AW! Epistles
From Karl 1
Abstract
Monday, 30 May 2005
Karl Rogers, a philosopher friend of several years ago, emailed me to say he had had a book (On the Metaphysics of Experimental Physics) published by MacMillan-Palgrave. As a critique of science as it is practised today, I thought some Christian fundies might find ammunition in it, though Karl does not think so.
My book was based on my PhD thesis—but made more accessible—and I do hope that it pisses off some academics that are a little certain about their assumptions.
Like me! (Young whippersnapper.) I remember your trying to explain postmodernism to me when you were lodging in Frome, but I still don’t get it. I’ve just been reading a book called Liar’s Tale by a journalist called Jeremy Campbell, a discussion of the philosophical attitude to truth and how it has moved progressively if not monotonically towards denying truth until we end up with postmodernism when there are as many truths as you desire, and therefore, it seems obvious, none at all. If perceptively and linguistically there is no truth, then I cannot see how we, or any other animal, can live. A great miracle of the Christian God, in the human form He took as His own son, was to walk on water. It is a miracle because it is true that no one can actually walk on water. Experience shows they cannot, and even most animals, from their own experience, will not attempt it. If we could walk on water, we would have a different truth, not an untruth. What would be unliveable with would be the truth changing continually, so that we could sometimes walk on water, and at other times we could not. Of course, it actually happens when the pond freezes over, and we know how dangerous that can be. Doesn’t it demonstrate in the most practical way possible, in life, that the correspondence theory of truth is correct? If it were not, we should never have been able to survive at all. Evolution confirms the old philosophic assumption—mind can apprehend the truths of Nature. Minds have evolved in the natural environment, and that explains the correspondence.
You are actually closer to the postmodernists that you think. Both you and they hold that truth is bound up with power. It circumscribes and defines our peceptions of our possibilities and expectations.
Is this a metaphor? that truth is exerting its power in circumscribing us. I can accept it reluctantly as a metaphorcal personification of truth, but that does not help much philosophically because truth is not a person. It does not have intent. In society, I can accept that truth, or the suppression or distortion of it, can be used by people to exert their power over others because it circumscribes us and so on. Which is the postmodernists view?
On the postmodernist view, truth is derivative from power. It is power that circumscribes people, making them reproduce the conditions of power, and the statement of certain truths is part of that circumscription. It is the reproduction of a mode of production of a society in which power is focussed in particular groups and channelled in certain directions. These groups are as much dominated by power as anyone else (even if they benefit from it more than other people) because they have to also perpetually reproduce the conditions of power. On such an account, power is never possessed, only excercised. The possession of power is an illusion.
Our explanations for experience and expectations about our modal possibilities of engaging with the world cannot be separated from the social reproduction of power. Hence, reality is perpetually socially mediated and, even though we may have realist intuitions, it is extremely arbitrary to consider any truths we may have as being correspondent to reality, rather than a transitory and contingent expression of human cognition and explanation.
I can accept what the postmodern view is in this respect about social truths, but I cannot get it when it comes to Nature. No amount of human power can make a physical “truth” work when experiment shows it does not because it is not true. I gather that philosophers see truth in these two categories at least—social and natural, nomos and physis, the Greeks apparently called them. Science is concerned with the natural and those are objective truths whereas society agrees upon social truths according to its history, culture and so on—whatever suits its people. Here truth is not objective. The church wanted to prescribe natural as well as social truths, but Galileo exposed the impossibility of it. A society is free to decide Christianity is the only true religion if it wants, but it finds itself in trouble when it decides say that the male is the first sex when observations show that the female is actually the first sex and it is the male that is biologically second (whence our redundant mammary glands).
You may well be right that “no-one can walk on water”, but, it is a prescription and not an empirical statement because an entire search of the world in the past, present, and future has not been undertaken. It is premised upon a whole host of theoretical expectations. (Incidently, there are many types of insect and a couple of types of spider that can walk on water—which is an empricial statement open to verification once we agree on terms such as many, couple, insect, spider, walk, and water).
It is empirically true because it is a fact, based on a large amount of experience, that no-one can walk on water. That is why it can be offered as a miracle possible only for a god. Gods can defy mortal experience because what gods do is made up and does not have to relate to any actuality. Its empirical description does not need every possible instance of it to be demonstrated. That is plainly impossible and could not be a basis for scientific method. It does not even need to be utterly impossible provided that the exceptions can be explained by demonstrable contingencies that happened to pertain at the time (like the exceptions that you cite for certain small animals, though I am talking about something rather heavier—people). Christians sometimes use such continencies to “prove” that miracles happen. So, it is premised on some other also empirical truths (until scientists or philosophers begin to try to explain them theoretically).
Where you and the postmodernists disagree is that, for them evolution is just a story, the same as the New Testament, whereas for you the former is true and the latter is false. Of course, if the postmodernists are right then not only are we confronted with the paradox that occurs when “there is no universal truth” is proposed as a universal truth, but, as far as I am concerned, no-one could deny that your truth is as good as any others. The problems (and difference) arises when you want to say that your truth is better. That’s when it becomes a question of power and the struggle commences.
I quite agree with you about power when you are talking about “truths” that are not demonstrably true such as God’s Truths claimed for the New Testament, an old and imperfect book of supposedly edifying stories, and religious “truths” generally. When you say “the former is true and the latter is false”, it is not just my opinion or even the opinion of a lot of like-minded believers in something arbitrary. It can be shown to be true to anyone willing to make the necessary observations. That is what empiricism in science is. It is because religious “truths” are not demonstrably true that they must be imposed.
I wouldn’t have said that scientists are Platonists, at least in the sense that, even if there are some, they think they are close to any universal truth that there might be. If there were any such thing as a TOE, then it would presumably be a universal truth, but TOE is a tongue in cheek expression that simply means a unifying theory—one that unites the forces of Nature. It still looks a long way off, and even if it were discovered, it would not explain everything as the name seems to imply, and perhaps does imply, to critics of scientific method. So, again I can agree with you that anyone’s universal truth is as good as anyone else’s because all of them must be arbitrary. But science is looking for particular truths, often very particular ones when subtle experiments are set up to test singular hypotheses. Such truths, like that of walking on water, are not as good as anyone else’s. No one except madmen think so, unless there once were a large number of those that did think so, but they have all since been drowned. It is the reason that the structures of the mind will have evolved to match natural structures.
Furthermore, it is implicit to a concept of truth that it provides explanatory power and, hence, makes experience intelligible. But, this means that you cannot ignore the being that has experiences and for which truth explains those experiences—ie people—without making that conception of truth unintelligible. Hence, social, cultural, and historical influences on the construction of both truth and experience makes the conception of a one to one relation between the mind and reality quite implausible (especially through an evolutionist’s account).
No I cannot ignore those that have the experiences because they have to report them to us for them to be recorded in the corpus of scientific data. I do not get why doing this renders the truth unintelligible. I can quite see that different people might formulate their own independent hypotheses to explain their experience, but the point of science is to compare them and determine which hypothesis is the best of them to everyone’s satisfaction. So long as it satisfies everyone’s similar experiences, it is a truth. People do not habitually try to walk on water any more because their experience is that water will not support their weight, and will enclose and drown them.
As Nelson Goodmann (in Ways Of Worldmaking) put it:
“What I have said so far plainly points to a radical relativism; but severe constraints are imposed. Willingness to accept countless alternative true or right world-versions does not mean that everything goes, that tall stories are as good as short ones, that truths are no longer distinguished from falsehoods, but that truth must be otherwise conceived than as correspondence with a ready-made world. Though we make worlds by making versions, we no more make a world by putting symbols together at random than a carpenter makes a chair by putting pieces of wood together at random.”
Well, I don’t know what has gone before, or where he is aiming, or what he means by world versions, but he seems to be hedging his bets in saying that there are endless truths but they are nonetheless severely restrained. I’d have to read George Cantor to wonder how many levels of infinity there might be involved in this restraining of the countless. Still, he is plainly right that not every “truth” imagined is as good as another one, but an excellent reason that he dismisses is that there is something actual that truth must correspond with for it to be true. And the illustartion given is hauntingly like the arguments put forward by Christian creationists who cannot or will not try to conceive of evolution working over long time periods involving many generations of individuals. Characteristics are not picked randomly from a ready made bag of them and put together at random. Effectively the assembly is selected by the prevailing conditions starting simply and then getting progressively complicated. The epigenetic landscape of the species that emerge at the end has been moulded by the environmental landscape of the individuals as they passed on their characteristics from one generation to the next. Physical Nature has been impressed in to the make-up of the emerging species.
The problem is to understand how we make truths, without turning upon one’s own tail, so to speak. My book is all about how physicists make their truths.
I still prefer to think that truths are discovered not made because they refer to realities and not chairs, but I can imagine that your book will be interesting to those who can understand it. I do remember that you said it was a popularisation of your thesis but I doubt it will be in concepts that I can get.
Frome library might baulk at buying such a book themselves. The best hope would be that Somerset libraries would feel obliged to buy it for circulation to the individual libraries, but Frome might just borrow it from an academic library like Oxford. That’s what happened when I wanted a rare book. Then I had to sit in the library for days on end trying to read it while surrounded by a creche, noisy schoolkids larking about, gabbing women, all punctuated by various delivery men wanting inbstructions, and all impervious—like the staff—to the purpose of a library. I suppose that is the multiplicity of truths we have these days. We old fogeys just have to wait for the grim reaper to take his scythe to us. We are dead before we die, no longer part of the world! I’ll order it. Reading it? Now, that’s another matter!
I forget to put a card on the table. I’m not a postmodernist. In fact, my intuitions agree with you that there is an objective world that exists independently of whether we understand it or not, and that we have to live in a way that is in tune with reality, so to speak, or we will soon disappear. But, and here I agree with the postmodernists, the problem arises when we try to understand that reality and derive how we should live from that understanding. But, even though I find postmodern critiques of modernity and its failure quite convincing, I am not satisfied with postmodernism and will not rest content with it. I guess that, at heart, my philosophical position is that of a realist, but I’m quite socratic about it.
I have a huge philosophical sympathy with your position and, in principle, all sciences have to be realist because sciences aim at explanation and not just descriptions of the facts of experience. But, once you look under the skin of the all too human search for truth then the goals of realism are quite unachieveable in practice.
I agree in the sense that we shall never have a complete theory, a TOE as imagined by the tabloid press. But I think I told you, I believe in the story beginning, “Once there was a squirrel…” If you have forgotten, or you do not know it because I did not tell you it (I always told it to all my students!), it is a simple parable about the unattainable. The squirrel saw a great magnificent looking mountain in the distance, with its changing moods according to the season and time of day. He determined to get to it because he supposed it must be a beautiful place since it looked to wonderful. So he set off, leaping from tree to tree. He died, an old squirrel never having reached his goal, but he met many wonderful squirrels in many marvellous trees and had many an adventure on the way. Science is like that. We might aim to know all there is and can never achieve it, but what wonders we shall find on the way.
The reason why “no-one can walk on water” is not an empirical statement is not trivial. The problem is the “can”. It is an alethic modality, determining a possibility, and, hence, it is a statement of the present possibilities that is perpetually directed to the future. It is not an empirical statement because the future is not accessible to experience until it becomes the present. Its reference doesn’t exist yet. It is a prescription, not a description. Such statements can be empiricially challenged and falsified, but they cannot be verified until the end of time and hence their truth-status is perpertually deferred. An empirical statement can only take the form “no-one has walked on water” or “no-one is walking on water” because these are matters of experience and description. They discuss the factuality and not the modal possibilties of existence. Furthermore, “no-one can walk on water” is a distinct kind of statement from statements “no-one will walk in water” because it remains a logical possibility that, at the end of time, no-one ever walked on water and it was still possible. Alethic statements refer to limits to experience and action, which are not themselves objects of experience, and, hence, by definition are categorical and non-empirical. Categorical statements imply conceptual and theoretical presuppositions and assumptions because they aim to explain the possibility of particular experiences and action (or the impossibilty of particular experiences and actions). Most scientific statements take this form and, hence, most scientific statements are categorical and non-empirical.
Furthermore, scientific theories aim at unifying experiences under the same categories, using the same concepts and mathematical equations, in order to explain experiences as being manifest according to the same natural laws. We all have experiences of objects falling to the ground when dropped and staying on the ground when left there, but there is nothing passively immediate in these experiences that allows us to unify these experiences as manifestations of universal gravitation, let alone being able to equate and unify these experiences with the movement of the moon and sun across the sky! New experiences and discoveries in science require new conceptions. In order to understand how discovery is possible and made in experiments, we need to understand how these conceptions are made possible. This is why science took a long time to happen and has a complicated history of struggles and failures. It took a long time to invent the categories and concepts under which we could unify and explain particular experiences. It is creative and metaphysical. This is why scientific discoveries are made. But, now, I’m starting to head into my book , so I’ll stop.
I do not doubt that what you say is true but is it relevant to any one setting up tricky experiments and reading black boxes eight hours a day? I see the statement “no one can actually walk on water” as an empirical one because it is a generalization of a lot of experience of people and water. You might rightly classify it in logic as unfounded until every possible case has been tested, but that is not useful or practical. And if it is possible but never has happened by the end of time, it must be so rare as to be hardly worth considering as a practicality. “No one can actually walk on water” is certainly prescriptive, I agree, but it is not arbitrary like “you ought to attend mass”. Most people in the world have never attended mass and it seems to have done them no harm, but I cannot see anyone other than logicians contradicting “no one can actually walk on water” because it is something they have experience of, and they understand it as a statement of what is possible. If the Christian Son did walk on water in actuality then the statement is already refuted, but the weight of experience is such that no one not beguiled by Christian mythology will believe it. If they saw it done before their eyes, the scientist would prefer to believe it was a trick. If scientists were able to study the practitioner and found it was genuine, then they would have to look for a new contingency to add to the statement “no one can actually walk on water” as a condition. So, a categorical statement it might be, as you say, but it is founded on long experience, and warnings that it might not hold for various technical reasons does not deter me or, I suspect, any scientist for whom direct observation and experiment are all that counts.
Gravity is not an obvious inference from objects falling to the ground, but as the name of a particular force that describes falling objects, and the motions of the planets, it is a successful hypothesis that will continue to be used as long as it continues to work. Indeed, successful scientific hypotheses are not usually refuted, they are bounded by some condition not previously considered. Even though Einstein’s equations of motion superseded Newton’s, everyone did not begin to use Einstein’s instead of Newton’s. Newton’s equations were not wrong in common use where the conditions that invalidated them do not obtain.
But even if we accept that only a madman would try to walk on water because we fully expect that he would drown, consider ourselves to be reasonable, and, therefore, only someone dispossessed of reason would try it if they did not wish to drown. However, it does not follow from this that our reasons for our expectations correspond with the structures of reality. It remains logically possible that there are a plurality of possible theories why human beings sink in water and the sinking of a human being does not confirm any possible theory. Even through theories aim at explaining experience, they are not confirmed by experience; they can only be falsified by experience. This is what I think Goodmann meant by his notion of versions. There can be an infinite set of possible theories that explain experience, but not all theories explain experience (because they do not match experience). Its like prime numbers. There is an infinite set of prime numbers, but not all numbers are prime.
When we are interested in the “structures of reality”, we are on different ground. We have not evolved to experience the “structures of reality” but reality itself, and so the “structures of reality” are necessarily hypothetical. The criteria of acceptance of an hypothesis, you will be familiar with and they seem sensible to me. Primarily, it must work, that is explain adequately what we observe. That counts out all the numbers that are not prime. It must be parsimonious, so there is no need to postulate the infinite set of primes when any one will do. Preferably, it will be elegant, so let us go for 1, if a prime number is all we want! I agree that none of this makes the hypothesis we have settled on true in the sense that it closely represents the structure of the reality we are examining, but it is the best we can do. The truth might still be 3 or 19. More refined criteria and tests will lead us on to new hypotheses that might work better in explaining the new contingencies and take us closer to whatever the structure is. Do you agree that science is continual refinement as well as discovery?
“I quite agree with you about power when you are talking about “truths” that are not demonstrably true such as God’s Truths claimed for the New Testament, an old and imperfect book of supposedly edifying stories, and religious “truths” generally. When you say “the former is true and the latter is false”, it is not just my opinion or even the opinion of a lot of like-minded believers in something arbitrary. It can be shown to be true to anyone willing to make the necessary observations. That is what empiricism in science is. It is because religious “truths” are not demonstrably true that they must be imposed.”
If you find some reasonableness in what I have said above, then you will see why I think that he difference between a scientifically inclined and a religiously inclined person is on the question about what constitutes a demonstration of truth. As such, the difference is one of methodology and, given that scientific methodology supposedly is prior to the truth it aims to discover, the construction of a methodology is a social mediated affair and is circumscribed by theory and expectation. Hence any truths discovered or demonstrated by it are as contingent as the methodology itself.
I might be ready to accept this but I have never been able to figure out how religious truths are determined or demonstrated except that they are pronounced quite arbitrarily by people who become saints or prophets for having done so. And having pronounced, I cannot see what the criteria of confirmation of their pronouncements could be unless it is wickedness or, at best, no change! It would be interesting to have a comparison of these alternative methods to the scientific one, but I have never yet seen it. Perhaps you do it in your book. And, if method is socially mediated, then there should be different methods for different societies, whether they are religiously conditioned or secularly. Where are they? If they exist as you imply, they can be compared, with success as the criterion, and we shall discover a better method than the one we have, even if it is socially mediated still.
“I cannot ignore those that have the experiences because they have to report them to us for them to be recorded in the corpus of scientific data. I do not get why doing this renders the truth unintelligible.”
I didn’t say that. I said that you cannot ignore how people experience the world and explain it, without making those experiences and explanations unintelligble. We need to understand how experiences and explanations are made, in terms of their historical, social, economic, and psychological conditions and functions, in order to ontologically understand how they came into being. Hence, we need to address the social mediation of experience and truth in order to make them intelligible as experiences and truths. This makes realism psychologically understandable and methodologically impossible.
Well, sure. It does sound interesting, although it would not benefit me much couched in all that logician’s jargon. I’d have to read Honderich’s Companion to Philosophy at the same time to even have a chance of getting it! It’d be a bit slow and tedious, with no guarantee I’d be any the wiser.
Anyway, I’m starting to head into my book again. But, before I go, I just want to say that I don’t think that you’ll have any trouble understanding the argument of my book (which doesn’t mean that you’ll agree with it) because it is written in accessible language. There might be a couple of points that you don’t quite see whys and wherefores, but, because you have a broad interest and reading in science, and a technical understanding of real scientific work, you’ll probably find it more accessible than most academics!!!!!! It was written with a philosophically minded scientist in mind, particularly a scientific realist, rather than a philosopher of science (which I tend to be quite dismissive about because they have ignored the real work of experimental science).
Now, I would like to propose a clear cut empirical statement: “hot water freezes faster than cold water”. This statement is an empirical statement because it is descriptive and can be induced from experience, once we agree on terms such as “hot”, “cold”, “faster”, “water”, and “freezes”. All of these terms are also descriptive of experienced phenomena that all similarly placed observers can come to agreement about. Such statements do not explain the phenomenon; they state tendencies and constant conjunctions of events. It is falsifiable and (even though such a statement has not been verified by an exhaustive search in all places to the end of time) is corroborated by every experience of the truth of the statement.
OK.
However, this generalisation requires metaphysical presuppositions about the nature of the physical:
- that space is homogeneous
- that space is isotropic
- that the nature of the physical will not change in the future.
We could not falsify or corroborate any empirical statement without these presuppositions because, without them, we could not know whether the statement was true, false, or its context of applicability (and hence meaning) had changed. These metaphysical presuppositions have been necessary for science since Galileo (Descartes and Newton) and the claim that science is distinct from metaphysics (made by positivists and empiricists) is simply false, rhetorical, and dogmatic. A transcendental conceptual foundation is necessary for science based on observation to proceed and this foundation requires underlying (unfalsifiable) presuppositions about the nature of the physical in order to make falsifiable empirical statements. Of course, modern science can be said to be an empirical science, providing that we are honest about the assumptions made about the physical we use in order to make observations in the first instance. However, whilst any empirical statement must be falsifiable, the assumptions required to make it are not proven by the corroboration of the statement by experience. There is a perpetual logical gap between the generality of such statements and the particularity of such experiences that is reflected in the tension between temporality of becoming, the indentity of being, and how we relate the two in our attempts to understand change.
I have the same problem with hearing the word “metaphysics” that Göring had with the word culture. It makes me want to reach for my revolver. I do not blame you as the messenger, or even Aristotle, but people’s way of using it. I take it to mean speculations beyond—or perhaps behind is the better preposition—the empirical, but religious folk seem to use it as a synonym for “supernatural”, and New Agers use it as a synomym for “paranormal”, which might be the same thing, and generally those who use it seem to want it to mean “spiritual”, often even hard nosed metaphysicians. That is why empiricists disdain it, I suspect, and not because they deny that there are things that empiricism will never explain. Part of the reason for that belief is theoretical, as you say. If relativity is true, then we cannot know what is beyond the cone of light that reaches us at whatever point we are at in space-time, and, if Gödel is true then we cannot have a complete set of self-contained propositions anyway. If I am a fundamentalist empiricist then I have to be disappointed that empiricism cannot be self contained, but it does not encourage me to become a supernaturalist, or even a philosopher, because however imperfect it might be, or our ability to access it in a pure enough way, Nature is the only objective criterion of truth we have.
So, although there are no doubt logical gaps and metaphysical presuppositions if we try to do what might be impossible to do, which is to establish a self sustained logical basis to science, I cannot see why empiricism does not confirm the general presuppositions as well as the specifics of any investigation. We cannot know what might pertain ten billion years hence, but we can look at the debris of the world of ten billion years ago, and make deductions from it. We might be misled into thinking some change in the generalities is really an apparent change in the specifics, but even errors like that would lead to incongruities that would reveal where the difference really was. I cannot see that inhomogeneity or anisotropy of space would not have noticeable effects, and if things are changing at a fundamental level, but so slowly that we cannot detect it, then, frankly what does it matter to us now? If God has set the world in motion and then gone for an eternal cup of tea, we do not have to introduce Him into our reckoning. So, I cannot agree that the transcendental conceptual foundation you mention is NECESSARY as you say, even if it is desirable in an ideal world (oops!). We accept a methodological foundation that leaves gaps (metaphysical, if you like) but the test remains the success of the method. Whatever the metaphysical assumptions are, they must be reasonable ones or the method would not yield any results that worked. So, we have to assume the world is orderly, and we find that it is. Essentially. scientific method is just suck it and see, and needs no justification at all. We do it because we exist. Are you saying that we are simply observing our assumptions because the method projects them into our results? Is that what the logical gap does?
None of this invalidates the empiricism of science in so far as our sciences remain at this level of description. However, it does not. The problem with empirical statements, such as “hot water freezes faster than cold water”, is that they describe a conjunction of events and as such do not explain these events in terms of the underlying properties and capacities of water, whereas it is a central part of the spirit of science to explain why this experience occurred in terms of mechanisms or causal sequences. Scientific descriptions use explanations in order to [make] empirical statements about the properties of entities in situations where more than one entity is involved. Take for example, the blueness of glacier ice and a claim that this is not a property of the ice but is in fact a property of the interaction between light and the crystalline surface of the ice. It not a property of water, but is in fact a property of reflection. Such descriptions are not purely based on experience, but are, in part, based on theory. This theoretical aspect of science brings with it a whole host of complications and philosophical problems about the relationships between theory, models, representations, and observations. Pretty much the entire philosophy of science is concerned with these problems and their resolution tends to create even more philosophical problems and the need for greater levels of complexity and abstraction in our understanding of science, experience, and explanation.
Perhaps it does for the philosopher in you but what about the scientist? Surely the astonishing entanglement of science is part of its strength and might show that it somehow does reflect the underlying truth about the material world. The Christians who argue with me about the validity of science seem not to understand that it is empirical at all, and they certainly cannot get this mutual dependency of it all. It seems to me that they are so used to accepting authority that they think science is based purely on the thoughts of famous men like Einstein or Newton, who have just imagined something as if they were Augustine or Aquinas, or even Plato. I think it is really quite wonderful that optical theorems deduced from bits of glass that can satisfactorily explain something quite different in Nature is science’s strength, and whether it is purely optical or a spectral property of the substance must be distinguishable by testing in a fairly straightforward way. I remember a scientific joke, at some conference, that purported to show that an electron trapped in ice was blue. A slide was a photograph of a large blue e minus photographed through a block of ice (even that was probably crumpled up cellophane—what cheats these scientists are!)
Furthermore, when we make experiments (involving interventions and representations) then this introduces a whole new level of complexity when theories and models, given in terms of causal and mechanistic explanations, are used to construct the machinery and instrumentation of the apparatus. Not only does this reveal the necessity of explanation in order to make observations, the theory-ladeness of observation, but it also reveals that experiment science is in fact based on realist commitments to particular metaphysical conceptions of the physical, and is not purely based on experience (as empiricists or positivists dogmatically would have us believe). These metaphysical conceptions are necessary in order to make experiments into the test of theory and, hence, experiments cannot test the validity of the conceptions. Providing that we are explicit and aware of these metaphysical preconceptions then this does not, in itself, undermine science. It only undermines the claim that modern science is positivistic and divorced from metaphysics. As you put it in a previous email, modern science is an adventure.
Well, I was trying to understand where you were going in your book by reading the first and last chapters and it seemed to condense to this summary you have here. In some ways it would be tremendously exciting if some alternative set of assumptions with an alternative method could produce results as good as those of science. Simple souls like me are obviously lacking that blessed state enjoyed by the religious, the philosophical and the insane, that conviction that science is merely one way of many of getting at the truth. It turns out that someone arbitrarily decides on a “truth” and others accept it as such with no confirming evidence. That is why they call it belief. I might find your proofs too difficult to follow, but tell me what the outcome is and if that works I will be more inclined to think your proof must be correct. If science is based on particular arbitrary metaphysical conceptions, then what would happen to it if some other metaphysical conceptions were used instead? You will see that it comes to requiring an empirical test, or at least a thought-experiment.
I have a book by Colin Wilson called Mysteries. It has an appendix by someone called Peter Maddox which claims to offer a way forward in parapsychology. It seems that “because memory is encoded by nucleo-protein macromolecules in cortical neurones, these memory traces must be psi-interactive biomolecules (PIBs). If this is true, it follows that the coupling of electromagnetism with psi will inevitably be governed by precise quantum energetic criteria, which immediately explains why telepathic receptivity as well as psi-interactive states are so critically balanced.” Here is a man whose metaphysical assumptions do not seem to be those of the average empiricist, but despite the high-faluting sound of this gobbledegook, it cannot do anything, or despite it being a way forward in parapsychology, I have not heard that there has been any breakthrough based on it. (The book was written in 1979.) You see people talk about different assumptions from the scientific ones, but none have ever been shown to do anything useful. Yoga or TM have not led anyone to any sublime abilities that can rival scientific achievements. Christians always chunter on that they have “The Truth”, but, if they have, it is a peculiar truth that leads adherents of it to complience, wickeness and insanity. Empiricism is proved by the fact that it actually works, even with the unsupported assumptions it has. That it works IS the support of the assumptions. The ultimate criterion is pragmatic.
Normative statements, such as “no-one can walk on water”, are modal statements about the capacities of human beings in relation to the properties of water. They make a statement about both the limitations of experience and action. Even though they are based on premises that can be falsified or corroborated by experience, empirical statements such as “the surface of any body of water will not support the weight of a human being”, they are not empirical statements themselves, being prescriptive rather than descriptive. They define the entities in question, such as human beings (and water for that matter), and, hence, are categorical. Hence, as you pointed out, should someone walk on water then this reveals a miracle rather than falsifying the statement. It would raise the question of whether the someone walking across water was, in fact, human, or whether the body of liquid was, in fact, water (or whether it was actually a sheet of thickened glass with a thin layer of water over it, for example). It would also demand that we question whether the appearance of a human being walking across water was in fact an illusion, hallucination, or a conjuring trick. Moreover, such a statement would not be falisfied if twenty billion angels or the children of God descended to earth and walked across and around the oceans, lakes, and rivers. It would merely require the categorical clarification that the statement “no-one can walk on water” should read “human beings cannot walk on water”. This was implicit from the onset (hence, we do not feel that the statement is falisified by instances of water insects skating or scurrying across the surface of ponds or lakes), and we would only need categorical clarification should beings with a human appearance start doing categorically superhuman things. So what? Why does this matter? The reason why it matters is that, once we accept that science is based upon metaphysical preconceptions of the physical, and also that it is based on categorical statements of the properties and capacities of beings, then we cannot simply say that it is empirical.
The trouble with what you say is that the metaphysical preconceptions and the categories are empirical anyway, or likely to be. The reason is that they are the products of our evolution. If those creatures that have the best sense of the environment they are in are the ones that survive to reproduce, you must end up with having creatures that have brains structured in such a way that they reflect the world they live in. Thus they evolve to have built in presuppositions about the Nature of reality and the appropriate categories of thought to be able to think of them. Our brains are not as they are arbitrarily but because living in the world has conditioned them to be like that. We might not be able to reason out why, at least not yet, but whatever is out there has shaped us in this way, and if we had not been shaped in this way, then we should not have been here to argue about it. Darwin explained Kant.
In fact, science is bound-up with a preconception of human reality and capacity to the extent that the battle between science and religion is not simply a battle over the truth. It is a struggle for a particular society and mode of human life. It is for this reason that religious fundamentalists are often anti-science whilst, ironically, many great scientists were deeply religious people. For the religious scientist, science helps us interpret God’s truth and creation, whereas for the fundamentalist this interpretation challenges their vision of society and human life. And vice versa.
The evidence I have seen is that great scientists are decidedly unreligious or anti-religion. Of course, in the time when Christianity still had a strong hold over people, scientists were necessarily religious, like most of their contemporaries, but being clever, they could find better reasons for admiring a Creator, through His supposed creation than the others, and so might have seemed more devout in some way. It certainly did not make them good any more than it did the popes. Newton was an unpleasant man, it seems. Studies of modern Nobel laureates suggests the opposite of what you say, and even studies of lesser scientific luminaries suggests that scientists generally are less religious by far than the average Joe, even in average Joe-land, America.
Not that I disagree with your general point about different views of life. The difference was recently highlighted by the late S J Gould when he proposed that science and Christianity should be granted their own magisteria to stick to. Then Catholic cardinals and fundamentalists would stick to their own guns that reality was not Christianity’s bag and morality was not science’s. Of course, it is absurd. It is absurd because the sort of thing that Christians are so convinced is truth are merely arbitrary assignments, however old and revered or even hoary they might be. They are not God given despite what they say. Science has still got Nature to measure itself by, not just the arbitrary commandments of rulers. It seems to be the old distinction between physis and nomos, and you will know much more about that than me.
My understanding of it is that nomos, social, religious or cultural laws and traditions, are arrived at by societies arbitrarily in the sense that they are a product of a particular social development. Natural laws are however there in Nature and are what they are whether any societies like it or not. You can check an observation of Nature or of society against reality and both might be true in that they are confirmed by the observations, but only the Natural law is basic. The observation of society merely shows what society choses to accept. Another society choses something different. We do not eat our grandmothers, but plenty of people did, perhaps still do. We do not marry our sisters, but the Pharaohs had to. We condemn and treat severely people who are homosexuals and pederasts, but the Greeks thought it the best way to educate a boy. And so on. Critics of science like to say that Nature is equally arbitrary for one reason or another, including the arbitrary metaphysical assumptions you speak of, but I would want to see what these alternative interpretations to the present arbitrary ones are, and how they stand up under testing.
The dogmatism of religious fundamentalism is antithetical to science not because of its adherence to unfalsifiable truths, but because of the restrictions that it places on the direction of the evolution of human society and life. Hence, Copernicus’ theory did not refute the bible (because, after all, it is central to Catholic Theology that the human interpretation of the truth of the bible is falible and the motion of the Earth does not have any bearing on the truths of Christianity), evolution theory does not refute the idea of a creator god (it merely changes our understanding of the idea), and quantum theory does not refute the idea of an omnipotent and omipresent god (after all, as Bohr retorted to Einstein’s famous “God does not play dice…”: “…stop telling God what to do.”). The struggle is deeper than that. It is a struggle about authority and the vision of society. It is a struggle about how human beings should engage with and understand reality. So, whilst I do agree with you in your criticisms of religion, I think that we need to extend our criticisms to the authority of science too. We need to deeply reflect and debate our vision about human life and our future world. Hence, both science and religion need to be subordinate to philosophy.
Christians have differing attitudes depending on the time of day, their particular sect, whatever bits of the holy word they chose to accept as binding and whatever they reject as unnecessary, and so on, because their views are arbitrary. The cardinals were happy that Galileo should expound his views as long as he disparaged them simultaneously by admitting they were just theories. They did not want hoi polloi to see that the bible was fallible, and they certainly did not want anyone to think the divines of the Church who interpreted the holy texts for the great unwashed were wrong, even if the bible was. Evolution changes our idea of the Creator into that of the God having an eternal cup of tea. Science can live with such a God because He is no different from no God at all. And old Einstein (and Stephen Hawking more so, perhap, in view of the use made of Einsteins witticisms), should have realised what a hostage to fortune his whimsical use of the word God was. For Him God was like the ancient “arta” of the Persians or the “logos” of Heraclitus (the latter being the Greek version of the former, in my view). It was order or reason behind Nature, but despite his personification of it, he did not think of it as a big human himself—any sort of personal God. Christians love to cite him at us though!
Now when it comes to authority, I agree with you. We are on common ground, but it is on the ground of the Greek nomos, not physis. I remain to be convinced that science is a question of authority except in indirect ways, such as who commissions it, and who owns it when it is done. I agree that those are huge areas of power that we need to control, but our lords and rulers are keen to deflect flak towards science and away from themselves, and I am conscious of not wanting to help them in their aims.
I saw Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ on TV the other day. Have you seen it? Whilst I liked the fact that the dialogue was in Latin, Aramaic, and Hebrew (with Spanish subtitles), all in all it was quite disappointing. Not to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it, but it is over hyped and the interpretation does not offer anything new. Even its blantantly antisemitic current is a continuation of the medieval and Nazi use of the passion play to whip up hatred for the Jewish murderers of Christ. It was quite amusing how Gibson portrayed all the Jews who hated Jesus as ugly with very bad teeth and big noses, whilst all the followers and devotees were beautiful with pearly white teeth and small noses. I’ve seen Gibson in interview. What a nutter! He really froths at the mouth and gets into quite the frenzy with his evangelical zeal, especially in his condemnation of his previously debauched life (drugs, booze, and women) and also abortion and stem-cell research. His face twitches and convorts as spittle flies from his mouth.
Greek and Aramaic were the languages of Palestine at the time, not Latin and Hebrew, and it seems more likely that Roman knights like Pilate would have used Greek publicly in that part of the world rather than Latin. Some Romans, speaking among themselves would no doubt have used Latin, and some holy men, such as the Jewish priesthood and maybe devout men like Jesus might have used Hebrew, in biblical quotations mainly. It’s not a film I’d pay to see but would watch it out of interest if it appeared on TV. So far it hasn’t, to my knowledge, and Shirl’s too. Gibson is a short arse. We often get delusional when brought up as Catholics. The gospels imply that Jesus might have been a short arse too. Catholics are seriously impressed by talk of hell and heaven, and many try to buy their way into the balmy place if they can. A friend of mine often gives his money to the church wile leaving his wife with little to feed them and even to clothe herself. I am convinced he thinks he is collecting brownie points for the fateful meeting with the bearer of the keys of heaven and hell. In short, you are right. They are nuts. But often it is not their fault but the fault of the awful system their parents forced them into.
[As an aside, I frequently consider recommending in a paper to Nature or New Scientist that neuroscientists should make a study of people who have turned to Jesus and become born again Christians after years of drug and alcohol abuse. It would be interesting to learn if they all suffered neurochemical damage to the same regions of the brain and that their religious revelations were in fact physiologically caused by their debauchery.]
Too right! The whole question of what motivates pious people is the central question of religion. Humans are supposed to be religious by nature, but I cannot believe it. It is custom, tradition, culture—indoctrination! That is for the innocents. For the rest it is opportunism and power grubbing. It ought to be fairly easy, I would have thought, to do the study you suggest, but it would require an honest doctor to do it. If the doctor is neutral towards or skeptical of religion then religious people will not accept it, and if the doctor is religious, no one should accept anything they do. The most important thing to them is their belief in their religion and not any sort of scientific objectivity. So, they are untrustworthy.
The film doesn’t hold a candle to Scorcese’s Last Temptation of Christ (have you seen it?) or to Jesus of Nazareth (with Robert Powell as Jesus), for that matter.
I have a vague recollection in the distant past of the Powell version, but have not seen more than a few clips of Scorcese’s. One appeared on TV in the black and white days about forty years ago by Dennis Potter, the man who wrote The Singing Detective, if you are familiar with that, about twenty years ago. Jesus was depicted as a speaker of a broad northern English dialect to give a feel of how the sophisticated Jerusalemites would have viewed him as a Galilaean. He was tormented by angst about whether he was deluded or really had a mission from God. It was unpopular because convinced Christians like Blair and Bush, let alone JC, know no such thing as self-doubt, so it had the usual Christian brickbats.
There are lots of interesting points that you have raised and I really want to discuss these with you. Firstly, like you, I really have a knee-jerk reaction to “metaphysics” when it is used to describe “the spiritual”, “the paranormal”, or whatnot, that lies outside the realm of physical reality. But for the record, “metaphysics” is a C16th word first used to catalogue the book by Aristotle that followed after his book on physics. Aristotle never used the word. However, the way that I am using the word “metaphysics” is not to describe some transcendental realm or reality beyond the physical world, but in the sense that is consistent with the discussion that is in Aristotle’s book subsequently called Metaphysics and also in the same way that Kant used the term. The study of metaphysics is a branch of logic that asks what must be true in order for x (a self evident fact) to be possible. Hence, in my book I ask, what must be true in order for modern experimental science to be represented as a natural science? Metaphysics is a study of the conceptual foundations that permit the unification of experiences in terms that transcend experience.
Fine! You have made the idea of metaphysics as “speculations behind the empirical”, as I crudely put it, clearer to me.
In the case of modern physics, one such conceptual foundation is that technology and natural phenomena operate under the same causal principles and laws. This permits technology to be used to investigate Nature, but there is nothing that can be derived from experience that proves that any principles abstracted from building machines are in fact natural principles. Thus the status of experimental physics as a natural science is not proved by the successes of particular experiments in constructing new machines. Faraday’s success in building an electromagnetic motor and representing that device in terms of electromagnetic field lines of force does not prove that the motor operates on natural principles nor does it prove the existence of an electromagnetic field as a natural entity that preceeded his work. Faraday’s successes and particular experiences are IN FACT limited to the context of success and experience (if you are IN ACTUALLY an empiricist about. In order for the results of his work to transcend those contexts, something that is necessary for his work to be represented as part of natural science, he needed to appeal to conceptions that are metaphysical, in the sense of the word described above, and, thus, reveals his preconceptions about the physical that are not themselves derived or induced from his experiences (and hence they are not empirical).
You lose me here, and the reason you do is that, for me, natural phenomena are phenomena in the natural world, and therefore include those devices we have learned how to make called machines. Maybe the example of Faraday and electromagnetic fields is jumping the gun a bit. Suppose you are a primitive man standing on a beach and experiencing the wind blowing at you. You experience it directly as a force tending to push you over. Later, as a slightly less primitive man, you are sitting in your boat on a lake and experience the same force of the wind, and might notice that it is pushing your boat towards the shore, or whatever. Later still, and still less primitive, you are in the same situation and get a flash of gestalt that makes you hold up your cloak or animal skin up to the wind and realize it is acting as a machine to propel the boat. Thereafter, you fix up a frame to hold the skin or fabric and you have invented the sail, a machine for propelling a boat. I am sorry for the prolonged parable, but I cannot see the seam here between the natural world and the world of machines that might require different metaphysical assumptions. They have the same assumptions, whatever they are, because machines arise in the natural world and subject to the same principles and conditions. Surely that is all Faraday and others like him are assuming, and it seems a reasonable assumption. Proof is a difficult thing, but the continuity here is surely evidence that the underlying metaphysics are the same, and justify the assumption that they are that is then confirmed by the success of the assumption in elucidating reality by experiments.
The point of my book is that, if we wish to understand science and the physical world that it investigates, then we need to understand the metaphysical principles and conceptions that allow it to identify “the physical” and how to explore it. So, whilst I accept that the concepts and precepts used to found modern physics as an experimental and natural science are arbitrary, in the sense that they are based on contingent historical foundations, they are necessary for modern physics and cannot be replaced without destroying the meaning of physics as a natural science. My point is not that these concepts are arbitrary, but is that they cannot be proven by experience. That is not quite the same thing. Their function is to elucudate experience by unifying and definiting fundamental representations of the physical world. If we wish to understand Nature, something that I always thought that physicists wanted to do, then we have to stop stubbonly replacing religious dogma with scientific dogma. We are entitled to question anything and everything.
I agree wholeheartedly that we are entitled to question everything, but to question things is not to contradict them. Tony Blair leads what was the socialist party in the UK. His questioning of socialist “dogma” is not questioning it but eliminating it without discussion! By the same token, I can question whether the wall that separates my front room and my back room is necessary or merely an encumbrance conditioned by earlier times when smaller rooms were easier to heat. So, I knock it out and the house falls down around me. It was certainly necessary as a structural wall for the house to remain upright. Questioning is fine, and philosophers are in to questioning things, but many people think that to question something is to imply there is something wrong with it. It might be a fault of public education, but it forces us into taking stances that cannot be misused by others.
So to question the metaphysical principles of science seems to me to be on the face of it admirable, but it ceases to be when you say the principles behind it are arbitrary because they are contingents of a particular history. That seems to be so, all right, but other contingent histories did not yield anything so useful as science. It yielded astrology, horology, sacrifices including that of humans, empty ritual and superstition and Christianity. Science might be contingent, but in other contingencies, it has not arisen at all, unless these poor substitutes are considered it. My problem is what I suggested last time, that there is some other set of principles that will yield some equally good or superior form of science. That is the belief of the New Agers, but all they do is rehearse again and again the same mistakes made by past believers in these divers science substitutes, and they all yield nothing useful.
Does physics help us understand Nature? In order to answer this question we need to examine how it preconceives Nature from the onset in order to construct its methods to explore it. But once we do this, paying close empirical attention to how science is actually done, then we find that the Nature explored by science is actually a greatly reduced subset of the world, the machines that physicists build and use, and this is why physics needs a metaphysics in order to transcend the experiences within the laboratory and related them the the wider physical world in which the laboratory is situated. That is what my book is about.
But surely it is a subset for purely practical reasons—to find problems that are manageable. And as the smaller manageable systems have yielded up useful hypotheses, these help us to expand the subset to larger and less tractable problems. And, if physics is not allowing us to understand Nature, then the problem must be with what “understand” means not with what Nature is. Surely that man’s sail shows that he has understood something about wind power, and even Faraday, whether his image of cutting lines of force means anything or not, has learnt something about Nature in being able to use what he has found to make electric motors. These are not transcendental things, but things that have become commonplace to us. They are now part of our Nature because we are creatures that live in the natural world and are learning how to use some of its wonders.
Ironically, the New Agers and parapsychologists use of the term “metaphysics” to describe anything that is not part of the physical world is actually based on the very positivistic conception of the physical world that they supposedly condemn. This is why they tend to annoy me. After all, if angels, ghosts, vampires, or whatever, exist, ie physically interact with and within the world, then they are part of the physical world. If they can be shown to exist then what is needed is a refinement of our understanding of the physical world, not a distinction between the physical world explored by science and a transcendental world explored by meditation or divine revelation.
I agree with this totally. The Christian God can be investigated by physics, if the Christians are right that God can interact with the world. It is as good a reason as any for dismissing God, and particularly that He can supposedly answer prayers, an utter illogicality. New Agers want an eclecticism that makes them seem ultra liberal in their outlook, and everyone else dogmatic, but they cannot get that we cannot pick this and that because we like the sound of them and put them together into a workable system. We cannot dictate what Nature does, or how she will respond to our efforts to test her. The trouble with what you have suggested several times, is that that seems to be what you are saying. If science is arbitrary, then we can do what the New Agers want and select a different metaphysics for a better science, and it will be one with spirituality (whatever it is) in it. You have not yet suggested what a new improved scientific metaphysics might be, and I will remain skeptical unless I can have some to inspect!
It for this reason that it makes no sense to me when someone says that superstring theory is metaphysical because it uses 27 dimensions and we only have experience of four. I want to question the very idea that we have an immediate experience of four dimensions. Of course we have experience of spatiality and temporailty, but these, in themselves, are not experiences of dimensions. They are not experiences of mathematical space and time. We do not have an experience of a euclidean straight line!!!!!! Every experience of a line is of a wobberly and curved line and we lay mathematical abstractions over these experiences. Hence, classical mechanics is no less, nor more, metaphysical than superstring theory or quantum mechanics. The metaphysical aspect of both is that the use of mathematics reveals the underlying form the the reality of the world. That is a postulation that we cannot derive or induce from experience.
I can appreciate what you are saying. It reminds me of the book Flatland about life in two dimensions, but the idea of having experience of mathematical dimensions is putting the cart before the horse. We have experience of the three spatial dimensions we live in and time too, but it is an experience that has become part of us through natural selection during the evolution of life. That is why we have mental categories, and that is what I meant by Darwin explaining Kant. We have the appropriate categories out of our evolutionary experience and so can think mathematically of these dimensions, and of time, thus being able to construct ideals out of the statistically less than perfect world we actually experience. Statistical variants from Euclidean straight lines are not likely to be valuable to our survival. Noticeable differences, like bending them into curves is. So we ignore the wobbliness of lines (indeed our perceptive mechanisms possibly evolved to make this happen) but can perceive curves and shapes. That mathematics can represent these is a fact found from experience, and the best explanation is that it reflects the underlying “reality”. The link is that we have necessarily evolved in the “reality” and so think in terms of it, even without having to postulate formal assumptions and so on. The inhabitants of Flatland could have no mental category of up and down, and so could not conceive of a bird or a fish moving in three dimensions, but they could extrapolate their two dimensional mathematics into three and four and so on, just as we do without ever experiencing them or needing to.
So when you say that the results of physics are proven by the fact that they work then you are neglecting to pay close empirical attention to the contexts of how the work and also to what else is said about those results which is additional to their function and pragmatic value. It does not follow from Boyle’s (in)famous suffocation of a bird in a glass jar that there is a universal vacuum that is filled by matter. It merely shows that it is possible to suffocate a bird in a jar by using a pump. The explanation for why it is possible is the thing of scientific interest and, even though this provides an intelligible account of experience, is cannot be derived from experience. It is based upon metaphysical conceptions that provide meanings to the experience and, for me, it is by understanding the differences in the way that experiences obtain their meaning from different metaphysical frameworks that we can understand the differences in the way that science and religion are constructed.
I am missing a few tricks in this game of cards. I agree that the explanation of the observation of the bird dying when the glass jar was evacuated is the thing of scientific interest, and the hypothesis that the jar was full of air necessary for life that was expelled by the pump adequately explains the observation. You say that this hypothesis is not derived from experience but it is. You might be right that merely the one experience of the bird dying in the bell jar that was evacuated is insufficient to conclude that there is such a thing as air, but we are back to the astonishing entanglement of science whereby hypotheses postulated in one sphere of investigation (experience) are found to supply the answers to others. We can be convinced of the existence of air not just from the one observation of the dying bird, but of many others too. The entanglement of it is quite like the mathematics of it. It might be that to describe it as metaphysical is an elegant way of describing it, but just as the English aristocracy were brought up to rule, we have been brought up for countless generations to live in this world, and its metaphysical underpinnings are therefore part of the make up of our senses and their organiser, our brains. There might be different metaphysical frameworks, but they are truly arbitrary. Only the one that structures science is based on Nature or physis. That is why it succeeds.
You see, even though, like you, I am opposed to dogma and am not religious, I am more open minded about religion than you are. For you, religion is based on false premises, pure and simple. But, I am not so certain. After all, the nature of God is an open question that has its objective truth (even if that truth is that it the nature of God is a fiction). I just do not know what it is. I just will not take someone elses’ word for it, even if they called “the Pope”, or “guru”, or whatever.
A New Agey friend of mine was getting annoyed with me the other day because I was pooh-poohing Von Daniken, Graham Hancock, and his curent favourite, Michael Cremo, as fantasists. His accusation against me was that I am dogmatic. What he could not understand is that I had studied the evidence and come to my conclusions. He had done the same and come to different conclusions. But I was the dogmatic one. The social studies students of the sixties when I was a student, and perhaps still today for all I know, were not allowed ever to come to a conclusions for fear of being accused of bias. If you are never to come to a conclusion for fear of being biased or dogmatic then there is no point in any form of study or of argument. There would be no point in justice. All cases would be given a verdict of Not Proven. For me Christianity is based on falsehood. Let us be franker—on lies. A good many years of study have led me to this conclusion, and I have written a lot of pages to explain it. Even so, Christians, who gave the modern meaning to the word dogma, accuse me of being dogmatic. These people do not understand evidence, scientific method or truth, and what is more they do not want to understand it. They are happy that they can make up God’s Truth as they go along so long as they attend church occasionally. Yes, God is an open question but it is possible to look into it, and the only possible explanation for anyone who takes it to be an open question is to reject it. Of course, few of us can approach it as an open question, we have been brought up to believe in God with our mother’s milk, in the social circumstances of general belief. That is why we will give the notion of God the benefit of the doubt. And why not? Since it is a figment, there can be no personal consequences of belief or unbelief.
I do not except “faith” as playing a role in philosophical inquiry. That is as true for religious claims as it is for scientific ones. So when you say things like:
“It is absurd because the sort of thing that Christians are so convinced is truth are merely arbitrary assignments, however old and revered or even hoary they might be. They are not God given despite what they say.”
This very much depends on whether the things that Christians says are true or not. I do not know. It seems to me to be at least logically possible that the truth statements made by Christians might both be banal repetitions of indoctrination and true. It all depends on whether Jesus of Nazareth was in truth the descendent of the house of David, the saviour of humanity, and died in order to share in human suffering, redeme us of our sin, and reforge the direct covenant between Man and God. I just don’t know.
Quite so, but one can say the same about many things that no one would even consider today as possible. Who today would believe that Pallas Athene could spring fully armed from the temple of God? Who would believe in centaurs or harpies? Who would believe in Father Christmas, or Mother Goose even though most of us did as children? Of course, it all depends on whether these creatures were what they were supposed to have been, but I can see no advantage in being a social scientist and submitting a verdict of Not Proven. Dogmatic, it might be, but we have these brains to help us to come to conclusions given our experience, and I can see no merit in not doing it in these cases. Perhaps I am making the mistake of giving God the credit for a greater intelligence than He has. Christians do not make any such error!
The part that I agree with you about is that the mere saying that it is true does not make it true, but, the lack of intellectual conscience and rigor on the part of the bigot does not, in itself, effect the truth status of what he or she says. For example, you could teach a parrot to say “one plus one equals two” with equal ease as teaching it to say “two plus one equals one”. When the parrot learns and says “one plus one equals two” it is both true and arbitrary, assuming that the parrot has no way of knowing the meaning of what it says and whether it is true or not.
And so, knowing that the parrot might not know itself, you would take some steps to find out whether what it said was true or not, unless, of course, you are a believer, when you will accept what the parrot says for fear of frying forever in hell by disbelieving it. It is of no concern to me that some people believe the words of a parrot, but what is annoying, and invites my response, is that they want to make me think the same as them. If they all kept to their aviaries to worship their parroting prophets, there would be no need to write answers to their squawking.
As a matter of historical record, scientists such as Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, and Schroedinger, just to name a few, all stated that they believed in God and wrote on the subject. None of these individuals (with the exception of Galileo) adopted authodox stances on the subject and they cannot be said to be merely reflecting the common beliefs of their times. Also, as a matter of historical record, Catholicism has a long history of good relations with sciences and has, as a matter of course, funded scientific work and provided children with education in the sciences.
I have not seen any decent review of this, but do admit that my father, who was a Catholic, admired his own Jesuit science and form teacher. Against that, I am aware of much more contrary to any preference by Catholics for science than for it. On my page on the social psychology of religion, I mention a study that showed that graduates from US Catholic high schools were much poorer at science than those from standard high schools. On the other side is the work I mentioned last time, that shows that excellent scientists are overwhelmingly opposed to religion, I assume because, they have grown out of it, just as they grew out of Santa Claus, and also, no doubt, because they are acutely conscious of what we have agreed above, that spirits cannot have anything to do with a material world unless they are part of it, and were that so, they would have been more evident than they are.
Maybe I misunderstand you, but it often seems that you lump Catholic Theology in with postLutheran doctrine. At no stage has Catholic Theology ever said that we should take a literal reading of the Bible. The idea that the Bible is literally true is a Lutheran idea. For Catholicism, human beings are fallible and only interpret the truth of the Bible. Of course, only Church sanctioned scholars are educated suffciently to interpret the Bible and consequently there is a need for doctrinal stances.
You are right in what you say that I ought to distinguish the Christian sects more, but then the whole argument would divide into multiple arguments. I might be unjust to one sect or another in generalising but they have a massive core of common teaching though they chose what of it they accept and reject according to the sect. Yes, Catholics preferred to leave doctrine to the divines of the church, and made it criminal to actually read the bible unauthorized. People who were not clerics were burnt for even possessing a Latin bible, let alone one in the common tongue. The author of many of the words we can read today in the King James Version was burnt at the stake for translating the bible into English—Tyndall. I can no more be persuaded to admire Christianity from its history than be persuaded to admire the Nazis (many of whom were Christians, including Hitler).
Galileo was not condemned because he advocated the truth of the Copernican system. It had been taught in Jesuit schools for forty years before it was banned. The problem with Galileo is that he did not follow “proper channels” and dedicated his un-sanctioned book to the pope. Furthermore, he also used the fact that the pope was a personal friend to take certain advantages and somewhat ridicule the pope by characterising him as a simpleton. This lead to the pope washing his hands of Galileo and thus leaving him in the hands of the inquisition who wanted to appease the Lutherans for political reasons. Hence the whole affair blew out of all proportion. The Church has subsequently apologised and accepted Kepler’s system.
I would be interested to know your source for all this. My understanding is that Galileo was accused of heresy before the Inquisition in 1616 and told to stop publishing his heretical ideas of the shape of the solar system, and so on, that were contrary to scripture. Galileo argued that truth cannot contradict truth. Scripture could not teach contrary to Nature. In that same year, the Inquisition stopped publication of Copernicus’s book unless it was “corrected”. Getting old, he published his views anew in 1632, and was silenced again with dire threats, although he was merely incarcerated in his home. He did not fancy the fate of Giordano Bruno, a few decades earlier. Admittedly, the Cardinalate had tried to compromise with him but on the grounds that he posed his ideas as merely hypothetical, robbing them of their impact. As for apologising, it is a current fashion, but is entirely meaningless. Can Nazis apologise for the death camps, and thus render themselves respectable and electable again? No more can the Church apologise for the death of countless heretics and witches in the most disgusting fashion. If anything, the heretics were right to say that it is the church that is the agent of the devil.
