Gramsci

How do you explain scientists who believe in God? I know of a good many at the university where I teach.
A person who appeals to science to justify his/her atheism is no less narrow-minded (and, quite frankly, stupid) than a person who rejects science for theological reasons.

Bruce Gorton

Gramski

How do you explain scientists who believe in God? I know of a good many at the university where I teach.

Personally, I expect a lot of it comes from the population pool that scientists are pulled from, coupled with those religious scientists finding their own ways to reconcile the faith of their childhoods with their adult lives.

If you want the real answers I would suggest asking them.

I am willing to bet however that if they are any good, they will generally reject “Science can’t explain” articles in much the same way I do.

A person who appeals to science to justify his/her atheism is no less narrow-minded (and, quite frankly, stupid) than a person who rejects science for theological reasons.

So a person who uses evidence to back his position, is no less narrow minded (and frankly stupid) than a person who believes it because he believes it.

I respect the religious scientist who puts forward the idea that his belief is based on the wonder of the world his science reveals – I disagree with his interpretation but I respect it.

What I do not respect however, is the jackass who thinks that trying to back ones’ position with evidence, or use evidence against the position held by another is in some way narrow minded and quite frankly stupid.

It is simply an attempt at “above-it-all-ism” adding little more than a **** to a crowded elevator.

Gramsci

But that would rule out all intuition. Following Quine, the ‘simplest argument’ for natural science becomes that only true statement one can make. But Quine’s position does not disprove the synthetic a priori, as many appeals based on ‘scientism’s’ reliance on evidence believe.

There are positions where one can say: I can’t say why it’s true (evidence pending), but I believe it.

There are numerous examples where this has occurred in science; and science would be poorer without it.

Consider this: “How do we know where to look if we do not know what we are looking for?”

The theory/belief of genes is one example.

Naturalism (as in natural science) will obviously come up with a lack of evidence of God. Where would (could) it look? It’s a no-brainer.

Certainly psychology is not going to find evidence of Mind by using the methods of natural science. Gilbert Ryle explained why about 50 years ago; in the “category mistake”.

Your par 3rd from the end alludes to a person able to wonder about his/her existens (Heidegger’s meaning) in the universe. Underline wonder. [Me Me]; an option towards reductionism.

The problem with evidence is that it is not self-explanatory. It is always the servant of method — hence the reliance in natural science on instrumentalism. Different instruments will produce different evidence.

I’ll leave it there.
I do think it’s a pity more people don’t engage with your questions — much more interesting than the usualy blog-fare out there.

Gramsci

Stuff missing from par 3rd from end. I tried to ‘draw’ something with letters.

Bruce Gorton

Naturalism (as in natural science) will obviously come up with a lack of evidence of God. Where would (could) it look? It’s a no-brainer.

Religious accounts can be tested against our other available knowledge.

For example, the Christian Bible has the story of Noah, which should have produced evidence of a worldwide flood. That evidence isn’t only lacking, there isn’t enough water for it to have happened.

It demonstrates the precise level of knowledge you would expect of people of that era – not of an all knowing God.

Accounts such as the Bible would be valuable evidence if they demonstrated the basic level of knowledge one wouldn’t associate with the societies they came from.

Gramsci

Quite correct. The Noah story didn’t emerge from the naturalistic frame, which began quite recently (from about 1750). Even modern historiography finds that and thousands of other stories and accounts difficult to deal with. Take, for instance, the annalists of the middle ages. They provide very little ‘evidence’ of anything, and the historian has to INTERPRET this against whatever other accounts are available.

But, as the Bible is not primarily a historical text, and it cannot be said to be a scientific text (science came much later), perhaps we can only ask what the Noah story means for those for whom it is relevant.

We are talking about two different languages here — naturalistic science and a certain set of traditions in religious belief/practice.

Quite obviously natural science is going to find this stuff meaningless; and vice versa.

In order for natural science to function, it’s ontology has to limit reality to that which can be observed empirically. Anything beyond that (like value) is meaningless.

A naturalist staring at a realm beyond the scope of science, and declaring that he/she can see “no evidence”, is like someone staring into a pitch dark room and saying there’s nothing there.

I’m not saying that science/religion is right/wrong. As absolutes, they become incommensurable, fundamentalist and incapable of dialogue.

Gramsci

This is all conjecture, but I can imagine from other ‘scientific’ evidence how the Noah story might have come about.
The Saudi Arabian peninsula is tilted in a way that makes submergence of the Euphates valley not a historical impossibility. We saw how parts in Indonesia were submerged when the Tsnami occurred there.
Yeah, the earth is unstable.
Think about the recent floods in Pakistan. I’m sure you saw photos of it: water as far as the eye could see. And it lasted a long time too. Whole towns were destroyed. What was the experience of the survivors of that flood?
Is it impossible for a similar flood not to have happened in the Euphrates valley in the last 5000 years?
If floods, tsunamis, etc. are so devastating for people today, how much more devastating was it for people thousands of years ago.
It’s amazing how religious people suddenly become when big disasters happen, and ther’s death on a massive scale.
If something like the Pakistan floods has happened in the Euphrates valley, washing entire towns away, I can imagine the Noah story coming out of that.
Will we see evidence of the Pakistan floods 5000 years from now?

And as for the “known world”, how can we (today) criticise people thousands or even hundreds for not ‘knowing’ its shape and size as we do? Only a few hundred years ago the “known world” didn’t extend much beyond Europe and parts of Asia.

How big was the world according to Alexander the Great? He and his army certainly travelled more than anyone else in his time.

Bruce Gorton

Quite correct. The Noah story didn’t emerge from the naturalistic frame, which began quite recently (from about 1750). Even modern historiography finds that and thousands of other stories and accounts difficult to deal with.

They don’t really, from what I have read up on it the Noah story is a corruption of the epic of Gilgamesh and likely never happened.

There were likely catastrophic floods in the era, there always have been in human history, and you can see how the story came about through a combination of “Growing larger with the telling” and it being used as a fable, but that doesn’t make it true.

The real problem is cultural biases – for example you argue that naturalism is useless against the Christian God right? What about against the Greek Gods then?

The stories have about the same degree of evidence, yet we know them to be untrue due to much the same naturalistic view of the universe.

There are good reasons we use a naturalistic approach when examining the historicity of things, because the naturalistic approach has a high success rate at getting at what is true.

Intuition is okay if you are in a hurry, and it can give you profound insights, but it can also go horribly wrong – which is why once you have had that insight you need to test it.

As to Alexander the Great – he didn’t know how big the world was, but he wasn’t a God, he was a great general. That is the gap here – a God, would have more in the way of knowledge than the people.

Gramsci

Attrocious typing. The 2nd to last par should read:
And as for the “known world”, how can we (today) criticise people thousands or even hundreds OF YEARS AGO for not ‘knowing’ its shape and size as we do? Only a few hundred years ago the “known world” didn’t extend much beyond Europe and parts of Asia.

Gramsci

Quite right. We are inextricably situated in language, culture and (we should add) memory.

Every society and culture has its Myths, without which we would find it very difficult to place ourselves in OUR world.
Think of the role Russian fairy tales play in the constitution of that culture; and African fables play here.
The problem with naturalism is that in proscribing this CONSTITUTIVE dimension of cultural, languaged being-in-the-world, it limits its scope to REPRESENTATION.

For naturalism, reality must be seen to EXIST before it can be TRUE. It necessarily fails to recognise that it is parasitic upon the ethical dimension where the True is brought into existence through such practices as the (re-)telling of stories (our mythic dimension).

Human life is not like natural life, but, embedded within it, refashions existence along a range of what we see as “the good”. Those that seem particularly expressive of ‘human becoming’ appear to outlive those expressions that seem more corrupt.

Some cultures appear Good for human flourishing; others have simply died out because they are corruptions (as against fulfilments) of our Being-in-the-world.

There are elements of Hindu, Muslim, Judaic and Christian living that do EXPRESS that deeper level of fulfilment, which all aspire towards the “more than” of what can be experienced within the bounds of human embodiment.

Drawing on a significant number of writers (e.g. Toulmin, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre), I fail to see how Science (barely a few hundred years old) satisfies those human aspirations.

If anything, despite the good that science certainly has done (curing bodily ailments), and satisfying curiosity, I don’t see how it has actually human NEED rather than human WANT.

Two world wars and (many before these) and a third war looming are a legacy of science’s splitting of FACT from VALUE.

This is one of the questions of ethics and science.

Gramsci

I rushed past one thought that needs explanation: “Human life is not like natural life.”
A fruit or vegetable lives ‘in its skin’. It has no life beyond its skin.
A human body lives ‘in its skin’. Hence, the scope of Medical Science.
Animals, insects, fish all live ‘in a skin’, within which (in the brain) these are able to PERCEIVE a world which is LEARNED ‘in Mind’.
Part of that ‘Mind’ is the instinct to herd in various intensities which seem dependent upon each species’ capacity/need for predation; as well as the environment in which its existence is adapted as the kind of being/species that it is (or has become). My understanding of evolution would fit this picture (is becoming).
Human life lives ‘beyond its skin’, not in the sence that it is a social animal (as buffalo, fish and baboons are social by herding), but to the extent that human life is able to invent itself, constitute itself, and so on, in a world that is re-created in so doing. That is the ethical dimension.
Only humans seem able to do that in a way that goes beyond mere adaptation and species evolution. The difference is that humans MAKE language, and hence BECOME languaged animals. Our World is ‘in language’; hence, we are engaged (socially) in practice sof worlding.
This is an EXPRESSIVE as opposed to a REPRESENTATIONAL view of language.
Now this is where naturalism (science) becomes limited. It must necessarily exclude the expressive in favour of a reductionist representational view. Language can only represent ‘the world’, and never constitute it (though, ironically, it succeeds in doing precisely that in its own way — hence, the ethical concerns).
One way to consider this is to read/compare Ludwig Wittgenstein’s two (whole) philosophies. The first is found in his Tractatus (the Representational view), which favours the scientific purposes of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. But after some time, Wittgenstein rejected this. He found the Expressive view more plausible. For this we read his Philosophical Investigations.

Gramsci

What you say here is quite true:

There are good reasons we use a naturalistic approach when examining the historicity of things, because the naturalistic approach has a high success rate at getting at what is true.

Quite recently there were news reports around various (Catholic) Saints being canonised or whatever is the correct term (beatified?).

It is interesting to read how this process is done. It’s based very much on EVIDENCE like unnatural healings or similar events we call ‘miracles’. The appeal seems very much to science, though not necessarily OF science.

I suppose one can conclude that the mystery of (human) life is not beyond the natural world but embedded within it (also).

Bruce Gorton

Gramsci

I am struggling to understand what you mean by that, by the sounds of it what you are saying is not so much mind-body dualism as such, as the very natural processes that produce our minds taking us further than we can readily understand via naturalistic investigation.

To some extent I would agree with that, except I do not know what the limits of naturalistic investigation are, and am hesitant to say something will never be answered.

What I would say is more “We do not know” than apply a model which has been shown to be so unreliable in other fields to answer such questions.

I will also leave it with this observation: At a time we thought we were the center of the universe, with the sun and moon circling us.

Then we discovered that we circled the sun, and that the sun was on a outer arm of a galaxy, which itself was simply one of many in a universe more vast and beautiful we could ever have imagined.

We thought we were special as a species – created to rule over all the others. That there weren’t so many others that you couldn’t fit them on a sufficiently big wooden boat.

Then we learned that we had evolved like any other species evolves, that the number and majesty of the species of this world far outstripped us, that we were just one species amongst many.

At each turn a belief in the exceptionality of humanity has been overturned by more data. I am hesitant to agree therefore that there is something exceptional in our mental abilities, we just do not know enough to know whether that is the case.

Gramsci

It is precisely the body-mind dualism that I am attacking; specifically its roots in Descartes and much of the Philosophy of Science that stems from it.
In this respect I am drawing on Roy Baskhar’s Critical Realism, where he undermines the ontological distinctions between the domains of Scienc and Social Science.

Included in Critical Realism is the view that knowledge is always expanding, and what we once held to be true is always open to revision. For example, our thinking was once geocentric, but is now heliocentric.
Thank you mathematics and astronomy!
Thank you Galileo!

I think one lesson here is that our ‘convictions’ should also be taken as provisional. We are always learning. The problem with scientific, religious and other forms of fundamentalism is that they “know it all”. That shuts the mind; closes down learning.

And I think the matter of ‘making saints’ is an example of the opposite — the Critical Realist position. The modern appeal to (natural) evidence seems to indicate the Church having learned from science; allowing science to serve the process. So science does not oppose religion. This case shows that they do exist in a dialogical relation; travelling as one would, following the line of a figure-8.
The problem emerges when science becomes a religion in itself — a set of ontological belief structures.

Gramsci

I should have ended the last paragraph with the vice versa. Huh! What happens when a religion becomes a religion?
I think that amounts to fundamentalism — when its core beliefs become overly defensive, hence insecure.

We all have CORE beliefs, but when they become ONLY beliefs, exclusive, and refusing to engage with other beliefs in DIALOGUE, then we become fundamentalists. Dialogue enriches our core beliefs, because we have to defend them and, perhaps, even re-evaluate them. Theat is the essence of Critical Realism.

On the other matter (Being Human), where the body-mind dualism becomes a precursor to choosing one against the other, we have conditions similar to a heresy.

The separation per se resembles the Manichean heresy (condemned by the Church).

As far as I know, the Arian heresy said there was only body (no soul = Mind). The outcomes of that heresy included all kinds of corruptions; though naturalists have tended (in one article I read) to defend it.

The other heresy (Jansenism, I think) said there was only soul/Mind, and the body was to be despised. It couldn’t say there was NO body. Quite evidently we do have bodies. The outcomes of that heresy was that you could torture and murder at will. It was ‘good for the soul’. A form of idealism. Clearly that was wrong.

What I am trying to argue one or more of the posts above is for a collapse of the dualism, much as Hilary Putnam does in his book, The Threefold Cord: Body, Mind, World.

It is a philosophical anthropology that allows me to appreciate natural science as a human construct; and even MORE relevant and valuable for that quality.

When science becomes a reified set of beliefs, it becomes a threat to humanity, in much the same way that religion reified from the human condition it is meant to serve becomes.

They both become dead things; and hence both produce death, not life.