When truth is our quarry the
imagination is an essential tool. But it can go horribly wrong….
In a blog post dated 6th March
and entitled “The Knights Errant Sally
Forth” PZ Myers responds to an article on Network Norwich and Norfolk
by James Knight. In Myers’ post there are some initial comments on atheism and morality.
There seems to be common agreement between Myers and James that in principle
atheists can be just as moral as anyone else. Although this question is interesting
and provocative I won’t pick it up in any detail here except to say that
atheism does have an epistemic problem that tempts moral and ontological
nihilism. But having said that we must acknowledge that theism is plagued by
the opposite problem of a lurking epistemic arrogance which in turn has a
tendency to quench all self-doubt with consequences amongst fundamentalists we
are all too familiar with.
However, having stirred the
seething pot of anti-theistic zeal that is Myers blog, James succeeds in getting some
interesting and useful responses from Myers. In a later blog post I hope to pick
up some of Myers points but for now I’ll simply quote part of his text with the
salient issues emboldened:
Knight’s second paragraph is a complaint that Hitchens’ didn’t tell
them what evidence for their god would be acceptable, which is a fair
complaint. Or it would be, if there weren’t another problem: define God. I can’t tell you what would be
evidence for or against it if you’re not going to settle down and get specific
about this god’s properties and nature. Is it an anthropomorphic being with
a penis that can impregnate human women? Is
it a vast eternal cosmic intelligence that encompasses the entire universe and
manipulates matter and energy with its will? Is it benign fluff, a happy
feeling of love that permeates us all? I suspect he’d tell us some meaningless
noise about a “ground state of being”, which seems to be the universal
bafflegab right now to avoid answering the question.
You know, this is the big difference. If you tell a scientist
that their evidence doesn’t distinguish between two alternatives, it’s the
scientist who thinks hard about the problem, comes up with what would be
differing consequences of an experiment if his hypothesis was valid or invalid,
and does the work. We actually love this part of theorizing, thinking through
the implications of a hypothesis and
then testing them. And that’s a process that involves getting specific
about the details of our hypothesis.
Theologians, on the other
hand, hate that part. We can ask them what the
difference would be between a universe that had a god and one that didn’t, between
a god that answers prayers and one that doesn’t, between a Christian god and a
Muslim god, between a Catholic god and a Protestant god, and they love to tell
us that the differences are profound, but not anything specific. And then they
yell at us that we haven’t given them the criteria that we could use to
discriminate between the alternatives. And then, most aggravatingly, if we go ahead and make some predictions
ourselves about what the universe ought to be like if there is or isn’t a god,
they yell even more that their god isn’t like that, we used the wrong
premises, we didn’t address their idiosyncratic view of a god…which is always conveniently tailored to
circumvent whatever test we propose.
Do you theological wankers
even realize that as the proponents of hypothesis about the nature of the
universe, it is your job to generate testable hypotheses about how it all
works?
And that we, as agents in opposition to your nonsense, would be overjoyed to
have you say something explicit about an
implication of your ideas that we could test? Actually, I think you do
know, because you so invariably avoid presenting any useful descriptions of
what your philosophy entails. We keep waiting. And right now, your silence and
the vacuity of what few feeble replies you make are just added to our stockpile
of evidence that you’re all farting theology out of your asses.
If I have time I will deal with
these contentions in due course. For the time being, however, I’ll leave a comment
on the following quote which also appears in Myers post. It leads into to some
significant questions about epistemology:
Watch out, here comes the egregious relativism, which sounds like
something straight out of Answers in Genesis ….I really despise the vacuous
Well, we just interpret the evidence differently argument — it’s a lie. Over
and over, I see it said in order to defend ignoring the bulk of the evidence.
…..elves have no evidence for their existence, have posited powers with no
known mechanism, and are arbitrary, ad hoc, bizarre explanations for a
perfectly ordinary object.
Flippant caricature about elves
aside, the kind of interpretative relativism Myers speaks of is the downside of humanity’s necessarily creative
efforts as it seeks to make sense of the cosmos: Witness, for
example, the arbitrary relativism in Biblical literalist
Jason Lisle’s “mature” creation model of cosmology; this model
returns to the old literalist rescuing device of signals arbitrarily created in
transit. Lisle’s use of the ASC coordinate system is in effect a piece
of creative sophistry that succeeds in blinding both himself and his ignorant
following to the inherent (self) deceit of his model. There are millions of
bits of evidence out there that matter is interacting with itself over millions
of light years, but Lisle effectively tells us to forget all that because he can
synthesise any evidence he wants with a sweep of his hand – God just made like that, thereby declaring
the signals the cosmos is sending us to be unreadable if not downright
misleading. How can Lisle get away with this?
What we call evidence is by and
large a very small sample subset of the theoretical
narrative that embeds it. Ergo, it is quite possible to embed the same
evidence in a huge variety of highly fanciful and irrefutable narratives that
“explain” the evidence. The conspiracy theorists typify this wanton creative
theorizing. Lisle’s ASC model is of a similar ilk; he has given himself
the freedom of countless adjustable variables which allow him to invent all but
any scenario to “explain” the data.
So what distinguishes a rational
theoretical narrative from the endless and arbitrary special pleading such as we see
from Lisle and the conspiracy theorists? The answer to that question is rational a priorism; that is, humans are
cognitively set up a priori to judge what is reasonable; in particular we assume our world is by and large sending us reliable, intelligible
and coherent signals about its state of affairs; that is, we assume this world
has a stable rational integrity about
the stories its signals tell; this is the rational
heuristic built into our thinking.
But this a priori heuristic is delicately
balanced and can be overridden by culture and/or insanity factors; as a consequence
we can either over use it or under use it. In the latter category the Biblical
literalists override the rational heuristic using a misreading of scripture
that almost treats it as a closed ended text book of mathematical axioms. They do not
take into account the lessons that the signals of history are sending us;
namely, that the Bible is very much a human book showing all the traits, and
foibles of human authorship, in many cases telling us less about God than it does about proprietary human conceptions of God *1. Above all they fail to do justice to
that fact that Biblical interpretation is subject to the open endedness of its historical
connection; this open endedness is brought about by the practically limitless hinterland of
information one can receive about a particular historical connection. At the bottom of
literalism is, I submit, an epistemic insecurity whose compensatory reaction is
to seek certainty in a closed ended axiomatic-like interpretation of scripture
rather than the less than certainness associated with the rational heuristic of our mental tool kit.
For the rational mind to work it
must proceed against a background of assumptions about the integrity and
intelligibility of the signals it receives. Without this background successful
theoretical creativity is stultified as the imagination becomes swamped with
the infinite possibilities of an otherwise bizarre and incoherent world. It is ironic that
fundamentalists are effectively challenging this assumption as a consequence of
their dogmatic mechanical literalism. In fact if pressed Biblical literalism
can even subvert belief in the integrity of God.
But on what basis have we the
right to assume the intelligibility and integrity of the signals our world
sends us? Clearly Myers, like the rest of us (or at least most of us), is making use of a heuristic
which although is likely to be probabilistically
imperfect nevertheless guides our science. Myers is therefore making an a priori
judgment about the basic integrity of this heuristic. But the conspiracy
theorists will not be impressed by any claim that this heuristic has evidence
to back it up, because in the final analysis the same evidence can, as Jason Lisle
and other Biblical literalists have shown, be synthesized using quite bizarre
and/or conspiratorial narratives*2. What we are left with is a reliance
on our a priori good sense as to what is rational. For Myers who is making this
kind of a prior judgment about integrity, coherence and intelligibility there
is little or no absolute basis for his judgment other than the appeal to “It
feels right”. Fair enough, I agree it does
feel right. In contrast the fundamentalists and conspiracists don’t just feel
they are right they are certain they are
right. But I advise atheists to not to go to the opposite extreme and tread the
postmodern path of hyper skepticism which may be the consequence of failing to find
logically obliging grounds as to why “It feels right” and why we know what we know.
For in going to this extreme one becomes like the cyclist who wonders how he
manages to keep balance and then promptly falls off his bike. The nihilism and anti-foundationalism of postmodernism
are ever the temptation of atheism. Our starting point must be “In the beginning Coherence, Intelligibility
and Integrity….” (Compare Proverbs 8 where we find a priori wisdom or reason
personified). Our epistemic pilgrimage is a knightly one in as much as heroic
hope rather than certainty drives it. But if that a priori basis is invalid the
search for truth becomes a quixotic quest.
Footnotes
*1 Once one realizes that this
processes is under the Sovereign Management of an immanent God “The Word of God” as a metaphor for scripture re-emerges.
*2 A demand for prediction can to a certain
extent call the bluff of the fundamentalist fantasists and conspiracy
theorists. But this really only works for the hard sciences; the soft sciences
(which often deal with issues which significantly impact our world view) have
much more the character of retrospective sense making narratives
and do not always lend themselves to successful prediction making. Soft
sciences are therefore far more dependent on the a priori assumption that the
cosmos is rationally readable.
Some relevant links:
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