PZ Myers on Unbelievable - is he guilty of "scientism"? (27 June 09)

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Steven Carr on June 29, 2009 at 14:57

Science is the methodology of applying publically available evidence to questions.

Perhaps with science,there are questions that cannot be answered.

But with religion, there are answers that cannot be questioned....

Permalink Reply by Justin Brierley on June 29, 2009 at 15:17

Perhaps I am overstating PZ's position - I'm assuming he is sympathetic to Dawkins and Dennet for whom evolution is a catch all theory that explains everything about ourselves - physical (obviously) but also social, moral, psychological, religious, even if we don't have the entire story yet, it will still be evolution that provides the answers.

We didn't get into it in the discussion, but I still think that Plantinga's argument that evolution is an epistemic defeater of naturalism is very good. He does a brilliant job of showing that quite contrary to God and Evolution being in conflict, it is Atheism and Evolution that are unhappy bedfellows. see an article here

Permalink Reply by Steven Carr on June 29, 2009 at 15:28

You think Plantinga's argument is good? It is not even coherent. Plantinga never defines what is meant by 'reliable' cognitive faculties, so his argument that evolution cannot produce 'reliable' cognitive faculties never even gets started.

Evolution cannot produce X, he says. What is X, we ask? I'm not telling you, says Plantinga, but evolution cannot produce X, so evolution is false...

Not much of an argument.

There is a problem in how the human brain manages to produce solutions to real-life problems that it comes across , selecting from the vast array of information that we are continually bombarded with, sifting out what is relevant and what is not relevant.

Such a problem is not solved by theism,unless you believe in a god who hardwired our minds to produce correct beliefs, which rather contradicts the theistic idea that we are free to choose our beliefs.

But Plantinga's argument is that on naturalism, people would find it hard to form correct beliefs about science.

Duh, that is why we have schools and universities , to teach people the science that evolution has ill-equipped them for finding out by their own efforts.

Plantinga himself, of course, shoots theism in the foot with his own argument.

In the world of Christianity, humans are allegedly under constant attack by demons, highly motivated to attack our reasoning and senses and perfectly capable of doing so.

But Plantinga just assumes these demons he believes in do not exist when he claims his cognitive faculties are reliable.

Why should we believe an argument of Plantinga's , until he renounces his claims that there are demons who can attack his reasoning?

If he is possessed by demons without his knowing it, then this possibility is a 'defeater' for any belief he has.

For all he knows, the demons Plantinga believes in may be wanting him to believe falsehood.

So it is Plantinga, living in his world of demons, who has defeaters for all his beliefs.

Permalink Reply by Steven Carr on June 29, 2009 at 19:18

RICHARD
I don't think the definition of "reliable cognitive faculties" is a serious problem. He just means our ability to make inferences about the world which are correct a reasonable proportion of the time.

CARR
That is the problem. Plantinga does not define what is 'correct'.

Suppose this alleged god designs human minds so that when they see a tiger coming towards us, they always produce the belief 'Jesus died for our sins'.

According to Plantinga, this means your cognitive faculties are reliable, as they produce correct beliefs.

But, of course, this is not what is meant by reliable.

So how did God arrange that people produce useful and true beliefs out of all the almost infinite number of true beliefs we could produce, unlesss God arranged that people believe *specific* things?

How we produce both useful and true beliefs is a problem for naturalism, but it is even more of a problem for theism, which is supposed to shun the idea that there is a god who designed people to believe specific things (that would take away their free will)

(And it is a problem for naturalism that people working in the field of artificial intelligence are making progress in solving)

Theism only solves the problem of how people produce beliefs that are both true and useful, by claiming people produce them by magic.


RICHARD (quoting Justin's article)
You are a prehistoric hominid living on the plains of Serengeti; clearly you won't last long if you believe lions are lovable overgrown pussycats who like nothing better than to be petted

CARR
How strange.

God allegedly designed us to live in a world where lions were lovable overgrown pussycats who like nothing better than to be petted.

But because of the Fall, that is no longer a true belief.

It seems our minds are perfectly designed by God to live in a post-Fall world, to be able to recognise dangers and evils and take appropriate action.

I guess god planned it that way all along.

RICHARD
Naturalists are not _assuming_ that a hypothetical population evolves reliable cognitive faculties.

CARR
Correct.

On naturalism, the chance of any named species developing the mental faculties we have is 1 out of however many billions of species there have been.

Plantinga claims that on naturalism the chance of having reliable mental faculties is very low.

And somehow he claims that this succesful prediction by naturalists refutes naturalism.

Forgive me for not quite following his logic here.

Permalink Reply by Trevor on June 29, 2009 at 23:57

I think you're confusing two meanings of the word "theory". It can mean a vague idea in casual conversation, but in science it's a unifying concept that has been tested to some extent.

In the context of "theory of evolution", it's generally considered to be quite a solid theory. It's hard to judge whether it's more or less solid than the "germ theory" of disease, for example. They're both virtually indisputable. I'd love to hear of someone well-informed who disbelieves the core principles of the theory of evolution for non-religious reasons.

Permalink Reply by Trevor on June 30, 2009 at 9:45

Although evolution is certainly an excellent exemplar of why the "god of the gaps" argument doesn't work. Like, if we knew nothing about evolution, it would be pretty tempting to think that there must have been some kind of God to explain our complexity. The "blind watchmaker" argument would seem to hold some water. But once we had even the early stages of evolution theory, one massive pillar of religion crumbled, and it became easier to doubt the other pillars.

And the vast majority of pro-religious arguments are "god of the gaps" arguments. The most diverse gaps commonly used are the start of the universe, the origin of life, the source of morality, the source of consciousness, the consistency in the universe... I've probably missed some.

That leaves rational religion resting on the existence of miracles, the power of prayer, and the reliability of the Bible, all of which seem somewhat lacking. Leaving blind faith as an option for the desparate.

Permalink Reply by Trevor on June 30, 2009 at 10:57

Me: "Leaving blind faith as an option for the desparate."
Richard: "What are you basing this statement on, apart from your imagination and scorn?"

It was based on the preceding review of arguments that lead nowhere. The phrase "blind faith" was used to specify the form of faith I was talking about. No scorn was felt -- I'm just saying it as I see it.

Me: "the start of the universe, the origin of life, the source of morality, the source of consciousness, the consistency in the universe."
Richard: "These you present as if they were trifling details of little or no importance."

They're very important, in that the world would be very different (or non-existent) without them. In a pragmatic sense, they're unimportant, because we have absolutely no practical need of the answers to the Big Questions. It's just intellectual curiosity. And given that religion only seems to provide man-made/made-up answers, it's (metaphorically) sawdust for our intellectual hunger.

Richard: "And I wonder if you are capable of explaining, scientifically, how "even the early stages of evolution" caused "one massive pillar of religion" to crumble...?"
Methinks you misread. A more grammatically complete quote from me would have been "even the early stages of evolution THEORY". By that, I mean that as soon as Darwin had the inkling of an idea of evolution (long before it was properly thought-through or tested) the impotency of the previous god-of-the-gaps argument (that God made man) was exposed.

I would have thought that you would remember from your atheist days that you barely need even a half-baked explanation of a gap to expose the weakness of a belief that relies on gaps. Why are you demanding that I have complete explanations for everything you want?

I disagree with Dawkins on this (and plenty of other things). I don't think the process of science will lead to explanations of all these topics eventually. However, that's no reason to make up or accept pseudo-explanations.

Permalink Reply by Inka Du on June 30, 2009 at 15:13

While we are playing "what does PZ think," I just wanted to correct a statement earlier that evolution does not explain the ORIGIN of life. I believe that it is technically true, it is a lame cop out. There is a gap there, but there's no reason to cede ground on that point. We have a lot of good models and hypotheses about it, all better than Godidit. And however those chemicals rejiggered themselves into the first cells, there was likely some evolution going on, through various processes that we still can't be sure about.

Permalink Reply by Inka Du on June 30, 2009 at 15:28

Hi, Yvonne. No need to go to the library. Just head over to talkorigins.org and I think they have a good run through of the creationist arguments you might be familiar with and the reasons they don't reflect scientific opinion.

But to briefly answer your question -- the 'apes' of today are not our direct ancestors, they are our cousins. We have a common ancestor, but they are no more our "fathers" than you are the mother of your cousins. Also, maybe to help you visualize it, "apes" are basically any monkey without a tail -- orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and, of course, the great ape. If you think about it THAT way, we're just another ape in the ape family and it's clear that with all those relations, we're probably not directly descended from any of them, any more than orangatauns are descended from chimps.

And evolution is still happening. It just happens, for the most part, really slowly. The evidence for evolution comes from the connection between animals and how much sense those connections make in geography and time. In the beginning we only had connections in anatomy to look at -- bone structure, etc. -- and the fossil record. Now we have really insanely detailed genetic maps telling the same exact story, but in much better detail.

I will leave the rest of your education up to you. ;)

Permalink Reply by Shrunk on June 30, 2009 at 16:04

Another problem I have noted with Plantinga's argument, which to me seems fatal:

He states that a mind that is the result of evolutionary proceses can never perceive the "truth" with 100% reliability. Only a mind that was the result of divine creation can do so. Let's concede him that point.

The problem that arises (for Plantinga) is that he must acknowledge that our minds are NOT able to perceive "truth" with complete reliability. This is demonstrated by the simple fact that, if we assume minds are God created, some of the finest minds He ever made have come to the conclusion that God does not exist.

So we are left with two possibilities:

1) The human mind has arisen thru naturalistic evolutionary processes.

2) The human mind was created by God, but He chose to make it so that it was indistinguishable from a mind that arose thru naturalistic evolutionary processes.

It may not be possible to determine which of these is correct. However, the result is that it is not possible to use the nature of the mind as an argument in favour of God's existence.

Is there any rejoinder to this argument?

Permalink Reply by Jerome Haltom on June 30, 2009 at 16:49

So I joined this site so I could provide a little bit of explanation.

Yvonne: Humans as they exist today, and apes, as they exist today, share a common ancestor (as do all living organisms on Earth). This common ancestor lived somewhere between 8 to 4 million years ago. This is a width swath of time. Others here should correct me if my times are wrong.

This common ancestor could not be called a 'monkey' in the sense you might think. It was not as a present day monkey or ape was. Present day apes and monkeys differ from this ancestor about as much as we differ from it. Though it may have been similar in appearence.

Like all life, lineages split and diverge. One lineage becomes two as half of a population is isolated from the other half. Only if one of the lineages die off will you not see it today.

Earlier you claimed 'evolution stopped'.There is no reason to think that this is true. We observe evolution in living animals today. For the amount of changes between us and a modern ape to accumulate seems to have required some 4 to 8 MILLION years. Of course it looks like it's stopped. Within your lifetime, you won't notice anything. Only in thousands/millions of years from now will anybody be able to look back and note the wide changes.

Not trying to convince you, simply trying to explain what the theory of evolution actually says.

Permalink Reply by Jerome Haltom on June 30, 2009 at 17:17

You need to more carefully read what Inka Du said, and not recast what he said as what you WISH he had said.

I'll address each word you used.

"cop-out": There are huge amounts of ongoing research into possible ways early forms of self replicating enzymes can be put together. These early enzymes, capable of replicating copies of themselves would be subject to the ongoing process of evolution. As soon as they make copies, and copies can have mutations, and the environment cal select the mutations, then evolution is happening. "cop-out" generally means "no work is being done". On the contrary. Massive amounts of work in this field is being done. Real work. That is the exact opposite of 'cop-out'. We have a mathimatical model that leads us to conclude that this is both possible, and likely how life began.

A "cop-out" is when one says "God did it" and provides no backing experiments or models which suggest that God in fact did it. People who say "God did it" are not in the lab attempting to demonstrate that in fact God did it.

"blind faith": Blind faith would be belief that chemicals 'rejiggered' themselves without the paragraph of stuff I just mentioned. Again, we have mathimatical models and ongoing chemical research which suggests this. If the research did NOT suggest it, we would not conclude it. Therefor it is, by definition, not 'blind faith.'

"blind faith" is when somebody believes in fact that God really did do it, without any evidence of merit to suggest that.

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