“And then there are people who believe that things don’t happen for a reason, nor are events influenced by anyone looking at us from on high. The creation of good and evil, justice and mercy, beauty and terror, are all in our hands, as complicated conglomerations of particles obeying the laws of Nature. I kind of like it that way.”

But what about miracles? You know, like what supposedly happened to that French nun.

“..we would call them pathological (or perhaps “Mr. President,” but that’s another topic).”

Thanks for that line, as it was the direct cause of water spewing everywhere! A good laugh, to be sure.

My favorite discussion of the “Don’t look at me, I’m just enforcing the Cosmic Rules, which, yeah, I’m sort of responsible for in the first place, but still, rules are rules, you know?” is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzf8q9QHfhI

“Yes, but wait for Lou…”

Okay, Sean, you are very, very droll and witty. I loved reading your post! In fact, I felt quite flattered! And I was thinking after my reply to The God Conundrum that you pysicists and biologists really do have to take a lot of pressure from the religious right, and I should understand that and make allowances.
However, I still have to say that you are side-stepping my point — or my question, I guess. Do you think your views of what is “reasonable” are conditioned by your way of knowing, and perhaps even by a Newtonian-Cartesian version of your way of knowing that physics has perhaps left behind? Okay, that’s leading the witness….
Do you think that your views on metaphysical questions are NOT conditioned by the basic pre-suppositions of your discipline? Physics began by ruling out teleology and practising an extreme reductionism, focusing on physical bodies in motion and a brilliant mathematicial formalization of “what’s happening” in terms of mechanics.
Given that, it seems to me highly likely that trained in such a discipline and dealing daily with the incredible adventure it is, pushing back the frontiers of what we know about these things, such a person MIGHT tend to view everything in the universe and in human experience as though the mechanics were “explanatory” in every sense of that term? Might — to use the buzzword — tend to “totalize” that approach into an exclusionary worldview?
I was haunted by the email that talked about the wonder of looking at rocks and seeing the depth and beauty of mindless physical mechanism in itself. Yes, yes, yes! But to say the natural mechanism is “mindless” relies on the Cartesian definition of “mind” as something separate from nature. The same respondent said that matter is inherently in motion. Yes! But for Aristotle, motion and design were how “mind” was defined…. So I guess today it’s sufficiently “scientific” to feel awe and wonder, as long as we specify that it is “mindless” mechanism we are feeling these responses about?
I remember watching a lunar eclipse with an honors seminar of students drawn from all the disciplines. We sat together in the dark for over an hour. When it was over, I said: “Does anyone else besides me feel really moved and awestruck?” I could hear the lit major-and-poet sitting beside me (a young woman) going “yeah….” Then a science major (a young man) said, almost angrily: “No, not at all. Because we can explain exactly how that is happening.”
Now I gotta tell you that while I could see that made perfect sense to him, it made no sense at all to me. I understood how it was happening when I was pregnant, too, but I still felt the utter awe of all those mechanisms over which I had absolutely no control turning on one after another and carrying me through the entire process based on eons of encoding that came down to me going back to the condensation of the first hydrogen molecules after the big bang. I’m sure that the artists in the room and the musicians were having their own responses. And every year in that seminar, in free-wheeling discussions, the two or three biologists always brought up the same pespectives, at the same points, as the biologists in previous years had done. Not because they were brainwashed, but because they were really good in their discipine and so they saw certain aspects of any problem with an amazing clarity derived from their discipline. And perhaps they didn’t see other aspects as well….
We self-select into our own disciplines, after all, and then we are arduously trained and conditioned. The responders to The God Conundrum by and large kept saying where’s the evidence for God? “God could settle the argument this afternoon by showing up.” Can you see that for many people God has shown up — that is the point to which their training and life journey has brought them. For them, the evidence is everywhere, at the same time someone else is saying, “Where? Where?”
Now I know in your mind this may simply sound like an appeal to irrational stuff that isn’t evidence. (Sometimes you’re right.) But this is my question. Do you think that if it isn’t scientifically-generated evidence, in the physical-science sense, then it couldn’t be valid evidence at all? Science after all has been from the get-go a reductive way of knowing. Actually, all ways of knowing are reductive in their own ways. There’s just more “out there” than we can ever get into focus. But I want to say that other ways of knowing have their own methodologies and validy-testing and highly-developed acquired sense of what is evidentiary.
You seem to imply well, that okay, that’s all very well and good, for you Levinas and toast types, but we scientists have to deal with this utterly stupid phenomenon of blind and ignorant “faith” trying to get creation science taught in schools! Well, I sympathize, I really do. But that’s no excuse for acting as though scientists have a right to teach scientific explanations as though they answer all questions except “meaningless” ones. This is an issue that will outlast ephemeral but highly-politicized conflicts because it goes to the core of all disicplined intellectual endeavor. We have to accept the limitations of our disciplines as well as their incredible power for coming to know. And we have to be aware that our own desires to know in certain ways, about certain kinds of things, exercise a strong determinism in what we discover to be the case.
I guess the big lesson of late twentieth-century thought for me is that we have to be willing to risk listening to otherness, or we’re repressing a part of being human that is inside of ourselves, too. The same Cartesian structures of thought that lead scientists to ridicule believers also lead scientists to ridicule women. Women seem to have made it into scientific respectabilty, hurray! (As seen in the shock and horror inspired by the “Male-ness” post.) But not theists…. I wonder why that is? Both have been great scientists.
P.S. I haven’t studied Eurigena, but the Aquinas-Scotus debate does have a lot to do with the issues Dawkins tries to address, though I’d never go so far as to say Terry Eagleton isn’t irritating! (He is brilliant, though.) And who said a Marxist couldn’t be a Christian?

Janet: I’m not a scientist, but I agree with the folks here as far as the supernatural. I think your views are based upon a misunderstanding of what science is, eg “conditioned… way of knowing”, “pre-suppositions” and “exclusionary world view”.

Uumm, just curious here. Do you suppose they might have prayed for improved quality and honesty in future Ohio elections? But by doing so, wouldn’t they have been in some way praying against their theocratically inclined political desires?? It is so confusing. Praying for what, and for whom; the “health and welfare” of the state’s citizens as it is abused by the GOP leadership that has failed to avoid massive corruptions and illegal elections? mmmmmm… pondering the imponderable.
I am sure this must be gd’s answering the prayers Two BOE workers have been given 18-month prison sentences for felony convictions stemming from what a government prosecutor called the “rigging” of an officially mandated recount for the 2004 presidential election.

Sam — you should believe me. I vastly prefer a world in which the hard work of developing values is squarely in our hands, rather than one in which they are imposed from outside.

Janet — thanks for the thoughtful reply. Of course I am conditioned by everything that I’ve thought about and everything that has happened to me (just like everybody else). Taking those influences into account, I try to be as honest about how the world works as I can.

Now I’m about to catch a plane, so more thoughtfulness will have to come later!

Sean,
Yes, Janet’s post *was* thoughtful. Perhaps you should also consider Jacob Bronowski question: “how do you know what you know”?

I must admit that you’ve left me “peevish”, so I’ll try to ask respectfully. Did you have to post this on Good Friday of all days?

I must admit that you’ve left me “peevish”, so I’ll try to ask respectfully. Did you have to post this on Good Friday of all days?

And I thought Good Friday was all about being crucified for your beliefs.

I wonder what the public response would have been had a Muslim group announced they were going to charter ten small airplanes and fill them with “prayer warriors” who would fly around Chicago praying for the residents.

All my moderate Muslim friends would have also been praying to God/Allah for “to guide leaders, pray for people in schools and hospitals, and ask for salvation”.

Whereas I would question their use of money and unnecessary carbon emissions, whereas a bus ride around Ohio, or even staying in their church and using their imagination, would have served just as well at least their intentions were well meaning and not destructive.

I remember a Nova episode way back around 1980, called “The Green Machine”, about plants. They did an experiment in which a fellow prayed to one enclosed box of plants, and not to a control group. The former did better. Just saying, that’s what I saw…

“No, the idea that suffering is something that just happens, and that we humans have the capacity to reduce it, is, to me, incredibly appealing. I would much rather believe this than in a deity who could achieve the same goals without suffering, but instead chooses to impart suffering.”

How does a deity/God impart suffering. Take a look at C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain. Good book.

So sorry, Elliot, for misspelling your name! I’ve read too many Renaissance manuscripts, where everything is spelled eight different ways, and I can’t really remember how we spell anything today anymore.

Janet,

Consider the following hypotheticals:

1) A 40 year old father truly believes that God is speaking to him and telling him the devil inhabits his 8 year old daughter so he molests her and ultimately kills her by holding her head down in a toilet until she drowns.

2) A troubled undergraduate student in the 1970′s after ingesting LSD and fasting in the desert for six weeks believes he can defy gravity and attempts to prove it by leaping from the top of the 12 story library on campus.

3) The leader of the most powerful country in the world thinks that he has the divine right to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent people because the god they worship isn’t Christian.

These are the types of scenarios that can be justified by what you describe as “other ways of knowing”.

Having never even met you, I am almost certain you are as mortified by these as most people. But when you open the door to these approaches, I cannot see how you can avoid such consequences.

Do I get goose bumps when I hear the Barber Adagio for Strings or for that matter George Jones singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today”…. Absolutely I do.
Do I need to provide a reductionist explanation for that response. No I don’t. I can enjoy the experience without analysis. But do I think the scientific method is the ultimate arbiter of what is objective reality and what is not… I do.

The “subjective” perspectives of QM and relativity are part of science and have been experimentally verified. That was not what I was referring to above. To state it more clearly. Let’s assume an alien civilization was observing the Rings of Saturn from well beyond our Solar System. During this observation, all human life on earth was extinguished by let’s say some extremely virulent version of the bird flu.

Would their observation of the Rings be altered by our demise? I think not.

Elliot

The truly odd thing about this is that is amounts to a very mechanistic view of prayer — that these planes are something like crop-dusters, speading God’s grace on the good people of Ohio far more efficiently than would have been possible if the same amount of praying was done on the ground.

In this light it is ironic that some contributors to this thread have been arguing eloquently for “different ways of knowing”. So far as I can see the organizers of these flights actually have a remarkably materialist model of prayer — almost scientific, one might say, and at odds with the viewpoint expressed by the apologists (and I use the term in its technical) contributing to this thread.

Zeus’ Headache,

I stated

I think that something like the existence of a personally involved deity, like the one cited by the prayer fliers, is well within the scope of scientific investigation.

In the interest of brevity, I did not bother to observe what I thought was obvious: that ample scientific evidence has accumulated contradicting that existence. I should have been more clear.

“The creation of good and evil, justice and mercy, beauty and terror, are all in our hands, as complicated conglomerations of particles obeying the laws of Nature. I kind of like it that way.”

I like it that way too. Categories like good and evil are completely human constructed and vary in time and space (in the historical/cultural sense). But since these categories, along with the categories of “science” and “religion” are also all in our head, then shouldn’t we first spend some time defining what we really mean when we throw such words around.

I disagree with some in this discussion who have seemed to imply that science is somehow outside of or beyond culture. This too feels to me like an antiquated belief that scientists really don’t need to subscribe to. A more useful way to view science is as but one patch in the great tapestry of cultural forms. This is not to denigrate science, but simply to point out it’s similarity religion and other belief systems. Of course, science has many unique aspects, chief among them being it’s institutionalization of revolution.

I’ve taken a stab at defining science and religion, but what do ya’ll think?

Janet (responding all the way back to #7) — I’m totally with you in regretting the disdain shown for awe and wonder by your young science major. Most working scientists are full of amazement and wonder at the workings of the universe. They generally believe that understanding the mechanisms behind the natural world adds to your appreciation of its beauty. College students can sometimes get carried away in their enthusiasms, you know.

More generally: sure, there are different ways of looking at the world. Rigorous training in a specific discipline doubtless colors one’s favorite ways of conceptualizing what they experience, and one’s conceptual predispositions doubtless influence what kind of discipline they go into. But when it comes to deciding whether some specific proposition is right or wrong, I don’t (or shouldn’t) really care about the personal predelictions that drove someone to believe in that proposition; I should judge it on its own merits.

In particular, I’m happy to admit that there are plenty of ways of looking at the world other than the scientific. “Was Hamlet crazy, or just play-acting?” is not a scientific question, nor is “Is the death penalty moral?”, although both are interesting questions.

So, when people say they believe in God, either they mean to make some specific claim about the workings of the universe, or they don’t. The entire point of the above post was to highlight the fact that, while academics and theologians and so forth like to think about God in a more philosophically nuanced way, the overwhelming majority of actual believers are much more literal about it. They really believe in some being that made the universe and intervenes in it to occasionally violate the laws of nature. That’s a view that has every right to be critiqued on conventional scientific grounds.

If you want to believe in God in some other way, that’s fine, but you would have to spell out exactly what that way is before I could tell you what I think. God turns out to be quite the moving target, once you move out of guy-with-a-beard territory. Personally, I find that the concept is completely unnecessary and unhelpful on all of the levels of which I am familiar. It’s just baggage from a less sophisticated era, and high time we moved on.

Again, in fewer words: why shouldn’t it?

ways of knowing

I don’t like that term. Gavin Polhemus, aesthetics is about beauty, not truth; therefore it is not about knowledge at all. As for J.L. Blumberg’s “other ways of knowing,” she never seems to list any other ways of knowing, or explain why we should respect them as valid. My impression is that the term is used to claim unearned respect for outmoded and invalid forms of epistemology which should be discarded as unreliable.

Ha! Zeus is both cruel and funny… excellent!

How about different “modes of perception” instead of “ways of knowing”? “Knowing” implies there is a basic truth which we can either know or not know, and nice cold hard facts are generally within the realm of science, which is what I think some of the folks here are objecting to. But the term “perception” allows for more subjective ways of accessing the world around us (e.g., through art and music). As for, “Was Hamlet crazy, or just play-acting?,” there is a well-defined answer; Shakespeare knew it and since he didn’t bother telling the rest of us, we’ll just argue ad nauseum over what it is. Whether or not morality, then, falls under the purvue of “science” is a question of whether or not there is an inherent sense of right and wrong to the universe (i.e., regardless of whether or not there are humans wandering around on Earth trying to decipher it).

“The pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.”

-Ian McEwan, Saturday

I have spotted a worrying trend. The frequency of faith-related posts around here does not seem to be Poisson. In fact, I estimate — very conservatively of course — that the rate of such posts has been increasing, and is consistent with a hyperbolic model having an asymptote at t_0 = 2008-04-01 01:00:00.17 UTC +/- 3 days (stat) +/- 11 days (syst).

(Most of the systematic error is due to my background model, which is a 3rd order polynomial. With some effort I may be able to improve this.)

Now, the extrapolation of this model leads to a result that is clearly unphysical, so something in the nature of a crisis or turning point must surely intervene. Perhaps WordPress will crash, or — as I judge more likely — Sean will convert to Zen Buddhism and apply to join the Shaolin Temple in order to study the application of martial arts in the context of geometrodynamics. Whilst he is pursuing this lifestyle, the opportunity to blog will necessarily be curtailed.

Of course, the later part is admittedly speculative, so please take it with a grain of salt.

In response to Jason Dick, #12,

Here are a couple of interesting articles which answers your comment. They may or may not be satisfying or helpful.

This first one is entitled “If God is all good, why does he allow pain, suffering and evil to exist in the world?” http://fmmh.ycdsb.ca/teachers/F00027452/F00027453/gr9fqgoodevl.html
http://fmmh.ycdsb.ca/teachers/F00027452/F00027453/prov1.html

I was at a particular physicist’s talk and he said something like “We can’t observe individual quarks, but we know they exist because the theory of QCD does a remarkable job in predicting the results of experiments, and so in that respect, quarks must exist. Likewise, if string theory also does a remarkable job in predicting the results of experiments, and the multiverse concept still persists in string theory, then we should regard the multiverse as existing as well, even though, like quarks, we can’t directly observe them.” So this kind of disturbs me. I’m not sure why I’m bringing this up. Perhaps because I read somewhere in this thread about science being another religion, or whatever. Anyway, it reminded me of this talk. The question I had was how do we know we can’t formulate a theory that works just as well but that does not contain the baggage of things completely outside our universe (like other universes) which we can’t even observe? What is the connection (if any) between a “belief” in the existence of these other universes based on a successful scientific theory, and a belief in the existence of things “outside” our universe (like a heaven or hell), based on something completely different from scientific arguments which also cannot be observed?

What was that great quote from Richard Feynman? It was something like, “Science is a kind of way of not fooling yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool.”
I think that sums up the difference, in my view, between science and “other ways of knowing.” Sorry I don’t have the exact quote.

Zeus’ Headache, you indulged in some clumsy thinking and misrepresented my views in various ways. The purposive formulation (there are different ways to look at it, it’s not a “the”) anthropic principle is supposed to be about why a single example, the universe, is the way it is. Of course it doesn’t have explanatory power, it’s not that sort of thing, it’s an after the fact interpretation. We aren’t going to have bunches of universes to play with, for experiments one way or the other. Also, you did not provide any of the suppose theoretical justifications for other universes, nor deal with the core empirical issue. You misunderstood my point about logical positivism, because (even if poorly worded) I wasn’t referring to the idea of God being discarded, but meant that it was hypocritical to discard the *logical positivism* once LP wasn’t on the “right side” of the argument any more. You did not deal with the implications of LP for multiple universes, or even how LP got away with being used against “undesirable” concepts even while being unable to deal with operationally meaningless phrases like “things continue to exist even while not being observed.” As for theories that are bad or inconsistent being discarded, well, the idea of the universe being conditionally existent contradicts nothing (unlike young-earth creationism, etc.) It is an interpretative take on what we already know.

BTW, a philosopher who thinks the universe is not existentially self-suficient is not practicing “religion”, which comes from a tradition of revelations or a founders’ vision, but is practicing philosophy (perhaps you forget the irony that the presentation of philosopy of science about how science should be done is itself philosophy, and not science.)

FInally, you misrepresented my take on the plants and prayer episode. All I said was, that’s what I saw on the show. I didn’t endorse any interpretation of it, or characterized it, clearly saying I was just passing on a simple “observation” *of mine* in the simple sense, not meaning the experiment itself. Hence, your pretense “So you “see” something performed on a tele program and immediately embrace it as an “observation” worthy of its long tradition in science. Hmmm…” was a clumsy canard, not based on any thing about the way I reported it. So far, you come across as an Ann Coulter style scientism dittohead, of the same sort who thinks that liberals are communists, etc., just substituing other targets instead in another context.

> But whatever you think of naive physics, it doesn’t really impinge much one way or the other on the inherent value or lack thereof of the sophisticated form of physics practiced by the elite.

Except that the ‘naive majority’ has convinced the politicians to use Aristotlean physics when making policy decisions, and has forbidden all public aid to any foreign NGO that practices (or even mentions) non-Aristotlean physics to third-worlders who desparately need such information. They’re trying as hard as they can to outlaw many non-Aristotlean practices and expressions. They congregate outside Newtonian clinics shouting hateful quips from Aristotle at patients. Now are they impinging?

From Vince, # 46
“I was at a particular physicist’s talk and he said something like “We can’t observe individual quarks, but we know they exist because the theory of QCD does a remarkable job in predicting the results of experiments, and so in that respect, quarks must exist. Likewise, if string theory also does a remarkable job in predicting the results of experiments, and the multiverse concept still persists in string theory, then we should regard the multiverse as existing as well, even though, like quarks, we can’t directly observe them.” So this kind of disturbs me. I’m not sure why I’m bringing this up. Perhaps because I read somewhere in this thread about science being another religion, or whatever. Anyway, it reminded me of this talk. The question I had was how do we know we can’t formulate a theory that works just as well but that does not contain the baggage of things completely outside our universe (like other universes) which we can’t even observe? What is the connection (if any) between a “belief” in the existence of these other universes based on a successful scientific theory, and a belief in the existence of things “outside” our universe (like a heaven or hell), based on something completely different from scientific arguments which also cannot be observed?”

I really, really appreciate this entry from Vince. For one thing, it is vulnerable. Vince asks a question and he really wants to know what other people think. He wants to think and talk about this, and I really want to do so, also.

Secondly, I love it because surely the question of “what makes a scientific theory different” from other kinds of theorizing is one of the most fascinating questions we face these days in philosophy (and in science). I wanted to hear what you-all scientific types think about that difference. (I approach it from within philosophy and literary theory, though I am fascinated with the history of science.) In fact, that’s mostly why I wrote to begin with.

But I gotta say to SOME of you that a look at the history of science itself will dissuade you from answering the question by saying the scientific kind of theory is “objective” and everything else therefore has to be “opinions.” Yes, of course, there is a great difference between opinions, which we all have, like Sean’s informed guess about which view of the singularity will win out, and on the other hand, genuine rigorous theorizing within any way of knowing. And there are other kinds of rigorous knowledge, I believe, that come to us through anguish and life journeys, and if it is humble and evidentiary (that is, if we can say “this is why I hold this, and only on this basis”)then it ought not to be ruled out of the conversation either.

What are other different and potent avenues for coming to know about reality besides science? All of the arts and sciences, I’m thinking, and I would say theology and I’m starting to think mysticism, though it’s not my way, all of which are highly formalized and disciplined and evidentiary in their own ways, if you start looking into them. Do you think musicians don’t have to hypothesize and do experimental testing? But they have a different kind of “falsifiabilty.” And in every field, reality — just like God — IS a moving target. But that doesn’t mean we don’t get anywhere.

I thought that the New Physics established that a physicist cannot claim that physics KNOWS (or better, CAN know) that a physical theory “is” a description of physical reality, or that whatever reality itself “is” can be described by physics as “objective physical fact.”

Isn’t physics nowadays a very rigorous attempt to formalize the kind of reality it has selected to address, but assuming that any truly scientific model is not the simple truth about that reality and is never “proven,” but onely “not yet falsified”; it has to be always open to future developments, which themselves will be judged by scientific critieria (which are always evolving).

As an attempt to formalize what it is trying to know, it will be AS GOOD AS IT PROVES TO BE IN THE FUTURE, AS JUDGED BY THOSE WHO WORK IN THE DISCIPLINE, which means in terms of the standards the discipline has worked out for its endeavor. In those terms, then, I think that a working expert physicist can legitimately say “quarks must exist.” But it’s not an absolute truth-claim like Newtonian science used to make — or at least people used to think it did. I’ve read a lot, as much as I can, and that’s where I thought physics was tentatively at, at this point?

This would mean that science is certainly not “just (like) a religion” (in the sense Vince meant)nor is it “just a socially-constructed model” with no relationship to a reality at all. That’s what makes science so powerful, so amazing. But at the same time Einstein and the Copenhagen physicists realized (I thought) that it was no longer possible for science to make those older classical claims that a formula or a physical theory is the equivalent of the reality it tries to formulate. A physical theory is neither objective nor subjective, because those terms don’t tell us much any more. We’ve moved beyond them; they proved to be way too crude. A physical theory instead appears now to be a rigorous and well-supported approximation which methodologically the reality must always have escaped because we could always make better measurements, and even then we would only know that, what we had measured, and not “the thing itself.”

There have to be intentional observers (us) taking measurements and making statistical summations about the reality, and that doesn’t make the results “subjective,” but it does limit them to what humans know by taking measurements and making summations!! Okay, stop. I really like what I just said. What do you think? Is any *human* knowing able to be thought of as the equivalent of “the ways things are,” as if we had attained a universal perpective? Is *human* scientific knowing the equivalent of ultimate rality? Or is it what it claims to be (I think), a rigorous HUMAN attempt to know better as much of reality as we can formalize selecting a certain kind of reality and using certain kinds of methods for measuring it?

Given Einstein and QM, I don’t see how one can determine if a scientific proposition is “right” or “wrong” scientifically? We can only determine what we think (validly) we must say is the “best theory” right now, based on the interpretive frameworks we have right now. That is the glory and the profound honesty of science, and I wish all religious people were equally honest about what they claim to know, and how they claim to know it. But many are! For every reactionary Fundamentalist in Ohio, there are also many Evangelicals (believe it or not!) and Orthodox and Episcopalians and Jews and Buddhists and so on who hold what they take to be their own hard-won knowledge with a proper epistemological humility and are not trying to invade science classrooms. I’m sorry you-all don’t see them very much: we are trying to get our voices out there….

At this point in the history of science, as far as I know, physics does not NOW claim to set out to look at ALL of reality or to use a method that is a universally applicable method for dealing with all of reality, and especially with the large swaths of human experience that it does not even claim to address, except on the physical level. Does any of this make any sense, in terms of Vince’s pondering?

Maybe these questions and considerations pale next to the immediate political climate, but they are perhaps more enduring questions, for the future?

I don’t think Blumberg’s comments are relevant to the reason why so many people are religious.

I believe that religion exists because people don’t feel comfortable seeing themselves as physical objects subject to the laws of physics (i.e. mere machines). Even though it is impossible for us to escape the laws of physics, we can pretend that we are somehow not subject to the laws of physics because we don’t have the technology yet to make objects with similar capabilities as the human brain.

If we were all robots made in some factory (but with exactly the same mental capabilities as we have now) then I don’t see how we could still be religious. Humans need concrete hands on evidence of scientific facts before they are prepared to throw out beliefs based on superstition that are contradicted by the science.

Here’s the Feynman quote I couldn’t quite remember:
“Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Here’s another one:
“This method [science] is based on the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea.”

How does this compare with “other ways of knowing”? What is the religious or spritual way of “knowing”?

Janet, science has a well-established (although never explicitly spelled out) way of judging its truth-claims. We make hypotheses, use them to make specific and unambiguos predictions, test them against data, and discard those hypotheses that come up short. It’s a cycle that gets us closer and closer to the truth, without any guarantee that we ever reach it.

If you give me an example of some other way of knowing, I can tell you how science compares to it. Just one, very specific, way of knowing, with some established procedure for understanding things that is different than the scientific one.

Just to be clear: I’m a huge believer that there are many different ways of thinking about the world, and many interesting topics of discussion other than scientific ones. There are moral questions, logical questions, aesthetic questions, etc. But as a way of understanding the workings of the material universe, I don’t think there are any serious alternatives to science.

#60 from Sean:
“Just to be clear: I’m a huge believer that there are many different ways of thinking about the world, and many interesting topics of discussion other than scientific ones. There are moral questions, logical questions, aesthetic questions, etc. But as a way of understanding the workings of the material universe, I don’t think there are any serious alternatives to science.”

I think I’m starting to get a clearer idea, Sean, of why you said back in “The God Conundrum” that people believing in God is not “reasonable” and “makes you crazy.” It’s that you think of belief in God as claiming God to be a way to “understand the workings of the material universe,” and that’s what I didn’t get before, because it’s so foreign to my understanding and experience of Christianity in general — around the world and historically.

Most Christians do NOT agree with the Fundamentalists’ attacks on science. (It’s quite peculiar to North America. Americans are so literalistic.) Teilhard de Chardin of course did early ground-breaking work in evolutionary theory, which he wrote about from a deeply Christian perspective too. (We’ve studied him in my church.) A couple Christian physicists I know go over to India every year because the Dalai Lama invited them to teach Western science to his monks! They’re Greek Orthodox; I’m Episcopalian; Teilhard was Roman Catholic. And I taught at a non-denominational Evangelical university where the students have always of course been taught evolution and all the science faculty are excellent and publishing scholars.

Funny story. A colleague of mine, an inexperienced teacher just out of grad school, was teaching about chromosomes early in her very first GE intro-to-science course, and a freshman girl raised her hand and said: “I don’t understand. The Bible says God made Adam first and then Eve, but then why does the man have the XY chromosomes and the woman is XX. It seems like it would be the other way around.” Well, my friend was so astonished that she just gulped and said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” She went to her department chair for advice and the two of them couldn’t stop laughing. A few days later he came up to her in the hall and said: “Hey, I figured out what you should say to that student. Tell her Adam was the experiment, and Eve was the control.”

I went back and reread “The God Conundrum.” It’s a LOT longer than I remembered!

And it has some really great stuff in it. I’m still trying to figure out where the fundamental tension or disconnect that I feel, reading it, is located, precisely. I may have treated it reductively before, and if so, I apologize.

Janet,

I wanted to respond to some of your earlier comments, but I thought I was a little too late to join the discussion. But since you are still leaving your comments, and since Sean took care of some of the more general issues, this might be a good occasion to write about what you wrote from my personal point of view.

I enjoyed your comments. I really do. But I have to say that, just as you seemed to be frustrated by what Sean wrote, I felt a little frustrated by the comments you left here and also to “The God Conundrum.” I apologize in advance if I sound offensive. English is not my native language and I cannot control all the nuances.

You used the words like “Anglo-American intellectual tradition”, “the Anglo-American rationalist-empiricist tradition”, and “the good-old British empiricist tradition” to characterize the position of scientists and atheists like Sean or Dawkins. The implications may be (1) these scientists/atheists take their positions because of their Western cultural tradition, (2) science/atheism is biased because it has its origin in the Western tradition, (3) someone from a different cultural tradition is likely to (if not necessarily to) take a different position, and (4) someone in some different discipline (like you, Janet) may be able to escape from such bias.

Janet, you sound like you are a North American, or at least a Westerner more broadly. I am Japanese, so I am from somewhat different cultural background. One can argue that you and Sean have more in common than Sean and me. Yet, you and Sean have very different views and my view is very close to Sean’s. You sound like a nice person and all, but when you criticize people for taking “a basically Anglo-American intellectual tradition” for granted, or “other way of knowing”, you are not being a spokesperson for a non-Westerner like me.

Why science appeals to me and other non-Westerners? I think the main reason is that science makes sense, even to the people outside of the West. The modern science may have its origin in the West, but it can cross the cultural borders. There is fairness and openess in science that is hard to find in other fields. You can think about the reason, but I think science deserves some credit for this.

How about religion? So, you are Christian. You are in the Judeo-Christian tradition just like many Americans, and Westerners in general. So, why can you criticize others for taking “a basically Anglo-American intellectual tradition” for granted?

What I don’t like about religions, aside from the fact that I think they are irrational, is that every religion is regional. If there is a god, why would it spread its message only to a part of the word and not the entire human population? Choosing any religion is unfair, because you are favoring one cultural tradition over others by doing it. Atheism is fair, because everyone is born an atheist.

Well, here’s an amazing example (from within the Christian community) of how to respectfully carry on genuine discussion with those we deeply disagree with, without dismissing an entire institution and way of life. It’s from “Soulforce,” a group that’s been traveling to Christian campuses to affirm the full humanity of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students on those campuses. You’ll find the following at http://www.soulforce.com/blogs/. Reflecting on visits last week to Seattle universities, one soulforce member writes:

“Ironically, the assumptions that lead us to accept the Bible as inerrant and perfect are the same assumptions that stop us from fully including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals into our churches and schools. At its base is the assumption that our worldview is shared, unchanging and unwavering, throughout all time and every category we would claim for our own. It is a form of prejudice. And the foundation of it all is fear: fear of our ability to cope with change, fear of having to wrestle with new ideas and situations, fear of losing our Self, fear of being alone, fear of being wrong.

“Faith cannot grow in concrete ground. It needs good, tilled earth. So we must wrestle with the earth we are blessed with, to sift it and question it, to tug at its roots and examine them, to prepare its branches for the grafting of new truths and revelations, to water it with thought, and nourish it with fervent study. Uncertainty cannot scare us, and—like Scripture asserts—we must prepared to submit our deepest truths to the ways of God. If we are to become the new creature, transformed, we cannot fear. There is no fear in love; that is the lesson—Northwest University included—must learn.”

This is now Janet again: here’s the part I would emphasize for scientitsts to consider:

“At its base is the assumption that our worldview is shared, unchanging and unwavering, throughout all time and every category we would claim for our own. It is a form of prejudice. And the foundation of it all is fear….”

Now Sean’s blog on how science operates (“What I Believe that I Cannot Prove”) dispells these kinds of assumptions about science. So how can someone like Dawkins in good faith use science to dismiss an entire group of people who vary greatly from one another and many of whom operate (within their faith) with the openness and humilty evidenced by soulforce.

Janet,

You say

“At its base is the assumption that our worldview is shared, unchanging and unwavering, throughout all time and every category we would claim for our own. It is a form of prejudice. And the foundation of it all is fear….”

Now Sean’s blog on how science operates (“What I Believe that I Cannot Prove”) dispells these kinds of assumptions about science.

What are the assumptions about science that Sean dispells? I agree that Dawkins should not “dismiss an entire group of people.” However, there is a widely held belief in a deity who is engaged in our everyday lives through supernatural powers. That belief is one that Dawkins is justified in dismissing, on the basis of science, no matter how much we might admire the belief’s defenders.

I’ve been reading your posts and I just can’t quite figure out what you are trying to say. Is it that God exists, or that science can’t address the question of God’s existence, or perhaps that the answer to that question can have different equally valid answers when address in different frameworks of knowledge, or that the existence of God is somehow personal. Perhaps it is not the actual question that bothers you, but rather the arrogance of science to claim it is the only way to answer this question. I just can’t tell. It seems interesting though, so I’m hoping I can figure it out.

Gavin says to Janet: “I’ve been reading your posts and I just can’t quite figure out what you are trying to say. Is it that God exists, or that science can’t address the question of God’s existence, or perhaps that the answer to that question can have different equally valid answers when address in different frameworks of knowledge, or that the existence of God is somehow personal. Perhaps it is not the actual question that bothers you, but rather the arrogance of science to claim it is the only way to answer this question. I just can’t tell. It seems interesting though, so I’m hoping I can figure it out.”

Janet responds: Thank you so much! I should pay you a kick-back, because I just got my own weblog up and running five minutes ago, and it addresses exactly these issues. I hope you’ll visit and tell me if it helps.

It really takes my course on the history of theory — which is a great branch of philosophy — to make it clear what I’m trying to say, so I’m putting transcripts from my course on my site. A lot of what I’m saying is well-known within my fields but I want to bring that high-level theory down (in my own way) to the issues that really matter to us in our ordinary lives. And I really want to hear what all you scientific types think about it, when you’ve heard my fuller arguments. And there are points I try to make that you could really help me with. I don’t know how to do a pingback yet, but here’s my web address: http://www.deepgraceoftheory.wordpress.com Tomorrow’s post is going to be a meditation on Sean’s posts on Dawkins and how science knows, and on “Soulforce” visiting Christian campuses.