I don’t think that science has disproven, nor even suggests, that it is unlikely that an Intelligent Designer was responsible for the world, and intended it to come into existence.
I don’t think that science has, nor even can, prove that divine and/or miraculous intervention is impossible.
I don’t think that the fact that we can make good predictive models of the world (and we can) in any way demonstrates that how the world has observedly panned out was not entirely foreseen and intended by some deity.
I think the world has properties that make it perfectly possible for an Intelligent Deity to “reach in” and tweak things to her liking – and that even if it didn’t, it would still be perfectly possible, given Omnipotence, just as a computer programmer can reach in and tweak the Matrix.
I don’t think that science falsifies the idea of an omnipotent,omniscient deity – at all.
I think that only rarely has this even been claimed by scientists, and, of those, most of them were claiming that science has falsified specific claims about a specific deity, not the idea in principle of a deity.
I do think that the world is such that IF there is an omnipotent, omniscient deity, EITHER that deity does not have human welfare as a high priority OR she has very different ideas about what constitutes human welfare from the ones that most people hold (and as are exemplified, for example, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), OR she has deliberately chosen to let the laws of her created world play out according to her ordained rules, regardless of the effects of those laws on the welfare of human beings, perhaps trusting that we would value a comprehensible world more than one with major causal glitches. In my case, her trust was well-placed.
I do think that the evidence we have is far more consistent with the idea that life and its origins are the result of processes consistent with others we see acting in the world, and not a result of some extraordinary intervention or series of extraordinary interventions, regardless of any question as to whether a benign or otherwise deity designed those processes with the expectation that life would be a probable or inevitable result.
I don’t think that it follows that, were we to find incontrovertible evidence of a Intelligent Creator (for instance, an unambiguous message in English configured in a nebula in some remote region of space, or on the DNA of an ant encased in amber millions of years ago) that that would mandate us in any way to worship that designer. On the basis of her human rights record I’d be more inclined to summon her to The Hague.
I think that certain theological concepts regarding a benevolent deity useful, inspiring, entirely consistent with science, and may reflect reality.
I don’t myself, any more, believe in some external disembodied intelligent and volitional deity, simply because I am no longer persuaded that either intelligence or volition are possible in the absence of a material substrate. But I do understand why people think this is false, and that consciousness, intelligence and volition are impossible, even in principle, to account for in terms of material/energetic processes, and I also understand that, although I think, for reasons that satisfy myself, that they are mistaken, the case is not an easy one to articulate, not least because of the intrinsically reflexive nature of cogitating on cogitation.
I think that “free will” is an ultimately incoherent concept; I think that the question “do we have free will?” is ill-posed, and ultimately meaningless. I think the better question is: Do I have the ability to make informed choices for which I am morally responsible?” and I think the answer is clearly yes.
Anyone else want to unload?
I think that the gods and their realms have the aspects that we’d expect for a bunch of made-up stuff, the anthropomorphizations, the wishes, and the magical thinking of humans creating fantasies. The slippery just-so facet of such thinking is a dead giveaway, so that, for instance, human design is analogous with what we find in life, except that in life we have no right to ask for the purpose, cognitive and psychological conditions, or specific mechanisms. It’s in fact a mystery, magic, very like human thought (which, conveniently for them is largely a black box for themselves), except for the extensive differences. The latter aren’t a problem for them, though, because they expect that, simply because they project themselves as black boxes onto an “ideal form” of intelligence and creation.
It isn’t very far from animism, since the causes are “like us,” only also very very different from us. This seems to make sense to human minds that have not learned to think in a more scientific and empiric manner, but it has never really worked for doing much more than telling pleasing stories.
Mostly, the whole issue is incoherent, the main reason that science doesn’t claim to debunk it. How is science supposed to address a hodge-podge of magical thinking anyhow? On the other hand, the analogy of religious thought to other fantastical thinking is heavily suggestive of the origins of such claims and beliefs.
Glen Davidson
Religionism? 🙂
Oh I love this from Sean Carroll (Thanks, BruceS!)
No, but (and you knew this was coming) science does show that ID is vastly inferior to unguided evolution as an explanation of life’s diversity. It isn’t even close.
It doesn’t work as an explanation at all.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t true. But something that could explain anything can explain nothing.
I do sometimes wonder if I am really “deaf to the music of the spheres”. I envy Lizzie’s experience of a life before atheism/agnosticism. Is there any reason to expect that there is an explanation for life, the universe and everything, or that humans are capable of discovering or comprehending it if it exists?
How can you choice Lizzie?
By weighing up alternatives and figuring out which will best serve my immediate or more distant goals.
No, I don’t think there is. I do think that the percept that we are immaterial things within a body is quite a powerful one – that there is a humunculus inside looking out. And it’s very easy, or at least fairly natural, to extrapolate from that to the idea that the homunculus can survive material death, and so other material homunculi – or homunculoni (Blas?) – big ones anyway – are also possible, and likely, and perhaps in charge.
And it’s also a powerful – and indeed helpful – habit of mind: to listen to the “still small voice”, even if it is your own, inner, wiser, self.
Don’t mind if I do!
A tribe from West Africa, the Wapangwa have an interesting creation story: A giant primordial ant defecated – went ‘poop’ as my son would say – and the resultant feces became the universe. ( The story is a bit more complicated than that and shows remarkable insight into the nature of emergent complexity, but thats another post) We immediately reject this story, but not because we consider the evidence for ant poop, find it lacking, and then reject it. We reject it because we instantly recognize it as a categorical mistake. Ants belong in a specific context. They are part of a colony, part of an ecosystem on the surface of the earth. Placing one at the beginning of the universe makes no sense.
We tend to view consciousness as the be-all-end-all of existence – mostly because that’s what seems to make us unique. It seems natural to some of us to place consciousness at the beginning of the universe but consciousness is as much a product of life on earth as an ant-hill. Placing consciousness at the beginning of the universe is just as absurd as placing a giant ant, and its absurd for the same reason: they’re both categorical mistakes.
Why did Buck Rodgers fight Tigerman rather than get it on with princess Ardala? IT MAKES NO SENSE. He was clearly in the ‘friends zone’ with Wilma Dearing and he was very hairy by future standards. Ardalla was bad-girl hot, her outfit came from an ‘adult store’, she had a battle cruiser and her dad ruled the galaxy. IT MAKES NO SENSE!
RodW,
Nice post 🙂
Anyone else want to unload?
Oh, man, where do I start?
I think that the whole Darwinism-vs.-intelligent design is a tempest in a tea-cup, a pseudo-debate, and an intellectual fraud. At the empirical level, there is no debate, period. At the philosophical level, there is sort of a debate, but neither easily resolvable nor terribly interesting. At the cultural-political level, the debate is again somewhat interesting, as an aspect of “the culture wars”, but the interest lies in treating the culture wars themselves an ideological mystification.
Basically, Darwinism is used as a scapegoat for the social ills produced by the destabilizing forces of unleashed capitalism. Since the social conservativism as an ideological position is completely unable to acknowledge the reality of political economy — this being intimately bound up with its hatred of sensuality, embodiment, ‘fleshiness’, and its manifest horror at the very thought of sexuality unpoliced by patriarchs and priests — all real causes are made to disappear behind a veil of symbolic associations. It’s magical thinking, pure and simple, and all evidence is either bent to its service or dismissed with sarcasm or irony.
In the service of their magical thinking, the anti-Darwinists, completely unable to accept the logical contradiction at the heart of their position — both pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist — create an illusory enemy, “materialism,” a position amorphous enough to be projected onto anyone, at any time, on the most spurious of grounds. It doesn’t matter (heh) that there aren’t any materialists, or that it’s not a position anyone takes seriously — they have to create an enemy onto which they can project all of their hate so that the logical contradiction at the core of their ideology doesn’t turn into self-hatred. And the Manicheanism, the resentment, the us-or-them, with-us or against-us, mentality permanently blinds them from even being able to recognize the sheer diversity of metaphysical positions.
I know that I’m supposed to take it that the other side is arguing in good faith, and to the extent that I take them to be sincere, I can do so. But I simply cannot take them seriously, as people with whom I can have an interesting dialogue. Creationism and intelligent design are interesting to me as a psychopathology of modernity. I can’t sit down and have a genuine dialogue with them any more than I can with the fellow who has gone on a hunger strike in Utah in protest of same-sex marriage.
(Well, looks like I had a lot to unload. Huh. Maybe I need to see a therapist myself about my anger management issues.)
I find the reflexive and unevidenced demonization of capitalism to be intellectually undifferentiable from the demonization of science and darwinism. People can be nasty, and people in power have the means to be nasty in large ways, but I see no evidence that one form of power guarantees utopia. Not to mention that the wealth generated by technology invented by greedy entrepreneurs has made death by starvation unusual, at least in capitalist countries.
I do not wish to debate this. It’s not the proper forum. Not for me and not for others.
petrushka,
Ok, fair enough.
KN,
Huh? I prefer the terms ‘naturalist’ or ‘physicalist’, but I certainly take the position seriously.
RodW,
O ye of little faith. It’s turtles all the way down and ants pooping back to infinity.
I’m willing to bet that the view you actually accept is not the straw man that they think we accept. They think that if one is a “materialist,” then there’s just nothing at all one can coherently and meaningfully say about consciousness, purpose, freedom, responsibility, value, intentionality, agency, or rationality.
Sure, but I don’t think we should cede the term to them merely because they insist on getting it wrong.
Can anyone explain how carnivores evolved from herbivores? At what point did the Prey become a predator? Is there a separate evolution line for predators and prey? How did the ‘match the following’ happen where Predators preferred some preys and ignored others?
Well, it was a nice rant. I agree with a lot of it.
Yes, I agree. But I take it that your criticism is not of mere capitalism, but of the laissez faire (or unleashed) variety. On my reading of history, that has been a disaster whenever it has been tried.
I’m taking that as a reference to the version of materialism that creationists and ID proponents attack. I see it as a strawman. The people that I know, who call themselves materialists, do no subscribe to most of what is attacked.
For me, the irony is that much of what the social conservatives do not like, has come from capitalism. To give one example, Hugh Hefner didn’t start his “Playboy” magazine as an act of benevolence; he did it to make money. So the social conservatives have declared war on liberals, for what has actually come from the economic conservatism that they favor.
Another irony, is that their conception of God is so small. Their God is a bumbling incompetent fool who gets everything wrong then has to patch up after it. A God that could design evolution would be so much greater.
Omnivores?
No wait, it was the fall.
Right. I mean, at a certain “philosophical” level, I agree with the diagnosis of capitalism developed in the Marxist tradition, but I certainly do not think that there’s anything in the Marxist or socialist traditions which offers a viable alternative to capitalism. And there’s no doubt — as Marx himself went to pains to point out — that capitalism did allow for something very, very important: a form of complex social organization that did not depend, at bottom, on slavery. So at the level of policy, I’m a semi-reluctant welfare-state liberal, warts and all. If I sometimes come across as wanting to make the perfect into the enemy of the good, it’s only because philosophers have the privilege, the luxury, of doing so.
Sure, and keiths makes the same point. I have reasons of my own for not wanting to advertise my views under the banner of “materialism”, “physicalism,” or even (perhaps) “naturalism.” In my rant, I was more interested in presenting my take on what drives the construction of the straw-man position against which social conservatives define themselves.
You sound like the Unabomber!! But even a lunatic can be right about something!
Ha yes, Omnivores too! Please explain the evolutionary line of those too.
They came from non-eaters via an adapted nose.
dietary preferences aren’t….species.
No, of course not, so Darwinist explanation of environment (which involves the Predator-Prey population balance too) ‘selecting’ is false.
Eh? Could you rephrase your conclusion and support it a bit?
I love and thoroughly enjoy believing that I have free will; that I have a soul; that god exists, and that my existence will continue on in some sentient format forever; that I will be reunited with loved ones after death; I love the feeling of love, fulfillment, joy, and hope these beliefs instill in my life on a day to day basis. I love the amazing miracles I see every day that reassure me that the divine exists and is all around me.
I appreciate the patience these beliefs provide me; the profound sense of meaning and value for every kindness and good thing that I encounter and that I can muster for those I love; the stability and peace in my own mind it offers as I take care of a parent succumbing to alzheimers and endure my own challenges as an aging grandfather. Any ridicule or condescension directed at me for these views pale to insignificance against the hope and peace these beliefs offer to temper the agony and grief that can sometimes be very difficult to bear in my time here.
Without these beliefs I was a wreck of self-centered angst, anger and hopelessness, living in abject poverty without good motivation or consideration for others. I changed my beliefs, and my life completely changed. I changed. There are a lot of people over at UD – and others – that helped me accomplish this, even if they didn’t know it at the time. I was looking for a way to believe in god again, and they had exactly what I needed.
And the great thing is, even if god and the afterlife doesn’t exist, even if I’m a stupid, foolish idiot for believing, at least for the duration between now and non-existence I have had that joy, sense of love, hope and fulfillment, a profound sense of value and meaning, along with the other successes in my life that those beliefs have apparently wrought. And if there is nothing but nothingness awaiting me when I pass, there will not even be the opportunity for me to be disappointed or feel chagrined. I will just be gone, after living a wonderful life thanks to the beliefs that saved me.
The big problem that I see with “free will”, is trying to work out what people mean when they use that term. What is meant seems to vary from person to person, and sometimes from day to day for the same person.
I agree with that “yes”. And for me, that is what I mean by “free will.”
No surprises here. But it would be a mistake to believe everyone needs a crutch in order to walk.
William J. Murray,
And we’re so happy you share your euphoric rays of sunshine with us, William. You’re a joyful beacon for us all.
William,
The tone of your comment, along with the fact of your continued participation here at TSZ, suggests that you harbor some lingering doubts about the beliefs you claim to hold.
Wouldn’t it be better to find a set of beliefs you could embrace without reservation or intellectual compromise?
I am someone who long ago shared all of the beliefs you mentioned, eventually jettisoning them with trepidation and reluctance.
Take it from someone who’s been there: joy, love, hope and fulfillment all survive intact, plus there is the peace that comes from being honest with one’s self.
They didn’t. Being carnivorous, herbivorous, or omnivorous are environmentally driven behavioral traits that have come and gone many times in many different lineages over the last 500 million years. Animals (and plants) tend to get nutrition from the food that’s most easily available to them. That’s why we end up with cases like Pandas living almost exclusively on bamboo and the Venus Flytrap.
I bet you didn’t know that cows are omnivorous and will eat meat when it’s easily available either.
However, when a person is doing science, like figuring out what’s wrong with a malfunctioning brain, the concerns are rather different. Actually knowing what the evidence supports becomes more important.
Of course it is up to the individual to take whatever course seems best to that person. It is not up to the individual to claim that ID/creationism follows from honest application of epistemology to the questions of the origin of life because the results of science do not please said individual. This is why Murray’s present testimonial is far more appropriate than the many unsupported charges previously made.
Glen Davidson
That was BEFORE you clarified the term ‘select’ in the other thread. I have continued my thoughts about the ‘select’ (which you agree is luck + ‘filter’) in the other thread.
No I didn’t. so it would mean depending on environment,the digestive system of species keep changing? It would also mean in the earlier evolution timeline, carnivores evolved from herbivore and they developed changes to suite their carnivorous habit by mutation BEFORE they became carnivorous ?
coldcoffee,
There is a scion of a herbivore line that now pursues squid into the very depths of the oceans, to nearly 10,000 feet, while many of its genetic relatives placidly munch grass. Amazing, how did that happen … no, can’t be arsed thinking: Design. This is Design, and that’s Design, and … you want me to flesh out my Design Theory? Huh. I am not obliged to match your pathetic level of detail.
I was expecting a simpler and much more common example “No. Of course not – look at the Sea turtles”. I think you need to improve your species vocabulary.
No. In a population of herbivores, individuals occasionally eat meat for various reasons. Among those individuals, there will be some with mutations that make them better able to digest this meat. These individuals, because of their increased meat digestive ability, will have an ecological niche available to them to a greater extend than their herbivorous relatives, so they will diverge from their herbivorous relatives through increasingly greater adaptation to digest meat, through the same mutational and selective process.
This isn’t hard to understand, yet you consistently feign ignorance and a lack of comprehension about this process. Why? Why don’t you want to understand it? Nevermind whether you believe this actually happened, the concept isn’t hard to understand. Yet you elect to remain patently obtuse on the subject every time. Why is that? It’s really quite ridiculous.
coldcoffee,
What, mentioning just one means I know of no others?
Thanks for this thoughtful piece, William. I will comment on it below (btw, I installed a new plug in to improve load times for posts with lots of comments, and it seems to have glitched the “quote in reply” function – which, however, still works if you use your mouse to select the part (including all) that you want to quote. It has massively improved the load times, though – the 500 coins post was taking an age until I did it.).
I can understand that, William. Like you, I enjoy “believing in” something analogous to your belief in “free will” except that mine does not require “belief” and, to my mind, makes more sense: my capacity to choose between courses of action on the basis of as much or as little information as I choose to obtain, and according to whether or not it best serves my current or more distal goal, between which again, I have the capacity to choose. In short: I enjoy my capacity to exercise volition, or “will”, and rejoice that I have enough resources, and liberty, to be mostly “free” to do so, within some limits (I’d love to fly like a bird, or be able to play the piano well, but I don’t think I’m free to do either of those things, no matter how strongly I will them). Unlike you, I don’t look forward to being reunited with my loved ones after death, but rejoice that my joy in my dead loved ones does not depend on something for which I have no evidence, but rather on the vividness of my memories of all that we shared, and hope that those memories do not become too fragmented by dementia. But like you, I love the sense of fulfilment and joy that love brings daily. I also love the sense of amazement I have in seeing the wonder of the world around me, not because I regard them as “miracles” (which would seem to me to be rather boring) but because of the extraordinary network of cause and effect, and regularity of natural laws that science keeps revealing at an extraordinary rate, and in which I feel privileged to take a humble part.
I hope I have never appeared to ridicule you for these beliefs, William, and if I have, I apologise. I do understand how belief in an afterlife can be a comfort to anyone caring for a loved person with Alzheimer’s – it must be one of the most agonising things that can happen, because not only do you lose the person you once knew (and too often, they, you) but it tampers with the very memories that for me are a person’s only probable immortality. I would love to meet my mother after death, especially if she had retained the serenity and wisdom she achieved in her later years, but not the damage to her intellect that her brain haemmorrhages robbed her of in her last few months. But I do not think it is likely. Instead, I have my memories of her whole life – and for me, that is a more coherent thing, because what was precious to me about my mother was my developing relationship with her as we both matured in response to things in our lives, including the long-wished for birth of my son, her last grandchild. But that is all intimately temporal – an eternal version might be nice, but I don’t know what it would be, even if I thought it likely, so it’s not something I feel I miss by not expecting. In reverse, I would love to think that in some afterlife I could watch my own son bear some grandchildren for me, as I think it is unlikely, if he does “give me” grandchildren, that I will live to see them grow very old, but then as I don’t think I’ll know what I’m missing if I don’t, that’s not a great concern! As it is, I have the joy of seeing him mature into a kind and interesting young man.
I’m sincerely glad that you found what you needed, William, and can understand to some extent what it has brought you – something that I rather took for granted for the first half century or so of my life – absolutely belief in a benign deity, and a sense that even if the world looked bleak, I was here for some reason even if I couldn’t fathom what it was, but which, with faith, I would discover. Losing that absolute belief was a world-rocking moment for me, but, interestingly, one that proved, when the dust had settled, to leave the world looking pretty well as it had done before, with the added bonus of not requiring belief in anything that did not have perfectly good direct evidential support. But that for another thread, perhaps.
Yes, Pascal’s wager does have it’s good side! And of course, your beliefs may turn out to be true, if not (in my view) well-founded. For me, though, I have found a way of achieving most (if not all) of the benefits your belief (which was once mine) brings without the slight disadvantage of having to “believe” anything that is not well-supported by good evidence.
I do realise that you think that your beliefs have logical support, and that mine don’t, but I beg to differ; but again, we can leave that for another thread. In the mean time all the best for 2014, especially in caring from your parent. I’d love to see Alzheimer’s eradicated – I think it is possibly the cruelest disease we have. I think we will, in fact – which is why I do psychiatric neuroscience! Although alzheimer’s is not my field. But those whose it is say things are looking increasingly promising.
There are good answers to your questions, coldcoffee, although not necessarily simple ones, but I’ll have a brief go.
First of all, carnivores probably didn’t simply evolve from herbivores, at least according to evolutionary science. “Eating” other organisms probably evolved extremely early (before modern cells, I would hazard), simply because absorbing another organism is a nice way of getting a bunch of concentrated materials you need for repairing and copying yourself that you’d otherwise have to get piecemeal from the ambient soup. Indeed, if Margulis symbiotic theory is right, eukaryotic cells owe their lineage to ancestors who “ate” other organisms whole, and our own cells can be though of as individual organisms each containing another!
But moving rapidly on from early unicellular organisms – at some stage one kind of organism (the lineage we know call “animals”) started to prey on the kind we now call “plants”, probably because plants tend to have roots and stand still, whereas animals can move. And plants can afford to because they can make food from carbon dioxide and sunlight, whereas animals can’t, although of course a few plants, even those with roots, do supplement their diet with animals.
So “carnivore” was the “original state”, whereas herbivores had to wait for herbs! Or for some carnivores to become carbondioxidivores.
But there’s nothing to stop any lineage evolving to make use of whatever energy resources are available in the current environment – that’s intrinsic to the theory. So lineage can acquire carnivorous habits (e.g. carnivorous plants! But also some marine mammals, although some remained herbivores, or at least planktonivores, as others have pointed out.
And some carnivores went the other way – many birds are herbivores, but descended from what were probably carnivorous dinosaurs.
And the general answer is: any variant that increases an organisms chances of reproductive success will by definition, become more prevalent, and one important way of increasing your reproductive success is having some trait that enables you to make use of a locally available foodstuff. If that is an animal, your lineage will tend to become carnivorous; if it is vegetable, then vegetarianism may be in your lineage’s future.
It may be in ours, as the planet becomes more crowded; plants tend to yield more edible stuff per hectare than most animals.
Ah. I’ve turned off “minify” and that seems to have deborked the “quote in reply” function.
Hope the load times are still reasonably fast.
And how can that activity been morally responsible?
keiths said:
“Lingering doubt” only exists in a belief system predicated on the idea that what one believes in is believed to be true. As it doesn’t matter to me if my beliefs are true or not, doubt of any kind is a non-issue.
I guess you could say that I’m the ultimate pragmatist; I don’t care if my beliefs are true; I only care that they work (or at least appear to). If they stopped working, I’d believe something else. Doubt, in my system, is a non-sequitur.
You may be surprised to know that I actually find this perfectly reasonable, although rather than “beliefs” I’d use the word “models”. I think the ultimate test of a model is not whether it is true, but whether it is useful. Scientific models are useful because they make good predictions (and we can thus reasonably infer that they are an approximation to some underlying reality). But we have many “normative” models as well. One of mine growing up was (from George Fox) the principle that there is “that of God in every man [i.e. person]”. It only required one additional vowel when my conception of God ceased to be of an immaterial “spirit” to work just as well.
And my conception of “God” now (or perhaps merely “god”) is of a kind of theoretical composite of how what we would know and how we would act were we not restricted by our own narrow points of view and experience. Such an entity doesn’t have to exist except as an ideal to be the standard by which I try to select my actions, and does the same thing as an omniscient and omnibenevolent God. All I’ve lost is the omnipotent part, which I don’t miss. All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I’d rather stick with my merely omniscient and omnibenevolent one, who feels all pain, and has no vested interest in one creature’s welfare over another’s, and whose only power lies in our own capacity to share a glimpse from that universal viewpoint.
I agree with this 100%, and I’ve used the term “model’ instead of beliefs many times to explain how I hold beliefs. It’s my current best model for achieving the results I want. When I call something a belief, though, that means I act as if that model is true.
By understanding how our choices affect people around us, by putting ourselves in their place and modifying our choices accordingly.
Interesting. Are you saying the early species had photosynthesis ability- because if they had no species to feed on they couldn’t be carnivores, they had to be herbivore? or are you just being real accurate with definition of ‘herbivores’ and ‘plankton eaters’ (ok I don’t know the technical word – ‘planktovores?’ )