I’ve been commenting on a thread over at Thinking Christian about Sean Carroll’s Discovery piece on why science and religion are incompatible. It’s an odd kind of discussion: the resident Christians excoriate Carroll, and in the same breath they assert that Christianity is always, authoritatively correct, which seems to rule out science as a way of answering questions. Anyway, I made a few comments about values being contingent, like language, rather than extra-human absolute truths, and a bunch of people piled on. I wrote:
On values: try substituting, mutatis mutandis the word “language” for “values”. Then your paragraph reads in part:
That we speak a certain language is (let us say) a physical state within the brain. Science can then look into its genesis and perhaps tell a plausible story about how it came to be. But the languages themselves are not physical states
But the last sentence doesn’t follow. In fact, languages are precisely physical states: patterns of utterance and interpretation replicated (with variations) in millions of brains, and transferred from brains to brains by socialization and education. Some have speculated that there are a set of “hardware” mechanisms which facilitate (and, presumably, constrain this process, but that’s relatively unimportant.Nobody argues about which the “correct language” is. (Well, no sane persons.) We can’t say whether French or English is more correct. We can debate the origins of each, and the relative effectiveness of each in expressing certain things. And we would certainly note the existence of deep commonalities between different languages.
Well, values are languages. They are languages that we use to talk about patterns of behaviour that we collectively approve or disapprove of. Like language, values are contingent, in space and time. Just as it would be difficult to speak with an Elizabethan Englishman, because of the evolution of language, it would be difficult to communicate about values with an Elizabethan Christian, for who slavery, burning heretics at the stake, and treating schizophrenia with exorcism were perfectly Christian values.
Your values are patterns in your brain which influence your response to certain stimuli. Nothing magical, supernatural, or un-scientific about them. Values are not extra-human things that tell us the way things ought to be: they are linguistic expressions that we use to tell each other how we imagine things ought to be.
Most of the comments were silly, but there was one by Franklin Mason that I responded to at some length. After I’d written it, I decided that I liked it so much that I would replay it over here:
So, I take it that you think it impossible for anyone to be incorrect in the values they hold.
Incorrect according to whom? Flip back to the language analogy, and remember “My Fair Lady”. To be an accepted member of a social group is, in part, to use the language of that group. In school children learn what is, and is not, “correct” spelling, grammar, and usage. Same with values.
Second point: science itself is a value-driven endeavor. It values truth above all else. Moreover, in the construction of scientific theory, you’ll find many values called open: value is placed in simplicity, explanatory power, predictive power, etc.
Yup. Science is a human endeavor, and as such we use the language of values to express many aspects of it.
Lots of value is non-moral in nature. The values I’ve described above are epistemological in nature, but they are values nonetheless; and like all values, they don’t simply describe how things have gone, rather they describe how things ought to go.
Let’s correct your drift here. We use the language of values to describe how we think things ought to go. Values (and language) are not free-floating absolutes; they are aspects of human thought and communication.
Thus, if all value is contingent and culture-relative (as you seem to wish to say), so too is science. On your view, science, just like morality, would come to be one of a plethora of ways in which one might come to the world, with no objective reason to prefer one over the other.
You know, people seem to think that as soon as something is described as “contingent”, all bets are off: that it could be not just different, but anything at all. But “contingent” means “dependent”, and things like language and culture – and science – are strongly constrained by the facts that they depend on. Case in point: our eyes evolved to be sensitive to particular wavelengths of light and particular types of visual stimuli: they’re good at detecting vertically symmetrical patterns, not so good at horizontal or rotational patterns. There are good adaptive reasons for this (e.g. threat detection), but it’s not the only kind of vision, as a quick trawl through the evo-devo literature will explain. It’s contingent: it could have been different. We could have evolved as nocturnal creatures, in which case we might have large eyes like Tarsiers with increased sensitivity to infra-red.
Now the point about this is that while the form of our vision is contingent, it’s not random. We didn’t get to choose our vision. We could tweak it a bit (with glasses), but we couldn’t rewire it. (More on that carefully-chosen verb form later.) And the same is true of things like language and values – and science.
Our language and values are contingent on our biology. If we had evolved with enhanced infra-red vision, we would be able to directly sense many more physiological phenomena – we might be able to “see” certain kinds of emotions and pains. Our languages would reflect this. Or if, as nocturnal creatures, we had evolved an enhanced sense of smell, we might rely on olfactory evidence and prefer it over visual. Now think about all of the ways that vision, and metaphorical uses of “see” and “perceive” crop up in your language – and, yes, in your values. “Seeing is believing”. How about “smelling is believing”?
And of course you use the “objective” word, which suggests that you hold true to the obsolete dichotomy that everything is either objective or subjective: absolute, or personal. Sorry: those words don’t really mean very much. They are just another piece of the language of values: ways that we communicate about social preferences.
I take it that most scientists reject this. The values that science exemplifies are quite objectively good, they would say; and if you disagreed, they’d think you were just flat wrong.
Scientists are human; scientists use human language to communicate about science; when that communication involves “how” and “why”, scientists use those aspects of language which evolved to talk about such things, which is the language of values.
No scientist would say that there are no values. They would (mostly) say that they aren’t what you seem to think they are. Scientists have arrived at the “rules” and “values” of science because they work: they lead to repeatable results, and minimize the likelihood of fraud and deception (especially self-deception!).
I said earlier that I would comment on the “we couldn’t rewire our vision” thing. Well, of course we are now getting close to the point where we can, and things are going to get quite interesting. Will our values change as we change? They always have in the past.
We are, understandably, parochial creatures. We pay lots of attention to the time and space around us: the recent past (say, the last couple of thousand years, the next century), and the planet which we inhabit. These preferences are, of course, contingent: contingent on our physical size, our senses, our environment, our natural (i.e. evolved) life span, and historical factors like the invention of writing and social institutions. Humans had a long, rich history stretching over hundreds of thousands of years before writing emerged, but of course we have almost no record of their lives, their societies, their gods, and their values. From this point of view, the last two thousand years is just an historical blip. And if we take an even longer look, we’ll realize that this whole human thing is just a contingent blip; when the next cosmic collision wipes out 90% of life on the planet, as has happened many times in the past, what survives and flourishes isn’t going to be human. But that’s OK.
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[...] said, Geoff Arnold makes a great point when he says: You know, people seem to think that as soon as something is described as [...]
Heya. I thought I’d correct one potential misconception. I’d suppose that I’d qualify as one of the “resident Christians” at Thinking Christian. But I don’t take Christianity to be always authoritatively correct. There is a certain core of Christian belief that I take to be authoritative and correct – roughly the truths articulated in the Nicene Creed. But lots that gets associated with the name “Christianity” I either reject outright or take a skeptical stance toward. Examples: rejection of evolution, condemnation of abortion at all stages of pregnancy, inerrancy of Scripture, and lots else. There’s actually lots of variation in what goes by the name “Christian”.
Franklin: I understand your position. I was mostly addressing what seems to be the “house rules” of Tom Gilson and others:
That’s a pretty extreme position which is incompatible with science and, arguably, with any form of rational dialogue…. I certainly don’t attribute it to all Christians, though.
I would encourage your readers to follow the link to the thread you’ve referenced, simply to see what “piling on” looks like there. Then compare it to the way “piling on” looks when a theist comments on atheist sites like Pharyngula or Wes Elsberry’s board.
Just a small thing, but
Please pardon the accidental early click on the submit button there.
Thank you
for characterizing that one comment of mine as silly. I think a more charitable interpretation would have been to recognize it wasn’t intended as serious. I don’t always take myself seriously; it would be rather a bore to live life that way, wouldn’t it? it might also have been more honest had you not presented that as representing “most of the comments.”
Apparently that one “silly” comment colored your impression of me, however, because after that point you chose not to respond to the substantive questions I asked you, including here and here.
Regarding this:
Please feel free to see a more recent response I’ve written. I published it before reading this post of yours, but it applies anyway. Please note that there’s an important distinction to be made, which I was getting at in the second-to-last paragraph, and which I would have drawn out more explicitly had I read this first.
It is not my position that Christianity is always, authoritatively correct. Now, that would be silly, if anyone were to hold that position. My position, and that of historic Christianity, is that God’s revelation of himself is always authoritatively correct, for God cannot lie.
He reveals himself through the Bible, through experience, and through nature. The Bible is the most explicit propositional revelation we have, obviously, which gives it precedence in terms of deriving propositional understandings of God, but nevertheless it requires interpretation, just as experience and nature require interpretation.
Christians have not always got that interpretation right, just as scientists have not always got their interpretations of nature right. It’s a learning process that proceeds over time, as is also the case with science. Some things are quite well established, however, both in Biblical interpretation and in science. Those things that are well established do not conflict. Some less well established interpretations remain to be worked out, but they are very few, and mostly confined to the first chapters of Genesis.
As to “excoriating Carroll,” I would think that any good scientist would also recognize that he is wrong in several (not all) of his assertions. He is not representing science accurately at all when he says science disproves the Resurrection of Christ, or even when he says science disproves reincarnation and transmigration of souls. That is the kind of thing for which I criticized him. That was no attack on science, it was an attack on metaphysics disguised as science.
In matters such as this, Tom, it is important to be accurate in your attributions and citations. You write,
In fact, Carroll carefully avoided notions of proof or disproof, and it is mischievous (or sloppy) to misrepresent him. As he wrote:
Sorry to quote at such length, but if you had actually read and understood these two paragraphs, I can’t imagine why you would misquote Carrel in the way that you did.
What Carroll said of that assertion “Jesus died and was resurrected” was that “science says: none of that is true”. In scientific language, it’s an untenable hypothesis. When taken together with all of the other facts and explanatory hypotheses we have about how the world works, what “die” means, and the fragmented, contradictory, and non-contemporary nature of the supporting evidence, the most reasonable position to take is that the “resurrection” hypothesis is not true. Pick your own favourite theory of truth – correspondence, verificationist, coherence, whatever. There are a number of obviously more probable hypotheses – that Jesus did not, fact, die, or that Jesus simply died and stories were made up about him later – that require no supernatural agency or violation of the natural order as we understand it.
Although Carroll didn’t quote it, Hume’s famous maxim lies behind the unwillingness of science to pay much attention to supernatural claims:
In the case of the Resurrection, the testimony doesn’t even come close. It’s not even a very original kid of testimony; it’s exactly the kind of story that early Christians would tell to establish their credentials among Eastern Mediterranean peoples familiar with Osiris, Mithras and others.
Tom write, “My position, and that of historic Christianity, is that God’s revelation of himself is always authoritatively correct, for God cannot lie.” But this seems to be simply tautological. On this view, every proposition is either consistent with GROH, and therefore true, or inconsistent with GROH, and therefore false. So GROH is simply a shorthand for “the set of all true propositions”. Or perhaps (given the word “revelation”) it refers to the set of all accessible true propositions. It’s not clear how this actually advances the argument.
Of course there’s a separate question, which is whether one can construct the set of all true propositions. Tom has already conceded that there is no unambiguous documentary source (since his preferred text is to be interpreted and understood in a manner contingent on the state of scientific understanding and other observations).
Overall, this seems to be a dead end.
Re: your comment 6, he wrote,
Did he use the word “proof”? I didn’t say he did. And I think you also need to be caught up on what science can and cannot claim to do with respect to prove, for I did not use the word “prove.”
I attributed to him the believe that science had disproved these things. Carroll did not say that was impossible, for obviously science can disprove. It disproved Aristotle’s theory of falling objects. Did science prove the later theory that every object falls at the same speed in a vacuum? Actually not; in fact that too has been disproved, if I remember correctly. Science can disprove, Carroll knows it, and I attributed that to Carroll. You need to follow your own advice about being careful about attributions and citations, Geoff.
Now I’ll admit he did not use the word “disprove” either. He just said, ” science says: none of that is true.” Don’t you think that’s close enough?
As I said, you need to follow your own advice.
You didn’t use the word “prove”, you used the word “disprove”. Yet in the context of what Carroll wrote, and which I cited, this is a distinction without a difference. Did you actually read the text? Do you understand why the word “prove” (or “proof”), with or without the “dis” prefix, is not part of the scientist’s lexicon? If you did, the rest of your comment is nonsensical.
Give me a break….
“Proof” is what you do with mathematical theorems, distilled alcoholic beverages, printing, court cases, water-repellent clothing, or bread dough. It has no meaning in science.
I take it that GROH is “God’s revelation of himself.” Obvious, yet other readers may appreciate the hint.
You say my position is tautological, which is odd, because at the same time you show how it could be falsified:
If a true proposition is found that is inconsistent with GROH, or vice-versa, then my position is falsified. I don’t think that’s happened. But it does provide our method of testing, which means it’s not tautological.
How does it advance the argument? It’s not an argument, so I don’t know why you would ask that question. I stated it to correct your mistaken depiction of my views. I suppose if you want it to have some place in some argument, this would be it: it gets us talking about what I actually hold to be true, rather than what I do not hold to be true. It would be rather silly to argue over something neither one of us believes, don’t you think?
You need to follow your own advice and be more careful about your attributions, Geoff. Really. You left this out:
<blockquotehristians have not always got that interpretation right, just as scientists have not always got their interpretations of nature right. It’s a learning process that proceeds over time, as is also the case with science. Some things are quite well established, however, both in Biblical interpretation and in science.
Just because a portion of a body of knowledge is ambiguous does not mean the whole body of knowledge gets tossed out. Physics and biology would be in quite a mess if that were the case.
I doubt we’ll get anywhere fruitful with all these misattributions and quotes out of context that are thrown my way. We’ll see, I’m willing to see if it improves, though.
(I’m used to having comment preview/editing, by the way. That’s no excuse for the typos and slight errors in what I wrote, like using “he” at the start of the previous comment). They’re still wrong, but I’m having to adjust to a different style of working. I’m sure you’ll bear with me on that, since it’s not so unusual in the world of blog commenting.)
What then did Carroll mean by “And science says: none of that is true”? If you say he meant, “Science has shown that none of this is true, but it hasn’t disproved it,” then I would call that a distinction without a difference.
And goodness gracious, science does disprove things. Falling objects? Would you say that Aristotle’s view is not disproved? Would you say the 19th and early 20th century view of the extra-nuclear cell as a homogeneous blob of undifferentiated protoplasm is not disproved?
Is there nothing that has ever been believed in the history of ideas for which it could be said, “Science has disproved this”? What if someone said lightning is the sudden flash of a string of Christmas tree lights. Would it be “not part of the scientist’s lexicon” to say science disproves this?
I am more than well aware that science does not “prove.” Goodness knows I had that drilled into me in grad school. But science does disprove, and I hope you can acknowledge how obviously wrong your statement on that is. It’s okay sometimes to admit you’re wrong.
I’m off to other activities for a few hours; I won’t be able to continue this quick conversation for now.
No I didn’t leave anything out, because I wasn’t quoting anything you wrote, I was stating my interpretation of something that you wrote (see below). Your comments above about getting the interpretation right, and partial ambiguity, are entirely beside the point.
Anyway, here’s what you wrote, with a few highlights of my own. My summary seems exactly on the money:
Good grief: you need to get past Popper (or at least the popular misinterpretation of Popper) and read up on the philosophy of science. (I recommend Arthur Fine’s delightful paper, and see also here.) And in any case, I can’t believe that your criticism of Carroll turns on the legitimacy of using the word “proof”. His argument, and mine above, is that the Resurrection is an untenable hypothesis, no more plausible than the existence of a snowball at the center of the sun. (I can’t demonstrate that there isn’t one, but there’s no good reason to treat it as a serious proposition.)
Back for a bit: Geoff, I can’t believe you’re claiming the legitimacy of my argument turns on “proof.” I never used the term in the post you’re criticizing. I used it once here and you’ve made a huge case out of it.
Well then okay. I concede. Carroll did not say science disproves these religious beliefs. He only says this: “And science says: none of that is true.”
It’s Carroll who needs to read Fine’s paper, at any rate. I didn’t say science says none of it is true. I said exactly the opposite. And you’re excoriating me for equating Carroll’s conclusion that “And science says: none of that is true.” with “science disproves it.” If “science disproves it” is a false statement (which it is for more than one reason), it is Carroll’s false statement, slightly paraphrased by me.