Wishful thinking and the Science of Religion

Great Debates
41

[QUOTE=mswas]
Your comment on agnosticism doesn’t make sense to me. How is it a contradiction to say, “I don’t know.”?
[/quote]

I should have been more clear. There are different currents of agnosticism. I was specifically referring to what is commonly known as “strong agnosticism”

– highlights mine.

While I have no quarrel with the “weak” description as it approaches my own feelings on the topic (again, leaving all man-made religious out of the equation. Strong atheist towards those), like I said, I find that it’s an unsupportable assertion to claim that we will never know the truth about our origins – be they biological or deistic. Meaning how can anyone possibly know what we can or can’t learn in the future – or for as long as humans are around? Makes no sense unless you’re Nostradamus.

Glad to heat that. Feeling’s mutual though I’ll quietly bow-out now since there isn’t much input I can shed onto the debate itself.

Thanks.

42

[QUOTE=lekatt]
Well, Yes, I have, the belief that I was created by my brain.
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, I think that’s a stupid idea too. Which idea are you misrepresenting with this sentence?

43

Hey tom, whereabouts in NE Ohio are you? I have family in Cleveland and would like an excuse to buy you a beer.

44

[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
Hey tom, whereabouts in NE Ohio are you? I have family in Cleveland and would like an excuse to buy you a beer.
[/QUOTE]
Geauga County, southern tier, along the US-422 corridor.

45

[QUOTE=mswas]
I thought you made some good rebuttals, but generally he’s right about the studying of religion.

  1. Anthropologists think they learn more about a religion than they actually do.
  2. Psychology is a pseudo-science at best. Try reading some Lacan for a while. He’d have us all being dead husks, our passion disconnected completely from action.

[/quote]

I thought we were talking about studying whether religion was correct. That’s out of the realm of sociology and anthropology. One can study a tribal religion (or a Western religion) without believing in it. I don’t read much anthropology, but I believe that it is not considered correct to knock the religion you’re studying.

It is true that an outsider will always miss some stuff. I direct you to two satires, “Digging the Weans” from The Worm Returns and Motel of the Mysteries both of which show how archaeologists of the future don’t quite understand what they find. On the other hand, someone inside a religion or culture might not be able to see it as clearly as someone outside.

Such as? You’d be surprised at what can be measured. When doing six sigma there are lots of times you can’t measure stuff directly (like customer perception) so you do a survey. That can be measured.

I accept it not on faith, but because it works.

The reason that no one studies this is that it makes no falsifiable claims. What can be studied is the origin and spread of religion, and whether the claims made by Christianity that can be falsified are.

Really? Of the books in my library on religion, 99% of them are by believers. There are plenty of religious scientists already. Now, there are fewer than in the general population, but not because any science class teaches anything negative about religion. We might wonder if this is an effect of being trained in logical reasoning. That highly recognized scientists, who’d you think would be better at this than average, are even less religious.

Most scientists don’t care. I think Dawkins is vocal because of the level of crackpot mail he gets about evolution.

Are you confusing psychology with psychiatry? If you say Freudian psychiatry, or the Jungian variety, are examples of pseudo-science, I’d tend to agree. But both my kids are psych majors (one in grad school on a PhD program) and they both spend a lot of time in the lab doing reproducible experiments. The brain is so complicated, and there is such variation among people, that you almost always get statistical instead of absolute results.

I used to believe in God. Never in Christianity, though. Belief in god for many people is a habit, acquired from parents. The culture might change belief.
Having read Dante, I know of Christianity’s complete cosmology. Straight from god (or deduced from the Bible) complete, and totally wrong. If the cosmology were accurate before scientific measurements were possible, that would be excellent evidence of something going on. Trying to fit it into real cosmology, lopping off a geocentric universe here and a sphere there is just pitiful.

46

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]

OK, let’s work with this. I posit that the hypotheses of gods and afterlives are testable by experiment.
For gods, we could observe the entire universe as best we could and try to find examples of phenomena for which natural explanations fail, leaving the supernatural “explanations” (note that I agree with Dawkins that they don’t really constitute explanations anyway, but that’s a bifurcation here) of gods. And gods could certainly bring the experiment to a dramatic and instant conclusion themselves – since you’re appealing to the authority of Nobel laureate physicists, I’ll in turn offer Steven Weinberg who wholeheartedly agrees that gods are a scientific, falsifiable hypothesis.

And afterlives are as falsifiable a hypothesis as they come, since every single one of us will carry out the necessary experimental observation when we die. Some predict that I will wake up afterwards (in which case, you can bet I’ll be keen to investigate whatever I find as rigorously as possible – as I say to Lib, you’ll easily spot me in heaven as the one going around looking for holographic projectors), while I predict that there’ll be no more “I” than there was in the 13.7 billion-year “Beforelife”.
[/quote]

I am quite interested in testing the competing claims of Christianity and materialism. The way I go about problem will likely seem strange to you. I recall that one of Dawkins’ New Ten Commandments was to form a worldview based on personal experience and reason. I have done exactly that. A since I was educated in scientific settings up to the age of 24, I had an opportunity to see scientists at work, as well as the normal routes of reading and studying.

So when scientific materialists make a statement, I check whether it matches my experience. If they say that all human behavior derives from Darwinian urges to survive and propagate one’s genes, I checked whether it’s true or not. Does the behavior of myself and others match that description? Does it come close? I concluded that it does not.

That was one failure, which is quite excusable. After many such failures, I started having serious doubts about how valid scientific materialism was. (I should clarify that some of my views resulted from my personal encounters with scientists as well.) At the same time I was starting to take part in a church group and read books by Christian authors. I found that the Christians I met (and read) made statements much more sensible than those made by the materialists.

Now obviously my approach is not scientific by Feynman’s definitions, and probably not by any other definition either. But I trust my approach because it involves a lot more different inputs than the scientific approach. In short, my approach involves almost everything that happens during my life, rather than just things that happen in labs or get printed in journals.

47

Who the heck says that?? Some behaviour, certainly, but all? Please, I have expended every effort not to mischaracterise theists here and build no strawmen whatsoever. Please return the courtesy.

You certainly need to talk to more scientists. I’d be honoured of you started with me.

Let’s try again. What statement did you doubt? We can explore whether you misunderstood it or whether it was phrased poorly.

Again, your previous replies suggest you might well stand to learn more about what the scientific approach is. Labs and journals are just one part of it. Tell me something which happened in our life for which the scientific explanation seems infeasible to you, and I’ll try to tell you what science has to say about it, if anything.

48

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
I am quite interested in testing the competing claims of Christianity and materialism. The way I go about problem will likely seem strange to you. I recall that one of Dawkins’ New Ten Commandments was to form a worldview based on personal experience and reason. I have done exactly that. A since I was educated in scientific settings up to the age of 24, I had an opportunity to see scientists at work, as well as the normal routes of reading and studying.

[/QUOTE]

Exactly was your education in a scientific setting? You have major misunderstandings on the process of science, which might be a result of the poor way in which science is taught. I certainly didn’t really understand the process until I was doing research in grad school, and then not as well as I understood it when publishing, editing, getting into arguments, and managing research. I don’t think it is anything you can learn from a book or by taking a class.

49

Well, this has gone on a fair ways since I was last here, but I feel like posting anyway; I’ll try to keep this brief though.

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
OK, let’s do this for two types of motor: Rudolph Diesel’s internal combustion engine and Mr. God’s bacterial flagellum. Please provide a trace of the former, then I’ll do the same for the latter.
[/QUOTE]
Are you trying to suggest via analogy that bacterial flagellum were bioengineered by some human with a surname of God? That seems like an unlikely claim, given that I’m led to believe that such flagelleum were observed via microscope long before any human was known to have the technology to even attempt to perform such a feat. I’d have to see some fairly good evidence before I accepted such a claim, since it seems so improbable. (Not as improbable as the idea that some fictional metaphysical critter did it, though.)

Seriously though, I don’t understand why you seem compelled to try and turn my analogy into the Divine Watchmaker analogy. That’s not what my analogy was about. It was about the speciousness of claims and attributions that are not backed by evidence. If you don’t want to discuss that, that’s fine, but the repeated attempts to twist it into something else seem very strange to me.

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
But what of those we haven’t?
[/QUOTE]
Things that we haven’t discovered the cause of, we don’t have knowledge about the cause of. Random claims by religion have not won simply by not yet having being disproven. Science can’t claim to have explained such things either, but to its credit, it doesn’t claim to have done so.

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
Could a theist not say that your comforting fantasy is that we’ll fill that gap naturally one day, and thus that you are blanketing your ignorance with faith in no less dogmatic a fashion?
[/QUOTE]
They could say that, but they’d be wrong. I’m not afraid of gaps, and am content to wait for an actual cause to be discovered without having to make up my own. The Great Unknowns don’t trouble me.

I occasionally assume that something is has natural causes without actually knowing it; it’s been shown to be a safe bet on every single other case, so occasionally I go on a limb and assume that the possible answer is probably the correct one in new cases, especially if I don’t really care what the answer is anyway. But I am not “dogmatic” about such things, and at no point do I feel that the belief I extend to theories so far extends the evidence that it is accurate to call it “faith”. Such characterizations are insulting, deliberately so; any theist accusing me of such things is trying to bring me down to their level to discredit my reasoning.

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
[I’m not trolling you here, begbert, despite being as atheistic to the core as yourself. I just think some of your characterisations of religion, especially of reasonable theists of which there are many, are misplaced]
[/QUOTE]
Reasonable theists don’t make god-in-the-gaps arguments, at least not in public. Reasonable atheists suffer from but one flaw: they fail to weigh all possible explanations for their experiences fairly (a flaw that’s likely worsened by the general credibility that the god-theory is granted, which causes people to drastically overrate it’s probability).

(And yes, for me, this is brief.)

50

No, I’m suggesting that the “trace” which theists claim demonstrates intelligent design in eg. RNA replication is fundamentally similar to that which you claim demonstrates intelligent design in your car – yes, the Divine Watchmaker. Whatever you appealed to, from the shapes called “writing” on the engine to the optimal function of each constituent part without which the entire process would literally stall, all of these are statistical arguments: that the probability of these features appearing by chance is infinitessimal. Theists make the same argument, and in my opinion there are instances where it is reasonable to do so even if I don’t ascribe to them myself.
Specifying vampires rather than other designers merely adds some properties (immortality, blood diet etc.) to the designer unnecessarily. Again, the analogy would be to add properties like omnipotentce, omnibenevolence etc. to the supernatural designer unnecessarily, which is still a different issue to whether there is such a designer or not.

Nobody is saying so. I suggest merely that it is not so unreasonable to believe something which hasn’t yet been disproven. In fact, there is arguably no place for the word “proof” outside of mathematics and formal logic. There are just facts and alternative explanations for those facts, and we each choose the explanations which sit most agreeably with us.

I suggest only that your characterisations might be deliberately (and unnecessarily IMO) insulting.

Ah but, you see, my OP’s position is that even the reasonable theist’s appeal to personal experience is fundamentally a god of the gaps argument itself. I’ve had such an experience myself, and still ascribe a natural explanation to it, while theists do not.

51

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
No, I’m suggesting that the “trace” which theists claim demonstrates intelligent design in eg. RNA replication is fundamentally similar to that which you claim demonstrates intelligent design in your car – yes, the Divine Watchmaker. Whatever you appealed to, from the shapes called “writing” on the engine to the optimal function of each constituent part without which the entire process would literally stall, all of these are statistical arguments: that the probability of these features appearing by chance is infinitessimal. Theists make the same argument, and in my opinion there are instances where it is reasonable to do so even if I don’t ascribe to them myself.
Specifying vampires rather than other designers merely adds some properties (immortality, blood diet etc.) to the designer unnecessarily. Again, the analogy would be to add properties like omnipotentce, omnibenevolence etc. to the supernatural designer unnecessarily, which is still a different issue to whether there is such a designer or not.
[/QUOTE]
I…completely don’t get your point. I didn’t make a watchmaker argument, I not discussing a watchmaker argument, and I’m not overly interested in discussing the watchmaker aspects of the watchmaker argument.

I mentioned vampires because I was analogizing with a critter with the omnis. I wasn’t analogising with some generic designer after all…

I’m confused.

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
Nobody is saying so. I suggest merely that it is not so unreasonable to believe something which hasn’t yet been disproven. In fact, there is arguably no place for the word “proof” outside of mathematics and formal logic. There are just facts and alternative explanations for those facts, and we each choose the explanations which sit most agreeably with us.
[/QUOTE]
Outside of a logical/mathematical context, “proof” means “conclusive evidence.” Preferably, “objectively conclusive evidence.” Or at least that’s the way I’ve always understood it. Conflating that with mathematical or logical proofs is an error, but simply using the term to mean conclusive evidence isn’t.

And God is already disproven, right from the get-go. It does the impossible. (Miracles.) Objectively speaking that’s enough; nothing exists which can do the impossible. And even if we entertain the variously implausible justifications for his impossible deeds, he still remains a wildly implausible notion, far less probable than unicorns and elves, which are merely hard to locate.

Trying to paint is as every choice being equally valid is nonsense. It’s only the power of historical precedent that has prevented all the theists from being the butt of most everyone’s jeering.

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
I suggest only that your characterisations might be deliberately (and unnecessarily IMO) insulting.
[/QUOTE]
I figure that’s okay if they’re also factually correct. If you can insult me with the truth, have at. I won’t necessarily like it, but I’ll have earned it, and so protest less than against slander.

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
Ah but, you see, my OP’s position is that even the reasonable theist’s appeal to personal experience is fundamentally a god of the gaps argument itself. I’ve had such an experience myself, and still ascribe a natural explanation to it, while theists do not.
[/QUOTE]
Right, and whenever they bring their gappy basis-of-belief argument out into the light, we give it the criticism it deserves. Mostly though, it just doesn’t come up. (With the reasonable ones.)

I mean, if you want to just up and define all theists as unreasonable, that’s fine, but I still think there’s merit to noting that some of that unreasonable lot are a whole lot more unreasonable than others.

52

Then, again, I suggest you are taking aim at targets you know you can knock down easily rather than the arguments which reasonable theists might set forth, and which I seek to address here.

Then you are once more defining and assuming gods and afterlives to be non-existent. Others, such as myself (an atheist as strong as any), do not.

And I did not paint every choice as valid, but I do not detect actual logical inconsistencies in reasonable theism. I simply do not accept many of its initial axioms. I consider theism to be valid but not sound. (I believe that distinguishing between these two terms should be taught in primary school.)

… which is precisely what I said in my OP about who the real opponents of reasonable theists are. I may have misread you, but it sounds like you consider reasonable theism to be a contradiction in terms.

53

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
Then, again, I suggest you are taking aim at targets you know you can knock down easily rather than the arguments which reasonable theists might set forth, and which I seek to address here.
[/QUOTE]
No theist ever argues for a propertyless watchmaker. What they do is present an argument which argues for a propertyless watchmaker, then claim it as support for their god, rife with other impossible attributes. Arguing against the argument they’re really making strikes me as being as valid an approach as attacking the argument they’re misusing. It’s just bypassing the inevitable bait-and-switch, that’s all.

And the propertyless watchmaker is still just a god in the gaps argument, nothing more. The complexity of the thing being created says nothing about what created it besides that it didn’t happen by accident…which was useful until somebody remembered/realized that evolution isn’t “by accident”. With that realization the watchmaker argument officially died; all that remains are poorly-assembled zombies of it, when ill-informed theists trot out the old corpse.

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
Then you are once more defining and assuming gods and afterlives to be non-existent. Others, such as myself (an atheist as strong as any), do not.
[/QUOTE]
This has nothing to do with an afterlife (though I can kibosh the idea of an eternal soul of you like; one doesn’t require the other), and I’m assuming nothing besides the fact that we can rely on the fact that the laws of nature have been shown to be pretty darned reliable - not a specious claim, I’d think you agree.

Miracles are impossible; that’s why we call them miracles. They by definition defy some law of nature, and ergo are immidiately slammed to the limits of incredulity, since accepting them would unweave our understanding of reality as we’ve been able to discover it. That doesn’t really mean that he’s impossible…but he’s so incredibly improbable that calling him impossible seems reasonably fair, as a shorthand for listing the various improbable things that given god X implies. However, if you prefer, just pretend I said “incredibly improbable”, and avoid quibbling over the word further. There’s still a sliver of a chance he’s real - if everything we know about everything is pretty much completely wrong.

Plus, that ‘interfering’ god we keep hearing about? The one in the bible? Yeah, he’s bunk. As are various others that come with baggage that’s already been proven false. (<-Note the non-formal-logical use of the term prove here.) And any with “omni-” problems. Hopefully, you’d agree with me about those particular gods being proven unreal, at least.

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
And I did not paint every choice as valid, but I do not detect actual logical inconsistencies in reasonable theism. I simply do not accept many of its initial axioms. I consider theism to be valid but not sound. (I believe that distinguishing between these two terms should be taught in primary school.)
[/QUOTE]
I’m not sure that it’s wise to use the logic terms outside of logical arguments - rhetorical arguments rarely have clearly defined premises, calling their meanings into doubt. Plus, trying to slop them over just slams us into the trouble that you can never “prove” anything in reality anyway, meaning that nothing could ever be sound…or maybe not even valid either. Ick. Let’s just stick to the informal terms and meanings for this, shall we?

Anyway, like I just said, rhetorical and verbal arguments rarely have clearly defined premises, so I see the axioms as being part of the argument, basically. So splittting off all the parts that distingish your god from an average desk chair and calling them axioms, and then claiming that you have a “valid” unbeatable argument for your god’s existence, that sounds like a bait-and-switch to me; no thanks. First define the god, then form the argument - and you don’t get to trade gods out later.

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
… which is precisely what I said in my OP about who the real opponents of reasonable theists are. I may have misread you, but it sounds like you consider reasonable theism to be a contradiction in terms.
[/QUOTE]
There’s reasonable and then there’s reasonable. All theists are less reasonable than an otherwise identical atheist. Some atheists are less reasonable than most theists. Possibly some theists are more unreasonable than all theists, maybe. I dunno. (Maybe we should have a contest.)

Would it help if I assert my position as being that, while all theists are wrong, some are more wrong?

54

begbert, it seems that you accept that the failure of natural explanation allows supernatural entities to be reasonably posited (though not with extra properties, which I agreed with you instantly anyway), that natural explanations are currently incomplete and might be fallible (though the probability is small - again, no argument there from me), and that reasonable theism can be logically consistent even if founded on premises you consider shaky (like me).

That’s actually all I wanted to achieve here - you now appear to me to be a reasonable atheist. :slight_smile:

55

I should be interested in a study which shows the demographics with respect to the purchasors and readers of the two books. I strongly suspect it would reveal the overwhelming majority in both cases to consider themselves atheists prior to the purchase and/or the reading, and yet when discussed of I frequently see them recommended to “theists” and often flashback to my adled stepmother’s tireless propagation of her bizarre Baptist indoctrinal materials. I should think that even if the religious were to be somehow motivated into reading the books that few or no Road to Damascus conversions have subsequently resulted. Dawkins’ tediousness aside he cannot be accused of being stupid and one wonders his purpose in the drafting.

Has anyone stopped believing in a god or gods as a result of reading either of the books? I would be very interested in hearing about it.

56

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
begbert, it seems that you accept that the failure of natural explanation allows supernatural entities to be reasonably posited (though not with extra properties, which I agreed with you instantly anyway), that natural explanations are currently incomplete and might be fallible (though the probability is small - again, no argument there from me), and that reasonable theism can be logically consistent even if founded on premises you consider shaky (like me).

That’s actually all I wanted to achieve here - you now appear to me to be a reasonable atheist. :slight_smile:
[/QUOTE]
Well, like I said, I don’t actually believe that anybody does posit entities with no extra properties; I mean, why bother? Sure, the room could be populated with invisible, intangible cows, but unless you can smell them or have to step in their poop, who cares? Surely if you’re positing such things, it’s because you’re entertaining the unsupported possibility that you’ll be interacting with these cows, er, gods someday.

And reasonable theism, logically consistent? Only if you consider it logical to put overmuch faith in your interpretation of events, while dismissing or ignoring other possible interpretaions (as is underscored by the fact that others seem to be having comparable experiences and interpreting them differently). I don’t consider that egotistical view to be all that logical.

So, do I seem unreasonable again yet? :slight_smile:

57

[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
Who the heck says that?? Some behaviour, certainly, but all? Please, I have expended every effort not to mischaracterise theists here and build no strawmen whatsoever. Please return the courtesy.
[/quote]

Well, if you must know.

Talk away. I’m listening.

I don’t think you’ve quite understand my point. I evaluated the institution of science based on what I experienced. So for example my opinions about scientific conferences were formed by attending them. Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World assures me that conferences are whiz-bang, excitement-filled occasions where you can expect vigorous argument to break out at any moment. My experience was quite different. I found that most of the audience was half asleep during talks, that some professors did crosswords or Sudoku when they thought no one was looking, and that there was more discussion about the quality of the cheese and crackers at the reception than the actual topic of the conference. The situation was even worse at weekly colloquia or seminars.

Now it may be that I was merely unlucky, that I had the ill fortune to only observe boring conference that are the exception while interesting ones are the rule. Perhaps Mr. Sagan’s description is correct in the majority of cases. I’ll never know because I’m not likely to see any more of them. I judge based on what I see.

As regards to scientific conclusions, that debate could go on forever if we’re going to fight over the precise wording of scientific statements. The point I’m trying to make is that many of the statements Dawkins makes in his book are obviously ludicrous. If you’re trying to cover him with a defensive retreat in which you load his statements down with qualifiers, then the debate will obviously go nowhere. Dawkins asserts that natural selection eliminates behaviors that aren’t useful in the Darwinian sense. I offer examples which prove the theory to be untrue. You then say that the theory is only true most of the time and there are exceptions. Thus, no matter how many exceptions I provide, I can’t refute your modified version of the theory. You’ve created something that can’t be refuted. (Or as junior skeptics say, it’s not falsifiable.)

58

The problem with this subject is one of significance. There is an implicit bias to tell us that the knowledge of the ancestors was ‘insignificant’. We hear that ‘astrology is BS’, not giving any credit to thousands of years of star gazers who gave us the first maps of the stars and brought us to the field of Astronomy.

I gave an example of a Qabbalistic meditation based on visualization that specifically activates the visual cortex. I know this because I experienced it. I was able to visually hold the character in my mind more vividly because of the meditation. The Rabbi who provided the translation was previously an engineer so likely he knew the underlying neurology. However, he was able to find palpable significance in the ancient writing that he was translating.

So the warnings that we receive about trying to find ‘significance’, are in and of themselves a double-edged sword. I find the notion dubious that knowledge was something that we suddenly acquired in the 16th century. It may be a common trap to find seeming corrolations between Quantum Mechanics and Buddhism, but I also think that it’s a little too simple to just dismiss it out of hand. If we can find corrolations between physical technology such as stained glass or steel swords, why not within the ideas as well?

The problem here is that for someone to really understand the corrolations, one would need to understand both the religious cosmology as well as the scientific one. This is difficult as 1-1 corrolations are highly rare. So if we are to embark on a scientific study of the same sorts of ideas, into religion and its mystical precepts, then the way we should approach the problem is by asking the question. “What were they trying to explain?” or “What was it that was being observed?”, rather than just assuming it’s a bunch of BS. The assumption I am making is that the ideas are based off of observed phenomena, and while they may be inadequate explanations for us today, they were all they had at the time. With more abstract concepts, we must ask what utility and purpose examining such abstraction had in the lives of those who dedicated so much time to their pursuit.

A little more respect for the wisdom of the ancients seems to me to be essential, and I don’t see this really occurring within the Dawkins, Dennett set.

59

Regarding the “I’ll tell you what science has to say about it”, why don’t we begin with this. Tell me what science actually say about the evolutionary basis of religion, and what evidence is offered to back it up.

60

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
Regarding the “I’ll tell you what science has to say about it”, why don’t we begin with this. Tell me what science actually say about the evolutionary basis of religion, and what evidence is offered to back it up.
[/QUOTE]

Well in all fairness, Daniel Dennett did write a whole book on the topic. I have it, I read the first tenth of it set it down because I got distracted and then just haven’t rotated back to it. I find the topic terribly fascinating, but just haven’t gotten back into it, not because of quality issues just because it hasn’t been a priority.