On another blog, FideCogitActio, some theists of a "classical" stripe (that's to say, like Brian Davies, Edward Feser) are criticisng the Evil God Challenge (or I suppose, trying to show how it can be met, or sidestepped). The main post includes this: In book I, chapter 39 , Aquinas argues that “there cannot be evil in God” (in Deo non potest esse malum). Atheists like Law must face the fact that, if the words are to retain any sense, “God” simply cannot be “evil”. As my comments in the thread at Feser’s blog aimed to show, despite how much he mocks “the privation theory of evil,” Law himself cannot escape its logic: his entire argument requires that the world ought to appear less evil if it is to be taken as evidence of a good God. Even though he spurns the idea that evil is a privation of good, his account of an evil world is parasitic on a good ideal; this is no surprise, though, since all evil is parasitic on good ( SCG I, 11 ). Based on the conclusions of se...
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The first video in the series is here, incidentally:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3hpmjf6hhg&feature=related
The one in the blog is number 3 of 6, I think?
I thought this was very good. You came across really well I thought. You displayed very good humour in the face of adversity. I ended up watching them out of sequence so I'm not even sure if I saw them all.
Atkins said that science is optimistic and philosophy is pessimistic, but I think what he's really saying is that science can find answers where philosophy can't necessarily. There's a dialectic between philosophy and science which you hinted at and Peter dismisses or ignores.
One becomes aware of the subtle distinction between philosophy and science when you read books by scientists discussing philosophy. Two of the best, in my view, are Why Beliefs Matter by E. Brian Davies (Professor of Mathematics at Kings College London, and Fellow of the Royal Society) and What is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger.
I would've liked you to have elaborated more on why you think there is something wrong with the question: Why is there something rather than nothing?
The fact is that without consciousness there may as well be nothing. The real paradox of the universe is that it managed to create sentient beings who can actually attempt to understand it at all.
Regards, Paul.
You said something like "human flourishing is important". Why??
I would have liked more on the "Can an is lead to an ought?" problem. Can science solve moral problems? e.g. is suffering "wrong"?
http://an-uninformed-opinion.blogspot.com/2011/04/use-of-philosophy.html
Thanks for the inspiration Stephen.
The only thing I kind of mucked up in this whole series was I didn't reiterate to Dawkins that the conceptual engineering philosophers do is a priori and armchair based, not empirical, so, while he said I was a scientist doing science, that's an odd use of the term.
Also, I should have said at the end about Galileo's balls that the thought experiment showed that it couldn't be a law that heavier things fall faster, but of course that does not allow us to predict what the balls which actually do right now (I cam pretty close at least to saying it did allow that, which was a silly mistake on my part).
Philosophers who think a priori should get together more often with empirical scientists. A great evening! Thanks Stephen.
The discussion reminded me of what another BHA distinguished supporter, Stephen Fry said that 'without testing, reason is akin to superstition'. http://humanists4science.blogspot.com/2011/04/stephen-fry-why-reason-is-almost-akin.html
But from that point on I think we have to accept that some aspects of philosophy, such as armchair philosophy about the world, are no longer adequate and should be relegated to history, as are some older methods of science. That's not to say that thinking alone is no use; theoretical physicists do that. The important point is that if you are going to theorise only, you should base it on the experimental work that has been done by science. Many old philosophical problems have either been explained away or no longer matter; and I think Peter was objecting this type of philosophy.
As was also pointed out, philosophy does not have a monopoly on critical thinking. In this respect then, even though the value of science may have come out of philosophical thinking I think now it is the case that thinking is what philosophers do, and thinking and experimenting is what scientists do, and so all that philosophers do is now a sub-set of what scientists do, and an inadequate sub-set for discovering what reality is about. Thinking alone may have appeared adequate pre-enlightenment; and it has produced all sorts of philosophical and theological nonsense (because both use only thinking as a methodology).
So we are by nature empirical beings, with thinking as an add-on. And these two methodologies are all we have. The distinction then between science and non-science is only an arbitrary and quite vague one - particularly since the various branches of science use these methodologies to various extents, to the point that it is often debated whether some sciences are in fact sciences.
There is no real barrier between science and non-science. What we have is general 'human knowledge acquisition'(HKA)which consists of empirical interaction with the world, and the conceptual analysis of what we find. Science, as we like to think of it, using the 'scientific method', is merely a more rigorous form of HKA that has developed further sub-methodologies to compensate for the fallibilities we have in our personal sensing and thinking.
One of the consequences of this is that science is still a fallible human activity; though it's usually the non-scientists, particularly theologians, who think this relegates science to some lower form of HKA. But it is the best of all our HKA, and as was said by Dawkins, if science can't do it nothing can.
In this respect I think philosophy is out on a limb (though not as rotten a limb as theology) in that its core sub-methodology is thinking alone. Yes, some philosophers try to match their philosophy to empirical observation - but many have not, and some still do it badly. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to some philosophers is their ignorance of science (the Churchlands have been pointing this out for some time with regard to mind/body). Peter Atkins has a great understanding of the consequences of what science has discovered. Stephen's comment on another post, "Atkins is not the sharpest philosophical pencil in the box" I think is misplaced. He gets plenty of the philosophy, but discards much of it as uninformative.
For all Stephen claims that philosophy is good at breaking down conceptual barriers I think it has actually constructed many unnecessarily. As Peter pointed out in several responses, philosophy complicates and muddles problems through vagueness and imprecision. Scientists are more adept at dealing with precision than I think philosophers are, particularly those scientists who are more precise in their use of language, in a way that acknowledges some of the difficulties. Many philosophers make problems out of nothing.
What makes you think science will run out of steam? What is the philosophical reasoning behind this? Is it just a hunch? Granted, there my be some vast amount of information we would like to have about what is 'outside' our universe that drives our universe into existence, and granted, there may not be enough time for humans or post-humans to develop science to the point where this information could be exposed and understood. But it's still too early to say. I find it difficult to conceive the capacity of post-humans to acquire knowledge about the universe, its origins, its exterior. It's roughly 2.5 millenia since the early Greek philosophers; what will we know 2.5 millenia from now? And 25 millenia?
"...I can be pretty sure that isn't behind the screen..." - Empirically we can be pretty sure, because we've come across no evidence. Philosophically we cannot be sure, because, being behind the screen, we don't know all the conditions that pertain that might make the world the way it is. It's quite possible that there is a God and that our parochial psychological perception of him is all wrong, that he did create everything but good and bad are uninteresting terms to him, only being of interest to us, or as theologians often put it, there is good in what we see as bad, we just don't understand why.
"If you can show that that belief is false that easily..." - But you haven't. You only show that alternative views can be constructed, which destroys the logical certainty of the main 'good God' belief; it doesn't actually show it to be false.
"It's hardly science, is it." - It's more science than philosophy. Philosophically it's very weak. But the point Peter is making is that philosophy itself is weak here, because we can imagine pretty much any scenario to explain away an opponents argument, whichever side of the fence we are on - and philosophically that's precisely what's been happening for thousands of years with no progress. It's the basic empiricism that you speak of that's allowing us to move away from this impasse and say, well, this is the most concrete evidence we have for non-belief, and there is no evidence for the content of God belief, so we use materialism/naturalism/physicalism as the working model. And it's this mantle that science has taken up, the development of this basic empiricism into the scientific method, that sets science above philosophy or theology as our best route to understanding the world.