Addressing questions is one thing, answering them is another
One of the places we’ve seen this claim that science has nothing to say about God or other religious beliefs lately is in the article about Francisco Ayala in the Times after he won the Templeton Prize.
Professor Ayala…won the prize for his contribution to the question “Does scientific knowledge contradict religious belief?”…[Ayala] says science and religion cannot be in contradiction because they address different questions. It is only when either subject oversteps its boundary, as he believes is the case with Professor Dawkins, that a contradiction arises, he said.
That’s a recipe for epistemic chaos. We can’t have hermetically sealed ways of “addressing” questions – not if we want to get things right. Ways of addressing questions have to be consistent with each other, at least. The claim that science and religion address different questions only works if you admit that religion – when it comes to addressing questions – is simply a branch of fiction. This means you’re admitting that religion doesn’t really address questions at all, if “address questions” is taken to mean raising questions in the hope of answering them.
You can’t do both. You can’t say that they’re radically different, and still maintain that religion does anything other than raise questions only for the sake of giving answers that don’t have to meet any criteria.
Epistemic chaos? Exactly right. And we see this all the time.
How do we know if our answers are true? If we allow for different epistemological standards to answer the same claims about the natural world, of course we shall encounter contradictions, which is excellent evidence that one or both approaches are wrong. To pretend that religion only attempts to answer different questions is the real fiction here.
So again, how do we know which epistemology provides us with answers that are true? To be practical, why don’t we trust the epistemological method that yields consistent and reliable knowledge to be accrued and its applications successfully applied? Oh, that’s right… we already do, often with our very lives, and Ayala is no different, just richer for the duplicity.
I’m starting to think that people like Ayala know perfectly well that their epistemology is whack. I’m starting to think that they are comfortable with lying through their teeth about this particular issue. They “consider it virtuous to tell lies,” as Bertrand Russell said (in just a slightly different context).
“… is simply a branch of fiction…”
It is a branch of fiction, but there is nothing simple about it. The apologetics have tried to give it gravitas by complicating and obfuscating religion when it really is just response to fears and the unknown plus attempts to sooth, pacify and control others.
I guess Ophelia is riffing on Shakespeare:
Glendower:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur:
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
The strategy employed by the “they are two different questions” folks has a home, of course, in our world. The question “How does this bomb work?” is a different question from “Why was this bomb built?” and a person could know the answer to the former without knowing the answer to the latter. Furthermore, the latter question raises issues of purpose and intent that are less obviously raised with the former question.
When it comes to humans, modern science promises to answer both questions. What are humans like and why are they like this? Psychology and evolutionary biology look poised to tell us everything (add any other science you see fit to add; it won’t affect the argument).
So where does the “they are two different questions” strategy find room? Well, if you want to grant the science, then you’ve got to push the question back. The ‘how’ question is now targeted to the universe as a whole—“How does it work?” (Answer—laws of nature). The why question becomes, “Why are the laws this way?”
It is an easy question to ask, and given that we are talking about the laws themselves, it is pretty tempting to argue that science cannot answer this question (the laws cannot explain themselves, after all).
But going this route has its costs, if one is really committed to the science. As Hume pointed out, if our ways of reasoning are geared to this world, then there may be no good reason to suppose that our familiar ways of discovering answers to “why?” questions should apply to the universe itself. ‘Why?” questions may simply have no answers here, and to insist that they must is to apply a manner of reasoning appropriate to the events that occur in the universe that has no necessary connection to the target phenomenon (the universe’s existence as such). So which is it? Are there shared standards for evaluating reasoning or not? If so, then the “two questions” strategy fails. If not, then we cannot use the familiar explanatory strategies that apply to events within the universe to the universe as a whole. But if we cannot do that, then theistic defenses of a god collapse, for they suppose that the forms of reasoning we apply to everyday life have applicability here.
Maybe you will pick at nits with the above. OK, but there is a quicker route to showing that the “two different questions” strategy is a nonstarter. Its appeal lasts only as long as the issues are couched in this very broad, sweeping way. Let’s get to the particulars. Is there an immortal soul or not? The working hypothesis of modern science is that there is nothing about human beings that cannot be explained in terms of science. There is no non-question beginning description of the data that the science cannot account for.
This is the fly in the theist ointment. They simply insist that there are questions about human beings, questions that survive whatever the science shows. But if science can explain everything that the immortal soul was invoked to explain, then there are no interesting questions remained to be answered, questions to which religion is in some unique position to answer. To insist that such questions must remain is to simply beg the question.
Religion has no answers to any questions.
“We can’t have hermetically sealed ways of “addressing” questions – not if we want to get things right. Ways of addressing questions have to be consistent with each other, at least.”
I’m not sure why this must be the case–not if we have two subjects or fields that are totally distinct from one another. In that case, they might have totally distinct (and possibly inconsistent) ways of addressing their respective questions.
The pertinent issue is whether religious claims are about a totally distinct field from scientific claims. And often they’re not.
Jenavir, I think you’re misinterpreting “ways of addressing” a bit too loosely for the context at hand. This isn’t about the particular methodological tools (controlled experiments vs. natural/historical experiments, Bayesian statistics vs. qualitative research methods) appropriate for investigating even the most distinct subjects or fields, for any value of “totally distinct.” This is about fundamental epistemology – the way one seeks out answers to questions in general – and not just the particular methodologies one uses to seek particular answers to particular questions.
One way of addressing questions is to start from the position that there is indeed something one does not already know and can learn, and to gather evidence and construct arguments and vigorously test hypotheses: Call it fallibilism, critical inquiry, science, etc. The most distinctly religious/theological way of “addressing” questions is faith, where people simply choose to – or, more commonly, are conditioned from an early age t0 – accept answers given to them by presumptive authorities (preachers, traditions, books) that entirely lack any objectively demonstrable expertise or knowledge.
The first way has quite a record of success in generating answers to questions, and also generates fruitful new questions. The second way primarily generates ignorance, usually with generous helpings of self-satisfied arrogance, self-justifying oppression, and self-righteous hypocrisy.
And, I should note, some religious people and traditions (Zen Buddhists, most neo-pagans, etc.) mostly pose questions and don’t presume to have answers. Nor do they necessarily even seek answers, if by “answers” one means anything they expect anyone else to believe as objectively true as opposed to subjectively useful. (I have a pagan friend who says, “Hell, I wouldn’t believe in any gods if they didn’t talk to me.” I wouldn’t exactly call her an empiricist rationalist, but she’s no more a fan of faith and dogmatism than I am.) But many more religious people and traditions pretend to be much more like the mystical, non-faith-based religious traditions than they actually are. “We’re just asking questions; we don’t assume we have all the answers,” they say, while turning around and declaring all sorts of things to be true which they haven’t a shred of evidence for. The worst of these annoying liars are the ones who go on the most about how much they claim not to know, but then incessantly tell other people they’re wrong about the very same things they claim not to have any answers about. (I’m looking at you, Karen Armstrong!)
Personally I have no problem with people thinking of their religious beliefs as beyond the scope of science. Martin Gardner is an excellent example of a skeptic who believes in divine miracles, but who also holds that such miracles are impossible to demonstrate and are therefore a matter of personal faith rather than science. The problem is that for every Martin Gardner in the world there are another million believers who want to have their empirical cake and eat it too. They will make any number of testable claims but when their claims are challenged by evidence *then* they pull out the “God is ineffable” card.
“It is only when either subject oversteps its boundary, as he believes is the case with Professor Dawkins”
But not of course with religion spilling over into politics or science.
Surely, the main point is that, in order for discourse to make any sense at all, there has to be an error theory, explaining how some utterances fail to meet the criteria for warranted assertability. Take a child learning a language. Most things have fairly clear criteria for saying something successfully about something an a particular time and in a particular context. That’s why language about Father Christmas tends to break down, because error theory tends to defeat hypotheses about the presence/absence/purported activity of the jolly elf.
Religious language tends to be fairly perduring, because the error theory is internal to theological traditions, and, since the language is complex and multifaceted, it can change as warrantability claims are defeated. Thus the god of the gaps. But when you’re working within a theological tradition the whole thing seems to make the greatest sense. However, as religions start to occupy the same social space, error theory becomes more and more tenuous, until religious believers simply start to make assertions about their own particular belief systems, and the resulting chaos is what we see around us.
Merely to say, as Ayala does, that religion asks different questions is simply to ignore the contradictions between religions, and the signal failure of the religions to provide general error theories for religion as a whole. If religion were a separate and independent way of making sense of the world (supposing that supposition makes sense – which is by no means clear), of the life world (Lebenswelt) in some form, there must be such an error theory, otherwise the terms within the religion will have no sense. (This is not the verification principle.) And this is exactly what we find. Anthropomorphic language makes perfect sense, but has no correlates, but once the religion is driven to posit transcendent beings (many of which are inaccessible to inspection), meaningfulness itself is in doubt – just read someone like Karen Armstrong – and the claim to be dealing with a separate realm of being or explanation is subverted.
Without some kind of objective error theory, religion can’t deliver the goods. Textual interpretation won’t do, of course, because there is no error theory for interpretation. That’s why sly organisations like the Roman Catholic Church talk about magisterium. There may be no external checks, but there are internal ones, and they make the rules, and claim that, even if you are right, you are wrong, if you contradict the magisterium (this principle is clearly stated in the Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian).
Ayala is just playing with words, and, as a scientist, he should know better. Dawkins does not. What he does is to call into question the claim that religions have error theories for the use of language, that is, he questions, quite reasonably, whether there are epistemic boundaries here. There aren’t.
Leave out ‘many of’ in the third paragraph.
My response to the NOMA argument:
“Of course they are seperate magisteria. After all, science deals with real, objective facts – while God is clearly imaginary.”
John Morales
I have riffed on that passage more than once in the past. It’s a good one!
True, but there isn’t really such a thing as “the answer” to the latter. That is no doubt why Ayala said “address” rather than answer – he gave himself a lot of wiggle room that way. That of course is part of the deceptiveness of this much-recycled trope. (Another is the sly implication 1) that religion can both address and answer such questions and 2) that religion alone can do that, or that religion can do that better than any other way of “addressing” questions.)
The theological lack of ‘shackling’ (as I think Plato describes it) opinions to justifications to form knowledge is shown by the great range of religious and theological ideas. As an example of what, to me, looks like ‘unshackled’ thinking, I listened to Thomas Altizer and Robert Price on the PoI podcast on the Death of God, which is quite painful to listen to. Price asks Altizer “how do you know these thinkers [Nietzsche, Hegel etc] are telling us the truth?” In reply he says:
So I hope this has cleared that one up.
OB says:
Indeed. And then there’s a related (and thorny) question: who gets to decide when “either subject oversteps its boundary”, as Ayala says? Theologians? Scientists? Hoary tradition? Or maybe a timid (or maybe political) reluctance of “upsetting” the believers in the audience?
George: yes, if your “way of addressing” is simply asking questions, as opposed to trusting what someone tells you simply because they’re an Authority, then that has to be a common feature of all subjects and fields. As you note, some religions and religious practitioners do this, but the hardcore ones don’t.
Chris Lawson: agreed. The problem is the bait-and-switch, the claiming of objective/verifiable truth-status while at the same time prating the virtues of faith and talking about how some things are beyond the ken of science. If you’re aware that something is purely a matter of personal faith and there’s no reason you can give another person for why they should believe it too, and you’re honest with yourself about this, then you’re unlikely to cause mischief and you’re also someone I can have a sensible discussion with.
Irene, indeed – the presumption of all these people saying “oooh he has overstepped the boundaries of science” is…surprising.
Love that avatar.
Jenavir, we are in perfect accord. If someone clearly admits that their faith beliefs are subjective, non-rational, and unsupportable AND THEY STICK TO THAT CONSISTENTLY, I find them perfectly pleasant company. Believe it or not, I even know a few believers of that sort. They’re awfully damned rare, though.