Two heads are not
always better than one.
In a blog post a dated 19th
February and entitled “The Apologists for
Religion” we find evangelical atheist PZ Myers complaining about theists
who would prefer to cope with the
results of science rather than contradicting them. So Myers, all too ready
to strain out scientific heresy, finds what is basically a philosophical reason
for why these “copers” are actually contradicting science all along. Below I
quote parts of Myers blog post followed by my own comments:
Are orbital mechanics atheistic? Can we say, well, the orbit of a
satellite is entirely compatible with the idea that a god is keeping it aloft —
that we could imagine that this god is actually doing all the heavy lifting and
flinging of the equipment about, but because he is so lawful, he’s doing it in
a way that precisely mimics the movements that it would follow if it were
obeying the laws of Newton and Einstein? In a trivial way, sure, you could
pretend everything is being directly manipulated by a sentient and
anthropomorphic (but invisible and intangible) god, but that’s mere
philosophical wanking. We certainly aren’t launching satellites with prayer,
and it’s anti-scientific to propose theological excuses for processes that are
accurately and entirely explained by math and physics.
My Comment: For the moment let’s forget about God (or
gods) and Myers naive caricature of a homunculus god moving stuff around like a poltergeist. Whatever is keeping a satellite on its course it
certainly isn't a law that merely
describes that course. Myers criticism is on par with saying that the
technical details of a computer programmed to successfully display a 3D simulation
of orbital mechanics is irrelevant as an explanation of the ostensible law-wise
display which, using Myers words, would be “entirely
explained by math and physics”. This
computer simulation metaphor is not gratuitous: As we know, there are some
people proposing that the cosmos is a kind of simulation thus entailing explanations
that would go a lot deeper than our law-wise descriptions.
The point here is that whether
you are a theist or an atheist, the striving for explanation doesn't
necessarily stop once a successful mathematical description has been arrived at.
Admittedly there is plenty of contention with explanations such as theism, the
simulation argument and the multiverse, but in each case there is an attempt to
take the explanation of otherwise fairly well understood patterns to the whole new
level of the metanarrative. There is a very human instinct which abhors
positing very particular states of affairs as just “givens”, such as, for
example, the peculiar contingencies inherent in gravitational laws, laws that
cry out for a “deeper” explanation.
Myers demand for mathematical explanation is also
contentious: There is no reason why all explanations should ultimately reduce
to the relatively elementary mathematically tractable patterns of law &
disorder. For example, much social explanation doesn't readily reduce to
mathematics; in fact in social explanation elementary events may have their explanation
in very complex social factors, factors that can only be described in narrative
intense terms. Genuine randomness is itself a case in point: Non-pseudo random
patterns cannot be explained/described using the small space, short time algorithms
we derive from physics. Humanly speaking genuine randomness can be reduced no
further than complex descriptions of its pattern.
Having said all that it may be
that Myers has some kind of psychology which means that for him successful
description feels entirely satisfactory and therefore he has no motivation to
take the explanation to a higher level of narrative. Fine, but no amount of aggressive
name-calling by him is going to stop those who are motivated to seek meta-level
narratives, whether they be the soft science social complexities implicit in
theism or the “turtles all the way down” regresses of the simulation argument
or the multiverse.
Humans are instinctively curious
as to why things are as they are and seek explanations that take things to a
higher level, beyond the patterns readily describable. If pressed the kind of
psychology which views successful pattern description as “scientific
completeness” has the potential to stultify science.
Conversely, if you believe that satellites are held aloft by god-power
and Newton and Einstein are superfluous, then some astronomer or engineer
asserting that the laws of physics describe and explain the motion of orbiting
masses is making an anti-religious argument. We understand the forces; we have
good descriptions of how they work; we have repeated, independently verified,
empirical observations of the mechanisms at work; we make predictions and test
them using our godless explanations, and adding a god factor to the equations
does not help or explain anything.
My Comment: A good theoretical description
is not rendered superfluous (or contradicted) if it is embedded into a higher
theoretical context. As we well know, Newton and Einstein are good descriptive
explanations of gravity but aspects of their logic more than hint that they are
not the last word on the subject and that meta-theories should be sought. What
Myers perceives to be godless explanations
is, I‘ll hazard, bound up with what he
imagines to be the self-managing, mechanical feel of explanations that employ “law
& disorder” as mathematical devices. That Myers thinks taking things any further
does not help or explain anything may
be an indication that he has the kind of psychology whose curiosity is entirely
satiated once good pattern description is secured. If this is the case there then
is little point in pursuing the matter any further with him; his intellectual
satiation is complete.
We have been living under a system in the US for decades, in which
scientists have been bending over backwards to avoid bringing up the profound
conflict between religious and scientific claims, in which public school
classrooms have been stripped of solid scientific discussions of evolution by
social and political pressures.
My Comment: It is certainly true that in
the US Biblical literalism is rampant and goes out of its way to contradict
much of the the hard won content of established
science. These literalist communities are at once both anti-science and
anti-academia - at least academia of the publicly funded kind. In contrast,
merely seeking meta-explanations doesn't in and of itself entail a necessary
conflict with scientific content
since it is a case of embedding established science into a higher level
explanatory narrative without gainsaying that content.
What I guess to be at the bottom
of Myers problem is, once again, the philosophical hang up of Western dualism.
This dualism instinctively superimposes a Nature
vs. God dichotomy on the origins debate (Expressed in my quote from Myers as a Newton/Einstein vs. God dichotomy). This dichotomy is implicated as the cause of a profound conflict in
Western thinking because this thinking only offers up a choice between what are
putatively two mutually exclusive categories; namely, impersonal natural forces
embodied in law & disorder objects and God. Dualists cannot think round
this dichotomy and feel sure it is a one size fits all binary choice.
The excuses don’t help. The creationists are angry at us because
they’re not stupid, and they recognize what is obvious that the accommodating
scientists try to deny: that accepting the mechanical and unaware nature of the
forces that have brought us into existence directly contradicts their
paternalistic idea of a benevolent universe that loves them and created them
with conscious intent. I can see through that bullshit, and so can they.
My Comment: The mechanical nature of law
& disorder explanations proves little in and of itself: Third person observations on brains yield
no more than the apparently insentient and mechanical processes of neural
activity and yet that is no reason to rule out the presence of the first person perspective of conscious
cognition; in fact implicit in those third person observations is a first
person perspective that does the observation
The “creationists” Myers refers
to are likely to be those who have a dualist theology like himself and perceive
the origins question to be a stark choice between so called natural mechanical
processes thought to be completely unconscious vs. the interventional activity
of a sentient God. As I have identified many times before on this blog the
North American ID community are right behind PZ Myers in this respect and so it
is no surprise that Myers should acknowledge that as far as their theological
choices are concerned he and they are singing from the same hymn sheet.
Final Comments
The discovery that nature has
such a remarkable organization that it can be rendered using the mathematics of
law & disorder seems to have two opposite effects on people: For types like Myers the significance of an organized
nature is found in his gut reaction (and it’s no more than a gut reaction) that
nature must be self-managing, perhaps even self-explaining. The
North American ID community agrees with Myers on this point to the extent that they can only see
the origins question as a choice between Natural forces (as typified by Law & Disorder) and God. It is this which leads
the North American IDists to stake all on the negative science of trying to
disprove OOL and “Evilution”. But ironically for many theists the significance
is exactly the opposite: The organization of nature, particularly if it can generate
life, based as it is in no mathematical necessity, is evidence of God’s ongoing
sustaining providence.
The coherence of nature which
makes it humanly intelligible is not a good enough reason for Myers to proclaim
a profound conflict between science and theism. All Myers has shown is that his concept of theism is very much at
odds with his nihilistic interpretation of the cosmos, an interpretation which
itself is tantamount to being a metanarrative; paradoxically Myers is
attempting “to make sense” (if such it can be called) of the lack of cosmic sense that he perceives. What
is really eating Myers, I submit, is bound up with his feeling that the cosmos looks
to be neither the work of sentience nor
the ongoing operation of sentience; to Myers cosmic forces, though highly organized,
are thoroughly impersonal and ruthless. With this feeling of Myers, which is related to the
problem of suffering and evil, I have both empathy and sympathy. In
contrast I certainly abhor the approach
of the Biblical literalists who misread chapter 1 of St Paul’s epistle to the
Romans as a direct condemnation of atheism. It is ironic that the polytheistic Romans
regarded Christians as atheists. In fact Romans 1 is not about atheism but instead it is about idolatry, the
misrepresentation of God in religions such as we find practiced by the highly
religious Romans.
But be that as it may I essentially
disagree with Myers’ brand of atheism and see it as a defeat in the face of The Riddle of the Sphinx.
Notes:
* For Myers post see: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/02/19/nyeham-postmortem-the-apologists-for-religion/
* Relevant links:
* Relevant links:
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