The Lack of Reason for God, Chapter 6
Oct. 22nd, 2014 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blimixThis is part of a series examining the the logic of Timothy Keller's book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.
Standard disclaimer: This, despite being a public post, is not an invitation for a religion debate with strangers. Been there, done that, still jaded.
Last week: In Chapter 5, we examined god's love and Hell.
Chapter 6
In which Keller claims to address the conflict between science and Christianity, but focuses almost exclusively on evolution versus creationism.
(Page numbers are from the hardcover version of the book.)
Warning: I expect that some folks who believe in both science and superstition may take offense at the first paragraph.
p. 85-86. Keller attacks the idea that science disproves miracles, claiming that miracles are outside the purview of science.
This is another straw man argument. Nobody is claiming that science says miracles in general are impossible. Science can and does disprove specific superstitions, such as "This psychic can read your mind" and "the Earth was created six thousand years ago" and "the stars influence people's lives in ways that can be predicted by astrologers" and "all humans are descended from Adam and Eve" and "infinitesimal amounts of medicine are different from placebos". In fact, nobody has ever managed to demonstrate supernatural abilities, god-given or otherwise, under scientific, controlled conditions.
I would also point out that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. The fact that there is no evidence of god that can stand up to scientific scrutiny does make it less likely that god exists. (This is basic probability. Imagine for a moment that god has a 50% chance of existing, and also that there is a 50% chance that the existence of a deity would leave evidence that we could find. We now have four equally likely scenarios: God exists with evidence, god exists without evidence, god doesn't exist but would give evidence if he did, and god doesn't exist and wouldn't give evidence if he did. We then discover that there is no evidence for god, thus eliminating the possibility that god exists with evidence. Now we are left with three equally likely scenarios, in two of which goes does not exist. The lack of evidence reduced god's existence from 50% likely to 33% likely. This sort of reduction would happen no matter what the original probabilities were.)
p. 87. Keller asks whether evolution really conflicts with Christianity, noting that some Christians believe that evolution was the mechanism by which god created humans.
He presents this argument as if to address concerns presented by believers in evolution. But the conflict here comes from the other side of the fence: Christians who insist that evolution cannot be responsible for people, because of god reasons. I would love to see Keller try to placate the fundamentalist who screamed, "Evolution is a crock!" out of nowhere at me and my sister when we were children; have him say, "It's cool, you can believe in evolution and god." The Christians who believe that the human race is six thousand years old create the conflict with evolution (and anthropology, archeology, geology, biology, et alia).
p. 87. Keller attacks the idea of evolution as "an All-encompassing Theory explaining absolutely everything we believe, feel, and do as the product of natural selection," as if anybody at all holds that idea. He seems to think that the alternative is belief in god. The rational alternative, of course, is to consult sciences such as biology, neurology and psychology.
p. 88. "Dawkins argues that if you believe in evolution as a biological mechanism you must also believe in philosophical naturalism. But why?" Keller cites Francis Collins as an example of a scientist who believes in Christianity.
I cannot say why. I also cannot tell whether Keller is correctly representing Richard Dawkins, because there is no reference to where and when Dawkins made this argument (which is an odd omission in a text peppered with footnotes). I am not aware of the necessity of connecting evolution with philosophical naturalism (outside of the obvious probabilistic reason; the theory doesn't need god, so use Occam's razor and take god out of the theory), but even given such a connection, I doubt that Dawkins believes that humans cannot entertain contradictory beliefs. (I have met scientists who believe in Christianity. Just like many other inconsistent thinkers, they use bad logic to work around the contradictions in their beliefs.)
p. 89. "Smith argues that the conflict model of the relationship of science to religion was a deliberate exaggeration used by both scientists and educational leaders at the end of the nineteenth century to undermine the church's control of their institutions and increase their own cultural power."
The conflict was created by scientists and teachers? Really? So it has nothing to do with Pope Paul III founding the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition (now Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), whose "sole objective is to 'spread sound Catholic doctrine and defend those points of Christian tradition which seem in danger because of new and unacceptable doctrines'"? You know, the folks who tried Galileo for heresy because their religion said that the sun travels around the earth? Something about glass houses comes to mind.
pp. 91-92. Keller cites Thomas Nagel: "He asks, for example, whether we really believe that our moral intuitions, such as that genocide is morally wrong, are not real but only the result of neurochemistry hardwired into us. Can physical science do full justice to reality as human beings experience it? Nagel doubts that. He writes: 'The reductionist project usually tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in physical -- that is, behavioral or neurophysiological -- terms; but it denies reality to what cannot be so reduced. I believe the project is doomed -- that conscious experience, thought, value, and so forth are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts.'"
If you, my reader, are unfamiliar with the reductionism/holism dichotomy, I strongly recommend that you read "Ant Fugue"* in Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. (In fact, go read it anyway, because it's wonderful.) Basically, reductionism is a way of looking at a system according to its component parts, and holism is a way of looking at a system as a whole. "Missing the forest for the trees" means losing the benefits of a holistic view by concentrating on a reductionistic view.
* There's a transcription here, but it has some typos and omits the graphics, one of which is very important.
Neither viewpoint is a statement about what does or does not exist; Nagel is incorrect on this point. The only reason to debate holism versus reductionism is to decide which viewpoint is more appropriate for a particular task. When someone says, "quantum theory doesn't explain morality," it would be more apt to say that trying to explain moral decisions with quantum theory would be impossibly tedious, requiring a vast computer to perform minute modeling of the neurological responses of an entire brain on a subatomic scale; even this wouldn't necessarily "explain" anything, because the person watching the results would have to understand how they arose. It is tremendously more useful to look at moral decisions through other, more holistic sciences, such as behavioral psychology.
None of this has anything to do with the question of whether life, morality, or anything else arises as a result of the interactions of subatomic particles. The claim that "science cannot explain" something natural, and the conclusion that natural things therefore must have supernatural causes, is based on the confusion of causation with explanation. The fact that you cannot personally make sense of a complex system by using a reductionistic viewpoint indicates only that this viewpoint is ill-suited to working within the limitations of your mind.
To illustrate, imagine if I said, "Computers don't work only in binary, because I can't conceive of a game as beautiful and complex as Skyrim occurring as a result of a bunch of ones and zeros. Obviously, computers have some sort of supernatural influence that transcends binary, and inspires gameplay that binary alone cannot."* Really, I would just be showing an understandable but naive ignorance of machine code, transistors, integrated circuits, compilers, et cetera. In a basic sense, of course the game Skyrim consists entirely of the binary code delivered on a DVD-ROM. But looking at it from that perspective simply isn't useful for most purposes.
* Yes, I know that video cards have transmitted analog pixel colors since the advent of VGA. It's an analogy.
What we're left with is the "I don't understand it; therefore god did it" mentality, which doesn't prove anything aside from the limitations of the author's experience and imagination.
pp. 92-95. Keller addresses the idea that evolution and natural selection contradict the Bible. He argues that different parts of the Bible can be interpreted differently (literally or metaphotically), so there's no contradiction if Genesis 1 is metaphorical. It is, because "I think Genesis 1 has the earmarks of poetry and is therefore a 'song' about the wonder and meaning of God's creation."
Not being Christian, I don't mind that he just threw half of Christianity under the bus. I wonder whether those who take Genesis 1 literally (and probably with better reasons than "the earmarks of poetry") will mind.
p. 93. "Christians who accept the Bible's authority agree that the primary goal of Biblical interpretation is to discover the Biblical author's original meaning as he sought to be understood by his audience.
My book club friend (a Christian) assures me that this is false. I will further note that Keller used the singular "author," in an attempt to pretend that it wasn't written by many people.
pp. 95-96. Keller says that Jesus used miracles to inspire worship, rather than belief. "Instead, he used miraculous power to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and raise the dead. Why? We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken."
I'm very relieved to hear that there's no longer any disease, hunger, and death. One wonders, though, how a divine creation by an omnipotent being could break in the first place.
My book club friend points out that Keller's use of "natural" here refers to the universe as god intended, rather than as it is, whereas before he used the term to refer to the universe as it is, without god's intervention.
Next week: Taking the Bible literally.
The whole series.
Standard disclaimer: This, despite being a public post, is not an invitation for a religion debate with strangers. Been there, done that, still jaded.
Last week: In Chapter 5, we examined god's love and Hell.
In which Keller claims to address the conflict between science and Christianity, but focuses almost exclusively on evolution versus creationism.
(Page numbers are from the hardcover version of the book.)
Warning: I expect that some folks who believe in both science and superstition may take offense at the first paragraph.
p. 85-86. Keller attacks the idea that science disproves miracles, claiming that miracles are outside the purview of science.
This is another straw man argument. Nobody is claiming that science says miracles in general are impossible. Science can and does disprove specific superstitions, such as "This psychic can read your mind" and "the Earth was created six thousand years ago" and "the stars influence people's lives in ways that can be predicted by astrologers" and "all humans are descended from Adam and Eve" and "infinitesimal amounts of medicine are different from placebos". In fact, nobody has ever managed to demonstrate supernatural abilities, god-given or otherwise, under scientific, controlled conditions.
I would also point out that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. The fact that there is no evidence of god that can stand up to scientific scrutiny does make it less likely that god exists. (This is basic probability. Imagine for a moment that god has a 50% chance of existing, and also that there is a 50% chance that the existence of a deity would leave evidence that we could find. We now have four equally likely scenarios: God exists with evidence, god exists without evidence, god doesn't exist but would give evidence if he did, and god doesn't exist and wouldn't give evidence if he did. We then discover that there is no evidence for god, thus eliminating the possibility that god exists with evidence. Now we are left with three equally likely scenarios, in two of which goes does not exist. The lack of evidence reduced god's existence from 50% likely to 33% likely. This sort of reduction would happen no matter what the original probabilities were.)
p. 87. Keller asks whether evolution really conflicts with Christianity, noting that some Christians believe that evolution was the mechanism by which god created humans.
He presents this argument as if to address concerns presented by believers in evolution. But the conflict here comes from the other side of the fence: Christians who insist that evolution cannot be responsible for people, because of god reasons. I would love to see Keller try to placate the fundamentalist who screamed, "Evolution is a crock!" out of nowhere at me and my sister when we were children; have him say, "It's cool, you can believe in evolution and god." The Christians who believe that the human race is six thousand years old create the conflict with evolution (and anthropology, archeology, geology, biology, et alia).
p. 87. Keller attacks the idea of evolution as "an All-encompassing Theory explaining absolutely everything we believe, feel, and do as the product of natural selection," as if anybody at all holds that idea. He seems to think that the alternative is belief in god. The rational alternative, of course, is to consult sciences such as biology, neurology and psychology.
p. 88. "Dawkins argues that if you believe in evolution as a biological mechanism you must also believe in philosophical naturalism. But why?" Keller cites Francis Collins as an example of a scientist who believes in Christianity.
I cannot say why. I also cannot tell whether Keller is correctly representing Richard Dawkins, because there is no reference to where and when Dawkins made this argument (which is an odd omission in a text peppered with footnotes). I am not aware of the necessity of connecting evolution with philosophical naturalism (outside of the obvious probabilistic reason; the theory doesn't need god, so use Occam's razor and take god out of the theory), but even given such a connection, I doubt that Dawkins believes that humans cannot entertain contradictory beliefs. (I have met scientists who believe in Christianity. Just like many other inconsistent thinkers, they use bad logic to work around the contradictions in their beliefs.)
p. 89. "Smith argues that the conflict model of the relationship of science to religion was a deliberate exaggeration used by both scientists and educational leaders at the end of the nineteenth century to undermine the church's control of their institutions and increase their own cultural power."
The conflict was created by scientists and teachers? Really? So it has nothing to do with Pope Paul III founding the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition (now Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), whose "sole objective is to 'spread sound Catholic doctrine and defend those points of Christian tradition which seem in danger because of new and unacceptable doctrines'"? You know, the folks who tried Galileo for heresy because their religion said that the sun travels around the earth? Something about glass houses comes to mind.
pp. 91-92. Keller cites Thomas Nagel: "He asks, for example, whether we really believe that our moral intuitions, such as that genocide is morally wrong, are not real but only the result of neurochemistry hardwired into us. Can physical science do full justice to reality as human beings experience it? Nagel doubts that. He writes: 'The reductionist project usually tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in physical -- that is, behavioral or neurophysiological -- terms; but it denies reality to what cannot be so reduced. I believe the project is doomed -- that conscious experience, thought, value, and so forth are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts.'"
If you, my reader, are unfamiliar with the reductionism/holism dichotomy, I strongly recommend that you read "Ant Fugue"* in Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. (In fact, go read it anyway, because it's wonderful.) Basically, reductionism is a way of looking at a system according to its component parts, and holism is a way of looking at a system as a whole. "Missing the forest for the trees" means losing the benefits of a holistic view by concentrating on a reductionistic view.
* There's a transcription here, but it has some typos and omits the graphics, one of which is very important.
Neither viewpoint is a statement about what does or does not exist; Nagel is incorrect on this point. The only reason to debate holism versus reductionism is to decide which viewpoint is more appropriate for a particular task. When someone says, "quantum theory doesn't explain morality," it would be more apt to say that trying to explain moral decisions with quantum theory would be impossibly tedious, requiring a vast computer to perform minute modeling of the neurological responses of an entire brain on a subatomic scale; even this wouldn't necessarily "explain" anything, because the person watching the results would have to understand how they arose. It is tremendously more useful to look at moral decisions through other, more holistic sciences, such as behavioral psychology.
None of this has anything to do with the question of whether life, morality, or anything else arises as a result of the interactions of subatomic particles. The claim that "science cannot explain" something natural, and the conclusion that natural things therefore must have supernatural causes, is based on the confusion of causation with explanation. The fact that you cannot personally make sense of a complex system by using a reductionistic viewpoint indicates only that this viewpoint is ill-suited to working within the limitations of your mind.
To illustrate, imagine if I said, "Computers don't work only in binary, because I can't conceive of a game as beautiful and complex as Skyrim occurring as a result of a bunch of ones and zeros. Obviously, computers have some sort of supernatural influence that transcends binary, and inspires gameplay that binary alone cannot."* Really, I would just be showing an understandable but naive ignorance of machine code, transistors, integrated circuits, compilers, et cetera. In a basic sense, of course the game Skyrim consists entirely of the binary code delivered on a DVD-ROM. But looking at it from that perspective simply isn't useful for most purposes.
* Yes, I know that video cards have transmitted analog pixel colors since the advent of VGA. It's an analogy.
What we're left with is the "I don't understand it; therefore god did it" mentality, which doesn't prove anything aside from the limitations of the author's experience and imagination.
pp. 92-95. Keller addresses the idea that evolution and natural selection contradict the Bible. He argues that different parts of the Bible can be interpreted differently (literally or metaphotically), so there's no contradiction if Genesis 1 is metaphorical. It is, because "I think Genesis 1 has the earmarks of poetry and is therefore a 'song' about the wonder and meaning of God's creation."
Not being Christian, I don't mind that he just threw half of Christianity under the bus. I wonder whether those who take Genesis 1 literally (and probably with better reasons than "the earmarks of poetry") will mind.
p. 93. "Christians who accept the Bible's authority agree that the primary goal of Biblical interpretation is to discover the Biblical author's original meaning as he sought to be understood by his audience.
My book club friend (a Christian) assures me that this is false. I will further note that Keller used the singular "author," in an attempt to pretend that it wasn't written by many people.
pp. 95-96. Keller says that Jesus used miracles to inspire worship, rather than belief. "Instead, he used miraculous power to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and raise the dead. Why? We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken."
I'm very relieved to hear that there's no longer any disease, hunger, and death. One wonders, though, how a divine creation by an omnipotent being could break in the first place.
My book club friend points out that Keller's use of "natural" here refers to the universe as god intended, rather than as it is, whereas before he used the term to refer to the universe as it is, without god's intervention.
Next week: Taking the Bible literally.
The whole series.
