http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(15)00743-5.pdf
Seems to fit in with recent threads.
His latest book, Faith Versus Fact, is
intended not to pile on the arguments
for atheism but to advance the debate
into its next round. It is a brief against the
faitheists — scientists and religionists
alike — who advocate a make-nice
accommodation between science and
religion. As with Michael Corleone’s offer
to Nevada Senator Pat Geary in The
Godfather Part II, Coyne’s offer to religion
on the part of science is this: Nothing.
This sounds more imperialistic and
scientistic than it really is, because Coyne
defi nes ‘science’ broadly, to encompass
any system of belief grounded by reason
and evidence, rather than faith. On
this defi nition, many of the humanities,
such as history and philosophy, count
as ‘science’, not just the traditional
physical and social sciences.
Coyne quotes several historical and
recent writers, particularly Carl Sagan
and the philosophers Yonatan Fishman
and Maarten Boudry, while adding some
examples of his own, to show how the
existence of the God of scripture is a
testable empirical hypothesis. The Bible’s
historical accounts could have been
corroborated by archaeology, genetics
and philology. It could have contained
uncannily prescient truths such as “thou
shalt not travel faster than light” or “two
strands entwined is the secret of life.” A
bright light might appear in the heavens
one day and a man clad in white robe and
sandals, supported by winged angels,
could descend from the sky, give sight
to the blind, and resurrect the dead. We
might discover that intercessory prayer
can restore hearing or re-grow amputated
limbs, or that anyone who speaks the
Prophet Mohammed’s name in vain is
immediately struck down by lightning,
while those who pray to Allah five times a
day are free from disease and misfortune.
I don’t read any of that stuff either. Life’s too short.
To each his own. I don’t read philosophy for the same reason.
Neil Rickert,
If it’s not empirically detectable, how might one distinguish it from not existing at all?
The weapons of faith: fear, surprise, and detecting the undetectable.
Nobody expects detection of the undetectable.
Glen Davidson
I refuse to concede that Biblical narratives are “literally false”. I order to generate the view that they are literally fakse, one must first interpret them as assertoric discourse (assertions here being the sorts of things that have truth-values). And it is precisely that interpretation that I am objecting to here. (The fact that millions of people of faith do take them as assertoric discourse is no objection to my view; I simply think that they are mistaken in doing so.)
If one adopts a “polydimensional” view of discourse, with assertoric discourse being but one of its many dimensions, one can see how to interpret Scripture in non-assertoric terms.
(The past few days I’ve been talking with two of my closest philosopher-friends about why we are not atheists. More on this after my house-guests leave and I have more time for TSZ.)
Of course, that is always one issue for theism. However, they do thereby protect their beliefs against empirical refutation.
http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/01/27/famous-authors-on-truth-vs-fiction/
KN: I have to join the chorus of folks who think you are being silly. One does not need philosophical training or obscure words to say that fiction conveys truths.
The question being addressed here is whether the Bible is fiction. Bearing in mind that historical fiction generally has references to actual places and events.
Kantian Naturalist,
*sniff* *sniff* Smells like the philosophical equivalent of “A different way of knowing.”
“Non-assertoric” seems to mean “not making claims about reality.” I’m not sure I see the point.
“Non-assertoric” is a double-edged word, I think. By that I mean that if the Bible doesn’t assert anything then none of it can be true.
Obviously, to the extent the Bible consists of questions, commands, exclamations, etc., it’s not true or false. But there are a ton of things in there which are at least ostensible assertions too. In my (mostly excluded middle) world, even apparent assertions must, at least generally, be either true or not true. One could take it a sentence at a time, if one wanted, and, on my view, every sentence would have to true, not true (i.e., false or having no truth-value), or insufficiently specified to be much of anything at all (I’m thinking here of things like “They were much struck in their hearts” Or “Lo, they were stout.”
Now, of course, we might not know whether most of the sentences we pass on are true or not (I’m guessing we probably don’t), and there are many that we likely will NEVER have a ton of evidence–one way or the other–with respect to their veracity. So there are burden issues as well as predominance of truths issues to making a determination as to whether it’s appropriate to say “The whole stinking book is fiction.” But none of that is molto misterioso, IMHO. It’s just the kind of thing that could happen in a courtroom.
I take the view that most of what philosophy has to offer the world is in the area of clarification. So, for me, misting stuff over (otherwise called “obfuscation”)–with our without big words–is helpful only in the sense of providing one or another of the parties enough wiggle room to get out town without a finding.
Without engaging in obfuscation, I’d like to know what parts of the Bible are not making factual assertions about historical events.
Psalms, perhaps?
What about all the dietary rules in Leviticus?
Are they directly from God? Spoken by God to Moses?
A different way of meaning, yes. A different way of making sense of one’s experience of the world.
I’m happy with different ways of knowing, but in a different context.
Yes, I’m using “non-assertoric” to mean “not making claims” (whether about reality or not). But do you not see the point of linguistic expressions that don’t make claims?
When I say, “I love you” I am not making a claim (not even a claim about my own psychology). I am expressing an attitude and making (or re-affirming) a commitment to a set of activities and actions.
What parts of scriptures are not making claims? Or what percentage?
And what churches are founded on the idea that scriptures don’t make claims?
Unitarian, perhaps? I’ve been to a few Unitarian services, and found an attitude similar to yours.
But I don’t know if they were not assertive about Biblical writings, because they didn’t read anything from the Bible.
Kantian Naturalist,
I would interpret that as a claim about your personal feelings.
Beats the hell out of me. But wouldn’t that be in a different sentence from “Thou shalt not cook the lamb in the milk of its mommy”?
I’m not so sure myself, but If you’re right, it can’t be true (i.e., it’s not cake). As I said, you seem very averse to choosing.
I don’t understand the question.
If the text says (the equivalent of) “God spoke to Moses, saying ‘Thou shalt not cook the lamb in the milk of its mommy?'” isn’t that an assertion? Even if the laws are written as separate sentences?
Statements like that could mean most anything, depending on context. Anything from, I’m horny and want to get laid, to I’m sorry I slept with your best friend. Or both, simultaneously.
I don’t read the Bible as being dominated by that kind of text.
KN:
Patrick:
Indeed, and one that can be evaluated based on the evidence.
(By the way, KN, don’t forget to respond to this.)
Yes, I would call that an assertion myself. KN differs, apparently.
I take KN to be arguing that fiction is a modern category that does not fit well with ancient writings.
I don’t think that opening line was actually mine, petrushka. But it does remind me of the lovely Marxian song
I was thinking. Suppose the sentence you put is interpreted to mean something like “Cooking meat in the milk of its mommy seems kind of….Ewwww. We are made to feel that way.”
That is, every reference to God in there is made into a sort of metaphor for some kind of feeling coming over people. KN might be saying something like that, and I think you could concoct such an interpretation if you wanted to, but the supernatural aspect would go bye-bye as a result. You’d just be “unpacking” God into warm feelings mixed with fear and trembling or something. And there’s nothing but bio and psych there.
The moral is, again, that you have to choose between cake and non-cake. You take cake and you get false (or unwarranted and likely unfalsifiable) claims. You take pie and you get nothing inexplicable by naturalists.
I fail to see why not.
My experience with churchgoers is they fall along a spectrum from inerrantists, to metaphorists. Most people seem to think that scriptures contain great stories and great storytelling and great poetry, but the question addressed here and now is whether the stories are accurate history.
I think it’s nit-picking to quibble over whether scripture falls into modern categories of fiction (which I was taught means novels).
Which then raises the question: What justification for believing this do they then have, and do they hold other subjects to the same standard of belief?
Would they believe claims about opposing political parties doing good stuff on no empirical evidence? Of course not, which means they have a hypocritical double-stanard with respect to the kinds of things they think justify their religions beliefs, vs what kinds of things they accept as justification for beliefs on every other subject. We can point this out.
Everything can be rationalized away into obscurity. All we can do when people do this, is to point it out: Hey dude, you’re just making up ad-hoc excuses now.
I’m not saying the debate can be won, that we can eradicate religion. But there are people who listen to reason, I know because I’m one of them. I used to believe.
walto,
Much lovelier than the Marxist song:
Sure, if we define “truth” as Coyne does (“Confirmity with fact” from OED), then I agree that, eg, the stories in Genesis are not literally true.
Whether literal truth is what bible should be read as intending is the more interesting question, but that seems to be related to KN’s line of thought, and I’ll leave that to him.
As I read Coyne’s book (or rather as I skim it), Coyne’s goal is to convince people to apply science and critical thinking, and not religion and faith, to important topics like climate change or what role religion can have in giving parents the right to refuse medical treatment for their children.
I wonder if pitting science against religion to show that biblical stories taken literally are false is an effective way to accomplish that goal.
I may post more on that tomorrow.
Right, whatever happened to Erik? This thread seems to be right in his wheelhouse.
One thing at a time! You may find the second question more interesting, but it would be nice to get agreement on the first question before moving on.
I do at times use a bit of hyperbole. 😉
I think I’m hardly alone in that though.
I deal with that by having lots of bibles!
Heck, I even have The Boomer Bible.
Where I come from that means the charge must be true.
There are only two kinds of literature, truth and fiction.
At least you have your priorities straight! You don’t read philosophy but you do read the Bible. 🙂
Man, what if the bible is a book of philosophy!?
murrayville?
Well, I did include the condition “if we define ‘truth’ as Coyne does.” because that condition makes the answer much easier.
But I doubt whether defining the issue that way will help Coyne in his objective of having US society apply scientific, critical thinking to important social issues in medical research, assisted dying, the rights of religious parents to control their children’s lives, climate change.
Coyne trots out the usual comparison of US to Northern European countries to discount arguments that societies with high proportions of non-believers must be amoral.
Given those societies, interesting questions open to scientific and historical analysis would be: how did such societies arise from their religious pasts? Are there any lessons to be learned there than can be applied to US politics in dealing with the important social issues Coyne mentions?
But Coyne does not attempt to engage with these types of details. Instead, he is satisfied to rehearse the standard pro-science, anti-religion arguments.
This may sell some books to his fans. But I doubt that it will have any impact in accomplishing his professed goals.
Yeah but you can be sincerely believing you are writing truth, but be mistaken. And not because you are regurgitating lies, perhaps you are misremembering, mispercieving or misspeaking. These things happen, and they happen more frequently when people are tired, stressed, hungry or ill.
In this way, what was initially remembered by person 1 and genuinely believed to be the truth, eventually was miscommunicated to person 2, who misheard a few words, then misremember a few more when he tells the story to person 3 and so on. And what you end up with has been genuinely believed to be truth all the way through, but been altered along the way due to fallible humans making our common mistakes out of no ill will or intent. In the end, what you are reading is no longer the truth.
I don’t think the purpose of defining “truth” in something like the manner Coyne does (i.e., as correspondence) is to help Coyne in those objectives. The point is to understand what we are talking about when we say something is true or not. If we can get everybody (except maybe Byers) to admit that many propositions in the Bible are not true, we will have made significant progress in understanding one another.
I don’t know or particularly care what Coyne is up to. From what you have written above, it doesn’t seem like he’s making a ton of sense. But, as I said, first things first. You’ve agreed that the Bible is not true (as “true” is most commonly understood); presumably the atheists here agree. What about the theists and agnostics? {ETA: And what about KN, whatever he is, exactly?}
It seems to me that only when you have agreement on that, does it make much sense to move on to “more interesting” issues.
You caught me: In the post you linked, I moved from “definition of truth” to “the issue”, leaving out some steps, because I really wanted to talk about how Coyne’s approach won’t achieve his objectives.
Let me fill in some of the gaps. Coyne starts the book by saying he was disappointed that his previous book on evolution did not convince religious evolution-deniers to change their minds. He decides it is because religious faith blinds people to the truth as shown by scientific reasoning and evidence. Therefore he is writing the book to show that science trumps religion when it comes to drawing conclusions about the facts and reality.
In the closing chapter of the book, he says that belief in evolution is not really that important, but the issues that I mentioned (like climate change) are vitally important; scientific reasoning, not faith, is needed to address them.
My point is that the book is not about showing religion is wrong when it speaks to scientific fact. That’s just a stepping stone to his main goal. Which is to convince people to apply critical thinking to important social issues.
He is right to think that is an important goal. But I don’t think a general strategy pitting science against religion is the right way to accomplish it.
We’re likely talking at cross-purpose because all I care about is what Coyne is up to in the book.
Faith vs. Fact? No, Jerry Coyne’s Theology vs. Whatever
And you honestly find this fallacious dismissal convincing?
Too bad the author of that review is full of theologically-based crap which assumes its conclusions and then tries to use those conclusions to argue against Coyne.
See that goddamn sentence I bolded? That’s the theist banging one of the favorite drums: that our intuition of “moral facts” is underlain by (objective) morality from god. But: the supposed “fact” of the existence of “moral facts” to begin with has never been demonstrated in our intersubjective reality. I don’t expect this reviewer, in two throwaway paragraphs, to prove the actual existence of “moral facts” but I do note that no theologist has ever proven them either. Of course they can’t. This turns out to be another one of those “religion has a special way of knowing” things. The only way religionists can claim that there might be such a thing as “moral fact” is by ignoring all of the real-world evidence, all the varied group and individual behaviors and words and our own subjective experience that morality is situational: that I would murder you to save my mother but would (probably) not murder you to prevent you from attacking someone else.
Every theist knows this, because these as the observable facts, but they pretend to know (with their special “religious way of knowing”) that there is some kind of invisible immaterial supernatural/transcendent basis for “objective” “moral fact” which – somehow – can never be communicated to humans directly or accurately but which – somehow – nonetheless, underlies the very existence of any “moral behavior”. That’s airy-fairy nonsense. It’s made up. There isn’t any “religious way of knowing” which allows theists to know that about morality, anymore than they can know there are real healing potentizations in a homeopathic remedy.
We, skeptics, do you, theists. the credit of assuming you are actually intelligent enough to be aware of the facts at a rational level (even if you wish to have faith in something unseen) and therefore we can skip the entire pointless discussion of your fiction of “moral facts” and go directly to questions which real-world knowledge might shed some light on: How do humans behave morally? What does evolution predict for moral behavior in social animals? No surprise, this question in Coyne’s book is one the reviewer blithely dismisses, clearly preferring the theological question: What does god’s existence tell us about the basis for morality? When Coyne never even considers giving a theological answer, the reviewer has the nerve to accuse Coyne of doing the wrong kind of theology!
Tom Gilson is an ass. More importantly, he’s a fool. And his review is crap written by a fool.
Mung,
I think the critic there makes an important point, and mung does well to highlight it. Philosophy of science (assuming that’s what Coyne is up to) is not itself science. That’s a good point.
As I see it, however, this criticism, though apt, need not be thought to be devastating. Philosophy of science, not being a thoroughly empirical field of study, does not “rise to the level of” (or at least is not a sub-species of) science. But religion does not even “rise to the level of” (is not a type of) philosophy: it’s just stories that make people feel good.
I grant that theology may be considered a type of philosophy, but (i) religion is not theology, and (ii) theology is generally a pretty bad sub-species of philosophy.
And Coyne is neither a philosopher nor a theologian. He is presumably not writing fiction. It’s not even bad science. So what do we call it?
Lack of a convenient label has never stopped you from bad-mouthing something before. Funny that now you’re trying to bad-mouth something merely because you can’t give it a convenient label.
Unfortunately for Coyne, there’s actually pretty good data that whether one accepts or rejects climate change has little to do with one’s scientific literacy. So improving the latter is likely going to do little or nothing to altering views on climate change.
In fact there’s a sizeable disconnect between how scientifically literate voters are and whether policies backed by the best science have popular support. Coyne seems to think that we need more scientifically literate and critically reflective voters so that the epistemixalky best policies will be popular with voters. That seems embarrassingly naive, and quite at odds with what we know about human beings from empirical social sciences (as well e.g. history).
I’ll look up a citation on this tomorrow and post it then.
It seems as if this is too obvious to be worth mentioning, but since it has gone unremarked upon thus far: if you really want to motivate people to care about climate change and demand that something be done about it, attacking their religious convictions is, without a doubt, the very last thing you want to do.
If Coyne’s goal is public policy guided by better science, then he choose the absolutely worst way of going about it by attacking religion. In attacking religion he picked a fight that he cannot win and which has nothing to do with the fight he actually cares about.
I agree the book is philosophy, not science. I doubt Coyne would claim the book itself was science.
Coyne grants philosophy the status of knowledge. Like mathematics, he makes it an exception to the rule that knowledge has to be regarding the facts of the spatio-temporal world. He says:
Philosophy can produce a similar kind of knowledge [to mathematics], an understanding of the consequences that follow logically from certain premises.
[…]Philosophy, for instance, provides a rigorous framework for thinking about issues like consciousness, evolution, and evolutionary psychology, for finding fallacies in pseudosciences like creationism, and for interpreting science for the layperson.
Given that, and in particular the last phrase, I think he can argue that his book is an attempt to impart knowledge. Where it succeeds and where it does not is open to argument of course, but because he allows philosophy to be knowledge, I don’t think saying the book is not science is by itself a successful argument against what the books claims.
But he does say there can be no knowledge in morality, art, or subjectivit feelings like love. He won’t make an exception for those as he does for math and philosophy.
I don’t think he needs to go into the subject of what is knowledge in general and what is not knowledge. It is enough for his argument against religion to make the (correct, I think) claim that science is our best method for explaining and predicting the spatio-temporal world.
But he wants to drive a stake through the heart of accomodationism, and in particular the “other ways of knowing” argument of some accomodationists. He is worried that if he does not do so, religious claims about the spatio-temporal world will be in argued to be an acceptable alternative to science because they are other ways of knowing.