Anthony McCarthy's New Blog

Yeah, More Comments in moderation

2009-08-19T02:32:00.001-07:00

99. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:04 am

Dan S. I don’t think I misread Greg Fish, it wasn’t that complicated and it’s a bunch of stuff I’ve read from other places. I didn’t misunderstand the new atheist argument about “morality” preceding “religion”, an aspect of that argument is one of the first disagreements I had with Coyne the first day I ever posted a comment on his blog. My point is the same, that any assertion made about that even in the early human population is so speculative that I wouldn’t consider it more than wishful thinking by those with an ulterior motive and I don’t think motives come any more ulterior than in the social and behavioral sciences. Except possibly those motivated by the urgent desire to prove faith, such as fundamentalism in its religious and anti-religious forms.

“Primate morality”, it’s come to a point where we’re making complex comments about “primate morality” and I’m supposed to take that phrase seriously in the context of science.

So many issues that could be raised, so little time.

How do you know that chimpanzees are better at making manifest their moral aspirations through actions than people are? What percentage of the teachings of Jesus do you think you could derive from mere observation of the behavior of contemporary “christians” without recourse to prior knowledge of those? How about even with prior knowledge of those but without the self-identification by the individuals you were observing as adherents of Christianity? I’ve observed many Jews, Buddhists, Moslems, agnostics who are better followers of those te achings than many “christians”. How well do you think that people who hold those teaching as their moral code practice them? Well enough that you don’t have to depend on their articulated self-identification as “christians”. And that’s just one of several complex riddles you would have to solve to some artificial and hardly universally held “human morality”. That is unless you change the meaning of “morality” itself, in order to construct some totally artificial “morality” that probably doesn’t exist within even one individual human being but which you can write up and publish in order for those with a similar professional, perhaps largely materialistic culture to agree with it out of what outsiders such as myself could suspect were less that unself-interested reasons.

I know you or gillt or the Sorbot will object at my daring to analyze the moral and ethical practices of behavioral and social scientists at this point, voicing my suspicions that their “objective” observations and interpretations of chimp morality and their analysis of the relationship of these “moralities” and “religion” are less than objective. But, unlike chimpanzees, the species that separate our species and theirs in the dead past and the pre-literate human and always illiterate earlier chimpanzee histories, there is a documented present and past in the communities of behavioral and social scientists to make recourse to. Any assertions made about their motives would be based on what folk such as yourself and Greg Fish and anyone who wants to say anything about it SAYS about it. And there is a written and documented record of what has been said about things like that in the past have come to. You must be able to appreciate that, unlike all but modern and relatively modern, human beings all those other beings are inarticulate, we have no access to their concepts of their actions, in all cases other than those where we can document their actions, those are totally absent as well. I don’t know how you could make the assumption that their “morality” isn’t evidence of a “religion” among them, that’s the development of a prior ideological position, not anything that someone who doesn’t believe that’s valid needs to take seriously.

You do remember that argument we had about the 35,000 year old statue last spring, when I had to point out to you that all of the speculations made about the motives of the human artist were contemporary inventions, none of which seemed to consider that the artist might have been a woman making a self-portrait or an image of her mother, that the figure could have been considered a piece of junk, even by the artist and a number of other points? Everything that was said about that available physical object, sprang from the imagination of a “scientist” or would be scientist or some blog wannabee or news scribbler. Any “correlations” such as the one you wanted to make to much later manufactured objects from much later populations and times (correlations with other, prior, speculations about those) had considerable gaps in time and place to contend with, no documented connection with those, as well as the lack of any real knowledge of meaning and intent by those making or viewing or using them. In the case of these, sometimes presumed to be, religious objects we don’t even have a plausible utilitarian use for them. It was speculation building on speculation filling in gaps with presumption, none of which had any basis other than previous presumptions and speculations in fulfillment of extraneous and, perhaps, ulterior desires on the part of those articulating them.

You can call that science if you want to, I can’t stop you. If that’s what “science” is, you can cancel everything I’ve said about science as a means of attaining more reliable information about the material universe because it looks a heck of a lot like a more sophisticated version of creation mythology to me. If physical and other hard scientists are content to contain that within science, then it’s going to pay a price and, perhaps, already is.

I was thinking that you hadn’t been trailing me lately just the other day.

B.S. Nelson If you’ve got a point, come out and make it because I’m not seeing much in what you say that’s worth making the effort to wonder about. I’d rather watch chimpanzees flinging stuff at people in zoos.
100. Anthony McCarthy Says:
August 19th, 2009 at 5:30 am

Oh, and, Dan S. I forgot to mention, about that 35,000 year old statue. I’ve yet to see any speculation about its “meaning” that takes into account that the attitude of the artist, never mind anyone else viewing it and the ideas they had about the object, was fixed for all time. The ideas that an individual have about a work of art changes, develops, sometimes is entirely overturned over time. You don’t know if the artist had second thoughts and went back to make modifications after they’d originally considered it finished. You don’t know if a second or third individual made modifications in it. Perhaps it was looted from another culture or was a found object and then modified.

Isn’t it fun to make up stuff about something like that? And to post comments you wonder will show up before what it refers to does? Though I’m going to post these two comments on my blog so they’ll appear in order.

Comments stuck in moderation

2009-08-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

# 54. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 18th, 2009 at 10:46 am

— Oh, Robert Wright is definitely a big fan of evo psych. As usual McCarthy wants to pontificate without reading the book. Skeptic

I asked if Robert Wright was trying to assert what he wrote was science, I said I had only read about the book but hadn’t read it at the beginning of my comment. I didn’t try to hide that fact. His documentation that Coyne misrepresented what he said was pretty clear, Coyne misrepresented him just as the critics of Unscientific America have repeatedly misrepresented it. Those are the only things I said about his book. You will notice I put the only statement about it’s purporting to represent science in the form of a question.

– So according to McCarthy the best possible explanation for morality and religion is likely to be non-scientific and supernatural? Skeptic

“The best possible explanation for morality and religion,” I know I’ve never asserted anything about any “best possible explanation” for them, I’ve said that I didn’t even think you could come to a real definition of “religion”, never mind “morality” that could be universally inclusive. I doubt such an “explanation” would be complete, it would definitely be non-scientific at this point for that reason.

As to your assumption that I mean a supernatural explanation being the best, no. I tend to look at the results of moral assertions and religious ideas in real life to see what the results are before hazarding an opinion on them. I don’t have much faith at all in theories about things like that, I want to see the results. So, I guess the answer to that part of your assertion would be, clearly not.

I think it’s also typical of scientism that it asserts that we have to come up with some sciency sounding supposed explanation of everything and that huge swaths of alleged behavioral science exists to fill that anxious emotional need. It might be unfortunate that large parts of human experience and the actual universe are now without real scientific explanations about them and that large parts of life and the universe almost certainly never will. It might be unsatisfying or produce anxiety on the part of those who can’t deal with the reality that large parts of life are and will almost certainly be without reliable verification. But that’s just too bad because that’s the way it is. We are stuck with reality and the limits of human abilities and human institutions, including science, are real. I wonder how much the boundaries of uncertainty could be pushed back if the junk science was junked and those people concentrated on stuff that had actual, physical evidence they could make more reliable observations about.

Not that I think the addiction to baseless theorizing is reserved for scientists, I think that’s probably more to do with how people in academia get jobs, recognition and rewards than it does about science. John Kenneth Galbraith once pointed out that agronomists, economists who deal with concrete, physical reality were considered to be far less prestigious than the lofty and airy theorists who, I’d say, have produced mostly junk. These days a lot of those are pretending they’re biologists of the evo-psy kind.
# 55. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 18th, 2009 at 10:49 am

gillt, you’re the one who wants to challenge my point that there isn’t a single documented incident of pre-historic behavior in either hominids or the ancestors of chimpanzees. And you expect me to cringe when you come up with that cowardly dodge. You are a fraud.

There is not a single observed or reliably documented incident of behavior to back up any assertion made about it pretending that it is science. Not a single one. Everything that has been said about them is story telling and creation myth.
# 56. gillt Says:
August 18th, 2009 at 11:03 am

Shorter McCarthy: “Knowledge is merely opinion!”
# 57. Anthony McCarthy Says:
August 18th, 2009 at 11:39 am

No, sciencey creation myth is still creation myth. No matter how many letters those making it up have behind their names.
# 58. Anthony McCarthy Says:
August 18th, 2009 at 11:44 am

— The discussion of New Atheism has stifled other valuable discussion. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. Skeptic

New atheism’s discussions have stifled other valuable discussions, that’s not an opinion that’s a fact. That is why it’s been necessary to discuss the silly fad.
# 59. Sorbet Says:
August 18th, 2009 at 11:44 am

-Sciencey creation myth is still creation myth.

Yes, we all know that. And trust the infamous Kentucky creation museum to gratuitously expound upon that myth.
# 60. Sorbet Says:
August 18th, 2009 at 11:47 am

McCarthy; tightly shutting his eyes and convincing himself that it’s a “silly fad” that will go away. No actual reading up on science though.
# 61. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 18th, 2009 at 11:59 am

I’m still waiting for that example of Paleolithic or even Neolithic behavior which has been observed and documented in a way that could be passed off as science.

In lieu of that, provide an explanation of how a “behavior” that isn’t observed could be known to have happened, or how a “behavior” that never happened could be real. We’ll leave the matter of how to verify the meaning of such a “behavior” till after one of you can answer the more basic point.

Comments Stuck in Moderation

2009-08-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

218. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 14th, 2009 at 12:09 pm

gillt, there are numerous non-fundamentalists who believe in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. I thought you’d been to Catholic schools, you claimed to have. I don’t know about the one you went to but the ones here would have made that distinction to at least the students they figured were smart enough to grasp the concept.

You never talked about Augustine in all those years? Aquinas? Or is your “Catholic education” about as real as the rest of your assertions. In short, lies.
219. Benjamin S. Nelson Says:
August 14th, 2009 at 12:57 pm

Anthony, to relate my own experience, I did present fairly sharp criticism of Coyne on his blog, and it was deleted (or misplaced — I don’t know). I then grieved this elsewhere; it caused a minor stir, as people were upset at the prospect that Coyne would engage in censorship, because that is a serious detriment to any productive discussion. The stir attracted Coyne’s attention, and he apologized for the error.

So it seems to me that the facts are quite the opposite of what you claim, as far as that goes.
220. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 14th, 2009 at 1:14 pm

Benjamin S. Nelson, I got deleted for making an innocuous remark about memes and for pointing out that his assertion that religion lacked an internal criticism was clearly not true based on internal criticism in both the Jewish and Christian scriptures. And he invited me on several occasions to stop posting comments on his blog, none of which were anywhere like as pointlessly vituperative as the diatribes just above.

I’m sure by now any critics of PZ even half as mild would have been banned and ridiculed in PZ’s dungeon.

I don’t question the right of bloggers to ban whoever they want to for whatever reason, I’m just pointing out how, against the whining and sniveling of these same trolls, that they’ve been allowed to keep commenting on this blog.
221. Sorbet Says:
August 14th, 2009 at 1:39 pm

Come on McCarthy, even you will contend that your words did not make much sense. I was trying to make a point about the NAs being influential in many circles and you responded with some irrelevant point about their “courage”. I guess you have redefined intellectual capacity. And for someone who was in grade school a long time back your own intellectual capability doesn’t seem to have evolved.
222. Sorbet Says:
August 14th, 2009 at 1:41 pm

I’m sure PZ and Coyne would have banned all of you guys by now

Translation: I am still upset that PZ banned me from his blog (in spite of no evidence to that effect). I would feel much less lonely if I fantasize about all of you being banned there too.
223. Anthony McCarthy Says:
August 14th, 2009 at 1:52 pm

— I was trying to make a point about the NAs being influential in many circles and you responded with some irrelevant point about their “courage”. Sorbet

Anyone who wants to check this out can see at 182 that Sorbet was the one who started in about “courage”. New atheists are always running away from what they said, when someone can answer it.

—- PZ banned

Sorbet, I was just making you guys jump through hoops about the mysterious comments that somehow seem to have reappeared, when I mentioned them. I said all along that I never whined about it because it’s PZ’s blog and he could ban me any old time he wanted to. I was mocking another neo-ath who was whining that a comment of his didn’t make it through moderation or got deleted here. And the whole time you were getting all worked up over me charging PZ with what you believed was a horrible crime of suppressing free comment, it’s something he has been doing proudly for ages now. I was reveling in your display of the new atheist double standard and hypocrisy.

If this was my blog I’d have banned a whole bunch of you weeks ago.
224. gillt Says:
August 14th, 2009 at 2:02 pm

I love it how every little point McCarthy tries to make, no matter its triviality, is immediately turned into a sweeping indictment of all NAs.

This is why mockery or silence are the only affective antidotes against him.
225. Sorbet Says:
August 14th, 2009 at 2:04 pm

McCarthy it’s you who is running away from a word that you used first, and you show no understanding of the world. It’s easy for you to sit on your high chair in liberal New England and declare that atheists don’t need any courage to declare their atheism.

Go tell that to an atheist in Oklahoma or Arkansas. Or go tell that to a gay atheist (like my friend) who grew up in a religious household and faced hell in coming out of both closets. Maybe some slits of wisdom will penetrate your eyes if you care to get rid of that inch thick blindfold you are wearing.
226. gillt Says:
August 14th, 2009 at 2:04 pm

oops. effective.
227. Sorbet Says:
August 14th, 2009 at 2:06 pm

If this was my blog I’d have banned a whole bunch of you weeks ago

In other news, bears have indicated a willingness to defecate in wooded areas.
228. Sorbet Says:
August 14th, 2009 at 2:23 pm

I never whined about it

Maybe that’s why you constantly commented on it. And any thinking person who looks at PZ’s comment section will immediately realize that he extremely liberal in allowing comments compared to many others.
229. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 14th, 2009 at 3:36 pm

Sorby, Why would I whine about someone doing something I’ve said PZ had a right to do?

Commenting on a blog isn’t something we have a right to do, it’s something we do with the provisional permission of the owners of the blog. They’re the ones with the rights in the situation, to permit it or to not permit it. You press “submit” and take your chances. That’s really all there is to it.

Clearly that’s a line of reasoning that over-taxes the new atheist brain which is only capable of rearranging prejudices and unable to process new ideas. It’s clearly too complicated for you.

— Or go tell that to a gay atheist (like my friend) who grew up in a religious household and faced hell in coming out of both closets.

Ah, now you’re going to lecture me about what it’s like being gay. Unless you’re gay, yourself, I suspect your knowledge is only half-vast at most. As to your friend, well, that’s one experience. I’ve known many, many people who have been oppressed by entirely secular parents and psych professionals. That’s not a form of oppression that is exclusive to religious bigots.

As for my being from New England, you going to tell New England Bob he doesn’t have a clue as well?

— I love it how every little point McCarthy tries to make, no matter its triviality, is immediately turned into a sweeping indictment of all NAs. gillt

I love it how gillt never comes up with anything substantial and the other new atheists think he’s a genius based on his pose of superiority. Such callow boys are so easily impressed, reminds me of the College Republicans we used to laugh at.
230. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 14th, 2009 at 3:59 pm

—- Go tell that to an atheist in Oklahoma or Arkansas. Or go tell that to a gay atheist (like my friend) who grew up in a religious household and faced hell in coming out of both closets. Maybe some slits of wisdom will penetrate your eyes if you care to get rid of that inch thick blindfold you are wearing. Sorbet

You might not know but one of the prominent voices promoting the hokum that gay people can “change” their orientation is Robert Spitzer, who is an atheist. It’s not a form of bigotry that is merely the result of religion, a lot of the stronger advocates of gay rights are religious, many clergy.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_spit.htm

Just in case my comment doesn’t get out of moderation in time.

Comments in Moderation

2009-08-08T06:34:00.000-07:00

# 28. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 8th, 2009 at 3:54 am

—- Are you talking about Jerry Coyne? Sven di Milo

Clearly I’m talking about Sam Harris when I’m talking about people who have made atheism their profession. I’d have said people who have made atheism their fundamentalist cult if I was talking about Jerry Coyne.

—- This blog has just become a parody of what a science blog should be. ShowsOn

And what SHOULD a science blog be? Another tiresome new atheist frat house? Jerry Coyne’s more genteel version of one?

The blog belongs to its owners, they get to decide what it SHOULD be.

— Simply posting parts of reviews that agree with your latest book isn’t scientific. ShowsOn

If anything, the owners of this blog have been unusually open about the negative reviews of their work, I would guess that they have been more open to discussing it than most of their opponents have been. Ophelia Benson has been allowed to gas on at vast, repetitious and tiresome length here as have trolls who are regulars at the blogs of people they’ve criticized.
They’ve certainly been more tolerant than Jerry or PZ of even the most ill informed critics on this blog.

— It is what I have come to expect from parts of the Humanities. ShowsOn

I expect you don’t mean Ophelia Benson, but that’s based on what I’d expect from the rest of your comment. Lots of the people working in the humanities could more than match your average science blogger for fairness and integrity, broadmindedness and openness to criticism. Lots of them are more consistently observant of those than many in the sciences and any of the new atheist ScienceBloggers I’m aware of.
# 29. Anthony McCarthy Says:
August 8th, 2009 at 3:58 am

Reading up the thread again, look at how they’ve tolerated other people presuming to define who is and isn’t a troll on their blog. It’s kind of funny how their opponents seem to figure it’s their right to label CM and SK’s supporters as trolls on their blog.
# 30. Matti K. Says:
August 8th, 2009 at 5:19 am

What is there so difficult to understand? Presently, Mr. Mooney and Ms. Kirschenbaum use this blog mainly to market their book. Therefore one can not expect them to debate the issues in the book for free.

Once the dust settles and nobody buys the book anymore, Mr. Mooney and Ms. Kirschenbaum will probably start to debate the issues again. Also, after the marketing pressures have gone, there will be room to confess the “maturation” of ideas, as has happened before:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2009/06/03/do-i-contradict-myself-very-well-then-i-contradict-myself/

I don’t see it as impossible that the present accomodationist stand of M&K will turn once again towards confronting the irrationalities of religion.
# 31. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 8th, 2009 at 9:32 am

— Presently, Mr. Mooney and Ms. Kirschenbaum use this blog mainly to market their book. Matti K

That would be as opposed to Jerry Coyne who gave his blog the same name as his book, the only reason I happened to come across his blog to start with.

— I don’t see it as impossible that the present accomodationist stand of M&K will turn once again towards confronting the irrationalities of religion. Matti K.

That would be as opposed to the irrationality of the new atheism which makes all kinds of claims about the mental instability of religious people, despite the high functioning of many of them and about the impossibility of the coexistence of science and religion in society and in individual scientists and others who accept science with little trouble. That is despite massive empirical evidence that the prejudice of the new atheists is factually incorrect.

And that’s not getting to the arrogance of the new atheists who claim the mantle of reason as they demonstrate they’re quite selective in their practice of it, when not entirely immune to its exigencies.

While Waiting in Moderation

2009-08-04T06:01:00.000-07:00

# 44. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 4th, 2009 at 9:00 am

Observer, the vicarious and undifferentiated blaming of religious believers, including liberal religious people for ‘creating an atmosphere in which fundamentalism can thrive’ is one of the distinguishing aspects of new atheism. I don’t think I’d ever have commented on the phenomenon once if they didn’t practice that double standard. Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Myers, etc. have all asserted essentially that position. Are you denying that idea isn’t prevalent as statement and practice among the new atheists?

Atheists who reject that standard aren’t atheists I’d consider “new atheists”.

And as I tell you guys all the time, I submit all bigots to the standard they reserve for their opponents because to not do that allows them to rig the rules in their favor.

Skeptic, you’re rather credulous about the evidentiary value of surveys, I’m considerably more skeptical of them. I’m absolutely certain that the new atheists who maintain the same superstition as some of the most benighted religious fundamentalists that religion and science are incompatible have some influence, they’ve been thanked by some of them for making their job easier. However, I’ve pointed out from the beginning that there are religious fundamentalists who either have training or careers in science even as they are religious fundamentalists, so you can be a religious fundamentalist and a scientist at the same time. The point being that the situation in real life isn’t a simple either/or proposition, it’s a lot more complex and nuanced, I’d suspect sufficiently so much so that the kind of survey you propose would be totally useless.

As to the “hundreds of individual charges” in the books, there are billions of religious believers in the world, hundreds of millions in the United States alone. Even “hundreds of millions of individual charges” wouldn’t make a single person who wasn’t “guilty” as charged responsible for them, especially if they specifically and vigorously rejected them.
If the Dawkins-Harris standard of justice was applied to science, they’d be culpable for some pretty awful stuff, crimes rivaling the worst of those committed by religious figures. By that standard, Dawkins would have to answer for eugenics and “race science”. Would you like that standard applied to him?

Another Comment in Moderation

2009-08-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

The rift exists becuase there really is a conflict between science and religion generally, and Christianity and evolution specifically. This simple fact is not contradicted by the existence of religious scientists or by the existence of forms of Christianity that have made their peace with evoluition. Saying there is a conflict between A and B does not mean that A and B are mutually exclusive. Jason Rosenhouse

The existence of religious scientists, many with more substantial careers than Myers, for example, are there. Their existence is a fact, their work is there to be seen. They are as there as the entire fossil record or the record of comparative genetics, it is a fact of history and of the real world. The historical fact that many of the most important scientists have been religious is a fact more objective than any of the speculations about undocumented behavior that Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett continually make to absolutely no objection by Rosenhouse or the other new atheists. Those people who produce both science and who believe in religion are the only ones qualified to tell us if they experience a "conflict between science and religion", Rosenhouse is incompetent to override whatever they have to say on that issue. Their existence in reality, in the objectively existing world is a refutation of the assertion more credible than anything he or Dawkins or PZ Myers theorize about it.

Biblical fundamentalism is in conflict with the science of evolution, many Christians would assert they are also in conflict with what's known about the history of "The Bible", and there are other scholars of those books who would say so too and who aren’t Christians. Those are real conflicts, but those aren’t the same thing as a blanket incompatibility of science and religion. Rosenhouse would have to explain how even some Biblical fundamentalists, even as they deny the reality of evolution, maintain successful careers in science. Even the assertion that fundamentalism is in “conflict” with “science” is objectively false. Richard Lewontin talks about a debate he and Carl Sagan had with an evolution denier who had a PhD in Zoology from the University of Texas in 1964. He asked what people should make of someone with that degree, clearly qualified as a “scientist” even in biology, who also denied the reality of evolution.

— Everything we know about human anatomy suggests that personality and whatnot are the products of physical phenomena in the brain; they die with the body. Jason Rosenhouse

As “human anatomy” is based in the physical body, of course anything you can ascertain by the study of it will end with death. But there isn’t any way to ascertain, scientifically, that the mind is a manifestation of chemistry. If there is a mind that exists independently of the body, then anatomy would be incapable of finding it or, perhaps, not be able to see it beneath what it could see. Rosenhouse is depending on the current fashion for the body only hypothesis instead of on actual fact, because that is only a philosophical position that isn’t universally held.

Here are two things I’ve read recently that are relevant to his assertion.

Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasize the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of "7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of "65." What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as son as we consider the fundamental property of thought, that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces "7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces "7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognizing a domain of the other type of law, laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed. A. S. Eddington Science and the Unseen World

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time.

It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. William James Varieties of Religious Experience Lecture 1

Delayed Comments

2009-07-31T07:45:00.000-07:00

23. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
July 31st, 2009 at 10:28 am

Peter Beattie, then it’s an ideological blog and not a science blog, which is pretty much what people have been saying.

Mistaking an ideology for science isn’t limited to the NA’s, it’s a common enough intellectual fallacy. Like most of those who make that mistake, the NA’s hold themselves above taking into consideration the topics and observations outside of “science” that would help them avoid that mistake.

If Collins is guilty of some kind of “sin” it’s in stating the truth that religion can accommodate science, I’ve never seen a supported assertion that he has injected religion into science. A career like his wouldn’t stand even one verified instance of that. Coyne and PZ are no less guilty of trying to inject their ideological position into science, even more so, I’d say.

25. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
July 31st, 2009 at 10:43 am

— Marc, there is already a religious test for any scientist appointed to public office - there is no way on earth that any open atheist would even be considered for the position. Atheists don’t want to impose a religious test - we want the one that’s already imposed to stop. Lee Harrison

The prohibition on a religious test to hold public office is binding on local, state and federal government, the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. It isn’t binding on THE PEOPLE, the voters. They can take any consideration they choose to take in how they cast their vote. There is absolutely no legal restriction that prevents them from doing that, there is none that could ever be made to work.

I really resent the lie that atheists are “where gay people were fifty years ago”. Fifty years ago atheists became a protected class under civil rights legislation and pre-existing provisions of the constitution. They have legal recourse if they are discriminated against in all covered areas specifically under the prohibitions about discrimination based on religious belief. Gay people, such as me, aren’t covered in more than local and state law against discrimination and in not a single state do we have equal rights to straight people.

2009-07-30T06:03:00.000-07:00

During this forced break from writing, I’m re-reading William James, Varieties of Religious Experience and finding it extremely relevant to the unending strife with the new atheists. I’ve decided to post a series of quotes from it as I read through August. You can find the full text at Project Gutenberg.

According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul....

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time.

It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.

William James, Varieties of Religious Experience Lecture I. My bolding.

Just as with Eddington, a lot of what James said is very relevant to the arguments on both sides of the phony religion war. If you haven't read them recently, you will find a lot to think about.

Delayed Comments

2009-07-24T03:36:00.000-07:00

# 171. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:27 pm

—- Hiding behind history doesn’t change the probability of something approaching zero because every second that goes by and a virgin doesn’t give birth gillt, of course

Well, that’s just fine and ducky, but that’s not what people who believe in The Virgin Birth of Jesus happen to believe. They believe it happened exactly once in the entire history of the human species. They believe it is a unique event, they believe it happened through other than natural means.

Of course, you don’t want to deal with what those people actually believe, you want to modify it into something you can discount and mock pretending to do so on the basis of science and, or mathematics. Only none of you can actually say how science or mathematics can address what is believed, so the people who believe it are correct when they point out that your “refutation” has nothing to do with what they believe.

If you think your mockery is going to be more effective than Voltaire-Russell, you’ve got quite the ego on you.

“Find a verbatim quote by Dawkins stating that science solves the virgin birth problem.” J.C. Samuelson

I never said that’s what he said. I said that he proposed applying science to something which clearly can’t be studied by science due to there being no physical evidence, etc (see above) available.

You said at 155 ” You’ve complained rather bitterly toward non-accommodationists who do not give allowances for religion at the table of empirical truth, yet now seem to be substantially agreeing with them. ”

Produce quotes from what I’ve said here or elsewhere that constitutes “bitter” complaints that “non-accommodationists” “do not give allowances for religion at the table of empirical truth”.

I assume you can back up your assertion, since I’ve never said anything like that. It should be easy enough to find them, if they’re there. I’ve only been posting comments here since the beginning of June.

—- to him, science is only science when it explains something. Science is not science when it looks for or asks for evidence.

How ridiculous. Science frequently has null results and those are important. I thought everyone knew that. However, you have to actually do more than make assertions based on your opinions for it to count as science. You, gillt, Sorbet, don’t seem to understand that. Which isn’t surprising to me anymore.

So, how do you propose to debunk The Virgin Birth with science, without methodolgy or evidence or any means of coming up with a probability of it happening?

More generally, I can see other than continuing to attribute things to me I’ve never said, you seem to be constructing more elaborate fallacies to attribute to me.

In your response at my blog, you make a large error. ” But notice also that your challenge requires a putative belief in the virgin birth as a miraculous event in history to presuppose that a miracle occurred; for there can be no scientific explanation of something that never happened. ”

First, I don’t require anything except that you deal with the three criteria contained in the belief. In order to confirm or refute a proposition, you have to deal with the proposition. I didn’t set those criteria and if you or anyone doesn’t like them, that’s just tough.

—– From my perspective, evidence-seeking itself is also a scientific activity. And, of course, I interpret the statement that miracles are “scientific questions” in that light. To me, this interpretation is at least as reasonable and in keeping with the principles of science as yours. JCS

But the evidence has to actually be evidence and not just an assertion of opinion, which is what you are doing. It’s a contest between your opinion that the miracle is impossible and the belief of other people that it is possible. You don’t have any more evidence for your position than they do. If you think they couldn’t fail to be impressed with your opinion, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.

—- To be sure (and as I conceded earlier), the ultimate goal of science is to render the universe comprehensible by finding explanations. JCS

I don’t think that is a realistic goal of science because we can never know how complete our knowledge of the universe will be. I doubt we’ve got all that long to “render the universe comprehensible” because we’re hurtling towards making our planet uninhabitable. And even if we had a long time yet, as a species, that goal is absurdly grandiose. I think science, as it actually exists, had better just try to come up with reliable but incomplete knowledge about the subjects it can study with the tools it actually has at hand and not in some epistemological wonderland of unavailable, proposed possibilities.

I’ll go through the rest of it a few times, but it looks like tire spinning to me. As you have not come up with a methodology, I’m going to have to continue to maintain that The Virgin Birth of Jesus can’t be addressed by science and that Dawkins is full of flannel.
# 172. gillt Says:
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:36 pm

As I’ve said since the get go, McCarthy has a Mickey Mouse understanding of science.

I don’t agree with everything Huxley says, but this quote is pertinent to a scientific way of knowing: “In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.”
# 173. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:42 pm

At any rate, it’s not about the First Amendment

I’d never held that blog owners editing their blogs is about The First Amendment. Here’s a little of what I posted last October 18th, which I’d proposed as “Don’t talk like a sexist prat day”.

Whenever you propose something like this you can count on two things happening. The first is the invocation of “freedom of speech” or “The First Amendment”. I’m happy to report to you that we are not bound in our personal lives to uphold the “speech rights” of bigots. As I never tire of pointing out, we are not the government. You’d think the left has been out of power long enough to not suffer from that mistaken idea.

http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html#5662085637375139729

People who choose to post comments on blogs should realize they don’t do so on the basis of rights but on the contingent permission of the owners, who has the right to remove them if they choose to.

That PZ doesn’t have the class to just delete things without ridiculing the people he deletes, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a right to do it. It just means that people should know he’ll use them that way if they risk disagreeing with him or his fan club.
# 174. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:49 pm

gillt, I’m not very concerned with your opinion of me.

“In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.”

Which Huxley would that be, Thomas, Julian or Aldous? I think it’s massively ironic for you to resort to it since you insist on imposing ideological blinders on reason and you can’t stand it when people point out that your chosen ideological position isn’t founded in absolute evidence.
# 175. PhysicistDave Says:
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:51 pm

J. C. Samuelson wrote:
>McCarthy finds this unpersuasive, because to him, science is only science when it explains something. Science is not science when it looks for or asks for evidence.

It’s worse than that, J.C. Everyone, including McCarthy, accepts that science proves certain things are impossible because extraordinarily well-established scientific laws say they are impossible.

Even OJ’s lawyers did not claim that he was innocent because the DNA match was not real but simply a “miracle.” They accepted the reality of DNA matching but claimed mundane human error or foul play, not a suspension of scientific law.

What we are dealing with in the case of Christians in the US is a social norm that they managed to impose on most people for a very long time that said that if the True Believers pronounced the magic words “miracle,” “faith,” and “religion,” then the rest of us would be committing a social faux pas if we continued to mention that their religion was proven false beyond a reasonable doubt by science.

Of course, the True Believers are not too consistent about this: they are willing to ridicule the unscientific aspects of others’ faiths (the Voodoo belief in zombies, New Agers belief in “pyramid power,” etc.) along with everyone else.

There is no issue of logic or philosophy here: it is just a matter of the social pressure that Christians were able to exert successfully for such a long time to prevent non-Christians from mentioning certain quite obvious truths about Christianity.

The claims that “New Atheists” are “militant,” “shrill,” etc. boils down to noting that we New Atheists are no longer willing to abide by that code of silence that Christians managed to erect as a rule for polite conduct to protect Christian nonsense from the ridicule it so richly deserves.

(I wrote a longer post to this effect responding to Anthony – too long, it seems, as it is still “awaiting moderation.”)

Dave
# 176. Anthony McCarthy Says:
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:57 pm

—- If you dislike it so much, edit the article yourself. As you said, Wikipedia needs people of higher objectivity. Sorbet at 161

Well, that’s the problem. When I read a reference book I don’t want it to represent what the authors and editors like or dislike, I want something closer to objective reality. I don’t trust Wikipedia to give that because too many of its articles are slanted by people with an agenda. I’ve seen hardly a single topic of interest to “skepics” or new atheists which don’t betray a political agenda.

Though there are some articles that I know are reliable, I only know that about subjects I’m fairly familiar with already.
# 177. Anthony McCarthy Says:
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:01 pm

PhysicistDave, I’ve said here and at my own blog numerous times I don’t believe in The Virgin Birth as an historical event, I think it was a literary allegory. I don’t happen to be a Christian either. Both JCS and gillt know that, though both like to pretend they don’t know it.

I was only arguing with the absurd idea that you can apply science or math to that and the Resurrection of Jesus as those are actually stated in the respective gospels and believed in by Christians. As defined and believed, neither can be subjected to science or probability.
# 178. PhysicistDave Says:
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:05 pm

Anthony,

For what it’s worth, when I read his books, I was horrified by some of Sam Harris’s comments about Moslems that you have alluded to.

I think Sam is basically a good guy, but I also think he used the understandable anxiety about Islam in the wake of 9/11 to engage in some horribly unjustified Moslem-bashing to prop up his own position.

He was wrong to do that.

Sam and I both count as “New Atheists”: i.e., we are both unwilling to abide by the old rule that religion is off-limits to public criticism from scientists when its beliefs have been proven false by science.

But that doesn’t mean I approve of everything Sam says or thinks (or vice versa, of course). And when I think he or other New Atheists are wrong, I am happy to publicly criticize them, just as I am happy to publicly criticize Christianity.

All the best,

Dave
# 179. PhysicistDave Says:
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:22 pm

Anthony wrote to me:
> I’ve said here and at my own blog numerous times I don’t believe in The Virgin Birth as an historical event, I think it was a literary allegory. I don’t happen to be a Christian either.

I think if you read through carefully everything I have posted to you, I did not actually say you were a Christian (at least that is my recollection).

However, it is certainly true that the point you tried to make is often made by Christians, and I did allude to that well-known fact.

I have tried to address the point you were trying to make rather than your particular religious affiliation or lack thereof.

And, I think I have shown that your point just does not hold up.

You also wrote:
> I was only arguing with the absurd idea that you can apply science or math to that and the Resurrection of Jesus as those are actually stated in the respective gospels and believed in by Christians.

It is your statement that is absurd.

You *can* apply science to the Virgin Birth and Resurrection, taken as actual physical events, for precisely the same reasons you can apply science to (supposed) physical phenomena such as astrology, pyramid power, OJ’s DNA match, carbon 14 data, Voodoo zombies, Neanderthal DNA, etc.

The traditional Christian claim is that the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection actually *physically* happened.

The only reason not to judge those supposed physical events by the same criteria we apply to other physical events is that their “miraculous,” faith-based,” “religious” nature somehow puts them in a different category.

But “miraculous,” faith-based,” “religious” are just words: they cannot alter physical reality.

Science says that human males cannot be born by parthenogenesis (the Y chromosome problem). Everyone accepts that in normal life.

You have given no reason to exempt Christian beliefs from that normal pattern of judging – except, as everyone knows, we have a social norm that says that Christians can cry “miraculous,” faith-based,” “religious,” and then science must back off.

That is simply a social game, verbal voodoo.

If you want anyone to take seriously your claim that the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection are exempt form the normal judgments of science, please give some actual *reason* for that special exemption.

Dave
# 180. PhysicistDave Says:
July 24th, 2009 at 1:24 am

Anthony,

Perhaps I can make my question to you a bit clearer and more specific.

As you know, there were various claims floating around the ancient world that various guys (Alexander the Great is one well-known example) were the product of a divinely-orchestrated conception without benefit of a human male.

Not everyone believed the claim about Alexander, of course, but then we also know that some early Christians (Ebionites) did not believe the Virgin Birth claim about Jesus either. Indeed, only two of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament even mention the Virgin Birth, and the earliest books, the authentic letters of Paul, do not mention it at all.

Few people suspend judgment about Alexander: science shows that Olympias could not have conceived a male via parthenogenesis (Y chromosome problem). Ergo, she did not: science proves that Alexander was conceived the old-fashioned way.

Do you agree that science shows that the claim that Alexander had no biological, human father is false?

If you do, why do you treat the Christian Virgin Birth as any different from the supposed divine conception of Alexander?

Please note: I am *not* claiming that the Virgin Birth story about Christ was derived form the Alexander myth. I am merely asking whether you think science applies to one case but not the other.

Similarly, if a contemporary human woman claimed that she was pregnant with a male child but that this was due to divine intervention without any contribution from a human male, would you agree that science shows that this could not actually happen and that that woman would be mistaken or lying?

If you do agree, why not apply the same criterion to the supposed Virgin Birth of Jesus?

I am truly bemused by your position on this. As far as I can tell, the only possible explanation for your position is simply that our social norms say that we are being nasty (“militant,” “shrill” etc.) if we point out that science proves that the Virgin Birth did not happen.

I think my four questions above are straightforward and not loaded. If you can answer them, and explain your reasons for your answers if your answers differ from the obvious answers that defer to modern science, perhaps the rest of us can understand your point.

Dave
# 181. Anthony McCarthy Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
July 24th, 2009 at 6:31 am

— But “miraculous,” faith-based,” “religious” are just words: they cannot alter physical reality.

Which isn’t a scientific belief, it’s a philosophical belief. Just as the belief that miracles can be performed through supernatural intervention is a religious belief and not a scientific one.

The actual belief in The Virgin Birth doesn’t claim it to have happened through parthenogenesis, it specifically claims it didn’t. To bring that into the attempt to “debunk” the belief is illogical, and by that I mean it violates the most basic rules of logic and rhetoric. You can debunk all kinds of “virgin birth” scenarios but anyone who is inclined to believe in the Christian belief in the Virgin Birth of Jesus would be entirely within the rules of both logic and rhetorical discourse to point out that you’ve not yet damaged WHAT THEY BELIEVE.

You do actually have to have some material evidence in order to arrive at a scientific assertion about what happens in the physical universe. As I understand things, string theory is discounted as reality by quite a few physicists on that ground. I’m finding what Lawrence Krauss has been saying about black holes to be rather fascinating too. And not just for what it means for physics. If the evidence turns out to be that he is right or if it remains inconclusive, I think unless scientists are very careful in explaining how they might have gotten that wrong it could be far more damaging to the reputation of science than anything religion can do to it. I think the popular misunderstanding of science as the key to knowing everything could end up damaging it quite badly.

And there’s absolutely no need to be condescending. I’m not impressed by that. I think you, as gillt and JCS and a number of others are making a basic mistake between your opinion and logical coherence.

Eddington's Priority

2009-07-08T05:43:00.000-07:00

I have posted below, Arthur Stanley Eddington’s 1929 lecture Science and the Unseen World, typos and all. I’m solely responsible for any of those. I would welcome notice of any errata which you might want to point out on the comment thread below. I’d never read Eddington on any subject before someone pointed out to me that he had said a lot of the things I do about the limits of science and religion eighty years before. The experience of reading the essay last week was eery, sometimes wording and illustrations he used was very close to what I’ve said on blogs, only he said it much more elegantly and with fuller justification. In light of his priority, I feel honor bound to post his essay.

I’m sure that new atheists and others won’t be impressed with Eddington’s impeccable credentials as a great scientist and clear thinker. I’m sure that even pointing out that Einstein said that his early exposition of relativity was the best in any language would not be enough for them to find fault with much of what he says about science, never mind religion. They will carp at his superannuated and, perhaps, overly popularized coverage of science in this essay. There is no one who can satisfy a determined intention of applying a standard to their ideological opponents, disqualifying their credibility for practices which they have no problem with in those who agree with them. Being foresighted and a deep thinker experienced with nay-sayers Eddington might have anticipated that with this passage from section XI:

The finding of one generation will not serve for the next. It tarnishes rapidly except it be preserved with an ever-renewed spirit of seeking. It is the same too in science. How easy in a popular lecture to tell of the findings, the new discoveries which will be amended, contradicted, superseded in the next fifty years !

His foresight might have extended to this condensation of an imagined newspaper readers conflict between advocates of various zealots of both “science” and “experience”. It’s a good parody of some blog threads, minus the profane invective.

Would it be altogether unfair to imagine something liked eh following series of letters in our correspondence columns? It arises, let us say, from a passage in an obituary notice which mentions that the deceased had loved to watch the sunsets from his peaceful country home. A.
writes deploring that in this progressive age few of the younger generation ever notice a sunset; perhaps this is due to the pernicious influence of the teaching of Copernicus who maintains that the sun is really stationary. This rouses B. to reply that nowadays every reasonable person accepts Copernicus's doctrine. C. is positive that he has many times seen the sun set, and Copernicus must be wrong. D. calls for a restatement of belief, so that we may know just how much modern science has left of the sunset, and appreciated the remnant without disloyalty to truth. E. (perhaps significantly my own initial) in a misguided effort for peace points out that on the most modern scientific theory there is no absolute distinction between the heavens revolving around the earth and the earth revolving under the heavens; both parties are (relatively) right. F. regards this as a most dangerous sophistry, which insinuates that there is no essential difference between truth and untruth. G. thinks that we ought now to admit frankly that the revolution of the heavens is a myth; nevertheless such myths have still a practical teaching for us in the present day. H. produces an obscure passage in the Almagest, which he interprets as showing that the philosophy of the ancients was not really opposed to the Copernican view. And so it goes on. And the simple reader feels himself in an age of disquiet, insecurity and dissension, all because it is forgotten that what the deceased man looked out for each evening was an experience and not a creed.

Science And The Unseen World

2009-07-08T05:41:00.000-07:00

By Arthur Stanley Eddington, F.R.S.
Plumian Professor of Astronomy, University of Cambridge

Sarthmore Lecture, 1929

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1929

PREFACE

The Swarthmore Lectureship was established by the Woodbooke Extension Committee, at a meeting held December 7th, 1907; the minute of the Committee providing for “an annual lecture on some subject relating to the message and work of the Society of Friends.” The name “Swarthmore” was chosen in memory of the home of Margaret Fox, which was always open to the earnest seeker after Truth, and from which loving words of sympathy and substantial material help were sent to fellow-workers.

The Lectureship has a two-fold purpose; first, to interpret further to the members of the Society of Friends Their Message and Mission; and, secondly, to bring before the public the spirit, the aims and the fundamental principles of the Friends.

The lectures have been delivered on the evening preceding the assembly of the Friends’ Yearly Meeting in each year. The present Lecture was delivered at Friends House, London, on the evening preceding the yearly meeting, 1929.

SYNOPSIS

I. Outline of evolution leading to the advent of Man in the physical world.
II. The questioning voice, “What doest thou here?”
III. Changing views of the scope of physical theory and the ideal of physical explanation.
IV. Both a scientific and a mystical outlook are involved in the “problem of experience”
V. The irrelevancy of “natural law” to some aspects of mind and consciousness
VI. The importance of “significances” and the consequences of ruling them outside the scope of inquiry.
VII . Assurance of the revelation of God rather than of the existence of God is demanded.

SCIENCE AND THE UNSEEN WORLD

I.

Looking back through the long past we picture the beginning of the world— a primeval chaos which time has fashioned into the universe that we know. Its vastness appals the mind; space boundless though not infinite, according to the strange doctrine of science. The world was without form and almost void. But at the earliest stage we can contemplate the void as sparely broken by tiny electric particles, the germs of the things that are to be; positive and negative they wander aimlessly in solitude, rarely coming near enough to seek or shun one another. They range everywhere so that all space is filled, and yet so empty that in comparison the most highly exhausted vacuum on earth is a jostling throng. In the beginning was vastness, solitude and the deepest night. Darkness was upon the face of the deep, for as yet there was no light.

The years rolled by, million after million. Slight aggregations occurring casually in one place and another drew to themselves more and more particles. They warred for sovereignty, won and lost their spoil, until the matter was collected round centres of condensation leaving vast empty spaces from which it had ebbed away. Thus gravitation slowly parted the primeval chaos. These first divisions were not the stars but what we should call “island universes” each ultimately to be a system of some thousands of millions of stars. From our own island universe we can discern the other islands as spiral nebulae lying one beyond another as far as the telescope can fathom

As it had divided the original chaos, so gravitation subdivided the island universes. First the star clusters, then the stars themselves were separated. And with the stars came light, born of the fiercer turmoil which ensued when the electrical particles were drawn from their solitude into dense throngs. A star is not just a lump of matter casually thrown together in the general confusion; it is of nicely graded size. There is relatively not much more diversity in the masses of new-born stars than in the masses of new-born babies. Aggregations rather greater than our Sun have a strong tendency to subdivide, but when the masse is reduced a little the danger quickly passes and the impulse to subdivision is satisfied. Here it would seem the work of creation might cease. Having carved chaos into stars, the first evolutionary impulse has reached its goal. For many billions of years the stars may continue to shed their light and heat through the world, feeding on their own matter which disappears bit by bit into aetherial waves.

Not infrequently a star, spinning too fast or strained by the radiant heat imprisoned within it, may divide into two nearly equal stars, which remain yoked together as a double star; apart from this no regular plans of further development is known. For what might be called the second day of creation we turn from the general rule to the exceptions. Amid so many myriads there will be a few which by some rare accident have a fate unlike the rest. In the vast expanse of the heavens the traffic is so thin that a star may reasonably count on traveling for the whole of its long life without serious risk of collision. The risk is negligible for any individual star; but ten thousand million stars in our own system and more in the systems beyond afford a wide playground for chance. If the risk is one in a hundred millions some unlucky victims are doomed to play the role of “one.” This rare accident must have happened to our Sun– an accident to the Sun, but to us the cause is our being here/ A star journeying through space casually overtook the Sun, not indeed colliding with it, but approaching so close thaas to raise a great tidal wave. By this disturbance jets of matter spurted out of the Sun, being carried round by their angular momentum they did not fall back again but condensed into small globe — the planets.

By this and similar events there appeared here and there in the universe something outside Nature’s regular plan, namely a lump of matter small enough and dense enough to be cool. A temperature of ten million degrees or more prevails through the greater part of the interior of a star; it cannot be otherwise so long as matter remains heaped in immense masses. Thus the design of the first stage of evolution seems to have been that matter should ordinarily be endowed with intense heat. Coll matter appears as an afterthought. It is unlikely that the Sun is the only one of the starry host to possess a system of planets, but it is believed that such development is very rare. In these exceptional formations, Nature has tried the experiment of finding what strange effects may ensue if matter is released form its usual temperature of millions of degrees dnd permitted to be cool.

Out of the electric charges dispersed in the primitive chaos ninety-two different kinds of matter— ninety-two chemical elements have been built This building is also a work of evolution, but little or nothing is known as to its history. In the matter which we handle daily we find the original bricks fitted together and cannot but infer that somewhere and some when a process of matter-building has occurred. At high temperature this diversity of matter remains as it were latent; little of consequence results from it. But in the col experimental stations of the universe the differences assert themselves. At root the diversity of the ninety-two elements reflects the diversity of the integers from one to ninety-two; because the chemical characteristics of element No. 11 (sodium) arise from the fact that it has the power at low temperatures of gathering round it eleven negative electric particles; those of No 12 ( magnesium) from its power of gathering twelve particles; and so on.

It is tempting to linger of the development out of this fundamental beginning of the wonders studied in chemistry and physics, but we must hurry on. The provisions of certain cool planetary globes was the second impulse of evolution, and it has exhausted itself in the formation of inorganic rocks and ores and other materials. We must look at a new exception or abnormality if anything further is to be achieved. We can scarcely call it an accident that among the integers there should happen to be the number 6; but I do not know how otherwise to express the fact that organic life would not have begun if Nature’s arithmetic had overlooked the number 6. The general plan of ninety-two elements, each embodying in its structural pattern one of the first ninety-two numbers, contemplates a material world of considerable but limited diversity; but the element carbon, embodying the number 6, and because of the peculiarity of the number 6, rebels against limits. The carbon atoms love to string themselves in long chains such as those which give toughness to a soap-fil. Whilst other atoms organize themselves in twos and threes or it may be in tens, carbon atoms organise themselves in hundreds and thousands. From this potentiality of carbon to form more and more elaborate structures a third impulse of evolution arises.

I cannot profess to say whether anything more than this prolific structures building power of carbon is involved in the beginning of life. The story of evolution here passes into the domain of the biological sciences for which I cannot speak, and I am not ready to take sides in the controversy between the Mechanists and the Vitalists. So far as the earth is concerned the history of development of living forms extending over nearly a thousand million years is recorded (though with many breaks) in fossil remains. Looking back over the geological record it would seem that Nature made nearly every possible mistake before she reached her greatest achievement Man — or perhaps some would say her worst mistake of all. At one time she put her trust in the armaments and gigantic size. Frozen in the rock is the evidence of her failures to provide a form fitted to endure and dominate ---- failures which we are only too ready to imitate. At last she tried a being of no great size. Almost defenceless, defective in a least one of the more important sense-organs; one gift she bestowed to save him from threatened extinction— a certain stirring, a restlessness, in the organ called the brain.

And so we come to Man

II.

It is with some such thoughts as these of the relation of Man to the visible universe that the scientifically minded among us approach the problem of his relation to the Unseen World. It is not with any dogmatic challenge that I have given this outline of evolution. Part of what I have described seems to be securely established; other parts involve a considerable element of conjecture – the best we can do is string together fragmentary knowledge. Scientific theories have blundered in the past; they blunder no doubt to-day; yet we cannot doubt that along with the error there come gleams of the truth for which the human mind is impelled to strive. So brief a summary cannot convey the true spirit and intention of this scientific probing of the past, anymore than the spirit of history is conveyed by a table of dates. We seek the truth; but if some voice told us that a few years more would see the end of our journey, that the clouds of uncertainty would be dispersed, and that we should perceive the whole truth about the physical universe, the tidings would be by no means joyful. In science as in religion the truth shines ahead as a beacon showing us the path; we do not ask to attain it; it is better far that we be permitted to seek.

I daresay that most of you are by no means reluctant to accept the scientific epic of the Creation, holding it perhaps as more to the glory of God than the traditional story. Perhaps you would prefer to tone down certain harshnesses of expression, to emphasise the forethought of the Creator in the events which I have called accidents. I would not venture to say that those who are eager to sanctify, as it were, the revelations of science by accepting them as new insight into the divine power are wrong. But this attitude is liable to grate a little on the scientific mind, forcing its free spirit of inquiry into one predetermined mode of expression; and I do not think that the harmonising of the scientific and the religious outlook on experience is assisted that way. Perhaps our feeling on this point can be explained by a comparison . A business man may believe that the hand of Providence is behind his commercial undertakings as it is behind all vicissitudes of his life; but he would be aghast at the suggestion that Providence should be entered as an asset in his balance sheet. I think it is not irreligion but a tidiness of mind, which rebels against the idea of permeating scientific research with a religious implication.

Probably most astronomers, if they were to speak frankly, would confess to some chafing when they are reminded of the psalm “ The heavens declare the glory of God.” It is so often rubbed into us with implications far beyond the simple poetic thought awakened by the splendour of the star-clad sky. There is another passage from the Old Testament that comes nearer to my own sympathies –
“ And behold the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earth-quake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. . . . And behold there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah?”

Wind, earthquake, fire –meteorology, seismology, physics – pass in review, as we have been reviewing the natural forces of evolution; the Lord was not in them. Afterwards, a stirring, an awakening in the organ of the brain, a voice which asks “What doest thou here?”

III.

We have busied ourselves with the processes by which the electric particles widely diffused in primaeval chaos have come together to build the complexity of a human being; we cannot but acknowledge that a human being involves also something incommensurable with the kind of entities we have been treating of. I do not mean to say that consciousness has not undergone evolution; presumably its rudiments exist far down the scale fo animal life. But it is a constituent or an aspect of reality which our survey of the material world leaves on one side. Hence arises insistently the problem of the dualism of spirit and matter. On the one side there is consciousness stirring with activity of thought and sensation; on the other side there is a material brain., a maelstrom of scurrying atoms and electric charges. Incommensurable as they are, there is some kind of overlap or contact between them. As the mind is traversed by a certain thought the atoms at some point of the brain range themselves so as to start a material impulse transmitting the mental command to a muscle; or again a nervous impulse arrives from the outer world, and as the atoms of a brain-cell move in response to the physical forces simultaneously a sensation of pain occurs in the mind.

Let us for a moment consider the most crudely materialistic view of this connection. It would be that the dance of atoms in the brain really constitutes the thought, that in our search for reality we should replace the thinking mind by a system of physical objects and forces, that by doing so we strip away an illusory part of our experience and reveal the essential truth which it so strangely disguises. I do not know whether this view is still held to any extent in scientific circles, but I think it may be said that it is entirely out of keeping with recent changes of thought as to the fundamental principles of physics. Its attractiveness belonged to a time when it was considered that the way to understand or explain a scientific phenomenon was to make a concrete mechanical model of it.

I cannot in a few moments make clear a change of thought which it has taken a generation to accomplish. I can only say that physical science has turned its back on all such models, regarding them now rather as a hindrance to the apprehension of the truth behind the phenomena. We have the same desire as of old to get to the bottom of things, but the ideal of what constitutes a scientific explanation has changed almost beyond recognition. And if to-day you ask a physicist what he as finally made out of the aether or the electron to be, the answer will not be a description in terms of billiard balls or fly-wheels or anything concrete; he will point instead to a number of symbols and a set of mathematical equations which they satisfy. What do the symbols stand for? The mysterious reply is given that physics is indifferent to that; it has no means of probing beneath the symbolism. To understand the phenomena of the physical world it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of that which is being symbolised. It would be irrelevant here to defend this change, to make clear the intellectual satisfaction afforded by these symbolic equations, or to explain why the demand of the layman for a concrete explanation has to be set aside. We have, however, to see how this newer outlook has modified the challenge from the material to the spiritual world.

For those who were bent on finding a model for everything, the material brain appeared in the light of a ready-made model of the mind. And being a model, it was for them the full explanation of the mind. A mechanism of concrete particles, like the billiard-ball atoms of the brain, was their ideal of an explanation. They were hoping similarly to find a mechanism of gyrostats and cog-wheels to explain the aether. The cog-wheels of the aether were hidden, but the cog-wheels of the mind seemed to be at any rate partly exposed. The mere sight of such machinery gave them a feeling of satisfaction, even if they could not tell in the least how it worked. I am not here greatly concerned with the question whether, or to what extent, the brain-cells may rightly be regarded as the cot-wheels of the mind. What I wish to point out is that we no longer have the disposition which, as soon as it cents a piece of mechanism, exclaims “Here we are getting to bedrock. This is what things should resolve themselves into This is ultimate reality.” Physics to-day is not likely to be attracted by a type of explanation of the mind which it would scornfully reject for its own aether.

Perhaps the most essential change is that we are no longer tempted to condemn the spiritual aspects of our nature as illusory because of their lack of concreteness. We have travelled far from the standpoint which identifies the real with the concrete. Even the older philosophy found it necessary to admit exceptions; for example, time must be admitted to be real, although no one could attribute to it a concrete nature. Nowadays time might be taken as typical of the kind of stuff of which we imagine the physical world to be built. Physics has no direct concern with that feeling of “becoming” in our consciousness which we regard as inherently belonging to the nature of time, and it treats time merely as a symbol; but equally matter and all else that is in the physical world have been reduced to a shadowy symbolism.

We all share the strange delusion that a lump of matter is something whose general nature is easily comprehensible whereas the nature of the human spirit is unfathomable. But consider how our supposed acquaintance with the lump of matter is attained. Some influence emanating from it plays on the extremity of a nerve, starting a series of physical and chemical changes which are propagated along the nerve to a brain-cell; there a mystery happens, and an image or sensation arises in the mind which cannot purport to resemble the stimulus which excites it. Everything known about the material world must in one way or another have been inferred from these stimuli transmitted along the nerves. It is an astonishing feat of deciphering that we should have been able to infer an orderly scheme of natural knowledge from such indirect communication. But clearly there is one kind of knowledge which cannot pass through such channels, namely knowledge of the intrinsic nature that which lies at the far end of the line of communication. The inferred knowledge is a skeleton frame, the entities which build the frame being of undisclosed nature. For that reason they are described by symbols, as the symbol x in algebra stands for an unknown quantity.

The mind as a central receiving station reads the dots and dashes of the incoming nerve-signals. By frequent repetition of their call-signals the various transmitting stations of the outside world become familiar. We begin to feel quite a homely acquaintance with 2LO or 5XX. But a broadcasting station is not like its call-signal; there is no commensurability in the nature. So to the chairs and tables around us which broadcast to us incessantly those signals which affect our sight and touch cannot in their nature be like unto the signals or to the sensations which the signals awake at the end of their journey.

Penetrating as deeply as we can by the methods of physical investigation into the nature of a human being we reach only symbolic description. Far from attempting to dogmatise as to the nature of the reality thus symbolised. Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies just that interpretation of the symbols which science is admittedly unable to give. It is just because we have a real and not merely a symbolic knowledge of our own nature that our nature seems so mysterious; we reject as inadequate that merely symbolic description which is good enough for dealing with chairs and tables and physical agencies that affect us only by remote commination.

In comparing the certainty of things spiritual and things temporal, let us not forget this– Mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience; al else is remote inference.

That environment of space and time and matter, of light and colour and concrete things, which seems so vividly real to use is probed deeply of every device of physical science and at the bottom we reach symbols. Its substance has melted into shadow. None the less it remains a real world if there is a background to the symbols — an unknown quantity which the mathematical symbol x stands for. We think we are not wholly cut off from this background. It is to this background that our personality and consciousness belong, and those spiritual aspects of our nature not to be described by any symbolism or at least not by symbolism of the numerical kind to which mathematical physics has hitherto restricted itself. Our story of evolution ended with a stirring of the brain-organ of the latest of Nature’s experiments, but that stirring of consciousness transmutes the whole story and gives meaning to its symbolism. Symbolically it is the end, but looking behind the symbolism it is the beginning.

IV.

What is the problem that is contemplated when we discuss the possible conflict of the scientific and the religious outlook? I think that so far as the Society of Friends is concerned we should define it as the problem presented by experience – the problem of the proper orientation of our minds towards the different elements of our experience. If science claims in any way to be a guide to life it is because it deals with experience, or part of experience. And if religion is not an attitude towards experience, if it is just a creed postulating an ineffable being who has no contact with ourselves, it is not the kind of religion which our Society stands for. The interaction of ourselves with our environment is what makes up experience. Part of that interaction consists in the sensations associated with impulses coming through our sense-organs; it is by following up this element of experience that we reach the scientific problem of the physical world. But surely experience is broader than this, and the problem of experiences is not limited to the interpretation of sense impressions.

Picture first consciousness as a bundle of sense=impressions and nothing more. As the sensation succeed one another, as they are compared in one consciousness and anther, from somewhere comes the query “What are we to think of it all? What is it all about?” To anser this is the purpose of science. But picture again consciousness, not this time as a bundle of sense-impressions , but as we intimately know it, responsible, aspiring, yearning, doubting, originating in itself such impulses as those which urge the scientist on his quest for truth. “What are we to think of it all? What is it all about?” This time the answer must be broader, embracing but not limited to the scientific answer.

Normally it is my task to propagate the truths of science, to urge its outstanding importance, and to tread myself the way by which it seeks an understanding of the phenomena which we experience. It is far from my thought to disparage what we gain by this quest. As truly as the mystic, the scientist is following a light/ and it is not a false or an inferior light. Moreover the answers given by science have a singular perfection, prized the more because of the long record of toil and achievement behind them. Why then do I not produce one of these scientific answers now? Simply because before giving an answer, it is usual to listen to the question that is put. It is no use having ready a flawless answer if people will not put to you the question it is intended for. So far as I can judge, the kind of question to which I have exposed myself in coming her to-night is, What is the proper orientation of a rational being towards that experience which he so mysteriously finds himself partaking of? What conception of his surroundings should guide him as he sets about the fulfilment of the life bestowed on him? Which of those strivings and feelings which make up his nature are to be nourished, and which rejected as the seed of illusion? The desire for truth so prominent in the quest for science, a reaching out of the spirit form its isolation to something beyond, a response to beauty in nature and art, an Inner Light of conviction and guidance – are these as much a part of our being as our sensitivity to sense impressions? I have no ready-made answer for these questions. Study of the scientific world cannot prescribe the orientation fo something which is excluded from the scientific world. The scientific answer is relevant so far as concerns the sense-impressions interlocked with the stirring of ths spirit, which indeed form an important part of the mental content. For the rest the human spirit must turn to the unseen world to which it itself belongs.

Some would put the question in the form “Is the unseen world revealed by the mystical outlook a reality?” Reality is one of those indeterminate words which might lead to infinite philosophical discussions and irrelevancies. There is less danger of misunderstandings if we put the question in the form “Are we, in pursuing the mystical outlook, facing the hard facts of experience?” Surely we are. I think that those who would wish to take cognisance of nothing but the measurements of the scientific world made by our sense-organs are shirking one of the most immediate facts of experience, namely that consciousness is not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense-impressions.

We may the more boldly insist that there is another outlook than the scientific one, because in practice a more transcendental outlook is almost universally admitted. I cannot do better than quote a memorable passage from the Sarthmore Lecture by L.S. Hoyland last year:

“There is an hour of the Indian night, a little before the first glimmer of dawn, when the stars are unbelievably clear and close above, shining with a radiance beyond our belief in this foggy land. The trees stand silent around one with a friendly presence. As yet there is no sound from awakening birds; but the whole world seems to be intent, alive, listening, eager. AT cush a moment the veil between the things that are seen and the things that are unseen becomes so thin as to interpose scarcely any barrier at all between the eternal beauty and truth and the soul which would comprehend them.”

Here is an experience which the “observer” as technically defined in scientific theory knows nothing of. The measuring appliances which eh reads declare that the stars are just as remote as they always have been, nor can he find any excuse in his measures for the mystic thought which has taken possession of the mind and dominated the sense-impressions. Yet who does not prize these moments that reveal to us the poetry of existence? We do not ask whether philosophy can justify such an outlook on nature. Rather our system of philosophy is itself on trial; it must stand or fall according as it is broad enough to find room for this experience as an element of life. The sense of values within us recognises that this is a test to be passed; it is as essential that our philosophy should survive this test as it should survive the experimental tests supplied by science.

In the passage I have quoted there is no direct reference to religious mysticism. It describes an orientation towards nature accepted by religious and irreligious alike as proper to the human spirit – though not to the ideal “observer” whose judgments form the cannon of scientific experience. The scientist who form time to time falls into such a mood does not feel guilty twinges as though he had lapsed in his devotion to truth; he would on the contrary feel dep concern if he found himself losing the power of entering into this kind of feeling. In short our environment may and should mean something towards us which is not to be measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician. We cannot argue that because natural mysticism is universally admitted in some degree therefore religious mysticism must necessarily be admitted; but objections to religious mysticism lose their force if they can equally be turned against natural mysticism. If we claim that the experience which comes to us in our silent meetings is one of the precious elements that make up the fulness of life, I do not see how science can gainsay us. Let it pause before rushing in to apply a supposed scientific test; for such a test would go much too far, stripping way from our lives not only our religion but all our feelings which do not elong to the function of the measuring-machine.

In justifying the place of religious experience in human life, we have not to consider it from the point of view of propagating a creed. We do not send missionaries to the blind to persuade them that it will be to their benefit to believe that a world of light and colour exists for other men gifted with eyes. We should not argue with the blind man who maintained that sight was an illusion to which some abnormal people were subject. Therefore in speaking of religious experience I do not attempt to prove the existence of religious experience, any more than in lecturing on optics I should attempt to prove the existence of sight. What I may attempt is to dispel the feeling that in using the eye of the body or the eye of the soul, and incorporating what is thereby revealed in our conception of reality, we are doing something irrational and disobeying the leading of truth which as scientists we are pledged to serve.

V.

I have already said that science is no longer disposed to identify reality with concreteness. Materialism in its literal sense is long since dead. But its place has been taken by other philosophies which represent a virtually equivalent outlook. The tendency today is not to reduce everything to manifestations of matter – since matter now has only a minor place in the physical world – but to reduce it to manifestations of the operation of natural law. By “natural laws” is here meant laws of the type prevailing in geometry, mechanics, and physics which are found to have this common characteristic – that they are ultimately reducible to mathematical equations. They may also be defined by a less technical property, viz., they are laws which, unlike human law, are never broken. It is this belief in the universal dominance of scientific law which is nowadays generally meant by materialism.

The harmony and simplicity of scientific law appeals strongly to our aesthetic feeling. It illustrates one kind of perfection, such as we might perhaps think worthy to be associated with the mind of God. One of the important questions that we have to face is whether the unseen world is governed by a like scheme of law. I am aware that many religious writers have felt no objection to, and even welcomed, the intrusion of natural law into the spiritual domain. (Probably, however, the are using the term “natural law” in a more elastic sense tha that in which the materialist understands it.) Why (they ask) should we insist for ourselves on exemption from a kind of government which is displayed in inorganic nature might be hailed as a manifestation of divine perfection? But I am sure that those who take this view have never understood and faced the meaning of the ideal scheme of scientific law. What they would welcome is not science but pseudo-science. Analogies can be drawn between spiritual and natural phenomena which may serve to press home a moral lesson. For example, one of Kirchoff’s famous laws of radiation states that the absorbing power of substances is proportional to the emitting power, so that the best absorbers are also the best emitters. That might make a good text for a sermon. But if ever scientific law makes a serious inroad into the spiritual domain the consequences will not be limited to supplying texts for sermons.

Natural law is not applicable to the unseen world behind the symbols, because it is unadapted to anything except symbols, and its perfection is a perfection of symbolic linkage. You cannot apply such a scheme to the parts of our personality which are not measurable by symbols any more than you can extract the square root of a sonnet. There is a kind of unity between the material and the spiritual world – between the symbols and their background – but it is not the scheme of natural law which will provide the cement.

In saying this I am not forgetting the likelihood of great future developments in science which may and indeed must bring to light types of natural law of which as yet we have no conception. Thus I do not judge the problem of life (in so far as it can be dissociated from consciousness) to be impregnable to the attack of physics. It is a matter of keen controversy among biochemists whether physics and chemistry as they stand are adequate to deal with the properties of living organisms. I express no opinion; but, in any case, whether they are adequate or not today, I cannot assume that future revolutions of science and the admission of new fundamental conceptions will not make them adequate. It is when life is associated with consciousness that we reach different ground altogether. To those who have any intimate acquaintance with the laws of chemistry and physics the suggestion that the spiritual world could be ruled by laws of allies character is as preposterous as the suggestion that a nation could be ruled by laws like the laws of grammar. The essential difference, which we meet in entering the realm of spirit and mind seems to hang round the word “Ought.”

This limitation of natural law to a special domain would be more obvious but for a confusion in our use of the word law. In human affairs it means a rule, fortified perhaps by incentives or penalties, which may be kept or broken. In science it means a rule which is never broken; we suppose that there is something in the constitution of things which makes its non-fulfilment an impossibility. Thus in the physical world what a body does and what a body out to do are equivalent; but we are well aware of another domain in which they are anything but equivalent. We cannot bet away from this distinction. Even if religion and morality are dismissed as illusion, the word”Ought” still has sway. The laws of logic do not prescribe the way our minds think; they prescribe the way our minds ought to think.

Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of “7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of “65.” What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as son as we consider the fundamental property of thought – that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces “7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces “7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law – laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.

VI.

Let me play the role of if materialist philosopher a few moments longer. The electric particles in obedience to the laws of physics have come together and built human brains. Still in obedience to those laws, they have by their evolutions brought about and stored in those brains the thoughts that make up the sum of human knowledge. Those unbreakable laws have decreed that to-night some of that accumulated knowledge is to be unloosed on you in the form of a lecture. I hope that you too will be good materialists and feel a due interest in the phenomenon that is proceeding, that observing the curious effects of Maxwell’s laws, the laws of thermodynamics and other physical causes that are leading to the emission of a modulated system of sound-waves.

But no; I was forgetting. That is how as materialists you ought to think of my lecture; but “ought” is outside natural law. I cannot expect more than that your brains will react towards the lecture in accordance with the unbreakable laws which govern them; and those who happen to fall asleep may claim that it was decreed by those laws.

This is, of course, a very old reductio ad absurdum; and he would be a very shallow materialist who has not appreciated the difficulty and persuaded himself that he has found an answer to it. I am not very curious as to how he surmounts the difficulty or whether his justification is valid. The upshot is that he connives at an attitude towards knowledge which does not treat it as something secreted in the brain by an operation of unbreakable laws of nature. It is to be judged in relation to its truth or untruth not in relation to any supposed theory of its origin.

Truth and untruth belong to the realm or significance and values. I am not able to agree entirely with the assertion commonly made in scientific philosophers that science, being solely concerned with correct and colourless description, has nothing to do with significances and values. If it were literally true, it would mean that, when the significance of our lives and of the universe around us is under discussion, science is altogether dumb. But there is this much truth in it. If we are to present science as a self-contained scheme, owing nothing to any judgments we may have formed by methods for which science does not take responsibility, then no doubt significances must be ruled outside its scope. This may be called the official attitude of science. Officially the scientists is just an adept at solving certain problems; he has no curiosity as to how these problems have come to be set; it is a complete surprise to him that mankind struggling after the eternal verities should take serious note of his pastime. But I think no one would venture to speak to a public audience on any scientific topic unless he were prepared to transgress beyond the official attitude. Imagine a speaker on evolution presenting a purely colourless description of the sequence of living forms and the struggle for existence, without ever hinting at an underlying significance for us of this change in our belief as to Man’s place in nature.

The religious seeker who pursues significances and values is often compared unfavourably with the scientists who pursues atoms and elections. The pin matter-of-fact person is disposed to think that the former are wandering amid shadow and illusion, whilst the latter is coming to grips with reality. I want therefore to give an illustration which will show that unless we pay attention to significances as well as to physical entities we may miss the essential part of experience.

Let us suppose that on November 11th a visitor from another planet comes to the Earth in order to observe scientifically the phenomena occurring here. He is especially interested in the phenomena of sound, and at the moment he is occupied in observing the rise and fall of the roar of the traffic in a great city. Suddenly the noise ceases, and for the space of two minutes there is the utmost stillness; then the roar begins again. Our visitor, seeking a scientific explanation of this, may perhaps recall that on another occasion he witnessed an apparently analogous phenomenon in the kindred study of light. It was full daylight, but there came a quick falling of darkness which lasted about two minutes, after which the light came back again. The latter occurrence ( a total eclipse of the sun) has a well-known scientific explanation and can indeed be predicted may years in advance. I am assuming that the visitor is a competent scientist; and though he might at first be misled by the resemblance, he would soon find that the cessation of sound was a much more complicated phenomenon than the cessation of light. But there is nothing to suggest that it is outside the operation of the sme kind of natural forces. There was no supernatural hushing of the sound. The noise ceased because the traffic stopped; each car stopped because a brake applied the necessary friction; the brake was worked mechanically by a pedal; the pedal by a foot; the foot by a muscle; the muscle by mechanical or electrical impulses travelling along a nerve. The strange may well believe that each motion has its physical antecedent cause which can be carried back as far as we please; and if the prediction of the two-minute silence on Armistice Day is not predictable like an eclipse of the sun, it is only because of the difficulty of dealing with the configurations of millions of particles instead of with a configuration of three astronomical bodies.

I do not myself think that the intermission of sound was predictable solely by physical laws. It might have been foreseen some days in advance if the visitor had access to the thought s floating in human minds, but not from any study however detailed of the physical constituents of human brains. I think I am right in saying that within the last two years there has been a change in scientific ideas which makes this more likely than the old deterministic view. But here I am going to grant our visitor his claim; to concede that even human actions are predicable by a –possibly enlarged – scheme fo physical law. What then? Shall we let our visitor go away convinced that he has gotten to the bottom of the phenomenon of Armistice Day? He understands perfectly why there is a two-minute silence; it is a natural and calculable result of the motion of a number of atoms and electrons following Maxwell’s equations and the laws of conservation. It differs only from a similar optical event of a two-minute eclipse in being more complicated. Our visitor has apprehended the reality underlying the silence, so far as reality is a matter of atoms and electrons. But he is unaware that the silence has also a significance.

Often the best way to turn aside an attack is to conceded it. The more complete the scientific explanation of the silence the more irrelevant hat explanation becomes to our experience. When we assert that God is real, we are not restricted to a comparison with the reality of atoms and electrons. If God is as real as the shadow of the Great War on Armistice Day, need we seek further reason for making a place for God in our thoughts and lives: We shall not e concerned if the scientific explorer reports that he is perfectly satisfied that he has got to the bottom of things without having come across either.

VII.

We want an assurance that the soul in reaching out to the unseen world is not following an illusion. We want security that faith, and worship, and above all love, directed towards the environment of the spirit are not spent in vain. It is not sufficient to be told that it is good for us to believe this, that it will make better men and women of us. We do not want a religion that deceives us for our own good. There is a crucial question here; but before we can answer it, we must frame it.

The heart of the question is commonly put in the form “Does God really exist?” It is difficult to set aside this question without being suspected of quibbling. But I venture to ut it aside because it raises so many unprofitable side issues, and at the end it scarcely reaches deep enough into religious experience. Among leading scientists to-day I think about half assert that the aether exists and the other half deny its existence; but as a matter of fact both parties mean exactly the same thing, and are divided only by words. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred have not seriously considered what they mean by the term “exist” nor how a thing qualifies itself to be labelled real. Dr. MacTaggart, wrote a two-volume treatise on “The Nature of Existence” which may possibly contain light on the problem, though I confess I doubt it. Theological or anti-theological argument to prove or disprove the existence of a deity seems to me to occupy itself largely with skating among the difficulties caused by our making a fetish of this word. It is all so irrelevant to the assurance for which we hunger. In the case of our human friends we take their existence for granted, not caring whether it is proven or not. Our relationship is such that we could read philosophical arguments designed to prove the non-existence of each other, and perhaps even be convinced by them – and then laugh together over so odd a conclusion. I think that it is something of the same kind of security we should seek in our relationship with God. The most flawless proof of the existence of God is no substitute for it; and if we have that relationship the most convincing disproof is turned harmlessly aside. If I may say it with reverence, the soul and God laugh together over so odd a conclusion.

For this reason I do not attach great importance to the academic type of argument between atheism and deism. At the most it may lead to a belief that behind the workings of the physical universe there is need to postulate a universal creative spirit, or it may be content with the admission that such an inference is not excluded. But there is little in this that can affect our human outlook. It scarcely amounts even to a personification of Nature; God is conceived as an all-pervading force, which for rather academic reasons is not to be counted among forces belonging to physics. Nor does this pantheism awake in us feelings essentially different from those inspired by the physical world – the majesty of the infinitely great, the marvel of the infinitely little. The same feeling of wonder and humility which we feel in the contemplation of the stars and nebulae is offered as before; only a new name is written up over the altar. Religion does not depend on the substitution of the word “God” for the word “Nature.”

The crucial point for us is not a conviction of the existence of a supreme God but a conviction of the revelation of a supreme God. I will not speak here of the revelation in a life that was lived nineteen hundred years ago, for that perhaps is more closely connected with the historical feeling which, equally with the scientific feeling, claims a place in most men’s outlook. I confine myself to the revelation implied in the indwelling of the divine spirit in the mind of man.

It is probably true that the recent changes of scientific thought remove some of the obstacles to a reconciliation of religion and science; but this must be carefully distinguished from any proposal to base religion on scientific discovery. For my own part I am wholly opposed to any such attempt. Briefly the position is this. We have learnt that the exploration of the external worked by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness – the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations (true or false) than those conditioned by the world of symbols. Are not these too of significance? We can only answer according to our conviction, for here reasoning fails us altogether. Reasoning leads us from premises to conclusions; it cannot start without premises.

The premises for our reasoning about the visible universe, as well as for our reasoning about the unseen world, are in the self-knowledge of mind. Obviously we cannot trust every whim and fancy of the mind as though it were indisputable revelation; we can and must believe that we have an inner sense of values which guides us to what is to be heeded, otherwise we cannot start on our survey even of the physical world. Consciousness alone can determine the validity of its convictions. “There shines no light save its own light to show itself unto itself.”

The study of the visible universe may be said to start with the determination to use our eyes. At the very beginning there is something which might be described as an act of faith – a belief that what our eyes have to show us is significant. I think it can be maintained that it is by an analogous determination that the mystic recognises another faculty of consciousness, and accepts as significant the vista of a world outside space and time that it reveals. But if they start alike, the two outlets from consciousness are followed up by very different methods; and here we meet with a scientific criticism which seems to have considerable justification. It would be wrong to condemn alleged knowledge of the unseen world because it is unable to follow the lines of deduction laid down by science as appropriate to the seen world; but inevitably the two kinds of knowledge are compared, and I think the challenge to a comparison does not come wholly from the scientists. Reduced to precise terms, shorn of worlds that sound inspiring but mean nothing definite, is our scheme of knowledge of what lies in the unseen world, and of its mode of contact with us, at all to be compared with our knowledge (imperfect as it is) of the physical world and its interaction with us? Can we be surprised that the student of physical science ranks it rather with the vague unchecked conjectures in his own subject, on which he feels it his duty to frown? It may be that, in admitting that the comparison is unfavourable, I am doing an injustice to the progress made by systematic theologians and philosophers; but at any rate their defence had better be in other hands than mine.

Although I am rather in sympathy with this criticism of theology, I am not ready to press it to an extreme. In this lecture I have for the most part identified science with the physical science. This is not solely because it is the only side for which I can properly speak. But because it is generally agreed that physical science comes nearest to that complete system of exact knowledge which all sciences have before them as an ideal. Some fall far short of it. The physicist who inveighs against the lack of coherence and the indefiniteness of theological theories, will probably speak not much less harshly of the theories of biology and psychology. They also fail to come up to his standard of methodology. On the other side of him stands an even superior being – the pure mathematician – who has no high opinion of the methods of deduction used in physics, and does not hid his disapproval of the laxity of what is accepted as proof in physical science. And yet somehow knowledge grows in all of these branches. Wherever a way opens we are impelled to seek by the only methods that can be devised for that particular opening, not over-rating the security of our finding, but conscious that in this activity of mind we are obeying the light that is in our nature.

VIII.

I have said that the science of the visible universe starts with a determination to use our eyes; but that does not mean that the primary use of the ey e is for advancing science. If in a community of the blind one man suddenly received the gift of sight, he would have much to tell which would not be at all scientific. Can we imagine him attempting to convey to his neighbours the significance of the new revelation by talking about the so-called physical “realities”? We know through science that the differences of colour in the external world – red, green, blue — are simply differences of electromagnetic wave-length; and the existence of colour-blindness shows how subjective the effects of the waves on our senses may be. But to a man who has received the revelation of sight the significant fact is not so much the truth about wave-length as the amazing transformation into a world of colour under the vivifying power of the mind. I need not stress the bearing of this when the eye of the soul is opened to the apprehension of the unseen world. The need of expression will not satisfy itself in preaching a scientific sermon. In the world, seen or unseen, there is place for adventure as well as for triangulation. It is right that we should, as far as may be, systematise and criticise the inferences that may be drawn as to the nature of the spiritual world beyond our consciousness; but whatever its abstract frame may be, it is transformed into different significance when it comes into relation with our consciousness – even as the skeleton frame of scientific truth is transformed into the colour and activity and substance of our familiar environment.

It seems right at this point to say a few words in relation to the question of a Personal God. I suppose every serious thinker is rather afraid of this term which might seem to imply that he pictures the deity on a throne in the sky after the manner of medieval painters. There is a tendency to substitute such terms as “omnipotent force” or even a “fourth dimension.” If the idea is merely to find a wording which shall be sufficiently vague, it is somewhat unsuitable for the scientist to whom the words “force” and “dimension” convey something entirely precise and defined. On the other hand, my impression of psychology suggests that the word “person” might be considered vague enough as it stands. But leaving aside verbal questions, I believe that the thought that lies behind this reaction is unsound. It is, I think, of the very essence of the unseen world that the conception of personality should dominate it. Force, energy, dimensions belong to the world of symbols; it is out of such conceptions that we have built up the external world of physics. What other conceptions have we? After exhausting physical methods we returned to the inmost recesses of consciousness, to the voice that proclaims our personality; and from there we entered on a new outlook. We have to build the spiritual world out of symbols taken from our own personality. As we build the scientific world out of the symbols of the mathematician. I think therefore we are not wrong in embodying the significance of the spiritual world to ourselves in the feeling of a personal relationship, for our whole approach to it is bound up with those aspects of consciousness in which personality is centred.

It is difficult to adjust the claims of naive impressionism and scientific analysis of the spiritual realm without seeming to disparage one or the other; but I think it only requires the same commonsense that we apply to the affairs of ordinary life. Science has an important part to play in our everyday existence, and there is far too much neglect of science; but its intention is to supplement not to supplant the familiar outlook. The biochemist chan teach us about the proteins and carbohydrates that make up a suitable diet, and we may profit by his knowledge; but it is not fitting that a mean should be looked upon entirely from the standpoint of absorbing a specified quantity of calories and food-values. It would be still more absurd for a man to refuse food, because he was sceptical as to the certainty of the theories of biochemists. Likewise it is well that there should be some to advise us whether our spiritual bread contains the right kind of vitamins; but for the most part it is the object of our teaching and our meetings to stimulate the spiritual appetite rather than to conduct this kind of research.

If the kind of controversy which so often springs up between modernism and traditionalism in religion were applied to more commonplace affairs of life we might see some strange results. Would it be altogether unfair to imagine something liked eh following series of letters in our correspondence columns? It arises, let us say, from a passage in an obituary notice which mentions that the deceased had loved to watch the sunsets from his peaceful country home. A. writes deploring that in this progressive age few of the younger generation ever notice a sunset; perhaps this is due to the pernicious influence of the teaching of Copernicus who maintains that the sun is really stationary. This rouses B to reply that nowadays every reasonable person accepts Copernicus’s doctrine. C is positive that he has many times seen the sun set, and Copernicus must be wrong. D calls for a restatement of belief, so that we may know just how much modern science has left of the sunset, and appreciated the remnant without disloyalty to truth. E (perhaps significantly my own initial) in a misguided effort for peace points out that on the most modern scientific theory there is no absolute distinction between the heavens revolving around the earth and the earth revolving under the heavens; both parties are (relatively) right. F regards this as a most dangerous sophistry, which insinuates that there is no essential difference between truth and untruth. G thinks that we ought now to admit frankly that the revolution of the heavens is a myth; nevertheless such myths have still a practical teaching for us in the present day. H produces an obscure passage in the Almagest, which he interprets as showing that the philosophy of the ancients was not really opposed to the Copernican view. And so it goes on. And the simple reader feels himself in an age of disquiet, insecurity and dissension, all because it is forgotten that what the deceased man looked out for each evening was an experience and not a creed.

IX

In its early days our Society owed much to a people who called themselves Seekers; they joined us in great numbers and were prominent in the spread of Quakerism. It is a name which must appeal strongly to the scientific temperament. The name has died out, but I think that the spirit of seeking is still the prevailing one in our faith, which for that reason is not embodied in any creed or formula. It is Perhaps difficult sufficiently to emphasise Seeking without disparaging its correlative Finding. But I must risk this, for Finding has a clamorous voice which proclaims its own importance; it is definite and assured, something that we can hold — of that is what we want, or think we want. Yet how transitory it proves. The finding of one generation will not serve for the next. It tarnishes rapidly except it be preserved with an ever-renewed spirit of seeking. It is the same too in science. How easy in a popular lecture to tell of the findings, the new discoveries which will be amended, contradicted, superseded in the next fifty years ! How difficult to convey the scientific spirit of seeking which fulfils itself in the tortuous course of progress towards truth! You will understand the true spirit neither of science nor of religion unless seeking is placed in the forefront.

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require. I recognise that the practice of a religious community cannot be regulate solely in the interests of its scientifically-minded members and therefore I would not go so far as to urge that no kind of defence of creeds is possible. But I think it may be said that Quakerism in dispensing with creeds holds out a hand to the scientist. The scientific objection is not merely to particular creed which assert in outworn phraseology beliefs which are either no longer held or no longer convey inspiration to life. The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton’s laws of motion, to Maxwell’s equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, of if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and transcribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science to maintain our stand against creed and dogma. I would not be sorry to borrow for our scientific pronouncements the passage prefixed to the Advices of the Society of Friends in 1656 and repeated in the current General Advices:

“These things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by; but that all with a measure of the light, which is pure and holy, may be guided; and so in the light walking and abiding, these things may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not in the letter; for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.”

Rejection of creed is not inconsistent with being possessed by a living belief. We have no creed in science, but we are not lukewarm in our beliefs. The belief is not that all the knowledge of the universe that we hold so enthusiastically will survive in the letter; but a sureness that we are on the road. If our so-called facts are changing shadows, there are shadows cast by the light of constant truth. So too in religion we are repelled by that confident theological doctrine which has settled for all generations just how the spiritual world is worked; but we need not turn aside from the measure of light that comes from our experience showing us a Way through the unseen world.

Religion for the conscientious seeker is not all a matter of doubt and self-questionings. There is a kind of sureness which is very different from cocksureness.

Preliminary Responses to J.C. Samuelson on The Virgin Birth Challenge

2009-07-06T06:51:00.000-07:00

Since I hold an agnostic position on the asserted miracle of The Virgin Birth of Jesus, at least in so far as science or mathematics can be applied to it, I’m going to press my own point of view.

I didn’t raise the issue of The Virgin Birth in any way, certainly not as a scientific debunking of religion. I also wouldn’t talk about it much as religion either, for reasons that have nothing to do with this argument.

I have defended those who do believe in it from charges that they are a danger to science or reason and have specifically defended the requirements of science against assertions from those who would replace those with opinions and dogmatic, authoritative declarations. I haven’t seen anything yet which makes the case for doing that from the “science side” of the issue other than the assertion that it’s in some way scientific, reasonable and fair. None of which are logical arguments but are just appeals to a pre-established point of view.

It could be added, this is a mighty strange way for me to be spending my time, but I think it is important to answer both for the integrity of science but also, and more importantly, for the right of religious believers to assert beliefs which harm no one.

Just as religion doesn’t deserve respect or belief when it violates its own moral teachings, science doesn’t deserve respect when it violates its own code of practice. Hypocrisy always earns skepticism and disbelief. And it is only on the ground of acceptance or rejection by people now that this question even becomes of any interest in the first place. Nothing we can do or discover will change the past, the event itself or the subsequent assertion of what that event was. It is for minds of people now that gives this fight any importance, in either the new atheist debunking and ridicule attempts or the activities of Christians.

Nothing that I have seen from the “science side” actually deals with the belief as asserted by Christians, none of their most extensive, if not entirely integrated, arguments are a solid reason for Christians to not believe in it. No more than I’ve seen a scientific argument in favor of The Virgin Birth. To make that clearer, if a religious believer alleged any scientific confirmations, those would be unconvincing to new atheists who could be expected to then apply the most exigent standards of science to those claims, even surpassing those they would assert in refutation of it.

So the “science” of miracles in this kind of case is a two way sword, one with a rubber blade. It doesn’t cut either way. That is a much bigger problem for the attempt to dispose of the belief with science than for those who irrationally and, I’d assert, irreligiously, hanker after a scientific verification of this kind of miracle for which there is no physical evidence. Real science would have to produce something which would approach closer to knowledge than religious belief in order to be effective. And, being an assertion of science, it would have to defend itself in review. And it can’t do that in this case. What it produces is belief which masquerades as a scientific position. Religious belief doesn’t suffer in the absence of scientific verification when that is impossible, certainly not in this situation. A religious believer will always have recourse to the valid point that the “scientific” viewpoint hasn’t dealt with what they believe and science can’t do that.

I will be out several weeks and when I return I’ll give a fuller response to J.C. Samuelson’s comment on the question. I will assert that he hasn’t answered the challenge, there isn’t a coherent methodology by which the requirements of science can be applied to the belief in The Virgin Birth. I have posted a preliminary response to some of his points but I’ve got to be away from my computer in about an hour and won’t be back for quite a while. If anyone takes on the Big Numbers question or posts a methodology on the Virgin Birth question I’ll deal with those then if I can. Of course, if you stump me, I’ll be honor bound to declare so.

Exploring Necessary Implications of Materialism

2009-07-02T16:04:00.001-07:00

I’ve had two requests to state the Big Numbers question as a formal challenge like the Show How You’d Subject The Virgin Birth To Science* challenge below. Further questions that arise from responses could become future challenges. I’d suggest you answer in terms that a layman could understand OK. Here it goes.

Materialists and others, imagine a big number in the set of counting numbers. A counting number that is a trillion, trillion powers larger than the number of the physical entities in the material universe. A number which can’t have a one-to-one correspondence to an actual, material entity in the universe.

- Is that number contained in the material universe? If so, how and in what sense is it contained in the material universe?

- Is that number real? Is it real in the same sense that a material object is real?

- If it is neither contained in the material universe or it is not real in the same sense as a material object is, explain how it could be real under the ideology of materialism.

- If that number is not a part of the material universe and so you hold it is not real, wouldn’t that mean that the set of counting numbers is, in fact, finite and not infinite?

A statement of a materialist who has already responded to this ( see below ) necessitates two further questions.

- If that number is real but it is non-corporeal, account for how a non-corporeal but real entities can be so notably relevant to the material universe. If you hold that numbers as non-corporeal but are real, that would overturn the ideology of materialism, wouldn’t it?

Would the numbers exist without the material universe? But if they can't then that makes my big numbers question is all the more relevant. Does that number exist and if it doesn't wouldn't that mean that there are a finite number of numbers? Maybe that property of the numbers system is just an invented myth? Do you really want to go there?

Note: I decided to avoid the puns that I unusually include in this challenge because some have used those to avoid parts of the challenge in the past. Also note, while I believe in God, I don’t draw any implication that the failure to locate the number system in the material universe is a confirmation of the supernatural, though others could certainly do so. I draw the conclusion that materialism is basically a fallacious idea.

Are Really Big Numbers Real, Exploring Materialism’s Necessary Implications

2009-07-01T05:19:00.000-07:00

This is a dialog from a blog thread yesterday, if it continues I’ll add that at the bottom. Note, this is with “Dan L.” who shouldn’t be confused with my frequent opponent “ Dan S.” Also note, I give the definition of “materialism” at the beginning which has always been what I understood the ideology to consist of. I didn’t realize Dan L is a mathematician before posing the question to him, I did know he was defending materialism. I had earlier said that I didn’t think that we could limit the universe to materialism and that, while I thought the biggest reason for rejecting Dualism was that it was unfashionable, I could see no inherent problem with the idea, though I don’t take that position or Idealism either.

AM — I'll pose a problem to you that I posed elsewhere. If by "materialism" you mean the belief that only those things within the material universe are real, consider this. Think of a number, let's say in the set of Real numbers, that is a trillion, trillion powers bigger than the number of individual entities in the physical universe, every subatomic particle, every everything. A number a trillion, trillion times bigger than whatever number that is. Is that number contained within the material universe? In what way is it contained in the material universe? Is it real? Is there a number even larger than that which, eventually, even you could not account for being in the material universe? Please explain in a way that will convince a skeptic of materialism as opposed to a true believer.

And there are other barriers to clarity on the issue of materialism. That's just one

Dan L.---- I think the anxiety and confusion such questions cause actually comes down to the fact that words like "exist" and "real" are notoriously hard to define. For example, the assertion, "I exist" is terribly problematic whatever Descartes might have to say about it. The atoms in my body are constantly recycled, as are the cells. New memories are constantly being added, and my beliefs and desires change as a function of new experiences in my life. To borrow from Nietzsche, "to be" is not the correct verb - it is "to become." This is connected to what I was saying to Mike about problems with intuitive notions of causality.

Another example: the U.S.S Constitution, moored right across the harbor from me, has at most one piece of wood left of the original ship. Is it still the same ship it was during the Revolutionary War? It has the same name and the hull was refurbished one board at a time as needed. I say there is a sense in which it is the same thing (the U.S.S Constitution) and a sense in which it is not (the physical matter of which it is composed has been recycled).

Similarly, there is a sense in which numbers exist and a sense in which they don't exist. Think about trying to make a perfect circle from a material substrate. Since the substrate is composed of a finite number of atoms, you can never get the ratio of the circumference to the diameter to be pi. It will always be a rational number. There is a sense in which pi exists and a sense in which it does not - we can calculate its value to an arbitrary degree of precision in principle, but in practice we actually can't.

As I've been trying to get across, I'm not really a reductionist. See my example in my response to Mike above - I don't believe knowledge can in principle be reduced to statements about subatomic particles. But I don't think the fact that we can talk intelligibly about abstractions makes souls, deities, or the flying spaghetti monster any more coherent as elements of causal models.

AM ---- What do you mean by "materailism" if it isn't that classic definition? Is there a coherent definition for "materialism", one that would be self-apparent to a reasonable person who was given that definition? If there isn't, then I'd contend that materialism wasn't real in any but a subjective sense, which wouldn't bother me but I'd imagine some materialists might have a rather strong emotional reaction to the idea.

Is there a number so large that there would exceed a definable one-to-one correspondence with the actual number of physical entities in the material universe? Would that number be a part of the material universe? Would that number be real? You know, when I really want to be a pain, I make it a rational number and then ask how it could be represented as a ratio. I've never actually had to duck after doing that yet.

I'd like an explanation of why that question isn't a valid one.

I believe the FSM is copyrighted and maybe even trademarked, and I do believe the creator of it is known. I don't think any souls and no supernatural deities have such a clear historical foundation. Gogol notwithstanding.

Dan L. — There's no coherent definition for "materialism" any more than there is for "dualism," which is usually taken to include various forms of animism and similarly "primitive" beliefs despite the fact that such beliefs bear little resemblance to scholastic Christianity. The categories are fuzzy. My philosophical beliefs are largely influenced by Dennett, but I don't agree with him on everything either.

The core of it, though, is that I reject dualism. I reject causal explanations that invoke immaterial causes. I have several reasons for doing so, but the most obvious is something that occurred to me by the age of twelve: that if the supernatural actually exists, then it is part of nature and therefore natural. If human intelligence is really mediated through a soul, then that soul must be able to transfer or transduce energy either by applying a force or through other means.

And there is no evidence that such a thing happens, or that it is a necessary element of any explanation of human behavior or any other natural event. Positing such things is completely extraneous to the goal of actually learning about how things work. Either you posit an entity whose existence we can verify through falsifiable experimental hypotheses, or you posit an entity that is by definition impossible to study. The latter is not science; it cannot be science; it is, in fact, antithetical to science.

Is there a number so large that there would exceed a definable one-to-one correspondence with the actual number of physical entities in the material universe? Would that number be a part of the material universe? Would that number be real? You know, when I really want to be a pain, I make it a rational number and then ask how it could be represented as a ratio. I've never actually had to duck after doing that yet.

Asking whether numbers exist is, to me, like asking whether I could put a particular build of Microsoft Windows in the freezer. Microsoft Windows isn't a thing; it's a pattern of behaviors that occur within an electronic device of a particular architecture. It does not exist corporeally, it exists functionally. To ask me to put it in a freezer is a simple category mistake. There is an abstract sense of existence, in which we can talk perfectly coherently about unicorns, and then there is an actual state of existence in which there is no such thing as unicorns. Likewise, we can talk about pi, the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter, even though there is no such thing as a perfect circle. And again, none of this implies the existence of a soul or a god or anything else "supernatural."

AM – @ Dan L. Asking whether numbers exist is, to me, like asking whether I could put a particular build of Microsoft Windows in the freezer. Microsoft Windows isn't a thing; it's a pattern of behaviors that occur within an electronic device of a particular architecture. It does not exist corporeally, it exists functionally. To ask me to put it in a freezer is a simple category mistake. Dan L.

So we have non-corporeal entities that seem to be relevant to the material universe, I'd imagine you would agree, at least to the extent that you can explain physical phenomena with math, in fact, science is about entirely dependent on doing so, at times with great accuracy. I'd guess you wouldn't hazard to explain that interaction between the material and the non-corporeal, would you? Would the numbers exist without the material universe? But if they can't then that makes my big numbers question all the more relevant. Does that number exist and if it doesn't wouldn't that mean that there are a finite number of numbers? Maybe that property of the numbers system is just an invented myth? Do you really want to go there?

I've never thought of this before, has anyone ever described a computer program as an artificial natural law? One that governs forces towards a, one hopes, relatively fixed end? Maybe the role that numbers play in those might help, or maybe not, since those are artificial and not natural but a merely mimic the actual universe. Maybe "phony natural laws" would be a better term.

Come to think of it "actual universe" might be a more inclusive term than "natural universe". Who knows? Maybe it might get some materialists out of a rut?

- There is an abstract sense of existence, in which we can talk perfectly coherently about unicorns, and then there is an actual state of existence in which there is no such thing as unicorns.

Unicorns were alleged to exist in the physical world, you were supposed to be able to trap one because they would put their head in the lap of a virgin. They were not alleged to be suprenatural or abstract. And now you're giving me two senses of existence, though I don't see how unicorns are at all relevant to numbers, what properties do they share in common? Certainly not in that one is a made up story and the other is rather useful to science and other areas of real life.

- Likewise, we can talk about pi, the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter, even though there is no such thing as a perfect circle. And again, none of this implies the existence of a soul or a god or anything else "supernatural."

I haven't implied that numbers are implications of the existence of a supernatural, as far as I know, our only means of knowing them is in relation to the natural part of that "actual universe" that I'm liking more as this comment develops. I don't think we have any idea if numbers would be relevant to the supernatural, just as we would have no reason to insist that logic or science would be relevant to it. There is absolutely no evidence that any of those would apply. All I wanted to do is explore the idea of real things that aren't contained in the material universe and I'm doubting numbers are the more I think about it. At least unless they got that infinity thing wrong. Wouldn't that be fun.

- Logic is prior to mathematics because you cannot do mathematics without logic.

Logic is the product of human experience of the material universe. In his Swathmore Lecture, Eddington said, "Mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience; all else is remote inference." Logic is the product of the human experience of the world. It has no known existence outside of us, we have no idea of any other animals in the universe use logic, it could be peculiar to us, a peculiar feature of our minds using our brains to reach and interact with the outside world. Maybe we're just interfaces, hum?

- If human intelligence is really mediated through a soul, then that soul must be able to transfer or transduce energy either by applying a force or through other means.

Why not? as I said there isn't any reason to believe that what we know about physical laws would govern any supernatural, there isn't any reason to believe that would be a necessity in the supernatural. There isn't any reason to think that a supernatural wouldn't be able to apply force to the material world. Many religions assert that what we do in the physical world has an effect on our souls in the supernatural, after all.

- Positing such things is completely extraneous to the goal of actually learning about how things work.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "learning how things work". I don't see that this is an absolutely necessary conclusion. Maybe it's, actually, intrinsic to the way in which we, as individual beings, are conscious in the material universe. No one has ever explained how we are conscious of the physical universe, we don't just reflect what's out there like a mirror.

- Either you posit an entity whose existence we can verify through falsifiable experimental hypotheses, or you posit an entity that is by definition impossible to study. The latter is not science; it cannot be science; it is, in fact, antithetical to science.

I never thought it was science, I'd say it's outside of the proper subject matter of science, the material universe being the only thing that science was invented to study. I think you've got the cart before the horse, too. Falsifiability is a tool of science to test ideas, it's not a test of usefulness or even the existence of something, it's a tool to test the usefulness of an idea about things.

If I wasn't tired I'd think of a dozen things that couldn't be falsified that you'd really rather not do without, actual existence, for a starter, though the separation of church and state is one of my favorites in this argument and the foundation of the entirety of civil rights and democratic government. And I think you might want to take up Exobiology and Evo-psy in that regard, in which case prepare yourself to do battle with, I'd guess, the larger part of the world council of new atheism. Certainly the blog contingent. Remember to be sufficiently pious while you're debunking them or you'll catch it.

During The Rain Delay

2009-06-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

A cleaned up comment

Note: I really, really wish the new atheists would get a few new hobby horses to bring up because this has been done to death.

Steven Sullivan, the question, which some new atheists, including Lawrence Krauss brought up and not me, was The Virgin Birth of Jesus. It wasn't any other one, it was that one. Remember that, I didn't choose the proposition for discussion the new atheists did.

In logic, when you are dealing with a proposition, you deal with THE PROPOSITION AS IT IS PROPOSED, that proposition chosen by these new atheists is the Christian belief in The Virgin Birth of Jesus.

That the new atheists, once they have proposed that topic, find that they have been unwise enough to choose a belief that was defined by the writers of two gospels and those who believe those two accounts, in a way that puts it beyond the reach of science, have only shown their own lack of insight and foresight. I'll deal with that below.

This inevitably leads them to find they are unhappy with their choice if they find their opponent is logical enough to be able to point that out to them and insist that they stick to their own, chosen proposition in the argument.

The continually manifested habit of trying to change the proposition mid-argument, which I've never not found to be the recourse of the new atheist who finds themselves unable to press their point using science, doesn't do anything but show that they want to twist the requirements of logic to suit their own ends, which is what they are continually accusing religious believers of doing.

Then the new atheist begins asserting that the person they are arguing with is a Christian who is probably some species of biblical fundamentalist who is, no doubt, a creationist-snake handler who deprives children of medical care, thus causing their early deaths. When you point out that you are not and fully accept evolution as deeply established and that you, yourself, don't happen to believe in The Virgin Birth but do happen to believe in the rules of both logic and the requirements necessary to practice science, they really lose it.

I will say that, this month, having to think through this and the other favorite proposition of new atheists, The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, I'm pretty impressed that the writers of the gospels and the early Christians, who are generally considered as superstitious idiots by new atheists , for some reason came to a far better understanding of the difference between believing in something and knowing something in a scientific sense, than many contemporary scientists and mathematicians. Some of whom are, actually, otherwise quite sensible.

Considering scientific methods hadn't been formally developed and would have almost certainly been unknown to those simple folk, their insight is rather more impressive than that held by many well known scientists today.

The Challenge To Subject The Virgin Birth of Jesus To The Methods of Science

2009-06-27T06:52:00.001-07:00

In the discussion over Lawrence Krauss' op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, the new atheists, as they almost invariably do brought up The Virgin Birth of Jesus. Here's the challenge that Krauss issued, as he described it in his piece:

When I confronted my two Catholic colleagues on the panel with the apparent miracle of the virgin birth and asked how they could reconcile this with basic biology, I was ultimately told that perhaps this biblical claim merely meant to emphasize what an important event the birth was. Neither came to the explicit defense of what is undeniably one of the central tenets of Catholic theology.

Here's the claim as made by one "MadScientist:

– Krauss never suggests that science move out of its own realm; what he is saying is that claims such as the virgin birth do not conform to what we know of the world. The claim of a virgin birth is essentially hearsay. MadScientist

One of the often made boasts of scientists is that they are required by science to back up their claims with the evidence attained through sound methodology. Well, let's see them do it in this case. Here's the challenge I issued in response.

Then it’s up to any scientist claiming that they can address The Virgin Birth of Jesus, as described in the gospels attributed to Matthew and Luke and actually believed by those who believe it, and not in a modified version so science can be made ez, to show how they could do it. They have to do it with absolutely no physical evidence, through an unknown range of possible mechanisms, and without recourse to any other human birth since it is held by its believers to have happened in that way exactly once in the entire course of history.

If you accept this assignment, please have your methodology and proof in by next Tuesday. You can feel free to post it on the last comment of my blog which you can reach by clicking on my name.

If anyone can produce a method that takes in all of those aspects, I’ll gladly announce that I’ve been stumped. But only if it addresses what is actually believed by those who believe it. Which I don’t happen to for historical and literary reasons.

I'll keep you posted on the results. If there are any.

I should add that I fully believe in the allegorical truth of the story. But I'll save that for the Christmas season.

The Kind of Religious Hypocrisy That Is Entirely Fair Game

2009-06-22T05:46:00.000-07:00

And why the New Atheists might really want to dump the rehabilitation of Herbert Spencer

Cynthia Davis, chair of the Missouri House Special Standing Committee on Children and Families is proof that the putrid ideas of Herbert Spencer and the Social Darwinists are not only alive, their true believers have political power.

Her recent legislative newsletter contains a detailed critique of a summer food program for children who receive subsidized meals during the school year. As full of double-talk as it does the a callous view of hungry children, Davis is a clear example of the reason Spencer shouldn’t be rehabilitated in an ill thought out defense of Charles Darwin.

In her own words, here are some low lights

- Is school the only place a child can get a nutritious meal? Parents have good reason to dispute the idea that their children will not receive a nutritious meal if they are not in a government institution. Who should be the one to pass judgment on what defines a nutritious meal?

- They are using a "crisis" to create an expansion of a government program. [Note: a fifth of Missouri children are believed to be in danger of hunger according to a federal report, apparently that’s not enough of a “crisis” for Cynthia Davis and the Republicans of Missouri who put her in this post.]

- This is not a discussion of how to handle the public orphanage. These are children who have parents already providing meals for their children. This program could have an unintended consequence of diminishing parental involvement. Why have meals at home with your loved ones if you can go to the government soup kitchen and get one for free? This could have the effect of breaking apart more families.

- Who's buying dinner? Who is getting paid to serve the meal? Churches and other non-profits can do this at no cost to the taxpayer if it is warranted. That is what they did when Louisiana had a hurricane. [I am assuming everyone capable of reading this realizes this is a whopper of a lie, considering what happened to those the government didn’t get help to after Katrina. Churches have never been able to make up for what only government can do. Churches have always been among the strongest supporters these kinds of government programs.]

- This is also an entitlement program with no cap on how much can be spent. In the early 1900's the average family paid about $20.00 per person per year for taxes. That left a great deal for our citizens to engage in acts of charity and helping poor neighbors who needed a meal.

- When churches offer a meal, they can serve the individual with a sense of love and caring for those less fortunate. Government cannot match that. Bigger governmental programs take away our connectedness to the human family, our brotherhood and our need for one another.

- While nobody is disputing the benefits of nutritious food, why the presumption that parents are not providing nutritious food for their children? Even if they are not, who created a new rule that says government must make up for any lack at home? The problem of childhood obesity has been cited as one of the most rapidly growing health problems in America. People who are struggling with lack of food usually do not have an obesity problem.

- Anyone under 18 can be eligible? Can't they get a job during the summer by the time they are 16? Hunger can be a positive motivator. What is wrong with the idea of getting a job so you can get better meals?
Tip: If you work for McDonald's, they will feed you for free during your break.

From the mind of Charles Dickens to chairing an important committee in a large American State. I’ll bet she watches A Christmas Carol with her children every year. Though on Easter she apparently lets them wander alone on dangerous highways in Missouri.

From what I’ve read about her preparing this post, you won’t be surprised to find out that Cynthia Davis constantly portrays herself as a “Christian” as she does what she does to the least among us. The phenomenon of “christians” who say and do the direct opposite of what Jesus, the older Jewish prophets and the earliest Christians did and taught, is an entirely legitimate target for the most severe criticism of religion. Criticizing Davis and those who put her in power on those grounds isn’t bigotry, it’s a moral duty. And some of those doing so are doing that on the basis of her religious hypocrisy.

Herbert Spencer was always popular with the callous rich. In the version of “christianity” as practiced by some, his teachings clearly are substituted for those they say are, literally, the word of God. This is odd, considering Spencer was agnostic, if not an atheist. Since Davis brought up the tax rates of the early 1900s, during that period, John D. Rockefeller famously delivered lesson on the necessity of pruning away the inferior blooms in order to produce the American Beauty Rose in line with Social Darwinism. Considering his own cultivated aroma of sanctity and his own religious pretensions, Rockefeller’s lesson was obviously and entirely removed from anything Jesus or his disciples are recorded to have said. About the best that can be said, was that he was speaking of businesses, on that occasion, at least.

Reading an attempt to resurrect Herbert Spenser and the other Social Darwinists by ill informed new atheists was ironic in so many ways, foremost among those was the fact that Spencer has always lived on in the ideas and programs of conservatives with political power, that ethical vampire never died. As ironic is that some of the most ardent movers of Social Darwinism in all too real life, are as ardent creationists, insisting on Genesis replacing science in biology classrooms. I’m sure they would be just as surprised as the new atheists to find their forgotten, if not quite missing, link.

Answer to a Comment on the Previous Thread

2009-06-21T02:46:00.000-07:00

I read the blog post which was kind of silly. You will notice that the writer depends on the one writer in the journal who tried to “debunk” the existence of Social Darwinism while dismissing the several he says support its existence. He also depends too much on the origin of the term “Social Darwinism” instead of on the ideas that are generally understood to comprise it. Odd that so many scholars of the other relevant writers are hoodwinked by Richard Hofstadter even today.

I thought this was especially telling:

That certainly sounds rough, but as it turns out, Hofstadter failed to mention the first sentence of Spencer’s next paragraph, which reads, “Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated.” As philosophy professor Roderick Long has remarked, “The upshot of the entire section, then, is that while the operation of natural selection is beneficial, its mitigation by human benevolence is even more beneficial.”

Beneficial for whom and to what effect is the whole point when talking Social Darwinism. Private charity has never, in history been sufficient to aid the destitute. Spenser was dependent on Malthus, his ideas about economics and politics are a development of his appalling writings.

The geneticist, Richard Lewontin pointed out an interesting difference between biological and political uses of Darwin’s ideas last month:

The parallel between the arguments for natural selection and nineteenth-century economic and social theory, however, misses an extremely important divergence between Darwin and political economy. The theory of competitive socioeconomic success is a theory about the rise of individuals and individual enterprises as a consequence of their superior fitness. But even though the Industrial Revolution resulted eventually, at least in some countries, in a general rise in material well-being, the number of immensely successful entrepreneurs is evidently limited precisely because their success depends on the existence of a large mass of less successful workers. No population can consist largely of people like Henry Clay Frick.

The theory of evolution by natural selection, in contrast, is meant to explain the adaptation and biological success of an entire species as a consequence of the disappearance of the less fit. Provided that a species does not become so numerous as to destroy the resources on which it depends, there is no structural reason why every individual of that species cannot be highly fit. If we seek a true originality in the understanding of Darwin and Wallace, it is to be found in their ability to adapt a theory meant to explain the success of a few to produce a theory of the success of the many, even though the many may be competing for resources in short supply. Whether they were conscious of this divergence of the theory of evolution by natural selection from the reigning economic and social theory is a question.

I’m not so sure they did appreciate the difference, but I’m really more interested in what we understand and do now than the reputation of people who have been dead for a hundred twenty years.

It’s been a long, long time since I read Spencer but I’m just about certain that he was opposed to state financed and operated public education. If that idea was carried out and the public schools gave way to private schools it would have the interesting effect of entirely opening up science classes to creationism, without even the veil of ID to hide it. Given the pretense of the New Atheism that they are the only reliable and true defenders of the teaching of pure evolution, defending Spencer in order to “defend Darwin” would have a pretty odd result. But I’ve never thought the new atheists were all that practical. I think the best way to defend the teaching of evolution is to forget the reputation of Darwin and concentrate on the enormous mass or post-Darwin confirmation that evolution is as sound an idea as any in the history of science.

It also shows how much of social progress the new atheists might be willing to abandon in the cults ideological quest. They like to think of themselves as being daring liberals or even leftists, but they're not.

I’m Burned Out Just Listening To A Little Of What Teachers Are Up Against

2009-06-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

A repost from my old blogging. The topic was the idea of “teaching the controversy” and a counter proposal by a university based genius to add more topics to high school biology courses. You'd be surprised what you can learn from asking people who actually teach in public schools instead of listening to people who either haven't been in one for years, or who never set foot in one.

Asking two high school teachers I know about one of those tertiary level issues I mentioned yesterday, I got a crash course in their reality. Most of the basic assumptions I brought to my questioning were wildly optimistic. Instead of the 185 days I assumed as their opportunity for teaching their subject it was actually 180 days. Instead of the three days I’d imagined given to standardized testing, it was actually a week, sometimes more. And, as one of them reminded me, a class period devoted to giving a unit test is also a “day” when they aren’t teaching new information. He said that he never gets to the end of the textbook he’s got, never mind adding new topics to be brought up. That’s why he couldn’t tell me how many actual teaching days to subtract for unit tests.

And, as both reminded me, their “day” is actually not a day but an “hour”. And that “hour” was 50 minutes long, at least a tenth of that just spent on getting kids settled and taking care of administrative junk. Then there are the non-teaching problems they’ve got while actually teaching their subject matter, ranging from confused or listless kids to even the best behaved kids cutting up, to kids with a history of psychopathic violence. I asked how they dealt with kids who didn’t have the background knowledge for their subject, they said it was a huge problem.

So, when you subtract the 15 minutes from those 180 hours and start subtracting “hours” given over to, not teaching but testing, and figuring in the time spent with remedial and behavior problems, it looks like a mighty hard job.

When you ask one, don’t even bring up what they think when university based geniuses start telling them what they need to add to their curriculum. Not unless you really want an earful.

A Comment

2009-06-20T03:05:00.000-07:00

E. , I’d agree with most of your last comment and as your goal is to promote rationality, you certainly see that irrationality isn’t limited to a subset or religious believers.

One of the questions that keeps popping up is why the United States and not some other developed country has problems over the teaching of evolution. You’ve hit on one of the biggest, our system of local and state school boards. If one municipality or state get hijacked by creationist candidates, as has happened, or even a whole state, it can take a court challenge to prevent them from putting it into science classes. I’m skeptical of the ability of a small, unpopular minority to sustain their civil rights on the basis of court rulings. The Rehnquist and Roberts courts have shown any rights gained even by legislation can be effectively abridged by a malicious court. Public acceptance is the only certain way to protect civil rights. I doubt that anyone should expect that Dover is the last word on the evolution struggle, those who want to keep religion out of biology classes in public schools here had better not rest on that, very possibly, temporary decision. Clearly, the new atheists’ hijacking of that issue combined with the rest of their program won’t help in the effort to build broad public support for protecting the science in the schools. You don’t win elections by insulting the majority of voters.

Given how difficult it is to change the basic forms of our government in the United States, the local-state school board structure should be taken as permanent. Even more permanent should be the fact that our basic act of governance is the vote.

The first time I ever waded into this issue was in the months before the 2006 election when the media was trying to provoke the left by widely discussing that stupid poll that showed the public would elect a gay person as president before they would an atheist. Stupid, not just because the poll was bogus, but because most of the various minorities coming out ahead of atheists weren’t in any great danger of being elected. I wrote a piece saying that the coming election was what the left should concentrate on, not getting into the already polluted atheist-religion squabble. I also told atheists that insulting the majority of the voters wouldn’t do a thing to make them want to vote for an atheist. I figured it was about as rational a point as possible to make.

A number of atheists, notably Amanda Marcott took that point and distorted the entire meaning of what I wrote, which was my refresher course in blog ethics. Austin Cline doing the same thing was several months away. But that’s not really important. What is important is that now a sizable number of atheists have recognized that the new atheism is irrational and is already damaging to other atheists’ interests and potentially to science. I think their positions are superior to the new atheists’ they are more rational and honest. I think their positions.

I figure science isn’t my responsibility, the future of science rests in the hands of scientists and those who fund their work. I’d like nothing better than to not have this distraction out of politics altogether. My interest is in political progress, environmental protection, national healthcare, civil rights…. all of which I think are more important than the keeping biology classes pure of extraneous religious content. I’m enough of a practical heretic to think that most of those who take biology classes need some of the other topics covered by the one and only biology class they’ll ever take more than they do a pure and pristine view of their ancestry. A knowledge of evolution isn’t going to keep them from an unintended pregnancy or a life threatening venereal disease. The evolution ball that every always has their eye on is important but its not all that big.

I think the real problem is that the line of explicitly anti-religious intent stemming from those around and about Darwin, as seen most honestly in Thomas Huxley but also others, which took up evolution as a weapon against religion, meets head on with biblical fundamentalism. I don’t think that is useful for science or religious liberalism. In practical terms, in the United States, at least, the effort would clearly favor the biblical literalists. The use of evolution as a weapon against religion has failed the test of history, it’s failed the test of time. It has been damaging to the publics understanding of science and has been an effective tool of political organization among the far right. I don’t think most of the Republicans who kow-towed to the TV evangelists cared at all about evolution and they demonstrably had no intention of following the teachings of Jesus, certainly not in economic and social justice. They saw them as a large and easily used political force. And they have won elections with them. The loss of power by the far right has not been due to the religious right disappearing but due to economic and other factors. The religious right is always going to be a potential source of votes for them.

So, when we are talking about reason, those considerations are the crux of the problem. The program of Dawkins, Harris, et al are irrational and unrealistic. I think their motive has nothing to do with the promotion of reason or science, it’s because they can’t stand the existence of anything but their chosen mix of materialism-scientism. In that they are no different from their opposite. They don’t like pluralism on the issue of belief any more than the most rigid Souther Baptists. The irony with the Southern Baptists is that the Baptist tradition began as a quite liberal one in which individual conscience and reason were major positions it took. There are still Free-will Baptists, though they are quite invisible. The ironies of the new atheism is that they are some of the worst supporters of science and reason and logic, certainly their web presence is anything but a new enlightenment. When arguing with them, notably one “Science Avenger” it was clear they had no concept of the basic requirements of science and had a very damaged idea of logic.

I don’t think religion is the only thing that could usefully be checked at the political door.

P.S. It shouldn't be forgotten that voters will not leave their religion outside of the voting booth.

Deluded Thinking: Believing You Don't Believe

2009-06-18T05:08:00.000-07:00

Davo said, “ I thought the new atheists (and most atheists) didn't like that there are people who believe things without evidence”. in response to this point, “At the bottom, new atheists just don't like that there are people who believe things they don't”

I'd guess some like to pretend that's what their ideology consists of. People like to pretend all kinds of things about their faiths. Some people like to pretend that the King James translation of the Bible is the final edit made by a committee guided by God, himself.

If that's the case then new atheists would have to be devoid of self reflection, which seems to be a common trait of the fundamentalist mindset.

Every single person who holds ideas holds some of them without evidence. Atheists who believe in memes, the Paleolithic tales of "behaviors' that render an "adaptive advantage" as evolutionary psychology creates out of thin air, and a host of other beliefs are things some of the most famous of the new atheists believe without any evidence.

There is no evidence for the ethical correctness of the separation of church and state, the political equality of all people, the right to liberty or life or the pursuit of happiness, there is no evidence that men deserve to have the same level of legal rights as women, that my own folk, gay people shouldn't be oppressed, there is no evidence that Plato's awful form of fascism isn't the optimal form of government. There is no evidence supporting the foundation of any moral position. Where's the evidence that it would be a good thing for the human species to continue for another generation?

Those things are all beliefs held on their foundational level without evidence. We all hold things as being the way we think they might be on the basis of our experience but unless you are going to conflate what we believe from our experience with evidence, those things can't be held on the basis of evidence. And if you do make that assumption, my experience says that you have no right to deny religious believers the right to believe in the deity of their choice and other associated beliefs. You don't even have the right to deny them the right to change those beliefs on the basis of further experience.

Whether or not you would deserve the dislike of people you insult on the basis of their beliefs won't matter because they won't care, they'll just do it without your approval. And they'll consult those feelings when they vote.

A Reason The New Atheism Needs To Be Discredited

2009-06-17T05:21:00.000-07:00

And sent to the dustbin of history

New Atheists aren’t All Atheists, that’s important to start with. A lot of atheists are pretty civil and level headed people, some of them want to have nothing to do with the new atheists and reject the program of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and the lesser lights among those self-defined “brights”. I’m not talking about grown ups who are also atheists or agnostics. This is about a subset of atheists who are bigoted, obnoxious, jerks. A lot of those bigots have PhDs and hold university positions, you can read about them in the post below this one.

Having argued against their blather for several years, the incident that made me focus now was the blog reaction to the murder of Dr. Tiller several weeks ago. That night, all over the blogs I frequented, his murder was used as a pretext for the new atheists on the comment threads, to repeat the putrid slogans of their prejudice as they tried to vie for the one who could tell the most bigoted and disgusting lie against “faith heads”.

Pointing out that Dr. Tiller was murdered while ushering at his Reformed Lutheran Church didn’t get the foul mouthed jerks to shut up. Reason is far from one of the more obvious habits of the new atheists on the blogs.

On one blog conversation I was part of that night, after the point about Dr. Tiller’s religion was made, one of the new atheists repeated the Harrisite formula that “there were no atheists who flew planes into buildings on 9/11".

Well, there were no Reformed Lutherans flying planes into buildings that day. There were no members of the United Church of Christ, or any other Christians or Jews or Hindus or Buddhists, or women, or gay men....... There weren’t any of the other fifth of the human population who were Moslem flying those planes either. Many thousands of times more Moslems condemned the crimes committed in the name of their religion by the hijackers and their controllers. Even countries which are hardly allies of the United States, such as Iran, condemned what was done. But, as all bigots do, the new atheists try to make all members of a group they hate guilty of the worst things a tiny number of them does. This has been done just about any time that bigotry takes hold and feels free to express it’s pathological thinking.

Since they pretend that they are the masters of logic, the blog bigots were angry when it was pointed out that by the doctrine of the new atheism, Dr. Tiller was culpable for his own murder. As an active member of his church he would be held by the new atheist creed to have “created an atmosphere in which his killer was encouraged”. His family and friends were responsible, people who subdued the gunman were responsible and every religious believer, the most pro choice, the most pacifistic, must be held responsible for the murder of Dr. Tiller. That is the only logical conclusion to make.

The new atheism is a kind of bigotry. Like all bigotry it is is dishonest and obnoxious. Some of the more silly adherents of it believe they are the bulwark of the new order, that they will, eventually, become the majority and that religion will be well on its way to extinction. Right now, given the size of their legions and absurdity of their claims, they are more reminiscent of the Grand Duchy of Fenwick than another New World Order. As they grow more obnoxious and foul mouthed, they are a lot more likely to kill off the atheism fad than to grow it.

I don’t think it does any good to count on that happening, though. Other forms of bigotry haven’t disappeared even as they have become unfashionable. I think active discouragement of the new atheism is necessary. That discouragement could begin by telling them you don’t want to hear their bigotry. Tell them any time thy start that you don’t want to hear it, that they’re not welcome to vent their sick thoughts.

The bad things that specific people or specific groups or religious authorities do are fair for comment, but only those people responsible for them are to blame. Atheists who want to blame religious people who aren’t guilty of anything should ask themselves if they want to be responsible for crimes committed by atheists. In the case of officially atheist states, murders that could be laid at the feet of atheism run into the tens of millions. Because if they make that rule and allow themselves to tar all religious people, they’re going to find that same tar sticking to them and they'll have no right to whine about it.

Bigotry Always Gives Birth To Stupid People

2009-06-17T05:19:00.000-07:00

It’s often wondered at, how otherwise intelligent people can be just plain dense. I remember having a discussion about the Noble Prize stud farm, a sperm bank that in which the Noble Prize physicist William Schockley left a deposit in the late 1970s or early 80s. At the time it was reported that several great thinkers, so honored, were reported to have participated in this most risible of eugenics projects, though they chose anonymity. Anyone who thinks eugenics died with the Nazis should be chastened to find that any number of Nobels had that much faith in the pseudo-science that late in the game, encouraged by others with scientific and quasi-scientific credentials.*

During that at times less than serious, discussion, the very serious fact that Schockley was infamous as a scientific racist was unavoidable. The man was a total nut case, believing that the inferiority of people with African ancestry was a fact of hard science. He was and is, hardly alone, scientific racism is hardly dead.

I remember hearing one of my science heroes on TV point out to him that Schockley and the rest of the geezers in the Nobel stable would likely be inferior breeding stock due to the accumulation of mutations and cell damage at their advanced ages. Like the rest of his project, apparently that was a variable the Nobel Physicist and the other men of science neglected to consider.

The truth is, bigotry is not based in sound information or reason, it’s based in gossip, phony evidence promulgated for ulterior motives, in the heat of envy and resentment.

When a person allows bigotry to take over a large part of their thinking, it makes the results just plain stupid. No matter what they might accomplish in their professional life where they are required by professional standards to delete their bigotry, when bigots take one step outside their narrow specialty, their intelligence and behavior, takes a dive to the bottom.

I think that the thing to notice here, is that they are smarter when they are forced by professional standards to cut it than when they are free to vent it.

So, I’m not impressed with the PhD’d bigots that abound these days. I don’t look at their degrees or what faculty they sit on or their publications. You have to look at what they say and what they use to back it up. When they spout stupidity, that’s what they’re spouting. When their ignorant fans repeat it, the quality of it doesn’t improve. As with old line racism, it can have a damaging effect on the entire country and take an enormous amount of effort to overturn. Anyone who is a student of the literature of sexism and Jim Crow will know there were many degreed, highly positioned experts cited in the screeds that comprise it. Many texts supporting the subjugation of women and the oppression of minorities are authored by those with impeccable credentials and letters after their names. A lot of what I’m seeing from the high and mighty in our intellectual culture, even now, even with the entire, bloody history of the 19th and 20th centuries to have learned from, looks mighty like that crap.

* They never attracted the rarest of the lot, the doubly Nobeled Linus Pauling, who was quoted as having declined participating because he preferred doing it the “old fashioned way”.

Letters To A Callow Atheist

2009-06-16T07:10:00.000-07:00

Vacation's over, I'm back at work so I'll just be posting some material gleaned from various arguments. Here's one from last night, a response to "Dan S." about the shoddy scholarship of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. The issue is Dawkins' failure to cite and engage any of the rigorous thinking of serious theologians and other writers on religion in his alleged smack down of God and those deluded enough to believe in God.

But that's the point, isn't it? You can argue that TGD has a whole bunch of various deficiencies, but when it comes to the question of whether or not a God bearing some resemblance to the entity usually described by that name actually exists (which Dawkins does state quite clearly is the limit of the book), there don't seem to be any substantial modern authors for the pro side.

Now, Dan. You really do disappoint me. Is this ignorance or is this a debating strategy?

Just about anyone with a grasp of logic realizes that arguing the existence of the supernatural is bound to be as fruitless as the search for finding the absolute foundations of mathematics due to our inabilities, not to the certainty that those don’t exist. I think, since there was a popular work that mentioned Godel in the title where they couldn’t miss it as they didn’t really read the whole thing, the Sci-blog wannabees and their equivalent in the general blogosphere might have an inkling of his contributions to uncertainty. They, as Dawkins and, perhaps, you, would know that people who write on the topic of religion at the most serious level don’t generally write about “proofs” for the existence of God these days. And, now, I’ve put you in a polemical bind because you can’t refute that statement without undermining your assertion by finding the relatively rare cases when they have broached that topic. And if you found them with google and Wiki, why didn’t Dawkins?

Of course, since he was a “theist” they wouldn’t have been impressed with Godel’s logical brilliance. Theists can’t think

But his book wasn’t just on that topic, it covered a range of charges against religion which have, in the main, been the concern from such frivolous thinkers as James and Wittgenstein and Kant (I don’t recall, did he mention Kant, who would have been especially apropos of your canard? ) ,..... those in the western tradition, alone, would fill a page. But with a toss of the hand, you with “science” on “your” side can safely discount all those as not worth knowing about without knowing the first thing about them. Just like the most primitive of biblical fundamentalists, only they’ve got scripture as an excuse to ignore science.

That Richard Dawkins, with the resources he had at his disposal from his endowed chair at Oxford, resorted to citing the man who introduced him to his wife, a broadcast media scribbler who had exactly one great radio drama, a good TV remake of that , a mediocre series of books on the same and, posthumously, a movie I didn’t bother to see since it was on the same material, as his only real cultural achievement, is truly one of the most amazing displays of scholarly ineptitude in recent history. The part of the public which sucked it up as gospel are a confirmation of the disastrous state of learning in the allegedly educated classes of the English speaking world. I’d think it could tell us something about the decline into a new period of benighted bigotry you seem to be the vanguard of. It sure looks like that to me, based on my readings of the ScienceBlogs.

Note: I'd never thought of it before today, I wonder if a percentage of Bertrand Russell's anti-religious product might have been due to his resentment of Godel making his greatest achievement a bit anachronistic. I'll look into that idea in the future and report any evidence I come across.

But It’s Not Fair When YOU Do It!

2009-06-15T02:33:00.000-07:00

First In A Continuing Series on The Double Standards The New Atheism Rests On

Going into the new atheist blogs is a waste of time if you expect to find a reasonable discussion on the topic of religion or much else. There isn’t much reason to be found among them and a lot less truth. Yesterday in the exchange laid out here, I came to realize that the recent foray I made was most usefully looked on as an anthropological field trip. I think you might see why.

It began when a fairly harmless comment which said something about an eminent physicist, who I won’t name because there were no direct quotes or citations given. He claimed that the physicist would tend to agree with Richard Dawkins that indoctrinating a child into religion was akin to child abuse. I asked about Quakers or parents who bring their children to Temple on the High Holy Days.... but that’s not the interesting part.

Here’s the exchange I had yesterday at The Intersection, with a commentator called “gillt”. Notice particularly that gillt isn’t happy with having materialists’ motives be the subject of even a polite question. Of course, attributing base, cowardly motives to religious believers is the bread and butter of the new atheism. I’ve edited my comments in a few places to clean up ambiguities and typos. Gillts are as they appeared. I should note that The Intersection is not a new atheist blog, though the owner is an atheist who is pretty fair and rational. The threads on the topic were dominated by new atheists.

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AM: Maybe there's a peculiar habit that scientists get from trying to find universal properties of nature, that they tend to abstract away from the more complex and messy every day reality. That scientists, who gain status and a good salary from studying the material world would want to hold they, actually, had their hands on the ultimate reality, would hardly be surprising. People tend to focus on what brings them respect and admiration. You can understand how people with that kind of personal investment might resent those who deny that theirs is the last word on the subject. I wonder if anyone has ever studied that attitude that is so common among those in the sciences on that basis. Not presupposing that their materialism is correct, but seeing it as an anthropological phenomenon in the way that a Shaman might come to regard himself and his profession. Though people don't tend to have a high level of self-knowlege when it comes to that kind of thing. Too much reality is dangerous for their self-image.

I've had some respect for (the physicist) L. K. , I'd like to know what he'd say to that speculation.

gillt: McCarthy says "that scientists, who gain status and a good salary from studying the material world would want to hold they, actually, had their hands on the ultimate reality, would hardly be surprising."

Armchair psychology aside, this category better describes physicists, particularly retired physicists turned theologians like Polkinghorne.

AM: Armchair psychology aside

That would be aside the uniform attributions made here about the far larger and more diverse percentage of the population who believe in a huge range of religions.

Not so comfortable being the subject of that kind of speculation, is it. At least I was attributing a common habit to them instead of a form of depraved ignorance.

I'm finding the exemptions that scientists seem to want to carve out for themselves increasingly interesting. I think scientists would make a far better subject for anthropology than a sculptor who has been dead for c. 35,000 years.

gillt: A layman's unpublished thoughts probably shouldn't bother too many of us. Then again, who isn't an authority on the internet? You will get back to me with those exemptions, but only the interesting ones, no?

AM: You're bothered by which part of what I said, exactly?

How about being exempt from having motives other than strict adherence to evidence and the logical necessities of it in asserting the truth of a chosen ideology.

Then you can go on to exemption from assuming other people have as much right to make up their own minds about what they choose to believe.

(Then in response to someone else who stepped in) I meant gillt, who apparently was perturbed that someone might question the motives of a materialist choosing their ideology because it elevated their social and existential position in the scheme of things. Materialists are not to be questioned about their motivations.

Apparently that's another double standard that the new atheism will not see violated.

(Then back to gillt) And I really am amused by that use of the term "layman". That would be as opposed to the high priesthood of science, one supposes.

gillt: “priesthood?" Sad soul, even McCarthy's language is god-soaked. Nevermind that, what concerns me more is his anti-atheist holy crusade moving from amusing to tiredly cynical. It appears McCarthy simply can't stand the existence of a new atheist anywhere, ever; can't stand them so much he seems to confuse the comments section for a game of space invaders. Take'r easy `ol boy

AM: Actually, it was sarcasm soaked.

I haven't said a word about why someone shouldn't be an atheist or that they should believe in religion, just that they shouldn't be bigots.

A Too Modest Proposal, It would Seem by Anthony McCarthy

2009-06-13T11:16:00.000-07:00

I was going to wait until this developed further and do intend to write the analysis that I promised Curious Wavefunction, but have decided to post the exchange we’ve been having on the topic of Sam Harris’ idea of a nuclear first strike against Moslems. The paragraph by Sam Harris is quoted by Curious Waveform in comment #83. I will begin to analyze it next week.

Curious Wavefunctions and my comments are the only ones included here. If other people enter the discussion I might include them. This exchange is contained in the comments to a post at The Intersection: Ken Miller: "Why Jerry Coyne is Wrong"

Note: I will point out that the proposal, first made at comment #88, to kill the scientists , who would be capable of building the nuclear weapons, which Sam Harris is willing to murder tens of millions of innocent civilians in a day to prevent being deployed, would be a far smaller number of murders than what Harris and many of his new atheist admirers on the blogs contemplate.

And it would have the benefit of preventing their being built. We could threaten to wipe out any country which we suspected of having a weapons program with our nuclear stockpiles right now. We could tell them unless they handed over all of their relevant scientists, physicists, chemists, and engineers so we could test them for competence and liquidate them, we will kill everyone. I suspect that any country faced with obliteration would be willing to make that trade. Or at least the second one would.

My proposal is contingent on people finding Sam Harris’ proposal reasonable enough to take seriously. I believe mine is the more reasonable since it is preemptive and it is also far less drastic in the numbers of people killed. And, as Sam Harris’ doesn’t, it targets those most responsible for endangering us. The scientists and engineers producing the weapons in the first place. It is a serious proposal, it has to be considering that Sam Harris and many of his admirers are able to calmly contemplate nuclear first strikes that would, by his own admission kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a day.

# 75. Anthony McCarthy Says:
June 12th, 2009 at 1:16 pm

If Ayaan Hirsi Ali's stated intention is to promote womens' rights in the middle east hooking up with someone who advocates nuking them in the millions sort of might put a dent in her effort.

I'd imagine even atheists in the cities that would be incinerated might not be too keen on her now that she's joined up with Harris and Hitchens. But I've been skeptical of her from the start.

# 77. Curious Wavefunction Says:
June 12th, 2009 at 1:21 pm

Anothony, have you read "Infidel"? You render Hirsi Ali a great disservice by primarily thinking of her in terms of an association with Sam Harris. Please, get over Sam Harris. Although I think part of his writing is spot on (again, not painting someone with a monochromatic brush is the mark of a reasonable response), there are bigger fish to fry. And did you bother to read his response and the relevant paragraph in his book? Care to debate the actual substance and details?

# 80. Anthony McCarthy Says:
June 12th, 2009 at 1:26 pm

You render Hirsi Ali a great disservice by primarily thinking of her in terms of an association with Sam Harris.

I'm pretty confident that her critics in the middle-east and other Islamic countries will certainly notice that she's on the board of his hilariously named "Reason Project". White guys sitting on North American and Europe might let Harris go on his "nuke em'" stuff, but when you're getting a target painted on you, it sort of focuses the concentration.

Harris wrote what he wrote. I'm hardly the only one who has noticed or commented on it. That horse left the barn a few years back.

# 81. Curious Wavefunction Says:
June 12th, 2009 at 1:30 pm

Again, Ali's association with Harris is not the locus of her identity, it is not the bedrock of her existence. Ali is a brave woman who suffered genital mutilation and had her agent killed for her "heretical" views. Well, ok. But a reasoned respnonse needs us to examine all sides of a debate. Let's start with the relevant paragraph. Now what do you think is objectionable? Give me some details.
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# 83. Curious Wavefunction Says:
June 12th, 2009 at 1:39 pm

Sorry, I forgot to post the paragraph (from pg 128-129 of The End of Faith)

"It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime-as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day-but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher's stone, and unicorns. That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen. Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly likely. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side."

Now please let me know what abhorrent problems you see with these words. I will be happy to go over the paragraph line-by-line since it seems to alarm you so much.

# 85. Anthony McCarthy Says:
June 12th, 2009 at 2:31 pm

CW, I've read Harris. You think being two-faced is a virtue?

There are few things that could discredit Ayaan Hirsi Ali [more] than liking up with Harris and Hitchens. I assume she's able to make an adult decision and accept the consequences, good or bad. Though it's possible she's being used, though I'd think assuming that would be rather patronizing. Whatever, if she is sincere about her goals, it was about as bad a move as could be imagined.

# 86. Curious Wavefunction Says:
June 12th, 2009 at 2:39 pm

So what exactly is two-faced about this? Please indicate the exact words in the paragraph above. The scenario as is described seems to me a very realistically possible future scenario in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, as documented by several people, for instance by David Sanger in his recent "The Inheritance". And the criticism of Harris is by a single individual, Chris Hedges, who also claims that both Harris and Hitchens would willingly torture people. Maybe that's why Hitchens had himself waterboarded. Even though I strongly disagree with both Hitchens and Harris in parts (Hitchens for instance seems to have no understanding of Hinduism and thinks that the fiasco that was Osho Rajneesh is emblematic of everything that could be wrong with the religion), unlike some people I don't want to interrogate them with a single brushstroke.
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# 88. Anthony McCarthy Says:
June 12th, 2009 at 6:35 pm

Curious Waveform, I think I might do an analysis of that paragraph, it's toing to take a while because I'm going to look for evidence to support or refute what he says. It's going to take a little while, I will post it on my blog.

I forget, did he talk about nuking North Korea? I don't seem to recall him thinking that might be a good idea.

You do know that he's putting a lot of peoples' lives at stake for the sake of those 19 men, don't you. Maybe, since they're the source of the problem, we should kill all the physicists. There are a lot fewer the ten million nuclear physicists. Or maybe just all of those in states that aren't nuclear yet. Though, actually, it's those with intercontinental missiles and nuclear weapons now that are the problem Maybe we should kill them all too, just as a precaution. Then we can start on the rest of the scientists who develop munitions. And industrial chemicals, and potential biological weapons..

# 90. Curious Wavefunction Says:
June 13th, 2009 at 9:25 am

Let me just say that I look forward to your nuanced and insightful analysis of the paragraph. All this talk about killing physicists, North Koreans and random Muslims detracts from the very specific words that he used and detracts from his description of a realistic scenario now recognized by many analysts as a huge problem in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. I look forward to reading your post. And would also suggest that instead of killing physicists we should kill chemical industry manufacturers, since without them there would no nuclear and chemical material to work with. But However I also propose that we don't descend into sarcasm; it draws your attention away from the matter at hand. Again, I very much look forward to your detailed and insightful analysis of those words. Please let me know if I can be of help.

# 91. Curious Wavefunction Says:
June 13th, 2009 at 9:30 am

Let's focus on the substance and actual details of what he said, and argue those.

# 94. Anthony McCarthy Says:
June 13th, 2009 at 12:44 pm

Curious Wavefunction, if it's all right to commit, as Harris says, " an unthinkable crime-as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day" due to the danger of a relative handful of fanatical moslems getting their hands on a nuclear weapon, why not save tens of millions of innocent civilians and kill every scientist who has the technical knowledge of how to produce those nuclear weapons in the first place.

Or do you believe that their being physicists, chemists, etc. make their lives so much more valuable than those of the tens of millions of innocent civilians, that it excuses their part in producing those weapons which Harris, and clearly you, are so worried about?

If you don't clear that question up, I'll have to conclude the answer is yes. Please clear up this point by telling me why it's all right to do what Harris proposes but wrong to do what I've asked about.

# 96. Curious Wavefunction Says:
June 13th, 2009 at 2:41 pm

Anthony McCarthy, now we are talking about substance, thank you. Sam Harris's paragraph clearly rests on an implicit assumption that is made clear in multiple place in the analysis; that the people who would get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry share a mental makeup similar to that of the 19 9/11 hijackers. First of all let me answer your other question upfront and say that the scientists you are mentioning are not out to deliberately kill and maim innocents, and not right now whereas our, Harris's and everyone's else's discussion concerns such fundamentalists and the dilemmas of the collateral damage that would be inflicted in fighting them. As a relatively trivial side-point, even killing all nuclear scientists is not going to deprive the general population of this knowledge, while undoubtedly depriving it of peaceful applications of atomic energy in producing electricity and radioisotopes for medical and agricultural applications. Also, we might as well say that we should kill politicians who are averse to signing test-ban treaties and who were responsible for the transfer of nuclear technology between countries, in terms of a contribution much more massive than that made by scientists. I think you will agree that such discussions don't get us very far. The fact is that the nuclear weapons are out there. We are concerned with people who are out to get them right now. We are not much concerned about what happened in the past. We want to prevent a nuclear terrorist attack right now. The real question is, how do we do this in the very near future? Harris is discussing such a scenario and trying to answer that question as well as raising other questions. So let's first get that other point out of the way. Now let's start analyzing Harris. He starts by saying:

"There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon"

Here he is talking about people just like the 9/11 hijackers who would get their hands on such weapons. I am sure you know that people in the State Department and the intelligence agencies spend their days and nights worrying about the same people, and they have been doing so for years before Sam Harris wrote his book. They worry about the Taliban who are 60 miles from Islamabad, and they worry about the ISI which is infested with fundamentalists. They would not worry so much if they thought that these people would be fazed by deterrence. Thus this worry and scenario is not specific to Sam Harris. If you want to read more, I will recommend "The Inheritance" by David Sanger in which he describes Pakistan's slipshod management of its nuclear arsenal.

Harris furthermore goes on to say:

"What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime-as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day-but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. "

Here Harris is referring to the now well-discussed fact documented by several government officials that Pakistan might have a spare nuclear arsenal that is mobile. In addition the Pakistani government refuses to disclose the location of its current arsenal and has contingency plans to move it around. Thus, if Islamic fundamentalists get their hands on these weapons, the scenario is likely to remain the same as both Harris and history itself note. The US has several precision weapons in its arsenal, but these would be of scant use if the location of the Pakistani arsenal is not known. Now consider that when the hunt for Osama bin Laden was on, more than one US official had considered the use of "small"tactical nuclear weapons in the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan. This was because of the great difficulty (still thought to be so) of scouting around in the maze of caves beneath the countryside where Bin Laden was hiding and attempting guerilla raids. Similar proposals had been put forward by the government during the Vietnam War. In fact they were considered seriously enough to ask JASON, the scientific advisory group, to author a report titled "Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia". And of course, both Truman and Eisenhower seriously flirted with the idea of using nukes in Korea. All of these excursions in Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea would have involved thousands and perhaps of millions of casualties of the kind Harris is mentioning. We may find these proposals abhorrent, but the point is that they were considered not by members of any particular political party or by rabid extremists or atheists but by relatively dispassionate officials in high echelons of the government. Therefore such kind of thinking is not limited to Harris, and predates his book by several years in many different contexts. Just like Harris, these officials considered this at one time or the other as one of the few available options. Their thinking involved introspection and they were aware, just like Harris is, that it would have been an "unthinkable crime", but also like Harris says they were thinking of these options as last resorts. Also note Harris's words, "may" which were converted to "should", a huge difference in terms of language.

Ok, on to the next paragraph:
"How would such an unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher's stone, and unicorns. That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen. Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly likely."

Now here, the real point Harris is making is to actually bear upon the incalculable harm that could be done, either by West or Middle East, simply by adhering to primitive concepts of faith. The focus here is on the great evils (indeed, Harris himself describes it as "perfectly insane" because it quite certainly is), even in terms of possibilities, that faith can engender in terms of action or retribution. As he says, we are told to realise the "horrible absurdity" that results from the consideration of such genocidal actions. And yet we are forced to consider them because we frequently deal with an enemy, exemplified by the 10 young men on 9/11, that by its actions imposes such a tortured analysis on us. So the goal here seems to point out the rather fantastic and unspeakable notions of utter horror that we are forced to consider, and all because of the fundamental problems with belief. Now you may disagree with this, but it is important to note that the essence of the argument in this paragraph is not the consideration of actual preemptive action but an analysis of the consequences of belief, and this is what this paragraph should be taken for, not as some explicit consideration involving the use of weapons of mass destruction. I think that's quite clear.

Finally, moving on to the last part:

We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side."

So here Harris is quite explicitly comparing the people who would contemplate use of such weaponry to the 9/11 hijackers; this quite clearly does not include all Muslim countries or all Muslims. The state department worries about the same people, for instance those who are part of the Taliban which is currently close to Islamabad. Harris also says that to prevent any unconscionable action on either their part or ours, it is the Muslim world itself that must take matters into its own hands and prevent such people from getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction. This is a point that has been made by dozens of other commentators who have nothing to do with the New Atheists; Ahmed Rashid, Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman for instance. The question that Harris raises is a dilemma. And not only is it a dilemma, it's a real-life dilemma that has enormous and immediate practical consequences. As I noted before, it has been faced in Asia and Afghanistan before by US presidents and they have also intensely grappled with the accompanying considerations of collateral damage and related issues. And it continues to be an active issue under scrutiny. To condense all of the above into a statement saying "Harris wants to kill millions of innocent Muslims by nuking them" ignores the details and nuance and is unbecoming of a rational and balanced debate.
# 97. Anthony McCarthy Says:
June 13th, 2009 at 3:04 pm

I will address those questions when I have had time to study and analyze the paragraph, it's become rather famous and I don't want to go over too much ground that has already been covered.

But in the mean time, what about my proposal? I should let you know that I have decided to post this exchange at my blog along with a more formal version of my counter proposal. Forgive the lack of italics, I'm reluctant to use them after the incident I set off here the other day.

Here is the final note to the exchange:

< < I will point out that the proposal to kill the scientists who would be capible of building the nuclear weapons, which Sam Harris is willing to murder tens of millions of innocent civilians in a day to prevent being deployed, would be a far smaller number of murders than what Harris and many of his new atheist admirers on the blogs contemplate.

And it would have the benefit of preventing their being built. We could threaten to wipe out any country which we suspected of having a weapons program with our nuclear stockpiles right now. We could tell them unless they handed over all of their relevant scientists, physicists, chemists, and engineers so we could test them for competence and liquidate them, we will kill everyone. I suspect that any country faced with obliteration would be willing to make that trade. Or at least the second one would.

My proposal is contingent on people finding Sam Harris' proposal reasonable enough to take seriously. I believe mine is the more reasonable since it is preemptive and it is also far less drastic in the numbers of people killed. And, as Sam Harris' doesn't, it targets those most responsible for endangering us. The scientists and engineers producing the weapons in the first place. >>

http://anthonymic.blogspot.com/

I will note that I am quite as serious about this as Harris and those who agree with him are. I have to be, considering what they deem to be perfectly acceptable.
# 98. Anthony McCarthy Says:
June 13th, 2009 at 3:06 pm

Oh, I should note, I'm at a remote computer right now and can't post to my blog from here. I'll add these two comments when I go home tonight.
# 99. Curious Wavefunction Says:
June 13th, 2009 at 3:43 pm

We certainly can propose that the Taliban hand their scientific experts over to us. I doubt whether the proposal would work. No harm in trying though.

# 100. Anthony McCarthy Says:
June 13th, 2009 at 4:45 pm

Does the Taliban have a nuclear program?

Since Iran and North Korea are the two countries most in the news for having active or potential or actual nuclear programs, and North Korea is suspected of selling nuclear technology, I think they are actually more likely to be a problem of the kind Harris foresees as necessitating nuclear conflagration. And they have the virtue of having relatively locatable nuclear installations and governmental centers to target.

I am trying to remember if Harris used North Korea, which had been in the news as the major concern for developing nuclear weapons in the near future as he began his career in anti-religious invective.. Though, as I told you I have to wait to borrow from the library. If you have Harris at hand, you could tell me if he proposed targeting North Korea. I believe the catastrophic "Axis of Evil" speech might have predated the paragraph in question. I really would like to know if he included North Korea in his proposed first strike targets.

(To be continued.)
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This is the exchange to date. I will post the rest of it, if it continues and will post an analysis of the paragraph Curious Wavefunction quotes in comment #83

Science Without Physical Evidence, Dawkins Brings Us Back To The Middle Ages.

2009-06-10T02:09:00.000-07:00

Note: This is post is an edited version of an August 02, 2007 piece from my old blog. Back then, I’d have less direct experience of the new atheists and held back a few points. I have decided in the face of this controversy at Jason Rosenhouses blog to include some points about Dawkins’ other, proposed, evidence free “science” as well. I will point out, if anyone is as to any doubt about the intellectual bankruptcy of the new atheism, that Dawkins was the Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and a Senior Editor of Free Inquiry when he wrote the bizarre article which first appeared there.

It was considered sound enough to be reposted at secularhumanism.org. Humanism clearly isn’t what it once was, either. Dawkins in a display of typical arrogance began his article “A cowardly flabbiness of the intellect afflicts otherwise rational people.... “ before attacking Stephen J. Gould. Irony is never far off when Richard Dawkins is speaking.

"Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question." Richard Dawkins

The first thing to notice about this odd passage is "Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide....". Why "whether"? Its an absolute fact that there is no physical evidence available. None. No medical records, not even skeletal fragments. No physical remains of the woman or son or a possible human father in question are available nor is their possibly surviving lineage known. It's unlikely in the extreme that those will ever be identified. Why try to obscure the fact that there is none of the evidence necessary to examine the question with science when it is indisputable that there isn't any? So, Dawkins proposes examining the question scientifically without any physical evidence. He proposes determining the paternity of a child without anything to go on, whatsoever.*

Perhaps somewhat more understandable, since it's Dawkins, he says that you can deal with the assertion of something that is claimed to have happened miraculously, outside the usual order of things and exactly once in the entire history of the world in the remote past, with science.

Dawkins, who has been one of the major figures in evolutionary psychology, which is based in making up creation myths and inventing allegedly beneficial adaptations, inventing scenarios amounting to fictional sociological and cultural anthropological field observations in the process, might be predisposed to figure you can do without that troublesome, and aggravatingly unavailable, physical evidence. So he’s never been one to be troubled by the kind of “science” you get when you fill in for those. He’s also the inventor of the bizarre idea of memes, which has been almost universally rejected by scientists and other people who think.

With the claims made by those who believe in the Virgin Birth, even argument by analogy can't address it. When an event is claimed to be unique, there is no possibility of making a comparison with another or even every other event proposed to be similar. Any scientific comparison with any other event would be irrelevant to the claims of a miracle unless you had physical evidence of it**

The total lack of evidence and the claim of uniqueness renders it clearly and most certainly NOT a question science can deal with. And this from the Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Certainly among the first things to understand about science are when there isn't enough evidence to practice it and when there is. Not that that hasn’t stopped him in the past, however.

Much as it must frustrate those who would like to deal with some religious questions with science, much cannot be. They might not like that fact but that is just too bad. When the physical evidence necessary to study those is lost to history or non-existent, that is simply impossible. Pretending that you can proceed without the evidence it is dishonest and, beyond doubt, unscientific. You can believe or not believe the claims but using the prestige of the name science to back up your assertions can be done honestly only under specific conditions. It also carries a serious responsibility.

No one has to believe in the Virgin Birth, this short piece isn't about that. This is about how one of the most famous and arrogant personalities of science can get away with saying something so stunningly absurd. With his status in contemporary culture, it's just amazing that a person holding a position like Dawkins' conveniently ignores something so basic to science.

If biologists are content with having Dawkins being the face of their science, they are exchanging short term glamor for long term problems. It is growing clearer that in the political climate in democracies that science can't support the dead weight of extraneous ideologies unnecessary for it. I will make a prediction that you can check out later, if Dawkins truly becomes the face of evolution it will continue to face fierce opposition by many of those he insults gratuitously. Its research funding will not be secure. In the face of his arrogant condescension, a large percentage of the public will not understand the science or want to.

* While it might be fun to point out, going into the need to give God a paternity test only heightens the apparent absurdity of Dawkins claim that this is "a strictly scientific question. Science not only can't deal with these kinds of things, it makes a mockery of science to try it.

**. Your only hope to determine the accuracy of a claim of a miracle is to look at whatever evidence of the specific event is available and see if the claimed result happened. Modern claims of, for example, miraculous cures of physical diseases, could, very possibly, be investigated by science but only by examination of the physical evidence. Without that, science can't be used to investigate the claim.

The New Atheism As A New Dark Age by Anthony McCarthy

2009-06-09T05:01:00.000-07:00

Are the ScienceBlogs supposed to be a place where people can go to find out more about science and reason? Is it unreasonable to ask a ScienceBlogger with a PhD in Mathematics, who teaches mathematics at a university, to clear up a disagreement about his subject on the thread of his blog?

The question is whether or not mathematical probability could deal with the proposal that Jesus was the only begotten Son of God, conceived by miraculous means and born to the Virgin Mary. What are the odds of The Virgin Mary conceiving a child by the Holy Spirit and giving birth to the only begotten Son of God, an event held by those who believe it to have happened exactly once in all of history.

I thought probability couldn’t honestly come up with the odds of that happening, apparently some of the new atheist faithful at the blog of Jason Rosenhouse PhD thought it could. I had pointed out exactly why science couldn’t deal with the question on the thread.*

Having had enough of trying to reason it out with the new atheists on his blog, I asked Jason Rosenhouse to settle the question by either telling us how it could be done or to say that it wasn’t possible to apply probability mathematics to that claim. If he thinks it can, would he sign his name to an attempt?

In the process of participating in the thread discussion this request was made in, it became clear to me that the new atheist program is a manifest failure. All over the blogs, the knowledge of the most basic requirements of science and logic demonstrated by the new atheists who post comments there, proves that they are generally quite ignorant of those. In many cases they are abysmally ignorant and as ready to spout their clueless blather as the most ignorant religious fundamentalists. If they can spout it on ScienceBlogs, without having their many errors corrected by others reading it, what does that tell you about the general culture there?

Many of the fundamentalists at least have the excuse that they’re not trying to pass themselves off as practitioners of science.

Is the level of science knowledge demonstrated by the new atheists of the blogs really what the new atheists are aiming for? Because it looks more like the dark ages to me, complete with sectarian bigotry and irrational hatred and fear by those who know better, correcting the most absurd error.

I thought that some other people might be interested in this question. Pass it on, if you think it’s interesting.

* 81 They are at odds because the scientific process by which one arrives at an understanding of the formation of, say, the blood clotting system is fundamentally *incompatible* with the theological process one uses to arrive at the conclusion that Jesus was the product of a Virgin birth.

I'm glad you used th Virgin birth, which I don't happen to believe in [see below], because it's such a good example of why you can't subject it to science.

1. There is no physical evidence to examine 2. It is held to have happened miraculously 3. It is held to have happened once in history

No evidence means no evidence that could identify a human father.

It happened miraculously, which means there is no way to explain how it couldn't have happened.

It is held to have happened once in history. As a unique event you could not debunk it by pointing to another or even every other human birth in history.

There is absolutely no reason you should believe it, as I said I don't, but any statement that you can subject the actual assertion to science only shows that you lack any real understanding of science.

[Note: I should point out I don’t believe in the literal truth of the story. I fully believe in the allegorical truth of it.]

Angel's Advocate?

2009-06-09T02:16:00.000-07:00

Not really, as I said in this ongoing back and forth, I don’t believe in the literal truth of the traditional Christian belief in the Virgin Birth of Jesus. I do think it has allegorical truth but that’s got nothing to do with whether or not it literally happened and it is most definitely not a question that could be dealt with by science.

I am advocating honesty by people who set themselves up as the champions of reason and science. It all started when I pointed out that Jason Rosenhouse had made a big mistake in his post about what Jerry Coyne has said about whether or not science refutes religious beliefs. Of course Coyne has, and, as I’ve come to see, he’s tried to give himself cover for it as he asserts it.
This started when “Divalent” brought up the Virgin Birth. Something I wrote on when Richard Dawkins made some remark about it being a question that could be settled with science. Here’s the record as copied from Jason Rosenhouses’ blog. Not the end where I have challenged him to come clean and settle the mathematical issue raised by one of the new atheists about subjecting the claim to probability.

80

"How do they come to be "at odds" if there is no point of refutation by science, ..."

They are at odds because the scientific process by which one arrives at an understanding of the formation of, say, the blood clotting system is fundamentally *incompatible* with the theological process one uses to arrive at the conclusion that Jesus was the product of a Virgin birth.

If someone uses both processes, they must compartmentalize. Using one process in the other's arena would produce a different outcome: an incorrect understanding of the origin of the blood clotting mechanism (and age of the earth, structure of the universe, etc), and (at best) agnosticism regarding such questions as Jesus's virgin birth and the supremacy of the God Zeus.

Posted by: Divalent | June 7, 2009 4:26 PM
81

They are at odds because the scientific process by which one arrives at an understanding of the formation of, say, the blood clotting system is fundamentally *incompatible* with the theological process one uses to arrive at the conclusion that Jesus was the product of a Virgin birth.

I'm glad you used th Virgin birth, which I don't happen to believe in, because it's such a good example of why you can't subject it to science.

1. There is no physical evidence to examine
2. It is held to have happened miraculously
3. It is held to have happened once in history

No evidence means no evidence that could identify a human father.
It happened miraculously, which means there is no way to explain how it couldn't have happened.
It is held to have happened once in history. As a unique event you could not debunk it by pointing to another or even every other human birth in history.

There is absolutely no reason you should believe it, as I said I don't, but any statement that you can subject the actual assertion to science only shows that you lack any real understanding of science.

And, as is evident as this futile salvage operation goes on, no understanding of honesty.

Coyne's meaning couldn't have been plainer, as the rest of his relevant writing on the subject shows.

Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | June 7, 2009 5:27 PM
82

No evidence means no evidence that could identify a human father. It happened miraculously, which means there is no way to explain how it couldn't have happened. It is held to have happened once in history. As a unique event you could not debunk it

By that standard, science has nothing to say about my belief that all government officials have been secretly and undetectably replaced by clones who are controlled by undetectable mind rays from undetectable aliens in undetectable spaceships.

Does your definition of science really involve an inability to reject delusions?

Posted by: Tulse | June 7, 2009 10:13 PM
83

"It is held to have happened once in history. "

by whom? by you? this is the worst of your ill-informed mishmashed ideas. The whole christ-redeemer story is copied from many many earlier myths.

and the point is that when people make claims that cannot be measured or disproved, Science can still say "that we have, say, five ways of measuring displacement in time and space, and three ways of measuring heredity and parental relationships... and some experience in telling lies and derived stories from truth...

and all of this sounds like crap...."

"There is absolutely no reason you should believe it, as I said I don't, but any statement that you can subject the actual assertion to science only shows that you lack any real understanding of science. "

and you lack any understanding at all. real or imagined...

Posted by: Kevin (nyc) | June 7, 2009 11:26 PM
84

"Coyne's meaning couldn't have been plainer, as the rest of his relevant writing on the subject shows. "

I see. So, when Coyne goes to great lengths in one passage to explain precisely what he means by a phrase, the correct way to interpret the meaning of the phrase is to go to other passages that are relevant (in your opinion) and glean the answer you want from them, with you magic meaning finder!

You study literature, don't you? Reconstructionalism, or possible post-modernisn?

Posted by: Seth Manapio | June 8, 2009 12:30 AM
85

Tulse,

"By that standard, science has nothing to say about my belief that all government officials have been secretly and undetectably replaced by clones who are controlled by undetectable mind rays from undetectable aliens in undetectable spaceships."

You forgot to say one of the magic words, "supernatural" or "miracle". Those are the words that exempt any claim from scientific scrutiny. Insert the word "supernatural" somewhere in that claim and you'll be right.

Presumably, if a scientist gets an experimental result that appears to falsify the hypothesis he was hoping to establish, he can just say, "I'll assume that was a supernatural event (or miracle), so it doesn't conflict with my hypothesis. My hypothesis remains unfalsified." Great way to do science!

Posted by: Richard Wein | June 8, 2009 3:18 AM
86

"It is held to have happened once in history. "by whom? by you?

By the people who believe that "Jeusus Christ is the only begotten Son of the Father", in other words people who believe in the Virgin Birth. Of whom I am NOT one as I said twice in that comment. I'm beginning to think the new atheism is a product of faulty reading and science education in the English speaking world.

Tulse, if you really believe that you might be able to find out by examining the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE if you could get some. I'd like to ask any REAL SCIENTISTS who might read this if this basic misunderstanding of the absolute basis of science by the new atheism isn't in some way troubling to you. Because it's pretty disturbing to witness it even up into those who have held endowed chairs for the "public understanding of science".

Seth Manapio, you do realize that if Coyne has said different, and conflicting things in this one review, he's guilty of one or more of a range of breeches of scholarship, inconsistency, incoherence, duplicity, ..... And I'll ask any scholars who might be reading this to look at the blogs to see that this problem is rampant among the new atheists there and is not seen as a problem when the stars of new atheism are revealed to have done it. As this thread shows.

Doesn't it trouble any of you that the new atheism is so shallow, so dishonest and so bigoted?

Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | June 8, 2009 3:51 AM
87

Anthony McCarthy

Virgin Birth has only happened once? Really? Christianity is the only religion that has a claim on virgin birth?

Posted by: ken adler | June 8, 2009 4:00 AM
88

Richard Wein, what would happen if a scientist published a paper that said or contained reasoning to the effect: I'll assume that was a supernatural event (or miracle), so it doesn't conflict with my hypothesis. My hypothesis remains unfalsified."

Of course, you were being factitious, but there isn't anything to keep someone from publishing a paper that does that now. Of course it would be a paper with one author, of very few, because no one would join on to a paper that said that, or if they found their name had been put on they'd threaten legal action to have it removed and a retraction published. And it would be a vanity publication because no reputable reviewed journal would accept it. And I'm certain that any real scientist who happened to read it would make it a laughing stock in the field it purported to cover.

It's remarkable that Gregor Mendel, or any of a host of other well known scientists who believed in the Virgin Birth or miracles in general seems to not have used the miraculous in a science paper in the modern era.

And, of course the reason they haven't done that is because they realize, as all real scientists do that science is about the normal, typical, non-miraculous phenomena of the material universe without recourse to explanations of supernatural intervention. If they didn't realize that, they wouldn't be scientists. And that works in the other direction too.

If the peer review and other normal mechanisms of the scientific community can't be relied on to maintain the integrity of science when religion is widely believed in it would have not only ceased to exist long ago, it never would have begun in the first place.

I guess I'm guilty of faith in the normal mechanisms of science which are in the hands of scientists and the editors of their journals. It seems to have worked relatively well.

Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | June 8, 2009 4:04 AM
89

Virgin Birth has only happened once? Really? Christianity is the only religion that has a claim on virgin birth?

Ken adler, the topic, which was introduced by Divalent and which I responded to was specifically "that Jesus was the product of a Virgin birth." in comment 80. That was the only claim of a virgin birth, which was under discussion here. That is the one which is held by its believers to have happened only once in history, by its believers.

And there's another common error of new atheists, they don't realize that in order to discuss a proposition, you have to discuss what it is that is proposed. If you don't you can't test that proposition for its coherence and certainly not find out if it could be refuted by science.

You can, however, look at something like the claim "that Jesus was the product of a Virgin birth" as a proposition of history or theology and then you could compare it to other stories of virgin births because the standards of evidence in those methods of investigation would be able to take that into consideration. That part of the belief that it had happened only once, might be mistaken or the entire thing could be the result of the adoption of another culture's myth to make a cultural point or to make a moral point. Which is what I happen to believe is the reason for the story of the Virgin Birth of Jesus based on having read Crossan. But, that ain't science.

Serious history is another discipline that is dismissed as unimportant by the new atheism.

Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | June 8, 2009 4:16 AM
90

"Serious history is another discipline that is dismissed as unimportant by the new atheism."

That's quite a brush stroke you have there.

Isn't evolution and geology a search for the true history of the earth? Since the "new atheists" are largely scientists, how can your statement possible be true?

But your basically saying that just because someone says something totally crazy is true and there is no way to disprove it, I still have to take their position under consideration? Excuse me while I look for a flying teapot.

Posted by: ken adler | June 8, 2009 5:45 AM
91

That's quite a brush stroke you have there.

I haven't seen anyone in the new atheism bothered by the absurdly ahistorical writings of Dawkins, Harris and other new atheist bright lights. I'd talk about broad brushes there but it's more like spray cans and bigoted graffiti with them. You show me an influential new atheist critique of the pathetic handling of history by its favorite authors and I'll reconsider.

Oh the blogs, among their acolytes, history, as accuracy, is considered beneath those who have "science" on their side.

Isn't evolution and geology a search for the true history of the earth?

No, they are physical sciences studying physical phenomena that don't have an historical record of the kind that the academic study of the history of human culture. Which is what I was clearly talking about as anyone who took history seriously would know.

Conflation is another habit of the new atheism, no doubt a custom that was borrowed from the social sciences in which that is the usual manner of doing things.

Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | June 8, 2009 6:01 AM
92

Sorry, I cut that sentence off in editing.

No, they are physical sciences studying physical phenomena that don't have an historical record of the kind that the academic study of the history of human culture is based in.

Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | June 8, 2009 6:04 AM
93

Jason wrote: Notice that [Coyne] says only that science suggests the impossibility of human asexual reproduction or life after death, not the absolute impossibility of those things.

I think this wording confuses a bit some things you expressed more clearly in your original post:

- Some of the things believed by most religious adherents in the U.S. today conflict with scientific/naturalistic explanations, i.e., they are miraculous in nature (and are central tenets of their faiths precisely because of that miraculous nature).

- One can accommodate at one and the same time both a "scientific" way of thinking that demands factual and logical support for one's conclusions, and on the other hand a "religious" or "faith-based" way of thinking that believes in the possibility, indeed the past occurrence of, supernatural events. Those who think of themselves as religious but allow for the factual and logical truth of evolution fall into this category.

- Such accommodation, though possible, ain't easy.

Posted by: Jud | June 8, 2009 7:22 AM
94

Jud, I did read the post, and I've read Coyne. If I was a new atheist I'd talk about moving goal posts at this point.

Thinking about the comments left here since last night.
The only thing this discussion is proving is that the new atheism is anti-scientific and illogical.

If want to debunk the belief that " Jesus was the only begotten Son of God The Father, Born of the Virgin Mary" you have to deal with what is believed, which includes that it was a miraculous event that happened once in the entire history of, at least, the world.

I've gone into why science couldn't do refute that, specific belief, without having any physical evidence.

Now you want to talk about other stories of virgin births in history to try to wriggle out of the unscientific claim that you can debunk the traditional Christian belief in the Virgin Birth of Jesus.

OK. What part of the Virgin Birth of Jesus could be debunked scientifically. There is one part that could be debunked but I don't think the new atheists would care for how that could be done.

You would have to find one or more verifiable, natural, virgin human births to refute the claim that A virgin birth happened once in history. Which would mean that the one Christians believe in was not the only virgin birth.

But that still leaves the birth of Jesus untouched because there is no way to prove that Jesus was not "the only begotten Son of God the Father" conceived miraculously by a virgin. His birth could still be the only one that fulfills all of the points in the traditional description. Science could only refute part of it by finding another miraculous, unnatural, virgin birth, which science can't do.
Well, there could be a way to test a modern claim like that, but not without a court order and a lot of tabloid style research.

You can't scientifically refute what a belief by changing the proposition you attempt to debunk or you're not debunking the proposition. That's a fundamental requirement of logic and science depends on logic. You have to discuss the proposition as it is claimed. And, unless you can show how it could be done without altering the proposed miracle in this case, I'm afraid, you're not going to be able to touch that with science, not without violating the requirements of science.
The only possible way to do it with science would be to have actual, physical specimens from Jesus and his mother and, perhaps, the real human father or a very close relative of his.

It's scandalous that the new atheists on a ScienceBlog aren't bothered by such an obvious and clear cut call by their own for the violation of the requirements of science and logic. It's scandalous that scientists wouldn't point out that they want to. ,

These are called "ScienceBlogs" for some reason, aren't they?

Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | June 8, 2009 7:46 AM
95

Tulse, if you really believe that you might be able to find out by examining the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE if you could get some.

No, Anthony, you clearly don't understand -- the aliens running this conspiracy are so powerful (indeed, from our puny perspective they might be called "omnipotent") that they have wiped out all physical evidence. Don't you get it, man? Don't you see?! Our world is being manipulated by omnipotent beings and YOU CAN'T TELL!!!

I'd like to ask any REAL SCIENTISTS who might read this if this basic misunderstanding of the absolute basis of science by the new atheism isn't in some way troubling to you.

While you're at it, ask some REAL SCIENTISTS to explain the notion of probabilistic nature of truth claims, and how science has moved away from the notion of certainty.

But that still leaves the birth of Jesus untouched because there is no way to prove that Jesus was not "the only begotten Son of God the Father" conceived miraculously by a virgin.

And there's no way to prove that Jesus was not King of the Leprechauns, or Mr. Bojangles, or the shooter on the grassy knoll. Should we take all of those claims equally seriously?

Posted by: Tulse | June 8, 2009 8:04 AM
96

Tulse, you, like some of the biggest names in the new atheism, are in serious need of studying a basic, college levelm text book on probability. Do yourself a favor and do that.

As I implied the first time I talked to you, the rest of this is too silly to respond to. Though I'm not unhappy to have a specimen of typical blog thread new atheist reasoning for people might want to contrast with what I said.

Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | June 8, 2009 8:48 AM
97

bah! you have no arguments you just go on and on with your insults.

We've heard the same virgin birth stories in all sorts of mythologies. Yet science has no evidence of parthenogenesis in mammals... unlike gila monsters for instance.

and you say science can't provide an opinion on this issue.

Well I think you are wrong. Science tells us about things that happen and why. In this case there is a birth and science can tell us exactly ONE method for this to happen (with a few variants).

Seems like a sound scientific basis for rejecting a non-sperm origin for this described person.

Posted by: Kevin (NYC) | June 8, 2009 1:06 PM
98

bah! you have no arguments you just go on and on with your insults.

And they said that irony died. But they never heard new atheists whine when someone held them to their own standards.

We've heard the same virgin birth stories in all sorts of mythologies. Yet science has no evidence of parthenogenesis in mammals... unlike gila monsters for instance.

Talk about your moving goal posts. And not getting the most basic fact of logic, that you've got to deal with the proposition as it is.

Why not go to the hymenoptera too while you're at it sci-boy.

Science tells us about things that happen and why.

Yeah, I can see that in your brilliant refutation above.

If there are any real scientists in the audience, here you go. This is where the new atheism is going to bring science. Right back to Aristotle and the scholastics. And those are the clued in ones.

I should confess. I came back here to copy this exchange to post on the new blog I've started to document this pure brilliance. I didn't expect this bonus.

Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | June 8, 2009 1:20 PM
99

Anthony wrote: Jud, I did read the post, and I've read Coyne. If I was a new atheist I'd talk about moving goal posts at this point.

Anthony, if you got the impression somewhere in my comment to Jason that I was referring to anything you wrote, that would be incorrect. I was simply telling Jason that I thought the portion of one of his comments from which I quoted was better explained in his original post. Nothing to do with you, I'm afraid.

Posted by: Jud | June 8, 2009 1:38 PM
100

"Talk about your moving goal posts"

ha ha ha guess you don't know what the word means and have to resort to insults!

how the weather under that bridge?

Posted by: kevin (NYC) | June 8, 2009 2:27 PM
101

Jud, I'm sorry about that. If you look at the time stamps it was at the end of an insomniac night.

Kevin, maybe I'm just taking Richard Dawkins briliant advice, now that he and Coyne are even going after their fellow atheists like E. Scott.

http://richarddawkins.net/article,3767,Truckling-to-the-Faithful-A-Spoonful-of-Jesus-Helps-Darwin-Go-Down,Jerry-Coyne#368197

I'm wondering, for the true faithful-faithless. Jason Rosenhouse, tell us how to apply probability mathematics to the odds of there being an only begotten Son of God the Father miraculously conceived and born of a Virgin. Now that the assertion by your fans has been made, I want to know what the math would look like. Remember, it's a miraculous birth that happened once in the history of the world.

Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | June 8, 2009 2:43 PM
102

Jason Rosenhouse, I really was serious about asking about applying probability to the question of the Virgin Birth of Jesus as it is believed in. I think it's a rather important question to settle as some of the new atheists seem to think it can be done.

Can probability be applied to this assertion and how would it be done? Or are they mistaken?

Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | June 8, 2009 6:07 PM
103

"Remember, it's a miraculous birth that happened once in the history of the world"

you're wierd. why do you keep saying that? People say it happened many times. go list the gods that had virgin births..

I'll start

"Athena leaped from Zeus's head, fully grown and armed - with a shout!"

or

"According to Graves, Hesiod (c. 700 BC) relates that Athena was a parthenogenous daughter of Metis, wisdom or knowledge, a Titan who ruled the fourth day and the planet Mercury."

oh there's that word again!!

Posted by: Kevin (nyc) | June 8, 2009 9:32 PM
104

Jason Rosenhouse, I really think as a mathematician you owe it to your readers to clear this point up. Can the Virgin Birth, as it is laid out in traditional Christian belief be the subject of mathematical probability. Would you be willing to put your name on an attempt to do so. Either you should say how it could be done or you owe it to your readers to say it's not possible.

You wouldn't want them to linger in logical error would you? Or isn't that the goal of the new atheists? To dispel error?

More generally, are you proud of the non-science converts to the new atheism as they express themselves on the blogs? Is their understanding of science and logic the one which is the goal of the new atheists? I will be posting this on my blog. It's not a challenge yet but it could be.

Posted by: Anthony McCArthy | June 9, 2009 4:52 AM
105

Kevin (nyc) I've already addressed that point in one of the recent comments, where you can review it if you didn't understand it. I don't have time for you guys to waste with bringing up points already covered.

Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | June 9, 2009 4:54 AM

The New Atheism:

2009-06-07T15:24:00.000-07:00

Is it a symptom of a breakdown in science education or in the teaching of reading, or both?

Or maybe it’s the result of watching too much low-grade sci-fi.

The wanna bees of the ScienceBlogs and their ilk match a level of arrogance and ignorance that is truly stunning, the scientists and other “brites” of the movement match them for sheer stupid.

Whatever it is, it’s got to be about the stupidest fad of the decade.

I’m thinking of documenting the stupid things New Atheists say, they supply an endless, steaming, pile of it.

OK Matt Do Make Your Best Stab

2009-06-06T14:57:00.000-07:00