Believe It or Not @ First Things

David B. Hart posted an article titled Believe It or Not at a religious blog called First Things. It was picked up at RD.net where I saw it and began commenting at both places. From the number of comments (309 at last count) this article has brought them more traffic than they have ever known. I decided to copy my FT comments here where I can keep track of them for later work. Over on RD.net, I wrote that the piece looked like The Courtier's Reply run through the MoPo generator.

4.22.2010 | 1:52pm Quine says:

Wake up, Mr. Hart! You are not living back in the day of Aquinas, now is well into the post Darwin. The old world was a mystery that seemed to run by divine magic. Then, it was the burden of any who challenged the gods to show otherwise. But now, the balance has flipped. We now know the natural history of the world and that people are a natural product of that history. That is why we need no longer try to disprove the supernatural; the weight is on you to prove it.

Got evidence?

4.22.2010 | 5:28pm Quine says:

@ Porphyry & VG,

If you can show we are wrong, do so. Else, drop the name calling ad hominum.

Got evidence?

4.23.2010 | 3:15pm Quine says:

GFA:What you don't get is that quantum vacuum may or may not exist because it is a thing, i.e. a being ("ens").
Got evidence that the quantum vacuum is a "thing"? I do not recognize that as a falsifiable proposition. Can you construct an experiment in which the quantum vacuum does not have the property of existence? How would you show that?

Those who would like to see a great presentation of a more realistic theory of nothing should watch Lawrence Krauss in this video:

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/4490

4.23.2010 | 3:22pm Quine says:

Ye Olde Statistician, have you ever felt the urge to sacrifice a goat to Existence Itself? (Of course, other than just eating one because you were hungry and wanted to continue to exist.)

4.23.2010 | 3:36pm Quine says:

Correction to my 3:15 comment: the quote should have been from Carlo, not CFA.

Sorry.

4.23.2010 | 6:04pm Quine says:

Hi Carlo,

You seem to misunderstand one of the most basic things about the scientific method. The method gives us a reliable way of showing that a falsifiable proposition holds up to testing. Nowhere does it say that all true propositions can be thus shown. In fact, all the future science that is going to be shown to be true is not at this time shown to be true, but that does not make it false. You could have a 50/50 test question and flip a coin resulting in a true answer. Truth can come by other means, but the problem is that we won't necessarily know it is the truth. The scientific method has no claim of exclusivity on this, but it is what we can use to get results.

Also remember that the method is most effective in cutting away what is wrong. No amount of further testing is going to show that the Earth is the center of the solar system. No amount of further testing is going to restore Newtonian gravity after Einstein. Now DNA testing of complex animals closes the door on questions of ancestry.

If you are going to propose that the quantum vacuum is a thing that could be absent somewhere while still having a "somewhere" you are going to have to tell us how we could check this, for us to take it any more seriously than anything else that could be true but we can't know (such as Russell's Teapot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot).

4.24.2010 | 3:16pm Quine says:

Carlo said:

Since you clearly think that rationality coincides with the scientific method, and I think that to be absurd, I propose that we can just leave it there.

I am sorry if you misunderstood me as I don't consider that "rationality coincides with the scientific method" but rather that the method is a proper subset of rationality (epistemology, specifically). As a scientist, I am sure you have read Popper and Kuhn on this.

4.24.2010 | 3:28pm Quine says:

James said:

Statistician said:

"A cause must have something in it of the effect, either formally or eminently."

This highly jargonized and archaic conception of causality has no connection to how the world actually works. Therefore, it cannot do the work you want it too. Nice try though!

Thanks, James, you got there first. I was going to run him around trying to justify this in explaining the observer effect in the famous double-slit experiment, or particle decay, or quantum entanglement, or worked backward through the problem of turbulence. Oh well, perhaps I will go do something constructive, instead.

4.24.2010 | 9:16pm Quine says:

Hi Carlo,

Richard Feynman famously described science as a way to keep from fooling ourselves. That is why we take our questions to that subset. I agree that truth can be found outside that bound, but also, we may be fooling ourselves. Also, I admit that you have to grant to others their right to undecidable opinions. However, we must draw the line at facts, and reject speculation that is inconsistent with known facts.

Cheers

4.25.2010 | 3:08am Quine says:

Ye Olde Statistician says:

... One consequence of these virtual pairs that are produced and annihilated immediately is the evaporation of energy from black holes predicted by Steve Hawking. That is, he predicted that black holes are not really black but gray. That is they lose energy. **Thus one can check, in principle, for radiation loss by black holes. If one can show that black holes don’t lose energy, the vacuum energy is falsified.**

Thanks to your friend. Yes, Bekenstein-Hawking radiation is predicted by theory and may be observed at some point in the future. If a black hole is found that does not radiate, then we would have data to use to go back and check the theory. That might mean that something is happening with quantum gravity (not understood at this time) such that the expected separation of virtual particle pairs by the extreme curvature is not enough. We see effects of the virtual particles everywhere else, so observation of no black hole radiation would not cause us to suspect the pairs are not being made as our first possible explanation (special case). Remember, I asked you for a place with nothing, and a black hole is somewhere with plenty of something. Anyway, thanks for thinking about it.

Ye Olde Statistician says:

Quine says:
"As a scientist, I am sure you have read Popper and Kuhn on this."
Are you claiming to be a scientist, or is that just a dangling participle?

That was from a reply to Carlo, who claimed to be a scientist.

Ye Olde Statistician says:

Don't know what any of those examples have to do with the concept that "causes must have something in them of the effect." The usual confusion is that this means the effect must be in the cause formally, that is, in the exact same form. That is why the distinction was made between formal and eminent causality.

I see that as a re-cloaking of the old causal chain arguments, however, it does not add any new strength. Also, you get the problem of generalizing. Showing any number of examples of "something in them of the effect" does not invoke an induction to all examples, which is what you need in order to get it to apply to an unseen cause. That is why counter examples on the quantum level (it only takes one, and there will be plenty) break the generalization and sink the rest of your argument.

4.26.2010 | 12:10am Quine says:

Frederick Greer said:

@ Quine

You may think there are counter-examples at the quantum level, but of course there are not. And all good philosophers of science today would seem to disagree with you. In fact, as far as the philosophy of science goes, quite a lot of very competent thinkers would argue that the evidences of modern physics point towards a stronger case for a modified Aristotelian view of cause.

Frederick, if you go back and read the thread you will see that my comment was about a property that Ye Olde Statistician was trying to work backwards through all effects to all causes, not cause and effect itself. He used that in the first step of an argument, and I am asking him to show that his statement is true over all effects, which I wait for him to do.

Frederick Greer said:

The only physicist I know competent to discourse in real depth on quantum issues tells me that the behavior of the quantum realm long ago forced him to abandon philosophical materialism, and to give up his cherished atheism, and to embrace a kind of "contentless theism."

I kind of like that second-hand anecdote because it exemplifies what I call "Homeopathic Theology" in which traditional concepts of deities are watered down to avoid the inconsistencies when they collide with the ever increasing body of facts discovered through science. The idea is that this avoidance makes them stronger as they are watered to, essentially, nothing. Since it does look like nothing may have exploded into everything, I can also go with believing all deities are, literally, diluted to nothing.

If you want any content, i.e. properties assigned to your deities, you need more than the wonder that there is anything rather than nothing.

Got evidence?

4.26.2010 | 12:55pm Quine says:

Stephen Kennamer, thanks for that truly excellent comment.

Here it is:

Stephen Kennamer says:

All right, here's what Hart gets right: Nietzsche and Hume did the job so well that there is really nothing for Dawkins and Hitchens to add. But I might also say that Augustine and John Calvin did the job so well that there is nothing for Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Kung to add. Nonetheless, Christian apologists go on writing, and sometimes their writing sinks to the level of Robertson and Falwell and Hagee.

The New Atheists are popular journalists and their efforts resemble that of the late 19th century's Robert Ingersoll rather than Nietzsche. Their writings do not add to his, either: he concentrated, as they also often do, on the elementary contradictions that can be found in the Bible by any ordinary reader.

So why are they repeating such stale news? Because over 350 years of knockdown arguments against theism have failed to knock it down. You can't say that Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche finished the job and eradicated what Voltaire called "the infamy." Hart can't argue that there is no need for these books: he can't say that superstitious religion--the rotgut kind, the kind that sees God's hand in every human event and hates gays--has been wiped out.

Everyone but Hart seems to understand that the New Atheists have been galvanized by seeing fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity not only grow exponentially in numbers and influence in the world's one remaining superpower, but essentially take over its government for eight years, there to make war on science as well as on other countries. Yes, it's true, the New Atheists do not engage with Karen Armstrong's impalpable god of the educated mystics of the Middle Ages--a god whose existence is so compatible with his non-existence that nothing is at stake either way. They engage with the god of Robertson and Falwell. Hart probably abhors that god as much as the New Atheists do--I hope he does--but he would rather purge the intellectual commonwealth of everyone who fails read Thomas Aquinas from cover to cover than oppose the people who would burn Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche at the stake if they had their druthers.

While he is accusing the New Atheists of missing the point of highly sophisticated arguments for the existence of God, he seems to miss the point of a really simple argument: if there is no compelling evidence for the belief in question, the skeptic is not really required to entertain the belief and take up the billions of pages of subtle exegesis. Perhaps Dawkins goes too far in arguing that he can prove the non-existence of god, but that does not acquit Hart of setting him up as a straw man. Most atheists are content with a much more modest assertion: "I do not say that unicorns do not exist; I say that you have not given me any reason to believe that they exist." The burden is on the believer. I don't have to read Aquinas's Summa Unicornicus until you give me something better than "He will prove that unicorns, although invisible, non-physical, and undetectable, exist ontologically and necessarily because a contingent unicorn is paradoxical." When Hart's "god" turns out to be merely the spiritual plenitude out of which something rather than nothing sprang into being, the intelligent atheist merely shrugs: a god that transcendent is impossible to disprove, but the existence of he, she, or it leaves earthly matters standing precisely as they stood before. It is only when Hart's god takes an interest in us, loves us, chastises us, and takes human form and dies for us because somehow our original sin required the blood sacrifice of our Maker or the Maker's son, that the atheist is presented with anything relevant to human life; and now the atheist can choose from a thousand arguments in refutation, drawn from philology, history, science, and even religious studies. We simply know too much about anthropology, comparative religion, and how the Bible came to be written and then sacralized. Freud was wrong about almost everything he said about everything, excepting only his observation that monotheism with its eternal life is an infantile wish-fulfillment. He could get this one thing right because it is obvious to any genuinely educated person; in fact, Feuerbach got it right almost a century earlier.

The New Atheists are topical polemicists. They do not argue at Hart's level because it has already been done. They rail against the current state of affairs because it does not seem to matter that it has already been done, and it clearly needs doing again. They don't refute Aquinas, but neither does Hart rehabilitate Aquinas; and if he did, there would still be no evidence for the god of American fundamentalists. The crimes committed in the name of religion are convulsing the globe; meanwhile, Hart's argument that atheists have not proved the non-existence of the not-exactly-existing god leave things just where they are.

4.27.2010 | 5:05pm Quine says:

Let's see if we can get some clarity on the philosophy v. politics of Atheism. I will start with the political aspects of the so called "New Atheists." Yes, there is a political component. This got started with the attempts of religious people to keep the teaching of Evolution out of schools. That was one instance of the general problem of the political power of the religious to inflect their superstitions upon the rest of us. We, who reject these superstitions, don't get burnt at the stake so much, anymore, but may be beheaded in Islamic countries. This part of the political struggle continues, and perhaps, we will see the day in the USA when a candidate does not have to pretend to be religious in order to stand a chance of being elected to a major public office.

Now on the philosophy; there is none. Atheism is the acceptance of neither Theism nor Deism. No atheistic arguments are needed, those who want to establish the existence of the supernatural have the burden to produce objectively observable evidence. No amount of speculation counts, nor does the fact that anything exists, at all, because else is nil. True, some philosophers will take time to show the unsubstantiated premises upon which the religious build their castles in the sky, or point out the folly of watering down the common deities until they are de minimis, but why keep doing that when their side is holding nothing?

Got evidence?

4.27.2010 | 7:21pm Quine says:

Adam Tanner said:

... He is saying that, whereas the best atheist writers once knew all about philosophy, history, religious thought, and so on and were able to produce morally and intellectually profound works, the New Atheists have turned out to be a squad of uniformed, unreflective, strident, boring clowns.

I agree with you; that is what he is saying. Now, here is why I don't agree that he has foundation for that. If you wanted to get from Rome to Alexandria you could hop in a little sailing boat and, if you had the skill, sail across the Mediterranean Sea as was done back in old times, or you could hop on a jet and fly there. Perhaps you might meet with protesters holding signs saying that you had no right to do so because you don't know how to sail a boat.

The old philosophers had the intellectual tools of the time to work with. Yes, they did very well with those tools, and we still quote the likes of Epicurus today. Through time past Hume, they provided reason, but were consistently met with the age old argument form ignorance, i.e. "We don't know the cause of X, therefore it is supernatural." However, as time went on, we came to know the natural cause of more and more phenomena, thus narrowing the application of this ignorance. Today the argument is backed up to the origin of the Big Bang, and is coupled with the burden of proof fallacy to form the ID group's favorite, Irrefutable Perplexity, or "What I say is right because you can't show it is wrong, and what you say is wrong because I can't see how it could be right."

Hume came before Darwin, or Watson and Crick, or the biological proof that all our memories are chemicals that go away when our brains decay, or the work of V. S. Ramachandran showing that some people with temporal lobe epilepsy spontaneously start seeing supernatural beings and write down "scripture." So many things that could not be explained in the days of the "old philosophers" can be skipped over, today. Is there any real reason for Dan Dennett, or anyone else, to get in the little sail boat (although Dan does sail, himself, for fun) to cross the modern gulf of reason?

Finally, as to your assertion that Dennett does not understand Hume:

Got evidence?

5.17.2010 | 8:22pm Quine says:

At least we are getting closer to on-topic.  David B. Hart in the article says:

[    The scientists fare almost as poorly. Among these, Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty.]

Let us look at some of what Victor Stenger (Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Hawaii and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado) has written in his "Godless Cosmology" piece in the book in question; specifically, after discussing why the Big Bang need not necessarily have a starting point or time he writes:

[    But even if we grant that the universe had a beginning, this does not imply that it had a cause.  D'Souza refers to me: "Physicist Victor Stenger says the universe may be 'uncaused' and may have 'emerged from nothing.'"  He scoffs: "Even David Hume, one of the most skeptical of all philosophers, regarded this position as ridiculous...Hume wrote in 1754, 'I have never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might rise without cause.'"
    Hume can be excused for not knowing quantum physics in 1754, but D'Souza and Craig cannot today, more than a century since its discovery.  They are wrong in their assertion that everything that begins must have a cause.  According to conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics, nothing, "causes" the atomic transitions that produce light or the nuclear decays that produce nuclear radiation.  These happen spontaneously and only their probabilities are determined.
    In 1983 Hawking and James Hartle produced a model for the natural origin of our universe that today remains fully consistent with all we know from physics and cosmology.  This is just one of a number of natural scenarios that have been published by reputable scientists in reputable scientific journals.  In one variation of the Hartle-Hawking model, following the review by David Atkatz, our universe appeared by a process of quantum tunneling from an earlier universe that extended back into our past without limit.  That tunneling passes through a region of total chaos.  I have worked out this model in full mathematical detail and published it in both a book and an article in a philosophical journal.
    All the published scenarios for a natural origin of our universe are consistent with existing knowledge.  However, none has been proven unique.  So, while we cannot say this is exactly how our universe came to be, the fact that we have several completely worked out scenarios refutes any claim that a supernatural cause was required to produce the universe.]

The most important phrase in the above is "was required" in the last sentence. In the time of Aquinas the requirement for a deity was squeezed out of what they did not know as alternatives.  So often we see supernaturalists make this kind of Sherlock Holmes fallacy where they think they have shown that we must turn to the supernatural because no other 'possibility' exists when it is their own incomplete knowledge of the possible that is the true problem.

From the straw-man style you have seen mocked in some recent comments, you might expect me to write "therefore, no supernatural" but no, all the arguments do not conclude "no deities" but rather, "no evidence for deities," and therefore, no reason to lift them above mythology.

[note: Victor Stenger posted the mathematics for the above quote here http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Godless/Origin.pdf ]
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5.18.2010 | 2:20am

Quine says:

Along the lines of the subject just mentioned by Papalinton, A. C. Grayling (Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, and a supernumerary fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford) wrote (in his essay "Why I am Not a Believer" for the book reviewed here by David B. Hart):


[In its focal and standard sense, religion not only denotes a metaphysical commitment to the existence of something non-natural in, or somehow outside but connected to, the universe, but further that this something's relation to the universe is in some way significant - centrally, by being some or all of the universe's creator, ruler, and moral instructor. The meaning of these remarks is of course only notional - as with a lot of theological and religious discourse, it is hard to attach a literal sense to what is claimed, which votaries defend by appealing to the ineffability of religious "truths" and the finitude of our minds in comparison - but they vaguely indicate what religious people claim to believe.


One has to say something along the foregoing lines when discussing religion because religious apologists are inverterately apt to defend against criticism or refutation by saying, "That is not what I mean by religion," and "I don't recognize that caricature of what I believe." Part of the sleight of hand at work here becomes obvious when one notes the great difference between what ordinary votaries of a religion believe and what their theologians and high priests say. For example: the ordinary churchgoing Christian has a more or less vague conception of a some what human-like, only grander, being or beings - God the "father," Jesus, Mary, the "Holy Ghost." saints and angels, and so forth - and they believe, or think they believe, in some literally true (though literally meaningless or contradictory) propositions about them such as that God became man, was born of a virgin, was killed but after a couple of days came back to life, and then "rose into heaven" - some aspect of a physical increase of altitude from the surface of the Earth residually involved - whereas if you speak to a theologian, you will find that, in the complexified and polysyllabic rarifications of his craft, at least not all these things are to be taken literally, but have metaphorical or mystical interpretations, though the grounds on which bits of the story are to be cherry-picked for literal truth and which are to be treated as metaphor are moot.]

5.18.2010 | 8:50pm

Quine says:

David B. Hart also (as I quoted above) touched upon the question of "something" v. "nothing."  Picking up from my previous posts, we now know that not every action need have a cause, so that whole argument does not get started, and that there may or may not have been a start of time itself, so necessity arguments based on either side of that don't get going, either.  Now, what about "something" from "nothing"?  As so often, it depends on what you mean by "nothing."  In our ordinary lives we might look at items on top of a table and easily understand that if items are removed, one by one, we will at some point reach "nothing on the table."  That is our basic idea in the  world of objects and as we grow past very early childhood we come to understand that a object that falls off the table still exists, and (after we get over Santa) that new toys will not materialize under a tree without some agency.

Of course, when you actually take all the items off the table, there still is air on the table, and photons bouncing off the table and entering your eye, and a vast number of  cosmic particles traveling through the space on (and through) the table, and (as we discussed above) a vast number of virtual particles coming and going in and out of existence, also in that space on the table.  There simply isn't anywhere where we have evidence of the simple idea of "nothing" and we can't establish that such is even possible.  All that physics we ignore while looking at an "empty" table starts to matter when you run the clock backwards and try to construct falsifiable theories re the very early time (perhaps start) of everything.  In a post above, I give the link to a presentation by Lawrence Krauss that includes computer generated visualizations from calculations of the "nothing" inside the proton (here is the direct YouTube link for the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo ).

On thing we try to avoid in our lives (most of us) is having "nothing in the bank" or no money.  But it can be worse, we can have less than nothing i.e. debt, or negative money in the bank.  Thus you might know someone who owns substantial property and think he or she is quite wealthy, but not know that it is all borrowed and therefore his or her net worth is nothing.  Many physicists believe that that is what we see here in a cosmos where the negative energy is in balance with the positive mass.  Thus nothing had to exist "before" because the "net worth" of everything needn't be anything.

As in the other cases, you might object that what physicists say "may be true" doesn't prove anything, but the important thing is that it shoots down the kinds of arguments for the supernatural that are based on "we can't think of anything else."