Evolving Thoughts

Does philosophy generate knowledge?

So Larry has responded. Go read it. I’ll wait….

Back? Good. Let me address some of the points there. Not all of them, because most of them I have already addressed in previous posts. I’ll link them at the end of this one. But the most important ones.

The first and most important one is that Larry agrees with me about “begging the question”. This is good. It means we are both prescriptivists with respect to technical terminology and that gives us a common foundation. It also means Larry has impeccable sensibilities.

He says that he is unaware of any scientist who argues that philosophy is to be rejected or denigrated because it isn’t scientific. And yet, in a case of apparent self-unawareness, that is exactly the view he has been pushing for some time, and it is also the view that Mlodinow and Hawking, Krauss and other scientists have also been pushing for a while now. I think of it, and we can call it, the Feynman Position (“philosophers are to science as ornithologists are to birds”). It is inherent in the books by Victor Stenger (The God Hypothesis) and Dawkins’ own books. Philosophy is fine if it agrees that religion is irrational or something not to be taken seriously. But when it dares to suggest that we might consider a view, like guided evolution by God, in order to determine whether or not a theist must of necessity be anti-Darwinian (and that given that Darwinian evolution is a fact we have thereby discredited theism), as Elliot Sober has done, then that is the idiocy and arrogance of philosophy!

I have argued exactly along the lines Sober (and Ruse, and many others) have done: there is a conceptual coherence between at least one kind of providentialism and Darwinian evolution. Am I therefore arrogant? None of these philosophers – exactly none of them – have ever argued that facts are open to negotiation by religious or conceptual worldview. They are all  very much pro-science. Sober has even written many books defending the inferential and conceptual coherence of Darwinian evolution, especially of natural selection. So if they think facts are facts, and that evolution occurs, what harm is there in considering whether someone who is religious might be able to hold theism and Darwinian evolution with all its accidents and contingencies simultaneously?

There is only one real reason why this might arouse Larry’s and the others’ ire: theism is false and so arguments that show someone might be a good scientist and religious are pernicious. In short, this is about accommodationism, which Larry has often railed against before. Religion and science are simply not, he says, compatible in any fashion. If a philosopher who is not religious, like Michael Ruse or Elliot Sober or Massimo Pigliucci, or someone as innocuous as me holds that they might be, we are anti science at heart. We are arrogant. We are foolish.

But a philosopher must proceed on what has come to be known as the Principle of Charity, and to argue with others as if they were at least trying to be reasonable. We cannot presume ab initio that our preferred view is right. Maybe religion and science are not only compatible, but even need each other. I don’t think so, but I can’t begin an argument on that presumption. To do so would undercut the very idea of reasoned discourse. The principle of charity requires us to reconstruct our interlocutor’s position and argument in the best possible fashion on the assumption they are honest and intelligent, and to argue against that (or be convinced, if it turns out the argument succeeds). Neither Larry nor Coyne seem to do this when considering the religious view.

I am not, I repeat not, arguing for there being “different ways of knowledge” here, although that is an interesting topic in its own right. Larry’s constant repetition of this claim is a red herring. I am not trying to produce knowledge, nor, to my best awareness, have I ever done so, except accidentally and then as a historian of ideas, not as a philosopher. Philosophy does not produce knowledge; that is the job of science. Philosophy examines ways knowledge is claimed to be produced, and the implications of what that knowledge might be for other views we hold. For example, we do not show that free will exists or not. If there is a neurobiological cause of all our actions, then that is the scientific result, and there’s an end to it (until some other science is done that refutes or refines that claim). What the philosopher does with that is try to figure out what, of our prior views on free will, must be abandoned in the light of these results, and what can be retained or revised. It might turn out that, for example, freedom of the will is simply a legal concept, and so we do not need to base it upon causal indeterminacy (my view, by the way). That is not knowledge. That is an argument from knowledge.

I do not know any nonreligious philosophers who argue that religion produces knowledge of a different kind. There may very well be some; not much would surprise me about people’s positions whether they are philosophers or not. But it is hardly the default view in analytic or even in continental philosophy. What philosophy does with such claims is examine them for coherence, ambiguities, and implications. “Suppose”, the atheist philosopher might say, “God reveals himself one way on a Wednesday and another way on a Sunday. Would you still count revelation as knowledge?” The theist philosopher would then have to defend against that point. The atheist philosopher raising the mere possibility is hardly arrogance or denigrating science.

And should that philosopher conclude that the theist’s position is not in contradiction to science or reason, that is not the same thing as advocating that position, any more than a medical finding that a virus causes Coxsackie disease is a claim that it should. If religion is compatible with science (or at any rate some varieties of religion are) then the arguments based on the claim that they aren’t should cease. It doesn’t mean that the philosopher wants religion to continue or that science should be somehow “reconciled” with religion. If religion and knowledge contradict each other, so much the worse for religion. The “accommodation” here is all on the side of religion (and historically, that is how it has played out, only over longer periods than a single lifetime usually. Religion always has to bow to the best available knowledge claims of the day, and has for at least the last 1000 years).

Larry is correct about one thing: the feature of scientists not entertaining contrary views seriously is a general human feature. It is hardly restricted to scientists. However, entertaining contrary views is a fundamental aim of philosophy, whether or not scientists like doing that, or artists, or plumbers, or politicians. Scientists will do this, but usually not from a desire to explore all issues (there are honourable exceptions). Science considers competing views only when they are viable competitors, and rarely extends beyond that. And my point: that is what science does. It can do no other (es kann nicht anders for the theologically informed). That is its nature. We need science to do only this or science would not generally get done.

But we need philosophy to consider views that science thinks are false or foolish, both as counterfactual hypotheticals and as possibly correct views. Also, ideas like “God” strongly test the coherence of our general conceptual equipment at the limit, as it were. Einstein did this, for example, as much as Putnam: what would God see or do. Einstein once wrote:

What I am really interested in, is knowing whether God could have created the world in a different way; in other words, whether the requirement of logical simplicity admits a margin of freedom. (Albert Einstein, quoted in Jammer 1999: 124)

Did this mean Einstein thought God existed or was necessary for science? Not at all, so if it’s okay for Einstein, why not for Sober? Is it because science has changed its attitude to philosophy rather than the other way around? I think so, and have said so before. Philosophy does what it always did: stress test ideas. Scientists now think that is not needed, in part because they are whiggish, in part because they are triumphalist, and in part because they simply do not care (possibly an indictment of our educational curricula).

Finally, because I have some work to get done that I am not paid for, methodological naturalism. Larry thinks, and I quote, “As far as I can tell, philosophers just made this up without ever thinking seriously about the evidence of how scientific thinking actually works outside in the real world.” Really? Methodological naturalism has been the ruling view of science since Thales of Miletus in the 6th century BCE. It is the view that we cannot investigate through natural means what does not follow rules. It is the idea that the sensible world, at any rate, is ruled by laws and regularities. It is the invention of “nature” as an idea.

To reject methodological naturalism is to in effect reject science as a possibility. It is not the claim that there is nothing else, nor is it the claim that science must be restricted to the physical world (at various times scientists have thought the paranormal, the spiritual, and even the theological were amenable to scientific investigation). If Larry thinks that he can scientifically investigate something that has no empirical evidence, I invite him to demonstrate that. In the meantime, any claim that is, as I have often called it, “empirically inoculated” is beyond the scope of science to investigate.

That doesn’t mean that we must accept it as a reasonable claim to hold though. There is a difference between saying “science does not disprove x” and saying “science proves x”. That we cannot show there is no divine hand in evolution is no reason to think there is. Even the most enthusiastic* of theistic evolutionists would concede that. So why is Larry concerned about methodological naturalism? Is it because he wants all knowledge claims to be restricted to scientific claims, and therefore needs to argue that no claim is beyond the scope of scientific investigation? And is that not scientism?**

*The word comes from “in-godded” in a late Greekism.

** Larry can avail himself of many rhetorical questions in an attempt to make me set out his claims so that he can accuse me of setting up straw man. I return the favour.

Links:

  • Larry’s first post, with links to Jerry Coyne’s post, and one of Larry’s prior posts about Sober.
  • My response.
  • His response that I am here responding to.
  • My previous attack on anti philosophy by scientists.
  • Cat videos.
Epistemology General Science Logic and philosophy Metaphysics Philosophy Science

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Comments (87)

  1. Not. I am only answering to the title of your post because I will have to read the contents in an evil, alchohol deprived state on the morrow. Which will give me clues to answer no doubt. On the face of it, Philosophy, while an accredited discipline, does no useful work nor discover any useful ideas whatever.

      1. The question is whether you need to be sober to write. BTW, the last thing I would call you, at least when it comes to philosophy, is “innocuous.”

    2. “On the face of it, Philosophy, while an accredited discipline, does no useful work nor discover any useful ideas whatever.”

      Gotta love nerd-programmers that state unsupported propositions as if they were arguments. You may as well have stated, “HURR DURR, GO TEAM SCIENCE!” Protip: Arguments consist of reasons and conclusions. What you have stated is a conclusion without reasons, making your preceding opinion impossible to attack. Come back to us when you construct a proper argument, jackass.

  3. It bothers me that these discussions always seem to assume that criticisms of scientism are always attempts to justify theology. I’ve gotta believe that there are plenty of folks like me who could care less about theology, but find the notion that the natural sciences and their methods have a monopoly on rational inquiry to be simply bizarre. What about ethics, history, law, literary criticism, economics—not to mention the umpteen unnamed activities that actual human beings do with their minds? Many of the scientists I’ve asked about these other things reveal a remarkable lack of experience with what’s involved in them. For example they seem to think that historians are in the business of accumulating facts about the past as if history were a sort of hyper-detailed geology instead of a conversation about what mattered in the past, a conversation that should certainly be mindful of what actually happened but is never reducible to it.

    Since discourse does other things than merely describe or report, the space of rational discourse is enormously big, vastly bigger than the subspace occupied by the sciences. The commonsense of many scientists seems to operate with an impoverished metaphysical imagination. i.e. they seem think of the universe of discourse as a big room with stuff in it. Of course it could be that valuing,deciding, choosing, creating, legislating, praising, and so on are purely irrational activities and that only knowing is legitimate. Thing is, I don’t merely think that this Sheldon Cooper version of reality is a tad constricting. I think it’s simply erroneous.

    1. The scientific way of knowing involves evidence, rationalism, and healthy skepticism. It’s used by everyone who wants to produce knowledge. This includes historians and economists. Not so sure about lawyers.

      1. Larry, your definition of science is eccentric, to say the least. Far too opportunistic as well. It is not credible. You can keep economics if you want to. As economists seem to increasingly mistake that they are practicing biology these days, I doubt it’s going to be a marriage that benefits biology in the long run. You want to claim the Laffer Curve for science? How about Milton Friedman?

  4. Your paragraph #8 ends the argument. So why did you “bury the lede”?

    But you may not have been the original target. What some scientists find objectionable is philosophers who claim to have special insight into what the science means and how science “should” be done.

    1. This is part of an ongoing debate Larry and I have been having for a good 20 years, and here it is part of a series of blog posts. The lede (I really hate that term; I’m not a journalist and when I briefly was the term was “lead”) is in the headline question.

      Much of this is based on how scientists in the 1960s and 70s responded to the strictures of Popper. But this isn’t relevant any more. When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s, Popper had been largely abandoned in philosophy of science and by the end of the 80s – 22 years ago! – philosophy of science had ceased imposing methodological strictures on scientists. Arguably it never really did apart from Popper. The positivists of yore thought that science had its own method, and they were just explicating it. No Kuhnian would impose such constraints, nor any Feyerabendian, Lakatosian, New Experimentalist, Semantic Theorist etc., etc. So who are these scientists responding to exactly? Something they encountered in the 60s? Something they heard at third hand? Some popular writer? My godz, if I reacted to everything said by a popular science writer, I’d be in a constant state of curmudgeonality…

      Oh, wait. That might explain Larry’s views.

      1. Your headline question serves the journalistic purpose of getting people to read, but while postponing the answer also serves that purpose by giving lots of scope for the conversation to continue, it blocks the philosophical purpose of creating clarity. If you want to move forward quickly then it is best to “get the lead out” and state clearly that the answer is “no”.

        1. Well, not really “no” of course. More like “not of the answers to certain kinds of questions”. Knowledge of various patterns of human discourse is useful for helping to clarify when people are arguing at cross purposes and I think philosophers do their discipline more credit when they take on the role of facilitator than when they presume to actually arbitrate or evaluate the answers to “philosophical” questions.

  5. Feynman was not as dismissive of philosophy in general as his hostile comments sometimes suggest. He took the trouble to study it himself, and in his Messenger Lectures series (later published as _The Character of Physical Law_) gave an account of the test of a law that could have come straight out of any mainstream philosophy of science textbook of the time (such as Hempel).

    I think it’s better to think of Feynman as we might think of AJ Ayer — a considerable (if specialized) philosopher in his own right, who thought that mush philosophy was literally nonsensical — that “the traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.” That is the sort of thing only a philosopher would say!

  6. I’ve read this and the previous post again, and the comments, and see where some confusion arises (at least for me).

    If you (all philosophical ifs and buts noted in advance) assume that Philosophy is the Queen of Science then such a label implies that all knowledge derived from scientific activities is subordinate to the considered realm of Philosophy.

    This may have been a sensible world view when sciences were starting up and were mostly about collecting observations. But now sciences have started to recognise and formalise natural regularities, the considered realm of Philosophy struggles to maintain its position.

    Now if you were to argue that a more accurate model (all philosophical ifs and buts noted in advance) of Philosophy is as the Handmaiden of Science (and History, Literature, Politics etc.) then you get a different view. As Handmaiden (or Butler) the role of Philosophy is to watch scientists and others going about their business and to facilitate the clarity of concepts arising from those activities. Possibly to give a discrete cough when ideas are getting out of hand.

    Scientists don’t want their elbows joggled with ideas that are not directly useful, and Philosophers don’t wish to have their well meaning interjections ignored. Times of transition are stressful.

    1. 🙂
      However, I don’t think anyone ever called philosophy Queen of the Sciences. That was Theology, at least during the middle ages. And at least since Locke if not earlier philosophy has been seen as the “underlaborer” of science, clearing up the undergrowth so the tree of knowledge can grow unimpeded. The metaphor of the Butler of Science brings to mind Remains of the Day. I’m not sure that’s the right idea…

      1. It’s interesting in itself that various disciplines have been named ‘The Queen Of Science’.

        A bit of Googling will demonstrate that Philosophy is The Queen of Science, but so is Theology, Biblical Theology, Mathematics, Metaphysics, Metaphilosophy, Psychology (thanks Nietzsche), Physics, Art (Leonardo Da Vinci), Chemistry, Logic, and so on.

        There’s a bit of a theme here… it would seem that an expert in their particular field judges their discipline to be the bestest.

        2. Speaking as a chemist, chemistry is not the Queen of the Sciences. It does not hold such a lofty position. It’s more like the Very Scientific But Unpopular Second Cousin of the Cool Sciences Who Gets Invited To Parties But Talked About In Disparaging Tones For Smelling Funny Despite Being Kind Of Useful.

          But the important thing to note is I’m not bitter about that. 😉

          Louis

  8. I am not, I repeat not, arguing for there being “different ways of knowledge” here, although that is an interesting topic in its own right.

    Is “knowing” whether your argument is logical and follows from your premises itself “knowledge”? Does Larry have “a way of knowing that relies on evidence” that demonstrates that any particular scientific claim is logical? Or is the logic separate from the evidence?

    ID advocates (IDiots in Larry-speak) claim that they are arguing based on evidence. What do you call the process of examining and deconstructing their arguments? Does it rely on “evidence” (they are claiming the same evidence) or does it rely on the philosophical process of examining ways knowledge is claimed to be produced?

  9. I strongly agree with your idea of philosophy as a tool to teach sound thinking and produce “clarity”, expressed in your previous post. Sound, clear, critical thinking is vital to the scientific approach. However, as others have already noted, the simple answer to Larry’s straightforward question is buried in the eighth paragraph (“Philosophy does not produce knowledge; that is the job of science”). And in a meandering post that tries to go everywhere (including psychology!) except tackling the question head-on. So much for clarity in this case. (I also think you’re selling philosophy short, as with Larry I too think philosophy produces knowledge… and when it does so it’s done scientifically.)

    Larry also painstakingly explained that you are missing that it’s not just scientists that use the scientific method to discover knowledge; he’s not carving out some hallowed ground for a segregated science, which is what you seem to be arguing against, he’s claiming for science/asking whether all endeavors that produce knowledge use the scientific method. He already accepted the charge of scientism, not just for himself but for economists, historians, etc. You talked about charity in arguing, but you seem to not take Larry at face value there and it makes your last paragraphs strange in the extreme, given the strength in the reality of his observation.

    Finally, while I agree with the idea of philosophy as “stress testing” knowledge, there is such a thing as nonsense and absurdity. Imagine the person who created airbags. It’s a waste of everyone’s time to come up with a stress test for this product on skateboards or oatmeal (if that can even be imagined). Products in the US carry warning labels like “do not use this mug as a flotation device”… why… would… anyone…? And this “why would anyone” puzzlement is exactly the reaction when philosophers become too enamored with word games unmoored from reality. That’s certainly the reaction you see to the absurd nonsense in Sober’s talk. You ought again to treat Larry with charity and address the parallel he draws with the FSM.

  10. And in a meandering post that tries to go everywhere (including psychology!) except tackling the question head-on.

    So says the person who pays lip service to philosophy but wants every issue to be as simple as delaring what you don’t like to be “nonsense and absurdity.” Guess what … that’s what Larry’s IDiots say about evolutionary science and, if the best response you can give is that they are talking nonsense and absurdity, then you have made no better argument then they have. That’s not word games unmoored from reality … it is the very basis of rationality. Unless you’ve given up on the need for that.

    1. Talking about stress testing air bags on oatmeal makes no sense. It’s absurd. It’s unmoored from reality. Talking about the FSM directing evolution is also absurd and unmoored from reality. This is what Sober’s overly long presentation boils down to. Please explain how philosophy distinguishes between them, since clearly intelligent folks are missing something.

      Perhaps you’re taking offense (my apologies) because you think there’s value in the exercise of testing air bags on skareboards, say, and I suppose I could see that there’s something amazing about being even able to construct such things. Perhaps we might even figure out something new and useful. Perhaps not for the oatmeal, but then again maybe you’d argue that seeing failure is instructive as well?

      I’m really trying to guess what your answer might be, all by myself and despite rather content free snark; you talk a lot about charity and trying to understand, but you’re not showing much in practice. I tried to point out how philosophy is useful and where we agreed. I tried to point out where I think you’re talking past Larry and seem to be missing points important to the other side–they may not seem important to you perhaps, but then it would be good to know why and at any rate, what you think, I’m curious and want your opinion. If it’s a waste of your time, my apologies.

      1. Switched over to Chrome and that seems to be working. For the “record,” here’s what I said:

        Haven’t actually read John’s post? Here, let me help:

        If Larry thinks that he can scientifically investigate something that has no empirical evidence, I invite him to demonstrate that. In the meantime, any claim that is, as I have often called it, “empirically inoculated” is beyond the scope of science to investigate.

        That doesn’t mean that we must accept it as a reasonable claim to hold though. There is a difference between saying “science does not disprove x” and saying “science proves x”. That we cannot show there is no divine hand in evolution is no reason to think there is. Even the most enthusiastic* of theistic evolutionists would concede that. So why is Larry concerned about methodological naturalism? Is it because he wants all knowledge claims to be restricted to scientific claims, and therefore needs to argue that no claim is beyond the scope of scientific investigation? And is that not scientism?

        The issue is not whether air bags are the same as god(s), the issue is how you come to think air bags are the same as god(s).

        … you talk a lot about charity and trying to understand, but you’re not showing much in practice.

        Don’t mistake me for John Wilkins. I, in many ways, wish I could be more like him, but I am, by profession a lawyer, and lawyers have no such instruction to be charitable. Still, I try, in these debates, to be at least civil if not snark free.

        … maybe you’d argue that seeing failure is instructive as well?

        Well, if you take Popper seriously, it is the very basis of science. But, as John has noted, nobody takes him seriously anymore … though in a few instances I think they should. Yes, failure in science is instructive … but about what? Let’s take Larry’s an Jerry’s favorite example … “intercessory prayer.”

        The only way that intercessory prayer would produce “scientific” evidence of its efficacy is if “God” was like a “natural law” … one prayer, one healing. Statistical studies can only tell us that God is not a natural law we can rely on to do what we expect he/she/it always does. But what theist claims that God is a natural law”?

        That’s the point of philosophers like Ruse, Sober, Pigliucci and John. Constantly trotting out “evidence” contradicting something that is not claimed is exactly the kind of philosophical misunderstanding that at least some scientists need to be reminded of.

  11. For some reason I cannot post a reply of more than a few words. As soon as I try to, the “Post Comment” button is hidden behind the black “Evolving Thoughts banner at the bottom and I can’t get it to post. I’ve resopnded to your questions here.

    Don’t mistake me for John Wilkins. I, in many ways, wish I could be more like him, but I am, by profession a lawyer, and lawyers have no such instruction to be charitable. Still, I try, in these debates, to be at least civil if not snark free.

    1. I did get confused about authorship. How far off the mark your comment was from the general discussion now makes a lot more sense. You repeat the concluding paragraphs that try to psychoanalyze a strawman rather than address Larry’s point head-on; I have nothing further to say on that. You also seem to think because I made a metaphor regarding stress testing and detecting nonsense using airbags, it therefore equates to airbags being gods to me; that’s plain weird. You then make all sorts of leaps. For example it is the case that better outcomes for those receiving prayer would be detectable (it doesn’t need to be one prayer to one healing, any statistical deviation is measurable). Certainly many theists held expectations that it would be–after all most religious folks pray with requests (and not for acceptable, as perhaps they ought to).

      Ultimately the sum of your argument seems to be that god is entirely supernatural and can never be measured or tested (since then that would be measurable in our world and subject to science). Which means god can have no discriminatory impacts in the natural world, it must all be mechanistic (or appear to be). Indeed that is Sober’s very point. Which means he always interferes in a predictable way, or doesn’t act, or doesn’t exist. Whichever, god is thereby irrelevant. The history of science is in fact replete with examples of things that were mysterious and attributed to god’s actions and each as proved in fact mechanistic (so far, admittedly).

      You’re of course entirely right that in your view there’s no point in scientifically looking at god’s influence, that would be entirely pointless. That’s not the way most people imagine god, it’s without doubt heretical in Christianity. You claim that no theist thinks of god as a natural law, but most people do expect that they will mechanically get into heaven or hell depending on their abiding by rules, rules which are themselves to be bidding natural laws in this world. Yet must have no objective means of being tested to gain consensus (it has to be a matter of faith, without which there is no religion).

      I feel the need after all this straying to remind you that Larry posed a specific question. How does any of this amount to a way to obtain knowledge? I suppose for theology, they can say that visions, apparitions of angels are sources of knowledge, ways to learn god’s natural laws we should follow. I’m happy to concede that these events (and claims) are untestable since if they are untestable they are not a reliable means of knowledge–knowledge being something that you can treat sceptically, test, check, repeat. In sum, most certainly not on faith.

      I’m sorry but your response over at your blog don’t advance the discussion. I’ll wait for the OP’s response.

      1. Still can’t post anything over a relatively few lines so I’ll have to break it up:

        it doesn’t need to be one prayer to one healing, any statistical deviation is measurable

        That was, of course, shorthand for any statistical deviation. Why would you expect, on the proposition that there is an infinite being with unknowable motives, to find a “statistical deviation,” without first making a philosophical “leap” as to what evidence you “should” find?
        And if that is what you are doing, how do you designate the very thing you are doing as not “knowledge” but “knowledge” nonetheless?

        1. Of course you continue to selectively talk about the issue. Perhaps you missed the point: “Which means god can have no discriminatory impacts in the natural world, it must all be mechanistic (or appear to be). Indeed that is Sober’s very point. Which means he always interferes in a predictable way, or doesn’t act, or doesn’t exist. Whichever, god is thereby irrelevant.”

          Let me put it this way: if god acts selectively, then it causes statistical deviations that can be measured. There is no way it would not, the impact is in the real world, that’s the whole point of something being a miracle, for example. You might argue that you’re not talking about miracles but that it happens routinely, but then you have to decide whether you mean routinely such that it always happens (god is a mechanistic property of the universe) or selectively (statistical deviations occur that are measurable).

        2. Let me put it this way: if god acts selectively, then it causes statistical deviations that can be measured.

          Statistical deviations from what? You are assuming we have some way of determining a base state of what is “natural.” That’s the point of methodological naturalism. We simply proceed on the premise that the regularities that we observe are “natural.” Is a “spontaneous remission” of cancer a “natural” or “supernatural” event? As far as science is concerned, we treat it as a natural but inexplicable event.

        3. Statistical deviations from repeated procedures. The “gold” standard for medicine, for example, would be a double blind study. In the prayer study, doctors and patients don’t know who is being prayed for. The control group is the base line–that is the “natural” state, in your terms I suppose. In chemistry, one would take might test how a reactant in a solvent works by exposing a material to just the solvent in one part (the control) and then the solvent with varying concentration of the reactant.

          Say god does exist and does decide to display his powers during the chemistry experiment. This would inject variations in the results that would need a new explanation. And indeed, science deals with things -like- that all the time. We think we’re holding everything constant except for one variable, but the results indicate that something else is also at work. If we couldn’t figure out what it was, that would be miraculous! But we figure out that the solvent might have an effect, or something’s purity wasn’t right, and so on. Then that’s corrected and bingo, not only is the anomaly explained but -everything- continues to be mechanistic and utterly predictable.

          Now let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There are absolutely things we haven’t figured out. There are “spontaneous” remissions that aren’t explained. Medicine is probably were chemistry was a century ago, but really it’s because what medicine studies involves several orders of magnitude more processes working at the same time which are hard to keep constant such that only one variable may be experimented on at a time, let alone genetic quirks. This is being solved by more complex models and mathematics and dna tailored studies, among thousands of new tools devised all the time.

          Here’s what all the progress of science has taught us: throwing up your hands in the air saying that it’s supernatural is for lazy people. We don’t just say, oh, this remission is unexplainable. Doctors publish a case study, others descend on the patient files, ask for dna samples, students are made to look for things that might have been missed in med schools, and it’ll be used as a data point that must be explained eventually. It’s pretty much what happened when it was discovered we couldn’t explain why some groups of people seemed to have a lesser risk of contracting AIDS, eventually they discovered certain genes conferred slight but significant resistances. (It wasn’t that some women were witches, or morally purer, or anything supernatural.)

          All the things that people thought were supernatural turned out not to be, but were entirely natural. It’s a little bit of a cop out, but one way to look at it is to notice that if something has impact in the natural world, it’s natural and not supernatural–making supernatural and fictional equal terms. If scientists figured out that let’s say, if a patient did some ritual, atoned for some wrong doings in her past, and had particularly wholesome people praying for her led to a cure… and it was repeatable, same procedure with the variables held equal yielding same results… that would be counted a natural cure and knowledge of how to cure something. There would be nothing supernatural about it. We might not understand the mechanism of action, it might indicate a new force of nature, but it would not be supernatural.

          And with all that said and all the effort, the possibility of something unexplainable isn’t ruled out. Whimsical gods might exist who deny equally worthy people cures, who decide to confound our attempts to understand creation, well, just because they can mess without us in undetectable ways. An underterministic prankster god is possible, scientists can’t deny that. And what a hell that would make our world. Let’s be grateful that so far, that’s never been the case.

        4. [Sigh]

          In chemistry, one would take might test how a reactant in a solvent works by exposing a material to just the solvent in one part (the control) and then the solvent with varying concentration of the reactant.

          But that assumes that prayer works like a reactant, i.e, like a natural cause. All you get from you’re experiment is the unsurprising result that the postulated “god” doesn’t act that way.

          Say god does exist and does decide to display his powers during the chemistry experiment.

          On what scientific basis would you make the second part of that hypothesis?

          Here’s what all the progress of science has taught us

          “Science” has not “taught” us that, since science doesn’t do metaphysics. That is your “ancillary assumption” (probably a good one, but not scientific). You can’t demonstrate that with empiric evidence.

          If we couldn’t figure out what it was, that would be miraculous!

          Really? After 300+ years of looking we haven’t figured out how gravity works at a distance. There is an absence of evidence of how it works. Who in the scientific community is throwing up their hands and saying that it’s miraculous? You grasp that part but miss the implication. For the same reason, we can’t use the lack of evidence for intercessory prayer as evidence of its absence.

          We think we’re holding everything constant except for one variable

          But we already “know” that we can’t do that. The Duhem–Quine problem.

          All the things that people thought were supernatural turned out not to be, but were entirely natural.

          An okay philosophical argument but not a scientific one. Hume’s problem of induction. Until people got to Australia, the inductive statement that “all swans are white” was, by your method, as true as “all things people thought were supernatural turned out not to be.” You are welcome to your philosophy but not welcome to call it “science.”

          and it was repeatable, same procedure with the variables held equal yielding same results

          Then it would, under the most widely accepted philosophy of science, be a natural cause and we would be looking for “natural” explanations of it … just like we continue to look for “natural” explanations of how gravity works at a distance. e to adopt

          One last thing:

          Whimsical gods might exist who deny equally worthy people cures

          Just how do you scientifically determine who the “worthy people” are? This is a central problem in all this. Ultimately, in order to do what you want to do (to maintain that science can address the existence or not of gods) you inevitably have to adopt positions that contradict your own position that science is the only way of knowing.

      2. after all most religious folks pray with requests

        As Larry and Coyne always do, you retreat, at the drop of a philosophical hat, to an argument against religions instead of the original subject. We were talking about methodological naturalism, not your opinion about religions.

        1. Good job bringing up the issue, which i point out it off topic but address, then not addressing it while dismissing it for being off topic.

        2. Well, if you spend three and a half paragraphs on something, others may get the impression that you think it is relevant to your point. My mistake. The point I was making was that religious people (or at least most of them) don’t expect such a simple correlation between prayer and results. That’s why they have sayings like “God works in mysterious ways.”

          Yours is an argument from the absence of evidence. Generally speaking, the adage “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” is correct. The exception is when you have a hypothesis which is so tightly constrained that certain scientific evidence must be produced by certain methods if it is scientifically true. YEC, to the extent they claim it is “scientific,” is such a hypothesis and is refuted by science. The Omphalos hypothesis, however, is not refuted by science. The notion of intercessory prayer isn’t refuted by science because the prayers are asking a being of infinite knowledge to do what’s best for someone based on his/her/its unknowable standards.

          We don’t (as Hume pointed out many years ago) actually get scientific evidence of causation. What we get is evidence of a tight (in our opinion) correlation, in time and space, between what we call a “cause” and what we call an “effect,” which is sufficient for the purposes of science but does not translate to non-scientific arguments. Methodological naturalism again.

          If someone gets well, against all medical expectations, in what we call “spontaneous remission” (as a placemarker for our ignorance), was it due to what we reasonably believed was failed medical treatment or to something else? We simply cannot establish scientifically that all causation is “natural” (which was Sober’s point), so we assert methodological naturalism as a substitute.

        3. And after the 3 paragraphs, the first line in conclusion was… “I feel the need after all this straying to remind you that Larry posed a specific question.”

          I think your entire response fails to appreciate something i’ve already written: under what you’re describing, it doesn’t matter if god exists or not. Take the Omphalos hypothesis. If it doesn’t change all the predictive powers of theories, mathematics, science, the laws of nature and so forth… who cares about whether reality is really 16 billion years old or started yesterday? It’ll still behave the same. Science isn’t done as mental masturbation to come up with cute little ideas that are untestable by definition. The point of science is to have explanations with _predictive_ powers. Science is useful to know that 7 weeks from now, if we want to land on the moon, we need to do x, y, z, at times t1, t2, t3.

          It’s utterly irrelevant and useless to haggle over things like what you’re describing. This is why I keep saying your view of the supernatural is fruitless and useless. It’s sophomoric time wasting to come up with untestable, unprovable theories, just because we can, that’s turning off scientists from all that navel gazing philosophy. Oh, you came up with something that can’t be proven wrong because it’s has exactly no bearing at all on anything we already know. Good for you. Meanwhile some of us are curing cancer.

        4. it doesn’t matter if god exists or not

          Duh! Yeah! Where have any of the philosophers said it makes any difference to science whether or not a god exists? That’s the point of methodological naturalism. Whether it makes a difference to theists is up to them.

          It’s utterly irrelevant and useless to haggle over things like what you a’re describing.

          Then why do people like Larry and Coyne spend so much time haggling over them by trying to show that science can address the question of the existence of gods? You can’t blame us for raising these questions when, in fact, its your “side” that started the whole discussion. What you want is for the philosophers to shut up and stop pointing out that your attempts to bludgeon theists with science is not a valid use of science. Sorry, that would be a betrayal of reason.

      3. i>god is thereby irrelevant

        Precisely what John said: “That doesn’t mean that we must accept it as a reasonable claim to hold though.” The problem is your claim doesn’t come via a “way of knowing that relies on evidence.” If you “know” god is irrelevant, then there is a way of knowing that isn’t evidence based. If there is no such thing as knowledge that isn’t evidenced based, you don’t “know” that a god of that type is “irrelevant.” You can’t (reasonably) appeal to philosophy and deny its usefulness in the same breath.

        1. I do not deny that philosophy is useful because i don’t gut it like you seem to do. Philosophy forms knowledge that is evidence based. If your argument is that there is knowledge that isn’t evidence based, and that’s what philosophy is about, then i thank you for your time and for sharing your opinions. I’ve gotten an answer that’s responsive to the initial question in my mind.

        2. Philosophy forms knowledge that is evidence based.

          Philosophy does deal with facts but it is not “evidence based” in the way science is. As Wilkins says:

          If there are philosophical explanations, they rely on ancillary assumptions well outside the scope of science.

          My own ancillary assumption is this: if it’s knowledge, then it is science or something very like science. If it is not something very like science, it isn’t knowledge. But that is not a scientific claim; it’s purely philosophical.

          That is my own view … science is the best route to “knowledge” we have. But if I (or you) “know” that, it doesn’t come from science.

        3. That’s a good definition, but it misses how science is grounded in reality and experiments. For a big example, while it may sound confusing, science isn’t bound to the scientific method; if some other method gave provably better results, all scientists would change overnight to using that. Science cares about correct, reproducible results that tell us what to expect in the future. Without predictive powers, something might as well be false (whether it is or not). If a theory predicts something and it’s so, it’s knowledge. (Yes, it can turn out to be false in certain cases, eg Newton’s laws were correct non-relativistically but not beyond… doesn’t matter, a proviso is attached to the theory to make it clear that it’s constrained and that it’s knowledge is an approximation… but an approximation is still knowledge, and very useful one at that!)

        4. while it may sound confusing, science isn’t bound to the scientific method; if some other method gave provably better results, all scientists would change overnight to using that.

          I agree with that and, in fact, the history of science shows it is true. There may be some sort of methodological advance that would allow science to address the issue of the existence of gods (you could Google John’s “Divinoscope” for example) but we’re talking about science as it exists and as can be reasonably be projected to be. Many things are conceivably possible and cats may look upon kings but that is no good reason to assert that science looks upon gods.

      4. How does any of this amount to a way to obtain knowledge?

        As I said before you first posted: Is “knowing” whether your argument is logical and follows from your premises itself “knowledge”? If not, what is the point of all this?

        I’m sorry but your response over at your blog don’t advance the discussion. I’ll wait for the OP’s response.

        May I politely and respectfully point out that that is a cop-out as egregious as any that William Lane Craig has used.

        1. Hopefully my reiteration of why your view amounts to pointless (and heretical) god explains better why it indeed seems fruitless to me. I do appreciate your coming back to explain that you think there is knowledge that isn’t evidence based, that answered a question in my mind.

        2. Hopefully my reiteration of why your view amounts to pointless (and heretical) god explains better why it indeed seems fruitless to me.

          [Blink] Heretical? So now you’re doing theology? On what scientific basis? Besides, I thought you said that was “off topic.”

          Ruse, Sober, Pigliucci and John were not discussing what is or is not “heretical” in any particular religion, they were discussing the limits of science and left any “reconciliation” between science and religion to the theists to work out … if they can. Discussing the nature and limitations of human knowledge is the very business of philosophy but is not itself scientific, in that it is not “evidence based” (since it relies on “ancillary assumptions”). Larry’s assertion that science is “the only way of knowing” also relies on ancillary assumptions and is, therefore, equally not “knowledge” under his formulation. Stalemate.

        3. Glad i could make you blink–it’s been hard to get you to pause and realize your idea of the supernatural is very… well, unusual. Perhaps a god of the gaps. It’s not a method to knowledge, it’s pretty fruitless. In any case, it’s entirely fair to think of philosophy as you describe its work, and I think that where we still have a question is regarding “ancillary assumptions” because there you must have a gatekeeping mechanism to keep out things that are not knowledge. I.e., philosophy must be sure that it does not let garbage in. If it is going to talk about the real world and science, then not grounding your assumptions in what’s real is like trying to apply the technique of swimming on land.

          I think that might be right on as far as where the disconnect ends up being. Philosophy doesn’t _need_ to be grounded the way science is to what happens in the real world. So one might come up with premises that are absurd and nonsense in the real world, derive a system of philosophy from that, and then evaluate science in that system. And scientists everywhere would groan about how pointless philosophy is.

          And I think that describes many of what we’re seeing today. To return to my first post, lots of philosophying that’s unmoored from reality. There’s a very useful role for philosophy to be demanding and push the envelop and ask good questions about alternative worlds. But it’s unfortunately very difficult to do in a way that’s going to be useful to science. It’s fine if philosophy wants a broad mandate (there’s no reason it needs to be further or always useful to science, it’s already given tons of tools to science).

        4. If it is going to talk about the real world and science, then not grounding your assumptions in what’s real is like trying to apply the technique of swimming on land.

          I see … science is true because it deals with the “real world” and, of course, we know what the “real world” is because we have science? Has no one ever explained “circular arguments” to you?

          your idea of the supernatural is very… well, unusual.

          And therein lies most of your problems in following the philosophers’ discussion of this issue. It is not a discussion of the nature and existence of the supernatural. It is a discussion of the nature and limitations of science and, indeed, all of human knowledge. If you, Larry and Coyne lose your obsession with somehow using “science” to prove the non-existence of the supernatural, you might be able to follow the argument better.

        5. Okay, I just want to say I don’t know how much more I want to pursue this. I have been “guilty” of snark but have gotten it back in full measure. I take no offense and wish none to TJ. We are free to disagree … with honor and respect (and humor). My original “dislike” may have been due to his description of John’s post as “meandering.” John is the most rational and lucid person I have had the privilege to meet and “meandering” is more than a small insult. Still, I am willing, if you are, to call this, if not a draw, at least a truce.

  13. As a physicist going through a master in analytic philosophy, I don’t really see the point of this discussion. It’s like comparing apples with rocks. Yeah, there’s a narrow view on which you can compare them, as objects perhaps, but that’s it.

    Saying that something is better than something else implies that there’s an underlying purpose against which the two things are judged. Science does not explain, nor does it knows anything about purposes. Purpose is something that a self-conscious being brings to the table. And science, so far, didn’t explain consciousness. The day it will, if it will explain it in physicalists terms, is the day science dies. Molecules don’t have knowledge. They only have a quantum state. There’s no truth in a quantum state.

    The war of some scientists against philosophy or religion, is the war of the insecure. They take confort in justifying their position by stating that their position is the best.

    I remember when we were children, sitting in trees, eating fruits, praising our branches that they have the best ones. We were young, we were fool.

    1. Science does not explain? I better find another line of work, then! I’m a biologist (a community and ecosystem ecologist with theoretical leanings) and explanation is precisely what we do. Why else would anyone do science?

      1. Of course science explains, hypothesis by hypothesis. I don’t know why Cristian would think otherwise. But scientific explanation is local, not global. If I explain that the way evolution works is by maximising fitness of genes (were that to be the right answer – at best it is partial), I have explained evolution, but not, contra Dawkins, the meaning of Life. There may be no other meaning, or there may be some deeper meaning – that is not a scientific question or one that can be settled by science alone. Ancillary assumptions always need to be employed. And these assumptions are metaphysical ones, or at the very least methodological, like “only that which you have empirical evidence of can be accepted” or “nothing exists that does not make a physical difference”. So I would say that science’s explanations are local and specific. If there are philosophical explanations, they rely on ancillary assumptions well outside the scope of science.

        My own ancillary assumption is this: if it’s knowledge, then it is science or something very like science. If it is not something very like science, it isn’t knowledge. But that is not a scientific claim; it’s purely philosophical.

        1. > There may be no other meaning, or there may be some
          > deeper meaning – that is not a scientific question or one
          > that can be settled by science alone.

          Why not, exactly? If science does explain, hypothesis by hypothesis, why shouldn’t it be able to find hypothesis all the way down or up or out, all the way to whatever purpose or meaning of things we currently don’t know if has one? Is there some definition to “meaning” that only our analysing brain can get to?

          I often think that I understand what people mean when they say that Science can’t explain everything, especially not purpose and meaning, and especially if it is big, or deep, or mysterious. And then I think about it for a minute or two, and realize that I don’t actually understand after all. Do people refer to that border between what the biological brain can contain of knowledge, and the physicality of that brain as a border of sorts? Do we call the analysing capacity of the brain to understand a purpose something else that isn’t covered somewhere in science? Or, put differently;

          Does this human brain looking for answers somehow have a capacity for understanding that isn’t there when this human brain is doing science? Or are people so determined to leave the brain out of the definition of Science as they rush forth over the event horizon of knowledge?

      2. “Science does not explain, nor does it knows anything about purposes.”

        Bad wording perhaps, but what I meant was that science does not explain or work with “purposes”. Of course science explains a lot of stuff!

        1. Science works with purposes when the system being studied is a teleological system. I think what you mean is science doesn’t deal with final purposes…

        2. The fact that it’s a teleological system doesn’t it imply that it involves conscious beings?

          Take for instance a timed-bomb and a star. Although for both there is an inherent count-down towards an explosion, one has a purpose but the other one has not, at least not an obvious one.

          My point is that purposes, values, truth are only present where there is self-consciousness. And since it’s not clear whether consciousness is supervenient on matter’s physical properties or it’s a fundamental property of a non-physical substance (the soul), we can not say that science it’s the only way of knowing stuff.

          Do you have an example of a teleological system that doesn’t involve humans/animals?

  14. I should mention that I agree entirely with John Wilkins about the misuse of “begging the question” although it’s easy to slip into the incorrect usage if you’re not paying attention.

    It’s like a couple of other misuses that bug me: writing ‘would of’ instead of the contraction ‘would’ve’ for ‘would have’ and writing ‘I could care less’ when what is meant is ‘I couldn’t care less.’ But that’s just me.

    I thought the cat video link was apposite, too. The Canadian Curmudgeon inevitably brings to mind the grand-daddy of all scientific curmudgeon’s, Sir Isaac Newton, whose curmudgeonliness was, to my mind, much redeemed by his ownership of a cat called Spithead and his alleged invention of the cat-flap for the convenience of the aforemetioned moggie. At least, that’s what I’ve read. Is that knowledge?

  15. Have you contemplated why people are religious? Isn’t it the case that these reasons (childhood indoctrination for example) demonstrably produce mutually incompatible conclusions, and therefore these are all invalid reasons (regardless of whether the conclusions may happen to be true)? If so, how could a philosopher express conclusions implying that professions of absolute confidence in one particular religious view could be totally compatible with science and reason?

    Also, is there a relevant distinction between a hypothetical sneaky capricious deity and the particular theological views typically advocated by existing mainstream religions? (If so, wouldn’t it be equivocating or disingenuous, when communicating these discussions with a nontechnical audience, to brush over the distinction while using words like religion and theism?)

  16. I said it before, and dammit, I’ll say it again*:

    “Hi John,

    Here’s my rough thoughts on the matter:

    1) It seems that “debate” is vastly confused by different arguments at different levels.
    Firstly, there are “matters of fact” (for want of a better term). There exists a subset of religious claims that are claims about the universe. These are ostensibly empirical claims, or at least claims open to empirical or reasoned analysis. Right from the outset I want to make a key distinction between rational in a personal sense and rational in an epistemological sense, I’ll call these rational(p) and rational(e). The vast majority of these claims can be, and have been, analysed by empirical/scientific/rational(e) means and found wanting. I.e. they were, however derived, attempts at explanatory hypotheses/frameworks for a series of observed phenomena (at least in part).

    These empirically verifiable claims have been shown to be inconsistent with observation and experiment, shown to be irrational(e) or in some manner scientifically falsified. I think it’s is perfectly legitimate to describe these claims as “irrational” as long as one makes it clear that one is using an epistemological/philosophical sense of the word “irrational”. When considering individual people or groups of people who hold beliefs in the veracity of claims of this nature I think there is a confusion/equivocation about which sense of the word(s) “(ir)rational” is being used. Is it irrational(p) to hold to the veracity of claims that are irrational(e)? Not necessarily, although it certainly can be.

    To be honest, I don’t see any genuinely controversial arguments at this level of the “debate”. Creationism in its various guises is false, demonstrably so. Likewise homeopathy etc. There are various formulations of religious ideas, like strict deism, which can in principle be made so that they don’t intersect with science. Whether or not they are rational(e) or based on reason as a mechanism of acquiring knowledge (more on that in a bit) is a different kettle of fish. For the other type of claims, there appears to be no reason to not describe those claims that are falsified as irrational(e), apart from a lingering personal attachment to maintaining religious privilege (or privileging religious explanations simply because they are in some manner religious).

    Secondly, there “matters of socio-political strategy”. There are political, psychological and sociological claims being thrown into the mix and insufficiently defined, clarified or even separated from the “matters of fact”. Here, I think, there exists genuine controversy. I think the “best” strategy is, as you mention, to take account of the context and act accordingly. The perfect is the enemy of the good here, and a pluralist approach seems the best option as you say. There really is no one “best” strategy to rule them all, and failure to take account of the context prevents one from even developing a good one. From what I’ve read across the main players’ places/blogs in this “debate” there really seems to be a lot of nonsense in this specific area, for example people claiming that simply because a claim is irrational(e) that a person holding it is irrational(p). Ironically, I see this coming distressingly often from the “accommodationist” side of things as a straw man of the “new atheist” view. I think this is because of the confusion over the issue of religious people being scientists. Which brings me to…

    2) Can religious people be scientists? Or even good scientists (whatever that might mean)? Yes of course they can. It’s irrelevant to the issue of the actual compatibility of science and religion. Should there be political, social and personal antipathy between science and scientists on one side and religion and religious people on the other? Does the fact of an epistemological conflict (if it exists, and I think it does) necessitate that there should be a conflict in other arenas? I think the answer is no to both questions, and I think, again, that these questions are irrelevant to the actual issue of compatibility.

    Whether or not science and religion are actually compatible is not a question of totting up believers and non believers in science and publishing the results, or a matter of political strategy. This, again, is an instance of confusing the personal/social and the epistemological. As you and others have noted, it also falls foul of the nebulous definitions of “religion”. This all essentially boils down to an epistemological claim about mechanisms of acquiring knowledge. I don’t think the conflict is at the “science and religion” level, I think it’s at the “faith and reason” level (i.e. religion is a manifestation of fideist claims of faith as a means of acquiring knowledge, and science is the most reasoned of the reason based methods of acquiring knowledge, there are of course other reason based methods). Does faith actually produce knowledge (where knowledge = justified true belief, for a provisional value of “true” given the usual philosophical niceties and caveats)? I would argue that it doesn’t for a variety of reasons (too long to mention at the moment, maybe this will come out later), not least of which is because faith can be used to claim anything and explicitly requires no external test of the claim to demonstrate its veracity. I think we have to make distinctions between what we believe to be true and what we claim to be factually true, and that this process requires a good deal of honesty and philosophical insight. Is “religion” all derived from faith? No, of course not. Within religion there are a variety of reason based arguments and reason derived claims, hence why I don’t think the conflict, such as it is, exists at the level of science and religion. And also why the Tillichs et al of this world are not totally irrelevant.

    This is why I think things like the NCSE’s bold statement about the compatibility of science and religion is in error. There are three reasons: a) it is aimed at the wrong level of the “debate” (e.g. it uses the religiosity of some scientists as if this demonstrates epistemological compatibility), b) it presents features as bugs, and c) that it is false in the crucial, epistemological sense. I think it equivocates on the terms involved and as such is more of an own goal than an accommodationist strategy to cool the social and political situation.

    Reason b) needs a little expansion. On the “accomodationism” side of the “debate” there seems to me to be a desperate struggle to cover up the challenging, “universal acid to ideas” aspect of science. It seems that some people think that if this aspect of science is too openly revealed that this will discourage religious people from engaging with science and thus further the culture war etc. I find this to be a spectacularly patronising view of religious people as a group. Now, again, my impressions may be incorrect, but I’m far from the only one to notice this. I also think this is a major component of the own goal because, as I said, it presents a feature as a bug. The challenging aspect of science is part of what’s good about it, it’s part of the process, without it science wouldn’t be science.

    Here is where I think it is relevant to mention religious scientists, to come at the “problem” from a different angle. If the NCSE had come out and said that they couldn’t comment on the philosophical compatibility of science and religion, that they have no stance on this technical issue, then the objection goes away. If also the NCSE made no overt attempt to pander specifically to religious people as a special interest group but instead presented this as if it were not a problem at all (which from an individual point of view it isn’t), then I think that would have been a better strategy, one which achieved the same goals whilst not bowdlerising science to do so. Show people that on a personal level science does not necessarily lead to abandonment of religious beliefs and acknowledge that whist this is the case, science will challenge them personally which is a good thing. This can all be done without making a very dubious philosophical claim which at best muddies the waters.

    Sorry this is a bit long, but I hope it makes some kind of sense.

    Louis ”

    * Look, I say something I think is sensible about once a decade, gimme a break!

    1. Oh and yes, philosophy does generate knowledge. It’s useful stuff.

      I think there exists, as in any discipline, a body of work that falls under the “Feynman Position”, simply put, the state of being a philosopher (or scientist) does not automagically grant the state of being correct. But that’s hardly a criticism of the whole field.

      Because Wohler synthesised urea in 1828 (part of the disproof of vitalism), at very roughly the same time Samuel Hanneman was advocating homoeopathy (explicitly derived from vitalism) does it follow all chemistry is bunk or useless or produces no knowledge?

      I’ll pause for the physicists in the audience to say “Yes”. Then I’ll ignore them and cough “dark energy”. 😉

      Of course it doesn’t.

      I’m going to take another pluralist stance on the issue of utility in philosophy. The logically consistent castles in the sky that can be built by philosophy or mathematics might not always be useful, but many of them are. Esoteric ideas and obscure treatises offer potentially novel ways to think about more pragmatic problems. It might be a little bit of a stretch to lump pure mathematics in with philosophy here, but since it’s an example I know, I have to do so (with appropriate caveats), Daniel Shechtman got the 2011 Nobel prize in chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals. This discovery was understandable in the absence of philosophical considerations above and beyond the norm, but the (relatively obscure to most chemists) pure mathematics of Penrose tiling was just such a logical castle in the sky waiting for real world application. As it turned out, the Moors had worked some of this out a few centuries prior and been tiling buildings with it, but let’s skip over that!

      Perhaps not the best example, but I haven’t had coffee yet!

      Louis

    2. A very thoughtful response (and it is, as you say, long, and I’ll have to take more time to digest it all). However, about this:

      This is why I think things like the NCSE’s bold statement about the compatibility of science and religion is in error. There are three reasons: a) it is aimed at the wrong level of the “debate” (e.g. it uses the religiosity of some scientists as if this demonstrates epistemological compatibility), b) it presents features as bugs, and c) that it is false in the crucial, epistemological sense. I think it equivocates on the terms involved and as such is more of an own goal than an accommodationist strategy to cool the social and political situation.

      I wonder what specific “bold statement” you are referring to.

      This kind of statement (from the “Understanding Evolution” website) is frequently decried by certain elements, but is it “bold”?

      Because of some individuals and groups stridently declaring their beliefs, it’s easy to get the impression that science (which includes evolution) and religion are at war; however, the idea that one always has to choose between science and religion is incorrect. People of many different faiths and levels of scientific expertise see no contradiction at all between science and religion. For many of these people, science and religion simply deal with different realms. Science deals with natural causes for natural phenomena, while religion deals with beliefs that are beyond the natural world.

      Of course, some religious beliefs explicitly contradict science (e.g., the belief that the world and all life on it was created in six literal days does conflict with evolutionary theory); however, most religious groups have no conflict with the theory of evolution or other scientific findings. In fact, many religious people, including theologians, feel that a deeper understanding of nature actually enriches their faith. Moreover, in the scientific community there are thousands of scientists who are devoutly religious and also accept evolution. For concise statements from many religious organizations regarding evolution, see Voices for Evolution on the NCSE website.

      1. I’d say this:

        People of many different faiths and levels of scientific expertise see no contradiction at all between science and religion. For many of these people, science and religion simply deal with different realms.

        Was a fairly bold statement of an epistemological position.

        Also, please don’t think I am having a pop at the excellent NCSE, I just think there was a more neutral stance to take on the science/religion angle than adopting something (NOMA) that, in my view at least, is erroneous and counter productive. I understand why they would do so, I sympathise entirely, it’s just a bit of a personal nit pick I suppose.

        The quoted text is explicitly an epistemological claim whether they realise it or not. NOMA and sundry philosophical positions are making, in my exceedingly dilettante/amateur/neophyte philosophical understanding, the claim that religion makes useful claims about a realm of our universe. Also that there exists some aspect of our universe which is coherent, open to inquiry of a sort and not open to “scientific” inquiry. I’m not talking here about “scientific” inquiry being applied to, say, history. I think the rational (philosophical sense) methods of science are the rational methods used in slightly different ways in history as far as it is possible to use them. Science is one application of reason, rationality and acquiring knowledge (as in justified true belief, for given provisional values of “true”). I’m not claiming that it’s SCIENCE UBER ALLES, just that the “tricks” of science are the tricks of all reasoned inquiry refined to systems where they are most applicable. I think this applies even in something like theology. Given various priors, various assumptions, it is possible to build a rational theological framework. That doesn’t mean I think those priors/assumptions should be granted of course! And that’s where the problem lies.

        People making positive theistic/theological claims/priors/assumptions are explicitly advocating a non-reason based epistemology. That’s where I differ with them, that’s where, I think, the conflict genuinely lies.

        Granted this is a drift from “does philosophy generate knowledge?”, but I think the answer to that is so manifestly “yes” as to be painful. Does all philosophy? Well obviously not! But does “philosophy” skirt the boundary regions of natural philosophy (science) and applied logic (mathematics)? Sure. Does it make useful contributions to those fields (if we have to be all essentialist about it)? Sure! The simple process of using reason to make inquiries about our universe, whether that be the bit of the universe between our ears or outside that is the only process we know to any degree of certainty generates any form of knowledge. Philosophy is just one part of that, even if it does nothing more (and it does do more) of pointing out common errors of theory construction and giving shape to the generation of ideas.

        Louis

        1. People of many different faiths and levels of scientific expertise see no contradiction at all between science and religion. For many of these people, science and religion simply deal with different realms.

          Was a fairly bold statement of an epistemological position.

          But it is a statement of fact. Whether or not you think it is justified, there are, in fact, many people of different faiths and levels of scientific expertise who hold to NOMA. Is stating an empiric fact a statement of an epistemological position, bold or otherwise?

          The quoted text is explicitly an epistemological claim whether they realise it or not. NOMA and sundry philosophical positions are making, in my exceedingly dilettante/amateur/neophyte philosophical understanding, the claim that religion makes useful claims about a realm of our universe.

          I don’t think so. While NOMA may make such claims, this statement does not endorse NOMA. What these sorts of statements are doing is saying to people who are not familiar with the science “Don’t be afraid to come in … evolution is not inherently an argument about God, as you’ve probably been told. It is an argument about the way the world is. Looking at the evidence will not automatically make you an atheist, as you’ve probably been told.”

    3. This is why I think things like the NCSE’s bold statement about the compatibility of science and religion is in error. There are three reasons: a) it is aimed at the wrong level of the “debate” (e.g. it uses the religiosity of some scientists as if this demonstrates epistemological compatibility), b) it presents features as bugs, and c) that it is false in the crucial, epistemological sense. I think it equivocates on the terms involved and as such is more of an own goal than an accommodationist strategy to cool the social and political situation.

      I agree that general claims about the compatibilty of science and religion are misleading because they are too vague Clearly, where both make claims about the natural world – about what is – science trumps religion because – usually – science can provide evidence to support its claims, we are not required to accept them on faith. (Although I do think evolutionary psychology rather lets the side down here occasionally)

      It is, however, pertinent to point out that there are many scientists who are able to accommodate their specific religious beliefs with their research. I’m guessing they do this by abandoning any of their faith’s claims about what is, retaining all the prescriptions about what should be and moving whatever deity they might worship outside the domain of science.

      This is to emphasize the point that there is more to religions than epistomological claims and that the New Model Atheists are misleading when they focus solely on those failures. Moreover, religions are not always univocal on doctrinal issues and religious texts such as the Bible are notoriously open to interpretation. There is nothing wrong in pointing that out.

      The fact is, wqhether the New Model Atheists like it or not, there are areas of human experience that lie outside the domain of science. The argument over abortion, which I referred to before, is a case in point. What does science say – what can science say – about whethere their is a right to life and, if there is, should it apply from the individual’s conception. This is not to say I agree with any specific religious viewpoint on abortion but neither can you or any other scientist cross the is-ought gap in one giant bound.

      Reason b) needs a little expansion. On the “accomodationism” side of the “debate” there seems to me to be a desperate struggle to cover up the challenging, “universal acid to ideas” aspect of science. It seems that some people think that if this aspect of science is too openly revealed that this will discourage religious people from engaging with science and thus further the culture war etc. I find this to be a spectacularly patronising view of religious people as a group. Now, again, my impressions may be incorrect, but I’m far from the only one to notice this.

      I don’t see it as a desperate attempt to cover anything up. So-called “accomodationists” are not trying to hide the fact that science is providing a better understanding than religions of how the universe works. They do not support the efficacy of prayer or acknowledge the existence of a god in order to appease the faithful.

      When, however, a prominent atheist (was it Sam Harris?) proclaims that, given a choice between the two, he would get rid of religion before rape or when Richard Dawkins characterises as “child abuse” parents teaching their children about their faith or speculates about the atheist ambition to destroy religion, then it becomes necessary to point out that inflammatory atheist rhetoric and the findings of science are not one and the same thing.

  17. I have to agree with Louis on the claim you make here:

    “Philosophy does not produce knowledge; that is the job of science. Philosophy examines ways knowledge is claimed to be produced, and the implications of what that knowledge might be for other views we hold.”

    Philosophy might not produce direct knowledge of material entities, or possibly any direct answers to ontological questions, but it certainly produces knowledge, and not purely in a historical fashion. It’s more knowledge of concepts, arguments and theories. It’s still knowledge though!

    Think about Gibbard’s early work on expressivist theories of normative language or Field’s work on nominalizing mathematics. Both provided philosophers with knowledge that certain kinds of semantic approaches to controversial discourse can be extended to cover more ground.

    It might not make Larry happy. But it’s definitely knowledge.

  18. No, science isn’t true “because it deals with the real world”. I know your reading comprehension isn’t that bad, so I credit your intelligence when I say that you’re certainly smart enough to avoid points that are sticky for you, know when to introduce yet more irrelevant points, or make outlandish claims.

    I admit to a /facepalm at being puzzled as to “why do people like Larry and Coyne spend so much time haggling over them” and that “[their] side stated the whole discussion”. Surely everyone reads the news once in a while. The prospect of having to haggle pointlessly over that much ground is frankly exhausting. Besides, it’s irrelevant to the question.

    And so with that, I thank you. First for your honesty in saying you thought it was possible to have knowledge without evidence. Most people pretend to be humble enough to call it faith. I’ll also derive some mild amusement at the thought of you going around tilting at the strawmen of scientists wanting to “shut up” philosophers, viewing yourself as guardian of “reason” asked to betray your principles when it’s pointed out that it doesn’t matter how cute a priori theories are if a posteri we see things work well enough for success (even if as approximations regardless of ultimate truth) to thus count as knowledge. I will also proudly post in my lab that Pieret’s version of Duhem-Quine proves scientists accomplish the impossible every day.

  19. There is only one real reason why this might arouse Larry’s and the others’ ire: theism is false and so arguments that show someone might be a good scientist and religious are pernicious. In short, this is about accommodationism, which Larry has often railed against before. Religion and science are simply not, he says, compatible in any fashion. If a philosopher who is not religious, like Michael Ruse or Elliot Sober or Massimo Pigliucci, or someone as innocuous as me holds that they might be, we are anti science at heart. We are arrogant. We are foolish.

    Not to say nasty stuff about Larry Moran who is hardly the most unreasonable of atheist-scientists bloggers but any assertion that someone can’t be a good scientist and religions is saying something profoundly anti-scientific.

    The entire reason science was invented was to explain phenomena with methods attempting to guarantee enhanced reliability of the conclusions. SCIENCE ADDRESSES EXISTING PHENOMENA, that was its first and paramount purpose.

    It is as objective a fact as possible that there have been not only good scientists but great scientists who have been religious. Nicolas Steno was a bishop and might be canonized someday, Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian priest and the abbot of his community, Lemaitre was a priest. There have been and are eminent scientists whose work still stands after centuries who were clergy or devout scientists. Their existence proves that the idea that religion and good science are incompatible is clearly and plainly false. Science exists in no other place than the minds of scientists and those who understand their work. In the minds of those scientists, science and religion are both present. In a few cases scientists have credited their religion as useful to them in their science. That would include most of those who invented science.

    A proposition that religion and science are necessarily incompatible is a denial of a real phenomenon and a presumption that those religious scientists aren’t as reliable in reporting their own experience and thinking as people who have never known them. Those scientists are the only possible source of evidence about that. What they have said is the only reliable source of evidence to judge the proposition that science and religion are incompatible. Atheists who are scientists can report on their experience, which wouldn’t be relevant to the question, they can’t speak for people whose experience is different and relevant to judging the truth of the proposition.

    1. Many religious scientists believe in the literal truth of the Bible. That proves, of course, that belief in a 6000 year old Earth and species that were created with a “poof” are compatible with science.

      Many scientists believe in astrology proving that …

      Never mind. I think you get the point.

      1. Do you have any evidence for either of those claims?

        Assuming that your claims are actually hypotheticals, I would say that yes, if many scientists held these positions, we would have to closely examine that and see how they did so.

        To me, the compatibility or incompatibility of science and religion is an empirical question. If, for example, many scientists believe in a certain kind of god, maybe that says that science and religion are compatible because they function in different parts of people’s lives.

        I would strongly recommend that anybody getting into these discussions learn some anthropology of religion. If there’s one thing that such a study teaches you, is that religion as actually practiced is complicated and messy and can’t be reduced to a set of ideas.

  20. There are various formulations of religious ideas, like strict deism, which can in principle be made so that they don’t intersect with science. Louis

    Deism holds that a Creator made the universe and set it in motion before letting it loose. It isn’t any less incompatible with science than religions that includes the first idea but holds that God’s intention underlies its continued operation. In Deism, the universe operates by God’s motivation, running by God’s rules automatically, in the second case, God continues to operate the universe, as it were. If you don’t like the idea of a universe created by a Creator that controls its operation, you don’t really like deism anymore than anything else.

    This idea of “intersection” between science and religion is an example of how constructing geometric representations of situations can be extremely misleading. Especially in this kind of Venn diagram scheme.

    Science, by intention and mutual agreement is supposed to exclude anything that can’t be shown to be relevant to the physical character of phenomena. Almost always, today, it is religion that is the subject of exclusion that is discussed, endlessly. What’s odd is that religion is the ONE area of human thought that has been successfully excluded from science, entirely. Economic and class interest are one of the least successfully excluded, though related issues of racism, sexism, political ideology, materialist ideology… those pervade many of the things called “science” today.

    Most odd about the Venn conception of non touching circles is that the rules of Religion don’t keep religious people and even formal religious sects from accepting every, single thing science legitimately tells us about the physical universe. And almost every single religious person accepts some of science, many accept that it provides the most reliable knowledge we have about the physical universe. Some accept way too much that gets called science, especially in the psych-soc-fMRI stuff.

    If you’ve got to have some physical symbolism, a room with a swinging door that only opens out is a better one. Science can’t accept information that doesn’t get through the rather narrow door it sets up to limit the content it processes, though anything it says about that narrow range of phenomena is, at times, of enormous use to life outside of that room. Though no one really lives in that room marked “Science”. Scientists have their minds full of stuff that would never get through that door.

  21. Great post!
    What I would like is for philosophers to make explicit exactly what kind of religion is compatible with science.

  22. “Scientists will do this [entertaining contrary views], but usually not from a desire to explore all issues (there are honourable exceptions).”

    Toning down noted and appreciated, but this is still completely false, at least in my experience. People go into science specifically _because_ of a desire to explore all issues. Technically minded people who lack that desire go and earn higher salaries elsewhere. On what, exactly, are you basing these claims/accusations?

    ———-

    “[Methodological naturalism] is the view that we cannot investigate through natural means what does not follow rules. It is the idea that the sensible world, at any rate, is ruled by laws and regularities. It is the invention of “nature” as an idea.”

    Any one of those three definitions would be ok (well, the last needs to be supplemented by telling us what you understand under “‘nature’ as an idea”). But please pick _one_.

    ———-

    “If Larry thinks that he can scientifically investigate something that has no empirical evidence, I invite him to demonstrate that.”

    Er, wow. Just wow. How do you think phenomena are discovered?

    The most well-publicised recent example would be the Higgs boson. We had no empirical evidence, we looked for it, we found it. It is now generally acknowledged to exist.

    Then there’s paranormal research. We looked for decades and found no empirical evidence – in situations where _the evidence should have been there_ if commonly hypothesized paranormal hypotheses existed. These phenomena are now generally acknowledged _not_ to exist.

    It is often argued that many theistic claims fall in the latter category.

  23. Would the Higgs boson be looked for if other confirmation in the chain of theory that led to it hadn’t been discovered first? It was a rather large and expensive undertaking, I don’t believe it would have been financed without some empirical evidence that it was possibly there. Not to mention the theory would never have been arrived at out of nothing.

    I’m always interested in how many arguments entirely out of ignorance and based entirely on prejudice are made by the champions of empirical evidence every day on the blogs. I think the science blogs might turn out to be the greatest contribution to intellectual decadence in history.

    1. Sure there was evidence for the _chain of theory_, but no direct empirical evidence – the Higgs boson was studied for decades before direct empirical evidence of its existence was obtained. It’s an example of scientific investigation of a _hypothesized_ phenomenon – it was a _hypothesis_ well supported by theory but not supported by direct empirical evidence. Telepathy is an example of scientific investigation of a hypothesis that was well supported by anecdotal evidence, but not supported by reproducable empirical evidence.

      If you want more examples, just think of the first time _any_ phenomenon was discovered – black holes, electricity, magnetism, you name it. Some phenomena or non-phenomena (Higgs boson, telepathy) are hypothesized before empirical evidence for their existence is discovered (or found to be absent). Some (X-rays) are completely unexpected at the time they are discovered. Either way, when they are discovered it is via scientific investigation.

      Oh, and rather than imply (baselessly) that my argument was made “entirely out of ignorance and based entirely on prejudice”, at least say so directly.

      1. Well, Konrad, that would constitute empirical evidence that supported the idea that the theory might be right. I would like to know what the results would have been if they’d proposed looking for something with absolutely no evidence and that governments should spend billions of dollars looking for it.

        As for the rest of it, I think you need to do a literature search before you make rash statements. I know you can get away with that stuff on science blogs but I’d hate to think that you can get away with that level of unfounded statement on a philosophical blog.

  25. Remind’s me of a debate over territory that took place in Bristol in the 80’s concerning women and dogs. St Werburgh’s women’s community center asked the question, should male dogs be allowed on the premises?

    The conclusion they reached was yes as long as they were castrated.

  26. I love the way you put the whole brains in a vat thing with the term “empirically inoculated” and also this quote:

    “Philosophy does not produce knowledge; that is the job of science.”

    I also have no qualms with the Principal of Charity, but do you think the above are views are actually held by many (any?) believing Theistic Evolutionists? My experience is that there is at least some idea of “knowing” that the claims are true and arguments that observation of the natural world in some sense supports it. If the only claims of theistic evolutionists were “I have developed an empirically inoculated and knowledge free view that I believe to be the case” would anyone care?

    1. I am not defending theists or anyone who thinks philosophy or religion (or art, moral reasoning, or Hollywood) does produce knowledge. It is my view that it doesn’t. Anyone who thinks it does has either misunderstood what it is they are doing (experimental philosophy, for example, is experimental when it isn’t philosophy, and is philosophy when it isn’t experimental) or doesn’t understand what knowledge is.

      Of course the teaching of philosophy or the doing of logic, conceptual analysis, etc., gives us knowledge of philosophy/logic/etc.; but in my view that is knowledge of convention, not the world. I took “knowledge” here to be about the world, as in “knowing what obtains”. Let us refine my bald assertion to the claim that “philosophy does not generate natural knowledge”. I can live with that.

      1. In reading the arguments here and at Larry Morans, I think philosophy does produce knowledge of what constitutes a bad argument and bad evidence and the difference between what you like and what is true. Which is not a negligible difference in how you think and live your life.

        Science, which is hardly the sole means of knowing something, is only as dependable in so far as people know that difference and believe it really matters. I wonder how much of what you can read at Retraction Watch blog is due to a lack of training in making those distinctions. And that’s not to mention the morality of lying, something that science can’t touch at all.

        I think that as scientists disdain philosophy and remain confident in their ignorance of what it can do for someone’s thinking, their inability to make those distinctions grows increasingly problematic. Leaving it to a matter of personality, disposition and a fear of getting caught cut corners and lying doesn’t seem to keep science on an even track.

        1. I should add that a knowledge of philosophy might also help scientists to understand the basis of their own branch of intellectual activity. I’ve met stunned shock and outraged rejection when stating such simple ideas such as science is a human invention and that it was made for the sole purpose of finding knowledge of the PHYSICAL UNIVERSE of enhanced reliability by ignoring aspects of wider human experience that aren’t of known relevance to that narrow purpose.

          I’ve found that scientists, especially those whose faith is scientism, believe that they can force other parts of human experience into a scientific form, even if it means chopping off or distorting the wider parts of human experience to the point they are not the same thing. They believe that calling their dismembered object by the same name makes it the same thing, even when nothing else like it has ever been found in nature. I’ve found that kind of thing all through the so-called behavioral sciences and even in real biology.

          I think one of the biggest problems among scientists is the inability to identify what can’t be treated with the legitimate methodology and tools of science and that sometimes those things are handled better with other branches of intellectual activity. I’ve noted in a recent series of arguments that history can generate knowledge that is absolute in its reliability, something can be known to be absolutely true with the methods of history. You can absolutely know that someone said something in a book or with an audio recording, you can know if they repeatedly said the same thing or endorsed an idea by someone else. Some of the knowledge you can have through history or journalism or the law is of an absolute reliability that much of what is included in science can’t possibly achieve. And quite often that knowledge is every much as important as the most important findings of science.

          I think more scientists would be able to understand points like those instead of imitating an enraged and sputtering TV aristocrat who thinks that their due respect has been violated by an insolent commoner when those realities are pointed out, if their understanding of science had been informed by what philosophy could tell them.

  27. I have serious issues with experimental philosophy. It often drives me nuts reading it and if its in an issue that interests me I will repeatedly think, why do it like this when anthropology or history can cover the same ground empirically.

    Dennet’s argument concerning trees for example drives me round the twist, as I suspect his perspective on a certain religious group has lead to him presenting in this manner.

    I think my perspective says more about me and the way I have been educated than it does about philosophy.

    I certainly don’t disagree with some of what Dennet has to say but I see no reason to believe all of it or suggest that experimental philosophy is a disreputable subject on the basis of my emotional reaction to part of what he has to say that I strongly disagree with.

  28. As John has pointed out from time to time, the claim that science is the sole producer of reliable knowledge is not a scientific claim. One is not simply saying, after all, that the scientific method is what scientists do, but that it is what they ought to do. The claim is normative, not descriptive. I guess that means that we can’t have knowledge about what science should be since, to quote John, that would be “knowledge of convention, not the world” and he is willing to restrict knowledge, in the strict sense, anyhow, to knowledge about the world where the world is a big room with things in it.

    I don’t care about names. If you want to insist that only something like chemistry produces knowledge, that’s OK with me, though it reduces the argument of this thread to begging the question. What matters to me is whether a particular form of social cognitive activity is rational, by which I mean useful to argue about. It’s the possibility of cogent arguments that matters whether you want to call a subject knowledge or not. Ethics or any other normative topic like scientific methodology doesn’t come down to making true statements about existing objects; but, or so I claim, it isn’t vain to argue about such subjects because there are better and worse things to say about them.

    The funny thing is the way in which folks who promote the universal empire of science don’t do very much justice to the internal heterogeneity of the sciences themselves. A survey of what scientists do shows that they aren’t obviously always doing the same thing. Do the same methodological principles underlie the investigation of natural laws like quantum mechanics govern determining facts like the history of the Earth? What about the metatheoretical work that physicists do when they define the space of possible theories of gravitation? What counts as legitimate science is in perpetual dispute. Larry Moran writes “The scientific way of knowing involves evidence, rationalism, and healthy skepticism.” How is this statement more specific than saying that morality comes down to doing the right thing? So far from legislating what will count as knowledge, Moran is merely listing some necessary conditions for doing science or perhaps any enterprise of rational inquiry. To get to sufficient conditions, it seems to me that it would be necessary to follow Wittgenstein’s advice to look and see. The trouble with scientism is that it isn’t empirical, and it isn’t just familiarity with nonscientific human activities that is missing.

  29. “and it isn’t just familiarity with nonscientific human activities that is missing.”

    Yes that’s true but I cant help thinking that way I trained in people related issues, but I think it’s familiarity that’s the problem I look at the issues here the bits of the argument I don’t like and at the end of the day the frustration lies in the fact I make the same mistakes myself with my own thought. We learn slowly and with great difficulty and all fall into similar traps and snares as we play the great game.

    I don’t think I am alone on this one, error is more common than many admit and I think the way we learn is to make mistakes, no shame or dishonor here unless you are playing some institutional reputation game and such things are fictive and manipulated for public consumption.

    I cant help thinking that at its core a large slice of this is simply a people problem and one of perspective.

    “One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion.”

    Rather than declare philosophy dead perhaps this group of people making this claim could modify it and start with the claim we can do the philosophy here better than philosophers.

    Extreme positions are useful experimental tools in debate, they have a value,place and function in the ever shifting sands of thought that will sweep over us all and serve as dust and cover to our bones.

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