foundation (and you can lay another one and we can test them against each other), is to go out and test our theories of knowledge and see if they lead us astray (we score many false positives or false negatives) or into confusions and incoherency.
If you have a different theory of knowledge, one you think is superior, I’d like to hear about it and what, if anything, you think you have come to know using this theory of knowledge.
No I believe it because it makes sense and the alternatives(other defintitions and theories of knowledge) I have seen, seem more prone to reaching unsupported and false conclusions.
Mung, my friend, you are glib as well as coy. These are traits I personally enjoy, but I think you have to admit they are more fitting for a would-be Wilde than a would-be Aquinas.
If you have responses to the objections that have been levelled against your (apparent) positions, you might give them occasionally. Or at least try to clarify what your views actually are if you think people are misconstruing them.
Rumraket,
Again, rumraket, no positivist has ever suggested that what is not known is therefore nonsense. You should take a look at my last post on that.
Then I still don’t agree with the statement. Take the parable of the invisible dragon in Carl Sagan’s garage. It is a description of a phenomenon that is unfalsifiable and unverifiable. Does that make it nonsense? Well, I guess we could have a different understanding of what one means when they call it nonsense.
I would simply say it is indistinguishable from the nonexistant and as such, belief in it’s existence would by definition be unjustified and therefore irrational.
That still doesn’t make the concept of an unverifiable phenomenon nonsensical or meaningless.
It’s apparently a common mistake to conflate positivism with evidentialist foundationalism. I good approximation of my views would be found here:
3.4.1(1) Atheism: Evidence.
And part 2: 3.4.1(2) Atheism: Objections to Evidentialism.
knowledge about the world is an iterative, re-entrant process
Elizabeth,
Its emergent!
It’s effutiationous! Its narrischkeit! And somewhat rannygazoo!
I worry that the two parts of this statement don’t really cohere as they are (presumably) intended to.
The first part of the statement is about relevant probabilities, and the second part of the statement is about that nebulous notion, “ultimate purpose for reality”.
Suppose — for the sake of argument if you wish, though this is in fact my own view — that Ilya Prigogine and Stuart Kaufman are basically right in thinking that there are laws governing far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic systems such that the origin of life is highly probable in a universe like ours. (Granted, that still leaves the origin of those fundamental laws as a question, but still.) If they are right, then the origin of life is not extraordinary (highly improbable) but (in some sense) “ordinary” (i.e. highly probable).
If that were the case, I don’t see how it would have any bearing at all on whether there is any ultimate purpose to reality or not.
Whether or not one affirms a kind of purpose or meaning to reality that transcends the purposes and projects of any and all sapient beings doesn’t seem to have to do with whether or not the emergence of life from self-organizing complex systems is highly probable, highly improbable, somewhere in between, or unknowable.
The latter is a strictly scientific question (though a highly speculative one at this point in the development of science); the former is, in a rough sense, “existential” — it is about whether or not one has a religious or spiritual temperament and the language one uses to express that temperament.
I think it is a bad mistake to take our language and symbolism for expressing our deepest hopes and fears — including, especially, our need to be rescued from despair — and hold that language hostage to empirical science.
One would never say that there is no beauty, power, and truth in the poetry of Rilke just because empirical science has no need for the hypothesis that there are angels — and yet that is precisely the mistake that atheists almost always make. But they are prone to make it because most theists also make the same kind of conflation — they worry that religion is more like poetry, then it concedes all epistemological authority to empirical science.
That is true, but not for the reason that most theists recognize.
The reason why theists do not want to shrink the distance between poetry and religion is because poetry has no epistemological authority in a public space of reasoning.
One of the central tenets of democracy is that laws that are binding on all are legitimate only to the extent that they are rationally persuasive to all; hence there’s a deep epistemological dimension to democracy: democracy couples political power to rational answerability. But poetry is precisely not rationally compelling to all. So, if the distance between religion and poetry were shrunk or even dispensed with, religion would lose all political authority in a democratic society, regardless of how much meaning and value religion brings to any individuals or communities.
In other words, the conflict between empirical science and revealed religion persists only to the extent that people of faith refuse to relinquish all attempts to impose their particular beliefs on those who do not share them.
If they were to do so, and affirm that the meaning and value of religion is basically a kind of communal poetry, one could affirm the central and indispensable role that religion plays in human life without there being any conflict between any utterance made in a religious vocabulary and any claim made in the empirical sciences.
I worry about the ultimate purpose of the ultimate purposer.
Nothing could be more mind-numbingly stupid than saying that “the existence of the God of scripture is a testable empirical hypothesis”. That’s precisely like saying that Rilke’s “Duino Elegies” fail to disclose an existentially vital human truth because empirical science has no room to accommodate the existence of angels.
Michael Ruse once said that Dawkins made him feel ashamed to be an atheist. Atheists should feel the same way about Coyne, and it is to their discredit if they do not.
Also, I don’t know if this was caught by anyone here up-thread, but Fishman is not a philosopher — he’s a neuroscientist.