It can’t be both
I want to try to figure this out. I could just conclude that I simply don’t know enough about it to figure it out, and I ought to either learn more or leave it to people who do know enough. That’s certainly a possibility, of course. I’ve been thinking when reading Sam Harris’s posts in reply to his critics that he just doesn’t seem to know enough about it, and it’s certainly possible that I don’t know enough about what I’m prattling about, either. But the difference is, it seems to me, that Sam’s critics have made a lot of good arguments, while the arguments I’ve seen so far from the ‘overt atheists are wrong and bad’ faction are not very good. But then I would think that. But actually I wouldn’t, because I’m not invested in thinking Sam’s view is (partly) wrong. It just strikes me that way, that’s all. It strikes me that way because I’ve read a little about meta-ethics, among other reasons – but it’s not because I’m loyal to one view or another. But I am invested in the idea that overt atheism is not a bad thing – so maybe I can’t recognize the goodness of good arguments against it.
So I want to try to figure it out. Massimo first of all said that Sam would
get more mileage out of allying himself with philosophy (not to the exclusion of science), rather than taking what appears to be the same misguided scientistic attitude that Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have come to embody so well.
Our friend G challenged him on that, and he replied
my problem with Dawkins and Coyne is different, but stems from the same root: their position on morality is indeed distinct from Harris’ (at least Dawkins’, I don’t recall having read anything by Coyne on morality), but they insist in applying science to the supernatural, which is simply another form of the same malady that strikes Harris: scientism, the idea that science can do everything and provides us with all the answers that are worth having.
This is the part that I don’t understand. There was some discussion of it on that thread, in which it was suggested that Massimo has a rather special definition of ‘supernatural,’ but Massimo said no, it’s Dawkins and Coyne who have a different definition of science. I still don’t understand.
I don’t think the root is the same. I think Harris on morality is not the same kind of thing as Dawkins and Coyne on theism. That’s because I think morality is not the same kind of thing as theism. There’s some overlap, sometimes a lot of overlap, but not so much that they’re the same kind of thing. Theism is about an entity external to human beings, one that could in principle exist even if human beings didn’t exist and never had existed. Massimo’s version of ‘supernatural’ seems to be ‘entirely outside of nature such that science cannot inquire into it in any way.’ What I don’t understand is why Massimo thinks that describes theism. A supernatural god of that kind would be, as far as humans are concerned, the same thing as nothing. If it’s entirely outside, then it has nothing to do with us, and we have nothing to say about it (and atheists have no quarrel with it). That’s not the god that people who believe in god have in mind. People who believe in god do say things about their god. That god is supposed to be part of the world in some way, if only as its parent or creator or designer. I don’t see how it can be possible for a god to be any of that and still be totally out of reach of science and thus of any kind of inquiry. I can’t make sense of that.
What am I missing?
I think the only thing you are missing is that Massimo is having a second conversation which is not about the same thing as Harris is talking about.
Massimo and many others seem to have valid objections to some of Harris’ points. I think some of them were addressed by Harris in his update but I think we need to wait for his book (October!) to hear his entire presentation.
Or maybe I am missing something too ;)
I don’t think you’re missing anything.
Massimo dances around the definition of supernatural like most theists – they say, “here, this is God” and just when you think you have something to argue against the slide it off the table.
I’m a little confused as to why you seem to conflate Sam Harris’ being an overt atheist with his position on morality. He’d be the first to tell you that there’s nothing about his being an atheist that makes his position true (in fact theists are more likely to side with him on the need for a universal morality).
In short – you can flat-out disagree with him about his position on morality without compromising anything of your own position on atheism.
I know a conservative who constantly inveighs against liberals for always assuming that conservatives are all the horrible nutcases like Limbaugh and Bush and so on. He demands, loudly, that they engage the good arguments of conservatives, ie, his arguments.
My response to this is that conservatives, as a whole, don’t believe his arguments. And he knows it. His position may or may not be conservative, but I couldn’t go outside and find 5 people who believe the things he does if I looked all day. What he’s doing by attacking liberals is he’s trying to obtain legitimacy for himself as the definer of conservatism by getting liberals to acknowledge him as such. My response to him is pretty simple- he needs to earn himself a meaningful place at the table at his own party before he can be its ambassador. He can’t go to his opponents and earn legitimacy as a representative for a group of people who don’t accept his point of view.
I feel like the critics of the new atheists all too often do the same thing. They have a vision of religion that doesn’t match anything actually practiced by the vast majority of self identified religious people in the country, or even the planet. Rather than convince religious people to think about things the way they do, they instead just insult atheists for not taking their point of view as representative of religion as a whole. They want to get legitimacy by getting atheists and intellectuals to accept them as the “real” definers and describers of religion rather than by getting actual religious people as a whole to think they way they think they should.
This makes a little more sense than the conservative friend of mine because at least these guys tend to be sequestered in the academic world, and they don’t usually actually try to represent actual people but rather a sort of philosophical position that they feel actual people would hold if they just thought about it more.
But its still dumb. Dawkins et al aren’t foolish for constantly treating religion as an ideology that makes testable claims about the real world which can then be addressed by science. That’s what religion, as practiced, really is. If Massimo (or Armstrong, or Eagleton) feels that religion shouldn’t be that way, he has way bigger problems than Dawkins. He’s got a hurdle in the form of 99% of the religious people on the planet who every day believe and behave and speak in a way that proves his view of religion as conclusively wrong.
Breaking it apart piece by piece:
So he thinks that “2 + 2 = 4” is not a fact of the matter. That’s a really contentious claim which would cause Kant’s eyes to pop straight out of his head. What are mathematical claims supposed to be, tautologies?
This is actually a radical concession to the moral realist. Actually, armed with this proposition, you can go ahead and claim that there are aesthetic facts! I love progressive rock, and you disco freaks don’t understand it because you’re not relevantly aware social beings like me.
But they do enter into Harris’s picture, because they exhaust his theory of value: i.e., misery is bad. This is supposed to be objectively bad. Though because of Pigliucci’s concession (2), Harris doesn’t have to commit to the idea that it is a universal bad. Which is unfortunate for Pigliucci, since the universality of the badness of misery is open to puzzling counter-cases: i.e., it is not clear what we ought to say about masochists, for example.
It’s true that he would have to come to that conclusion… unless Harris thought the child-hitting case was defeated because of the same standards we use with the burka case. i.e., when he says that the wellbeing of individual children comes ahead of societal wellbeing. At least in saying so, Harris would have an appeal to reasons, and not some airy fairy “intuition”, or vague reference to virtuous conduct.
Then Harris and I would start wearing burkas too. Unfortunately, that world is not this one. So… not interesting. Still, there’s the individuality vs. community problem:
Unless it is a fact of the matter that in the first place misery occurs in individuals and is judged to be present according to individual standards. This is also a reason for rejecting eugenics and social Darwinism. They reify happiness and misery without careful appeal to what real people actually think about their feelings.
The rest of us can then go on to ask what sense these standards are objective if they’re so idiosyncratic — but Pigliucci has a harder time answering that question, because of (2).
This is an object lesson on why most philosophers have stopped using the phrase “category mistake”. Often it’s just a means of using semantics as a means of begging the question.
Why are we talking about neurobiology when the issue is any empirically motivated change whatsoever? As it happens, mathematics went through incredible revolutions due to new pragmatic cognitive demands. Zero, the calculus, etc. So… yes, Harris would say that we ought to be able to change even those core parts of our conceptual scheme. He’s not unique in saying it.
What are you missing? Nothing. The locution (one can scarcely call it a word) ‘god’ does not have a meaning. It grabs meaning from context, and the contexts in which it is used are so diverse and contradictory, that it really cannot be thought to have a dictionary meaning in an ordinary sense.
In fact, gods are, very often anyway, moral creations. Someone speaks of a god in a particular way, and someone else immediately says, “I couldn’t believe in a god like that.” Dawkins picks out perhaps the most general definition possible – even Eric Reitan is prepared to accept it in his reply to Dawkins (et al.), Is God an Illusion, but at the same time lots of people are prepared to say that that isn’t what they mean by ‘god’.
As Grayling has pointed out in a dozen different places, it seems that gods have got progressively more removed from human beings as we have learned more about the world, first from the natural forces of which they are the (often) eponymous agents, then to mountains wreathed in smoke or mists, then to sun and stars, and finally beyond physical being altogether, though often, despite that, thought to have some kind of relationship with physical being and especially with conscious, apparently free, beings. This should make gods so understood accessible to some kind of scientific examination, at least to the extent of disproof, since such gods don’t seem to make any detectable difference, and it seems likely that they should, if there is such a being or are such beings.
Believers, though, tend to think that they are accessible in experience, experiences of the numinous, that uncanny creepy-crawly feeling one gets in certain places thought, for this reason, to be holy, infused with some sort of “divine” presence, which really begs the question. But usually, for those who think like this, this is already to move out of the physical/material world, because the mind is taken to be a distinct substance which can apparently make contact with whatever lies beyond the world. And you can’t get more rarified than this, since, if gods are only accessible in non-physical ways, they must be assumed, and very often the logic of god-talk is said to require this, to be non-existent. Gods cannot be existent beings, for then they would immediately be part of and therefore less than the sum of other existents, and thus not gods in the requisite sense. To use Tillich’s expression, God “is” – though strictly we can’t say this – the Ground of Being, not a being. But what that means is anyone’s guess.
But, I don’t think you’re missing a damn thing, and unless religious believers are prepared to say what it is they are believing when they use language about god or gods, then there is little more to be said than that this kind of language is simply a form of verbal trickery. And for a lot of people it is. Gods are just mythical beings, ways of understanding our humanity. Richard Holloway, who was once an Anglican bishop, though I rather think he no longer counts himself to be one, in his book, Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition, does this quite consciously. Religious language is purely imaginative, and is useful in helping us to understand something of the layered depth of human reality. What I think that Holloway forgets – and his books are literate, humane, and insightful – is that most religious people don’t regard religious myths in this way, and so what is imaginative richness and depth for him is absolute truth and reality for someone else, who accordingly thinks that everyone should live, and even be forced to live, in the light of and in obedience to that reality.
But if Massimo wants to talk about religion, he’s going to have to know more than he seems to. What he seems to do is to buy into the verbal sleight of hand, without being aware that this is what he does. Arguably, this is what he accuses Harris of doing in relation to ethics. It’s a bit of pots and kettles….
And then – it would be one thing for Massimo to think of god that way for his own purposes, but it’s another for him to claim that that’s what religion is and to jump off from that claim to really snotty arbitrary off the wall shots at Doyne and Cawkins.
And he’s got Michael De Dora doing it too – and then he defends him from the “venomous” retorts. I just don’t get it.
FBob, I’m not conflating Sam Harris’ being an overt atheist with his position on morality – I’m more discussing MP’s conflation of the two. At least I think that’s what I was doing. It’s been a stressful day.
Marie-T beat me to it. Happy birthday OBBBBBB!
Thanks Marie-T and BenNNNNNNNNN!
This point might be purely academic, but maybe it’s still worth making: even with a supernatural being beyond scientific inquiry, it might not necessarily be beyond all inquiry. After all, you might think there are “other ways of knowing” besides scientific ways. If so, then maybe Massimo’s god beyond science could be reconciled with the god of ordinary believers: knowable by non-scientific ways but beyond the reach of science.
Here is a MP’s comment:
“Oh, the other difference is that the natural exists, the supernatural is a figment of some people’s deranged imagination.”
MP thinks the natural is the only thing that exists – this seems to be no different than what RD and JC think. RD and JC are suggesting the application of science to claims of the supernatural not to the supernatural itself – which they can’t – because it doesn’t exist.
It would help to have some past context: This pissyness Massimo aims at some of his fellow atheists – and I’ve known Massimo Pigliucci for a decade and have no doubts about his firm and complete atheism – goes back to some fairly specific arguments about philosophy of science and the limits of science. Those arguments have nothing to do with anything Sam Harris has to say about ethics – even though MP brought up the older beef in that context, then hand-wavingly said it all comes from the same “scientism” when I called him on it (which term he then defined in such a way that it applies to NONE of the people he so labeled).
Unfortunately, having said what I’m sure the dispute IS NOT about, I cannot in any substantial way pin down what the dispute IS about. Massimo specifically brought up “accommodationism” in his blog once, and I pointed out in the comments why his whole discussion of the matter entirely missed the point – or rather, missed several points. The thread was immediately hijacked by idiots like John Pieret (a god-bothering troll who’s a big fan of Nesbitt and Mooney, ’nuff said; he’s never commented here, thank the FSM), and Massimo never responded on that thread in any way. I’ve poked at Massimo about this point-missing every time his pissyness at the Nü Atheist Crüe (since people keep applying stupid labels to Dawkins/Harris/Myers/et al, I figured I’d make up one that I at least find amusing) has manifested since then: The closest he’s ever come to addressing it is the hand-waving, still point-missing, straw-man-erecting response Ophelia quoted in this post. And I still don’t get why Massimo thinks the methodological naturalism/metaphysical naturalism distinction has bugger all to do with it (see the link above for what he had to say, and my response), or even why he thinks Dawkins and Coyne even disagree strongly with him on this issue.
That’s the craziest thing about this: I don’t think Dawkins or Coyne or Myers would necessarily disagree with Massimo about the inability of science to address the supernatural – but they would just point out that religious believers keep making claims about the natural world that can and should be addressed by science, or at least broadly scientific, empirical reasoning. I think Massimo’s picking this fight with a straw man version of the Nü Atheist position that he’s absorbed via osmosis from hanging out with people who are given to casually and consistently distorting everything outspoken atheists say.
Come to think of it, given Massimo’s long association with the CFI, this might not be unrelated to the hands-off, hyper-skittish attitude that the “skeptical movement” has long displayed about religion, which PZ mocked just today. Hmm…
Whoops! I forgot to put the actual link in when I referred to PZ mocking the “skeptical movement” and it’s wildly inconsistent refusal to criticize religion.
“i.e., it is not clear what we ought to say about masochists”
Suffering is not the same thing as pain, suffering is an emotional response while pain is physical.
“i.e., it is not clear what we ought to say about masochists”
Suffering is not the same thing as pain, suffering is an emotional response while pain is physical.
I, too, think you are not missing anything – much. I think your enquiry would be better directed at WHY these people say this stuff that is apparently point-missing. Get some face time with them, if they are worthwhile. I suspect that the real problem is covert – their framing is necessary to them. Maybe they define a meaning of a term differently in different parts of their argument to protect some flank you don’t realise is important to them.
G Felis: “…the inability of science to address the supernatural…” immediately raises the question ‘who or what IS able to address the supernatural?’ By ‘address’ I assume acquire knowledge of the supernatural by some process or other itself open to natural and/or rational examination.
For the supernatural to become examinable and provide data and evidence for such examination and discussion ‘it’ must interact in some way with the natural world. Otherwise we are left with ‘theology’: literally the study of God, but in reality the study of ancient texts purporting to be about the aforesaid and alleged God.
I would dearly love to know which human discipline is equipped to study the supernatural. In my teens I went to a couple of seances involving ouija boards, and was impressed but remained sceptical. Then went to see the Tony Curtis film ‘Houdini’ in which the great showman and escape artist, who was eager to make contact with his deceased mother, was portrayed hiring mediums and psychics to help him. He announced that despite his eagerness to the contrary, all the alleged contacts and presences that he experienced could have been arranged using standard tricks of the showbiz trade. A Freudian psychologist later told me that the film was faithful to documentary accounts of Houdini’s life. So I rest my case.
Until otherwise convinced, I maintain that no animal, human, or human discpline can address the supernatural.
The supernatural remains therefore a mental construct, like the i of mathematics. Both of course have their uses.
I would be interested in your view on this.
Ian, I agree, and I think a lot of confusion on the religion/science debate comes from people thinking that religion “studies” the supernatural. When it actually just codifies a culture’s imaginative stories about the supernatural.
And hey, maybe that’s a “way of knowing.” I’m not opposed to that notion. But it’s not a “way of knowing” about the supernatural. It’s a “way of knowing” about what people want from the supernatural, what people want the universe to be like–or, conversely, what they fear from it.
Thanks for the helpful context, G…and it’s interesting to see that even with the context, you’re just as stumped about what MP means by it all as I am.
“I don’t think Dawkins or Coyne or Myers would necessarily disagree with Massimo about the inability of science to address the supernatural”
Right…but I think they would also say, as I did, that nothing else has any ability to “address the supernatural” either. I think the problem with that mantra is that it usually leaves it at that and unwary observers are left free to conclude that some other item – something that is not science but is a way of finding out things – can address the supernatural.
This is what Dave2 was talking about. “After all, you might think there are “other ways of knowing” besides scientific ways.”
You might, and if you did, I think you’d be making a mistake – at least, you would if you take science in the broad sense as opposed to the narrow one. In other words I think ways of knowing that really are ways of knowing have to be on a continuum as opposed to being radically different from each other. Science is more systematic and better equipped with ways to second-guess and third-guess itself, and so on, but less formal forms of inquiry still have to check their results against reality. If they don’t, they’re not ways of knowing; they’re something else.
Now, Massimo said that science can address astrology and ghosts and so on, because they do make real-world claims. But of course so does religion, yet he remains adamant that religion is different. I don’t get it.
I see so many arguments where someone claims that is religion not science or that is philosophy not science and it seems to be stated solely to stop further discussion. Many (especially I think Russell Blackford) have commented on the continuity of individual knowledge – we do not compartmentalize it into religion here, science over here, art over there, philosophy way over there, etc. We don’t think that way which is another reason why religious scientists seem so baffling to many of us.
Hey! What’s to get? He’s wrong!
Apropos of ways of knowing. Has anyone ever given any content to this notion? I know Gould thought that’s what he had done, but he didn’t. Does it really make sense to say that there is a range of ‘things’ that can be known in a different way from some other range of things (and here I’m not talking sub-atomic particles or things like that? And if so, what meaning would ‘know’ have in each case? In what way are they related?
One of the problems with ‘moral knowledge’ is trying to define how we can know, in the relevant sense of ‘know’, that something is morally right or wrong. Well, doesn’t this have to be asked about claims to religious knowledge? And it’s even harder in the religious case, because at least we know what we’re talking about when we speak of morality. If ‘know’ shifts its meaning between say knowing that the Sun is at the centre of the solar system, and, say, knowing that there is a god who is one in three persons, then exactly what claim are we making here? If the meaning really does shift, then this is not two different ways of knowing, it’s two different activities, and whether one is actually a way of knowing is pretty much doubtful, unless someone can say what they mean when they say it, and it makes sense to take the word ‘know’ and use it in two different ways.Uusually what is meant, I suppose, is that there are two different sources of evidence, so that the word is used in a parallel way, but no one has produced the evidence yet.
But it still seems that, if we could know the supernatural, then it would be part of the natural, for that is what knowing is about, and knowing about it would immediately link it with the natural. This is the point that Stenger makes all the time. The justification of religion – and it has to begin by justifying a realm of being that can be known – has to do a lot more than just change the meaning of a word.
As to codifying stories about the supernatural, Jenavir, don’t you really mean codifying myths?
Lots of people have given content to the notion but I have yet to see any content that really works to back up the claim. I’ve seen lots of hand-waving, and plenty of misfires (like Rosenau’s wild invocations of tennis, novels, anything and everything), but nothing better than that.
There’s the ever-popular “I know I love my lover” – but that’s a clunker, for a lot of reasons. One, actually you donn’t, necessarily. Two, even if you do, that doesn’t tell anyone else anything. Three, even then the knowledge isn’t completely free of reasons. If you make it the much less easy “I know my lover loves me” it becomes even more obvious that actually evidence is far from irrelevant – it doesn’t take much effort to think of evidence that would show “X does not love me”!
And so on.
‘But it still seems that, if we could know the supernatural, then it would be part of the natural, for that is what knowing is about, and knowing about it would immediately link it with the natural.’
In much the same way alternative medicine would cease to be ‘alternative’ if it was supported by scientific evidence.
Presumably, inference of unobservable stuff is a different “way of knowing” than direct acquaintance. They would probably add intuition to that bunch. So my intuition of God is a different way of knowing either inference to Him or acquaintance with Him. So we know of his Love by that intuition.
My favorite use of the “know your lover” trope was by John Lennox in debate with Dawkins, when Lennox asked Dawkins how he knew his wife loved him. The proper reply, I think, is to apply the analogy to its logical conclusions in the debate. i.e., if Lalla Ward (Dawkins’s wife) spent most of her time in the attic, ignoring Dawkins entirely and never interacting with him, only every so often to wake him up by causing some mischief (flooding the house, setting his bed on fire, burying his cat under a mudslide, etc.), then we would be quite right to question whether or not Lalla loves Richard. And if Richard remained confident in his own love for Lalla, then we would be right to question whether or not he had all his marbles.
Well, yes, Benjamin, knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by inference are different in one sense, but they’re not two different ways of knowing, since both depend upon connexions with the perceptual world – that’s why I said that I wasn’t thinking in terms of sub-atomic particles, which are related, several inferences along, to things that we can see and feel, and we can even explain, because of the atomic structure, why they feel that way. And of course, OB, there has been lots of hand-waving, but even claiming to know that your lover loves you is subject to the kinds of evidence that wouldn’t be out of place in sociological research. Same goes for aesthetic response, and other kinds of human experience.
Intuition clearly doesn’t really work as a way of knowing either, because intuitions, insightful as they may be, need to be backed up by evidence. That’s why so many of the bright ideas that simply come out of nowhere turn out to be duds. It’s got to do with the logic of ‘know’.
Of course, we might come upon a race of beings whose ‘knowledge’ had a completely different categorical structure, so that they modelled the world differently, yet just as effectively, and it might look as though we had two different, interpenetrating realities, and two different ways of knowing. But I suspect, if we actually came upon them, we would be able to find out how their cognitive structure worked, and how it related to ours.
Bats clearly structure an aural world, just as we structure a visible one, and blind people can do the bat trick too. But the worlds intersect. And worlds that are structured by emotional language intersect with visible and audible cues as well. It’s silly to think of them as somehow out there disconnected from things that we can see and hear. That’s how we learn about love in the first place, and we are incredibly sensitive to facial expressions for example, which, while these responses may be coded into the genome, are also responses to things that we see and hear. If a supernatural world exists, it’s clearly, by defintion, unknowable, so why even think of it as existing? But if people say that the supernatural world intersects with the natural one, then, like the world of bats, it’s a natural one too.
The only reason for talking about supernature, so far as I can tell, is because it seems to leave space for gods, but where? This really is a mugs game. That’s why we just have to tell religions that all their vaunted knowledge is just myth, and they really know it already. Why else do they get upset when you remind them? Sometimes myth can be understood as a reflection of aspects of human nature. At other times they’re just burnoff from overheated imaginings in the night.
But it really is time to stop temporising over this, like so many ‘atheists’ seem to want to do, because it has now become simply unacceptable to continue to shore up worldviews which have all the negative consequences that irrational religious beliefs so manifestly have. All you have to do is look around. Isn’t it enough already? Why cannot Massimo and De Dora see this? For MP to continue carping at Coyne and Dawkins is simply to misunderstand the stakes involved, as well as some of the simpler aspects of cognitive language.
Jenavir: ‘But it’s not a “way of knowing” about the supernatural. It’s a “way of knowing” about what people want from the supernatural, what people want the universe to be like–or, conversely, what they fear from it.’
Quite. It’s a self-inflicted pea and thimble trick; categorising what’s inside one’s head for what’s out there; projecting and fulfilling wishes. Trouble is, how do you know when you are doing it and when not? (Well, I at least know when I am doing it. It’s the next bloke who’s got the problem. ;-)
‘Know yourself’ as the oracle said. And Haldane added something to this effect: the Universe is definitely queerer than we suppose, and may well be queerer than we CAN suppose. (Or to drop another name, Martin Rees observed recently that one could set up a seminar on quantum mechanics for chimpanzees, and stock it with their best and brightest, but still get nowhere.)
Putting the two together: ‘know yourself’ may be an impossible task, even for an army of Einsteins. But the further along that infinite road we get, the better off we probably are. Only one request: please don’t ask me how I know.
Eric: yes, “myths” expresses what I meant.
The “I know I love my lover” thing is interesting because it shows what people are often really trying to defend when they defend religion. They’re trying to defend the things that give life meaning, and somehow they feel those things are under attack by the “new atheists.” They probably think this because of stereotypes about scientists and atheists as cold and nihilistic.
In their attempt to defend non-religious meaningful things by defending religion, they end up conflating a whole bunch of things that are really quite different. Emotional self-knowledge and subjective experience aren’t the same as faith in the existence of an external, powerful entity that affects the world in objectively measurable ways. They’re different in their epistemology and in their practical and social effects.
Many of the comments y’all have made are in line with my own view, but I think it’s worth actually reading the link I provided to Massimo’s post about accommodationism (again here so you don’t have to scroll up and find it). He cites “last Thursdayism” as an example of a possible religious position that science is not equipped to address. To that, I can say three things:
[1] There are no serious last Thursday-ists in the world, so who gives a flying fuck? Scientists and theologians alike roundly mocked and rejected Gosse’s Omphalos hypothesis for good reason – which leads me to…
[2] Believers believe things that MATTER to them, which is why there are no serious last Thursdayists in the world. It is also why many if not most of the beliefs that believers actually DO hold are beliefs that have some impact on the world we all share – and are therefore amenable to scientific inquiry (or, more broadly, rational critical inquiry). Jerry Coyne gave some pretty good specific examples of this in his answer to MP today.
[3] Philosophy cannot address last Thursdayism (and claims similarly isolated from any potential counterevidence) any better than science can. Last Thursdayism is an ad hoc phenomenon-saving claim: Really, it’s just a variation on the “mysterious ways” escape clause, with an extra dose of mysteriousness. Such claims form a closed logical loop: The “mysterious ways” claim is advanced by unsupported and unsupportable assertion in order to counter criticism. The philosopher can point out that the “mysterious ways” assertion is unsupported and unsupportable, and that it does not and cannot counter real criticisms supported by evidence and reason if no evidence or reason can be offered in its favor – but the scientist can point out the same thing, so what’s the difference? There is no special property or domain of philosophical reasoning that makes it any better (or worse) than science at countering naked assertions and other non-rational, evidence-free claims: The philosopher can point out that the naked assertion violates the principles of parsimony and burden of proof, and the scientist can justly and appopriately point out the exact same problems couched in the (only slightly different) language of science.
My point 3 is, of course, more or less the same thing y’all have been saying about the fact that no one can actually “address” supernatural claims: Since all supernatural claims are more or less by definition unsupported assertions – if you could provide support, it wouldn’t be a SUPERnatural claim, it’d just be natural – our work is done once we’ve pointed that out. We are not obligated to take such claims seriously, period. If for some reason Massimo thinks that it requires a PhD in philosophy to point out when someone is making an unsupported assertion and that scientists (or other non-philosophers) who say so are talking out of turn or some such nonsense, he’s just being an ass. And if he’s saying something else, I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is that he’s trying to say.
Eric, that stuff about ‘the Ground of Being’ always puzzled me too. My background is in EE, so a ground is a concept I’m familiar with. I would define it as the reference potential that all other voltages are measured against. Most of the faithful are happy with an analogous definition for their god when I bring it up. Then I point out that the various faith traditions can’t seem to agree on the measure of just about anything.
In electronics that situation would be called a ‘floating’ ground. The problems that can result when bringing together two systems with floating grounds are almost as spectacular as the culture clash between some religious groups interacting; it can be done, but if you aren’t careful there *will* be sparks.
Funny, I would have expected the one true God, Ground of All Being, to be more of a fixed ground; a truly universal standard. I guess that makes me just another atheist fundamentalist.
“but even claiming to know that your lover loves you is subject to the kinds of evidence that wouldn’t be out of place in sociological research.”
:- )
I know, that’s part of what I was saying.
Nussbaum has a good riff on this in relation to something Nell Noddings said about not needing [science, reasons, evidence, something along those lines] to know [whatever] when she saw her daughter asleep on the couch. Nussbaum pointed out that she did need it, actually – what if her daughter were ill or drugged, for instance?
The “love” example is a terrible argument, since a scientific research program concerning love isn’t exactly hard to imagine.
We can start with the fact that there’s clearly more than one kind of love. Thus, idioms like “I love you, but I’m not in love with you,” “I love you, but not in THAT way,” “I love him like a brother,” etc.
However, even if we take a sub category of love, perhaps matrimonial love, we can ask, “When Smith talks about experiencing feelings of love for his wife, are those experiences the same as or even similar to the feelings Jones describes as love for HIS wife?” Of course, we can’t directly access how Jones or Smith feels about their respective wives, but we can ask carefully formulated questions and engage in brain imaging studies to at least start to tackle questions like these.
Such a study would be really interesting for a few reasons. For example, perhaps we would find that “love” breaks into categories, “matrimonial love,” “fraternal love,” “familial love,” etc. according to definable measurements — answers to questions and facts about imaging studies. Or we might find that “love” doesn’t break into categories easily, but seems to constitute a broad, diffuse spectrum of different behaviors and neural phenomena. The former result would suggest that Homo Sapiens in general are hard-wired to favor certain kinds of relationships, and may provide hints as to the evolutionary history of human social behavior. The latter result would suggest that feelings of love are driven more by experience and context. It would also suggest that a large set of distinct “neural strategies” can effect consistent behaviors — it is certainly possible that Smith and Jones could behave similarly towards their wives while their subjective experiences concerning their wives are widely divergent. Such a finding (either way) would tell us a lot about what love is, and what it means to be human — and it would be a scientific result.
And we don’t need to stop there. Are certain results from brain imaging consistent among (e.g.) those who cheat on their wives? Are certain patterns of answers to the study’s questions indicative of an especially loyal wife? Some people, of course, are rather uncomfortable using the word love except when they really mean it, while others are less worried about “diluting” the word. Is there a physiological or functional difference between these sorts of people that we can capture in a study? Do they mean different things by “love,” or are they reacting differently to the same neurological phenomena?
I don’t need to know much about physics to turn on a light bulb; I don’t need to know much about neurology to know I love my mother. But to blithely assert that science cannot even address questions concerning love is, to me, not much different from saying since no knowledge of physics is required to turn on a light bulb, there are no questions about light bulbs that science can answer.
The “in principle vs. in fact” distinction that Harris has been trying to draw lately is useful here. Applying science to subjective phenomena is difficult, no doubt, but that does not imply it is impossible in principle — and if it’s not impossible in principle, then there’s no reason to rule out the possibility of studying it scientifically at some point in the future.
Yup, it’s a terrible argument – but people make it all the time – with an air of triumph.