Draft of a chpt for a popular book on Humanism. This is most recent, longer version. Some notes etc. missing. Still pretty rough.
Humanism: Science, Reason and Skepticism[1]
What are science and reason?
Humanists
expound the virtues of science and reason. But what are science and reason? And
we should we think it wise to rely on them?
By
science, I shall mean that approach to finding out about reality based on the
scientific method. This is a method that was fully developed only a few hundred
years ago. Science, as I’ll use the term here, is a comparatively recent
invention, its development owing a great deal to 16th and 17th Century thinkers
such as the philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
So what
is the scientific method? Here’s a very rough sketch.[2]
Scientists collect data through observation and experiment. They formulate
hypotheses and broader theories about the nature of reality to account for what
they observe. Crucially, they also test
their theories. Scientists derive from their theories predictions that can be
independently checked by observation.
Take for
example, the old Aristotelean theory that all heavenly objects revolve around
the earth. With the aid of an early telescope Galileo observed that Jupiter had
moons that revolved around it, not the Earth. He thereby falsified Aristotle’s theory.
Theories
can also be confirmed or supported by
observation. To say a theory is confirmed by a piece of evidence is not to say
that it has been established as true. Even false theories can be confirmed. To
say a theory is confirmed is just to say that it is supported by evidence, even
if just to a small degree.
If you
can derive from your theory a prediction that is unlikely to be true if the
theory is false, then discovering that the prediction is true strongly confirms
your theory. For example, to explain the erratic orbit of Uranus given Newton’s
Laws of Gravitation, astronomers posited the existence of an as yet
undiscovered planet. From their theory, they predicted the location of this new
planet, looked, and discovered a planet there (Neptune). Because it was
unlikely that there should just happen to be a planet at that position if their
theory was false, this observation strongly confirmed their astronomical
theory.
Notice
that for a theory to be confirmed, it must make predictions – predictions that observation
might reveal are false. That’s to say, the theory must be falsifiable. If a
theory can’t be falsified, then neither can it be confirmed.
Systematic
and rigorous testing, rooted in what we can directly observe of the world
around us, is the cornerstone of the scientific method and thus science as I
define it. Emphasis is placed on formulating
theories and predictions with clarity and precision, focussing wherever
possible on phenomena that are mathematically quantifiable and can be objectively
and precisely measured, e.g. using a calibrated instrument.
True, scientists are human.
They are vulnerable to various social, psychological and financial pressures.
They have their biases. Still, rigorous application of the scientific method is
able to reveal such biases. No matter how psychologically wedded the scientific
community might be to the hypothesis that blancmange cures baldness, and no
matter how much money the blancmange manufacturers might pump into their
research, if blancmange doesn’t cure baldness, a properly conducted scientific investigation
will eventually reveal that fact.
Non-scientific approaches to rationally
assessing beliefs
The
scientific method is a powerful tool, but surely not every reasonable belief is
arrived at by means of it. People held beliefs, and held them reasonably, long
before the appearance of science.
Suppose my
friend tells me he has an elephant in his trouser pocket. Given the absence of
any enormous bulges round his middle, it’s entirely reasonable for me to reject
his claim: there’s no elephant there. True, I make this judgement on the basis
of what I observe, but what I’m doing here could hardly be called science –
certainly not as we defined the term above. We were making these kinds of
judgement long before the development of the scientific method.
Let’s
also remember that beliefs can also be supported or refuted by non-empirical
means (that’s to say, without appeal to observation). Take mathematical truths,
for example. That twelve times twelve is one hundred and forty-four is
something you can establish from the comfort of your armchair by reason alone.
So too can other conceptual truths. It’s possible, for example, to figure out whether my great grandmother's uncle's grandson
must be my second cousin once removed by just unpacking these concepts and
examining the logical relations that hold between them. Again you can do this from
the comfort of your armchair. No empirical investigation is required. Or
suppose an explorer claims to have discovered a four-sided triangle in some
remote rainforest. Do we need to mount an expensive expedition to check whether
this claim is true? No, again we can establish its falsity by conceptual means,
from the comfort of our armchairs.
So, even
while acknowledging that science, as characterized here, is an extraordinarily
powerful tool, we should acknowledge that other non-scientific but nevertheless
rational methods also have their place when it comes to arriving at reasonable
belief – including armchair methods. Science is merely one way – albeit an important
way – of arriving at reasonable beliefs.
What’s so great about reason and science?
Why
should we favour the application of science and reason over other methods of
arriving at beliefs, such as picking them at random, believing what we would
like to be true, or accepting whatever some self-styled guru or psychic tells
us?
Advocates
of science often point to its extraordinary track record of success. The scientific method, in its fully developed form,
has only existed for perhaps 400 or 500 years - just a few of my lifetimes. Yet
in that short time it has utterly transformed our understanding of the world
and the character of our lives. Five hundred years ago, Westerners believed
they inhabited a universe just a few thousand years old, created in just a few
days. They possessed almost no effective medicine and relied on their own legs
or horse power to travel the country. By means of science we have discovered
the universe is about 13.75 billion years old, developed electricity and
computers, unravelled the genetic code, created vaccines, and visited the moon.
True,
scientific theories are overturned, and it may well turn out that some of our
current theories are mistaken. Scientific theories are often adopted only
tentatively and cautiously. Nevertheless, the scientific method has allowed us
to overturn a great many myths and make enormous progress in understanding the
nature of the universe we inhabit. While what scientists assert is sometimes
dismissed by critics as being “just a theory” (that’s often said about the
theory of evolution, for example), a great many scientific theories are
extraordinarily well-confirmed. It is always possible that any given scientific
theory, no matter how well-confirmed, might turn out to be false. That does not
mean it’s at all probable. Many scientific claims and theories, such as the
germ theory of disease or the claim that the Earth goes round the sun rather
than vice verse are now so well confirmed it would be ludicrous to suggest they
are false.
Science,
and reason more generally, are valued by Humanists because of their ability to reveal, or at least get us closer
to, the truth. Science and reason offer us truth-sensitive ways of arriving at beliefs.
Humans
have a remarkable capacity for generating false but nevertheless impressively
rich and seductive systems of belief. Almost every culture has evolved beliefs in
invisible and supernatural beings, such as ghosts, spirits, demons or gods. Belief
in the magical objects, psychic powers, precognition end-of-world prophecies,
etc., remains widespread across much of the developed world. Belief in
non-supernatural but nevertheless bizarre phenomena such as Nessie (the Loch
Ness monster), alien-piloted flying saucers, alien abduction and conspiracy
theories involving 9/11, the moon landings and the Holocaust, is also rife. Our
vulnerability to such false belief systems is well-documented. Even the
intelligent and well-educated are vulnerable. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator
of that quintessentially rational fictional character Sherlock Holmes, believed
in fairies, and was successfully hoaxed by two little girls who faked
photographs of fairies with their box brownie camera.
Very many
of these beliefs systems are rooted in testimony
– reports supposedly originating with eyewitness to events such as miracles,
amazing cures, precognition, and bizarre objects in our skies. One particularly
striking series of reports concerned an object that appeared over the building
site of a new nuclear power station back in 1967. Sanitation workers claimed
they saw a large lighted object hanging over the plant. A guard confirmed the
sighting. The police arrived. An officer said the object “was about half the
size of the moon, and it just hung there over the plant. Must have been there
nearly two hours.” The object vanished at sunrise. The next night, the same
thing occurred. The county deputy sheriff described seeing a “large lighted
object”. An auxiliary police officer reported “five objects – they appeared to
be burning. An aircraft passed by while I was watching. They seemed to be 20
times the size of a plane.” A Wake county magistrate who arrived on the scene claimed
to witness “a rectangular object, looked like it was on fire… We figured it
about the size of a football field. It was huge and very bright.” In addition,
there was hard evidence to support these claims. Local air traffic control also
reported an unidentified blip on their scope.
A local
news team finally arrived to investigate. The object appeared again at five a.m.
When they attempted to chase the object in their car, the news team found they
couldn’t catch up with it. Eventually, they pulled up and looked at the object
through a long camera lens. “Yep, that’s the planet Venus alright,” noted the
photographer.[3]
Though
this might not have struck you as remotely likely, those various eyewitnesses to
a large illuminated object hanging over the nuclear plant had seen nothing more
than the planet Venus. That anomalous radar blip was just a coincidence.
What’s
interesting about this case is that if it had not been solved by a bit of good
luck – by those reporters showing up and publicizing the truth – it could
easily have gone down in the annals of UFO-logy as one of the great unsolved
cases. UFO buffs would no doubt have seized upon it and said something like
this:
“Here we have, sincere,
multiple, trained eye-witnesses - workers, policemen, a deputy sheriff and a even
magistrate. They have produced broadly consistent reports of a large lighted
object hanging over a nuclear plant. They have no motive to give false reports
(indeed, such officials are often hesitant and embarrassed about giving such
reports). It’s absurd to suppose they might just have just seen a planet. Don’t
forget their claims were supported by hard evidence in the form of that radar
blip. Surely the best explanation of this testimony is that there really was a
large lighted object hanging over the plant.”
Fortunately,
we got lucky and now know the truth about this particular case. It illustrates the
point that human beings are remarkably prone to generating such false testimony,
and for a wide variety of reasons. This particular example was produced by an
optical illusion and a coincidence (that radar blip), but take out a subscription
to Skeptical Inquirer (published in
the US) or The Skeptic Magazine (UK)
and you will discover such amazing reports are constantly being explained by
reference to a wide variety of other far-too-easily-dismissed-or-overlooked mundane
mechanisms.
The moral
is obvious: a significant number of such otherwise-unexplained reports are likely
to be made anyway whether or not
there really are any visiting alien spacecraft, psychic powers, or miracles.
But then the existence of such testimony is not good evidence that such
phenomena are real.
True,
it’s often reasonable to take testimony at face value. If Ted and Sarah, a couple
I know well and have learned to trust, tell me that a man called Bert visited
them last night, I’ll rightly take their word for it. But if Ted and Sarah add
that Bert flew round the room by flapping his arms, died and then came back to
life, and then finished temporarily transformed their sofa into a donkey, it’s
no longer reasonable for me to just take their word for it that these things
happened. When it comes to such claims, we should raise the evidential bar much
higher because we know that such reports – including reports that might seem
very hard to explain in mundane terms – are going to be made from time to time anyway,
whether or not they are true.[4]
One
variety of false belief to which we’re exceptionally prone is belief in hidden agency
– in hidden beings with their own beliefs and desires. We’re particularly quick
to appeal to hidden agency when presented with significant questions to which
we lack answers. When we could not understand why the heavenly bodies moved in
the way they do, we supposed that they must be other agents – gods. When we
could not explain natural diseases and disasters, we supposed they must be the
work of malevolent agents, such as witches or demons. When we couldn’t explain
why plants grew, or the seasons rolled by, we supposed that there must be
sprites, or nature spirits, or other agents responsible for these things. As a
result of this natural tendency to reach for hidden agents when presented with a
mystery, we have populated our world with an extraordinary range of unseen and
mysterious beings and developed extraordinarily rich and complex narratives about
them.
Those who
are broadly skeptical about claims such as those described above often disparagingly
refer to them as “woo”. As we have seen, woo claims – or W-claims, as I’ll call
them – are a diverse bunch, involving psychic powers, alien abduction,
cryptozoology (Big Foot, Nessie, etc.) past life regression, end-times
prophecies, miracles, ghosts, fairies, demons and gods. They are claims with
which we are peculiarly fascinated (which explains why they feature so much in
tabloid newspapers, fiction, films, and so on), and to which we are easily
drawn. Clearly, while not all may be false, many are. Large numbers have been debunked.
Many are incompatible. Many god claims, for example, are mutually exclusive. A
large number of them must be false.
The Humanist
position is that we should take a skeptical
attitude towards W-claims. We should not just assume they are false (some may
not be). However, Humanists, as a rule, believe we should subject such reports and
claims to close rational and scientific scrutiny, and acknowledge that our
inability to find a plausible-sounding but mundane explanation for a report of
a miracle or flying saucer is not, as it stands, good evidence that it is accurate.
Note the
reason outlined above for being skeptical about such reports is not that what is reported is impossible
or even improbable (some religious folk insist that if there is a miracle-performing
God, then such miracles are neither impossible nor improbable; thus those who are
skeptical about miracle reports because they assume miracles are impossible or
improbable are guilty of presupposing there’s no such God). It’s not impossible
or even particularly improbable that there exist bizarre and as yet undiscovered
creatures that humans occasionally glimpse. The reason we should nevertheless be
pretty skeptical about such cryptozoological reports (Nessie, Big Foot, and so
on) is that they are likely to be made pretty regularly anyway whether or not
they’re true.
The
scientist and Humanist Carl Sagan once said, “Extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence”. Under the heading “extraordinary claims” Sagan would
certainly include what I am calling W-claims. Sagan is correct about W-claims.
We should raise the evidential bar much higher than usual before accepting them.
Why? If for no other reason than that we have an extraordinary track record of
unreliability when it comes to making them.
In addition,
we also possess excellent evidence that many specific W-claims are false. If
someone claims they can successfully dowse for water, we should be pretty
skeptical about that claim, not just because we know such claims are likely to
be made anyway whether or not dowsing works, but also because we now possess ample
scientific evidence that dowsing doesn’t work.
The world
is chock full of competing W-claims, including religious claims. They are, as I
say, claims to which we are easily drawn and peculiarly vulnerable. If we step
out into the marketplace of ideas as willing to accept someone’s testimony that
they have psychic powers or a direct line to God as we are their testimony that
they had baked beans for lunch, our heads are soon going to fill up with
nonsense. If we value truth, it’s important we apply science and reason as best
we can – as, if you like, a filter. False beliefs may still get through, but
subjecting claims – especially
W-claims – to rigorous rational and/or scientific scrutiny before accepting
them gives us our best chance of having mostly true beliefs.
It is for
this reason that Humanists insist on subjecting religious claims to such
scrutiny. For of course religious claims usual are or involve W-claims. Let’s
now turn to some examples of religious claims that have failed to pass the test.
Science as a threat to religious belief
Many
religious claims have been falsified, or at least shown to be rather less
well-founded than previously thought, as a result of scientific investigation. Here
are three examples:
Young Earth Creationism. Young Earth Creationists (YEC) assert that the
entire universe was created by God approximately 6,000 years ago (certainly
less than 10,000 years ago). This estimate is based on Biblical sources. In the
17th Century, using the Old and New Testaments as his source, Bishop James
Ussher calculated that the moment of creation to be during the night before the
23rd October 4004 BC. Young Earth Creationism has since been empirically
falsified in numerous ways by the cosmological, geological, biological,
archeological and various other sciences.
An Earth-centered
universe. Back in
the early 17th Century. The dominant cosmology, endorsed by the Catholic
Church, placed the Earth at the centre of the universe. The other heavenly
bodies, including the sun, revolved around it. This view was supposedly supported
by scripture. For example, Psalms 96:10 says, “the
world is established, it shall never be
moved." And in Joshua 10:12-13, Joshua commands the
sun to “stand still”, which suggests that the sun moves. This cosmology was
rejected by Galileo (who was accused of rejecting it without proof, and was
subsequently shown the instruments of torture and condemned to house
imprisonment as a result). Science has, of course, established beyond any
reasonable doubt that Galileo was right and the previously dominant religious
view wrong.
The power of prayer. Many people believe in the power of petitionary prayer. For example, it’s often claim that praying for people with a disease improves their chances of recovery. Yet recent rigorously-conducted large-scale scientific studies do not support this view. Indeed they undermine it. In 2006, American Heart Journal published the results of a $2.4 million experiment involving 1,802 heart-bypass patients, conducted under the leadership of Herbert Benson (a specialist who also believes in the medical efficacy of petitionary prayer). The results were unambiguous: prayer had no beneficial effect.[5] A similar large-scale trial of patients undergoing angioplasty or cardiac catheterization also revealed prayer had no effect. That prayer has beneficial medical effects is a religious belief that can be scientifically tested. Tests strongly suggest it’s false.[6]
The power of prayer. Many people believe in the power of petitionary prayer. For example, it’s often claim that praying for people with a disease improves their chances of recovery. Yet recent rigorously-conducted large-scale scientific studies do not support this view. Indeed they undermine it. In 2006, American Heart Journal published the results of a $2.4 million experiment involving 1,802 heart-bypass patients, conducted under the leadership of Herbert Benson (a specialist who also believes in the medical efficacy of petitionary prayer). The results were unambiguous: prayer had no beneficial effect.[5] A similar large-scale trial of patients undergoing angioplasty or cardiac catheterization also revealed prayer had no effect. That prayer has beneficial medical effects is a religious belief that can be scientifically tested. Tests strongly suggest it’s false.[6]
The development of Darwin’s theory of natural selection has also posed
significant challenges to religious belief. Most obviously, Darwin’s account is
incompatible with the Bible-literalist account of how the different species
came into existence – including our own species with the creation of Adam and
Eve. It is also incompatible with the doctrine of the Fall, according to which
the entire world is corrupted by the sin of these, it turns out, non-existent
individuals. Darwin’s theory also provides a naturalistic explanation for the
existence of things that, many theists had previously argued, could only
reasonably be attributed to some cosmic intelligent designer. William Paley,
for example, famously drew an analogy between the eye and a watch. Suppose we find
a watch on a beach. Given it has a purpose for which it is well-engineered, it
is more reasonable to suppose some intelligence designed it for that purpose
than that it is a mere product of natural forces such as the wind and waves.
Ditto the eye, thought Paley. Darwin succeeded in undermining this particular
design argument for the existence of God. He says,
The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly
seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has
been discovered.
Of course, many contemporary theists accept the theory of evolution.
Some also maintain there is no tension between Darwin’s theory of natural
selection and the thought that God has guided the evolutionary process by
directing mutations to a particular end – the emergence of human beings. However,
Darwin himself considered the hypothesis that God guides the evolutionary
process in this way is antagonistic to his own theory[7].
On the theory of natural selection, the mutations that
drive the evolutionary process are random in the sense that they are not
goal-directed, e.g. towards either the adaptive needs of organisms or the
production of a certain sort of species.
To the extent that mutations are selected by some sort of transcendent being, they
are not selected naturally.[8]
Religious belief is itself now
increasingly a focus of scientific investigation. In some cases what is
discovered is potentially a threat to the beliefs in question. One example much
discussed in the media is the so-called “God helmet” developed by Koren and Persinger. The helmet produces a weak
magnetic fields around the wearer’s head. About 80% of subjects report a
"sensed presence" which they interpret as an angel, a deceased
person, etc. About one percent say that they sense the presence of God. When
the Humanist Susan Blackmore tried the God helmet, she said it produced “the
most extraordinary experiences I have ever had”.[9]
How
might these and similar findings threaten religious belief? Not necessarily by
demonstrating such beliefs are false. As the psychologist Justin Barrett points out:
Having a scientific explanation for
mental phenomena does not mean we should stop believing in them. Suppose
science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me — should
I then stop believing that she does?[10]
Obviously, even if we could show that experiences of God, angels, or the
dead walking among us have a natural, scientifically identified cause, that
would not establish that there is no God, that there are no angels, or that the
dead don’t walk among us. However, were we to discover that these experiences have
such an explanation, and also that, given certain natural facts, people are
likely to report such presences anyway whether or not they exist, that would demolish
whatever support such experiences might be thought to give such beliefs. The
reassurance offered by the mantra: “Lots of people have these experiences so surely
there must be something to it” would
be entirely undermined.
Other rational threats to religious belief
So, science has threatened and indeed has falsified various religious
beliefs. But that’s not to say they can’t be threatened and undermined in other
ways too.
Surely we don’t need to apply the scientific method in order reasonably to
rule out the hypothesis that one universe is the creation of a supremely
powerful and evil deity. While the universe contains a great deal of pain and
suffering and moral evil, it also contains an enormous amount of good (in the
form of love, laughter, ice-cream, kindness, rainbows, etc.): far too much good,
arguably, for us reasonably to believe this is the creation of such an evil deity.
Perhaps an evil god would allow some good as the price paid for greater evils,
but such is the scale of the good that exists that it is absurd to believe this
world is the creation of such a malevolent being.
I suspect most of us can immediately recognize this just isn’t the sort
of world an evil deity would create. Here, it seems, is a god hypotheses we can
reasonably set aside even without bringing the scientific method to bear. Observation
of the world, I suggest, allows me reasonably to rule out an evil god in much the
same way that my observing your trousers allows me reasonably to rule out the
presence of elephant in your pocket.
But if it’s true that we can observe that this is not the kind of world
an all-powerful and supremely evil deity would create, why might we not also observe
that it’s not the kind of world an all-powerful and supremely good god would
create either? Surely, given the quantity of pain and suffering we see around
us, it’s also reasonable for us to cross that deity off our list of likely
candidates? This is, of course, the evidential problem of evil – perhaps the most significant threat to belief in
an all-powerful and supremely benevolent god.
The problem of evil may not pose a scientific threat to belief in an
all-powerful, all-good god, but that’s not to say that it can’t be significantly
enhanced by science. Science is able to reveal vast hidden depths of pain and
suffering. It has revealed, for example, that for the two hundred thousand
years we humans have lived on this planet about a third to a half of every
generation has, on average, died before the age of five (from disease,
malnutrition, etc.). The vast scale of this suffering of both children and
parents over such a long period of time before the one true God finally got
round to revealing himself, his one true salvific religion, and the fact that all
this horror is ultimately for the best, strikes many Humanists as further
excellent evidence that there’s no such deity.
While science and observation are undoubtedly capable of undermining god
beliefs, they are not the only threat. Armchair methods are also capable of
refuting a god hypothesis by, for example, revealing that the hypothesis
involves an implicit logical contradiction or incoherence (in much the same way
that that the hypothesis that there exists a four-sided triangle does).
So, to conclude, science, and reason more generally, are able to threaten,
and indeed demolish, religious beliefs.
Immunizing strategies
When religious and other W-claims are challenged by science and reason,
various strategies may be employed in their defence. Here are four examples.
(i) Selective skepticism
When your W-claim is challenged by reason and science, it can be
tempting to play a skeptical card. There is, for example, a well-known
philosophical puzzle about how to justify our belief that science and reason
are reliable methods of arriving at true belief. Surely, any attempt to justify
reason by making a case for its reliability will itself employ reason. But then
the justification will be circular and thus as hopeless as trying justifying the
belief that a second hand car salesman is trustworthy by pointing out that he
himself claims to be trustworthy.
Similarly, pointing out, as we did above, that science has a great track
record when it comes to exposing falsehoods and revealing the truth is to
employ exactly the sort of inductive reasoning on which science is itself
based. So it might appear that this kind of justification is also hopelessly
circular.[11]
Do these puzzles constitute an insurmountable problem so far as
justifying the Humanist’s belief that reason and science are reliable methods
of arriving at true beliefs? That’s debatable. But they do at least provide
those whose beliefs are challenged by reason and science with a nice rhetorical
move. They can now say, “Ah, so it turns out that reason and science are faith positions too. And thus so are all
beliefs based on them. So, in terms of reasonableness, we’re all square. My
beliefs are no less reasonable than yours. It’s leaps of faith all round!” They can then head out the door leaving
you to solve the thorny philosophical puzzle they have just thrown in your lap.
I call this strategy “Going Nuclear”. Those employing it aim to achieve
what during the Cold War was called “mutually assured destruction”. Kaboom! By
exploding this skeptical device they aim to bring all beliefs down to the same
level of (ir)rationality.
The key point to notice about this popular ruse is that the person who
employs it almost certainly doesn’t believe what they say about reason. If they
really believed all beliefs are equally reasonable, then they would suppose,
say, that it’s as reasonable to believe that milk will make you fly as that it won’t.
But of course they don’t believe that. They constantly place their trust in reason.
Indeed, they regularly trust their lives to reason whenever, say, they trust
that the brakes on their car while bringing them safely to a halt.
In fact, your opponent was almost certainly happy to employ reason up
until the point where they started to lose the argument. Only then did it occur
to them to get skeptical. You can also be pretty confident that they’ll try
using reason to prop up their belief again once the intellectual threat has been
forgotten about.
In short, your opponent’s skepticism about reason is not sincere. It’s just
a smokescreen device - a position they selectively adopt in order to avoid
having to admit that, according to the standards of rationality that they
employ in every other corner of their life, what they believe is false. That’s
intellectually dishonest.
(ii) Reinterpretation
When a prophecy or a piece of religious scripture is contradicted by
evidence, it will often be reinterpreted by believers to make it consistent
with – or “fit” – the evidence after all. Take failed end-times prophecies, for
example. Nostradamus’s famously prophecied:
The year 1999 seven months,
From the sky will come the great King of Terror.
From the sky will come the great King of Terror.
This was widely claimed to be a prediction of Armageddon. When July 1999
came and went and Armageddon failed to materialize, the passage was simply
reinterpreted. More recently, the Christian Harold Camping used the Bible to
predict that rapture and Judgement Day would occuron May 21st 2011. When
May 21st arrived and nothing happened, Camping insisted that Judgement Day had indeed
occurred, only in a “spiritual” way (which is why no one noticed). He insisted
that the Bible was clear that end of the world would then arrive on 21st
October 2011.
The Genesis account of a six-day creation is no longer taken literally
by all Christians (though it still is by many). It too has been reinterpreted. The
more sensible Christians now insist that such passages should be understood as
poetry, a metaphor, etc.
Notice that once reinterpretation is adopted as a blanket strategy for
dealing with any potential conflict that might arise between science on the one
hand and religious claims and prophecies on the other, the latter become
unfalsifiable. Whatever evidence shows up will be shown, one way or another, to
“fit”. And, as we noted earlier, if a claim is unfalsifiable, then not only is
it not confirmed, it cannot be.
(iii) Explaining away
For Bible literalists, the suggestion that Genesis should not be
interpreted literally is not an option. Evidence supporting a
billions-of-years-old universe in which life has existed for billions of years
must be made to “fit” with their religious belief in some other way.
Contemporary Young Earth Creationists (YECs) have developed a raft of
explanations for why scientific discoveries concerning the light from distant
stars, carbon-dating, ice cores, chalk deposits, plate tectonics, the fossil
record and so on do not, after all, constitute a threat to their belief in a young
universe.
The fossil record, for example, is now usually typically explained by YECs
by reference to the Biblical flood on which Noah floated his ark. The deluge
created mud deposits which formed many of the sedimentary layers we now find
beneath our feet. It also drowned many creatures, including dinosaurs, which
become buried and fossilized with those sedimentary layers. The ordering of
fossils within the layers is explained in terms of different ecological zones
being submerged at different times, in terms of the differing ability of
creatures to escape the rising waters, and so on (man, being the smartest,
would be last to drown, which explains why we only find traces of man in the
topmost sedimentary layers).
Of course, such explanations usually just raise a host of other problems
for YEC. The Flood theory for example, raises some interesting puzzles
regarding the Ark. How did Noah get two of every “kind” of creature (including
the dinosaurs, such as argentinosaurus at100 tons and 120 feet long each) into
a boat with a cross section not much bigger than that of my Victorian terrace
house? After the Ark was finally deposited on Mount Ararat how did Noah get the
creatures back across vast oceans to their various habitats? Visit a YEC
website and you’ll discover much speculation and theorizing about such
questions. What you can be sure of is that the YECs will be able to cook up some
sort of explanation. One way or another, they will find a way to make the
Biblical account of creation “fit” the available data. Achieving this kind of “fit”
is something YECs pride themselves on. Here’s Ken Ham, a leading YEC:
Increasing numbers of scientists are realizing that
when you take the Bible as your basis and build your model of science and history
upon it, all the evidence from living animals and plants, the fossils, and the
cultures fits. This confirms that the Bible really is the Word of God and can
be trusted totally.[12]
What Ham doesn’t mention here is
that any theory, no matter how ludicrous, can be squared with the evidence
given enough ingenuity. Believe that the Earth is run by a secret cabal of
alien lizards? Or that the Holocaust never happened? Or that dogs are spies
from the planet Venus? Or that the universe is the creation of a supremely
powerful and evil deity? All these beliefs can ultimately be made consistent with – be made to, as Ham
puts it, “fit” – what we observe around us, given sufficient patience and
imagination. One way or another, every last anomaly can be explained away.
There is a popular myth about
science that if you can make your theory consistent
with the evidence, then you have shown that it is confirmed by that evidence - as confirmed as any other theory. The
proponents of many ludicrous belief systems exploit this myth.
But the truth, as we have seen, is
that a theory can only be confirmed by the evidence if it is falsifiable. Ham’s
strategy of endlessly explaining away any counter-evidence that might crop up renders
his theory unfalsifiable. Thus, unlike theories that take genuine risks with
the evidence (such as the theory of evolution), Ham’s version of YEC not only
is not confirmed by the evidence, it cannot be.[13]
(iv)The accusation of scientism
Those who have subjected religious and other W-claims to critical
scrutiny and found them wanting are sometimes accused of an irrational bias
towards scientism – the view that all
meaningful questions can in principle be answered by science.
Scientism is almost certainly false. Many questions appear to reach
beyond the ability of science to answer. Consider the question of why the
universe has the most fundamental laws that it does, or why it exists at all.
These do not appear to be the kind of questions science might, in principle,
answer. Any scientifically established law or principle that supposedly
accounted for the existence of the universe would merely postpone the mystery –
for what, in turn, would explain why that particular law or principle holds?
The most fundamental moral questions are also widely considered to be questions
to which science cannot supply answers. As Hume points out, science reveals
what is the case, whereas morality is concerned with what ought to be the case.
And it appears one cannot justify “ought” conclusions by appeal to such “is”
facts (though Sam Harris has recently challenged this view in his book The Moral Landscape[14]).
Mathematical and conceptual puzzles would also seem to be the kind of
puzzles that science can’t answer. Indeed, many classical philosophical puzzles
appear, at core, to be conceptual puzzles the solutions to which will require the
armchair methods of the philosopher to deliver.
So I think we should acknowledge that there are questions science can’t
answer (at least some of which can perhaps be answered in other ways). However,
none of this is to say that science, and empirical observation more generally, are
incapable of supporting or refuting religious and other W-claims.
When your belief in a W-claim is threatened, it can be tempting to place
its subject matter behind a protective veil. Many insist that claims about gods,
ghosts, psychic powers and so on are immune to scientific refutation because
they are claims about a realm to which science is necessarily prohibited access.
True, such beliefs may concern a part of reality that is supposedly unobservable.
But the unobservable is not scientifically off-limits. Subatomic particles and
the distant past of this planet cannot be observed either, but, because theories
about them often have empirically observable consequences, they are still capable
of being empirically falsified or confirmed. The same is true of religious and
other W-claims. If someone insists there exists a God who answers petitionary
prayers, we can check and see if such prayers are answered. If it is claimed
that psychics can communicate with the dead, we can test whether the
information they supposedly receive is reliable, and also whether it might have
been acquired by some other means. If it is claimed that there exists an
all-powerful and supremely evil creator, we can check whether the universe has
the sort of character we should then predict it to have. The fact that
something is, even in principle, unobservable does not entail that it is not
scientifically or empirically investigable.
Admitting that science and reason have not supplied, and perhaps cannot
supply, answers to certain fundamental questions does not entail that science
and reason can’t pretty conclusively rule certain answers out. Suppose I
acknowledge that I currently have no satisfactory answer to the question, “Why
is there something rather than nothing?” Does it follow that I should, then, acknowledge
that the Christian answer a serious contender? No. Suppose Sherlock Holmes is
having a bad day. He can’t figure out whodunnit. Still Holmes might still be
able reasonably to rule out the butler, who has a cast-iron alibi. Similarly, Humanists
may not be able to answer all of life’s big questions. It does not follow that
they cannot reasonably rule certain answers out – including religious answers.
Who’s being reasonable?
Just how reasonable are the religious in believing what they do? The Humanist
answer is: not very. They suppose it is in each case unreasonable for
Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Bahais, Quakers and Scientologists to believe
what they do.
Of course, a religious person will likely come to a different assessment
of the reasonableness of their own religious belief. Most religious people
suppose their own brand of belief is either supported, or at the very least not
undermined, by science and reason.
On either side of such disagreements about the respective reasonableness
of Humanism and religious belief you find smart educated people doing their
best to think carefully and objectively. Yet at least one side has to be
mistaken. Who is more likely to be mistaken?
If we Humanists are mistaken, what, according to the religious, explains
our error? Here are four answers regularly offered by Christians (and others)
for the failure of Humanists to recognize the reasonableness of their belief:
(i) Humanists fail to recognize the reasonableness of
Christian belief because they are ignorant of the Christian message and/or that
strength of the intellectual case in its favour.
Is this true? A recent U.S. study found that those self-identifying as
atheists and agnostics scored better on average on a general religious knowledge
quiz than did the religious. They also had a better knowledge of Christianity,
on average, than did those self-identifying as Christian.[15]
It does not appear to be ignorance of the Christian message that accounts for widespread
lack of belief.
So is non-belief better explained by a lack of appreciation of the power
of the arguments for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity? You
would expect professional philosophers and philosophy graduate students to have
a fair knowledge of those arguments. Yet a recent PhilPapers survey suggests
that, globally, only 14.6% of professional philosophers and philosophy graduate
students favour or lean towards even theism, let alone Christianity.[16]
The above statistic prompted some Christians to claim that the
proportion of theists is at least higher among those specializing in the philosophy
of religion and this in turn suggests that a greater familiarity with the
arguments for theism does lead to an increased likelihood of belief. However,
even if it were true that a higher percentage of philosophers of religion are
theists and Christians, that would not, as it stands, support the conclusion
that this is a result of them having acquiring a better appreciation of the
strength of the case for theism and Christianity. For of course philosophy of
religion is much more likely than other branches of philosophy to attract committed
theists and Christians in the first place.
(ii) Humanists reject Christianity not because it is
unreasonable, but because they don’t want it, or theism more generally,
to be true.
Those attempting to explain Humanist non-belief as a product of wishful
thinking often quote the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagal, who once said:
It isn’t
just that I don’t believe in God, and naturally, hope there is no God. I don’t
want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.[17]
But is this the view of most Humanists? I doubt it. It’s certainly not my
view. I would dearly love Christianity to be true. The Christian message is one
of hope. It provides numerous attractive reassurances, especially about death
and justice. In particular, it promises that we can be reunited with our dead
loved ones beyond the grave, that we and they can live in joy forever, and that
bad people will ultimately get their just deserts. These are appealing beliefs
for many of us.
Nor am I particularly prone to wishful thinking when it comes to
metaphysical beliefs. For example, I really don’t want it to be true that I
lack free will, yet I am inclined to think I do, because that, it seems to me,
is what the arguments suggest.
Indeed, that Christianity is not, as a rule, the sort of thing people want to be true is fairly obviously contradicted
by the manner in which Christians tend to promote it. They tend to be place at
least as much emphasis on how wonderful it would be if Christianity were true
as on any intellectual case that might be made in its support.
Wishful-thinking-based explanations for the failure of individuals to
appreciate the reasonableness of Christian belief also run into trouble with those
tortured individuals who struggle valiantly to keep their faith but (often as a
result thinking critical thinking about what they believe) eventually lose it nonetheless.
Their rejection of Christianity does not appear to be motivated by wishful
thinking. Quite the opposite.
(iii) Humanists have a faulty God-sense.
Another explanation for Humanist non-belief turns on the thought that
some people can know directly that God exists virtue of their possessing a
reliable sensus divinitatis or God-sense.
Such lucky individuals do not need to reason their way to belief in God. God
just directly makes himself known to them via this extra sense. Their belief in
God is also reasonable given that it’s generally reasonable to believe that how
things appear is how they are (it’s reasonable for me to believe there’s a cup
on the table if, other things being equal, that’s how things look). So why is
it that I fail to have this direct awareness of God’s existence? According to Christian
philosopher Alvin Plantinga, because my sensus
divinitatis is malfunctioning as a result of sin. According to Plantinga, my
failure reasonably to believe in God is, at least in part, a result of my faulty,
sin-corrupted connection with God. Plantinga offers a similar explanation for
my failure reasonably to believe the great truths of the Christian Gospels.
(iv) Humanists are led astray by devils.
In the U.S. Bible belt you will find church signs that read, “A free
thinker is Satan’s slave”. The devil is often credited with blinding many to
the truth of Christianity. In The
Screwtape Letters, for example, the author and theologian C.S. Lewis, who
really believed in devils, illustrates how he supposes devils mess with our
minds and lead us away from the truth. So perhaps part of the explanation for
my failure to recognize the reasonableness of Christian belief is that I have
allowed myself to be seduced by the diabolical trickery of Satan’s minions.
The four explanations sketched out here, even in combination, are weak. Yes,
some of the claims made above, if true, would account for the failure of
reasonable people to believe in Christianity assuming Christianity can be
reasonably believed. However, there’s little reason to suppose the claims are
true (what independent evidence is there for the existence of either devils or
a faulty, sin-corrupted sensus divinitatis?).
In addition, there’s pretty good reason to think at least some of the above explanatory
claims are false (as we saw above the evidence tends to undermine the
suggestion that failure to believe in the truth of Christianity, given
Christian belief is reasonable, is in large part due to ignorance of the
strength of the case for Christianity and/or wishful thinking).
This, I suggest, is true of such religious explanations of atheist and Humanist
belief more generally. There’s no very good reason to expect atheism and Humanism
to appear reasonable to a great many otherwise reasonable people if such
beliefs are not, in fact, reasonable.
True, people can be psychologically manipulated into believing atheism,
as has happened under several atheist totalitarian regimes. Under such a
regime, it would be unsurprising if people considered atheism reasonable even
if it was not. But of course the atheism of most Westerners can’t plausibly be
put down to the use of such totalitarian methods. I wasn’t raised mindlessly to
recite an atheist creed and told I would be executed if I failed to believe.
Let’s now turn to the suggestion that, actually, it is the Christian,
Jew or Muslim, etc. that is mistaken about how reasonable their particular
variety of religious belief is. How plausible is that?
Highly plausible. After all, all the major religions are focused on W-claims
– claims about Gods, miracles and so on – about which we’re notoriously unreliable.
Human beings have an impressive track record of being remarkably easily
convinced of the reasonableness of such beliefs quite irrespective of their actual
reasonableness.
Almost everyone, even the religious, is prepared to acknowledge the
power of many religions to convince people of the reasonableness of claims that
are, in reality, unreasonable. Many Christians believe Islam unreasonable. Many
Muslims consider Christianity unreasonable. Almost all Christians and Muslims acknowledge
that what Scientologists believe is unreasonable. A great many religious
people, including even many Christians, also recognize that Christian YEC is
absurd, despite the fact that polls consistently indicate that about 45% of
U.S. citizens believe YEC and do so primarily on religious grounds.
Let’s summarize. There is no particular reason to expect atheism or Humanism
to appear reasonable to a great many people if they are not in fact reasonable.
Neither atheism nor Humanism are built round W-claims. Nor, unlike religions,
have they an established track record of deluding large numbers of people about
the reasonableness of their claims. On the other hand, there’s every reason to expect
a religion like Christianity, or Islam, or Judaism, to appear reasonable to a
great many people even if it is not, in fact, reasonable.
This strongly suggests that it isn’t the atheists and Humanists who are deluded
about the reasonableness of what they believe; it’s the Christians, the Muslims,
the Jews, and so on.
[2]
Nothing I say here should be
understood to commit me to the view that, say, observation is not theory-laden,
etc.
[3]
Philip J. Klass, UFOs: The Public
Deceived (Amherst NY, Prometheus Books 1983), p 83.
[4]
Reference my paper (Published in Faith and
Philosophy 2011. Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011. Stephen Law. Pages
129-151)
EVIDENCE, MIRACLES AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS
EVIDENCE, MIRACLES AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS
[5]
H. Benson et al., “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessionary
Prayer (STEP) in Cardiac Bypass Patients: A Multicenter Randomized Trial of
Uncertainty and Certainty of Receiving Intercessionary Prayer,” American Heart Journal 151 (2006):
934–42.
[6]
M. W. Krucoff et al., “Music, Imagery, Touch, and Prayer as Adjuncts to
Interventional Cardiac Care: The Monitoring and Actualization of Noetic
Trainings (MANTRA) II Randomized Study,” Lancet
366 (2005): 211–17.
[7]
Darwin (1868), p. 236. – (1868). The
Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. New York: Appleton, 2nd
edition, 1876. Also see Philpse, Herman “The Real Conflict Between Science and
Religion: Alvin Plantinga’s Ignoratio Elenchi”. Forthcoming.
[8] For a more detailed discussion of this a related
issues see Herman Philipse, “The Real
Conflict Between Science and Religion: Alvin Plantinga’s Ignoratio Elenchi” (forthcoming).
[9]
Roxanne
Khamsi (December 9, 2004). "Electrical brainstorms
busted as source of ghosts". BioEd Online. http://www.bioedonline.org/news/nature-news/electrical-brainstorms-busted-source-ghosts/
[10]
Quoted in an email exchange with Robin
Marantz Henig in latter’s “Darwin’s God” New York Times 4th March 2007.
[11]
For an explanation of this
problem of induction see the chapter “How Do I Know The Sun Will Rise
Tomorrow?” Stephen Law, The Philosophy
Gym: 25 Short Adventures in Thinking (London: Headline, 2003)
[12]
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/lie/root-of-the-problem
[13]
For a much fuller explanation
of what is wrong with Ken Ham’s strategy, and why, unlike Ham’s version of YEC,
the theory of evolution is indeed very strongly confirmed, see the chapter “But
It Fits!” in Stephen Law Believing
Bullshit (Amherst: Prometheus, 2012)
[14]
Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape (London: Black Swan,
2012)
[15]
Results of a 2010 survey conducted by the Pew Forum on
Religion and Public Life – results summarized at: http://www.pewforum.org/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx
[16]
Results of the Philpapers survey are at: http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
[17]
(Thomas
Nagal, The Last Word (New York:
Oxford `University Press 1997). p130).
Comments
One point. I spend a lot of time considering the problem outlined so succinctly by A C Grayling regarding levels and varieties of belief. The fact that a theologian will effectively 'Do a degree' (and beyond)in order that his (for argument) 'belief' is fit for public scrutiny. That stance inevitably weaves towards philosophy and I have met priests and vicars in my professional capacity, who cheerfully 'admit' to having a different kind of faith to their parishioners. Allowing fundamental fantasy to bring a congregation together seems dishonest to me. Yet again, we are forced to admit that, 'in order for good people to do bad things, it takes religion'. It is probably because this is a hobbyhorse of mine, I felt it a little absent. Or perhaps this is not yet the place for such a tangent?
Forgive me if I have missed something.
My bet is still that, if asked the right questions by their followers, most 'Church Leaders' would appear at the very least to be agnostic.
Very much looking forward to the end result!
Cheers.
I think your explanation of ‘falsifiability’ is an important addition – I don’t think you had that in the last draft.
John Barrow and Frank Tipler in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle make a good point about Paley’s watch compared to biological evolution. An unfinished watch serves no purpose, whereas every generation in evolution is its own end result.
The other point is that evolution is mathematically chaotic which means, as Stephen Jay Gould once pointed out, that if you were to rerun evolution you’d get a completely different result. It’s this point that separates science from religion.
I like your exposition on ‘scientism’ – it explains, in effect, what separates science from philosophy.
Sorry Tulpa, I don’t agree with your statement: 'in order for good people to do bad things, it takes religion'. It takes demonisation of a group, that’s all, and it doesn’t have to be religious – it can be political or racial or familial – it’s usually a result of one group being oppressed by the other, or perceived as such.
Regards, Paul.
Isn’t Science (capital “S”) the result of formalising rules of rational enquiry together with the addition of loads of infrastructure, communities and lab coats to aid its work? The formalisation safeguards rationality and helps exclude irrationality. As a result Science is a good exemplar of rationality for study but we don’t need the infrastructure, communities or lab coats to reason in accordance with that rational kernel of the scientific method.
And when considering the evil deity it seems to me that we do follow that kernel of the scientific method. First we guess, “I wonder if there’s an all powerful maximally evil deity”. Then we compute the consequences of the guess: “that would mean there would be minimal good in the universe”. Then we compare the computation results to nature : “there’s loads of good in the world” and, as a result, throw the guess out (bits in bold are Feynman). We’ve followed your (and Feynman’s and Popper’s and…) characterization of the scientific method, we just haven’t used the lab coats, heavy duty maths, peer review and research grants that characterize Science-with-a-capital-S.
There was one sentence that didn't seem quite right,"...and then finished temporarily transformed their sofa into a donkey..."
"finished by" maybe?