Many critics of Intelligent Design and creationism are methodological naturalists – that is, they believe that supernatural topics are off-limits to science, and that science is inherently unable to pass judgment on religious claims.
Many of these same critics are also accommodationists, meaning they believe that there is no real conflict between science and religion, and that believers should not feel threatened by evolution or any other area of modern science.
Methodological naturalism and accommodationism reinforce each other. By separating science and religion into “non-overlapping magisteria”, to borrow Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase, each side is reassured that its own “turf” is protected from the other. Science classes are off-limits to religious ideas, and the faithful can rest assured that science will not overturn their cherished beliefs.
I think that methodological naturalism and accommodationism are both untenable. Religious claims, such as those regarding young-earth creationism and the efficacy of prayer, can easily be investigated (and falsified) using the methods of science, provided that they make testable predictions.
The magisteria are not separate. They overlap considerably, and in the areas of overlap, science has the formidable advantage of being both rational and empirical, and not faith-based.
Religion is fighting a losing battle. It is giving up ground as science advances.
.
walto,
That seems wrong to me. I would say that “the Easter Bunny” refers to a rabbit that hides colored eggs on Easter morning. The reference is still comprehensible even if there is no qualifying rabbit.
KN,
There’s a big difference between square circles, which are presumably impossible in all worlds, versus “the person who is breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste”, who certainly exists in some possible worlds.
Following Frege’s and Russell’s work, most philosophers today would say that phrases like “the Easter Bunny” have sense but no reference.
The sense of a term or expression tells us what it ‘means’, in the sense of ‘not being nonsense’ — the reference of a term or expression tells us what objects or properties in the world are picked out by the term or expression. To say “Santa Claus doesn’t exist” is to say, “The name ‘Santa Claus’ has sense but no reference”.
Oh, that’s definitely right! But presumably there’s some important tie between reference and existence: the term “square circle” doesn’t refer to anything because square circles are impossible. (I don’t know if “square circle” has a sense or not.) “The person breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste” doesn’t refer to anyone in the actual world. (But does something have to refer to an object in some possible world in order to have any sense at all? I don’t know!)
KN,
I would say no. “The 11th prime number between x and y” has a definite sense, and it either exists in all possible worlds or none, but we can’t say whether it exists without at least knowing the values of x and y.
Anyway, this is far afield from the question that petrushka and I are discussing.
Petrushka is saying that “the person who is breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste” might exist, even though we know that no one is breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste.
That’s a difficult proposition to defend, but he at least seems willing to try.
If logic requires reference (rather than meaning), then a reductio ad absurdum may often require reference to non-existent objects.
If I write a biography of a person, and the biography includes untrue incidents, one could say the “the person who did this and that” does not exist.”
But it would not say anything about the existence of the subject of the biography. For example, one could say that the railroad worker who raced a steam driver at Big Bend did not exist. This would, according to best evidence, be a true statement, but would say nothing about the existence of John William Henry.
This is a fairly simple point, and I cannot figure out why it is resisted.
Science cannot disprove anything in any ontological sense; it cannot ascertain if the YEC god model is true or false ontologically. Science cannot even say if it one model is more likely true than the other.
Science can only say that one model is more effective at making independently reproducible, empirical predictions than another. That doesn’t make the model more likely true ontological sense; it only makes it more effective in that particular epistemological sense.
Perhaps, William, but that isn’t my point,
My point would be that “the YEC God” is a set of hundreds of incidents and attributes.
Demonstrating that some of them are historically untrue does not demonstrate the non-existence of the entity. To the extent that the non-existence statement is logically true, it is equivalent to saying that a specific list of incidents did not happen. It adds nothing, and it implies something that does not follow.
It is, among other things, bad writing. If something like it occurred in a news publication, I would say the publication is dishonest.
petrushka,
It’s resisted because it doesn’t make sense when applied to “the person breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste.”
You seem to be interpreting it this way:
1. “The person breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste” is a definite person X, who may or may not exist.
2. Through careful observation, we’ve established that no one is breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste.
3. Therefore, the definite person X is not breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste.
4. However, X may still exist — or not.
The problem, of course, is that “the person breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste” does not pick out a definite person X unless there actually is some X who is breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste.
You’ve been quite disdainful of philosophy here at TSZ, but the philosophers are way ahead of you on this issue. Google rigid and non-rigid designators, for starters.
petrushka,
I agree with you – at least to a point.
I was making a point about using science to make ontological claims about reality and the concept of non-overlapping magisteria. Science cannot even claim that it is true that the Earth was not created 6000 years ago, and so cannot claim that the YEC god has been shown to not exist, therefore keiths has no argument to begin with. Science is not an ontological enterprise. Religion is.
One should distinguish between an implication of science and a claim made from the ontological metaphysical position of Scientific Realism. No scientific fact, data or model scientifically implies that the Earth is in reality more than 6000 years old.
If the YEC god is necessarily defined AS the god that created the earth 6000 years ago, then perhaps if science could prove that – in reality – the earth existed 4.5 billion years ago, the YEC aspect of that god would be false, and you’d have to call god something else, because there would have been no young earth creation.
It would be like continuing to call a person “Shakespeare, author of Hamlet” after it was proven that someone else wrote Hamlet. There would still be a Shakespeare, but “Shakespeare, author of Hamlet” would be a false attribution. There would be no “Shakespeare, author of Hamlet” and there would be no “Young Earth Creationist God”. There may still be a shakespeare or a god that fulfilled all other attributes.
If you actually read my posts you might note that I accept your logic.
It remains bad writing.
ETA:
The reason it is bad writing is that it implies something that does not logically follow.
Writing is about communication, and what you have done is something not unlike advertising copy, which leads to an unjustified conclusion without being technically false.
I’ve read your posts quite carefully, and it’s clear that you don’t accept my logic.
I’ve stated that “the person breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste” does not exist, because we know that no one is breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste.
You disagree:
I’ve explained why your position doesn’t make sense, and why we can say something about the (non)existence of the ‘alleged person’.
This is, of course, the point I tried to raise originally. Keith must see “the YEC god” as having a much more narrowly defined set of characteristics. I just have not come across any groups who hold their gods as having such limited, and behavior dependent, qualities.
Here is another attempt to explain the problem I see. I think you have set up an implied set of premises and conclusions that aren’t included in your reasoning.
1. The God that created the world in seven days = A.
2.The YEC God = A.
3. The YEC God = the God that created the world in seven days.
If the God that created the world in seven days does not exist, then the YEC God does not exist.
I’m afraid this is how I see Biblical religion.
1.The God that created the world in seven days = A.
2. The YEC God = A.+ B + C + D +…
If the God that created the world in seven days does not exist, then either the YEC God does not exist, OR premise 2 is not factually correct.
Robin,
No, but I do see “the YEC God” as necessarily having YEC characteristics, just as I see “the person breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste” as necessarily having the characteristics of breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste.
A YEC God that doesn’t have YEC characteristics isn’t a YEC God at all.
There may be other Gods, and there definitely are other people (7 billion of them!), but the YEC God doesn’t exist, and the person breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste doesn’t either.
To me it seems nonsensical to talk about a YEC God lacking YEC characteristics, just as it would be nonsensical to talk about an Easter Bunny lacking Easter Bunny characteristics (“Yes, Johnny, the Easter Bunny exists, but he doesn’t hide colored eggs on Easter morning. He is a retired insurance broker living in Hoboken, New Jersey.”)
On the other hand, if you see “the YEC God” as a God who just happens to have some YEC characteristics, in the opinion of young earth creationists, then I can understand why you would want to say that the existence of this God isn’t disproven when YEC is. But YECs aren’t nearly so casual about it; they think the Bible is literally true, and the God they worship is the God described in its pages. And if you think the God in question doesn’t have YEC characteristics, then why refer to him as “the YEC God”? Why not call him “the Christian God”, or something like that?
Just saw this elsewhere on the ‘net. Only glanced at it myself.
http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/over-time-buddhism-and-science-agree
I take it the author is a biologist.
W
Mentioned this at UD?
William and Keiths seem to agree on something, but I find the line of reasoning similar to saying that evolution is the theory proposed by Darwin. Darwin was wrong about genetics and wrong about natural selection being the dominant driver of change. Therefore evolution is wrong.
There is an unstated assumption of identity, which I think is unjustified in both cases. The YEC God is not necessary coextensive with the God that created the world in seven days. One could assert that definition, but such an assertion should be made explicit.
With regard to
and
This isn’t quite correct, and it’s important to see why it is close, but not exactly, correct.
Firstly, whether scientific theories should be understood instrumentally or realistically is itself a philosophical issue that science cannot address one way or the other. There’s no way to keep oneself to the science alone and say that that settles the issue in favor of instrumentalism or constructive empiricism — or that we can get scientific realism straight from the science alone. To get to either view we have to philosophize about the science.
Secondly, whether religion is essentially metaphysical is itself a further contention that also has to be dealt with in philosophy of religion. That’s not obvious, either. One might, for example, think that religions are essentially affective or non-cognitive, and then that religious attitude is then associated with some particular bit of metaphysics.
So whether or not either science or religion has anything to do with metaphysics is a question that has to be dealt with in terms of philosophy of science and philosophy of religion.
petrushka,
If we can’t even agree on the straightforward case of the toothpaste thief, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to agree on the YEC God, so let’s start by seeing if we can come to an agreement regarding the thief.
I’ll begin with a case I think we’ll agree on. Suppose I tell you that I’m being victimized by a toothpaste thief who is breaking into my house at night, as described above, but that I also think that her name is Yvonne Driscoll, that she’s a strawberry blonde, thirty-six years old, with a cleft palate, and that she chain smokes Pall Malls and works at the Luby’s close to her home in Conroe, Texas. As before, we determine that no one is actually breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste, but I think you’ll agree that this does not mean that Yvonne Driscoll doesn’t exist. She might exist, and she might even have all the characteristics above except for the breaking and entering part, in which case I am simply mistaken about her nocturnal habits.
Do we agree about Yvonne?
Now let’s consider the original toothpaste thief. I complain to you about a stranger who is breaking into my house at night and stealing my toothpaste. You ask me what I know about this person, and I say “nothing”. We review the surveillance footage, check the sensors, and weigh the toothpaste. All the evidence shows that no one is stealing my toothpaste.
I conclude that “the person breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste” does not exist. There is no such person. If there were, then “the person breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste” would NOT be breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste — an obvious contradiction.
Yet you say…
…which makes no sense to me. How could “the person breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste” possibly exist if no one is breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste?
If we wanted to check whether this person exists, what would we do? Who would we investigate? All seven billion people on earth? We already know that none of them qualify as “the person breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste”, because no one is breaking into my house and stealing my toothpaste.
It’s worth pointing out that the above debate, while interesting, has no bearing on my original point about science’s ability to tackle the supernatural.
Our debate concerns whether “the YEC God” refers to a God who essentially has YEC characteristics, or whether those characteristics are incidental, such that “the YEC God” would continue to be “the YEC God” even without them.
None of that alters the fact that we can define a God — let’s call him Bruno — who definitely created the universe 6000 years ago, and who wouldn’t be Bruno if he had created the universe at any other time. Science tells us that Bruno doesn’t exist, and it does so handily. It makes no difference that the Bruno hypothesis involves the supernatural, because it is testable. Science tests it and rejects it.
Science makes no such claim, as I’ve already pointed out. Science makes no ontological claims about what exists or what is real; it only makes claims about the effectiveness of models in predicting data. You’re conflating scientific realism with science.
William:
Says William.
Try reading some scientific papers, and you’ll see that scientists routinely make claims about reality. The fact that you think they shouldn’t is irrelevant to the actual practice of science.
By definition, if something is supported by evidence – that there is some phenomenon to investigate or there are some entailments alleged to be observable – that phenomenon is in the domain of reality. By definition, claims of “supernatural” events that are unobservable – have no effects in the domain of reality – then there is no way to judge whether or not the “phenomenon” is just made-up stuff (figments of human imagination).
Seems to me imagination can be beneficial in some circumstances, harmless or dangerous depending on whether groups or individuals decide to use these figments of imaginations as the basis for actions: especially actions that affect others that don’t share their figments.
Science can’t investigate what people imagine unless those figments are claimed to impinge on the real world. It can investigate whether claimed entailments exist and (for me, the most important point) are indeed discontinuities. A real effect with an imaginary cause must be an extraordinary event! If God gets bored watching a soccer match and decides to kick the ball into the net, we could we learn something by analysing the match video.
Just because scientists make claims doesn’t mean those claims are scientific in nature.
Democracy rules! Anyone can make a claim. Such claims may or may not be correct. Such claims may or may not be supportable evidentially. A claim that has evidential support can be considered scientific. So what?
Just because scientists fill their scientific papers with claims about reality doesn’t make those claims scientific.
So sayeth the Great William, Arbiter of All Things Scientific and Unscientific.
He does it so well. For example:
UD Link
UD Link
That last quote seems like a very specific claim that science has “disproved materialism”. I suspect WJM will not be able to provide a reference however, perhaps not realizing that “prove” is a strong claim.
So seems to me WJM makes his fair share of scientific claims that are actually not scientific at all. Furthermore, he complains about things that people do that he also does himself. Makeing a claim that appears scientific (what has and has not been shown) but of course which is not really anything of the sort.
According to WJM, design is “obvious”. That’s probably why they’ve left it at that, and not done any further work. If it’s “obvious” that’s all you need. Design is “self-evident” apparently and that’s good enough for WJM.
I’ll take this to mean that since you don’t have a rational response, you’ve decided to employ rhetoric against me personally.
It’s a simple matter of logic, keiths. Scientists have made all sorts of claims – about design, about CSI, about irreducible complexity, about “bad design”, about the inferiority of the “lesser” races, about survival of the fittest, about fine tuning. Either all claims made by scientists are scientific in nature (an absurd proposition on the face of it), or the fact that a scientist makes a claim has no bearing on whether or not the claim itself is scientific.
That’s my thinking too, although I confess, I don’t know what “YEC characteristics” would be in a God.
Fair enough I suppose.
Having grown up in a conservative Christian family and met numerous biblical literalists, some who were YEC, I’ve been exposed to a variety of descriptions of the Christian God. Yet I’ve never met anyone who referred to God as “the YEC God” and no one who ever described any God as having specific “YEC characteristics”. The Christian God may come in a few flavor variations, but all of the YECs I’ve come across agree that the dates of God’s creation have nothing to do with the God’s characteristics; God is just God – omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, all-loving and so forth – whether He created the world 4.5 million years ago, 6000 years ago, or last Thursday. As such has been related to me, I can’t say I’ve ever been introduced to any Godly qualities that would make said God a “YEC God”. Hence my disagreement. I do, however, totally agree that if such a God possessed specific characteristics that made it a “YEC God”, then yes, that God would be impossible.
ETA: I’ll add that I noted this above that most adherents don’t define their God so succinctly:
Why would it be “impossible”?
Only some of those claims were made by actual scientists. That you can’t tell the difference is telling indeed.
The only claims made regarding CSI from scientists seem to from those refuting the idea. If the people making the original claims re: CSI were scientists, they’d respond to the refutations rather then pretending they do not exist.
That’s how it works in the reality based community. Someone makes a claim, people attempt to knock that claim down. If you don’t respond, well, you lose!
With ID it seems that the original claim can never be “knocked down”. That you (or anybody) cannot demonstrate that the Explanatory Filter can indeed determine design does not seem to dent their belief in the EF. Hardly science!
Because it is impossible that the world is young.
Why is that?
No, they were all made by actual scientists.
Whether or not a claim is responded to, and how it is responded to, has no bearing on whether or not the original claim is scientific in nature.
According to keiths, if a scientist makes a claim that “can never be knocked down” or even “demonstrated” has no bearing on whether or not the claim is scientific. According to keiths – apparently – what makes a claim scientific is if a scientist makes the claim. Many ID proponents are scientists. They make claims about ID. Hence, according to keiths, those claims must be scientific by definition.
Otherwise, keiths would have to agree that just because a scientist makes a claim doesn’t mean that claim is scientific.
The funny thing is, this is patently obvious logic. If a scientist claimed “Nature is not conscious. It doesn’t plan for the future”, that is obviously not a scientific claim; it’s a metaphysical claim. If a scientist claims that blacks are inferior to whites, or claims that it is better for the human race if idiots and criminals are euthanized, those are obviously ideological claims, not scientific ones.
It’s absurd to claim that a claim is scientific just because a scientist makes the claim.
It’s just not the case that “science makes no ontological claims about what exists or what is real; it only makes claims about the effectiveness of models in predicting data”. This is false, and importantly so.
On the contrary — the situation is one in which both
(1) science makes ontological claims about what exists or what is real, and not only claims about the effectiveness of models in predicting data. (“scientific realism”)
and
(2) science makes no ontological claims about what exists or what is real, but only makes claims about the effectiveness of models in predicting data. (“scientific instrumentalism”)
are philosophical interpretations of science — “science alone” tells us nothing at all about whether we have better reasons for accepting (1) or (2).
We might have better reasons for accepting (2) over (1) — I say that even though I’m a scientific realist myself — but that cannot be decided by “just the science, hold the philosophy”.
Evidence.
Please define scientist, then show how Behe/Dembski/Axe meet that definition.
“…God doesn’t play dice with the world.”
No, it’s not false. Science is a methodology for acquiring a certain kind of data and translating that data into certain kinds of models. Nothing more. It makes no claims about reality per se – in fact, it insists that it is only provisional, all models subject to change. Ontological/metaphysical extrapolations of the product of science, like scientific realism, make claims about reality.
ll take that to mean you have no answer.
ID makes the claim that there is a designer of the universe. Therefore that makes ID not science, which I agree with.
From someone who “becomes satisfied with the debate” and walks away, that’s rich.
That is an answer, William, and a perfectly succinct one to boot. If you don’t understand it – that is, if you don’t understand why Einstein made the statement so frequently – then it makes sense that you don’t know why a young earth is impossible.
If a scientist were to say, “Nature is not conscious and does not plan for the future,” that’s not just a metaphysical claim — it’s a non-scientific metaphysical assertion.
But it would be a perfectly acceptable for someone to say, “there is no generally observable causal relation between what adaptations would prove beneficial to the organism and what variations will actually arise” — that’s both empirically well-grounded and a claim about reality.
Likewise, claims about the genetic inferiority of non-whites, or the desirability of eliminating anti-social behavior from the population, are empirically false even though they were promulgated due to the prevailing ideology. The fact is that it was both scientists who promulgated the ideologically-motivated but empirically false claims, and other scientists who discovered that those claims are false.
What makes a claim “scientific” or not isn’t about whether it is made by scientists, but about whether it survives scrutiny by the community of inquirers over time. The claims of eugenicists didn’t survive scrutiny. But that doesn’t mean that the claims which do survive scrutiny by the community of inquirers over time aren’t also claims about what is really the case.
In other words, careful attention to the social and historical dimension of the authority of scientific knowledge is fully compatible with both scientific realism and scientific instrumentalism, so that debate cannot be settled by pointing to the fallible, provisional nature of scientific claims or to the role that non-empirical factors (e.g. ideology) play in scientific theorizing and in how scientific discoveries and theories are taken up in public discourse.
The problem I have with your view is that you seem to think there’s some deep tension between the provisional, fallible-but-corrigible nature of scientific models and the claim that scientific models tell us what reality is like.
From what I can tell, you want to insist on a stark, all-or-nothing view — if a scientific theory doesn’t tell us exactly what reality is like, absolutely and completely, then a scientific theory can tell us nothing about reality at all but is only a device for predicting further data.
It doesn’t seem to occur to you that a scientific theory is a partial and tentative model of a limited domain of reality, to be replaced by a better model of that domain as more evidence of what the world is really like becomes available to us.
While I get this impression as well, KN, I think William is actually insisting that science should be limited to being just a methodology for acquiring a certain kind of data and translating that data into certain kinds of models. That it isn’t that, or rather that scientists, politicians, “Big Business”, “Intellectual Elites”, and other pejorative institutions allow, encourage, and hold up science to be more than that is some kind of fraudulent evil conspiracy (or words and feelings to that effect). This is an extension of William’s repeated contention that science freely trespasses into territory that in which it does not belong or have any authority. Science threatens the make believe realities – such as objective morality – that people like William feel are necessary for “good living”. And so, such folk try to knock science down whenever possible and keep it confined to it’s “proper place”, whatever that is.
I’ll take you’re unwillingness to explain it to me and your descent into rhetoric to be an admission that you cannot provide an explanation and are just bluffing.