If ‘every doctrine’ is revisable, then it seems Haught has pretty much sold off any supernaturalism in religion, no? Then what’s a god for to Haught?
Also, he seems to be saying that the Universe is gaining consciousness. That just sounds loony. Does the Universe sin (as opposed to people)? How does it repent? If it doesn’t will the Universe be doomed? Will it die? Where will it go when it dies? Since Xtians are told there will be a ‘new heaven and earth’, will there be two Universes at the End of all things, the new one and the newly-dead one? Which one will we live in? Do the best people get the ‘new’ Universe, and the less-saved get the pre-owned Universe? And so on.
If this is how to stitch together science and theology, give me four-armed Shiva.
kirk (who sometimes feels he’s got ‘clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right’)
I get this same sort of thing at Planet Wisdom, so much so that I’m just fed up with arguing with them. They put down atheism, as in this article—“They [atheists] talk about the most fundamentalist and extremist versions of faith, and they hold these up as though they’re the normative, central core of faith. And they miss so many things. They miss the moral core of Judaism and Christianity—the theme of social justice, which takes those who are marginalized and brings them to the center of society. They give us an extreme caricature of faith and religion. ”— And then they turn around and do the exact same thing, by quoting Nietzsche and Camus as if they were the be all and the end all of Atheism. They completely miss Secular Humanism, and its core of optimism for the future of humanity!
Yes, it’s frightening what these people believe passes for rational thought. I’m on a site called Below Top Secret, and frequently post on their Faith forum. I know that my efforts are quixotic, but I keep hoping that just a tiny bit will get through. The only reason I go there is to support the few beleaguered atheists who are regulars.
In googling “john haught” review “new atheists” I found this WWW below which summarizes every blog commenting on the Salon article and John Haught in general.
http://tailrank.com/4318111/The-atheist-delusion
This also might give some links of interest…
I think John Haught is ‘different’ - I haven’t figured him out.
He is a “theistic evolutionist”, a Roman Catholic who testified “for science” in the Dover case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Haught
In googling “john haught” review “new atheists” I found this WWW below which summarizes every blog commenting on the Salon article and John Haught in general.
http://tailrank.com/4318111/The-atheist-delusion
This also might give some links of interest…
I think John Haught is ‘different’ - I haven’t figured him out.
He is a “theistic evolutionist”, a Roman Catholic who testified “for science” in the Dover case.
That is common, actually. What’s different is that Haught is willing to think that science can and will trump any teaching of the Church.
Here’s a rough cut:
(1) Science has no independence at all from theology. Nothing in Genesis (or whatever text is under discussion) can be wrong. This seems to be the literalist or fundamentalist position.
(2) Science and theology have some independence. The ‘gist’ of Genesis is retained (or of whatever text or teaching or belief is under discussion). But there is epistemic independence still. This is the default position of the catholic church, from what I understand of it. There’s a difference between evolutinary biology or ‘Darwinism’ and ‘evolutionism’ or a world-view taking evolutionary biology as its cue. This is curiously lost in anglo-amaerican discussion, so far as i can tell.
(3) Science may and perhaps must supercede theology. This is Haught. Somehow he can still get theology out of this.
So for another example, heaven and hell are to be taken as real, but no-one thinks seriously there’s lakes full of fire (can you fill a lake with fire?). And, Christ isn’t a door even though He says so, but he’s really something divine-like that a door is a good metaphor for. Haught would simply abandon that, and that seems to be effectively abandoning theology. Right?
In googling “john haught” review “new atheists” I found this WWW below which summarizes every blog commenting on the Salon article and John Haught in general.
http://tailrank.com/4318111/The-atheist-delusion
This also might give some links of interest…
I think John Haught is ‘different’ - I haven’t figured him out.
He is a “theistic evolutionist”, a Roman Catholic who testified “for science” in the Dover case.
That is common, actually. What’s different is that Haught is willing to think that science can and will trump any teaching of the Church.
I think there are some contradictions in Haught’s interview. For example,
What do you say to the atheists who demand evidence or proof of the existence of a transcendent reality?
The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, since there’s no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself—that evidence is necessary—holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there’s the deeper worldview—it’s a kind of dogma—that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It’s a deep faith commitment because there’s no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It’s a creed.
Are you’re saying scientists are themselves practicing a kind of religion?
The new atheists have made science the only road to truth. They have a belief, which I call “scientific naturalism,” that there’s nothing beyond nature—no transcendent dimension—that every cause has to be a natural cause, that there’s no purpose in the universe, and that scientific explanations, especially in their Darwinian forms, can account for everything living. But the idea that science alone can lead us to truth is questionable.
This particular quote from the interview does NOT make Haught sound like someone who would/should testify for evolution at the Dover case.
That is pure hogwash on Haught’s part.! As Sydney Hooks notes, science is acquired knowledge while faith begs the quesion of being knowledge. Science works while other methods are guesses and nonsense. Faith is the I just say so of credulity! Thanks,Jackson.
Advocatus, yes.
[Interviewer"] “What do you say to the atheists who demand evidence or proof of the existence of a transcendent reality?”
[Haught’s answer:] [1] “The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, [2] since there’s no scientific evidence for the divine, [3] we should not believe in God. But that statement itself—that evidence is necessary—holds a further hidden premise that [4] all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there’s the deeper worldview—it’s a kind of dogma—that [5] science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It’s a deep faith commitment because [6] there’s no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. [7] It’s a creed.
[Interviewer:] Are you’re saying scientists are themselves practicing a kind of religion?
[Haught:] [8]The new atheists have made science the only road to truth. [9] They have a belief, which I call “scientific naturalism,” that there’s nothing beyond nature—no transcendent dimension—that every cause has to be a natural cause, that there’s no purpose in the universe, and that scientific explanations, especially in their Darwinian forms, can account for everything living. [10] But the idea that science alone can lead us to truth is questionable.
This particular quote from the interview does NOT make Haught sound like someone who would/should testify for evolution at the Dover case.
None of the individual thoughts/statements in this extract denies evolutionary biology, or indeed any particular science. It does deny a philosophical world-view. Haught knows his onions; he’s just not going to preach natural*ism*, which is not provable in the way that any particular scientific theory is provable.
Be careful that you don’t both make a case *for* naturalism at the same time you *use* naturalism to deny non-naturalistic theories. That’s inconsistent: you aren’t generally allowed to assume X-ism is true just to refute a non-X-ism, when the whole debate is about ‘is X-ism or non-Xism tru?’ This - i say *gently* - is a common mistake here in the forum. For ex, ‘of course morals are brain-states’ assumes a naturalistic explanation of morals is true; but it’s not a good move just using that assumption to say ‘*therefore* non-natural morals are refuted.’
Dawkins is especially bad on this move. More than once he “argues” fallaciously that even if God exists, He must be both provable scientifically, and be subject to evolutionary laws. But that just assumes that naturalism is true, when the usual argument involving gods exactly rubs up against naturalism - there’s non-natural beings, and non-natural norms (like morals, or reason), and so on. As pointed out some time ago, there’s no earthly experiment one could possibly conceive to ‘prove’ that any particular act of lying is wrong. That only makes a moral like lying stupid to believe as a moral if you’re already committed that there’s only one road to knowledge, the scientific way. And Dawkins himself has refuted this, knoweth he or not, when somewhere else he said that he has ‘evidence’ that his wife loves him. Whatever that evidence may be, it must be of a very different character from measuring mass or temperature. For instance, is the evidence she wrote X poinds of love-letters? But there’s no single poundage of love-letters that reliably measures true love across any population. An so on. so even Dawkins seems to implicitly believe that there’s more than one kind of evidence, and therefore knowledge. And that’s all the non-naturalist needs.
Dawkins is especially bad on this move. More than once he “argues” fallaciously that even if God exists, He must be both provable scientifically, and be subject to evolutionary laws. But that just assumes that naturalism is true, when the usual argument involving gods exactly rubs up against naturalism - there’s non-natural beings, and non-natural norms (like morals, or reason), and so on.
This depends on his audience, however. That is, insofar as Dawkins is speaking to a largely scientifically-minded public, the naturalist premise may be taken as largely assumed.
However I would argue that insofar as I can reconstruct Dawkins’s argument about God from memory, it does not quite fit with what you’ve given him. To begin with, Dawkins is quite careful never to claim he can disprove the existence of God. All he claims is that given what we know about the world, the existence of God is vanishingly unlikely. The form of that argument which appears relatively original to Dawkins is the following: God is supposed to be omniscient. That means that, as regards knowledge, God is extremely complex. Yet so far as we know, things that have complex belief-forming mechanisms take time to evolve. They don’t simply spring into being. So the more complex God is purported to be, the more time he would need to have evolved. So it is highly unlikely that such a being would exist prior to any sort of evolutionary process.
The problem also with asserting the existence of non-natural beings is where you draw the line. Do you believe in ghosts? In ESP? In angels? In the efficacy of prayer? Because all of these things have actually been claimed to exist, and refuted quite convincingly by scientific testing. If one accepts that these tests are probative, then the scope for non-naturalism shrinks considerably. Indeed, one does begin to wonder where it really can reside. If one does not accept these tests (or accepts them on one side of one’s mouth while rejecting them on the other, which is a classic theologian’s move, and amounts to not accepting them) then one is simply engaging in a variety of spiritualist nonsense. There is a fine line between asserting the existence of non-natural beings and simply engaging in pseudoscientific obscurantism.
I do believe that Alvin Plantinga accepts that evil angels may have some role to play with the evil in the world, to take one example. I have known other theologically-minded philosophers who claimed that we would never reach a full understanding of the causal processes of the brain, because they believed so strongly in an incoherent notion of free will. Both of these are entirely disprovable to the degree that anything is.
inthegobi - 30 December 2007 03:15 PM
As pointed out some time ago, there’s no earthly experiment one could possibly conceive to ‘prove’ that any particular act of lying is wrong. That only makes a moral like lying stupid to believe as a moral if you’re already committed that there’s only one road to knowledge, the scientific way. And Dawkins himself has refuted this, knoweth he or not, when somewhere else he said that he has ‘evidence’ that his wife loves him. Whatever that evidence may be, it must be of a very different character from measuring mass or temperature. For instance, is the evidence she wrote X poinds of love-letters? But there’s no single poundage of love-letters that reliably measures true love across any population. An so on. so even Dawkins seems to implicitly believe that there’s more than one kind of evidence, and therefore knowledge. And that’s all the non-naturalist needs.
I’m not following you here, Kirk. Everyone accepts that there is more than one sort of evidence, in the banal sense that there is visual evidence, auditory evidence, the evidence of my gut feelings, the evidence of testimony, circumstantial evidence, etc., etc. Not all of this evidence is equally strong, and all of it is essentially natural.
I don’t see how Dawkins’s point has anything to do with non-natural evidence. It has to do with his gut feeling from a long period of familiarity about the mental state of his wife. The fact that this essentially amounts to a summary of different sorts of evidence doesn’t make it non-natural. It simply makes it complex and nuanced. (It is also not infallible).
So I’m afraid the non-naturalist has a lot more to do here than merely talk about gut feelings.
Insofar as Dawkins is speaking to a largely scientifically-minded public, the naturalist premise may be taken as largely assumed.
I’ll avoid the stuff on the source of evil, and experiments to prove prayer or ghosts don’t exist. But did the soviet cosmonaut prove heaven doesn’t exist by not finding it past the atmosphere? That was a weird claim in the 50’s, and it hasn’t gotten any less strange now just because it’s uttered often and loudly. So there’s a partial answer to a hard question.
If scientifically-minded = philosophical naturalist, then you’re correct. But it’s obvious that there are lots of scientists and scientifically-minded laymen who are nonetheless well-characterized as at least non-naturalist. Galileo, the whole Jesuit Roman College circa 1600 (my specialty right now is translating extracts of Christopher Clavius’s philosophy of science), Gassendi, Newton, Leeuwenhoek, Einstein, Gould - all seem at least non-naturalists. Be honest: I’m a theist and was a chemist and science instructor for some time. I happily taught evolution, continental drift, the Big Bang. Isn’t it stretching things a bit to up and deny that a person like me is ‘scientifically minded’? You’ll not offend me by saying Yes, but it would be good to know if that’s a general conclusion.
However I would argue that insofar as I can reconstruct Dawkins’s argument about God from memory, it does not quite fit with what you’ve given him.
To begin with, Dawkins is quite careful never to claim he can disprove the existence of God.
That’s true - but don’t you find that coy? To deny any route to knowing that gods exist is to do Hume’s move for moral facts. If you’ve blocked any causal role for moral facts, you ‘shave’ them off with Ockham’s razor, and it’s almost a word-game to say that that isn’t an argument against moral facts. It’s not knock-down, but if I could prove to you that there’s no way to perceive the returning ghosts of the dead, you’d accept that as evidence ghosts don’t exist, and ‘evidence against’ is ‘proof’ in a normal person’s mouth. So I techinically agree with you while wondering if Dawkins doesn’t protest too much about that.
. . . the existence of God is vanishingly unlikely.
Hey, fair enough - but again, unlikely = less than a coin-toss, and that’s about all I’d ever mean by an argument against God’s existence. Again, I might be only word-disputing with you.
Btw: I put Dawkins’ argument making God’s existence unlikely in a different thread.
[Kirk/inthegobi:] Dawkins himself has refuted (that there’s only one way to know and have evidence) . . . when . . . he said that he has ‘evidence’ that his wife loves him. Whatever that evidence may be, it must be of a very different character from measuring mass or temperature. . . And that’s all the non-naturalist needs.
[Dougsmith:] Everyone accepts that there is more than one sort of evidence, in the banal sense that there is visual evidence, auditory evidence, the evidence of my gut feelings, the evidence of testimony, circumstantial evidence, etc., etc. Not all of this evidence is equally strong, and all of it is essentially natural.
Not more than one *set* of evidence; a whole different kind of evidence, that correspondingly must have its own method. (Tho’ FYI I’ll take ‘distinct set of data’ also, in order to refute any form of reductionism among the particular sciences also - but that’s not a naturalism/non-naturalism issue, except at a very deep and crunchy level.)
[Dr Smith’s evidence that his wife loves him] It has to do with his gut feeling from a long period of familiarity about the mental state of his wife. The fact that this essentially amounts to a summary of different sorts of evidence doesn’t make it non-natural. It simply makes it complex and nuanced. (It is also not infallible).
I don’t mind a gut-feeling at all. I’d call it ‘simple judgment’ - IF the term ‘gut-feeling’ weren’t ambiguous. Whether you call gut-feelings reasonable or not, it leads to a dilemma for a naturalist method of knowledge being the only way to come to know:
[’Horn’ 1 of dilemma:] If all you mean by ‘gut-feeling’ is that Dr Smith (let’s leave Dr D out of this) has a *mere* feeling with no reasonable support, then it’s rather coy to call it evidence. So Dr Smith cannot say he ‘knows’ in any non-question-begging fashion that his wife loves him, since he does not have the right kind of evidence.
[Horn 2 of dilemma:] But if Dr Smith is seriously using the word ‘evidence’, we know that being loved as a husband is at least weird to put under an experiment (Thus my odd example of weighing her love-letters to ‘experimentally prove’ she loves him.) What decisive experiment will generally prove true love exists in the average person? Let it be brain-states: so Dr Smith, if he hews to scientific naturalism, must rationally accept that his wife loves when the neuroscientist gives her a love-potion. And that’s absurd, since we’d hardly call that ‘true love’. Okay then, suppose you add ‘a brain-state gotten inthe right way: well, that’s all the non-naturalist needs, since ‘the right way’ is rather a coy way to say ‘but not in any mere physical causal way, like being drunk on a love-potion.’ Doug calls this ‘nuanced’, but I might well call it hiding the problem in a machinery he cannot make specific. (For then he’d have exactly the same problem all over again: once a mechanism is found, it’s not anything like what we’d call one *person* being in love with another, just like the love-potion isn’t what makes for spousal love; if instead you leave the machinery hazy enough, then that’s just the same as lacking a causal account of spousal love after all. and this meta-argument works just as well for the traditional account of justifying beliefs, and judging actions as moral)
Btw, I’m not worried about infallibility. There’s a diff between being successful and being rational, even though we often use success as evidence for rationality.
So I’m afraid the non-naturalist has a lot more to do here than merely talk about gut feelings.
Well, I’ll agree to that. But here’s some flags for you, Doug: I agree that all our knowledge comes through the senses, but does not come solely ‘from’ the senses. So I’d claim to know that doug has lots of non-natural attributes, but I know it only through my senses - i have no special person-detector, although I do have a mind-that’s-not-identical-to-my-brain. That makes me a *premodern* dualist, not a cartesian one - technically a hylomorphist. I’m at least a dualist about knowledge: there’s no single definition of knowledge; instead there are a small but non-unitary collection of knowledges that are unified only by analogy.
Kirk,
Though I am still a bit befuddled by your use of language, I think you fail to make a convincing argument if you can’t say what the “mind” that is not brain or the knowledge that comes not “from the senses” is or where it comes from. This is the same problem with the morality that is “not reducible to biology” or the physical universe yet exists in the same sense as facts about the physical universe exists. Non-naturalism has the serious problem of ultimately being unable to say anything about the non-natural except “gut-feelings” and intuition, which are notoriously unreliable in understanding the natural and so which haven’t a great claim to being reliable for understanding the non-natural, if it exists.
So while you may not be unscientifically-minded when you are doing science, you appear to be unscientifically minded about the nature of knowledge, because you seem to feel it can be gained by way of fuzzy non-natural entities such as the “mind.” Science does, I believe, rest on naturalism, though not all scientists are thoroughoing naturalists. We are very good at splitting our ways of thinking into different standards for different subjects. From the perspective of science, love is a brain state and the mechanism by which it is arrived at is irrelevant. The objection to a potion-induced love not being “real” assumes the non-natural a priori, and while we may be culturally predisposed to feel that way, despite our knowing better through scientific naturalism, that doesn’t make it “absurd” as you claim.
And Dawkins himself has refuted this, knoweth he or not, when somewhere else he said that he has ‘evidence’ that his wife loves him. Whatever that evidence may be, it must be of a very different character from measuring mass or temperature. For instance, is the evidence she wrote X poinds of love-letters? But there’s no single poundage of love-letters that reliably measures true love across any population. An so on. so even Dawkins seems to implicitly believe that there’s more than one kind of evidence, and therefore knowledge. And that’s all the non-naturalist needs.
Kirk
The context of this quote was part of a debate, where his opponent threw a red-herring into the discussion of ‘faith’, and implied that his faith in God was similar to Dawkins’ faith that his wife (who was in the audience) loved him. I’m not sure what the name for this rhetorical trick is, but it rattled Dawkins and had nothing really to do with the substance of the debate. From my perspective, this was confusing the word ‘faith’, and also equating his wife (who obviously exists) to God (who is so non-obvious his very existence is questioned).
I think this is also off track from the book or the article in Salon—but maybe I’m missing something.
I’ll have to re-read the rest of Kirk’s comments. I think that rather than pointing out an error in logic, he is using rhetoric to shield the fact that there actually isn’t any evidence for God’s existence (scientific or otherwise). But let me re-read the posts....
I think [a chunk of inthegobi’s commnents are] also off track from the book or the article in Salon—but maybe I’m missing something.
Yeah, guilty as charged.
I think that rather than pointing out an error in logic, he is using rhetoric to shield the fact that there actually isn’t any evidence for God’s existence (scientific or otherwise). . . .
I haven’t given any evidence for God’s existence yet - and maybe I won’t ever on this forum. I need room to put a god first, and so I need to first refute arguments here and there that deny even that room. And as others have pointed out, it seems really hard to sort this out, and lots of basic things bear repeating, sometimes many times to the same person.
To put it in probability terms, I need to get the ‘A god exists’ dial back to ‘coin-toss’ on the dial. A better way to put it is that I only want tp prove that a god’s existence is neither crazy nor absurd. That’s all i’m attempting right now. I agree with dougsmith that mucking around in non-naturalism doesn’t give me a free pass to assert any god exists. But it is needful to go over that.
I haven’t given any evidence for God’s existence yet - and maybe I won’t ever on this forum. I need room to put a god first, and so I need to first refute arguments here and there that deny even that room. And as others have pointed out, it seems really hard to sort this out, and lots of basic things bear repeating, sometimes many times to the same person.
To put it in probability terms, I need to get the ‘A god exists’ dial back to ‘coin-toss’ on the dial. A better way to put it is that I only want tp prove that a god’s existence is neither crazy nor absurd. That’s all i’m attempting right now. I agree with dougsmith that mucking around in non-naturalism doesn’t give me a free pass to assert any god exists. But it is needful to go over that.
Sincerely,
Kirk
Thanks.
Please continue to make posts and point out logic errors if you see them.
Thanks for the ideas and patience with well-meant rebuttals.
I think this book and the Salon article are springboard to a lot more discussion.
To begin with, Dawkins is quite careful never to claim he can disprove the existence of God.
That’s true - but don’t you find that coy? To deny any route to knowing that gods exist is to do Hume’s move for moral facts.
Actually I don’t find it coy at all—I think it’s quite straightforward of him. The problem, perhaps, is in the title of the book. However if the probability of X is sufficiently small, really a delusion is an adequate explanation for one’s belief in X.
And I don’t think it has anything to do with Hume’s causal role for moral facts ... Again, Dawkins isn’t claiming that justification for belief in God is completely lacking, just that the probabilities are sufficiently high against it.
inthegobi - 30 December 2007 05:27 PM
if I could prove to you that there’s no way to perceive the returning ghosts of the dead, you’d accept that as evidence ghosts don’t exist, and ‘evidence against’ is ‘proof’ in a normal person’s mouth.
Not quite sure where you’re going with that, but there have been plenty of fakirs and fakers who have claimed to have evidence or perceptions of ghosts. The ones that have been studied with any detail have not been credible. So given that we know (as much as we know anything empirical) that the mind is a product of the brain, and that there is no evidence for life after death, and that there is no evidence whatever for ghosts, there is clearly going to be no way to perceive these things, since they clearly do not exist.
But perhaps you were using that simply as an offhand example.
And re. “gut feelings”, by saying that I or Dawkins has a gut feeling that our wives love us, I am not saying that we lack evidence.We have plenty of evidence for this, every day. Indeed, in this context the “gut feeling” is really produced by the combination of evidence we have before us, much as we have a “gut feeling” that Richard Nixon and George W. Bush are criminals. That’s not from lack of evidence!
