The Fall and Rise of Idolatry

Philosophers’ Noisy Talk

In the fourth century AD, Athanasius (one of the great early church fathers) described the impact upon idolatry from the time of Christ’s coming down to his day (circa 325AD).  He argues that the coming of Christ amongst men drove out superstition and idolatry in the Roman Empire and the Mediterranean nations.

Idolatry amongst the Gentiles was real, pervasive, and local.  Every town had its shrines and deities.  Athanasius witnessed the decline and decrepitude of the established religion of idolatry.  But what caused it?

When did people begin to abandon the worship of idols, unless it were since the very Word of God came among men?  When have oracles ceased and become void of meaning, among the Greeks and everywhere, except since the Saviour had revealed Himself on earth?

When did those whom the poets call gods and heroes begin to be adjudged as mere mortals, except when the Lord took the spoils of death and preserved incorruptible the body He had taken, raising it from among the dead?  Or when did the deceitfulness and madness of daemons fall under contempt, save when the Word, the Power of God, the Master of all these as well, condescended on account of the weakness of mankind and appeared on earth?

When did the practice and theory of magic begin to be spurned under foot, if not at the manifestation of the Divine Word to men?  In a word, when did the wisdom of the Greeks become foolish, save when the true Wisdom of God revealed Himself on earth?  In old times the whole world and every place in it was led astray by the worship of idols, and men thought the idols were the only gods that were.  But now, all over the world men are forsaking the fear of idols and taking refuge with Christ; and by worshipping Him as God they come through Him to know the Father also, Whom formerly they did not know.

The objects of worship formerly were varied and countless; each place had its own idol and the so-called god of one place could not pass over to another in order to persuade the people there to worship him, but was barely reverenced even by his own.  Indeed no! Nobody worshipped his neighbour’s god, but every man had his own idol and thought that it was lord of all.  But now Christ alone is worshipped, as One and the Same among all peoples everywhere; and what the feebleness of idols could not do, namely convince even those dwelling close at hand, He has effected.  He has persuaded not only those close at hand, but literally the entire world to worship one and the same Lord and through Him the Father.

Again, in former times every place was full of the fraud of the oracles, and the utterances of those at Delphi and Dordona and in Boeotia and Lycia and Libya and Egypt and those of the Kabiri and the Pythoness were considered marvellous by the minds of men.  But now, since Christ has been proclaimed everywhere, their madness too has ceased, and there is no one left among them to give oracles at all. . . .

And what is one to say about the magic that they think so marvellous?  Before the sojourn of the Word, it was strong and active among Egyptians and Chaldeans and Indians and filled all who saw it with terror and astonishment.  But by the coming of the Truth and the manifestation of the Word it too has been confuted and entirely destroyed.

As to Greek wisdom, however, and the philosophers’ noisy talk, I really think no one requires argument from us, for the amazing fact is patent to all that, for all that they have written so much, the Greeks failed to convince even a few from their own neighbourhood in regard to immortality and the virtuous ordering of life.  Christ alone, using common speech and through he agency of men not clever with their tongues, has convinced whole assemblies of people all the world over to despise death, and to take heed to the thing that do not die, to look past the things of time and gaze on things eternal, to think nothing of earthly glory and to aspire only to immortality.  [Athanasius, On the Incarnation.  Translated and edited by Sister Penelope Lawson.  (New York: Macmillan Publishing House, 1946.), p.75ff.] 

Idolatry still exists in places around the world.  But when the Christian Gospel of Christ takes hold, idolatry is the first and abiding casualty.  The reverse is also true: if a civilisation rebels against the gentle yoke of Christ, it is not long before superstition and various idols make a comeback.  Consider how many “scientists” have become reverently superstitious about Evolution, seeing its hand, influence, control, and explanatory power everywhere.  Consider how our Most High Priests of scientism gravely propound an infinite number of parallel universes to warrant the complexity of the one in which we live.  For Stochasticity to have a chance of producing such an exquisitely balanced and fine tuned universe, there must needs be an infinite number of other universes where the emergence of life is impossible or has failed.  These nonsenses and contradictions are uttered most gravely and reverently by the most superstitious of all.

The Delphic oracle–the alleged voice of Apollo himself–was a charlatan’s purse (and at root everyone knew it).  It survived for so long because of the wilful credulity of those who needed such things to make some kind of superstitious sense of the world. The coming of the Gospel eradicated that need.  But deny or ignore the Gospel and gross ignorance soon makes a return.

The distance between our modern superstitious scientists and the devotees of Delphi is less than a cigarette paper. 

More Gadfly Than Blowfly

Syndrome of the Embarrassing Advocate

Every so often we are treated to one of our resident Unbelievers pontificating away as if his life depended upon it.  Sir Bob Jones is a wealthy man–irreverent, atheistic, and entertaining–who likes to throw together an occasional opinion piece in the NZ Herald with all the panache and thoughtfulness of someone deep in his cups.  In other words, Bob is not to be taken seriously.  Mercifully he does not take himself seriously.  More gadfly than blowfly.

Nevertheless, Bob is a self-professed empiricist.  It’s all science for him.  Not religion.  All hard data, not superstitious rubbish.  He bombastically writes:

I’ll stick with science rather than fairy tales.  All the primitive praying never saved us from the Creation’s syphilis and rabies as antibiotics have, this just one of the thousands of examples of our debt to science.

Except that old Bob doesn’t stick with science.  If he were to do so, he would be entirely more believable.  On the contrary, he appears not to understand much about science nor fairy tales for that matter.  As things stand, Bob has convictions about everything as do all opinionated folk.  Yet, for some bewildering reason, Bob has apparently never considered the limitations of his beloved empiricism.

Naturalistic science tells us precisely nothing about what ought to be.  Yet, despite this, Bob has plenty of opinions and convictions about the way things ought to be.  He hates humbug.  He detests hypocrisy.  He cannot stand idle laziness.  He is sure he knows a crime when he sees one.  Theft is a no no.  He can tell a good Pinot from the sub-standard quaffer.  Since this is Bob’s version of “sticking with science” every time, the only appropriate response is gales of guffaws.  

Now Bob has read the classics.  But apparently when they did Logic 101, back in the day, Bob must have  ducked out to play with his chemistry set.  What is known as the naturalistic fallacy politely points out that naturalistic science may well describe what is the case, but fails utterly when it comes to determining what ought to be the case.  Empirical science is descriptive; it is unable to be prescriptive.  Our five senses can tell us what is, but fail when it comes to determining what ought to be.

Yet ironically Bob, the empiricist, has gone on record to say that he opposes abortion because he does not approve of murder.  This is Bob’s version of  sticking “with science rather than fairy tales”.  This is an example of Bob’s inconsistency, even irrationality.  As we said, more gadfly than blowfly. 

We are glad that Bob opposes abortion.  One hopes, however, that he is not foolish enough to think that his opinion is scientific or based upon science.  Science has nothing to say about whether murder is morally good or bad. So passes those who “stick to science” every time and ridicule God as a fairy tale. 

But, then, when the deadline threatens and the Pinot beckons we can’t expect too much–at least not in the way of  careful, judicious reasoning. 

Letter From Europe (About the Death of Human Rights)

The Sovereignty of Depersonalised Will

When men turn away from God, the “centre” no longer holds.  There is no absolute moral code to which all men are subject and in bonds.  All that is left is the “man-as-god” volition of individuals, then, eventually, the will of the one, the uber-man, the dictator.  The West is currently in the phase of rejecting morals and championing the volition of individuals.  Eventually, the uber-individual, the One, the Dictator will emerge.

The European Court of Human Rights is now well down this track.

Gregor Puppinck, PhD, Director of the European Centre for Law and Justice explains how human rights are becoming “trans-humans rights” under the influence of individualism, skepticism and biotechnologies. Human rights courts are currently redefining the “new man” through the creation of post and trans-humans rights.

– How does trans-humanism enter into the legal field?
The rights guaranteed by the European Court of Human Rights, define man. In 1950, when the Convention was signed, these rights were defined in order to protect the inherent abilities of human beings, their nature, which distinguish man from animal and manifest his or her dignity.  At the time, man was not technological, and the existence of a human nature and dignity as the basis of rights was well established. But today, biotechnology can not only enhance our natural abilities, but also endow us with new ones.  . . .

 – How did biotechnology influence human rights?
Human rights express and set as a standard successive conceptions that society makes about man: there were ‘humanist’ rights followed by ‘personalist’ rights. It is nowadays post-human rights that are paving the way for trans-human rights.

Post-humanism is the domination of individual wills over human nature. As a result, it is replacing human rights with ‘rights of individuals’. Although the wording of the Human Rights adopted in 1950 has not changed, their individualist interpretation has altered, even revolutionised, their content. Thus, the Convention recognizes the right to life, but the individual will to die or to abort a pregnancy is prevailing over that right. Assisted suicide, euthanasia or abortion are post-human rights.

Trans-humanism is about the surpassing and substitution of human nature by biotechnology. Access to these technologies is becoming an individual right because they allow everyone to achieve himself or herself in a greater way. By becoming a human right, technology – the artifice – is humanized, socially integrated into our evolutionary conception of man.

Thus, asserting the existence of a “right to have a child unaffected by the disease”, the European Court of Human Rights has incorporated the techniques of genetic screening in the definition of rights. Eugenics becomes therefore a component of an increased human nature. It is a trans-human right.

This passage from human nature (humanism) to the individual will (post-humanism) and eventually to technology (trans-humanism) is perceived as extending our freedom, our autonomy, through the increasing faculty to define ourselves in a limitless way. Thus, far from challenging the human rights, post and trans-humanism are renewing and improving the fulfillment of the promise of happiness offered to mankind ​​during the eighteenth century.

– Does the Court not pass judgment on these techniques?
In a new way, the Court now considers that a moral argument has no value in itself (because it necessarily refers to a certain idea of ​​man), but only in a sociological way, according to the social acceptance it enjoys. Any idea of mankind would be relative. In 2010, it held that:“concerns based on moral considerations or on social acceptability are not in themselves sufficient reasons for a complete ban on a specific artificial procreation technique such as ova donation.” Legal limitation to the individual will is no longer to be accepted if it is based on a conception of man or good. The Court requires scientific arguments. For example, in a recent case of adoption by a couple of women, it rejected the moral argument of the government who wanted the ban, asking for scientific evidence that it is never something good for a child to be raised by a same-sex couple.

– What do you attribute this change to?
The Court is affected by ambient skepticism and relativism. It has lost confidence in the ability of legislators to pass moral judgment on “right” and “good”. Science is what is left as “truth” to the Court for founding its judgments. Actually, scientism is the last refuge of skeptics before nihilism.

This moral skepticism destroys human rights in that they result from non-scientific moral choices and thus reduces these rights to the sole principle of freedom, which also implies the one of equality. And this freedom is the undefined will of individuals. It is the passage of human rights to the “rights of individuals”.

Specifically, the Court understands its case law as inherently progressive. For it: “the Convention is a living instrument, to be interpreted in present-day conditions”, that is to say, the evolution of techniques and attitudes as the Court sees and wants it. The Court defines itself as “the conscience of Europe”, it intends to renew, unify and advance European society.

– This is basically what happened with the condemnation of France for refusing to transcribe the civil status of foreign-born children by surrogacy…
Indeed, it is striking to see the Court considering that the practice of surrogacy is not in itself contrary to the human rights. It deems that the state must justify restrictions it poses to practice, so that surrogacy would be a freedom. It is heartbreaking to see that the Court did not even mention the surrogate mother and the genetic mother–their dignity and rights. The Court denies the possibility of intrinsically evil acts: it’s all about circumstances, except when it comes to individual will and freedom.

Translation of an interview published originally in French by Flora Thomasset, La Croix, Friday October 31st 2014, page 11.

Letter From the UK (About Dawkins’s Dogmatism)

Richard Dawkins, what on earth happened to you?

Dawkins in 2014 is a man so convinced that he possesses God-like powers of omniscience that he can’t understand why everyone is angry at him for pointing out the obvious

Eleanor Robertson
The Guardian
30 July 2014

Another day, another tweet from Richard Dawkins proving that if non-conscious material is given enough time, it is capable of evolving into an obstreperous crackpot who should have retired from public speech when he had the chance to bow out before embarrassing himself.

“Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse,” huffs Dawkins. Seeming to have anticipated, although not understood, the feminist reaction this kind of sentiment generally evokes, he finishes the tweet: “If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”

. . . . Dawkins has been arrogant for years, a man so convinced of his intellectual superiority that he believes the one domain in which he happens to be an expert, science, is the only legitimate way of acquiring or assessing knowledge. All of his outbursts in recent years follow from this belief: he understands the scientific method, a process intended to mitigate the interference of human subjectivity in data collection, as a universally applicable way of understanding not just the physical world but literally everything else as well.

Hence his constant complaint that those appalled by his bigoted vituperations are simply offended by clarity; feeble-minded obscurantists who cling to emotion, tradition or the supernatural to shield themselves from the power of his truth bombs.

You don’t have to be religious to find this level of hubris baffling. In his review of The God Delusion, Terry Eagleton remarks:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Dawkins’ narrowmindedness, his unshakeable belief that the entire history of human intellectual achievement was just a prelude to the codification of scientific inquiry, leads him to dismiss the insights offered not only by theology, but philosophy, history and art as well.

To him, the humanities are expendable window-dressing, and the consciousness and emotions of his fellow human beings are byproducts of natural selection that frequently hobble his pursuit and dissemination of cold, hard facts. His orientation toward the world is the product of a classic category mistake, but because he’s nestled inside it so snugly he perceives complex concepts outside of his understanding as meaningless dribble. If he can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist, and anyone trying to describe it to him is delusional and possibly dangerous.

All we can do at this point is hope his decline into hysterical dogmatism culminates in a reverse deathbed conversion. But if there’s one thing Dawkins has tried to impress upon us, it’s that miracles don’t exist. So I’ll do him the courtesy of not holding my breath.

Justification of Knowledge and Truth (Part II)

A Bold Plan for Perpetual Ignorance

How do we know that what we know is actually true?  Wittgenstein and the post-modernists argued that we never will know absolute truth; all we can have is perspectives (including this one).  This has not sat well with traditional philosophers, but it has certainly had a field day in the world of academia.  We now have endless lists of perspectives as subjects for study: queer literature, minority art, feminist politics, proletarian ethics, trans-gender discourse, and so on, ad nauseam.  The end result is lots and lots of insignificant jobs for post-modern academics.  Lots of heat, but not much light.

We have argued that rationalism–one of the traditional justifications of knowledge–elides into tautologies and irrationalism.  The second major tendency to justify knowledge as being true-truth is empiricism.  This is probably the tendency which is most popular today–largely, due to the widespread belief that science (which employs the “empirical” method) delivers the truth.  As Frame explains:

The common view is that during the ancient and medieval periods, the growth of human knowledge was slow because the methods of acquiring it were based on tradition and speculation.  Great thinkers like Bacon and Newton, however, convinced the world of a better way: forget traditions and speculations.  Verify your hypotheses by going to the facts.  Experiment. Observe. Measure.  Gradually, observed facts will accumulate into a dependable body of knowledge. . . . That kind of investigation is successful, the argument goes, because it provides publicly observable checking procedures.  If you do not agree with a theory, you can go and check it out.  The facts are there for all to see; just compare the theory with the facts. [John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Nutley: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1987), p.115.]

This approach is widespread and appeals to the modern tendency that equates “science” with near certainty.  But, in the end, empiricism fails as a justification of truth and knowledge.

1. In reality we know many things which we cannot check out ourselves.  For example, we believe most certainly that the City of London exists, although we have never verified it personally.  We believe that quarks exist, that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and that man has landed on the moon.  We know these things to be true not because we have verified them by checking the facts, but by accepting the testimony of others whom we trust.

2. Our senses often deceive us.

3. There is no purely empirical inquiry.  All data has to be first recorded and reported, then analyzed and evaluated.  The analysis and evaluation of data draws upon our pre-commitments.

What we “see”, “hear”, “smell”, “taste”, and “feel”, is influenced by our expectations.  Those expectations do not come just from sense-experience but from theories, cultural experience, group loyalties, prejudice, religious commitments and so forth.  Thus there is no “purely empirical” inquiry.  We never encounter “brute”, that is, uninterpreted facts.  We only encounter facts that have been interpreted in terms of our existing commitments.  [Ibid., p. 117.]

Science is not purely empirical; therefore, it cannot bear the weight which empiricism wants to hoist upon its shoulders.

4.  Empiricism cannot verify propositions which we all accept as true truth.  For example, “all men are mortal” cannot be verified by empiricism, although everyone accepts the proposition as true.  To prove or disprove them empirically, empiricism would need to study and research the entire universe.  Mathematical propositions cannot be verified empirically, although most accept such propositions as universally true.  In fact, empiricism relies upon such mathematical propositions in testing and examining the facts.  Empiricism cannot prove, nor therefore accept as true, the proposition that the sun will rise tomorrow.  Anything to do with the future must remain in perpetual doubt for the empiricist.  Moreover, empiricism can say nothing about ethical values–for example, that murder is wrong.  True, the empiricist will accept that murder occurs, but has no foundation or basis to assert that it is right or wrong.  The proposition, “man ought not to kill another human being” is beyond the ability of empiricism to validate or establish as true.  In the final analysis, empiricism cannot verify or justify empiricism.

Frame concludes:

Like the problems of rationalism, the problems of empiricism are essentially spiritual.  Like rationalists, empiricists have tried to find certainty apart from God’s revelation, and that false certainty has shown itself to be bankrupt.  Even if the laws of logic are known to us (and it is unclear how they could be on an empirical basis), we could deduce nothing from statements about sensation except, at most, other statements about sensation.  Thus, once again, rationalism becomes irrationalism: a bold plan for autonomously building the edifice of knowledge ends up in total ignorance.  [Ibid., p. 119]

Devolutionary Progress

The Impossibility of Science

The world of science is in a parlous condition.  It is not a recent phenomenon.  However, its rotten fruits seem to appear more frequently.  Who would have thought that we would see “official science” sanctioned by actual governments along with the putative government of the United Nations–which “science” has then moved aggressively to silence criticism and debate.  It has also been caught withholding and fabricating data, and even argued that those who oppose should suffer imprisonment and other legal sanctions.  Yet this has become “normal” in the vast propaganda overreaches of climate science and its spurious hypothesis of man-caused global warming. 

Something is going on beneath the surface.  How could a scientific position cause such alarm that to oppose it or question its veracity would invite civil sanctions?  What kind of society would act in that way?  An increasingly primitive one.  Socrates was condemned to death for the heinous crime of corrupting the youth of Athens.  Was it because of his bi-sexuality?  No.  Was it due to his pederasty?  No.  It was due to his suggestion that the gods may be mythical, not real.  For this “corruption”, he was condemned to a big sip of  hemlock.  The question is, Why has modern, official science become so corrupted that it more resembles the primitive ignorance of ancient Athens than a modern, advanced state? 

To answer the question we need to consider the philosophical and religious foundations of science.
  Since the attenuating of Christendom, science has undergone two philosophical developments.  The first was a transition from believing the natural order was created and maintained by the ceaseless personal activity on an Omnipotent God to a view that the material order was simply a vast machine–mechanistic, impersonal, blind, yet perpetually sustaining. 

Christopher Dawson explains the consequences of this first shift:

From the 17th century onwards the modern scientific movement has been based on the mechanistic view of nature which regards the world as a closed material order moved by purely mechanical and mathematical laws.  All the aspects of reality which could not be reduced to mathematical terms and regarded as resulting from the blind operation of material forces were treated as mere subjective impressions of the human mind, and in so far as man himself was viewed as a by-product of this vast mechanical order, they were inevitably deprived of any ultimate reality.  [Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry (London: Sheed and Ward, 1945),  p. 219.]

The initial consequence, then, was a dehumanising of man that implicitly removed any substantial significance to human reason, thought, ideas, beliefs, art, creativity, and all the goals, standards, and motivations of human behaviour.  All was merely subjective, not actually real.

A universe of this kind seems to leave no room for moral values or spiritual forces; indeed, it is hard to see what place the mind of the scientific observer himself has in the blind and endless flux of configurations of atoms which is the substance of reality.  [Ibid.] 

The first philosophical shift to a blind mechanistic world of Nature appeared to liberate man.  In fact it devalued him and made him irrelevant and disconnected to the cosmos.   The second philosophical shift was even more devastating.  If men, including scientists, were mere purveyors of arbitrary and inconsequential opinion, the same must hold for the scientist and to scientific endeavour.  The early-modern scientists believed that there was an epistemological congruence between the observer and the natural world.  The eye and the mind was fit to observe and think about what was actually there.  It could discover and comprehend things as they actually were.  There was an ontological harmony between atoms and the mind.  God had made it so. 

But in the modern world this broke down philosophically. 

If the laws of mathematics are simply the creation of the human mind, they are no infallible guide to the ultimate nature of things.  They are a conventional technique which is no more based on the eternal laws of the universe than is the number of degrees in a circle or the number of yards in a mile.  Physical science, in fact, is nothing more than measurement.  It does not reveal the intrinsic nature of things, but deals simply with their quantitative relations and variations. . . . Thus scientific laws have the same relation to nature as the printed score of one of Beethoven’s sonatas has to the music, or as Professor Eddington has said, they have as much resemblance to the real qualities of nature that a a telephone number has to the individual subscriber whom it represents.  [Ibid., p. 225.]

Under this view, the mathematician and the physicist became little more than literary novelists playing number games, or creators of chess puzzles.  Yet, so many mathematicians work as if it were not so.  As Paul Davis has observed:

It is often said that mathematicians are Platonists on weekdays and formalists at weekends.  While actually working no mathematics, it is hard to resist the impression that one is actually engaged in the process of discovery, much as in an experimental science.  The mathematical objects take on a life of their own, and often display totally unexpected properties.  On the other hand, the idea of a transcendent realm of mathematical Ideas seems too mystical for many mathematicians to admit, and if challenged they will usually claim that when engaging in mathematical research they are only playing games with symbols and rules. [Paul Davis, cited by Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony 1700-1999. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.82.]

Davis suggests that the philosophy underlying mathematical endeavour today is at odds with the reality of experience of mathematicians as they work the discipline.  But the philosophy is the ultimate controlling official narrative.  Officially, maths is only playing games.  It is not reality.  It does not describe the configurations of  reality in the natural order.

This principle of merely playing games has spread progressively through a whole host of scientific disciplines.  Thus it comes as no surprise, then,  that Climate Science is made up of computer models, speculative projections, and compulsion.  That’s all there is.  That’s all there can be.  The universe, including our world, is essentially unknowable to man, who can only play games with symbols, rules, and numbers.

As science has become more and more metaphysical and speculative in its operations, so dissent and scepticism comes to be viewed more and more as heresy, a disturbing of the youth of Athens.  Hot on its heels come the sanctions of the state.  And so it has come to pass. 

Similar observations can be made about evolutionism.  Evolutionism is only a game, because philosophically and epistemologically that’s all it ever can be.  If it were true, it could never be formulated.  Dissent, therefore, must be punished, and swiftly.  Science progressively falls under the heavy hand of the Collective Borg.  Neither it, nor the Borg, will survive. 

Pour Me Another One

Klingon Cloaking Devices and the Starship Ideology

Now we are being told that genetic factors account for about 30 to 40 percent of of whether a man becomes a homosexual or not.  We suspect that similar claims could be made about whether a man becomes a murderer.  But one thing is absolutely sure, apparently.  Environmental factors definitely, most definitely do not play any role whatsoever.  Moreover, choice is absolutely, totally, and completely excluded as a factor in becoming a homosexual.

But they [the research scientists] said this did not imply that upbringing or other social factors, or individual choice, had a bearing on sexual orientation.  “Sexual orientation has nothing to do with choice,” one of the lead researchers, Dr Michael Bailey, from Northwestern University in Chicago, said. [NZ Herald.  Emphasis, ours.]

Notice the emphatic assertion.  Homosexuality has nothing to do with choice.  When a scientist becomes this emphatic with respect to human behaviour, expect that science has elided into cheap propaganda.
  So, if one stops being a homosexual and becomes a heterosexual (as many have) it has nothing to do with choice.  It must be around 40 percent genetic and the rest  hormonal factors at birth.

The last thing you would ever take seriously, apparently, is the evidence and testimony of thousands of people who have given up homosexuality (Christians use the term “repented of”) and develop normal heterosexual relationships.  When “science” starts excluding evidence before one’s face, ideology has become the fox in the henhouse, and science has departed by the nearest door.

And as for “bi-sexuality”, presumably genetic configurations account for around 40 percent of that perversion also, with the balance being supplied by the hormonal environment at birth.  How about serial heterosexual promiscuity?  Of course–what else would it be?

The previous generation toyed with the idea that all human behaviour was socially conditioned–just like Pavlov’s dogs.  The behaviourists had a field-day in all sorts of social fields, such as criminology.  Lawbreaking was a social condition, brought about by society’s conditioning.  The criminal was not to blame, nor bore any responsibility for his actions.  He, along with all of us, was an ethical robot. Gradually, as people reflected more upon this preposterous idea, comparing it with their own ethical decision making, the community eventually uttered a collective, “Yeah, . . . nah!”.  Regarding humans as malleable and trainable as dogs did not wash–but not before society collectively wrung its hands with paroxysms of guilt over poor Johnny, the rampant axe murderer whose criminal offending was caused and conditioned by a father who spent too much time in the pub.

Now the theory has come forth in another form.  Behaviour is largely genetically determined, coupled with a bit of social conditioning.  No human behaviour, therefore, may be regarded as moral or immoral, ethical or unethical.  Genetic determinism means that one can no more be blamed or held accountable for homosexuality or theft or lying than one can be blamed for one’s skin colour or height.  Genes don’t lie or steal or lust.  They just are.  Choice, says our messianic mad scientist, has nothing to do with it.  Nothing, I tell you.  Nothing!  And if it were to be a factor, it would only prove that humans have a “choice” gene. 

This is not science.  It is ideology covered by a Klingon cloaking device.

Not Even Close

Some Questions from David Berlinksi about Scientism

Justin Taylor 12:00 pm CT
February 12, 2014

 David Berlinski—a secular Jew who is a philosopher and mathematician and is agnostic about God—asks and answers some questions in The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (2011):

Has anyone provided a proof of God’s inexistence?
Not even close.

Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here?
Not even close.

Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life?
Not even close.

Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought?
Close enough.

Has rationalism in moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral?
Not close enough.

Has secularism in the terrible twentieth century been a force for good?
Not even close to being close.

Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences?
Close enough.

Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational?
Not even ballpark.

Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt?
Dead on.

Here is an interview with him:

It’s a Mad Materialist World

Superstition and Avatar II

Is the world ultimately personal or impersonal?  The Christian position is clear, without ambiguity.  If a hair falls from one’s head or a sparrow dies, such apparently random events are indeed ultimately personal in the sense that they are at the will, command, and direction of a person–the Living God.  When a hair falls from one’s head it is from the Lord.  When the sparrow dies, it is by the Lord’s will and command.  Even what appears to us to be the most random act is actually not; it is infinitely personal. 

The lot is cast into the lap,
But its every decision is from the Lord.
Proverbs 16:33

Modern man has a diametrically opposed view.  His confession of faith is that the world is ultimately random and impersonal.  Since there is no person behind it all, the universe is thoroughly and ultimately impersonal.  What is just is.  And what exists is just matter, or more precisely, matter, energy and motion.  That’s it.
  Everything, literally everything, can be reduced to a trinity of these three, and ultimately to inanimate energy.  We call this view materialism.  Here is Vern Poythress’s description of the West’s official, established religion:

According to materialism, the world consists in matter and energy and motion.  The world is physical in its most basic and deepest structure.  Everything else is built up from complex combinations and interactions of matter and energy and motion.  Elementary particles form into atoms; atoms form into molecules; molecules form into larger structures like crystals and living cells; cells form organs and organisms; and each one of us is such and organism.  The structure of our brains leads to complex humans actions and thoughts, and these lead to human meaning.  [Vern Poythress, Inerrancy and Worldview: Answering Modern Challenges to the Bible (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2012), p. 28.]

And here are some of the implications of this established religion:

According to materialism, the universe as we know it originated in the big bang.  Human beings are random products of biological evolution, so we have no particular distinct significance except what we create for ourselves  The goal of living is whatever each of us as an individual chooses.  But the cosmos as a whole has no goal, no purpose.  And it looks as though life itself is only temporary, because the winding down of the amount of free energy in the universe will eventually make it impossible for life to exist.  The universe will end up cold and inert.  

According to this view, there is nothing wrong with the world–the world simply is.  There is no afterlife.  Morality is a by-product of the human brain in its biological structure and human social interaction. (Ibid.)

Imagine we were watching a fierce debate over the meaning of life.  Imagine in the heat of debate one of the protagonists pulled out a gun and shot his opponent dead.  Materialism requires us to acknowledge that the shooter won the debate.  There was no retort after the shot, no counterpoint was made.  Silence represents defeat.  There was no true moral significance or portent to one shooting the other.  There is nothing actually wrong with the one shooting the other. Any suggestions of morality reflect only social conventions, which are really nothing more than prejudices–and stupid at that, because they are merely superstitions.

Few people really believe such dogma–although every so often you meet people who claim that they do.  The vast majority of ordinary folk are only nominal believers in the materialist religion.  They confess it to be true when it is convenient.  But they spend most of their lives adding superstition upon superstition to give themselves a modicum of comfort. 

They long for human significance.  They find ways of adding more comfortable extra stories onto the materialist substructure of matter and energy and motion.  Some people may add a religious dimension of a pantheistic sort.  They may postulate a kind of spiritual “energy” in the cosmos, with which they can commune.  Nature becomes “Mother Nature.”  As a society, we become pluralistic in our views of human significance, just as we are pluralistic in many other respects.  We autonomously choose which ideas we wish to embrace, even when those ideas are at odds with reality. (Ibid, p. 28,29.)

Doubtless if we just took a superficial sounding of everyday human actions and beliefs we might conclude that materialism is not the established and accepted religion of our culture.  People do not act as if it were.  But the reality remains: materialism rules in the kitchen.  Everything else is superstitious comfort food. 

This ultimate impersonalism often goes together with some kind of acknowledgement of personal significances.  In fact, it is no so hard for some people to desire to reanimate dead matter by ascribing semi-personal characteristics to phenomena of nature.  We already mentioned the expression “Mother Nature”.  Such an expression gives to nature semi-personal characteristics. 

If matter is at the bottom of everything, there is continuity between human beings and trees. . . . A hard-nosed scientific materialism in one part of the mind can actually be combined with a soft yearning for communion with spirits; people can travel toward new forms of animism, spiritism, polytheism, and pantheism  Everyday, people within advanced industrial societies are looking into astrology and fortune-telling and spirits and meditation.  That direction might seem paradoxical.  But actually it is not surprising.  In principle a thoroughgoing materialism breaks down all hard-and-fast distinctions within the world.  If a materialist viewpoint is correct all is one.  And the many–the diversity of phenomena–all flow into this one.  (Ibid., p. 30,31.)

Cosmic impersonalism produces rampant superstition where personality and personalism is ascribed to physical matter, whether living or inert.  A new animism emerges–just as debilitating  and silly as the old animism.  Meanwhile, the hard nosed materialists breathlessly await Avatar II. 

The Best and the Brightest

What The Fool Says in His Folly

The more the secularist investigates the universe by-his-lights, the more he is driven to meaninglessness.  Not despair necessarily.  Some optimistic secularists relish in the meaninglessness of the universe (or so they say) as a backdrop to their own glory.  “Sure all is meaningless; there is no point to any of it–but I choose to deny it; I refuse to bow to it.  I am like the titans of old.  I choose to live heroically, as if there is meaning in it all.  I shake my fist at the storm of  meaningless fate and declare my own grandeur.”

Noble stuff.  Pathetic and useless, of course, but nevertheless a powerful testimony to the traitor in the room.  Human nature just cannot live consistently with itself when it propounds a secular, atheistic and materialistic world. 

Bertrand Russell, one of the more celebrated atheists in the middle decades of the previous century, painted graphically and realistically the materialist world-view:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief.  Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals must find a home.  That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspirations, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins–all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.  Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. [Cited by Leon Lederman, The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question (New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), p. 409.]

Now, of course, Russell was sufficiently myopic that he never faced up to the paradoxical element in his last sentence.  The “scaffolding of these truths” serves to be a vicious contradiction, if the world Russell describes is actually true.  In a meaningless world to speak of truths and ideals is a contradiction in terms.  Moreover, the very fact that Russell seeks to describe such a world meaningfully and draw forth its implications for human living (“. . . can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built“) is evidence that Russell’s world is not true.  If Russell’s world were true, he could never describe it, nor reason about it. If he can describe it, and reason about it, his world-view cannot possibly be true. 

Behold the folly and blindness of the modern secularist.  He is a walking, living, breathing, talking, and reasoning contradiction in terms.  Truly does the Scripture testify concerning us: the fool hath said in his heart there is no God.  (Psalm 14:1; 53:1).  And so we all languish, as the poet says:

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night; . . .

unless and until . . .

Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

To the merciful and generous and gracious God, be glory forever and ever.

The Ugly Scientist

Fraud and Deception

Science trades under the mantle of objective, tested, authenticated conclusions.  It turns out, however, that in all  scientific endeavour there is a strong dose of interpretation and subjectivity.  This is not just the case for science; it is true of all human actions.

Larry Woiwode illustrates the principle:

No fact exists without an interpretation of it, as a philosopher by the name of Cornelius Van Til once said.  What he meant is if I say, “The Civil War”, anybody who hears those words is stormed by sets of facts, some merely by naming it as I have.  If you view it as a war of northern aggression, you have facts to support that.  If another sees it as a conflict that installed commercial manufacture over agrarian interests, facts might well support that view.  If I say its genesis was slavery, I might well be closer to the truth, but I would have to summon my series of facts to support that. . . .

Take a step farther back.  If you believe trees are a result of random happenstance or believe they were ordained to look as they do, part of a design fulfilled, then your view of the tree and facts about it will differ, according to your ideology.  [Larry Woiwode, Words for  Readers and Writers (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2013), p. 33f.]

Modern science is presently dominated by a perverse ideology: scientism–which holds that the only reality, the only thing which exists, is matter.   It denies the subjective, ideological construction of all scientific endeavour.  It claims pure, brute objectivity. 

As a result, it perversely drives science into being a more ideologically bound and subjectively dominated enterprise.
  There are some things which absolutely must be true–for philosophical or ideological reasons.  “Science” becomes a club to beat upon those who would disagree.  Moreover, the belief that one is purely and absolutely objective easily results in self-willed blindness.  It comes as no surprise then, that fraud has become more common in the scientific enterprise.  Since the data represents brute factuality and pure objectivity, manipulation of it must be equally brute, objective, and factual.  One man’s data is as good as another. 

One of the more recent pieces from Creation Ministries International highlights the growing incidence of deceit and fraud in scientific research.  Some excerpts:

Most of the known cases of modern-day fraud are in the life sciences.  In the biomedical field alone, fully 127 new misconduct cases were lodged with the Office of Research Integrity (US Department of Heatlh & Human Services) in the year 2001. This was the third consecutive rise in the number of cases since 1998.This concern is not of mere academic interest, but also profoundly affects human health and life.Much more than money and prestige are at stake—the fact is, fraud is ‘potentially deadly’, and in the area of medicine, researchers are ‘playing with lives’. The problem is worldwide. In Australia misconduct allegations have created such a problem that the issue has even been raised in the Australian Parliament, and researchers have called for an ‘office of research integrity’. . . .

The major problem with fraud is that of science itself, namely that scientists ‘see their own profession in terms of the powerfully appealing ideal that the philosophers and sociologists have constructed. Like all believers they tend to interpret what they see of the world in terms of what the faith says is there.’ And, unfortunately, science is a ‘complex process in which the observer can see almost anything he wants provided he narrows his vision sufficiently’. An example of this problem is James Randi’s conclusion that scientists are among the easiest of persons to fool with magic tricks. The problem of objectivity is very serious because most researchers believe passionately in their work and the theories they are trying to prove. While this passion may enable the scientist to sustain the effort necessary to produce results, it may also colour and even distort those results.

Many examples exist to support the conclusion that researchers’ propensity for self-delusion is particularly strong, especially when examining ideas and data that impugn on their core belief structure. The fact is ‘all human observers, however well trained, have a strong tendency to see what they expect to see’. Nowhere is this more evident than in the admittedly highly emotional area of evolution.

[The original article includes citations and footnotes]

Attempts to Curry Favour

Unworthy of God and Man

One of the sad features of many modern Christians is how deeply they have been influenced by the propaganda of Unbelief. 

A central plank of the cascade of scepticism towards the Christian faith is that (Unbelieving, rationalistic, atheistic) science is objective and deals only with brute facts.  Therefore, to many  the pronouncements of science reflect infallible and certain truths which are testable and verifiable.  Anyone who denies or questions the veracities of Unbelieving rationalistic science consequently must be ignorant, foolish, stubborn or blind–of a combination of all of the above. 

Many Christians dislike the idea that they would be regarded as ignorant or foolish.
  So they seek to made accommodations between Scripture and Unbelieving science–which means they deny the evident testimony of Scripture and bend it in the attempt to to make our faith more conformable to the objective, verifiable “truths” of science.  This represents a sad, treacherous response.  It shows a lack of understanding of the tentative nature of the scientific enterprise and of the constant revision of once “verified facts” of science throughout its history. 

In reality, many conclusions of modern science are neither purely scientific nor genuinely empirical.  The common perception that science deals only with verifiable facts and direct observation is utterly naive, as is the notion that scientists are purely objective truth seekers.  Indeed, many of the so-called facts of nature are more ‘interprefacts’ than verifiable facts.  Even Forster and Marston admit “[t]he notion that science is ‘verifiable’ is dead.  Scientific knowledge is always partial, and even a scientific “theory of everything” never will be total knowledge.’  Yet many theologians continue to treat scientific conclusions as simply “matter of fact”, while failing to recognize the ideology behind them.  [Andrew S. Kulikovsky, Creation, Fall, Restoration: A Biblical Theology of Creation (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications Ltd, 2009),  p.40.]

Unbelieving rationalistic science presents itself as objective and interested in “just the facts, ma’am”.   Naive Christians, contrary to the Bible’s teaching, believe the propaganda.  They have not taken account of the deep black-magic in every unbelieving heart, regnant to one degree or another: fallen man instinctively hates God and suppresses the truth about Him as Creator and sovereign Lord.  There is a spiritual bias against God from the outset.  For Christians to ignore the existence of this bias is foolish. 

When Christians seek to engage in science using precepts and presuppositions and assumptions that are consistent with the Christian faith they are routinely mocked as being prejudiced.  “Of course you would say that,” is the sarcastic rebuttal.  Many Christians have not learned to regard Unbelieving science in the same vein: it too is prejudiced, but in the opposite direction.

Worse, the prejudice of Unbelief is vicious in the sense of being riven with internal contradictions.  It claims to believe in an objective, rationalistic cosmos that exists by chance, yet all the while it deploys values and concepts that reflect anything but randomness–such as language that conveys meaningful content.

For a Christian to give up the clear meaning of the text of Scripture in a vain attempt to impress Unbelief is a very sorry business.  Playing the fool to gain the respect of other fools is unworthy of both God and man.   

Honest Atheists

Blind, Pitiless Indifference

There are few honest atheists around.  Those that are tend to embarrass fellow-travellers.  Merry warriors enlisted in God’s Kingdom enjoy reminding them about honest atheists, thus heightening the embarrassment.

A World without God

Justin Taylor12:24 am CT
June 5, 2013

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

—Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (Basic Books, 1995), 95.

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving;
that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms;
that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave;
that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system,
and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—
all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.
Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

—Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903); emphasis added.

Exposing Pre-Commitments

A Moment of Rare Honesty

Every so often an Unbeliever comes along who shows they are aware of their assumptions and pre-commitments.  It does not happen very often.  The cry of our age is, “Just the facts, ma’am.”  We just focus upon facts and follow wherever they take us.  The problem with this is that our presuppositions have already determined what will be accepted as fact, and what will be discarded.

For example, the Christian is presupposed to accept the existence of the God revealed in the Scriptures.  Therefore, His revelation of Himself is factual, objectively and eternally so.  It is true truth.  The Unbeliever is predisposed to deny the existence of God.  Therefore, he regards the Bible as anti-factual or non-factual or mythical.  The Unbeliever’s presuppositions have already determined not only what the facts will be but also how and where they will be discovered or learnt. So Unbelief is plagued by two self-deceits.  The first is that it has no fundamental suppositions or presuppositions.  The second is that Unbelief is objective: it follows the facts wherever the facts lead.

But then again, every so often an Unbeliever comes along who is self-conscious about these things and admits them to himself and the world.  Such an Unbeliever is self-consciously presuppostional in the way that he thinks and operates–which is to say, he is more honest than the “just the facts, ma’am” brigade.

Harvard geneticist, Richard Lewontin is one such.

In an article arguing for the superiority of science over religion . . . Lewontin freely admits that science has its own problems.  It has created many of our social problems (like ecological disasters), and many scientific theories are no more than “unsubstantiated just-so stories.”  Nevertheless, “in the struggle between science and the supernatural,” we “take the side of science.”  Why?  “Because we have a prior commitment to materialism.” [Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), p. 96.  (Emphasis, ours).]

 This “prior commitment to materialism” is not factual; it is a religious commitment that makes modern Unbelieving science atheistic in its procession.  But Unbelieving science also, apart from more honest brokers like Lewontin, wilfully obscures its presuppositions, and claims instead that it is only driven by the facts, the empirical data, to its conclusions.  

And there is more, for Lewontin says even the methods of science are driven by materialistic philosophy.  The rules that define what qualifies as science in the first place have been crafted by materialists in such a way as to ensure they get only materialistic theories.  Or, as Lewontin puts it, “we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations.” (Ibid.)

This, as Colson and Pearcey observe, is a stunning admission.  But it is stunning only in its honesty and candidness, not in its substance.  What Lewontin is describing is both known and expected by Believers.  Unbelief reasons in a vicious circle: circular because we are creatures, vicious because the Unbelieving circle turns upon self.  To put it crudely, Unbelieving science produces Unbelieving facts, theories, and explanations.  Believing science produces Believing facts, theories, and explanations.

There is a popular saying to the effect that  one may be entitled to one’s own opinions, but not one’s own facts.  This is a naive oversimplification.  How often have we been told that it is a fact that the world is warming?  The temperature data proves it, we are informed.  But the temperature data record is patchy, incomplete, and full of data holes.  Therefore, temperature data is “adjusted”, “interpolated” and “filled in”.  The facts are massaged.  And the massaging has a number of assumptions built in which already pre-commit the masseuse to have the “facts” produce a certain pre-determined outcome–that is, the earth is warming.

The facts are not always what they seem, which is why credible science proceeds on the basis of testing, retesting, replication, and retesting again.  But when everyone in the hen house is clucking the same sound, the rigour of replication often softens.  The “apparatus of investigation” elides into an exercise to produce certain explanations and certain results that reinforce the consensus of the day.

The moral of the story is that whilst it is essential we talk about facts and empirical data, it is equally essential that we are aware of our philosophy of fact, and talk about that as well. Full disclosure is always be best policy.  But Unbelief hates such notions because they skewer Unbelief’s apparatus of self-deceit.  That’s one reason Unbelievers often get angry when debating with Christians.

The truth often hurts.

A Brouhaha of Brahmins

Thomas Nagel and Self-Contradictory Materialism

Below is a precis of an article about the materialist establishment’s conniptions over perceived heretic Thomas Nagel.  It is very well written and well worth perusing. 

The Heretic

Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him?

Mar 25, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 27 • By ANDREW FERGUSON

The Weekly Standard

Last fall, a few days before Halloween and about a month after the publication of Mind and Cosmos, the controversial new book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, several of the world’s leading philosophers gathered with a group of cutting-edge scientists in the conference room of a charming inn in the Berkshires. They faced one another around a big table set with pitchers of iced water and trays of hard candies wrapped in cellophane and talked and talked, as public intellectuals do. PowerPoint was often brought into play. 

The title of the “interdisciplinary workshop” was “Moving Naturalism Forward.” For those of us who like to kill time sitting around pondering the nature of reality—personhood, God, moral judgment, free will, what have you—this was the Concert for Bangladesh.
The biologist Richard Dawkins was there, author of The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene, and other bestselling books of popular science, and so was Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts and author of Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. So were the authors of Why Evolution is True, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World, Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, and The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions—all of them books that to one degree or another bring to a larger audience the world as scientists have discovered it to be. 

Contemporary philosophers have a name for the way you and I see the world, a world filled with other people, with colors and sounds, sights and sensations, things that are good and things that are bad and things that are very good indeed: ourselves, who are able, more or less, to make our own way through life, by our own lights. Philosophers call this common view the “manifest image.” Daniel Dennett pointed out at the conference that modern science, at least since the revelations of Darwin, has been piling up proof that the manifest image is not really accurate in any scientific sense. Rather science—this vast interlocking combine of genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, particle physics—tells us that the components of the manifest image are illusory. 

Color, for instance: That azalea outside the window may look red to you, but in reality it has no color at all. The red comes from certain properties of the azalea that absorb some kinds of light and reflect other kinds of light, which are then received by the eye and transformed in our brains into a subjective experience of red. 

And sounds, too: Complex vibrations in the air are soundless in reality, but our ears are able to turn the vibrations into a car alarm or a cat’s meow or, worse, the voice of Mariah Carey. These capacities of the human organism are evolutionary adaptations. Everything about human beings, by definition, is an evolutionary adaptation. Our sense that the colors and sounds exist “out there” and not merely in our brain is a convenient illusion that long ago increased the survival chances of our species. Powered by Darwin, modern science proceeds, in Dennett’s phrase, as a “universal corrosive,” destroying illusions all the way up and all the way down, dismantling our feelings of freedom and separate selfhood, our morals and beliefs, a mother’s love and a patient’s prayer: All in reality are just “molecules in motion.” 

The most famous, most succinct, and most pitiless summary of the manifest image’s fraudulence was written nearly 20 years ago by the geneticist Francis Crick: “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” 

This view is the “naturalism” that the workshoppers in the Berkshires were trying to move forward. Naturalism is also called “materialism,” the view that only matter exists; or “reductionism,” the view that all life, from tables to daydreams, is ultimately reducible to pure physics; or “determinism,” the view that every phenomenon, including our own actions, is determined by a preexisting cause, which was itself determined by another cause, and so on back to the Big Bang. The naturalistic project has been greatly aided by neo-Darwinism, the application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human behavior, including areas of life once assumed to be nonmaterial: emotions and thoughts and habits and perceptions. . . . 

Thomas Nagel may be the most famous philosopher in the United States—a bit like being the best power forward in the Lullaby League, but still. His paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” was recognized as a classic when it was published in 1974 . . . . Nagel occupies an endowed chair at NYU as a University Professor, a rare and exalted position that frees him to teach whatever course he wants. . . . For all this and more, Thomas Nagel is a prominent and heretofore respected member of the country’s intellectual elite. And such men are not supposed to write books with subtitles like the one he tacked onto Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.

The Guardian awarded Mind and Cosmos its prize for the Most Despised Science Book of 2012. The reviews were numerous and overwhelmingly negative; one of the kindest, in the British magazine Prospect, carried the defensive headline “Thomas Nagel is not crazy.” (Really, he’s not!) Most other reviewers weren’t so sure about that. . . .

“Thomas Nagel is of absolutely no importance on this subject,” wrote one. “He’s a self-contradictory idiot,” opined another. Some made simple appeals to authority and left it at that: “Haven’t these guys ever heard of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett?” The hearts of still others were broken at seeing a man of Nagel’s eminence sink so low. “It is sad that Nagel, whom my friends and I thought back in the 1960’s could leap over tall buildings with a single bound, has tripped over the Bible and fallen on his face. Very sad.” . . . .

“Evolutionists,” one reviewer huffily wrote, “will feel they’ve been ravaged by a sheep.” Many reviewers attacked the book on cultural as well as philosophical or scientific grounds, wondering aloud how a distinguished house like Oxford University Press could allow such a book to be published. The Philosophers’ Magazine described it with the curious word “irresponsible.” . . . 

But what about fans of apostasy? You don’t have to be a biblical fundamentalist or a young-earth creationist or an intelligent design enthusiast—I’m none of the above, for what it’s worth—to find Mind and Cosmos exhilarating. “For a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe,” Nagel writes. “It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.” The prima facie impression, reinforced by common sense, should carry more weight than the clerisy gives it. “I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life.”  

The incredulity is not simply a matter of scientific ignorance, as the materialists would have it. It arises from something more fundamental and intimate. The neo-Darwinian materialist account offers a picture of the world that is unrecognizable to us—a world without color or sound, and also a world without free will or consciousness or good and evil or selves or, when it comes to that, selflessness. “It flies in the face of common sense,” he says. Materialism is an explanation for a world we don’t live in.

Nagel’s tone is measured and tentative, but there’s no disguising the book’s renegade quality. There are flashes of exasperation and dismissive impatience. What’s exhilarating is that the source of Nagel’s exasperation is, so to speak, his own tribe: the “secular theoretical establishment and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates.” The establishment today, he says, is devoted beyond all reason to a “dominant scientific naturalism, heavily dependent on Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against attacks from religion.” . . .

Nagel follows the materialist chain of reasoning all the way into the cul de sac where it inevitably winds up. Nagel’s touchier critics have accused him of launching an assault on science, when really it is an assault on the nonscientific uses to which materialism has been put. . . . Materialism, then, is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go as far as materialists want it to. It is a premise of science, not a finding. Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result.

But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion.

Here materialism bumps up against itself. Nagel insists that we know some things to exist even if materialism omits or ignores or is oblivious to them. Reductive materialism doesn’t account for the “brute facts” of existence—it doesn’t explain, for example, why the world exists at all, or how life arose from non-life. Closer to home, it doesn’t plausibly explain the fundamental beliefs we rely on as we go about our everyday business: the truth of our subjective experience, our ability to reason, our capacity to recognize that some acts are virtuous and others aren’t. These failures, Nagel says, aren’t just temporary gaps in our knowledge, waiting to be filled in by new discoveries in science. On its own terms, materialism cannot account for brute facts. Brute facts are irreducible, and materialism, which operates by breaking things down to their physical components, stands useless before them. “There is little or no possibility,” he writes, “that these facts depend on nothing but the laws of physics.”  

In a dazzling six-part tour de force rebutting Nagel’s critics, the philosopher Edward Feser provided a good analogy to describe the basic materialist error—the attempt to stretch materialism from a working assumption into a comprehensive explanation of the world. Feser suggests a parody of materialist reasoning: “1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has. 2. Therefore we have good reason to think that metal detectors can reveal to us everything that can be revealed” about metallic objects.

But of course a metal detector only detects the metallic content of an object; it tells us nothing about its color, size, weight, or shape. In the same way, Feser writes, the methods of “mechanistic science are as successful as they are in predicting and controlling natural phenomena precisely because they focus on only those aspects of nature susceptible to prediction and control.”

Meanwhile, they ignore everything else. But this is a fatal weakness for a theory that aspires to be a comprehensive picture of the world. With magnetic resonance imaging, science can tell us which parts of my brain light up when, for example, I glimpse my daughter’s face in a crowd; the bouncing neurons can be observed and measured. Science cannot quantify or describe the feelings I experience when I see my daughter. Yet the feelings are no less real than the neurons.

The point sounds more sentimental than it is. My bouncing neurons and my feelings of love and obligation are unquestionably bound together. But the difference between the neurons and the feelings, the material and the mental, is a qualitative difference, a difference in kind. And of the two, reductive materialism can capture only one.

“The world is an astonishing place,” Nagel writes. “That it has produced you, and me, and the rest of us is the most astonishing thing about it.” Materialists are in the business of banishing astonishment; they want to demystify the world and human beings along with it, to show that everything we see as a mystery is reducible to components that aren’t mysterious at all. And they cling to this ambition even in cases where doing so is obviously fruitless. Neo-Darwinism insists that every phenomenon, every species, every trait of every species, is the consequence of random chance, as natural selection requires. And yet, Nagel says, “certain things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as non-accidental if we are to pretend to a real understanding of the world.” (The italics are mine.)

Among these remarkable, nonaccidental things are many of the features of the manifest image. Consciousness itself, for example: You can’t explain consciousness in evolutionary terms, Nagel says, without undermining the explanation itself. Evolution easily accounts for rudimentary kinds of awareness. Hundreds of thousands of years ago on the African savannah, where the earliest humans evolved the unique characteristics of our species, the ability to sense danger or to read signals from a potential mate would clearly help an organism survive.

So far, so good. But the human brain can do much more than this. It can perform calculus, hypothesize metaphysics, compose music—even develop a theory of evolution. None of these higher capacities has any evident survival value, certainly not hundreds of thousands of years ago when the chief aim of mental life was to avoid getting eaten. Could our brain have developed and sustained such nonadaptive abilities by the trial and error of natural selection, as neo-Darwinism insists? It’s possible, but the odds, Nagel says, are “vanishingly small.” If Nagel is right, the materialist is in a pickle. The conscious brain that is able to come up with neo-Darwinism as a universal explanation simultaneously makes neo-Darwinism, as a universal explanation, exceedingly unlikely.

A similar argument holds for our other cognitive capacities. “The evolution story leaves the authority of reason in a much weaker position,” he writes. Neo-Darwinism tells us that we have the power of reason because reason was adaptive; it must have helped us survive, back in the day. Yet reason often conflicts with our intuition or our emotion—capacities that must also have been adaptive and essential for survival. Why should we “privilege” one capacity over another when reason and intuition conflict? On its own terms, the scheme of neo-Darwinism gives us no standard by which we should choose one adaptive capacity over the other. And yet neo-Darwinists insist we embrace neo-Darwinism because it conforms to our reason, even though it runs against our intuition. Their defense of reason is unreasonable.

So too our moral sense. We all of us have confidence, to one degree or another, that “our moral judgments are objectively valid”—that is, while our individual judgments might be right or wrong, what makes them right or wrong is real, not simply fantasy or opinion. Two and two really do make four. Why is this confidence inherent in our species? How was it adaptive? Neo-Darwinian materialists tell us that morality evolved as a survival mechanism (like everything else): We developed an instinct for behavior that would help us survive, and we called this behavior good as a means of reinforcing it. We did the reverse for behavior that would hurt our chances for survival: We called it bad. Neither type of behavior was good or bad in reality; such moral judgments are just useful tricks human beings have learned to play on ourselves.

Yet Nagel points out that our moral sense, even at the most basic level, developed a complexity far beyond anything needed for survival, even on the savannah—even in Manhattan. We are, as Nagel writes, “beings capable of thinking successfully about good and bad, right and wrong, and discovering moral and evaluative truths that do not depend on [our] own beliefs.” And we behave accordingly, or try to. The odds that such a multilayered but nonadaptive capacity should become a characteristic of the species through natural selection are, again, implausibly long. . . .

In this sense too Nagel is a throwback, daring not only to interpret science but to contradict scientists. He admits it’s “strange” when he relies “on a philosophical claim to refute a scientific theory supported by empirical evidence.” But he knows that when it comes to cosmology, scientists are just as likely to make an error of philosophy as philosophers are to make an error of science. And Nagel is accused of making large errors indeed. According to Leiter and Weisberg and the others, he is ignorant of how science is actually done these days.

Nagel, say Leiter and Weisberg, overestimates the importance of materialism, even as a scientific method. He’s attacking a straw man. He writes as though “reductive materialism really were driving the scientific community.” In truth, they say, most scientists reject theoretical reductionism. Fifty years ago, many philosophers and scientists might have believed that all the sciences were ultimately reducible to physics, but modern science doesn’t work that way. Psychologists, for example, aren’t trying to reduce psychology to biology; and biologists don’t want to boil biology down to chemistry; and chemists don’t want to reduce chemistry to physics. Indeed, an evolutionary biologist—even one who’s a good materialist—won’t refer to physics at all in the course of his work!

And this point is true, as Nagel himself writes in his book: Theoretical materialism, he says, “is not a necessary condition of the practice of any of those sciences.” Researchers can believe in materialism or not, as they wish, and still make scientific progress. (This is another reason why it’s unconvincing to cite scientific progress as evidence for the truth of materialism.) But the critics’ point is also disingenuous. If materialism is true as an explanation of everything—and they insist it is—then psychological facts, for example, must be reducible to biology, and then down to chemistry, and finally down to physics. If they weren’t reducible in this way, they would (ta-da!) be irreducible. And any fact that’s irreducible would, by definition, be uncaused and undetermined; meaning it wouldn’t be material. It might even be spooky stuff.

On this point Leiter and Weisberg were gently chided by the prominent biologist Jerry Coyne, who was also a workshopper in the Berkshires. He was delighted by their roasting of Nagel in the Nation, but he accused them of going wobbly on materialism—of shying away from the hard conclusions that reductive materialism demands. It’s not surprising that scientists in various disciplines aren’t actively trying to reduce all science to physics; that would be a theoretical problem that is only solvable in the distant future. However: “The view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics,” he wrote, “must be true unless you’re religious.” Either we’re molecules in motion or we’re not.

You can sympathize with Leiter and Weisberg for fudging on materialism. As a philosophy of everything it is an undeniable drag. As a way of life it would be even worse. Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath. Say what you will about Leiter and Weisberg and the workshoppers in the Berkshires. From what I can tell, none of them is a psychopath. Not even close.

Applied beyond its own usefulness as a scientific methodology, materialism is, as Nagel suggests, self-evidently absurd. Mind and Cosmos can be read as an extended paraphrase of Orwell’s famous insult: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Materialism can only be taken seriously as a philosophy through a heroic feat of cognitive dissonance; pretending, in our abstract, intellectual life, that values like truth and goodness have no objective content even as, in our private life, we try to learn what’s really true and behave in a way we know to be good. Nagel has sealed his ostracism from the intelligentsia by idly speculating why his fellow intellectuals would undertake such a feat.

“The priority given to evolutionary naturalism in the face of its implausible conclusions,” he writes, “is due, I think, to the secular consensus that this is the only form of external understanding of ourselves that provides an alternative to theism.”

In a recent review in the New York Review of Books of Where the Conflict Really Lies, by the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, Nagel told how instinctively he recoils from theism, and how hungry he is for a reasonable alternative. “If I ever found myself flooded with the conviction that what the Nicene Creed says is true,” he wrote, “the most likely explanation would be that I was losing my mind, not that I was being granted the gift of faith.” He admits that he finds the evident failure of materialism as a worldview alarming—precisely because the alternative is, for a secular intellectual, unthinkable. He calls this intellectual tic “fear of religion.” 

“I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear,” he wrote not long ago in an essay called “Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.” “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

Nagel believes this “cosmic authority problem” is widely shared among intellectuals, and I believe him. It accounts for the stubbornness with which they cling to materialism—and for the hostility that greets an intellectual who starts to wander off from the herd. Materialism must be true because it “liberates us from religion.” The positive mission Nagel undertakes in Mind and Cosmos is to outline, cautiously, a possible Third Way between theism and materialism, given that the first is unacceptable—emotionally, if not intellectually—and the second is untenable. Perhaps matter itself has a bias toward producing conscious creatures. Nature in that case would be “teleological”—not random, not fully subject to chance, but tending toward a particular end. Our mental life would be accounted for—phew!—without reference to God.

I don’t think Nagel succeeds in finding his Third Way, and I doubt he or his successors ever will, but then I have biases of my own. There’s no doubting the honesty and intellectual courage—the free thinking and ennobling good faith—that shine through his attempt.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

Christian Science Properly Called

 God in the Lab

Scientism is the philosophical belief that  matter is the only thing that exists.  If it’s not made up of atoms–if it cannot be reduced to, and explained by, the interaction of atomic nuclei and electrons–it does not exist. 

Most hard core evolutionists are believers in scientism.  Most scientists are believers in scientism to some extent.  They believe that religion and science are oil and water and can never mix.  So, when they enter their labs or conduct their research they lock the door and exclude all religious considerations.  Outside the lab they may be church goers, or Hindu’s or deeply religious in some way or other.  This is a stupid idea.

Every religion, including scientism has a view about the origins of being.  To suspend that when one goes into the lab to conduct scientific research is to deny one’s faith.

Christian scientists often get caught up in this.
  They think that because science deals with the natural, as long as they look for natural causes for all phenomena they can be truly professional and consistent scientists.  It is only when they have to resort to explanations that invoke God that they are betraying the scientific disciplines.  So, materialists in the lab; Christian believers on Sunday. 

This view reflects a poor understanding of the Scriptures, and of science for that matter.  The Scriptures declare God to be Almighty, the Maker of all things.  God made matter–but more, He created, established, and maintains the natural causes and effects of the material order.  The very regularity of matter, by which it can be studied and meaningfully experimented upon is due to God’s constant, unceasing commands issued over the universe–without end.  Therefore, when a Christian scientist enters the lab he is studying the causes and effects and phenomena of the natural order, the material world, but he is also studying the handiwork and the commands of God at the same time. 

If the Christian scientist turns to his Unbelieving colleague and asks, Why do you think the universe is  mathematically ordered, his colleague will probably shake his head.  He does not know. It’s beyond the competence of science.  But why?  His whole career is dependant upon the regularity of natural causes, of the repeatability of experiments, of the mathematical order of the material world.  Why not face up to and ask and seek to answer that elephantine question? 

The regularity of the material order does not traduce the Christian faith; it loudly testifies to it.  Natural cause explanations and discovery do not “shrink” God, they make Him more and more glorious to the Believer’s mind.  It takes a fool to deny pertinent evidence staring him in the face. 

The more complex we discover the created order to be, the more glorious and great God becomes to our eyes. 

In a word, Christian scientists need to give a religious explanation for everything. Rather than shutting out their faith when they enter the lab, they must tell the truth.  The lab and its work is only meaningful because the natural material world is ordered and regular, which in turn is so because of the unceasing work of the Almighty, supernatural Creator God. 

The tragedy of Unbelieving science is that it celebrates the regularity and order of the material world, and posits that such things are because of chance.  Go figure. 

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part VI

The Persistence of Philosophy

[Part VI of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

The positivist tradition in philosophy gave scientism a strong impetus by denying validity to any area of human knowledge outside of natural science. More recent advocates of scientism have taken the ironic but logical next step of denying any useful role for philosophy whatsoever, even the subservient philosophy of the positivist sort. But the last laugh, it seems, remains with the philosophers — for the advocates of scientism reveal conceptual confusions that are obvious upon philosophical reflection. Rather than rendering philosophy obsolete, scientism is setting the stage for its much-needed revival.

Advocates of scientism today claim the sole mantle of rationality, frequently equating science with reason itself.
Yet it seems the very antithesis of reason to insist that science can do what it cannot, or even that it has done what it demonstrably has not. As a scientist, I would never deny that scientific discoveries can have important implications for metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and that everyone interested in these topics needs to be scientifically literate. But the claim that science and science alone can answer longstanding questions in these fields gives rise to countless problems.

In contrast to reason, a defining characteristic of superstition is the stubborn insistence that something — a fetish, an amulet, a pack of Tarot cards — has powers which no evidence supports. From this perspective, scientism appears to have as much in common with superstition as it does with properly conducted scientific research. Scientism claims that science has already resolved questions that are inherently beyond its ability to answer.

Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence.

Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence. One longs for a new Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of this latest superstition.

---

Austin L. Hughes is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina.

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part V

The Eclipse of Ethics

[Part V of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

Perhaps no area of philosophy has seen a greater effort at appropriation by advocates of scientism than ethics. Many of them tend toward a position of moral relativism. According to this position, science deals with the objective and the factual, whereas statements of ethics merely represent people’s subjective feelings; there can be no universal right or wrong. Not surprisingly, there are philosophers who have codified this opinion. The positivist tradition made much of a “fact-value distinction,” in which science was said to deal with facts, leaving fields like ethics (and aesthetics) to deal with the more nebulous and utterly disparate world of values. In his influential book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), the philosopher J. L. Mackie went even further, arguing that ethics is fundamentally based on a false theory about reality.

Evolutionary biology has often been seen as highly relevant to ethics, beginning in the nineteenth century. Social Darwinism — at least as it came to be explained and understood by later generations — was an ideology that justified laissez-faire capitalism with reference to the natural “struggle for existence.” In the writings of authors such as Herbert Spencer, the accumulation of wealth with little regard for those less fortunate was justified as “nature’s way.” Of course, the “struggle” involved in natural selection is not a struggle to accumulate a stock portfolio but a struggle to reproduce — and ironically, Social Darwinism arose at the very time that the affluent classes of Western nations were beginning to limit their reproduction (the so-called “demographic transition”) with the result that the economic struggle and the Darwinian struggle were at cross-purposes.

Partly in response to this contradiction, the eugenics movement arose, with its battle cry, “The unfit are reproducing like rabbits; we must do something to stop them!”
Although plenty of prominent Darwinians endorsed such sentiments in their day, no more incoherent a plea can be imagined from a Darwinian point of view: If the great unwashed are out-reproducing the genteel classes, that can only imply that it is the great unwashed who are the fittest — not the supposed “winners” in the economic struggle. It is the genteel classes, with their restrained reproduction, who are the unfit. So the foundations of eugenics are complete nonsense from a Darwinian point of view.

The unsavory nature of Social Darwinism and associated ideas such as eugenics caused a marked eclipse in the enterprise of evolutionary ethics. But since the 1970s, with the rise of sociobiology and its more recent offspring evolutionary psychology, there has been a huge resurgence of interest in evolutionary ethics on the part of philosophers, biologists, psychologists, and popular writers.

It should be emphasized that there is such a thing as a genuinely scientific human sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. In this field, falsifiable hypotheses are proposed and tested with real data on human behavior. The basic methods are akin to those of behavioral ecology, which have been applied with some success to understanding the behavioral adaptations of nonhuman animals, and can shed similar light on aspects of human behavior — although these efforts are complicated by human cultural variability. On the other hand, there is also a large literature devoted to a kind of pop sociobiology that deals in untested — and often untestable — speculations, and it is the pop sociobiologists who are most likely to tout the ethical relevance of their ostensible discoveries.

When evolutionary psychology emerged, its practitioners were generally quick to repudiate Social Darwinism and eugenics, labeling them as “misuses” of evolutionary ideas. It is true that both were based on incoherent reasoning that is inconsistent with the basic concepts of biological evolution; but it is also worth remembering that some very important figures in the history of evolutionary biology did not see these inconsistencies, being blinded, it seems, by their social and ideological prejudices. The history of these ideas is another cautionary tale of the fallibility of institutional science when it comes to getting even its own theories straight.

Just the same, what evolutionary psychology was about, we were told, was something quite different than Social Darwinism. It avoided the political and focused on the personal. One area of human life to which the field has devoted considerable attention is sex, spinning out just-so stories to explain the “adaptive” nature of every sort of behavior, from infidelity to rape. As with the epistemological explanations, since natural selection “should” have favored this or that behavior, it is often simply concluded that it must have done so.

The tacit assumption seems to be that merely reciting the story somehow renders it factual. (There often even seems to be a sort of relish with which these stories are elaborated — the more so the more thoroughly caddish the behavior.) The typical next move is to deplore the very behaviors the evolutionary psychologist has just designated as part of our evolutionary heritage, and perhaps our instinct: To be sure, we don’t approve of such things today, lest anyone get the wrong idea. This deploring is often accompanied by a pious invocation of the fact-value distinction (even though typically no facts at all have made an appearance — merely speculations).

There seems to be a thirst for this kind of explanation, but the pop evolutionary psychologists generally pay little attention to the philosophical issues raised by their evolutionary scenarios. Most obviously, if “we now know” that the selfish behavior attributed to our ancestors is morally reprehensible, how have “we” come to know this? What basis do we have for saying that anything is wrong at all if our behaviors are no more than the consequence of past natural selection? And if we desire to be morally better than our ancestors were, are we even free to do so? Or are we programmed to behave in a certain way that we now, for some reason, have come to deplore?

On the other hand, there is a more serious philosophical literature that attempts to confront some of the issues in the foundations of ethics that arise from reflections on human evolutionary biology — for example, Richard Joyce’s 2006 book The Evolution of Morality. Unfortunately, much of this literature consists of still more storytelling — scenarios whereby natural selection might have favored a generalized moral sense or the tendency to approve of certain behaviors such as cooperation. There is nothing inherently implausible about such scenarios, but they remain in the realm of pure speculation and are essentially impossible to test in any rigorous way. Still, these ideas have gained wide influence.

Part of this evolutionary approach to ethics tends toward a debunking of morality. Since our standards of morality result from natural selection for traits that were useful to our ancestors, the debunkers argue, these moral standards must not refer to any objective ethical truths. But just because certain beliefs about morality were useful for our ancestors does not make them necessarily false. It would be hard to make a similar case, for example, against the accuracy of our visual perception based on its usefulness to our ancestors, or against the truth of arithmetic based on the same.

True ethical statements — if indeed they exist — are of a very different sort from true statements of arithmetic or observational science. One might argue that our ancestors evolved the ability to understand human nature and, therefore, they could derive true ethical statements from an understanding of that nature. But this is hardly a novel discovery of modern science: Aristotle made the latter point in the Nicomachean Ethics. If human beings are the products of evolution, then it is in some sense true that everything we do is the result of an evolutionary process — but it is difficult to see what is added to Aristotle’s understanding if we say that we are able to reason as he did as the result of an evolutionary process. (A parallel argument could be made about Kantian ethics.)

Not all advocates of scientism fall for the problems of reducing ethics to evolution. Sam Harris, in his 2010 book The Moral Landscape, is one advocate of scientism who takes issue with the whole project of evolutionary ethics. Yet he wishes to substitute an offshoot of scientism that is perhaps even more problematic, and certainly more well-worn: utilitarianism. Under Harris’s ethical framework, the central criteria for judging if a behavior is moral is whether or not it contributes to the “well-being of conscious creatures.” Harris’s ideas have all of the problems that have plagued utilitarian philosophy from the beginning. As utilitarians have for some time, Harris purports to challenge the fact-value distinction, or rather, to sidestep the tricky question of values entirely by just focusing on facts. But, as has also been true of utilitarians for some time, this move ends up being a way to advance certain values over others without arguing for them, and to leave large questions about those values unresolved.

Harris does not, for example, address the time-bound nature of such evaluations: Do we consider only the well-being of creatures that are conscious at the precise moment of our analysis? If yes, why should we accept such a bias? What of creatures that are going to possess consciousness in the near future — or would without human intervention — such as human embryos, whose destruction Harris staunchly advocates for the purposes of stem cell research? What of comatose patients, whose consciousness, and prospects for future consciousness, are uncertain? Harris might respond that he is only concerned with the well-being of creatures now experiencing consciousness, not any potentially future conscious creatures. But if so, should he not, for example, advocate expending all of the earth’s nonrenewable resources in one big here-and-now blowout, enhancing the physical well-being of those now living, and let future generations be damned? Yet Harris claims to be a conservationist. Surely the best justification for resource conservation on the basis of his ethics would be that it enhances the well-being of future generations of conscious creatures. If those potential future creatures merit our consideration, why should we not extend the same consideration to creatures already in existence, whose potential future involves consciousness?

Moreover, the factual analysis Harris touts cannot nearly bear the weight of the ethical inquiry he claims it does. Harris argues that the question of what factors contribute to the “well-being of conscious creatures” is a factual one, and furthermore that science can provide insights into these factors, and someday perhaps even give definitive accounts of them. Harris himself has been involved in research that examines the brain states of human subjects engaged in a variety of tasks. Although there has been much overhyping of brain imaging, the limitations of this sort of research are becoming increasingly obvious. Even on their own terms, these studies at best provide evidence of correlation, not of causation, and of correlations mixed in with the unfathomably complex interplay of cause and effect that are the brain and the mind. These studies inherently claim to get around the problems of understanding subjective consciousness by examining the brain, but the basic unlikeness of first-person qualitative experience and third-person events that can be examined by anyone places fundamental limits on the usual reductive techniques of empirical science.

We might still grant Harris’s assumption that neuroscience will someday reveal, in great biochemical and physiological detail, a set of factors highly associated with a sense of well-being. Even so, there would be limitations on how much this knowledge would advance human happiness. For comparison, we know a quite a lot about the physiology of digestion, and we are able to describe in great detail the physiological differences between the digestive system of a person who is starving and that of a person who has just eaten a satisfying and nutritionally balanced meal. But this knowledge contributes little to solving world hunger. This is because the factor that makes the difference — that is, the meal — comes from outside the person. Unless the factors causing our well-being come primarily from within, and are totally independent of what happens in our environment, Harris’s project will not be the key to achieving universal well-being.

Harris is aware that external circumstances play a vital role in our sense of well-being, and he summarizes some research that addresses these factors. But most of this research is soft science of the very softest sort — questionnaire surveys that ask people in a variety of circumstances about their feelings of happiness. As Harris himself notes, most of the results tell us nothing we did not already know. (Unsurprisingly, Harris, an atheist polemicist, fails to acknowledge any studies that have supported a spiritual or religious component in happiness.) Moreover, there is reason for questioning to what extent the self-reported “happiness” in population surveys relates to real happiness. Recent data indicating that both states and countries with high rates of reported “happiness” also have high rates of suicide suggest that people’s answers to surveys may not always provide a reliable indicator of societal well-being, or even of happiness.

This, too, is a point as old as philosophy: As Aristotle noted in the Nicomachean Ethics, there is much disagreement between people as to what happiness is, “and often even the same man identifies it with different things, with health when he is ill, with wealth when he is poor.” Again, understanding values requires philosophy, and cannot simply be sidestepped by wrapping them in a numerical package. Harris is right that new scientific information can guide our decisions by enlightening our application of moral principles — a conclusion that would not have been troubling to Kant or Aquinas. But this is a far cry from scientific information shaping or determining our moral principles themselves, an idea for which Harris is unable to make a case.

A striking inconsistency in Harris’s thought is his adherence to determinism, which seems to go against his insistence that there are right and wrong choices. This is a tension widely evident in pop sociobiology. Harris seems to think that free will is an illusion but also that our decisions are really driven by thoughts that arise unbidden in our brains. He does not explain the origin of these thoughts nor how their origin relates to moral choices.

Harris gives a hint of an answer to this question when, in speaking of criminals, he attributes their actions to “some combination of bad genes, bad parents, bad ideas, and bad luck.” Each of us, he says, “could have been dealt a very different hand in life” and “it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.” Harris’s reference to “bad genes” puts him back closer to the territory of eugenics and Social Darwinism than he seems to realize, making morality the privilege of the lucky few. Although Harris admits that we have a lot to learn about what makes for happiness, he does advance his understanding that happy people have “careers that are intellectually stimulating and financially rewarding” and “basic control over their lives.”

This view undermines the possibility of happiness and moral behavior for those who are dealt a bad hand, and so does more to degrade than uplift at the individual level. But worse, it does little to advance the well-being of society as a whole. The importance of good circumstances, and guaranteeing these for as many as possible, is one that is already widely understood and appreciated. But the question remains how to bring about these circumstances for everyone, and no economic system has yet been devised to ensure this. Short of this, difficult discussions of philosophy, justice, politics, and all of the other fields concerned with public life will be required to understand what the good life is and how to provide it to many given the limitations and inequalities of what circumstance brings to each of us.

On these points, as with so many others, scientism tends to present as bold, novel solutions what are really just the beginning terms of the problem as it is already widely understood.

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part IV

The Eclipse of Epistemology

[Part IV of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

Hawking and Mlodinow, in the chapter of their book called “The Theory of Everything,” quote Albert Einstein: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” In response, Hawking and Mlodinow offer this crashing banality: “The universe is comprehensible because it is governed by scientific laws; that is to say, its behavior can be modeled.” Later, the authors invite us to give ourselves a collective pat on the back: “The fact that we human beings — who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature — have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph.”

Great triumph or no, none of this addresses Einstein’s paradox, because no explanation is offered as to why our universe is “governed by scientific laws.”  Moreover, even if we can be confident that our universe has unchanging physical laws — which many of the new speculative cosmologies call into question — how is it that we “mere collections of particles” are able to discern those laws? How can we be confident that we will continue to discern them better, until we understand them fully?

A common response to these questions invokes what has become the catch-all explanatory tool of advocates of scientism: evolution.
W. V. O. Quine was one of the first modern philosophers to apply evolutionary concepts to epistemology, when he argued in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969) that natural selection should have favored the development of traits in human beings that lead us to distinguish truth from falsehood, on the grounds that believing false things is detrimental to fitness. More recently, scientific theories themselves have come to be considered the objects of natural selection. For example, philosopher Bastiaan C. van Fraassen argued in his 1980 book The Scientific Image:

the success of current scientific theories is no miracle. It is not even surprising to the scientific (Darwinist) mind. For any scientific theory is born into a life of fierce competition, a jungle red in tooth and claw. Only the successful theories survive — the ones which in fact latched onto actual regularities in nature.

Richard Dawkins has famously extended this analysis to ideas in general, which he calls “memes.”

The notion that our minds and senses are adapted to find knowledge does have some intuitive appeal; as Aristotle observed long before Darwin, “all men, by nature, desire to know.” But from an evolutionary perspective, it is by no means obvious that there is always a fitness advantage to knowing the truth. One might grant that it may be very beneficial to my fitness to know certain facts in certain contexts: For instance, if a saber-toothed tiger is about to attack me, it is likely to be to my advantage to be aware of that fact.

Accurate perception in general is likely to be advantageous. And simple mathematics, such as counting, might be advantageous to fitness in many contexts — for example, in keeping track of my numerous offspring when saber-toothed cats are about. Plausibly, even the human propensity for gathering genealogical information, and with it an intuitive sense of degrees of relatedness among social group members, might have been advantageous because it served to increase the propensity of an organism to protect members of the species with genotypes similar to its own. But the general epistemological argument offered by these authors goes far beyond any such elementary needs. While it may be plausible to imagine a fitness advantage to simple skills of classification and counting, it is very hard to see such an advantage to DNA sequence analysis or quantum theory.

Similar points apply whether one is considering the ideas themselves or the traits that allow us to form ideas as the objects of natural selection. In either case, the “fitness” of an idea hinges on its ability to gain wide adherence and acceptance. But there is little reason to suppose that natural selection would have favored the ability or desire to perceive the truth in all cases, rather than just some useful approximation of it. Indeed, in some contexts, a certain degree of self-deception may actually be advantageous from the point of view of fitness. There is a substantial sociobiological literature regarding the possible fitness advantages of self-deception in humans (the evolutionary biologist Robert L. Trivers reviewed these in a 2000 article in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences).

These invocations of evolution also highlight another common misuse of evolutionary ideas: namely, the idea that some trait must have evolved merely because we can imagine a scenario under which possession of that trait would have been advantageous to fitness. Unfortunately, biologists as well as philosophers have all too often been guilty of this sort of invalid inference. Such forays into evolutionary explanation amount ultimately to storytelling rather than to hypothesis-testing in the scientific sense. For a complete evolutionary account of a phenomenon, it is not enough to construct a story about how the trait might have evolved in response to a given selection pressure; rather, one must provide some sort of evidence that it really did so evolve. This is a very tall order, especially when we are dealing with human mental or behavioral traits, the genetic basis of which we are far from understanding.

Evolutionary biologists today are less inclined than Darwin was to expect that every trait of every organism must be explicable by positive selection. In fact, there is abundant evidence — as described in books like Motoo Kimura’s The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution (1983), Stephen Jay Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), and Michael Lynch’s The Origins of Genome Architecture (2007) — that many features of organisms arose by mutations that were fixed by chance, and were neither selectively favored nor disfavored. The fact that any species, including ours, has traits that might confer no obvious fitness benefit is perfectly consistent with what we know of evolution. Natural selection can explain much about why species are the way they are, but it does not necessarily offer a specific explanation for human intellectual powers, much less any sort of basis for confidence in the reliability of science.

What van Fraassen, Quine, and these other thinkers are appealing to is a kind of popularized and misapplied Darwinism that bears little relationship to how evolution really operates, yet that appears in popular writings of all sorts — and even, as I have discovered in my own work as an evolutionary biologist, in the peer-reviewed literature.

To speak of a “Darwinian” process of selection among culturally transmitted ideas, whether scientific theories or memes, is at best only a loose analogy with highly misleading implications. It easily becomes an interpretive blank check, permitting speculation that seems to explain any describable human trait. Moreover, even in the strongest possible interpretation of these arguments, at best they help a little in explaining why we human beings are capable of comprehending the universe — but they still say nothing about why the universe itself is comprehensible.

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part III

The Eclipse of Metaphysics

[Part III of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

There are at least three areas of inquiry traditionally in the purview of philosophy that now are often claimed to be best — or only — studied scientifically: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Let us discuss each in turn.

Physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow open their 2010 book The Grand Design by asking:

What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? … Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

Though physicists might once have been dismissive of metaphysics as mere speculation, they would also have characterized such questions as inherently speculative and so beyond their own realm of expertise. The claims of Hawking and Mlodinow, and many other writers, thus represent a striking departure from the traditional view.

In contrast to these authors’ claims of philosophical obsolescence, there has arisen a curious consilience between the findings of modern cosmology and some traditional understandings of the creation of the universe. For example, theists have noted that the model known as the Big Bang has a certain consistency with the Judeo-Christian notion of creation ex nihilo, a consistency not seen in other cosmologies that postulated an eternally existent universe. (In fact, when the astronomer-priest Georges Lemaître first postulated the theory, he was met with such skepticism by proponents of an eternal universe that the name “Big Bang” was coined by his opponents — as a term of ridicule.) Likewise, many cosmologists have articulated various forms of what is known as the “anthropic principle” — that is, the observation that the basic laws of the universe seem to be “fine-tuned” in such a way as to be favorable to life, including human life.

It is perhaps in part as a response to this apparent consilience that we owe the rise of a large professional and popular literature in recent decades dedicated to theories about multiverses, “many worlds,” and “landscapes” of reality that would seem to restore the lack of any special favoring of humanity. Hawking and Mlodinow, for example, state that

the fine-tunings in the laws of nature can be explained by the existence of multiple universes. Many people through the ages have attributed to God the beauty and complexity of nature that in their time seemed to have no scientific explanation. But just as Darwin and Wallace explained how the apparently miraculous design of living forms could appear without intervention by a supreme being, the multiverse concept can explain the fine-tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the universe for our benefit.

The multiverse theory holds that there are many different universes, of which ours is just one, and that each has its own system of physical laws. The argument Hawking and Mlodinow offer is essentially one from the laws of probability: If there are enough universes, one or more whose laws are suitable for the evolution of intelligent life is more or less bound to occur.

Physicist Lee Smolin, in his 1997 book The Life of the Cosmos, goes one step further by applying the principles of natural selection to a multiverse model. Smolin postulates that black holes give rise to new universes, and that the physical laws of a universe determine its propensity to give rise to black holes. A universe’s set of physical laws thus serves as its “genome,” and these “genomes” differ with respect to their propensity to allow a universe to “reproduce” by creating new universes. For example, it happens that a universe with a lot of carbon is very good at making black holes — and a universe with a lot of carbon is also one favorable to the evolution of life. In order for his evolutionary process to work, Smolin also assumes a kind of mutational mechanism whereby the physical laws of a universe may be slightly modified in progeny universes. For Smolin, then, not only is our universe bound to occur because there have been many rolls of the dice, but the dice are loaded in favor of a universe like ours because it happens to be a particularly “fit” universe.

Though these arguments may do some work in evading the conclusion that our universe is fine-tuned with us in mind, they cannot sidestep, or even address, the fundamental metaphysical questions raised by the fact that something — whether one or many universes — exists rather than nothing. The main fault of these arguments lies in their failure to distinguish between necessary and contingent being. A contingent being is one that might or might not exist, and thus might or might not have certain properties. In the context of modern quantum physics, or population genetics, one might even assign probability values to the existence or non-existence of some contingent being. But a necessary being is one that must exist, and whose properties could not be other than they are.

Multiverse theorists are simply saying that our universe and its laws have merely contingent being, and that other universes are conceivable and so also may exist, albeit contingently. The idea of the contingent nature of our universe may cut against the grain of modern materialism, and so seem novel to many physicists and philosophers, but it is not in fact new. Thomas Aquinas, for example, began the third of his famous five proofs of the existence of God (a being “necessary in itself”) with the observation of contingent being (“we find among things certain ones that might or might not be”). Whether or not one is convinced by Aquinas, it should be clear that the “discovery” that our universe is a contingent event among other contingent events is perfectly consistent with his argument.

Writers like Hawking, Mlodinow, and Smolin, however, use the contingent nature of our universe and its laws to argue for a very different conclusion from that of Aquinas — namely, that some contingent universe (whether or not it turned out to be our own) must have come into being, without the existence of any necessary being. Here again probability is essential to the argument: While any universe with a particular set of laws may be very improbable, with enough universes out there it becomes highly probable. This is the same principle behind the fact that, when I toss a coin, even though there is some probability that I will get heads and some probability that I will get tails, it is certain that I will get heads or tails. Similarly, modern theorists imply, the multiverse has necessary being even though any given universe does not.

The problem with this argument is that certainty in the sense of probability is not the same thing as necessary being: If I toss a coin, it is certain that I will get heads or tails, but that outcome depends on my tossing the coin, which I may not necessarily do. Likewise, any particular universe may follow from the existence of a multiverse, but the existence of the multiverse remains to be explained. In particular, the universe-generating process assumed by some multiverse theories is itself contingent because it depends on the action of laws assumed by the theory. The latter might be called meta-laws, since they form the basis for the origin of the individual universes, each with its own individual set of laws. So what determines the meta-laws? Either we must introduce meta-meta-laws, and so on in infinite regression, or we must hold that the meta-laws themselves are necessary — and so we have in effect just changed our understanding of what the fundamental universe is to one that contains many universes. In that case, we are still left without ultimate explanations as to why that universe exists or has the characteristics it does.

When it comes to such metaphysical questions, science and scientific speculation may offer much in fleshing out details, but they have so far failed to offer any explanations that are fundamentally novel to philosophy — much less have they supplanted it entirely.