I’ve said before that Tartarus, vast though it is, is a fairly empty place and gloomy with it. It doesn't produce an atmosphere conducive to discussing issues that are more germane to the world above. Hence most of what I’ve written here has been extremely self-indulgent and solipsistic. Updates are sporadic because I have little to cue me to write, not enough changes in Tartarus to provoke a reaction. Yesterday, however, whilst exploring down one of the many nameless corridors here, I entered a cavernous room that inexplicably contained a strong gale of hot, dry air and thousands of loose sheets of paper. The wind carried the sheets in strange balletic eddies before depositing them in the corners where they piled up like great, towering drifts of snow. More paper seemed to be entering the room by some means all the time so that this process appeared to be endless. The paper piled up. I made my way to one side of the room and found it to filling up with discarded sheets from sacred texts and religious treaties on the nature of God, the formation of the world and the origins of mankind. In the opposite side of the room all the sheets were scientific papers and articles refuting much of what was in the other side and making claims that atheism was thereby a sound position to take.
Whilst glancing through various stray texts, it occurred to me that when people pick up this science versus religion debate, they tend to fail to distinguish the true quiddity of the terms. Science and atheism are not synonymous and religion is not offering, or trying to offer, any scientific proof for the existence of God. It is an apples and oranges argument. Religion offers no proof and science will give no credence to things that are not evidentially provable. As such they are not well made for sensible debate.
Religion attempts to offer us a route to understanding how moral codes are derived from the notion that a God exists. This invariably requires that very human attributes are ascribed to God in order to support some notion of divine providence. It is the lack of rationality of this route from the transcendent that concerns scientists as it cannot be translated into terms that would be acceptable to scientific method.
Science, however, is amoral. It is not focused on the same issues of how we should live our lives but is more concerned with empirical discovery to further our understanding of the universe in which we live in order to, in the main, have more control over our own destiny and provide a platform for further scientific discovery.
Science gets itself into difficulties when it fails to recognise the limits of its methods. We often perceive science to be the epitome of understanding whereas, in fact, it is, in the main, a method for approximating likely outcomes. It is about constructing models that generally seem to reflect empirical experience to an acceptable degree of tolerance. What it does not do, though, is provide an exact understanding of the world as it actually is nor can it answer all questions. If scientists attempt to answer a question that is couched in a way that requires the answer to be derived from inductive reasoning it is already failing to comply with the central tenets (dogma even) for valid scientific discovery. Just because I have only ever seen white swans does not give me the scientific support for saying that all swans are white (even though my personal experience may strongly suggest it). This is why I believe that atheism is not really a scientific position. It is denying the existence of God through induction – “because I have seen no evidence of God, God can’t exist”.
A scientist can of course critique religion and religious dogma for failing to be soundly based. The mistake, though, is to say that because the logic of religion fails to be scientifically convincing that there can be no God because this makes God’s existential status dependent on religion whereas there can be no causal link, logically or chronologically. This is where so many atheists make their mistake by refuting God’s existence by critiquing something that has no causal link to God’s existence. All that these people can do is to dispute the validity of religious dogma not the existence of God.
It is easy for scientific thought to critique religious dogma for failing to operate in an evidential way and it is easy for religious thought to critique science for failing to deliver moral guidance. We’re back to the apples and oranges. Science is amoral so we should not be using religious intuition to critique it and religion is faith based and therefore cannot be critiqued for failings in scientific rigour. The religious should stop trying to intuit scientific propositions derived from religious principles (e.g. the Sun revolves round the Earth, the Earth is only a few thousands years old and so on) and the scientists should stop trying to induct propositions on the nature of God by spouting science (you heard me, Dawkins).
So where does that leave us? God knows. No he doesn’t. Yes he does. No he doesn’t, he can’t. Can so. Can’t. Can….etc.
2 comments:
Hmm. I like the image of the papers lilting through the hallways and landing on either the religion side or the science side.
Of course, great caverns of ink have been expended on this topic. Thanks to the internets, many of those gallons have become mere pixels, which tends to underscore the insubstantiality of the entire enterprise. But at least it means fewer caverns must be drained of their ink. The caverns should be left pristine as much as possible.
I think religion does intrude on science when it makes empirical claims about the world, as it sometimes does. It says, for instance, that Jesus died and then woke back up, and that Mohammed was whisked into the sky on an ornate chariot. These are things that either happened or did not, and believers place great importance on whether they did or didn't.
Science does illuminate questions of value. Among other things, there are scientific accounts of the origins of human morality (I am not here vouching for them, just noting their existence) and ongoing scientific studies on the nature of belief.
So the twain do meet, and thereupon we must take sides. (Assuming we care.) I throw in with science because it has a really strong track record of generating reliable, useful results.
It also has a track record of announcing findings that later prove to be false, but the falsification -- the one we take seriously enough to label as such, anyway -- also comes from within science.
My 'faith' in science -- and I reject that word for it -- is nothing more than a confidence that science will continue refining its conclusions by sticking to its proven methods. I want it to be free to continue -- free vis-a-vis religion, which often feels threatened by it, and vis-a-vis any other political or other motivation.
I deny the existence of a right to enjoy, agree with, or otherwise "like" the findings of science. We might like them and we might hate them. (As it happens, I frucking hate the way many spiders behave toward bugs and even other spiders. I also wish we had a second moon.) Religious believers might hate the findings too, and for their own reasons. This does not get them a right to wave them away -- we have a right to opinions, but not a right for facts to be X rather than Y.
I want science to continue illuminating reality with as few restrictions and taboos as possible. I want scientists to stick with the method, which includes being duly modest about what they know and do not. "We don't know" and "we're not sure" should never, ever fall from the vocabulary of science.
As for atheism, I have written about the epistemological limits (as have many others). I don't "know" that god does not exist in the way that I "know" that I am touching a keyboard. Dawkins sets forth a scale of probability, and assigns the non-existence of god at only the second-highest level. I agree with that. At that level, I live as though there is no god, and a proper label for this is atheism. But I remain open to the possibility that evidence will emerge to show me that god actually exists; I am not similarly open to the possibility that evidence will emerge that I'm actually stroking the back of an fox instead of a keyboard.
I think atheists are sometimes -- only sometimes -- given to moments of bluster when they'll say things like, "it is an unassailable fact that there is no god," but I take that to be bluster and little more.
OK, this comment is quite long enough, so I'll shut my pie-hole now and stop wasting precious pixels.
-Dale
Thanks for the comment, Dale. I’m in sympathy with much of it. I tend to group atheists and theists in the same epistemological category of belief based cognition. They are both trying to purport a belief founded on inductive reasoning from certain observations (be they about the physical world or words in some sacred book). This is why I consider it to be a fairly fruitless task; one side will never convince the other because no verifiable conclusions can be reached. An agnostic position would be to recognise that god is not an object of knowledge (in the way that light is not discernable to the ear, so god is not discernable to the mind) and so would not be distracted by debate over divine existential status but rather focus on the matters that are within our capacity to understand. Of course you could argue that the concept of agnosticism is a belief that God is not an object of knowledge and is therefore no more valid than other beliefs but the important difference is the corollary that God no longer becomes part of the equation in terms of what we need to prove or disprove, we can move on. In many ways the distinction, in practical terms, between an atheist and an agnostic is slight. The agnostic, however, is at least immune from being pushed into those moments of bluster that you mention.
However, my post was not really about the distinction between atheists and theists. It was, as you observe, about science and religion. As I said, I do not see science and atheism as being synonymous. There are many scientists who are not atheists and many atheists who are not scientists. The problem I have is when people leverage science to support atheism they risk doing bad science in the same way that when the religious try to use science to support their religious views, they are prone to do bad science. So we will get someone who, coming with a religious prejudice, will make scientific observations about the world to produce inductive conclusions that there must be intelligent design. You will then get a scientist who, coming with an atheistic perspective, will make other observations that will produce inductive conclusions that there is no intelligent design. Now we may have immediate sympathy for one argument over the other but that does not improve the validity of the conclusions – if it did the argument would have been over decades ago.
The religious need to stop making claims on the physical universe that are derived from their contemplation of the divine. Atheists should stop using science to disprove religious beliefs. I would be far happier if they just argued the ethics of how we should live – there, perhaps, is some common ground.
I have a wider issue with science as a whole in the fact that it is amoral and therefore it has the potential to do as much harm as good. Scientific progress is following no design. It could be progress towards our extinction as much as it could be towards our salvation. But that is a longer discussion.
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