When I say “worldview” I’m thinking about where these people stand on the big questions of human existence. “Worldview” as I understand it doesn’t necessarily encompass every little thing. It’s probably true that most atheists don’t think that pure reason can be used to decide whether Chopi’s music was better than Schubert’s, as Ayn Rand seemed to think. But that misses the point.
I can take two books, such as B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two and Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers. Both authors make explicit claims that they are presenting solid facts based on sound science, yet they clash in the facts that they present. One is sure that human behavior is shaped entirely by instinct while the other denies the existence of instinct. One says that private property is the key to prosperity and happiness, while the other insists it destroys prosperity and happiness. Likewise they clash on morals, philosophy, and more. Further, I could easily dig up a dozen or more books from the same period, all claiming to be based on science, and all clashing with each other. The same would still be true today. So when I hear someone assert, as someone did earlier in the thread, “Put two scientists in the room together and they’re going to find fundamental ground they agree on. …So all scientists are deriving their knowledge from the same source - reality - and they’re going to come up with common beliefs because of this”, I can’t believe that because it contradicts what I see.
My personal observations come mostly from the fields of math and theoretical physics, since those are the fields I was in. The most famous example is string theory, a paradigm that’s taken hold in physics without experimental evidence. However, understanding the problems with string theory is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. In conversations that I’ve had with physicists, if they’re personal and ‘off the record’, they’ve expressed large doubts about big chunks of quantum theory. Similarly in mathematics, I’ve spoken with a number of mathematicians willing to criticize whole fields of their own profession as nonsensical. It’s worth remember that professional mathematicians and scientists are a self-selecting group. Those who enter the field but then find themselves disappointed with the lack of rigor are likely to leave. Somewhere around half of all grad students who enter the technical fields don’t make it to the Ph.D., though obviously not all drop-outs leave for that reason. Those who remain through grad school, post doc, and the tenure process are the ones who can accept what they find.
This isn’t just something that I happened to observe. For instance, T. H. Kuhn studied scientists at work and produced The Structure of Scientific Revolutions–there’s a good synopsis of it here–arguing that all scientists work within a paradigm, and that the nature of the paradigm causes believers to shape their research results to fit it. This New Yorker article has a good summary of some recent high-profile cases in which well-established results could not be reproduced.
You can technically not have an “official” belief about something you don’t have enough data for, but you still need some sort of working belief or test model. If you are driving and don’t have a map, you may think the next exit is likely to get you where you want to go, but you can’t be sure. It’s not an official belief, but it is a working one. Any decision you make is based on a belief you have, and not every belief has the luxury of sufficient data, but you still have to make decisions and take actions. Even inaction is a belief that there is little risk to that choice.
I think you’re overinterpreting the concepts of “common beliefs” and “based on”.
I don’t think anyone would attempt to argue that, say, Voltaire and Freud and Bertrand Russell agreed about everything. But I think it’s fair to claim that they had some common beliefs based on a shared rationalist-materialist epistemology. For example, they all believed that the earth orbited the sun and the moon orbited the earth, and believed that the models of Newtonian physics at least to a large extent explained those phenomena.
Such common beliefs are fully “based on” rationalist-materialist “scientific” epistemology in the sense that it’s the only thing they’re based on. Nobody with a scientific perspective uses any epistemological tool other than empirical science to explain the relative motions of the sun, moon and earth. And in using that tool on a well-understood problem like basic orbital revolution, nobody comes up with a substantially different answer. That’s the sense in which all scientifically-minded people really do have common ground about the nature of reality.
But that doesn’t mean that everything that scientifically-minded people believe is based exclusively on well-established scientific theories. Especially not when it comes to “the big questions of human existence” on issues like morals and philosophy. Just because writers may claim that their philosophical positions are based on science doesn’t mean that they’re derived only from scientific facts exclusively via scientific methods. So naturally we wouldn’t expect to find unanimity in their conclusions.
None of this really validates your claim that “a great deal of what is advanced as science” lacks support from empirical experimental evidence.
Certainly, a lot of relatively new areas in science, such as string theory, are still highly unsettled and insufficiently verified, and they may well be eventually abandoned in favor of more successful theories. (And the period of transition in changing from one dominant theoretical paradigm to another, as Kuhn described, is not always unanimous or flawlessly rational.) But the acknowledged uncertainty around the margin of existing bodies of scientific knowledge does not justify us in doubting the whole concept of scientific certainty in general. Just because string theory and parts of quantum theory are still controversial doesn’t call into question the validity of the equation F=ma, for example.
As for mathematics, that’s mostly irrelevant because pure mathematics is explicitly not about modeling reality, but rather about proving what consequences logically follow from accepting certain conditions on various precisely defined abstractions. For example, the fact that the generalized Poincare conjecture is true on differentiable manifolds in dimension 3 and false in dimension 7 holds good whether or not there actually exists a seventh dimension in physical space.
I teach in a mathematics department myself, and IME while it’s true that mathematicians often disagree about the merits of different philosophies of mathematics such as intuitionism or finitism, they usually have a pretty good consensus when it comes to the truth or falsehood of specific propositions. I would definitely be interested in knowing more about the criticisms by mathematicians of entire fields of mathematics as “nonsensical” that you claim to have encountered, because I don’t find that very plausible.
Oh come on. Science is an ongoing investigation. Human behavior has many components and a very high order of complexity. Of course there are still open questions in that field. But you won’t find many scientists disagreeing on what time the sun will rise on Tuesday, or what will result from the mixture of two chemicals under set conditions.
I do, they are simply ignored. I point out the ways that various claims about gods violate physical laws, that’s handwaved away. If I was speaking about anything else those would be considered perfectly valid disproofs; but as always religion is granted a double standard. I also point out the fact that since there are innumerable different mutually contradictory claims about gods, most must be false; that’s outright ignored.
No, I simply regard it as an irrelevant rhetorical trick. It is, again, a double standard; if someone else came on here and made a claim that violated the laws of physics (like plenty of conspiracy theorist and pseudoscience types do), their claims would be denied as impossible, and demands would be made for evidence that such physics-breaking events had occurred. But when a religious claim is made, suddenly it’s the person who points out that “it breaks the laws of physics and you have no evidence it ever happened” who is being unreasonable and irrational.
I get denounced as irrational and unreasonable and intolerant because I apply the same standards to religion that I and most people apply to everything else, instead of putting it in a protected box.
Because it’s irrelevant. If gods are supernatural beings, then yeah, of course natural laws don’t apply to them, pretty much by definition.
Sure, if you were speaking about anything to which physical laws were claimed to apply. If somebody comes around arguing for a god that’s a natural phenomenon subject to physical laws, I’ll back you up to the hilt in disputing that claim by means of physical arguments. But that’s not what most believers think that God is.
And rightly so, because a supernatural being is no more intrinsically constrained by rational logic than by physical law.
I entirely agree with you that these conditions make the concept of a supernatural being irrational. What they do not make it, however, is demonstrably false.
It’s not just you but a whole lot of atheists who automatically conflate the concepts of “rational” and “true”. Mind you, I’m not claiming that there’s any way to demonstrate that the two are not in fact the same: you are certainly free to make the assumption that nothing can be true except what is rational. Indeed, it’s quite a reasonable assumption. But it is an assumption, not a provable assertion.
You can’t use rationality to prove that rationality is the only valid source of knowledge and consequently that only entities conforming to rational criteria can exist. Because if there were any other valid source of knowledge, rationality wouldn’t be able to detect or test it. That fact, as Voyager notes, may be logically trivial and not very interesting. But it’s pretty important when it comes to evaluating the validity of “disproofs” of claims about irrational concepts such as gods.
Well, imaginary numbers are called that because, back when they were first introduced, the Old Guard dismissed them offhand as silly and “unrealistic”. The word “imaginary” was chosen and used in a derogatory way, because in the eyes of the likes of Descartes these numbers did not “really” exist. Hell, they disapproved of them specifically *because *imaginary numbers weren’t about modelling reality but exploring the consequences of set premises in the purely abstract.
So that’s one example. Of course, back then mathematics and physics were not quite as clearly dissociated as they are today.
Good point about the historical development of mathematics involving a lot of philosophical disputes. However, what ITR champion was talking about was “a number of mathematicians willing to criticize whole fields of their own profession as nonsensical” whom he personally had spoken with.
So unless he was calling up Descartes on the ouija board or something, I don’t think this is germane to his point.
Nonsense. That’s an excuse that was relatively recently created to handwave away the fact that such laws do rule out “supernatural” entities. And it doesn’t change the fact that if the subject wasn’t religion, no one would accept “natural laws don’t apply” as an excuse.
Then we can say nothing meaningful whatsoever about it and should ignore the whole issue. Even your own argument is self annihilating; if rationality does not apply, then your argument doesn’t.
Of course, this is again just a rhetorical gimmick that almost no one actually believes. Gods & religion are only “incomprehensible” as long as some skeptic is asking “why?” As soon as he’s gone, suddenly it all becomes comprehensible again.
Getting back to the OP, I’d draw the lines charitably, especially with popular or long-standing ideas. If millions of people say similar things, they may all be wrong, but they’re probably not stupidly wrong. Other people have minds too, and they may have caught something I missed. Of course, sometimes the irrationality is so outrageous it hits you in the face with a rubber chicken; but, barring that, I’d rather risk treating a few crazy notions with respect, than prematurely condemn possible good ideas, especially since people are prone to label ideas they disagree with as irrational, when really they just missed the point.
On science: I love it, but sometimes it’s not the right tool. No one is going to decide who to vote for this November by getting 100 Obamas and 100 Romneys, putting each of them in a model U.S., and taking a chi-squared of the results. That’s true of most decisions we have to make in everyday life: scientifically speaking, there’s insufficient data, but we have to make a decision anyway. And I wouldn’t give a license to someone who drove by solving the cars’ differential equations of motion, because he’d rear-end me while looking at his clipboard and calculator. I’d much rather trust someone who drives by intuition and gut instinct. If intuition and instinct are based on experience, following them is more rational than the scientific approach.
Almost all these arguments begin by restricting them to omnibenevolent deities, and they often end by saying they don’t apply to deities who are dicks. No one ever tried to demonstrate that the Greek gods don’t exist because of this argument. They never claimed to be all good.
Many people think the Christian god is omnibenevolent, so the argument of natural evil does apply there.
Not only this, but we seem to be evolutionarily wired to make irrational choices. The endowment effect makes something possessed by someone worth more to them than it is to someone who does not possess it - even if the owner only got it minutes before. Studies with chimps found a similar characteristic.
Even for cereal it has been shown that you are less likely to buy if the number of choices increase. Since most people don’t have time to compare nutrition information for every cereal on the shelves, I strongly suspect that the subset that is compared will be chosen based on packaging, etc.
I’ve got a better idea - take the Romney from the Mass days and the anti-Romney of today. Put them in a collider. The power generated from their mutual annihilation would power the US for years.
Odd - nearly everything I read by the proponents of string theory goes out of its way to explain the lack of experimental evidence and how provisional the hypothesis is. Opponents seem to claim that string theorists go well beyond the evidence, but the evidence is actually the equations so far.
Still, imagine a religious leader using the same caveats as a string theorist does. Instead we get “I believe with a perfect faith.”
You may also be confusing the science with the media reports about the science.
The science usually says something like “we thought X might be bad for you, so we followed this methodology to craft the following experiments, based on our examination of the results of those experiments, we observed the following, and our evidence suggests that there may be a connection where increasing X leads to poor outcomes”. Then the media reports “X is bad for you”, then someone else does more research, more experiments, more analysis, and has a similarly nuanced report that again gets mis-characterized/simplified by the media.
In many cases, the conclusions as stated by both scientists are indeed consistent with the evidence and observations.
I don’t care how recently it was invented (although in fact I’m skeptical of your timeline there: there are certainly discussions of different pramanas or epistemological categories in Sanskrit philosophy as far back as the early medieval period that suggest a real disjunction between natural and supernatural objects of knowledge).
The fact remains that magic != physics, and believers in deities or any other magical entities cannot be disproved when they claim that such entities transcend natural laws.
We can say nothing rationally meaningful about it, true. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t confuse not being able to discuss something in rationally meaningful terms with conclusively proving that it is false or nonexistent.
Tough shit. As honest debaters, we don’t get to reject a valid statement just because many people who make that statement secretly prefer to disregard it in favor of something much more illogical.
The point I made early on is about the definition of rational being oversimplified by the popular atheist argument of believing something that can’t be falsified. Whether it’s a popular opinion among atheists or not, that’s not the definition of rational. You didn’t really address the point, you just made the same assertion I’m challenging.
Reason, what is reasonable, has something to do with context. As I pointed out, all people have a belief system that consists of intellect and emotion. The plain facts, and how they interpret those facts through the lens of their experience and , knowledge base, etc. All people operate on some degree of faith, or trust. We obviously don’t verify every piece of information that comes our way. It’s necessarily irrational to believe information we receive from trusted sources or to believe what the majority of our social group believes.
That is especially true if we hold certain unproven beliefs as merely possible , or our current belief, acknowledging that our belief system is a work in progress.
Holding things we can’t possibly know with certainty as absolute truths can be considered irrational, as can holding things as true once we’ve been made aware of strong contradictory evidence.
If we are going to judge religious beliefs with the same standards we judge all beliefs {which is the correct thing to do} let’s also judge faith , or trust, and the belief systems of humans by one standard as well. IOW , religious faith is not a separate and different mechanism from the kind of faith and trust agnostics and atheists have. It simply has a different outcome.
Speaking of average people, not scientists, we all operate by assuming certain information we receive is true. It’s not an irrational act. My suggestion is that people who accept certain beliefs because they were taught them , and those beliefs are reinforced by their group, are not necessarily being irrational. OTOH, if they NEVER question any of those beliefs , or embrace them in spite of being exposed to serious factual challenges , then irrational can be an accurate term.
What is rational depends to some degree on the context of the individual and is not a one size fits all definition.