I appreciate Tim Kowal’s long, thoughtful response to my post on Ben Stein and intelligent design, but after reading and re-reading it I’m afraid it misses the mark.  Lines like “Strictly speaking, natural selection is not a scientific theory” only help to harden that impression. They don’t call it the Theory of Evolution for nothing.

Science, as I see it, is the process by which we as humans attempt to better understand the natural world.  Whether we want to phrase this as “God’s creation” or merely as “the natural world” is unimportant.  When it comes to actually taking apart the radio and figuring out how it works, we don’t need to ask whether it was made by hand or by a machine, in America or overseas. All we need to do is take it apart and then put it back together.  Similarly, with science – whether it is biology or geology or physics – all we need to do is ask the question “how?”

How does it all tick?

That, to me, is science.  The exploration of how the natural world ticks.  To me, as a person of faith, I think of this as a way to better understand God also, to understand how creation ticks. I find the anthropomorphizing of God in “theories” like Intelligent Design to be insulting both to God and to my intelligence.

Let me explain.  Let’s take, for example, the rock cycle.  This is the natural cycle whereby rock is pressed down into the earth and then reemerges as magma.  That rock – now igneous rock – is  pressed slowly down into the earth, turns into sedimentary and then metamorphic rock, and finally is melted down once again into magma.  It is a process which takes millions upon millions of years.  Understanding this process helps us understand the earth beneath our feet (and a great deal more) and it is entirely irrelevant to our understanding of this process whether or not it was created or designed by God.  If a group of Intelligent Rock Cycle Designers came around arguing that instead of this being a natural process it was instead one guided by some other Intelligence, I simply fail to see how their alternative theory would be at all useful to our understanding of the rock cycle.

But does it diminish from it? [Read more →]

At Master Resource, Jim Manzi synthesizes several objections he’s aired to comprehensive greenhouse gas regulations in one easy-to-read Thomas Friedman take-down. I find this stuff pretty persuasive, but it’s worth noting that there’s real tension between objections to cap-and-trade grounded in rigorous cost-benefit analysis and objections to cap-and-trade grounded in, well, Senator Inhofe’s belief that “global warming is the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people.”

At its core, Manzi’s argument hinges on accepting the scientific consensus with respect to both the existence of global climate change and its probable impact. He uses the UN’s own projections to argue the economic costs of regulation outweigh the likelihood of catastrophic warming. On the other end of the conservative spectrum, we have people like Rick Santorum, whose recent op-ed helpfully compares  anthropogenic global warming to other well-known examples of crank science like The Theory of Evolution.

Aside from lazily gesturing at the uncertainty of scientific knowledge and repeating “ClimateGate” over and over again, Santorum doesn’t really have an argument against the existence of climate change. Unfortunately, this outlook seems to be the dominant strain of thought on the American Right (granted, the leaked CRU emails didn’t help matters). The problem with this approach is that straightfoward denialism is totally inconsistent with any attempt to grapple with the real costs of emissions controls – if there’s no danger from unregulated greenhouse gasses, why bother to see if the actual science of global warming demands immediate action?

Straightforward denialism allows those who favor aggressive emissions controls to shape the public’s perception of climate science. Instead of sober cost-benefit analysis, people who basically accept the existence of global warming (read: most of the voting public) are now more likely to think that climate change is catastrophic rather than incremental. The longer the right’s response to anthropogenic warming is dominated by the likes of Inhofe and Santorum, the longer this perception will linger, which doesn’t bode well for efforts to stop monstrously expensive cap-and-trade legislation.

Remember that big chart Al Gore used in his documentary?  If not, here it is:

This chart shows the correlation of high global temperatures and high CO2 levels (though some have argued that if you look closely, you’ll see that temperature actually rises before CO2 levels rise, but we’ll leave that for another day.)  More interesting to me is the presentation of the data itself, and particularly the x axis which includes the present year all the way back to 650,000 years ago.

Now, compared to the life of a human being, 650,000 years is a long time.  In fact, modern humans have only been on earth for about 200,000 years, so not even a third of that chart includes human life. [Read more →]

Dan Riehl points us to some of the neat technologies developed during the Apollo era.  They are neat, too, but I have to say – given the price-tag of the space program – you’d think we’d have come up with better stuff than scratch-resistant glasses and memory foam.  In other words, the fact that these technologies were developed during the massively expensive space program is incidental – I’m sure wireless headsets would have been invented regardless.

I have been very glad to read the many arguments against David Brooks’ column announcing the end of moral philosophy. My own problems with what seems like the cyclical and predictable tendency for new scientific discoveries to signal the end of other modalities of knowing are reasonably well documented on this site. Insofar as I tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to what I often can’t help but see as the aggressive imperial tendencies of some strong science proponents — somewhat ironically, it occurs to me that the most aggressive amongst the proponents are often not themselves members of the scientific community — that is not to say that I question the power of science’s explanatory model. It’s just to say that I think that as powerful as science happens to be that it has certain limits that ought not to crowd out other modalities of knowing. Mark had an excellent post on this point some time back when we were batting about the existence of God.

Wrote Mark,

Indeed, in insisting otherwise, both sides insure the continued conflation of science and religion, and both science and religion get demeaned in the process.  For instance, when religion gets up in arms over the teaching of evolution in science class and demands that intelligent design theory be given equal time – also in science class – it must pretend to be something it is not, and was never intended to be.  Religion is not science, and in attempting to gain acceptance as a science, it allows itself to be treated on the same terms as science.  In other words, it begs to be treated as if it were falsifiable, when the entire point in faith is that it is something that is unfalsifiable.  Worse, it forces religion to get tied up in arguments that have precious little to do with the elements of faith that are so very important: things like morality, conscience, meaning, etc.  And so it loses the forest for the trees, to use a cliche.

But similarly, science demeans itself when it used as a proof of the non-existence of god.  Science is not meant to provide unfalsifiable answers, nor is it intended to answer questions that can only admit of unfalsifiable answers.  To do so is to turn the scientific method on its head.  And in so doing, science demeans itself because it loses part of its very essence.

In all honesty, I think that my own cautionary tendencies around the reach of science are at least in part based on a cultural bug. Canada simply doesn’t house the same degree of religiosity as the US and so I don’t perceive myself to operate day-in-day-out within an environment that houses the same degree of antipathy towards science as many of our commenters here at the League do. To my own mind, and in the minds of most of those with whom I interact, the power and position of science in interpreting the world is largely unassailable, so the more pressing exercise is to stand up for those other, less buttressed but, I would argue, equally valuable modalities of knowing.

Post teaser: discussion of torture memos after the jump. [Read more →]

Yesterday, Will Wilkinson lobbed the “mysterian” stone at E.D. over his resistance to seeing happiness as something that can be scientifically quantified,

There are no doubt limits to human understanding, but where that limit is is another damned empirical question. I think the probability that we’ve approached that limit when it comes to the mind or human subjectivity or morality or the conditions of human flourishing is approximately zero. I think science is hard, but it’s just laziness or complacency to think the science of X is impossible or pointless. I think I’m trying to argue that your kind of typically conservative (intellectually, not politically) “mysterianism” is motivated by the assumption that if we actually learned something about a putatively ineffable subject matter, it might matter to how people live.

I often feel like people (albeit a relatively small sub-section of people) misuse the term mysterian when they encounter others who mount some degree of resistance to uniquity of science. Mysterianism has its roots in the philosophy of mind and is a term that has posthumously been applied to those thinkers who argued that the hard problem of consciusness (reconciling the subjective components of conscious experience with the objective information we have about the brain) may not be solvable. The New Mysterians, such as they are, have in some cases extended this sense of unsolvability to more problems than just that of consciousness. It is in this regard that Wilkinson seems to be using the term.

But the whole exercise of labeling those people who question science’s ability to solve all problems as mysterians speaks to the underlying bias with which many of those science resisters are often engaged: reductionism. Modern science has exclusively to do with an understanding of the world that is based upon the study of physical matter and in that regard it provides a system with extraordinary explanatory power. But the best of scientists with whom I’ve ever spoken acknowledge that to take that study one step further and forward the often unspoken premise that therefore all understanding can be reduced the study of physical matter is to misunderstand the exploratory nature of science itself.

The assumption of reductionism is that the only way to know something is to know it scientifically. This isn’t science as science, this is science as dogma. And the resulting concern is that by forfeiting all other modalities of knowing, we lose something important about our understanding of the world. Indeed, it becomes difficult to see how we go about resolving issues of, say, value and ethics, in a world bereft of subjects, where all that has ontological status are rocks, trees, atoms, and the like.

Pushing back against the primacy of scientific knowledge is not to suggest that something cannot be known and understood. It is rather to open up space for other modalities of knowing that might provide equally useful to scientific knowledge, perhaps even complimentary. So I tend to agree with Will that we haven’t come close to reaching the limits of human knowing about any variety of topics, but those limits close in much more quickly when we assume that human knowing means only and ever scientific knowing.

Reading through this whole, excellent series on atheism, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc. has been an extremely worthwhile experience.   As I wrote in the comments to Chris’ post (you have no idea how much I’m loving that we have a student of theology in our little crew here):

I’m reminded of the old – and classic – Simpsons episode with Stephen Jay Gould, in which the judge orders “religion to stay five hundred yards away from science,” but in which Gould acknowledges that he was unwilling to test whether the apparent bones of an angel were real or fake. I’ve long thought this was one of the most poignant Simpsons episodes; I also think it (ie, the episode as a whole) does a good job illustrating the way in which faith (which as you correctly note is synonymous in many ways with trust) should not – and cannot – attempt to masquerade as science, even as science should not – and cannot -seek to take the place of religion.

I think this old Simpsons reference gets to the crux of the problem, not only with respect to overly evangelistic atheists, but also to overly evangelical, uhh, evangelicals.  It also explains why I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in its original incarnation in the context of the Kansas Intelligent Design debate, was perfectly within the realm of legitimate dialogue…and why its occasional subsequent use as a way of mocking religion is not.

I think Chris is absolutely correct when he writes that “faith=trust,” and that “I’ve never met a human who does not trust in something or someone.”  This, to me, is the central issue – ultimately, even the most hardcore atheist must put a certain amount of blind trust in SOMETHING, even if that trust is something as fundamental to atheism as the idea that reality exists and can be understood purely through rationality.

But whereever one chooses to place their trust, the fact is that whether that trust is properly placed is more or less unfalsifiable, and not subject to scientific proof or disproof.  For the religious person, there is simply no way to prove through science that god exists or does not exist – as long as there is something in the universe that cannot rationally be explained, there is a basis for trusting in the existence of god.  For the atheist, there is likewise simply no way to prove through science that god exists or does not exist – as long as a scientific or rational explanation for anything in the universe is theoretically possible, there is a basis to trust in the ability of reason to explain everything, and no basis to trust in the existence of god.

[Read more →]

When Freddie suggests that part of the problem with modern atheism is that it seems like many (most?) prominent atheists couch their arguments in the folds of derision I can’t but heartily agree with him. I’m not a religious individual myself, but it rankles me something fierce when I listen to a PZ Meyers or a Bill Maher hold forth about the stupidity/absurdity of religion. I mean, people should feel free to disagree about things all they want and debate those disagreements, we’re better off when we have those types of debates. But we fail to receive the benefits of having those types of important debates when they take place within a context lacking respect and dignity for all parties involved.

The challenge here, I think, is to hold in mind that whether you are an atheist who rests her understanding of the world in science and empirical data or the religious believer who finds meaning through scripture and God, that both means of understanding are properly understood to be a process of inquiry.

In terms of resting one’s belief about the nature of the world in the revelations of science, there is often a corresponding failure to understand that doing so is, in itself, a choice to explore the world from a particular vantage point. The popular view of science is that is has to do only with the material, that whatever we can touch and feel, dissect and study with our senses is what is really real. Insofar as God and the process of understanding through religion don’t deal with the material, atheists thus assume that they are invalid and merely the hair-brained superstitions of the unenlightened.

But empiricism and materialism are not, in fact, the same thing. Empiricism is a study of reality through the avenue of experience and the assumption that only the material can be experienced is itself an unspoken premise that limits what we stand to discover. The explanatory power of the natural sciences not withstanding, operating under the assumption that only the material constitutes reality and is therefore deserving of consideration is as much a matter of faith as a belief in God.

I take the idea of whether one can have an experience of God to be an open question so long as experience isn’t necessarily relegated into the domain of the material. Despite not being a religious individual I have had what I would call an experience of God that was entirely subjective and has infused my own life with a deeply held spirituality. That the experience can’t be easily translated into material terms doesn’t, at least in my mind, invalidate it as an experience. Nor does it cause the influence of that experience on my life to be null and void.

It is this, in my mind, that gives religion the power that Freddie rightly notes it has: the infusion of one’s life with a deeper current of purposefulness through openness to an experience of something greater than one’s self. Again, rightly understood, I think such an experience isn’t so much determinative as it is dispositive.

Besides, I feel like the whole argument over the existence of God is misplaced. It’s not a belief in God that keeps me from adhering to any particular religious tradition, but my concerns around the way that most religious traditions operate, the stasis of belief that tends to become the norm in such communities, and the levels of discrimination and xenophobia that such stasis can tend to produce. Most of the criticisms that I’ve ever heard about religion are grounded in those same kinds of concerns, but those concerns have literally nothing to do with the belief in the existence of God, there are cultural not metaphysical. So a good faith argument about the problematic elements of religion ought to focus on those cultural elements, and would be a good deal more effective as a result I would wager.