PLAYING THE MYSTERY CARD
(from my book Believing Bullshit - go buy it!)
Suppose critics point out
that not only do you have little in the way of argument to support your
particular belief system, there also seems to be powerful evidence against it.
If you want, nevertheless, to convince both yourself and others that your
beliefs are not nearly as ridiculous as your critics suggest, what might you
do?
Perhaps Play The Mystery
Card. As we will see, this sort of strategy is particularly popular when it
comes to defending beliefs in the supernatural – beliefs in ghosts, angels,
psychic powers and gods, and so on. By far the most popular version of the
strategy – the version on which I focus here – is to say, “Ah, but of course this
is beyond the ability of science/reason to decide. We must acknowledge that
science and reason have their limits. It is sheer arrogance to suppose they can
explain everything.” Some things may indeed be beyond the ability of science
and reason to decide. However, as we’ll see, those who say “But it’s beyond the
ability of science/reason to decide” in order to try to immunize what they
believe against rational criticism are often erecting little more than a
smokescreen.
“But it’s beyond science /reason
to decide”
Scientism
The view that science can
ultimately explain everything – can answer every legitimate question – is
called scientism. Actually, even most scientists consider scientism a
dubious doctrine. Many of them accept that there may be questions science
cannot answer.
Take moral
questions, for example. Is killing always wrong? Is it morally acceptable to
design a baby? Science can make new technologies possible, including weapons of
mass destruction and genetic engineering. But even most scientists agree that
science cannot tell us whether it is ever morally permissible to use such
technologies. It seems, as the philosopher David Hume famously noted, that
science ultimately reveals only what is the case; it cannot tell us what
we morally ought or ought not to do.
Nor, it would seem, can
science explain why the universe itself exists – why there is anything at all.
Scientific explanations involve appealing to natural causes or laws. For
example, if you ask why the water froze in the pipes last night, a scientist
explain by pointing out that the temperature of the water fell below zero, and
that it is a law of nature that water freezes below zero. That would
explain why the water froze. But what
explains why there are any natural laws or causes in the first place? What
explains why there is a natural world at all? Why there is something rather
than nothing? Here, it would seem, science cannot provide the answers.
So, scientism appears to be
false. It seems there probably are questions science can’t answer, questions
that extend beyond its proper domain. So, if the credibility of what you
believe is under scientific threat, why not protect it by suggesting that
it, too, is something science cannot adjudicate. Indeed, accuse your
critics of scientism!
The veil analogy
This kind of appeal to
mystery is particularly effective if combined with a veil analogy.
Suggest that observable, scientifically investigable world is not all there is
– there is also some sort of mysterious further reality hidden from us, as if
behind a veil. Maintain that some of us
– those lucky enough to be equipped with the right sort of transcendent faculty
or insight – may perhaps obtain glimpses of the mystical reality that lies
beyond the veil (and of course it’s terribly important that we listen to these
“experts” – psychics, say, or “spiritual” people). Perhaps, even if we are not
fortunate enough to be equipped with such a transcendental sense ourselves, we
may nevertheless find at least some suggestive clues as to what lies on
the other side (at this point, you might wish to reach for a generous helping
of supporting anecdotes to bolster your conviction that, say, angels or
psychic powers, exist – see Piling Up The Anecdotes). But science, as a
discipline, with its overly rigid and restrictive conception of what counts as
“evidence”, is pretty useless when it comes to establishing anything about what
lies behind the veil. Yes, we should acknowledge that science is a remarkably
powerful tool when it comes to establishing how things on this side of
the veil. The natural, physical world is its proper domain. But only a fool
would suppose that science can establish anything about what lies beyond the
natural, physical realm.
So what does lie beyond the
veil? Some would begin with the dead. Spiritualists often use the veil analogy,
describing the deceased as having “passed over to the other side”. While
science may not be able to penetrate the cosmic partition dividing us from
them, the spiritualist, luckily, has the ability to glimpse, if only dimly,
through the veil. If the spiritualist’s abilities fail to show up when
subjected to some rigorous scientific testing, well, you wouldn’t expect them
to – such gifts are just not the kind of thing science is equipped to
investigate.
Of course, it’s not just our dead loved ones who
are supposed to reside behind the cosmic divide. So do angels, fairies, demonic
beings, and trans-dimensional aliens. Supernatural powers or energies, such as
those that account for the miraculous abilities of psychics, spoon benders, and
dowsers. also operate behind the veil. And of course God, the ultimate agent,
is supposed to reside in large measure behind the veil. “God”, as the
philosopher Hegel once put it: “God
does not offer himself for observation.”[i]
Because all these phenomena
lie beyond the cosmic divide, it’s widely supposed that belief in such things
cannot be discredited by rational or scientific means. Such beliefs are immune
to rational or scientific refutation.
Character assassination
This kind of immunizing
strategy is often combined with an implicit, or not so implicit, attack on the
character of the critic. Quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet (after the
appearance of the ghost of his father) can be used to lend the ad hominem
attacks a little gravitas:
There are more things, in
heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
See? Your philosophy
is rather foolish. It fails to acknowledge that reality is far richer than your
narrow, naturalistic, scientistic world-view can appreciate. You’re an arrogant
know-it-all who thinks that you – or at least science – can supply all the
answers. Show a little humility!
Nowadays, the accusation
that someone is unfairly discriminating against others is one of the most
potent you can make. No one likes to think of themselves as a bigot, or to be
associated with bigots. So dressing up your charge of scientism as an
accusation of unjust discrimination is likely to be doubly effective. If
someone persists in presenting what looks like a credible scientific threat
against what you believe, try asserting, or, better, implying, that they are an
intellectual bigot – that their scientistic world-view manifests nothing more
than a nasty, unimaginative and irrational bias against people who hold beliefs
such as your own. Try claiming that, just like women, or ethnic minorities, you’re
being bullied and victimized.
You, by contrast, will now
appear wonderfully humble, modest and open to new ideas and perspectives.
Clearly, you are also far wiser and more “spiritual” than your narrow-minded
critics, for you appreciate that the world extends far beyond your own, or even
science’s, limited horizon. Who would want to side with such arrogant,
scientistic oppressors against the humble and wise?
Non-scientific refutations
Is it true that beliefs
about supernatural agents, gods, powers and other phenomena, are essentially
immune to scientific refutation? Might they be immune to any sort of
rational refutation?
Before we look at the
specific question of whether science might settle certain supernatural
claims - including the claim that God does, or does not exist - I want first to
make two important preliminary points. It is often assumed that if certain
supernatural claims are to be refuted, they would have to be refuted by
science. Only science has that sort of capability. So, if it could be shown
that science cannot refute such claims, it would follow that they cannot be
refuted at all.
Actually, even if science
cannot refute certain supernatural claims, it would not follow that they can’t
be pretty conclusively refuted. The two preliminary points I’ll now explain
are:
(i)
not all effective rational
refutations are scientific, and
(ii)
not all effective empirical
refutations are scientific.
In which case, some
supernatural claims, perhaps even some god claims, may be refutable - may even
be empirically refutable - even if they’re not, properly speaking, scientifically
refutable.
The scientific method
“Science”, as the term is
most commonly understood today, refers to a certain sort of activity involving,
and/or body of knowledge produced by, the application of something called the
scientific method – a human invention not much more than four hundred years
old, the emergence of which owes much to thinkers such as the philosopher
Francis Bacon (1561 -1626).
Scientists collect data by
observation and experiment. They formulate hypotheses – and broader theories –
to explain what they observe, and subject their hypotheses to tests.
Scientists derive from their theories and hypotheses predictions that can be independently
checked. For example, an astronomical
theory that predicts the planet Mars will be in a certain place at a certain
time can be checked by other astronomers. Tests can also take the form of
controlled experiments carefully designed to be repeatable (other scientists
should be able to repeat the experiment and obtain the same result). A
scientific approach to testing theories emphasizes the importance of
formulating hypotheses and predictions with clarity and precision, focussing,
wherever possible, on mathematically quantifiable phenomena that can be
reliably measured, e.g. by using a calibrated instrument.
Through the application of the
scientific method, various hypotheses and theories can be, and have been,
refuted. The point I want to stress here, however, is that people have been producing
powerful refutations of beliefs for much longer than the four hundred years or
so that this refined tool known as the “scientific method” has existed. Even
today, beliefs are refuted by other means. Here are two examples.
1. Conceptual refutation
Suppose an explorer claims
that, on her travels, she discovered a four-sided triangle. We ask her what she
means. “Was it really a triangle?” we ask. “You are using the word
‘triangle’ with its normal meaning?” “Oh yes” she replies. “Only the one
I discovered has got four sides.” It’s clear that, with just a bit of
elementary reasoning, we can show that our explorer has discovered no such
thing. A triangle, by definition, has exactly three sides. So a triangle with
four sides involves a straightforward logical contradiction – it would have to
have exactly three sides, but not have three sides. This is something reason
alone can establish. We don’t have to bother mounting our own expedition to
trace our explorer’s footsteps and check whether there’s a four-sided triangle
where she claims. We can know, just by thinking about it, that there’s
no such thing. This refutation of the explorer’s can hardly be classed
“scientific”. It’s certainly not an exercise in empirical science. No
observation was required. Some straightforward reflection on certain concepts
– those of triangularity and four-sidedness – is sufficient to refute her
claim.
This raises the possibility
that various claims about the supernatural might also be refuted without any
appeal to science. Indeed, my introduction (1st appendix) provided a
possible example. If we understand God to be, literally, an agent – a
person who acts in a rational way on the basis of his beliefs and desires, but
God is also (or was?) a non-temporal being, capable of existing outside of a
temporal setting, then we run into similar conceptual obstacles. The concepts
of agency, action, belief, desire, and so on, are, it seems, essentially
temporal concepts. Talk about a non-temporal agent or person seems, on closer
inspection, to make little more sense than talk of a four-sided triangle. But
if that is true, then we can refute the claim that the time is itself the
creation of such an agent without any appeal to empirical science. A simple
conceptual argument does the trick.
So here’s one way in which
a rational refutation of a claim need not be a scientific refutation. It
might be a conceptual refutation. These are, of course, the kind of arguments
in which philosophers specialize.
2. Empirical but non-“scientific” refutation
It seems to me that even an
empirically-based refutation – that’s to say, a refutation based, at
least in part, on observation of the world around us – need not be
“scientific”. Suppose Jim claims to have a cat stuffed inside his shirt. We
carefully go round him, visually inspecting and patting every part of Jim’s
shirt. We hear no “meeiows”, and find no out of place bumps that might be a
cat. So we conclude, reasonably, despite not having actually looked inside
Jim’s shirt, that there’s no cat there. We have pretty clearly refuted Jim’s
claim, and have done so on the basis of empirical observation. Were there
really a cat inside Jim’s shirt, we would surely expect to detect some signs if
its presence. If, even after careful checking, we find no such signs, we are
justified in supposing there’s no cat there.
There are two morals I went
to extract from this example. The first is that, while this refutation is
empirically-based, it would surely be odd to class it as a scientific
refutation. Were we really doing science when we noted the absence of bumps and
“meeiows” and concluded there was no cat present? Surely, this is an example of
the common-or-garden variety of empirical refutation people have been
conducting for millennia, long before the development of the rather refined and
specialized tool known as the scientific method. Concluding that it’s not
raining because the ground outside is not wet, or that the chicken is not
cooked because the juices are not running clear, or that it can’t be eight pm yet
because the sun is still up, are perfectly acceptable empirically-based
inferences to draw, despite the fact that they are not ordinarily classed as
scientific. Indeed, such common-or-garden, everyday refutations can be just as
devastatingly effective as their laboratory-based counterparts. Call them
“scientific” if you like, but, given such refutations aren’t typically
performed by scientists and don’t involve the “scientific method”, it seems to
me less misleading to describe them as empirical but non-scientific.
The second moral I’ll draw
is that the effectiveness of such everyday refutations is not threatened by the
fact that we could yet turn out to be mistaken about the there being a cat up
Jim’s shirt. This refutation, like any empirical refutation (even of the
properly scientific variety), is open to the possibility of error. It is
possible, for example, that Jim has secretly been producing mute micro-cats.
Perhaps, by a programme of selective breeding, Jim has managed to get them down
to just an inch or two in size, and he has one of these micro-cats hidden under
his left armpit, where we have failed to detect it. This is a possibility. But
the mere fact that we might be mistaken doesn’t entail that we do not, on the
basis of the available evidence, have excellent grounds for believing there’s
no cat present.
Might such an empirical, if
not properly scientific, refutation of certain supernatural claims be possible?
Again, I don’t see why not. Suppose Mary claims she has a supernaturally-aided
ability to predict the toss of a coin. She says an angel whispers into her ear
whether the next toss will be heads or tails. Because Mary’s claim concerns the
supernatural – concerns what is behind the veil dividing the natural from the
supernatural realm – does that entail that the claim is not amenable to
empirical investigation and refutation? Obviously not. Mary’s supposed angel
may be the other side of the veil. But its activities, if real, have
consequences that can be observed on this side. If there really is an angel
whispering in Mary’s ear, Mary will able to predict correctly the next ten
tosses of the coin. If she fails to predict all ten tosses correctly, it’s
reasonable for us to conclude that Mary is either lying or deluded. While not
terribly “scientific”, this would constitute a straightforward and effective
refutation of a supernatural claim.
What about belief in God?
Might that also be open to an empirical-based, if not properly scientific,
refutation? Again, I can’t see why not. In fact, as we saw in my introduction
(2nd appendix), the evidential problem of evil does appear to
constitute just such a refutation. If there really is such a maximally
benevolent and powerful being, then surely, while the universe might contain
some pain and suffering and moral evil, surely it wouldn’t contain anything
like the amounts we observe. It certainly wouldn’t contain any gratuitous
suffering. But surely there is so much suffering, including non-human
suffering, that it’s implausible that it can all be explained as the
unavoidable price paid for certain greater goods. Notice this argument is
obviously empirically-based – it relies on our observation of the world
and the vast quantities of suffering it contains. Science might make a
contribution towards the argument’s effectiveness, of course, by revealing, for
example, that the suffering we observe has also been going on for hundreds of
millions of years (that’s a properly scientific discovery). But the
evidential problem of evil is not ordinarily classed as “scientific” argument,
despite being empirically-based. It’s a common-or-garden type empirical
refutation. Which is not, of course, to diminish its effectiveness effective.
To sum up, even if
we cannot, strictly speaking, provide a scientific refutation of belief in God,
it does not follow that we cannot refute belief in God. Also note that anyone
who supposes that only science is capable of refuting god beliefs is
seriously underestimating what other approaches – including more philosophical
or conceptual approaches – might be capable of.
Science and the supernatural
Let’s now turn to the
suggestion that, setting to one side these other kinds of refutation, no scientific
refutation of a supernatural claim is possible. I see no reason to accept this.
Samantha’s supernaturally-empowered spit
Consider a hypothetical
case. Suppose Samantha claims her saliva has miraculous healing powers. If she rubs her saliva over wounds, skin
complaints, diseased organs, and so on, this has a miraculous curative effect.
Samantha’s friends and relatives swear to the amazing restorative powers of her
spit. Samantha doesn’t know exactly how it works, but she does claim to know
that it has something to do with the spirit realm. By some supernatural means,
people are cured.
Does that fact that
Samantha’s claims her spit has some sort of supernatural power – that
the cures it produces are of a supernatural origin - mean that her claims are
not scientifically refutable? Obviously not. It’s not difficult to think up
some properly scientific tests. For example, suppose we provide Samantha with
three vials, one of her own saliva, one of a stranger’s, and one of something
that is not saliva at all, but just looks and feels like it. We have Samantha
rub her miraculous spit on a number of subjects with various medical
conditions: cuts, skin complaints, and so on. This trial is “double blind”:
neither the subjects to whom the substances applied nor Samantha know who are
getting Samantha’s saliva and who are getting something else. We then monitor
the subjects to see if those with a certain sort of skin condition, cut, etc.
recover more effectively than those who do not. If Samantha’s spit really does
have the miraculous power she claims, we should expect those who receive it to
get better quicker than those who don’t.
Such a test might provide
strong evidence that Samantha’s spit does, indeed, have such extraordinary
powers. However, suppose those who receive Samantha’s saliva treatment fail to
get better any quicker than those who don’t. Surely this would provide us with
a strong piece of scientific evidence that Samantha’s claim is false. Suppose a
variety of further tests are conducted, all of which produce a negative result.
And suppose that we have (which, of course, we do) credible scientific evidence
that people are highly prone to the power of suggestion (merely telling someone
that something will make them better can be surprisingly effective – see Piling
Up The Anecdotes). Surely the
reasonable conclusion to draw, now, would be that Samantha is mistaken, and
that the testimony of her friends and relatives concerning the miraculous
powers of her saliva are in large part a result of the power of suggestion.
It’s worth emphasizing that
in the above example science would not just have failed to find evidence that a
certain supernatural power does exist. It would have established pretty
conclusively that it doesn’t exist. We would have, not just an
absence of evidence, but evidence of absence. When supernatural
claims are tested, and we get a negative result, true believers often insist
that this “proves nothing” – we may not have found evidence for what they
believe, but we haven’t shown what they believe is false. In some cases, that’s
true. But “prove” is a slippery word (as we’ll see later in this chapter), and
it may be that the tests have established beyond reasonable doubt that what
they believe is false.
So science can pretty
conclusively refute at least some claims of a supernatural nature. This is
because such claims, if true, often have empirically-observable consequences.
They are, in this respect, no different to claims about other “hidden”
phenomena, such as claims about tiny, unobservable particles, or about the
distant past. Such claims may be about phenomena to which we don’t have direct
observational access. But that’s not to say that they cannot be pretty
conclusively refuted by the methods of science.
Of course, it will always
remain possible that Samantha’s spit does, sometimes, have miraculously
restorative powers. We might still be mistaken. But that’s not to say we’re not
justified in supposing Samantha’s claim is false. It’s possible that
that my attic is inhabited by invisible space gerbils, that George Bush was a
robot, and that the French are Martian imposters and the Eiffel tower is a
transmitter for secretly sending reports back to Mars. Any nutty belief about
the world can always claim to be possibly true, for we can never prove beyond
all possible doubt that it’s false (as we’ll see in “But It Fits!”). That’s
not to say we can’t prove beyond reasonable doubt that it’s false.
Samantha and her miraculous
spit was a hypothetical example. However, many claims of a supernatural nature
have been scientifically investigated in some depth. Scientists have tested the
claims of remote viewers, psychics, crystal healers, etc. and others claiming
to have some sort of supernatural ability. Such investigations have failed to
provide good evidence that any of these abilities actually exist, and, in many
cases, they have provided overwhelming evidence that they don’t.
Let’s look at an actual
example of such an investigation – an investigation that prompted a believer in
the amazing powers of crystals to Play The Mystery Card in defence of
their belief.
Professor Christopher French and
colleagues Lyn Williams and Hayley O’Donnell at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at
Goldsmiths, University of London conducted a study into the claim that
crystals have unusual powers that can be detected when they are held. The resulting
paper was presented to the British Psychological Society Centenary Annual
Conference in Glasgow in 2001. The study compared the reactions of a group of
volunteers who were told to meditate while clutching real crystals bought from
“new Age” shops with a control group given fake crystals. Those given real
crystals reported higher concentration powers, heightened energy levels and
better spiritual well-being. However, exactly the same feelings were reported
by those holding fake crystals. This experiment repeated an earlier one in
which the experimenter, Williams, knew which crystals were real and fake, and
so was not “double blind”. This second study was double blind. The result?
Neither experiment found any difference in the effects reported between real
and fake crystals.
Richard Wiseman, a colleague of
French’s, commented on the results:
The suggestion is
that the power of crystals is in the mind rather than in the crystals
themselves.[ii]
Let’s suppose you believe
in the miraculous powers of crystals and, in particular, in the ability of
people to sense the power of crystals that they physically handle. But you’re
now presented with these experimental results which strongly suggest, as
Wiseman notes, that the experiences people have as a result of handling
crystals are a product of the power of suggestion, rather than anything in the
crystals themselves. Oh dear. What do you do? One commentator on a blog
reporting the experiments responded like so:
There is much
that exists beyond the visible spectrum of light, and beyond the five senses.
Not being able to prove the existence of something does not disprove its
existence. Much is yet to be discovered. You would do better to discover it by
looking outside your narrow frame of reference.[iii]
This is a curious
collection of sentences[iv]. The
first three are, of course, all true – indeed they are truisms. Yes,
there’s much that exists beyond the visible spectrum of light, and beyond the
five senses. X-rays, for example. It is undeniable that not proving the existence
of something does not disprove its existence. And of course, it’s also
undeniable that “much is yet to be discovered”.
However, while the first three
sentences are truisms, they fail to engage with the experimental results. What
the experiment produced is some rather compelling evidence that some of the
effects people typically report on handling crystals – increased concentration,
spiritual well-being, heightened energy levels – are not a result of some special feature of the crystals themselves, but
rather e.g. the power of suggestion. It is important to stress what we are
looking at here is not a mere absence of
evidence for the claim that crystals have such effects, but rather some positive evidence of the absence of any
such effects. Yet notice how, in response to this experimental evidence, our
commentator says “not being able to prove the existence of something is not to
disprove its existence”, thus misrepresenting the results of this investigation
as an absence of evidence rather than what they actually are: positive evidence
of absence.
What of the suggestion that there’s
much that is “beyond the senses” (whether it’s a supernatural realm or merely
more of the natural world is left open) that the methods of science are not
well-suited to discover (being too “narrow”). The thought seems to be that if
we want to discover more about this undiscovered realm, we need to open
ourselves up to other ways of knowing. But what other ways of knowing? A survey
of crystal healing literature and websites suggests a combination of
gut-feeling and intuition (see “I Just
Know!”), and heavy reliance on various anecdotes about the effects of
crystals, such as people being supposedly cured, etc. (see Piling Up The Anecdotes).
This is a fairly typical example of
how people Play The Mystery Card in
order to deal with compelling scientific evidence against their beliefs in
miraculous or supernatural phenomena. The scientific method has a fantastic
track record when it comes to revealing what lies beyond the visible spectrum
of light and is hidden from our ordinary five senses. As I say, scientists have
discovered not only X-rays, but also subatomic particles, distant galaxies, and
so on. We are given no reason to think scientific method is not suitable when
it comes to investigating the alleged powers of crystals. Indeed, many of the
claims made about crystals clearly are
scientifically investigable, because they have observable, empirically-testable
consequences. Moreover, science has produced good evidence that at least some
of these claims are false.
Still, our commentator sweepingly
dismisses such scientific findings, misrepresenting them as a mere “absence of
evidence”. On no grounds whatsoever, and
in the teeth of evidence to the contrary, our commentator insists that
scientific methods are far too “narrow” to refute the various claims made about
crystals. And of course, their dismissal of such scientific evidence is
delivered with an air of humility and superior wisdom in contrast to the
implied know-it-all attitude of the scientific critics.
The skeptic damping effect
A version of “it’s beyond science
to decide” that often crops up in defence of supernatural claims is an appeal
to the so-called skeptic damping effect.
When those claiming to have extra-sensory perception (ESP) – e.g. a
supernatural ability psychically to read minds, view things remotely – are
tested under rigorous, experimental conditions, their claimed abilities tend
mysteriously to vanish. Why is this? Those who insist ESP is real sometimes claim
that the presence of sceptical observers has a damping effect on ESP, as
Geoffrey Munroe, a psychologist working in this field, notes in his paper “The
Scientific Impotence Excuse: Discounting Belief-Threatening Scientific
Abstracts”.
…proponents of
extrasensory perception (ESP) sometimes discount failed attempts to support the
existence of ESP by claiming that the phenomenon disappears when placed “under
the microscope”, especially the cold microscope of ESP non-believers. That is,
there is a kind of observer effect where ESP is changed or eliminated when
attempts to observe and measure it are taken. Thus, scientific methods,
including careful observation and measurement, are impotent to reveal answers
to the question of whether or not ESP exists.[v]
The skeptic damping effect provides
a convenient excuse for the failure of experimental studies to produce
convincing evidence of such abilities. But does the suggestion that the
presence of skeptical observers somehow suppresses ESP really succeed in immunizing
the claim that it exists against scientific refutation? Not necessarily. In
fact, if it is merely the presence of sceptical observers that supposedly has
the damping effect, then, interestingly, a controlled scientific experiment
could be conducted to establish this. Those claiming ESP could be tested,
sometimes with a hidden skeptic observing them, and sometimes not, to see if
their ability varied in the way they claim. (as my friend Jon Cohen pointed out
to me). If on the other hand, it is the involvement of controlled, laboratory
conditions designed to minimize the chances of trickery, etc. (whether or not a
skeptic happens to be present), that supposedly produces the damping effect,
well that excuse would then place ESP beyond the ability of such
laboratory-based studies to either confirm or refute. However, we could still
have good empirical grounds for being highly skeptical about the reality of ESP
if, for example, we know that (i) all the claimed effects can be faked by
trained magicians, (ii) several of those claiming such powers have actually
been caught faking them, (iii) all the supposed evidence for the existence of
such powers is anecdotal (see Piling Up
The Anecdotes for more on this), (iv) there are many known mechanisms by
which individuals might become convinced that people have ESP when in truth
they don’t, (v) there is no known mechanism that would account for ESP, and so
on.
A similar move is sometimes
made in defence of certain religious claims. When a scientific study into the efficacy
of, say, petitionary prayer on heart patients (see Piling Up The Anecdotes)
reveals that prayer has had no effect, defenders of belief in the effect of
prayer will sometimes say, “God will not be tested”. God does answer
petitionary prayers, just not under controlled experimental conditions.
Scientific refutation of god claims?
Let’s now turn to the claim
that God exists. Might this claim be scientifically confirmed or refuted? We
have already seen that the belief that there exists an all-powerful, supremely
benevolent creator God faces a serious empirical challenge - that raised by the
evidential problem of evil. However, I suggested it would be odd to describe
the evidential problem of evil as a scientific argument against the
existence of God.
Still, why shouldn’t a
scientific refutation of a god claim at least be possible? The extent to which
god claims are refutable depends largely on which particular god is under
consideration. If, by “god”, I mean nothing more than a mysterious transcendent
something-or-other, then the claim that “god exists” is certainly difficult to
refute scientifically. That’s because, in order for science to have a chance of
refuting it, a hypothesis must have observable consequences, and it’s not clear
what observable consequences, if any, this particular god claim has.
However, as we begin to add
more to our concept of god, so there’s potentially more for critics – including
scientific critics – to get their teeth into. We have seen, for example, that
if you claim god is a non-temporal person or agent, then you run up against
certain conceptual objections. If you claim there’s a God-with-a-capital-G: (an
all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good creator God) then you run up against
empirical evidence – such as that involved in the evidential problem of evil.
Go further still and claim, as many do, that your god created the entire
universe around about six thousand years ago, and science can establish beyond
reasonable doubt that no god of that sort exists.
The claim science can
indeed establish beyond reasonable doubt that “there is no god” is a view
currently most closely associated with Professor Richard Dawkins, author of The
God Delusion. Let’s take a closer look at his central argument.
The God Delusion
The God Delusion was a worldwide bestseller
that provoked a huge storm of criticism from many religious people. Dawkins
was, and continues to be, accused of all sorts of confusions, muddles and bad
arguments. One of The God Delusions’s central contentions is that what
Dawkins calls the god hypothesis – the hypothesis that there exists a
superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the
universe, and everything in it, including us – is very probably not true.
Dawkins notes how some
theists attempt to bolster their belief in the god hypothesis by insisting that
it appears neatly to explain features of the universe that, they suggest, would
otherwise be deeply and puzzlingly improbable. For example, it seems the
laws of nature and starting conditions of the universe have the Goldilocks
property of being “just right” to produce life. Had those starting conditions
been only slightly different, life would have been impossible. That the
universe does appear to have such “fine-tuned” properties has been noted by
many eminent scientists, including for example the astronomer Royal Martin
Rees, who says:
a degree of fine
tuning – in the expansion speed, the material content of the universe, and the
strengths of the basic forces – seems to have been a prerequisite for the
emergence of the hospitable cosmic habitat in which we live.[vi]
Some theists, noting the
universe has such fine-tuned properties, then argue like so. Surely the probability
of the universe having such Goldilocks features by chance must be
extraordinarily low. So low, in fact, that it is much more likely that some
sort of intelligence deliberately designed the universe this way. That
intelligence, they suggest, is god. This kind of fine-tuning argument is not
typically supposed to constitute a conclusive proof of god’s existence, but it
is held to be, in the words of John Polkinghorne, “strongly suggestive”.[vii]
Actually, before we
proceed, it’s worth noting that this fine-tuning argument, by itself, is no
more “strongly suggestive” that John Polkinghorne’s God exists than it is
“strongly suggestive” that there is, say, an evil god. The argument, as it
stands, is entirely neutral so far as the moral properties of the designing
intelligence are concerned. The fine-tuning argument faces all sorts of serious
objections (including, for example, the conceptual objection raised in my
introduction: that the very idea of a non-temporal intelligent agent that
desiged the universe makes no more sense than a non-spatial mountain), but
perhaps the most obvious objection is that even if the universe does show signs
of having been produced by some sort of intelligence, it is a huge and, as it
stands, unwarranted further leap to the conclusion that this intelligence is
even a god, let alone the very specific god of love that Christians like
Polkinghorne believe in. As the physicist Paul Davies notes at the end of his
book The Goldilocks Enigma:
The other main
problem with intelligent design is that the identity of the designer need bear
no relation at all to the God of traditional monotheism. The “designing agency”
can be a committee of gods, for example. The designer can be a natural being or
beings, such as an evolved super-mind or super-civilization existing in a
previous universe, or in another section of our universe, which made our
universe using super-technology. The designer can also be some sort of
superdupercomputer simulating this universe.[viii]
However, let’s set this
problem to one side and get back to the issue at hand, which is Dawkins’
criticism of such arguments. Dawkins argues that, when theists appeal to god to
explain such otherwise supposedly improbable features of the universe, they
overlook the fact that the god to which they appeal to must be at least as
complex, and thus at least as improbable, as that which he is invoked to
explain:
A
designer god cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any god
capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the
same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress
from which he cannot help us escape.[ix]
If the existence of the
universe having such organized complexity is highly improbable, then, says
Dawkins, the existence of a god having the kind of complexity to account for it
must be even more improbable. So God doesn’t solve the problem of the
complexity of the universe. Rather, with god, we merely postpone the problem of
accounting for such complexity. But then the complexity we observe in the
universe provides no justification for introducing god. Worse still, if the
theist is right and the probability of such complexity just happening to exist
is very low, then surely the probability of God existing must be even lower.
Dawkins argument is
intriguing, and worthy of closer study. However, I won’t assess its cogency
here. My focus is not on whether Dawkins’ argument is any good (I’m not sure it
is) but on some of the dubious moves some theists have made in response to it.
While there are theists who have responded to Dawkins’ argument in a fairly
intellectually honest and straightforward way, others have instead reached for
the usual bag of immunizing tricks, in particular “Ah, but this is beyond the
ability of reason and/or science to decide!”
Alister McGrath’s response to The God Delusion
The theologian Alister
McGrath is a long-standing critic of Dawkins. In his article, “The
questions science cannot answer - The ideological fanaticism of Richard
Dawkins’s attack on belief is unreasonable to religion - and science”[x],
McGrath attempts to defend religion against Dawkins’ attack. He begins by
pointing out there are questions science cannot answer:
In The Limits of Science,
Medawar reflected on how science, despite being “the most successful enterprise
human beings have ever engaged upon”, had limits to its scope. Science is
superb when it comes to showing that the chemical formula for water is H2O. Or,
more significantly, that DNA has a double helix. But what of that greater question: what’s life
all about? This, and others like it, Medawar insisted, were “questions that
science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower
it to answer”. They could not be dismissed as “nonquestions or pseudoquestions
such as only simpletons ask and only charlatans profess to be able to answer”.
This is not to criticise science, but simply to calibrate its capacities.
McGrath then goes on to do
several things. First of all, he accuses Dawkins of being ideologically
wedded to scientism. Dawkins, claims McGrath, simply assumes that “science has all the
answers”. But of course, scientists need to show a little
humility. There are “questions science cannot answer”.
This first line of attack
on Dawkins, though popular with his critics, entirely misses its mark. Even within the book McGrath is attacking, Dawkins quite unambiguously
acknowledges that, “Perhaps there are some genuinely profound and meaningful
questions that are forever beyond the reach of science.”[xi]
Indeed, Dawkins seems happy to concede that moral questions may well fall into
this category. Dawkins says: “we can all agree that science’s entitlement to
advise us on moral values is problematic to say the least”[xii].
McGrath is attacking a position Dawkins does not hold.
In fact, not only is McGrath’s
charge of scientism is unwarranted, it is in any case irrelevant. For suppose
we can show that scientism is false – that there are indeed certain questions
science cannot answer. Does it follow that Dawkins’ argument fails? Obviously
not. Science might still be able to show there’s no god. Perhaps Dawkins has.
McGrath then proceeds to
attack Dawkins’ argument against the god hypothesis, not by identifying any
flaw in it, but by simply insisting we can’t “prove there is no god”. Now, interestingly, Dawkins remarks in The God Delusion that in McGrath’s earlier attack on Dawkins,
McGrath’s point seemed to boil down to “the undeniable but ignominiously weak
point that you cannot disprove the existence of God”[xiii].
Dawkins agrees we can’t conclusively prove
the non-existence of god, but points out that doesn’t entail that belief in god
is immune to scientific skepticism. For, Dawkins suggests, the god hypothesis
has observable consequences:
a universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind
of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?[xiv]
Dawkins maintains that, in
response to this question, McGrath previously offered no real answer. It’s
ironic, then, that in the Times
article in which McGrath attacks Dawkins, McGrath still offers no answer.
In short, McGrath entirely fails to engage with Dawkins’ argument. McGrath
merely levels at Dawkins the inaccurate and irrelevant charge of scientism, and
makes the inaccurate claim that Dawkins is trying conclusively to prove there’s
no God, which Dawkins explicitly is not.
Still, it’s worth spending a
moment to consider why McGrath
supposes there can be no conclusive proof or disproof of the existence of
God. In his book The Dawkins Delusion – Atheist Fundamentalism and The Denial of The
Divine, McGrath presents an argument of sorts:
Any
given set of observations can be explained by a number of theories. To use the
jargon of the philosophy of science: theories are under-determined by the
evidence. The question then arises: What criterion be used to decide between them,
especially when they are ‘empirically equivalent’. Simplicity? Beauty? The
debate rages, unresolved. And its outcome is entirely to be expected: the great
questions remain unanswered. There can be no “scientific ‘proof’ of ultimate
questions. Either we cannot answer them, or we must answer them on grounds
other than the sciences.[xv]
McGrath’s point seems to be
that, when it comes to such world-views as “god exists” and “god does not
exist”, both theories fit the
available observational evidence. They are, McGrath supposes, “empirically
equivalent”. But then neither theory can be proved or disproved by appeals to
the evidence.
But is it true that both
theories fit the observational evidence equally well? Actually, as we’ll see
later in “But It Fits!”, any theory,
no matter how nuts, can be made to “fit” – be consistent with – the
evidence, given sufficient ingenuity. It doesn’t follow that all theories are
equally reasonable, or that we cannot fairly conclusively settle the question
of whether certain theories are true on the basis of observational evidence. In
effect, McGrath here just asserts
that the god question cannot be fairly conclusively settled on the basis of
observational evidence. Again, he has no argument. But he does have insults. He
peppers his responses to Dawkins with numerous ad hominem attacks, variously describing Dawkins’s approach as
“aggressive “, “embittered”, and “fanatical”.
Say, “Ah, but of course
this is beyond the ability of science and reason to decide” often enough, and
there’s a good chance people will start to accept it without even thinking
about it. It will become an immunizing “factoid” that can be conveniently
wheeled out whenever a rational threat to the credibility of your belief crops
up. Perhaps this is why, rather than respond to Dawkins’ arguments, McGrath
just starts chanting the, “Ah, but of course this beyond the ability of
reason/science to decide” mantra, recognizing that many readers, even if
momentarily stung by Dawkins into entertaining a serious doubt, can quickly by
lulled back to sleep: “Oh yes, I remember, it’s beyond the ability of
science/reason… scientism…zzzzz.”
Despite its intellectual trappings,
McGrath’s response to Dawkins, in essence, has no more substance to it than
does that of the commentator who defended their belief in the amazing powers of
crystals by insisting, without any justification at all, that the scientific
method is far too “narrow” to refute such beliefs.
“You can’t prove a
negative”
Let’s now turn to a variant
of “it’s beyond science/reason to decide”. One reason why some suppose science
and reason are incapable of establishing beyond reasonable doubt that certain
supernatural claims – e.g. that fairies or angels or spirit beings exist – are
false, is that they assume you can’t prove a negative. Indeed
this is widely supposed to be some sort of “law of logic”.
For example, the Georgia minister
Dr. Nelson L. Price asserts on his website that:
…one
of the laws of logic is that you can’t prove a negative.[xvi]
If Price is correct and this is
indeed a law of logic, then of course it immediately follows that we can’t
prove that there are no fairies, angels or spirit beings, or, indeed, that
there is no god. We will have established that the non-existence of God is indeed beyond the ability of reason
and/or science to establish!
The fact is, however, that this
supposed “law of logic” is no such thing. As Steven D. Hales points in his
paper ”You Can Prove A Negative”[xvii],
“You can’t prove a negative” is a principle of folk logic, not actual logic.
Notice, for a start, that “You
cannot prove a negative” is itself a negative. So, if it were true,
it would itself be unprovable. Moreover,
a claim can transformed into a negative by a little rephrasing – most
obviously, by negating the claim and then negating it again. I exist is
logically equivalent to I do not not
exist, which is a negative. Yet here is a negative it seems I might perhaps be
able to prove (in the style of Descartes – I think, therefore I do not not exist!)
Of course, those who say, “You
can’t prove a negative” will insist that I have misunderstood their point. As
Hales notes, when people say, “You can’t prove a negative”, what they really mean is that you cannot prove
that something does not exist. If
this point were correct, it would apply, not just to supernatural beings lying
beyond the cosmic veil, but also things that might be supposed to exist on this
side of the veil, such as unicorns, Martians, rabbits with twenty heads, and so
on. We would not be able to prove the non-existence of any of these things
either.
But is the point correct? Is it true that we can’t prove that something
does not exist? Again, it depends. If John claims there’s a unicorn in the tool
shed, I can quickly establish he is mistaken by going and taking a look. We
could similarly establish there’s no Loch Ness monster by draining the Loch.
But what of the claim that unicorns once
existed? We cannot go back in time and directly observe all of the past as
we can every corner of the tool shed or the Loch. Does it follow that we cannot
prove unicorns never existed?
It depends in part on what you mean
by “prove”. The word has a variety of meanings. By saying something is
“proved”, I might, for example, mean that it is established beyond all possible doubt. Or I might mean it
has been established beyond reasonable
doubt (this is the kind of proof required in a court of law). Can we establish
beyond reasonable doubt that unicorns have never inhabited the Earth? True, the
past has been and gone, so we can longer directly inspect it. But surely, if
unicorns did roam the Earth, we would expect to find some evidence of their
presence, such as fossils of unicorns or at least of closely related animals
from which unicorns might have evolved. There is none. We also have plenty of
evidence that unicorns are a fictional creation. In which case, it’s surely
reasonable for us to conclude that there never were any unicorns. Indeed, I’d
suggest we can establish this beyond reasonable
doubt.
In response, it might be said, “But
you can’t prove conclusively, beyond
all possible doubt, that unicorns
never roamed the earth” This is undeniably true. However, this point is not peculiar to negatives. It can be made about any
claim about the unobserved, and thus any
scientific theory at all, including scientific theories about what does exist. We can prove beyond reasonable doubt that dinosaurs existed. But not
beyond all possible doubt. Despite the mountain of evidence that dinosaurs
roamed the earth, it’s still possible that, say, all those dinosaur fossils are
fakes placed there by alien pranksters long ago.
Let’s sum up. If “you can’t
prove a negative” means you can’t prove beyond reasonable doubt that
certain things don’t exist, then the claim is just false. We prove the non-existence
of things on a regular basis. If on the other hand, “you can’t prove a
negative” means you cannot prove beyond all possible doubt that
something does not exist, that may, arguably, be true. But so what? That point
is irrelevant so far as defending beliefs in supernatural entities against the
charge that science and/or reason have established beyond reasonable
doubt that they don’t exist.
Playing The
Mystery Card
in response to the problem of evil
As we have seen, the evidential problem of evil
constitutes one of the best-known and most powerful-looking threats to the
rationality of Theism. Theists respond in a variety of ways, by, for example,
constructing theodicies. However, many Theists acknowledge that, while many
such theodicies have been developed, the evidential problem of evil does still
appear to constitute a significant problem. How else might they try to deal
with it?
One popular response is to appeal to mystery. In some mysterious fashion, the
suffering we and other creatures experience is all for the best. In some
incomprehensible way, this is the kind of world a good God would create,
despite the fact that it is plagued by enormous quantities of horrendous
suffering.
Of course, as it stands, this is not terribly
convincing. After all, we could deal with evidence against any belief by making
a similar move. Suppose that as a juror you are presented with abundant
evidence that the accused is a serial killer – including independent
eye-witness testimony, excellent forensic evidence, and so on. It appears to be
an open and shut case. In response this wealth of evidence, the defence simply
says, “In some mysterious way we can’t understand, all this evidence was
concocted. The accused is, in fact, innocent.” If that’s the best the defence
can come up with, it’s clearly reasonable for you to find the accused guilty.
In effect, the defence is admitting defeat – acknowledging that the evidence
against the accused really is compelling. They’re right that there’s the possibility of error – of some sort of
elaborate conspiracy to frame the accused – but that possibility exists in
every legal case. It doesn’t prevent prosecutions establishing guilt beyond
reasonable doubt.
The philosopher Quentin Smith expresses his
frustration with this kind of appeal to mystery:
So how do theists respond to arguments like this? They say there is a
reason for evil, but it is a mystery. Well, let me tell you this: I'm actually
one hundred feet tall even though I only appear to be six feet tall. You ask me
for proof of this. I have a simple answer: it's a mystery. Just accept my word
for it on faith. And that's just the logic theists use in their discussions of
evil.[xviii]
Smith is right to condemn
such crude appeals to mystery. However, there are more sophisticated versions
that we need to consider. For example, theists also often say something like
this:
“God, let’s not forget, is
not only limitlessly benevolent and powerful, but also infinitely intelligent
and wise. Just as a toddler cannot be expected to grasp the good reasons why
its loving parents sometimes do things that cause the toddler to suffer (e.g.
give them immunizing injections) so we should not expect to understand
everything a loving God does. God’s reasons for allowing suffering are often
likely to be beyond our grasp. Yes, we cannot understand why such a being would
produce hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering, or bury thousands of
children alive, but that does not mean such suffering provides us with good
evidence that there is no such God.”
The philosopher Stephen
Wykstra, for example, suggests that
if we think
carefully about the sort of being theism proposes for our belief, it is
entirely expectable – given what we know of our cognitive limits – that the
goods by virtue of which this Being allows known suffering should very often be
beyond our ken.[xix]
Notice that Wykstra is not
here making an entirely gratuitous and unjustified appeal to mystery, as in
Quentin Smith’s example. Wykstra’s suggestion is that, if there is a God, well
then we should expect there to be many things we cannot understand. In
particular, we should expect there to exist many evils for which God’s
reasons remain mysterious. In which case, the fact that there exist such
evils is not good evidence that there’s no such God.
This sort of appeal to
mystery to deal with the evidential problem of evil may be more sophisticated,
but I can’t see that it ultimately fares much better than the cruder version.
First, notice that when a
parent inflicts suffering on their child for that child’s good, the parent will
do their very best to explain to their child that they do care for them, that
this is suffering is for their own good, and will even make some sort of
attempt to explain why they are causing this suffering, even if only in the kind
of over-simplified terms a child might understand. A parent that did not do
these things would rightly be considered callous and uncaring. Yet our cosmic
parent figure, if he exists, fails to make himself clearly known, fails to
provide any such reassurance to those he makes suffer appallingly, and fails to
provide any kind of explanation at all for the horror he
unleashes. Surely we do, then, have excellent evidence that even if there is an
all-powerful god, he is not particularly caring or benevolent.
In reply, some may insist
God does provide these kinds of reassurance and explanation – they are all to
be found in the Bible. But it’s hardly clear to me, or indeed the majority of
humans currently suffering on this planet, that such explanations and reassurances
are to be found there – why didn’t God make them clearer? In any case, what
about the countless generations of humans that suffered before the Bible was
written? Why did God unleash millions of years of agony before finally getting
round to providing us with some reassurance that, actually, it is all, in some
mysterious way we cannot grasp, for the best?
Second, notice that there
are presumably limits to how much evil can be put down to God’s
mysterious ways. Suppose the world contained even more evil, and hardly any
good at all. Suppose it resembled a vast Hieronymus-Bosch-like vision of hell:
a landscape of endless torture and despair with not a jot of beauty or
happiness to be seen. Would it still be reasonable to say, “There’s no good
evidence here that the world was not created by a supremely powerful and
benevolent creator. It’s still entirely reasonable for us to believe in an
all-powerful, all-good God!” Surely, as the level of evil increases, we do
eventually reach a point where we can justifiably say, “There may be a
creator god, but it’s not that one.”
Third, and most
significantly, notice that precisely the same immunizing strategy can be
employed to defend belief in an evil god against the evidential problem of
good. A believer in an evil god can say: “Evil god’s fiendish intelligence
is boundless. So we should expected there to be many goods his evil reasons for
which lie beyond our ken. In which case, the amount of good that exists is not
good evidence that there is no such evil god!”
Clearly, this won’t wash.
We know we are justified in supposing there is no evil god on the basis of the
amount of good we observe. There are limits to the amount of good that can be
put down to an evil god’s mysterious ways, and those limits are clearly
exceeded by what we see around us. There are vast amounts of good in the world,
far too much for it to be the creation of an evil god. But then there are, very
obviously, also vast quantities of evil – far too much for this to be creation
of a good God.
The moral of the unsolved case
An example of one last
dodgy “appeal to mystery” worth nailing before we end this chapter runs as
follows.
“Why does the universe
exist? You cannot answer this question. You must admit that it is a mystery
that has not been solved. But if you do not know the answer to this question,
then you cannot know that my answer – that it was created by God - is
incorrect. You must admit that, for all you know, I’m right! “
This is a bad argument.
Suppose Sherlock Holmes is having a bad day. He just cannot figure out
whodunnit. Does it follow that he cannot reasonably rule certain suspects out?
Of course not. Holmes may
not know who did it, but he might still know who didn’t. He might be able
pretty conclusively to rule out certain suspects (the butler, for example, who
has a cast iron alibi). Similarly, someone unable to explain why the universe
exists may nevertheless be able to use their powers of reason to rule certain
answers out. Even a religious person will typically admit that there is
overwhelming evidence the world was not created by an evil God. But then
they must admit there could be overwhelming evidence that it was not
created by a good God either.
This point is by no means restricted to
religious beliefs, of course. Many belief systems often start with a mystery –
they offer to explain what might otherwise seem rather baffling. Those who
believe there’s a family of plesiosaurs (snake-necked dinosaurs that went
extinct 65 million years ago) living in Loch Ness, that the world was once
ruled by aliens who still visit occasionally, that there’s a ghost in their
attic, will point to peculiar shapes on the surface of the Loch, or the
extraordinary ancient Nazca drawings in Peru (huge images only visible from
high in the sky – some say they were created for the benefit of passing
aliens), or exquisitely constructed crop circles, or the weird rattling sound
coming from the attic, and say, “Explain that!” They challenge us to
explain how such things were formed, or how or why they were made. When we
can’t, they conclude their beliefs, which we may be forced to concede do
explain these things (if rather badly), can’t be so unreasonable after all. But
of course, whether or not we can explain such things, we may still have
excellent evidence that there is no family of plesiosurs in living in Loch Ness
(for a start, the Loch has been frozen solid top to bottom many times over
during the ice ages that separate us from the age of the plesiosaurs).
Conclusion
Mystery, as such, is no bad thing.
Pointing out mysteries can be a valuable exercise – firing up our curiosity and
getting us to engage our intellects. Nor is there anything wrong with
acknowledging that some things may forever remain a mystery, may even be in
principle unknowable.
Sometimes it’s also reasonable,
when faced with a problem case for an otherwise well-established theory, to put
it down as a mysterious anomaly. If on countless occasions an experiment has
confirmed water boils at 100 degrees C, the fact that on one occasion it
appeared not to may quite reasonably be put down to some unknown factor. If we
can’t discover what went wrong, it can be reasonable for us to just shrug and
move on – putting the freak result down to some mysterious problem with the
set-up (a faulty thermometer, perhaps).
It’s also often reasonable, when we
have a theory that works but we don’t fully understand why it works, to say, “Why this happens remains, for the
moment, a mystery. But we know it does”. We might have strong evidence that
smoking causes cancer, say, long before we understand why it does so.
So the appeal to mystery has its
proper place, even in science. What I object to is the way in which the appeal
to mystery is increasingly relied on to deal with what otherwise would appear
to be powerful evidence or arguments against certain beliefs, particularly
beliefs in the supernatural. Whenever mystery is erected as a barrier to
rational inquiry, a barrier that says, “You scientists and philosophers may
come this far armed with the power of
reason, but no further – turn back
now!” we should be concerned, particularly if no good reason is given for
supposing science and reason cannot, in fact, take us further. The more we
appeal to mystery to get ourselves out of intellectual trouble – the more we
use it as a carpet under which to sweep inconvenient facts or discoveries – the
more vulnerable we become to deceit: to deceit both by others and by ourselves.
[i] GWF
Hegel, Lectures on The Philosophy of
Religion, 1: Introduction and Concept of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 258.
[ii] Quoted
in “Crystal Healing All In The Mind” by John Woodcock and Jennifer Hill, The Scotsman, March 29th,
2001. Available at: http://www.rickross.com/reference/general/general369.html
Accessed 27th September 2010.
[iii] http://recursed.blogspot.com/2006/05/debunking-crystal-healing.html
Accessed 27th September 2010.
[iv] As the
owner of the blog, Jeffrey Shallit, points out.
[v] Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Volume 40, Issue 3 (2010), 579–600.
[vi] Martin
Rees, “Other Universes: a Scientific Perspective”, in Neil A. Manson (ed.), God and Design: The Teleological Argument
and Modern Science (London: Routledge, 2003), 211–20.
[viii] Paul
Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma
(London: Penguin 2007),
[ix] Richard
Dawkins, The God Delusion (Black Swan,
2007), 136.
[x] Published
in The Times 10th
February, 2007.
[xi] The God Delusion, 80.
[xii] The God Delusion, 80.
[xiii] The God Delusion, 80.
[xiv] The God Delusion, 80.
[xv] Alister
McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion
(London: SPCK, 2007), 14.
[xvi] Quoted
in Hales “You Can Prove A Negative”, THINK
issue 10 (2005) 109-112, 109. The webpage appears to have disappeared.
[xvii] THINK issue 10 (2005) 109-112.
[xviii] Quentin
Smith, Two Ways to
Defend Atheism. Speech presented to the Atheist Alliance
convention in Minneapolis, MN on April 6, 1996.
[xix]
Stephen Wyskstra, "The Humean Objection to Evidential Arguments from
Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of 'Appearance'", International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 16 (1984), 73-93.
91.
Comments
Instead of worrying that people believe in god, focus on what they believe about god's nature. I think this approach might benefit Dawkins, Harris et al., who deal harshly with Islam and not simply those who use it to justify violence.
Forget about gawd loving us, etc.
Science can help in deciding 'right & wrong' as in cloning (assuming it works correctly). The silly popular idea of 'duplicating someone' has been shown to be pure BS, so a clone is nothing more then another person, like any other. Even in religion this is even more true as every soul is unique(supposedly). So since every person is seen as scientifically unique then what is wrong with cloning??? After all that is what twins are.
Whenever anyone gets too serious about their invented world view or philosophy, I just remember.....
"we are all crazy, doing silly things, until the world ends." And it all drops into perspective.
A good post and it shows the crazy complexity of trying to figure out anything.
Anonymous above is me.
Point one:
A person you're speaking to is unlikely to be invoking mystery to cheat or dodge, but to say that they don't have all the answers in their framework, and that you don't have the answers in their framework either (a sentiment which assumes that their framework is universal and true, which is why it goads). This is important to note because most of the people you're claiming to challenge have a mixed view: Partly experiential, partly on modern knowledge, and partly traditional. You would have them part with their traditionalism and to consider their culture, ancestors, trail blazers, and esteemed elders fools and wrong in the knowledge that they passed down. That is why they warn of arrogance as you say, and why they claim to believe (trust) the elders yet not have all the answers. It is a more social and familial approach to finding the truth. The conclusion of things they don't understand but trust as likely to be accurate: It's mystery, unknown but worth exploring.
Point two:
Current scientific research has a half life depending on the subject. Astronomy, for example, may hold fast to an idea and be without a major discovery/debunking for decades, whereas concepts in psychology change often and have a typical half life of about five years. If we drew philosophical conclusions on data as complex and dynamic and broad as scientific research, it would be extremely premature at this point, as a lot of the data is only conclusive enough to work with for experts in the field, but not draw relevant philosophical musings and conclusions from. An easy litmus test for this is to note how philosophers like Dawkins, Harris, and yourself are all relying on very fluid scientific theories for your philosophies (some outdated), but how no scientific theory or research depends on, or benefits in any way from your work. This is because it is not a symbiotic relationship but a parasitic one, as the data is not complete enough to yield a truly groundbreaking thought in philosophy that in turn reforms or supplements any natural science.
The ensuing anxiety of that fact is diverted to a satan, the theist, who is blamed for this failure for secular philosophy to please science and enjoy an exclusive relationship with her; but science isn't in bed with religion either, it just has no chemistry or attraction to quasi-naturalistic philosophies that so yearn to be seen with her.
So I would venture to say that mystery is an enduring and necessary aspect and subject to invoke when discussing and debating philosophy, and that claims to science or truth or reason are extremely idealistic and forced, and subject to frustration when checked with reality or competing philosophies and theologies.
To take a quote out of your piece:
"But what explains why there are any natural laws or causes in the first place? What explains why there is a natural world at all? Why there is something rather than nothing? Here, it would seem, science cannot provide the answers."
In fact, this is not a terribly difficult question to answer...
Physical laws exist because physical objects interact and communicate with each other. It is the communication between objects and the measurement of the relational component of this communication that creates the
physical laws.
Physical laws are created each time a measurement takes place in the universe.
The relational component of information exchange between "objects" is indeed deterministic...this is why, when you look at a brick wall using your eyes can't see through it...
Scientism is simply an attempt to reify the scientific world-image.
This is where you don't understand where the problem is with "Scientism"...it has nothing whatsoever to do with "explaining things"...BUT everything to do with confusing the world-image of science with reality...
I mean, you probably do believe in Scientism...because, you most probably believe that causality is a "real" thing...but, it isn't...one can't prove logically or experimentally that causality exists...the arguments for an indeterminant universe and a determinaistic universe are on a knife edge...but, if one were to choose...it would be the deterministic universe that slightly edges out the indeterminant universe view...so all this talk of "probability" is a wrong model.
One can only use a definition of causality using the world-image, i.e. causality only exists if a prediction can be made of a future event using the world-image.
Dawkin's ideas about God and the Universe or so egregious...this is where he confuses the world-image model with reality...he is either intellectually muddled...or an idealogue...either way he is pretty incompetant as a promoter of real science to the public...