I was looking up the 1927 Solvay conference on Wikipedia (if you've seen that picture on 9gag with all the hk physicists in one photo - that is the Solvay conference)
Anyways it culminated in the debate between scientific realism and instrumentalism.
Scientific realism is the idea that we must find out the exact objective truth of how things function. In physics we call this "classical physics" where if parameters A, B and C are met, then event D will always occur. This becomes problematic for reasons I cannot be fucked explaining.
Instrumentalism is more empirical - science is seen as an instrument in viewing reality. The soundness of scientific theory is judged by its ability to predict existing or new phenomena, and not by its practical application to real world. For example, we don't care whether electrons actually exist as waves or particles or both or not - as long as all the observed phenomena can be explained by either the wave or particle function, it's a good enough scientific theory. There is no need to justify it with models and other ways to actually ground it in reality. Instrumentalism won the debate btw and classical theory went out the window in one conference.
Now for the first time in a couple of weeks I can introduce a second point and it's actually on a related note.
On T2 biv I heard Buddha claim to Sandra that he could absolutely destroy the idea of religion (or something similar). Presumably with logic.
Now if you know me, I've been openly cynical about religion but I'm far from actually logically disproving that stuff. I can easily prove why it's not necessary for me. I cannot prove by induction why it would be unnecessary for everyone else. Think about it - if it were possible to prove or disprove religion empirically, don't you think the whole world would have decided on one or the other?
Anyways I would've liked to hear said proof, seeing as I heard logical fallacies go both ways. Forgive me for paraphrasing, because I just don't remember (only Sandra will read this so correct me if I'm wrong)
The background is that religion is a pile of bullshit (as most of these debates seem to have as a premise)
Sandra: Religion provides a basis for moral guidance
Buddha: It is entirely possible to have a good moral compass and not be religious
I think I stopped them right there. I could see where they were going but it was not articulated in a way that played on the flaws of the opposition's argument.
The second comment is the more glaring mistake - it was never claimed that religion is the sole provider of grace and goodwill so the retort really argues nothing.
However the first comment isn't too perfect either. There's no real logical fallacy seeing as it's the first comment but at the same time it didn't really claim anything in the first place. It claims something that pretty much is pre-existing in society anyway. It's like a jail warden claiming that they have people who do community service when there are perfectly fine people outside who do community service anyway.
By now you are thinking. Wow Jeff how skilfully you have led us away from the fact that this has absolutely nothing to do with instrumentalism and scientific realism.
So say hello to link in 3, 2, swag
Instrumentalism can avoid the direct debate between science and religion. Personally in my life there have been no observable phenomena for which God or any other faith system is the sole explanation (except boobs lol - this is how easy it is to ruin the tone of a text ahaha), and sure as hell I can't use supernatural intervention to predict what will happen next.
At the same time, religion doesn't really attempt to explain scientific phenomena (well it does try but it's the Old Testament so nobody really gives a fuck - see all of Genesis) but the crux of the faith is supernatural explanations for supernatural phenomena. It's not meant to be governed by the rules of scientific method and logic.
By the way I have seen ontological proofs and a lot of them rely on "maximum excellence/greatness" "supreme perfection" and other derpy stuff, and I haven't ever heard anyone quote them to prove their religion correct, and I'll assume people look at these mathematical novelties and not as a legit proof for a god. Anyways even if they prove a god there's like a 1/->infinity chance that it's your god.
I hold this view until someone tells me that you can prove religion with logic and scientific method, then oh boy are you fucked.
11 comments:
"By the way I have seen ontological proofs and a lot of them rely on "maximum excellence/greatness" "supreme perfection" and other derpy stuff, and I haven't ever heard anyone quote them to prove their religion correct, and I'll assume people look at these mathematical novelties and not as a legit proof for a god."
If you're talking about Anselm's ontological argument:
1 i dont think it's a mathematical argument - it's something along the lines of 'think of the most perfect being ever. but wait! we can think of a being even more perfect than this: the most perfect being ever which actually exists in reality'.
2 it relies on the idea that you can think something into existence which (i hope) is clearly an absurd proof for (what i think is) the typical, actually-existing-in-our-reality christian god
I've read Anselm's which is like "if we can think it must exist", basically.
But that particular comment was wrt Goedel's uber long one, using something called modal logic which I think resembles maths.
Also I don't agree with your 2 because as far as I'm aware God is not some dude in the sky that manifests itself with heavenly voices and shit. Not today at least.
I'm not 100% sure but I think he does all that man in the sky shit in Old Testament, the one that (almost) everyone knows is fables, whereas the New Testament (the "Christian" one) has Jesus talking on behalf of God because he is God anyway, even though he is the Son or ???.
First thoughts, sorry for roughness, might have more to say later.
1. It's not as if Christianity has a dearth of a rigorous intellectual tradition, despite how hard the contemporary Church tries to deny it. Here, for example, is Duns Scotus on Triple Primacy: http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/GODASFIR.HTM. He's not an anomaly, the history of philosophy is populated with theists, and I'm sure Wikipedia/Google would happily lead you to them if you wanted.
2. Regarding the apparent theism/specific Christianity split: I think this is a red herring, because it seems to rely on tendentious assumptions about divinity. Like, conceiving of God as supreme-entity-over-others I would take to be bad theology. God-as-ground-of-contingent-existence or God-as-pure-actuality seem to be better views, and less vulnerable to your point about the distinction between general theism and Christianity.
3. For fuck's sake would people stop fucking up the whole line of moral arguments so badly? Get past the idiotic pop-atheist and possibly-even-more-imbecilic-if-that-were-possible evangelistic tracts, and move on to the actual fucking literature? Like, nobody even bothers to actually cite Kant who codified the thing in the first place, and nobody ever brings up MacIntyre, who seems to be pretty fucking relevant? Is it really that fucking hard to engage the actual philosophy? If I'm sorry I'm so exasperated, and it's not directed at anybody in particular, but most of these discussions are so incredibly awful and both sides only usually engage each other at their absolute worst it gets so fucking tiring.
Also as for Genesis & natural phenomenona: I would generally assume that the Jewish scribes or whoever compiled Genesis wasn't trying to synthesize cutting-edge Israelite science, and I would generally assume people who think otherwise can be quite safely ignored.
haha I didn't mean 'man-in-the-sky' when I said actually existing in our reality: I meant a god that doesn't exist outside of our plane of existence, as opposed to say, a god that exists outside of our universe and before the big bang etc.
also I'm pretty sure there are Christians who think of the biblical miracles in the old testament as evidence of the existence of god, and that god is a man that exists in the sky - even today. I don't think you have to look too hard to find them.
Oh right I see what you mean now (Y)
And yes that most likely right. It only takes the idiots of each group to make them look bad.
1. Why would the Church deny the presence of scholars, what?! And yes of course a lot of scientists had faith in God. People keep telling me this but I don't know what it's meant to prove.
2. I don't get your point 2. If you could chop out the jargon in the first and last clause that would be better for clarity.
3. Not sure why it would be necessary to mention specific people when we are talking about the values of an entire following.
4. I assume you're referring to Creationists but it'll be hard to "safely ignore" more than half of the USA. Also I think it was Moses as Marcus mentioned once, and no I don't think Moses could go hk science on the Bible.
And dismissive comments about the Old Testament aside, most Christians out there can't bring themselves to shuck the Old Testament.
Okay, my last comments were pretty terse and impolie; I'm sorry about that, I should have been a lot less dickish.
1. I was making a sly jab at certain wings of conservative Christianity, whose intellectual strategy seems to consist solely of "(My interpretation of) The Bible says it, therefore I must be right." Here, as much as I disagree with the Catholic politics and moral theology, I have nothing but admiration for the rigour of their intellectual tradition; of which Duns Scotus is exemplary (and again, not anomalous). Here, I'm not really talking about scientists (though I guess they're important) but the Christian philosophers and theologians who have demonstrated, if not the truth, then at least the inner coherence and rationality of the faith (Aquinas and Leibniz are the two that first come to mind; they were quite devout Christians and immensely respected in the history of philosophy; and they're by no means anomalous. Christian faith (or at least some strains of Christian faith) is never opposed to reason and logic, and in many cases is in harmony with it.
About religious scientists, though, I'm pretty sure they get brought up to refute the Draper-White thesis, which any decent historian of science should tell you is a very, very, very tendentious thesis anyway.
2. I see the "oh, you've only proved God, that doesn't necessitate Christianity" thing a lot; it's not exactly my favourite objection. Apparently it doesn't matter at all that Anselm, for example, is sort of a really pious person explicitly situating his ontological argument in the context of a long and extended prayer? Like, most of the natural theologians are theologians, Christian theologians, not deist philosophers. And I know of at least theologians (Gregory of Nyssa and Anselm) who actually try to logically demonstrate the necesssity of key Christian doctrines such as the Fall and Incarnation. This isn't to say they succeed, but you're drawing a line in the sand that isn't quite there.
(About the jargon: sorry about that, but clarifying them I think would take a while; this is long comment already, and I don't think they were all that relevant. If you're curious then I could attempt it, I guess.)
Moreover, I'd also say that once you establish a theistic framework (and I mean framework there, not just establish the existence of a God-entity), it's not that much more of a leap to full-blown religion. You can stay deistic, if you want, but I think Charles Taylor has demonstrated that deism was only a sort of historical intellectual-cultural stepping stone between supernatural religion and "exclusive humanism," to use his terminology.
3. The argument from morality in the philosophy of religion has a long and noble pedigree behind it; it also happens to be one of the arguments that are completely mangled once you descend from the ivory tower. Most Christians misunderstand the argument and take it to be some sort of vague "religion provides a good guide for life" and most atheists try to counter it by going "but I'm a perfectly nice person and I don't need religion". Both of those approaches aren't exactly wrong, but they both require a fundamental misunderstanding of the actual argument from morality, which has nothing to do with religion per se but with the metaphysical grounding of morality (or lack thereof). Kant is sort of very relevant since he's I think the first to clearly and explicitly formulate it; though his approach is a little odd, since it centres around issues of desert and value. Nevertheless, I still think Kant (and a whole lot of other people) should be required reading for anybody going to bring up the relationship between religion and morality, because otherwise you just get people with very very poor arguments talking past each other and it's all a complete philosophical mess, a disgrace to the human intellect.
MacIntyre I mentioned because he has a very interesting line of thought regarding the problem of the plurality of post-Enlightenment rational and ethical traditions (and from there he works his way to virtue ethics, Aristotelian telos and finally Thomism). This is I suppose as close as you might get to a clear, explicit interlinking of morality and religion, rather than morality and "bare" theism, but MacIntyre is arguing at an entirely different level and exploring entirely different ideas to the typical adolescent debates; of which the example in your post I would imagine to be default.
4. I guess I was saying in the realm of intellectual debate; you can safely not listen to anybody who tries to read Genesis as scientific account of creation (so I then refuse to trust half the USA and Dawkins on matters of religion; this is a general principle that seems to hold up fairly well considering the rest of their contributions). Moses probably didn't actually write Genesis, incidentally, modern biblical scholarship has well and truly put to death that notion amongst everybody but the most stubborn conservative Christians (see: evangelicals and fundamentalists.) More likely, they were compiled by Israelite scribes putting together multiple ancient Jewish creation myths and legends to construct a sort of national narrative for the Israelite people. The creation myth in Genesis, as with all creation myths is an attempt to situate a particular culture (ancient Israel) in a relationship with divinty, all expressed in their unique idiom (hence, seven "days"). Genesis I see as a story about relationships, between God and humanity, God and Abraham & Sarah, God and Isaac, God and Jacob. I'd say it takes a very awful hermeneutic (see: creationism) to see the stories in Genesis as scientific/historical accounts.
Also, I'm not trying to go Marcionite and throw out the Old Testament, only trying to correct what I believe is a faulty and pernicious interpretation of the Old Testament. If some Christians see that as throwing out the Old Testament, then well, I'll be right here praying for them.
1) Right, so you're saying there are people who can make very valid philosophical claims about Christianity, as opposed to the caricature of circular logic that we are all familiar with. I'll take your word for it because I highly doubt I'd get all the philosophy. I really don't know Leibniz for very much apart from "the guy who almost invented calculus" - not an avid philosophy fan =P
2) What interests me is "you've only proved God". Is this like actual proof, or funky thought experiment proof? The ontological arguments rely heavily on convenient definitions and assumptions, and since we really have no idea what adjectives would describe a God, it's a bit wishy washy.
3) I still don't think the origins of morality is very relevant to the nature of the discussions we are hearing today. They would be largely from personal experience. If a Christian/whatever thinks that a) they have a good set of morals and b) they believe that religion taught them those morals, then it is a valid argument. It is a moot point though, unless somehow the atheist went theist or vice versa and went from zero morals to lots of morals, or vice versa. Otherwise it's just "rah rah rah join our side we have morals" when in truth probably both sides have the same amount.
4) Yes I agree that Genesis and a lot of the Old Testament is not meant to be taken literally, and is a kind of "show not tell" view of the world. As in it's the implications that are more important than the actions themselves.
By the way I hope you'll forgive me for pretty much ignoring anything that I need to go on wiki to understand - I really am not THAT into this whole thing :L
And you must be the same anon that linked me to something when I invoked something to do with Galileo. Or some other Renaissance or earlier philosopher/scientist/whatever. It was to do with religion as well. What was it again?
1. Okay, fair, I'll leave it at that.
2. I was thinking specifically of metaphysical lines of thought that eventuate in a theistic conclusion, not just basic arguments to establish some sort of divine thing. I suppose here I'm thinking of the scholastic tradition, especially Thomism, wherein God is the centrepiece and cornerstone of all their metaphysics, but the ocassionalists (al-Ghalazi, Malebranche) are also interesting for their theory of causation. I guess Berkeley also fits here, as would maybe Michael Dummett, who made a sort of Berkeley-style argument (but that was sort of philosophy of language, not metaphysics exactly.) Like, I don't think the debate is so much God/not God as naturalist metaphysics/not-naturalist metaphysics.
As far as proof goes, though, I really don't think there's been a "proof" in the mathematical or even scientific sense for anything of philosophical significance, the premises in any argument are always, always, always disputable. Like, Cicero said something along the lines of "There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it," I would only amend that to say "There is no opinion so absrud that some half-clever philosopher will be able to provide good arguments for it." Arguments, good, solid, reasonable arguments are everywhere in philosophy, but talk of proofs seems wildly overoptimistic.
Regarding, ontological arguments though, I should say that the term "ontological argument" is a misnomer, it'd be a lot better to see them as an entire family of arguments - Anselm might have first formalized it, but Descartes and Leibniz also made them at some point in their careers, and then there's the post-Kant revival with folk like Hartshorne, Plantinga, Gödel (staying on the analytic side alone). They all work with quite different presumptions and logical structures and the like, and in the most part, the logic is far beyond the reach of the everyday pedestrian (I guess you've already seen Gödel's formulation). The general consensus, I think, is that they don't work, but every trained philosopher whose taken a look at them disagrees as to just exactly why they don't work.
3. Thinking about it, you're probably right; I was supposing that the arugments revolved around the "truth" of religion rather than the social utility of religion. I can see in that latter case a reason for those conversations to take the shape they have. I'd still say that's a depressingly low standard for most theists to reach, and the argument from morality still is very very closely related to this debate, but much less forcefully now.
4. I think that's a very good way of putting it, implications being more important than the deed itself.
The Galileo thing is this, (http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/an-interesting-question/), I think.
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