AW! Epistles
From Karl 8
Abstract
Sunday, 21 August 2005
“The question of the existence of God might be more serious than that of Puss-in-Boots because people believe in God but not in Puss, but the question was about meaning, not about seriousness. If the question about the existence of God is no more meaningful than that of the existence of Puss, then it becomes serious that a large number of people take it seriously anyway… So, merely that a lot of people think one thing is important but another is not is sufficient reason to conclude that the one must be important, and the other not. A lot of people find Emmerdale Farm is important to them, but it is entirely fictional so far as I know. Are you open-minded about that? A lot of people think football is important, but I gather that you are not one of those. How would you summarise this subtle principle that you have discovered?”
Okay. But I do not agree that the question about the existence of God is no more meaningful than that of Puss-in-Boots. I also suggest that neither do you. The sheer volume of writings on your pages indicate that you too consider the inexistence of God as more important than the inexistence of Puss-in-Boots. There is a diversity of opinion on the existence of God, whereas there is no such diversity in opinion that Puss-in-Boots is a fictional character. No doubt there are a few million fans of Emerdale Farm, but, as far as I know, they all know that it is a fictional TV show. If there was any doubt, we could visit the studio and meet the script writers and actors. And, yes, millions of people think that football is important, but I take it that you believe that football exists! I have yet to meet anyone who doubted the existence of football. How would I summarise the subtle principle that you credit me with discovering? I am not so arrogant as to dismiss the beliefs of billions of people as being self-evidently false, especially when there is no way that I could know that. In my view, the fact that billions of people say that the existence of God (of one description or another) is important to them is a sufficient reason to take the existence of God seriously as being important and possibly true. I guess that my principle is: respect for the heartfelt beliefs of others (especially those beliefs that I do not share!). However, the truth of a proposition cannot be derived from its popularity. Hence, for me, it remains an open question for which I do not know how to answer one way or the other.
Strictly, the existence or not of God is marginal to the purpose of my webpages, which is to expose Christianity as an odious and murderous scam. The original pages were to show that the origin of Christianity had a much more historical and non-supernatural explanation than any Christian could allow. From there I went on to the origins of Judaism and also to science and religion, which is where my own atheism, in respect of fatherly figments formally came into it. Nothing stops anyone in logic from accepting my explanation of Judaism and Christianity while still retaining a belief in a God. It is simply that the biblical explanations of the so-called Hebrew God are myths and not history. In any event, the fact that a billion or two people believe in Christianity is no proof of its truth or even its worth. Most of these people were brought up with this particular religion, and have no basis for discarding it. They are indeed sheep. So, what I am saying is that these people could have been brought up to believe in Puss-in-Boots just as sensibly as they believe in God, in a slightly different version of our own world. Philosophers then would be saying about Puss what you are saying about God, and they would be dismissing God as a fairy tale. If the religion of the Son of Puss had led to the same quantities of blood and soot as the religion of the son of God has then I would have been writing about the Kittyians in the variant world, to expose their evil. You would be writing that there is a diversity of opinion about Puss but none about God who is purely fictional. As for Emmerdale and football, they were introduced because of your principle that what is popular must be taken seriously. Neither are. It is what people think God is that matters, because a fairy tale becomes a reason for murder and suicide. That is what I object to about religion, and the recent denial among Moslem clerics about the Moslem suicide bombers in London parallels the denial of Christians that the history of Christianity is abhorrent. To support a patriarchal religion is to prove you are monstrous or ignorant simply because no one otherwise could. You say that Christian beliefs are not self-evidently false, but I say they are. They are false by some of the criteria that the Christian saviour is reported to have uttered himself. If that does not make them false, then the religion is false anyway, because the supposed words of the Christian God are not to be believed, even by Christians. The Christian God said the tree is judged by its fruit and when the fruit are rotten the tree is put to the axe. Christians take Jesus to be God, but he denies it himself on the grounds that no man can be good, only God is. That refutes Christianity. Isn’t it self-evident enough? I fail to get how anyone, let alone a philosopher, can respect beliefs that are manifestly contradictory at their very root, and especially when their consequence has been immeasurable suffering and uncountable murders.
“…I do not understand why people cannot see that their premises are human ones. That they are projecting their desires on to an almighty being they call God. If pre-Socratic Greeks knew this then why is it taking so long to percolate down to John and Joan Doe in the American mid-West, people with huge advantages over the Greeks of 2500 years ago? The reason is that the scam is deliberately perpetuated by rogues who gain out of it, and governments who use it to manipulate opinion. If philosophers think it an interesting thing to defend for argument’s sake then they are not taking it seriously enough, even though, it seems, seriousness is a serious criterion!”
It remains the case that the religious beliefs of naive people could be manipulated by evil people, whilst the fundamental tenets of those beliefs could be true. Hence, evil people can pervert the truth to suit their own ends. I do not defend religion for arguments sake— I defend religion for the sake of liberality and a regard for truth. I am also not prepared to allow God to become the property of rogues and governments, as if they had the patent on the idea! They have stolen God. The fact that people unthinkingly believe rogues, governments, and madmen is a product of bad education and poorly developed critical faculties. This is a problem for political economy and democracy, rather than a theological question. It is a problem of propaganda and oppression that operates by fostering ignorance and maintaining authority. Which is why I understand why you are so passionate about your project of exposing these lies and falsehoods. Of course, religion has been shamelessly used by wicked and clever people to manipulate the ignorant and frightened, but, the question that you have avoided throughout our discussion, that I have raised several times, is, if spirituality and religiousness are the products of lies and scams, then how were the lies and the scams possible in the first instance? Why did anyone believe them? It seems to me that the liars and manipulators are only able to control and use religion in this way because they already have managed to gain authority to do so. Hence, the question is how did they gain authority in the first instance. If religion is so obviously false then they could not have used religion to gain authority. However, in my view, the human desire to seek spiritual meanings and explain the world by appeals to the divine is a deep part of the human psyche, a genuine yearning for truth and meaning, that is manipulated by evil people in order to place themselves in the position of being the arbiters of truth and meaning. The lies were successful because they tapped into something deep within the human psyche. If you wish to understand religion then you need to question and understand the need for religion. This is why I wish to make to distinction between the objective truth about God and what people claim is the objective truth about God. I cannot see any way that I can know the former and thus I am left with a wilderness of opinions. The claim that God does not exist is opinion too.
If you defend monstrous opinions on the grounds of liberality, you will end up in the lobster pot I spoke of before. Let fascists take over, and it will need a great deal of lost life, yet agaion, to retrieve the situation, if indeed it is retrievable now that fascistic governments have the ultimate in terror weapons. Let Christian or Moslem fundamentalists get control and Lo! We have fascism! They too will not willingly yield control to non-Christians or non-Moslems. The history of these religions prove that they are not 100% truth and love. It is hard to distinguish even 1% of these qualities when they are in power. Religion is not interested in truth. It is interested in perpetuating itself, and makes people into ants, doing only what they are permitted in the ant house. And rulers have not stolen God, they invented it! Religion has been used for social control in advanced societies that have left a recorded history. Admittedly, what happened before that, is anybody’s guess, but it is unlikely that religion was what is today called “organized”. It was organized for its practical value in controlling populations. And this is not speculation. The documents to show it have been deciphered and reported. You write, “It is a problem of propaganda and oppression that operates by fostering ignorance and maintaining authority.” But your argument is circular. That is the very purpose of these religions. This is not quantum electrodynamics, with which I believe you are quite at home, so you must be suspending your own critical faculties not to see it. You ask why anyone believed the liars and the scammers in the first place, as if these subject people 4000 years ago were PhDs in philosophy. They were already subject. Kings were absolute. Kings ruled in the name of the local God. People identified with the local God. The local God was the real king, and the king was the God on earth. God’s agent as a minimum, and God himself for some. Religion was not necessarily any more “spiritual” than football tribes are now. It was an expression of identity and culture, and used by the law makers to get people to conform with the social norms or laws they prescribed. Religion was communication. What the king prescribed, God had prescribed. Cultures evolve, and their value to the rulers evolves too. They are not just *imposed* by rogues, unless a people is conquered. Then there was resistance, but decimate the population and the problem was soon solved. Humans have a great deal of curiosity, but I do not thing that there is anything deep in the human psyche that perpetuates religion, and that is pretty obvious when religions either diminsh in importance when there is no call for them, or sometimes change in their nature with no one apparently noticing. There is nothing deep, nothing profound or fundamental about them. Like Dr Who, Christianity has metamorphosed several times in its 2000 years existence. What is unusual about humanity is that we can talk and we can think about our situation. That makes us inevitably think about truth and meaning, but it is absurd to me to think that the answers can be had arbitrarily from the mouths of other human beings. Human beings are liars, and an almighty God is capable of doing what He likes, so what possible purpose could He have in passing on messages by human agency? When it comes to objective truth about God, the same applies. He has done nothing to show us objectively and unequivocally that He even exists, even though He is almighty. He is also allegedly omniscient, so He knows the doubts that must arise from this, and the scams that breed out of the uncertainty, but He is plainly not interested— or does not exist! We get no signs, either, that Puss-in-Boots exists, and we know why, yet the criterion for God has to be different!
“Technically we have proof of almost nothing— perhaps nothing at all! That is the problem that Descartes tried to solve to begin philosophising at all. But if we have proof of nothing, how can Christians be sure of what they believe to the extent of bandying it about as the truth, especially since much of it is manifestly not true. They have been gulled by their parents, pastors and priests. The honest and sensible stance is to be skeptical of everything, and that is the scientific attitude. Let us refuse to accept anything on the say so especially of pastors and priests, and accept that even our parents, and grandparents even, can themselves have been gulled into believing what is false.”
If we have proof of nothing, which it seems evidently the case about theological matters, if nothing else, then I conclude that Christians are wrong for claiming that their faith is true, especially when it is contradictory and confused, and I also conclude that athiests are wrong for claiming that they have knowledge about what they evidently cannot have knowledge about. I agree with the virtue of scepticism. Hence, I am sceptical about your atheism too and choose to remain an agnostic. I am yet to be convinced that there is any advantage to being an atheist rather than an agnostic. You are welcome to offer reasons. Moreover, as I briefly discuss in chapter 3 of my book, Descartes philosophy did not actually start with scepticism. Rather he started with the self-evident truth of geometrical mathematics and used scepticism to clear a space for the mathematical to become to fundamentum of knowledge and the model by which all other truth claims could be assessed in terms of clarity. And, as you well know, Descartes remained a devout Catholic and the perfection of God was a central metaphysical concept for the justification of his epistemology and his understanding of Nature. As it was for Newton and Galileo too.
What did Descartes have to clear to make a space? He had to clear away “precipitation and prejudice” and “things which are evidently false” or that he finds “some reason for doubt in”. Moreover, he declared, “we shall in the first place doubt”…“because we desire to apply ourselves only to the search after truth…” And then Descartes, I read in Bernard Williams’ book about him, made a speech early in his career (about 1626) in which he urged that sciences should only be founded on certainty. So, I think it is wrong to say that Descartes’ philosophy “starts” with mathematics except in the sense that he was a mathematician and was impressed by the logic of mathematical proofs which he took to “present themselves clearly and distinctly” to his mind— in other words, were self-evidently certain. You are a skeptic, you say, and are skeptical about religious claims, the principal one of which is that there is a God. To be skeptical that there is a God means you have no reason to believe there is a God. So, as, I said before, the skeptic about God should be an atheist, simply because there is no reason for belief. “One cannot discover or experience the inexistence of anything.” If there is no God, there could be no evidence of it, so the absence of reason to believe leaves only one conclusion. There is no fence for the agnostic to sit on. To be an agnostic is no position to hold. It is to be an atheist without the courage to admit it. You excuse it with your liberality argument whereby those with monstrous views, that certainly have impacted on others in the past to their severe disadvantage, and still do, will not be challenged on the basis of a false liberality that belies your pure attitude on what knowledge is.
“Once again, I agree with most of what you say, but feel no obligation to consider every possibility that might be, and to keep reminding myself, ‘Ah, it might be! Don’t forget it!’. Some thing or event might be, but when I have no reason to believe it is or was, I cannot see the sense in having to consider it, let alone reminding myself of it. Skepticism saves you from that.”
What is so wrong with keeping an open mind about things that you do not know? I do not constantly remind myself “intelligent life might exist on other planets” during every waking moment— I simply keep an open mind and speculate upon it from time to time, as well as listening to the speculations of others. The question of the existence, nature, and purpose of God is exactly the same. I’m open minded when I think about it, but most of the time I do not. The same is true of Atlantis and Robin Hood. I have not given Puss-in-Boots much thought.
Why not? You are admitting you see no reason even to consider Puss—skepticism. I feel the same way about God— skeptical—and that is what I have been trying to explain. As soon as you say one might not be a figment, you have to allow the same for the other. You are agnostic about God, OK. Are you agnostic about Shiva, or Aphrodite, or Marduk, or Krishna, or Priapus? Presumably not. The skeptical way, led by Descartes, is to doubt things to get rid of prejudice and precipitation ie coming to rash conclusions. I have no secure evidence there is a God, and the supposed religions He has initiated are all wicked, though He is supposed to be perfectly good. It is not keeping an open mind to ignore all this. It is no longer an open question like the harmless one about life elsewhere in the universe. Let the believers in Zarkon, the evidence of whom they claim they have found on an insect inscription (or aye-aye) in a Wiltshire crop circle, begin to murder the believers in Karzon, the amabassador of the bug-eyed Grays who left a smoking circle in Rendlesham forest inscribed in interstellar Gray hieroglyphics warning us against the evil insectivoid invasion of the sentient universe, then even you might pause. You would not know about these things, so how would you judge them, or should they be allowed to continue to kill each other? When your liberality clashes with your morality, how do you resolve the conflict?
“It saves you from having to account for unlikelihoods. And I still insist that the profoundness of the absence of the evidence is relevant.”
On this point I disagree with you. I have already made my argument about how the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I will not repeat myself. I just accept that we clearly have different standards of evidence. Furthermore, I do not know how you can place a numerical value on the probability of the existence of God. Its a nonsensical and arbitrary assignment. The truth is that, even with the absence of evidence, you have no logical basis for such an assignment. What is the probablilty that God exists? It is not a question of chance and hence you have no mathematical basis for assigning probabilities. Plausibility is not the same as likelihood.
On the first point, I suggest you are deceiving yourself because in practice you accept it all the time. There is no evidence of unassisted human flight, and that is evidence that humans cannot fly unassisted. Because you reject the principle that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, you will reject the absence of evidence of human unassisted flight, as being evidence that humans cannot fly unassisted, and will therefore happily jump off a multistorey car park. You know quite well that all the evidence there is is that people who jump off high places not only cannot fly but end up dead when they hit the ground below. All the evience is for “splat”, and there is no evidence at all for “wheeeh”! There are many similar examples that can be brought, with or without the dire consequences, which show that absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence, and that you have no confidence in rejecting it in circumstances when the consequences are fatal or injurious. As for likelihoods, you started making the point generally by talking about cases like Atlantis. I am skeptical that Plato’s Atlantis existed, except as a figment of Plato’s imagination, which means I thing it unlikely that there ever was such a place in reality. In the case of God, I think he does not exist, so I can put a precise numerical value to it—0! You, on the other hand make Him like Schroedinger’s Cat. You sit on the fence with the probability of God existing hovering in a virtual state between 0 and 1. Open the box and see what you find!
“So the absence of evidence when in logic and experience it ought to be present is certainly evidence for its absence.”
So you insist. However, this begs the question of why you think that, if God existed, evidence of God’s existence ought to be present. Why cannot God “act in mysterious ways” and deliberately leave the question of God’s existence ambiguous? Perhaps it is part of God’s plan. Maybe God is testing Lucifer’s claim that man would reject God if given free will. Perhaps it is only human arrogance that lead us to believe we are at the centre of God’s plan. Perhaps we are merely a small part. Perhaps the plan is to show Lucifer his folly and welcome him back into heaven. Perhaps we are humunculi in a greater cosmic struggle that has nothing to do with the salvation of our souls. Perhaps we are part of an experiment and God cares as much for us as a scientist would care for a colony of ants in a laboratory. Perhaps God loves his ants, but refuses to interfere, even when the ants come up with crazy ideas about God and use these to justify killing and torturing each other. Now this might leave us with many critical questions about the motivations of God, but those questions would presuppose God’s existence.
Perhaps they would, but I thought we had agreed that if spirits exist but cannot or will not respond to us for whatever reason, then their existence is of no consequence to us. And any figmentary character could be substituted here, the argument remaining true. The characteristic of fictional beings is that they do not make their presence felt in reality. If people begin to believe they exist, it is the people that have to act for them. The fictional being acts entirely through human agents, even though it is imagined as massively powerful. The reasons it does not appear are invented as fiction, as you just did. The fact that I can invent gods is no reason for me to believe in them. Heraclitus knew that we invented gods, but the Doe family of Springfield, Missouri, and a hundred million people like them have not yet cottened on.
“I repeat, it is not proof, but we seem to have agreed that proof of our own lives is problematic, so we have to stick with evidence, and evidence is judged on its quantity and quality to give us a likelihood.”
On your account, the probability that atoms existed prior to the C20th century was zero. There was an absence of evidence about the existence of atoms for much longer than there has been an absence of evidence for the divinity of Jesus. Perhaps you will discover the crucial evidence tomorrow. Prior to the C19th century it was highly plausible that the evidence supported a static universe, at the beginning of the C21st century it is highly plausible that the evidence supports an evolving universe. Who knows what evidence will show in one hundred years? Evidence depends on how you look and interpret what you see, as well as what is there, and our ability to collect and reinterpret evidence changes with time and technology. It may well be the case that God exists and we simply have not evolved enough to have even become aware of that existence. Let alone understand God.
The whole point of evidence is that you have to go on what of it there is. Evidence changes, and that is what bothers religionists. President Bush and Mr Blair have invented new principles of evidence in the war on terror that they have exacerbated if not necessitated, and it is that they will hold people in jail with no evidence at all of ill-intent, just alleged suspicion—the evidence might turn up sometime in the future. Your argument disparages evidence on the grounds that it is not all in, will change, and so we are left paralysed. That suits fascists. Rulers will not be paralysed. They will act to further their own interests, but the evidence of it we have might change, and so is invalid! Whether the evidence is scientific or legal, we should stick to it, and not try to anticipate evidence that might never turn up. I accept that unequivocal evidence for the son of God might turn up tomorrow, but I would bet against it. Almost all religious evidence that has been “discovered” recently has been forged, and it is a fair bet that most of the older evidence is the same, including the gospels. Democritus believed the motions and materials of the world were best explained by atoms 400 years before Jesus was born when the demos believed in Hercules and Apollo. He must have thought he had evidence for them, imperfect and inadequate that it was. It was better evidence than the Christians claimed for the existence of God incarnated on earth. God is omniscient, believers tell us, but your latest addition to the holy litany of the theology of Christian fiction, suggests He is not. He plainly does not understand us. We are too backwards for Him yet he is trying to save us by writing confused and confusing books, and appearing in a loincloth. It sounds to me as though He is slumming.
“It is unlikely that Atlantis, as described by Plato, ever existed.”
Not true. It is simply unknown whether it existed. We have barely began to survey the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Furthermore, some historians have claimed that the site for Atlantis was in the Americas, Ireland, or Cornwall (depending on the historican in question) and the “loss” of Atlantis was actually a loss in mapping and navigation skills.
Ho hum! And the Nazis thought it was at the north pole, and von Danikan thought it was in space, and Churhward thought it was really Mu in the Pacific, and a thousand other romances.
“It is not unlikely that cities did suffer destruction by earthquakes and floods, and might have served as a model for Plato’s Athens-puffing story. They were not Atlantis.”
How do you know? Moreover, in Plato’s Dialogues the Atlantis story is raised in the context of a competition about argumentation, rhetoric, persuasion between Socrates, Timmaeus, Critias, and Menexenus as expounded in three dialogues (the Republic, Timmaeus, and Critias; the latter is incomplete and it is unknown whether Menexenus’ dialogue was ever written). It is raised in the context of a story about a war between Athens during its golden age under the rule of Athena and Atlantis. There is no reason to believe that Plato actually considered this story to be true, nor that he was trying to convince the reader that it was true.
Quite.
“Christian and Jewish believers have to fall back on this sort of false reasoning to defend the myth of Moses and the Exodus. There is no evidence of it outside of the Jewish scriptures, but two escaping slaves recorded in some ancient papyrus, Greek-style federations of tribes, gradual migrations instead of one mighty one, and so on, are all used as excuses for the lack of evidence, with no acknowledgement that these excuses destroy the biblical story, showing that the Exodus is mythical.”
So you have a good reason not to believe it. But even if it is true that the Old Testament is based on lies and falsehoods, it has no bearing on the question of whether God exists or not.
You seem to have this bee in your bonnet about the existence of God. They have a bearing on whether the Jewish and Christian claims for God are true or false. Their claims are based on this compilation of old works that are often false.
“Well, I take it to be perverse for someone to do something they know, or ought to know, to be wrong. Since Christians do not seem to be able to distinguish right from wrong, they are often perverse, but think they are models of rectitude. Anyway, we agree in the end.”
Our disagreement on this point is a matter of semantics. It would be perverse to continue it.
“I quite understand that, but I make my judgement from the record of latter day prophets for whom the words madmen or confidence tricksters apply closely. As to the bible, it is a book of myths whose characters are mainly fictional, and where they are not mainly cannot be distinguished in external recorded history.”
This seems plausible to me. But that does not make it true.
“Even so, the evidence in the bible is that many of the Jewish prophets were considered madmen by the leaders of Judaism at the time,”
But the leaders of Judaism could have been liars or madmen themselves, threatened by these prophets. Who knows?— My point is that no-one does.
So, the book is valueless.
“…and, if there is any historical truth in the angel Gabriel visiting a virgin Mary and charmingly persuading her that she would be the mother of the Saviour, then it is pretty obvious what it is, to any uncommitted reader.”
I have no idea whatsoever whether this story is true or not. Personally, in my humble opinion, I would say that it never happened. Christians just didn’t like the idea of the mother of Jesus having sex so they made up this story. They obviously turned a blind eye to how Jesus’ siblings came into the world. But, my point is that, on the basis of this story, there is no reason to believe that someone tricked Mary into believing that he was the angel Gabriel in order to have sex with her. As far as I’m concerned, the most plausible alternatives are that the story is true or it was completely made up after the fact of the foundation of Christianity as a religion.
It can be related to some of the content of the Scrolls, but it would show Essene beliefs had been altered or misunderstood to generate the biblical myth.
“It is entertaining but not too fruitful, except to show that the evidence can easily be read into the bible that the prophets and angels were madmen and confidence tricksters, just as modern ones are.”
I accept that you can interpret the bible in this way. And where I can see your reasons for claiming that “the prophets” were madmen or liars, I do not see any reason to believe that the angels were anything other than embellishments. I do not think that they were people pretending to be angels or madmen under the grip of self-delusion. But, perhaps, some prophets had hallucinations (all that fasting in the desert, probably using funghi and snake venom to induce visions too) and saw angels. I just do not know.
Whatever. It just was not historically what the believers make out it was.
“For my own part, my judgement is that the Jewish prophets were based on the propagandists sent out by Cyrus the Persian to undermine confidence in the local rulers. This is a historical truth, although little is known about them, especially as the great paternalistic religions of the world have deliberately destroyed as much as they could find about the Persian empire and its religion— the basis of all three of the others!”
An interesting opinion and one that may well be true. But, as I’m sure you accept, historical truths are the products of analysis, interpretation, and an educated imagination. I think that you claim too much when you claim that this is a historical truth. It is a theory based on research and interpretation. It may well be plausible and persuasive, but that does not make it true.
Maybe it is not true that your own image looks out at you from a mirror. There are texts that show that Cyrus used propagandists.
“Being an agnostic in this context must mean the same as being an unbeliever— you will not be taken in by anyone claiming to be an angel or prophet of God.That is the undoubted outcome of not believing for skeptical reasons, but being an agnostic leaves you open to the guiles of these confidence tricksters, and they are very clever.”
The only being that could convince me of the existence of God is God.
The only being that could convince me of the existence of God is Harvey the Rabbit. We are both equally likely to be enlightened. Perhaps you do really have a better chance than me since I have had to give up all intoxicating substances! My point really is that to encourage agnosticism as a supposed respectable perch for inncents to balance upon leaves them vulnerable to missionary activity, and unlike atheists, Christians are inveterate liars, believing that to lie for God is virtuous.
“There is no point in being a confidence trickster if you are not convincing, and that means able to convince people contrary to their better judgement.”
Sure, but the fact that some people are liars about their knowledge of the divine does not mean that the divine does not exist. Of course, there is no point to telling a lie unless there is a chance that the lie will be taken to be the truth, but it does not follow from the existence of liars that truth does not exist. I was reading a couple of articles about the dramatic increase in the level of fradulent scientific research over recent years. Obviously the pressures and difficulties of obtaining funding or fame prove too much for some people. One would presume that one would have to be pretty convincing to get away with scientific fraud for any length of time. Does that mean that one should reject the possibility of genuine scientific research? Of course not! It just means that we have to be on our guard and develop our critical faculties further.
If people are getting away with it for any length of time then the science is poor. For a long time, no one thinks it is important enough to check. But these people do eventually get exposed because of the way science works. No Christians want to check the validity of the bible. That is the difference. They believe it even though it is untrue.
“It is certainly a negligible probability that a camel would go through the eye of a needle, and evidently that was the view of the divine son of God of the Christians. Modern Christian prophets and angels or saints (like TV evangelists) are quite desperate to ensure that the flock do not start to imagine that Jesus meant this. The myth of the narrow gate is false, but has been spread by Christians, notably baptist evangelicals who seem to have invented it, to persuade their followers it is all right for their pastors to get rich and remain saints. The same construction with the same intent is recorded of some early rabbis, and seems to have been a typical skeptical response among Jews of the time. And while it might not be possible to test religious statements of post mortem bliss or horror, or whatever, it is possible to see the character of the Christian prophets of latter years and the consequences of their prophetic teachings. In my skeptical opinion, they plainly do not pass muster, and even Christians disown them, for obvious reasons.”
I accept this. But, I do not agree that it follows that because some people have misused the teachings of Jesus, for their own purposes, that those teachings are falsified by that misuse. In fact, as you show in your writings to great effect, it is the teachings themselves which reveal the false prophets and fraudsters, as well as the hypocrites. As you say, they plainly do not pass muster.
There evidently was a book of sayings that the gospel writers drew on. It is called “Q” by scholars from the German “Qwelle”, source, but the Gospel of Thomas is another similar but apparently independent collection. These collections do not need to have been the words of Jesus, and the fact that paraphrases of some of them are known in Rabbinical literature suggests they were general collections of wisdom sayings. Jesus seems not to have been particularly original. The sayings do, of course, remain wise whoever said them.
In response to your claim that I "make it sound as if an opinion based on good evidence is a lesser form of knowledge", I replied “it is what is called an ‘educated opinion’ or an ‘informed opinion’. But it is still an opinion which may be true or false.” You said it is not knowledge at all. This seems to be a reasonably high standard of knowledge to me, but you seem to think that it undermines everything and makes all research pointless. I don’t understand your reasons for this. It seems a little hysterical to me. You say:
“In that case we have no knowledge at all, so what are we arguing about, and how can anyone make a career out of it unless they are charlatans? Even learning how to make clay models and even mechanical ones is knowledge, is it not? How to use mathematics and therefore logic is knowledge too, is it not? If it is not, what is the point of it all? It seems we might as well twiddle our thumbs. The best knowledge we have is experiences that have been tested against an hypothesis that has not been shown to be false under the conditions of the test. The hypothesis is a fancy word for opinion and experiences are the evidence. It is the form that knowledge takes. What sin is anyone committing by admitting it, and decrying “knowledge” based on no evidence other than what someone says is God’s word.”
Firstly, at length in my book and these emails, I have repeatedly said that we are able to obtain knowledge about our alethic possibilities of making. So we can have some knowledge about making clay models and mechanical models. And I have also said that we have knowledge about making music and arts in general. In fact, I have argued that, in experimental physics, knowledge is pretty much limited to that. I have also repeatedly said that mathematics and logic provide knowledge of an epistemic kind. I also maintain that we can have knowledge of an ordinary, eveyday nature about our lived-world of experience. But, as I have also argued, theological and cosmological knowledge is not possible through experience because it has to be mediated by things that are different from the object of enquiry (i.e. exegesis or dialectics of discourse, text, and symbology in the case of theology, or machine performances in the case of astrophysics.) So it should be pretty clear that I accept that some kinds of knowledge are possible and others are impossible. It does not logically follow from my claim that your arguments about Christainity are informed and educated opinions, rather than knowledge, that I deny all knowledge. I am denying that your claims are based on knowledge. In my opinion, they are interpretations based on historical evidence and readings. When you say “the best knowledge we have is experiences that have been tested against an hypothesis that has not been shown to be false under the conditions of the test” then, in my opinion, you seem to have a very slack standard of knowledge. Given that you are clearly a fan of Karl Popper, I am very surprised that you would make such a claim. In my view, a corroborated hypothesis remains a hypothesis that we have good reasons to work with and test further; it is not knowledge. Somewhat ironically, I seen to be more persuaded by Popper than you. The “best explanation” or “best theory” is not knowledge, even if it seems extremely plausible, almost undeniable, because it is supported by a large body of evidence and has been corroborated by critical srutiny and test. It also does not follow from an exacting standard of knowledge that, even if the best one could hope for is educated opinions and interpretations, one should give up all research. The point of research is to discover things of interest and reveal misconceptions and falsehoods. Even if knowledge and truth remains out of our reach, critical research remains extremely valuable and enjoyable. Have you forgotten your own analogy about squirrels, trees, and the distant mountain? As far as I am concerned, we might well be limited to opinions and experiences, but knowledge remains an ideal against which we should remain critical about the objective truth of our opinions. This should be of importance to a historian, especially given that the past is not an object of experience, especially in the case of a biblical historian. There is no possibility of obtaining objective knowledge through history. It is interpretation and critical analysis all the way down. The error would be to represent historical analysis and interpretation as knowledge.
Secondly, I have said several times in our email exchanges that we need to make a distinction between the objective truth about the nature of God and what human beings say about the existence of God. Religious people should not claim to have knowledge of God. They are limited to statements of belief, faith, and personal experience. The fact that there are all too many charlatans who make false knowledge claims does not detract from the fact that there are many genuine religious people who seek truth and meaning through religion. In my view, such genuine people should attend to historical research when trying to understand their own religion and research such as yours should be deeply intellectually troubling, to say the least, for any Christian. You raise a massive critical and well researched historical interpretation of Christianity that Christian scholars need to take very seriously. For secular social theorists, in my opinion, your work also has critical value in understanding our contemporary society and is very interesting. But, you have not proved anything or given the definitive final answer. It is only an opinion, no matter how passionately you feel about its truth. Of course, one should not deny that passion for truth is probably the deepest motivator for research, but, if one aims to be objective, one needs to distance oneself from one passion about one’s research.
The disagreement we have seems to be about how important knowledge mediated by whatever as tools for getting it is. The point about “Once there was a squirrel…” is that the squirrel learns a great deal without ever achieving the goal it set itself, and you agree with that insomuch as it stands for “critical research”. You say Even if “knowledge and truth remains out of our reach, critical research remains extremely valuable and enjoyable,” rejecting it as knowledge even though it is “valuable and enjoyable”, etc. Well, if my definition of knowledge is slack compared with your exacting one, it is at least one that leads us to understand something about the world, and however critical you are about the way society is developing, it is developing and not standing still by adopting the inexact definition of knowledge that is too poor for philosophers. If anything has to measure against some ideal knowledge before it is knowledge, then knowledge is impossible. Ideal knowledge is unattainable by definition in a real world. Indeed, ideal knowledge is a good definition of God! The reason why my slack definition of knowledge is knowledge is the same as the reason why a blind man would like to have even imperfect vision. Imperfect knowledge is useful in itself, and might help us to towards perfect knowledge. You would not want to persuade the blind man not to have some sight because it does not measure up to your exacting standards of what sight is, would you? You are saying that empirical scientific knowledge is wrongly conceived knowledge, not merely that it is imperfect knowledge, for all it is is heuristic know-how. Yet even if it were, it would lead— has led— to the development of machines, like lenses, spectacles, microscopes, telescopes, and then on to equivalent instruments in what are misconceived as different wavebands in the electromagnetic spctrum and so on, all pottering, but pottering that has let us see things we could not previously see, like the skeleton and organs of living creatures. The inventiveness of the classical world was finshed off by Christianiaty, and all that remained for a thousand year dark age was know-how, most learning being squashed out of existence in favour of devotional time wasting, filth and misery. Yet the decline from pure practical knowledge to imperfect supposition, brought us out of this misery in only a few centuries. I suggest it shows that know-how alone, though it is undoubtedly knowledge, lacks any guiding principles, but these come from what you disregard as knowledge at all, but merely opinion. What then prevented proper, correct opinion from developing and guiding the know-how properly? Maybe it did, and that is what we have. Regarding that other Karl, I am not a particular fan of his or anybody’s because I am not a fan of depending on solitary wise men or any authorities for truth. I am a fan of his proposition that something has to be falsifiable to distinguish it from religious and political dogma and pseudoscience. It does that well, though it can mean nothing if it is dealing with illusions because testing is useless being theory laden, and interpretations invalidate any knowledge that depends on it. I would sooner rely on my own interpretation of knowledge than on the knowledge passed on to me as church dogma that is an interpretation by some ancient or modern rogue. Though you might be alive because of it, you insist that the discoveries of micro-organisms beginning with Pasteur and leading to hygeine, disinfectants, immunization and antibiotics is not knowledge because it depends on machine intervention and interpretation. You say here that a ’point of research is to discover things of interest and reveal misconceptions and falsehoods’, but otherwise you consider the discoveries of science vitiated by their being interpretations of instruments that are themselves false and misconceived. In your pursuit of some exaggerrated purity of knowledge you sound like a philosophical mullah acting as a spokesman for a philosophical Taliban. Thus, it is an error to think we can get knowledge from history because it is ’interpretation and critical analysis all the way down’, yet George Santayana says if we do not learn from it we are doomed to relive it, and we constantly do relive it because we do refuse to learn from it. Whether you intend to or not, you encourage us not to learn from it because it is not ideal enough knowledge. You go on to say we should distinguish between the objective truth about God and what humans say about Him. Yet the only objective truth we have about God is that He steadfastly refuses to leave us with any unequivocal evidence of Him. That certainly is sufficient for me to disbelieve what anyone claims to know about Him other than nothing! Anything that we know nothing about because it never impinges on our world, we can safely ignore, whether in some extreme of purity of reason, we have to accept that He might nevertheless exist. What preternatural ability lets us distinguish religious charlatans from genuine religious people who seek truth and meaning through religion. Christians cannot. The religious charlatans depend upon the fact that religious people seeking this truth and meaning cannot distinguish them. And, when any of them claim to have found this truth and meaning, how are we to know they are not liars or deluded from the manual of pure knowledge? These people, you say, should attend to such things as I have compiled on my webpages even though it is no more than an opinion. That is the constant Christian refrain against their critics. Science is an opinion. Evolution is an opinion. History is an opinion. The Christian critic has an opinion, but it is no better than any other opinion, specifically the Christian one. It is precisely this sort of false equality that abandons all evidence and critical assessment that science and dear old Karl (Popper) were concerned about, and I thought most other philosophers too. I am satisfied to accept that we are mere imperfect mortals not gods so that all the knowledge we have is imperfect, but not all the imperfect knowledge is equal, as the Christians want us to settle for, and we can demostrate it through reason and evidence.
“I fully accept that the needle does have an eye, but, even so, I do not have to imagine that it is even-stevens whether the camel can pass through it or not. Centaurs might once have existed, or still do somewhere, but I do not have to sit firmly in the centre of the fence on it as an issue.”
Well, that is your decision. If you have the psychological need to make judgements about things of which you have no knowedge and then elevate these judgements to the status of knowlege then that is your affair. You are only human after all. But you are making an error nethertheless.
Puss can purr comfortable in the knowledge that she is in your ’not disproved’ category of truth. Earlier you disparaged Pascal’s wager but perhaps it would be safer for you to take it up. After all, hellfire must be in the ’not-disproved’ category of purity.
“I can come down on one side fully confident in my decision based on the evidence there is while acknowledging the needle’s eye chance that I might be wrong. I am not compromised, but I am foolish to equate the utterly unequal probabilities that the evidence offers.”
I do not agree that these involve "utterly unequal probabilities that the evidence offers". I have tried at length to offer a reasoned and articulate argument that it is impossible to provide empirical evidence, mathematical proof, or logical proof, about the existence or inexistence of God. I have argued that I have no reason to make such a judgement one way or the other, so I refuse to do so. I have also stated that I have a commitment to a liberal respect of the heartfelt beliefs of others, including yours. And, futhermore, I have also stated that I am committed to a high standard of knowledge which does not permit opinion to be represented as truth. In my view, your own standard of knowledge has serious philosophical and logical flaws and is ultimately based on assertion. I accept that you have good reasons for your beliefs and have, at each and every stage, been respectful and honestly complimentary of your research, but I have refused to accept that you have obtained objective knowledge. You have not.
It is curious how these qualifying adjectives creep into the argument. I do not remember claiming that I or science had achieved objective knowledge, though you have implied it before. We have differed over what knowledge is, and objective knowledge can only be your ideal knowledge that I reject as being as imaginary as God, indeed equal to God. I have also said that we shall only achieve any such knowledge when we become gods. What I nevertheless think is true is that science aspires to achieve objective knowledge, through successive approximation, what you say Gooding has disparaged as asymptotic realism, though I have often said that few scientists think we shall get it, so they agree it is asymptotically approached. You accept I have good reasons for my beliefs, yet immediately before that you said it had philosophical and logical flaws that rendered it nothing more than assertion. To assert something is to declare it positively and assuredly. There is nothing wrong in asserting something when you have good reasons for it. You obviously think you have good reasons for asserting your discoveries, so you do not criticize assertion in itself. Most people take assertion left unqualified to mean that something is affirmed *without* any good reason. You are therefore being less than clear, despite your conviction that you have unequalled standards of knowledge. The only knowledge that can meet up to your superlative standard, so far as I can see, is know-how that you have obtained by direct experience. If that is so, and we are to be puritanical about it, we are cast back to our animal origins, because the thing that makes us human is that we have culture, a shorthand way of saying that we can learn from each other, and particularly from generation to generation. All of that, though, requires human intervention and interpretation. You yourself have chapters devoted to historical analysis and criticism of scientists from Leonardo to Morpurgo, and a good many philosophers too, all of which could be dismissed from your argument on your own grounds that your historical analysis and interpretation is not knowledge but your opinion. You cannot meet your own standards of proof. As for probabilities, I thought we were talking at that instant about centaurs, although it is you who sees a distinction between the conception of centaurs and that of God. If I wake up in the morning to find my beans covered in slime trails and badly damaged, I can deduce, without having to put any precise mathematical figure on it that they have probably been attacked by snails. Since my garden is overrun with snails, I could say it is most probable or almost certain they have been attacked by snails. If I find my lawn full of hoof marks, I could just as well say that it is most improbable that they were caused by centaurs, since I have never come across one in my life, no one of my acquaintance has, I have read no reports of them in Britain, and to the best of my knowledge, they are mythical and therefore entirely fictional beings. If it were suggested they were caused by centaurs, everyone would agree it was impossible that they were (except you perhaps). Even children recognize that centaurs are in the same category as Willy Wonka and Peter Pan, that of figments of the imagination, but, it seems, the philosopher cannot let himself do that. No wonder philosophy degenerated into theology. Finally, you speak of heartfelt beliefs. Well, many Americans have the heartfelt belief that the white race is superior to all others. The US Straussists have the heartfelt belief that the world should be ruled by “philosophers” and “gentlemen”, namely themselves, and the rest should be slaves fed myths to keep them quiet. Many earnest Christians think the whole of humanity ought to be Christians and, if they choose otherwise, and object to the way US Christians, particularly, want to arrange the world, then they should be bombed en masse. Belief is to accept something as being true, the trouble being that no reason is needed for many people’s beliefs. In your purity of understanding knowledge, you are accepting either unfounded belief or well-founded belief as being equal because both do not meet your celestial standard, and so are not knowledge. It might feel superior up there, but most of us live here on earth where we have to live practical lives with practical standards.
“[Foolish] is what agnosticism is. It was invented so that Victorian dissenters could take a position that did not completely alienate the church-going hypocritical Victorian middle classes. It pretends to be an honest position but is a cop out.”
In my view, this is a purely rhetorical utterance and is a crude overgeneralisation. My own agnosticism is based on reason and honesty and you will have to try a little harder than that if you wish to persuade me to be an atheist.
I couldn’t dream of penetrating your barrier of philosophical purity of thought. But what I was saying here was agnosticism is foolish to equate the the evidence and alternatives. As a matter of fact, hoping to check what Thomas Huxley actually regarded agnosticism as, I read in The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Ed J Bowker) that Huxley ’defined its basic principles as repudiation of all metaphysical speculation, and of most Christian doctrine as unproven or unprovable, and the application of scientific method to the study of all matters of fact an experience’, a much stronger view of it than was held subsequently, and certainly by you.
“Now, on the narrower issue of the content of my pages, you are wrong that I am writing generally about the history of religion.”
Are you saying that you are not making general claims about the history of religion on your web pages? But, even if you are (and you meant to include the word “not” in that sentence), are you saying that you have definitively explained the origin of religious sensibilities and debunked all religion?
You see, I am not a good rhetorician at all! Let me rephrase it as, ’You are wrong that I am writing about the history of religion in general’. It was because you had said, ’you have only scratched the surface of the origin of religion’, but that was not my purpose.
“I began them explicitly writing about the historical origins of Christianity, and that has led me much further afield into Judaism and Persian religion. So, you are not right that I have focused on Christianity.”
I said that you have MAINLY focussed on Christianity. On the basis of wordage on your webpages, I think that this is clearly the case.
That is what I explained.
“The pages on Judaism and Zoroastrianism show that Judaism and Christianity were both not revealed religions at all, but were grounded in Zoroastrianism.”
I haven’t read your pages on Zoroastrianism and Judaism. So much to read, such little time. But, I was led to believe by my previous readings on the subject (many years ago) that Zoroastrianism was founded in about 600BC. Which, in my view, would make it quite a late development in the history of religion, relatively speaking. But, my point was not that you haven’t read further afield than Christianity. My point was that you are far from providing the definite final word on the subject of the origin of religion. My point was that the question of the origin of religion is a deeper one than the question of the origin of Christianity (and Judiaism and Zorastrianism for that matter). My point was that you still have a lot of work to do before you can claim to have understood religion. Have you examined polytheism and shamanism in any detail? If you have, your webpages do not seem to reflect such a body of research.
I would agree with you, if my purpose was to understand the origin of religion. Since it happened before recorded history, and does not fossilize easily, the actuality of it is likely to remain inaccessible to us. Naturally, at points I touch on conjectures about it, but it does not matter much how it began. My guess is that it was a primitive culture that cemented the bonds between the members of a group of people, and it included explanations of natural things. The central point is that in historical times when we find texts explaining what religion meant to the people of the ANE, it was being used by kings to manipulate populations.
“Once again, my view is that the evidence is overwhelming, but since evidence counts for nothing unless it is proof, it is a waste of time reading it. That, of course, is what the Christians like to hear.”
Again, this is merely shoddy rhetoric. I did not say that evidence counts for nothing unless it is proof. Repeatedly, I have said that it provides peruasive and good reasons for belief. I have simply denied that your claims about the inexistence of God are based on knowledge. It is immaterial to me whether Christians like to hear that or not. Their religion is based on faith, not knowledge. Your atheism is based on disbelief, not knowledge. I have agreed that you have good reasons for your disbelief. I have simply and clearly stated why I hold that good reasons and educated opinions are not knowledge. I do not see the need to repeat myself futher.
I am afraid you do because it is not clear why evidence can be in some sense good and persuasive yet not be knowledge. If the celestial definition of knowledge is the preception of what is certainly true, then only what is certainly true can provide any persuasive arguments. How can something categorized as untrue be persuasive? Yet opinions are not certainly true. You seem to have art and craft knowledge, and ideal knowledge, which presumably would settle all argument, and otherwise there is opinion, which I take to be the human forms of knowledge you have mentioned before, but is not knowledge at all. I am happy to see different degrees of truth, but that is evidently slack. Christians like to hear it said by others that their belief is as good as any other because any belief is nothing but an opinion. I refer again to what I wrote above. Snails or centaurs, in this world we are faced with different levels of certainty based on the evidence. Proof provides us with certainty, and when we are certain of the truth of something, we have knowledge of it, but generally we do not have proof and therefore do not have certainty but only some likelihood of it. I am living in, and addressing people in the real world, not people in the stratosphere as you are, so perhaps my standards have to be different. More realistic, I would say, but maybe you are right, not so rigorous because such an over zealous definition makes us all into ignoramuses by ignoring the art of the possible. Opinion is belief, and belief can be well founded or not well founded, and this is what is possible in reality. Absolute knowledge is God, so to ignore knowledge unless it is absolute, or ideal, or however it is removed from human cognition, is to admit God in another form, and that is dishonest. It is begging the question.
I’ll try to find time to read your pages on Zoroastrianism as soon as I have time. You know how it is. But I remember finding the stuff that I read on this religion years ago to be very interesting and I would like to read your opinion. Have you finished my book yet?
I finished the book, but now you will have to explain it to me. You will find the Judaism pages easier to understand.
“I have to take your word for it that there are assumptions that could make the inferences from the test grossly wrong. I suppose the hypothesis that the sheep in the UK a few years ago were suffering from foot and mouth disease could have been wrong because we assumed they were not suffering from boredom. Or stones do not fall to the ground by an attractive force but fly off into space from a repulsive one because we failed to take congnisance of our observations being reflected in the sky by assuming we were making them directly.”
You are being silly again. But, seriously, have you never devised and performed a complicated scientific experiment? If you had then you would know that you have to make lots of assumptions and simplifications in order to design, build, operate, and interpret an experiment that tests model based on a primary hypothesis. The model also requires assumptions and simpifications. The sheep were diagnosed as suffering from foot and mouth because they had the symptoms associated with foot and mouth. Of course, it may well be the case that there might be some other disease which has the same symptoms as foot and mouth, until there is a reason to think otherwise, the vests assume that if the animals are suffering from the symptoms of foot and mouth then they will consider it to be a case of foot and mouth. It is also assumed that the best method to deal with foot and mouth is to slaughter all the animals and burn their bodies. Not only is this hypothesis questionable, but it also shows that if the animals were suffering from something else that had the same symptoms as foot and mouth then we would never find that out because the evidence was destroyed. In the case of the stones, we moderns do assume that there is an attractive force that acts upon the stone, rather than an internal principle within the stone to move towards the ground, but, when we would want to test the accuracy of Newton’s quantifiable formulation of that assumption, his Universal Law of Gravitation, we would have to construct a controlled experiment, such as Cavendish’s experiment, to measure G. This requires assumptions and simplifications. Furthermore, even the most accurate experiments have “margins of error” and are not perfectly repeatable. It requires assumptions and simplifications to estimate the consistency of the experiment with the theoretical expectations, even in a relatively simple experiment such the Cavendish experiment.
Sorry about being silly. I can’t help it. I can accept that some of the experiments using huge machines such as those you were involved with at CERN might require the assumtions you speak of, and perhaps simpler experiments too, but it is the seriousness of the consequences that I doubt. So that, when the margins of error are known, and the consequences of the assumptions on the result can be estimated, they can be discounted in well designed experiments because they are just not significant.
“Mainly the assumptions we make are that the laws of Nature are not a function of position— on our scale of measurement, anyway— and such things, but these are things that have been tested themselves.”
Have they? I was unaware of any experiment that had tested the assumptions that the Laws of Nature were isotropic and homogeneous in space and time. Do you have the details of that experiment? Or did you just imagine it? Moreover, how could that experiment be tested in order to show that it was accurate in all places and for all time? Such an experiment would require the very assumptions that it supposedly was designed to test. I simply do not believe you that any such test has been proposed, let alone performed, but please feel free to send me the references of where the details of this experiment, or series of experiments, were published.
What I mean is that experiments that test common things like the acceleration due to gravity, Snell’s law, and all that sort of schoolboy stuff, whenever they have been done seriously have not revealed any significant changes in the phenomenon under test, so far as I know. I believe tests on gravity are nowadays sensitive enough to measure even small variations, but the variations found are just what would be expected by the presence of mountains, loads of heavy metal or other changes in density, and so on.
“The assumption is that they apply in our untested instance allowing us to test for something else.”
Newton explicitly states this in the preface of Principia. It is a basic assumption of all experimentation. Furthermore, as has been pointed out by subsequent natural philosophers and philosophers of science since then, these are metaphysical assumptions because it cannot be tested by experience.
I am not sure it is true, because our proposed law or hypothesis could not work if our assumptions were wrong. If were keep the pressure constant in testing the gas law, then V = aT. If we keep the temperature constant then PV = b. So we have found a law PV = RT, and it gives correct results when both P and T are allowed to change within certain bounds. Whatever metaphysical assumption has been made seems to be tested by the functioning of the combined law. This seems a nice simple case, so it would help me if you showed me what the critical assumptions are.
“And again, if such assumptions were unjustified, the hypotheses made of them would soon begin to fail in circumstances where the assumptions were false.”
If some previously held universal law of physics, say the second law of thermodynamics, was found not to hold in a space probe in orbit around a black hole, would that mean that the universality of the law was found to be false or was it that the isotropy and homogeneity (i.e. the invariance) of the space-time metric was found to be false?
If it did fail, any possible explanation should be considered in the light of the nature of the failure, such as whether it was constant or had the period of the orbit round the earth, and so on. We would use observations to try to decide what was going on, and we shaould all be terrifically excited by it all!
“What I was saying is that the test need not have been explicitly a test, but might have been an activity such as those you mentioned. An experiment to build a machine to use the gold hooks from the sky to get to heaven without dying might have some trouble in being realised. We might have to conclude that the hypothesis of gold hooks from the sky was wrong, although we were not explicitly testing it.”
The point is that should we have a theoretically possible machine and we tried to build it, then we would have to make a lot of assumptions in the process. Thus, if the machine failed, then we do not know whether our design or the theory was flawed. The only thing that we know is that we have failed to build a machine to get us into heaven without dying.
But, if we have confidence in the theory, we would try another design, and keep persisting as long as our confidence in the theory and our ability to build working machines remained. I agree that sooner or later our confidence in one or the other would be threatened, but, I presume that, meanwhile, we have continued to use other theories to make successful machines, so our machine making aptitude has not diminished, and our other hypotheses are working well. So, in this case, we should begin to question the hypothesis, and our efforts to make these machines, in the end have tested it to destruction.
“Removing the jargon from supposed profound theories often deflates them back to the level of the commonplace.”
I know that you hate jargon, but the reason that it is used is to specify meaning in a way that ordinary language does not. In the vast majority of the theories of physics, this specifity is not optional.
I appreciate what you say, and do not hate jargon per se, because I accept it makes explanation shorter. What dismays me is that gurus of various kinds use jargon— or often not jargon because it is meaningless really— to seem profound. Pseuds like to talk about energy, vibrations and so on because uneducated people think they are saying something scientifically meaningful. It is the emperor’s new clothes— everyone has to agree how marvellous they are for fear of seeming stupid or losing their friends. I accept I am incompetent to judge, but I suspect that some philosophy is like that, and a lot of religion for sure.
“It does for much of psychiatric theory by whichever of its gurus you choose, and it probably works for much of philosophy too.”
Up to a point. But everything depends on what you are trying to do.
“I do not doubt, in all my criticisms of Christianity, that it helps some people, and no doubt psychiatry, astrology, homeopathy and even aromatherapy do too.”
The test of any therapy must be whether it helps people. This is true of psychiatry, homeopathy (which has also helped animals), and aromatherapy. But your criticisms of Christianity are based on historical and biblical interpretation and are presented as truth claims. It seems to me that it could be possible that these claims are correct and your efforts have helped people come to understand that they have been deceived by Christians. However, hypothetically, it is also possible that your specific claims are false (your historical analysis is flawed or based on erroneous evidence), but the overall conclusion (that Christianity is founded on lies) is true. You have the right answer for the wrong reasons, so to speak. For example, just for argument’s sake, it might well be the case that Jesus was not the son of God, nor was he an Essene, but was actually a completely fictional composite of several other people from different eras and places. In which case, your criticisms, even when false, could help people counter other falsehoods (ie those of Christians). Your research would be flawed as history, but tested as being rhetorically helpful for your own purposes of countering Christian liars and apologists, if this was the case. At least until it became known that your research was flawed.
And as for astrology? Well, I accept that it might help people, which is all well and good, if it does, but, given that proper astrology (rather than the newspaper variety) makes detailed predictions and character analyses, it seems to me to be directly testable in a simple and quite methodical way. An example of such a test would be thus: Test two thousand people who state that they have never had a proper reading of their astrological chart. Ask them all for their birth information and, in secret, use the correct information of half of the test group to produce their proper birth chart, whilst for the other half, just put in random information about time and place of birth and then make a proper chart using that. Allow astrologers to interpret all these charts using their own system and then hand them out to the people. Ask each person to say whether they found the readings to be meaningful and accurate about their characters. If there is an asymmetry in favour of people who found their own birth charts meaningful over those with random charts then there clearly is something meaningful in astrology. But, even if this was the result of such a test, this would not, in itself, support the claim that the position of the planets against the stars determined one’s character. Not only would more testing be needed, but, a radically different alternative explanation is available. For example, it might be the case that it is not the stars but the early experiences of the environment (temperature, mood, light) that effects character. In which case, human character would be sensitive to which season one was born in and how one was situated within the seasonal cycle for one’s first year of life. On such accounts, one’s star chart is simply a clock, but it is the earthly environment that causes differences in character types. One could test this hypothesis by repeating the above experiment, but this time in the southern hemisphere (in which the seasonal cycle is oppositional). If there was an asymmetry in favour of the northern hemisphere (the same hemisphere in which the system of astrology was devised) then this would support the alternative explanation. Anyway, I’m digressing, but my point is that each and every tests involves assumptions about what would constitute a crucial diffference and how we reveal it fairly. In each test, we are in a position in which we make assumptions about the hypothesis and the test. Thus testing is much more complicated than simply checking theory against experience.
The point about pseudoscience is that those who believe them do not believe the tests on the grounds, if they offer any, that the test destroys the vibrations or whatever, presumably their way of saying that the metaphysical assumptions behind them are mistaken. What I would expect, if you are right that all testing is subject to a plethora of untestable assumptions, is that tests would not work at all because in each case a variety of assumed conditions could not pertain, and the test would effectively be subject to random noise. If you are right that each test makes its own metaphysical assumptions, are we not showing, when a test works, that the assumptions were right, and, if it does not work, but a refined hypothesis can make it work, then the same is true? If the assumptions manifest themselves in reality as failures to tests of some hypothesis but the hypothesis can be made to work with a tweak, then how do the metaphysical assumptions differ in practice from physocal conditions that falsify the test?
“Belief and particularly attention helps, and the reason is simple psychology. It is testable and it works. So does a rabbit’s foot. You do not need to think the rabbit’s foot is God but simply that it will help. It does.”
Does it? How would you test it? I guess that we could ask soldiers before they go off to a war whether they carried a rabbit’s foot. We then would see how many of the soldiers with a rabbit’s foot came back in proportion to the overall number of soldiers that came back. We might be able to show that soldiers who carried a rabbit’s foot were statistically luckier than those who did not. But, it might well be the case that soldiers who carried a rabbit’s foot were not actually luckier, but were simply more fearful and took less risks. Or, conversly, they might be overly confident about the power of their rabbit’s foot that they took more risks and so more of them were killed. The problem is that such a test would require so many assumptions that it would not actually be a fair test. The only thing that we could be sure of is that it was very unlucky for the rabbit.
Yeah! I like it. The belief in God as a protector could be tested in the same way, and, if the effect were reversed because the believer was too confidant God would save him and he took silly risks, then we can conclude God was not helping him at all. Only the positive outcome confirms the soldier’s belief in his magic charm, God or rabbit’s foot. But when I say “it helps” it is exactly in the sense that the soldier gets courage from it, even though it is unfounded courage. The one who comes through the ordeal of the battle, will be convinced his rabbit’s foot worked. He would not be interested in the fact thet two thirds of those who believed died and only a third survived. He will find a way out, even ultimately that they one who died did not really believe!
“Any scientific effect has to be above and beyond this psychological and TLC effect.”
The scientific criterion for estimations of the success of psychiatric therapy has to be whether it is of benefit to patients.
Even if a placebo is more effective?
“When it comes to explanations, the success or failure of this or that can always be explained away by the dominance of the id over the ego, or vice versa, or anything else that sounds plausible,…”
Yes, but this is only of concern once it has been confirmed that there is evidence that Freudian psychotherapy is helpful is a significant number of people. After that, we could see out subtle differences in the kinds of patients for who it was helpful, and why, and for those it was not, and why not.
