Over at the Huffington Post Blog, Sam Harris, author of the best selling book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, has posted his reaction to President Bush’s comments about teaching Intelligent Design. Harris’ post received gushing approval from well-known, pro-evolution author Richard Dawkins.
In the church we often repeat the aphorism that there is no real conflict between Science and Religion.
Prolific Evolution advocate Stephen J. Gould often insisted that there is no conflict between Religion and Science because they are two different, non-competing realms. ID advocates like Phillip Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial and Reason in the Balance, have argued that this is nonsense and that even though the idea is often repeated, it is insincere double-speak; that despite these assertions to the contrary, a majority of evolutionary advocates believe that evolutionary science disproves religion and that they are only separate realms in the same way that reality and fantasy are different realms.
I am not interested in retreading the specifics of the Evolution vs. Intelligent Design debate here. If you want to discuss that topic you can do so here.
I am interested in your reaction, especially you faithful LDS scientists, to the following paragraph of Harris’s post:
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality. Likewise, Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of “non-overlapping magisteria” served only the religious dogmatists who realize, quite rightly, that there is only one magisterium. Whether a person is religious or secular, there is nothing more sacred than the facts. Either Jesus was born of a virgin, or he wasn’t; either there is a God who despises homosexuals, or there isn’t. It is time that sane human beings agreed on the standards of evidence necessary to substantiate truth-claims of this sort. The issue is not, as ID advocates allege, whether science can “rule out” the existence of the biblical God. There are an infinite number of ludicrous ideas that science could not “rule out,” but which no sensible person would entertain. The issue is whether there is any good reason to believe the sorts of things that religious dogmatists believe — that God exists and takes an interest in the affairs of human beings; that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception (and, therefore, that blastocysts are the moral equivalents of persons); etc. There simply is no good reason to believe such things, and scientists should stop hiding their light under a bushel and make this emphatically obvious to everyone.
As an interesting, related tangent, many of you are probably aware of Punk Rock legend Greg Graffin of the pioneering California punk band Bad Religion and author of the influential Punk Manifesto. What you may not know is that Graffin has a Ph.D. from Cornell in Evolutionary Biology. He is the head of Cornell’s Evolution Project where he takes a more circumspect position than Harris, but still declares:
The idea that naturalism might be a kind of modernist religion has been advanced in recent years (Johnson, 2000). Evolutionary biology enjoys a privileged position at the core of this belief system because it offers explanations about why and how humankind originated. Any teacher of evolution is by default a teacher of a deeply philosophical world-view, one that differs dramatically from that of traditional theistic religion.
The proposition that one must “believe in evolution” as people blindly believe in God is easily discounted. Still, much of modern evolutionary biology today is sprinkled with tinges of dualism. Notions of progress, purpose, emergent properties, optimality, and increasing complexity in evolution all contain vague hints of dualism, and are debated in symposia and published in books and journals by today’s most active evolutionists. These architects of modern naturalism have traditionally shunned the ideas of religions, but to what degree they discount the supernatural remains to be seen.
The most important feature of evolutionary biology is its integrated view of humankind’s place in nature that easily lends itself to a deeply satisfying metaphysics based entirely on materialist principles. This provision, coupled with the observation that theology has lost so much of its appeal to the average citizen, leads to the controversial conclusion that, in the modern world, Naturalism is a substitute for, and provides all the benefits of, traditional religion. If the naturalists have their day, theism is effectively dead.
What is your reaction to Harris’ declaration and Dawkins’ approval? Harris and Graffin both seem to be confirming Johnson’s accusation. Do you think most scientists agree with Harris? Do they agree with Graffin? Or do Harris, Graffin, and Dawkins represent a radical minority among scientists? I’m interested in what you all have to say.
I think that the efforts of some atheist scientists to politicize science even more than the Republicans have will backfire. Most people are religious and I truly fear that people will believe people like Dawkins on these matters. Likewise Democratic scientists who’ve politicized this will make Republicans become more anti-science. There was a great analysis of this over at John Hawks yesterday.
As for the idea that biology is committed to a strong form of naturalism, I think that is bunk. Some scientists are and think that science is so committed. But when they do this they tend to make the same mistake the IDers make – conflating philosophy with science too much.
In a way the current debate hides many undertones that are quite troubling – from both sides. This could end up being a crucial moment for science. I should add that similar debates are occurring in physics. So this isn’t just a biological debate. Although the physics debates are less well known.
Also check out the results (pdf) of Graffin’s Cornell Evolution Project which seeks “to determine the degree to which the world’s leading evolutionary biologists believe in traditional religion, naturalism, and the philosophical implications of their science.”
Personally, if I were a scientist, I’d be worried to find my colleagues telling anyone “if you believe in this, you’re a nut and can’t possibly agree with what I say is the truth.” And that seems to be what Harris, in particular, is saying.
As to Graffin… you can turn anything into a belief system, complete with shibboleths and articles of faith and prophecies, any time you want. His own words indicate there are tendencies towards that in naturalism. It’s obviously easier to say “evolution happened in such and such a way” and not turn it into a religion than it is to say “Joseph Smith was a prophet of God” and not turn it into a religion.
I don’t think there has to be a conflict between believing in God and believing we can sort out a lot of the rules that govern the world we can observe and experiment upon. I think a lot of the people who’ve decided that direct observation and experimentation are the only ways to determine what the truth is, are going to discount the existence of God. I don’t know that that means I should stop considering the evidence presented to me, or stop knowing that there are other kinds of evidence out there.
Scientists aren’t particularly self-reflective, so they rarely notice when their statements (which for a politically inclined scientist range all over the map) exceed the range of their expertise (which is generally rather narrow, as science runs on specialization these days). Chomsky is one of the better examples of this: I am a linguist, so hear my definitive pronouncements on world peace. Right. Just because scientists are ignorant of the limits of their own expertise doesn’t mean we have to play along.
Not that I’m an ID advocate, but the efforts of scientists to just drive opinions they don’t like from the field of public discussion irritate me. Who do they think funds their laboratories and universities?
Futhermore, they misrepresent the facts blatantly, generally holding out as fact, for example, that no self-respecting scientist could believe in God when polling data shows that about half of scientists believe in one sort of God or another (the exact proportion is not particularly relevant). The more noise they make, the less credibility their statements carry.
“there is no real conflict between Science and Religion.”
I personally feel that this phrase it complete garbage. Obviously what is meant is that “true” science will not conflict with “true” religion, but that’s a fancy way of simply saying “truth doesn’t conflict with truth.” Who would ever say that truth and truth have separate domains? No many people, but nonetheless many are willing to say that science and religion or separate domains, a sort of is/ought separation. Since when is religion reduced to mere morals? Since when does science not have anything to say regarding human nature, even our moral natures? Since when does religion not desribe the creation of the pretty much everything around us? The fact is, there is a lot of conflict between science and religion when the two terms are given their rightful definitions. Gould was pretty much wrong.
Nevertheless, I can’t fully agree with either Harris, Dawkins or Gaffin. While science vs. religion may be a war between facts to some degree and a war between people to an even lesser one, the real war exists between the approach each one takes. Religious discourse is squarely founded in authority. This naturaly leads to all sorts of unpleasant consequences, the details of which are far too well known to need repeating. The obvious fact is that authority isn’t a very safe path to follow uncritically.
Science, in the spirit of the enlightenment, basically threw authority out the window all together instead relying upon method as endowed by experience and rationality. This too isn’t the safest path to take due to the natural fallibility of man, the very same failing of the authority model. Whereas authority will quickly lend itself to claims going well beyond the truth, experience and rationality will always fall short of the truth.
I personally feel that the best path to take is to adopt a somewhat critical of authority, keeping it on a leash of composed of experience and rationality. Clearly some authoritative claims of religions are totally false. Just as clearly, however, some authoritative claims of religion aren’t even approached or addressed by the methods of science.
Harris is completely correct. He’s saying that there is a single standard for truth, and “not disproven by science” is not that standard. This is so self evident that it hardly requires comment. Harris is also advocating that science be recognized as the most sure path to truth that we have. This is a debatable thesis, but it’s hardly a controversial one.
The process of science is a process of effectively matching means to ends in a way that is replicable. I’ve said this elsewhere, and I’ll say it again: Whether you’re Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, or some other moron, if you oppose or seek to limit the scope of science or enlightenment reasoning or pre-post-modern thought (or whatever label you want to give it), you are advocating that people should be deceived (or at least kept in the dark) about the means that they choose to achieve the ends that they desire.
Religion is always already accountable to our highest standards of reason–that’s why so many religious leaders engage in so much obfuscation: if they can’t fool people (and themselves), then they’re out of business. That is also why religion has followed exactly the course that Freud predicted in The Future of an Illusion; i.e., it’s claims have become increasingly abstract and difficult to test empirically (e.g, in our own religion, apologists have increased the limits they place on the limited geography theory to make it encompass smaller and smaller areas as archeology and biology have made stronger theories less and less tenable.)
The pivotal question that Harris raises for me is “whether there is any good reason to believe the sorts of things that religious dogmatists believe”. I actually think he’s got a good point when he says that people need to have standards for truth, but he’s dreaming if he thinks that anyone will agree on those. The real problem here is that scientists and religious types usually end up talking past each other.
I agree wholeheartedly with his point that there is no reason to make a factual concession due to the strength of an assertion rather than the strength of the warrants that support it.
I don’t see that he’s willing to allow for the non-materialistic types of evidence that religious people often find persuasive, so I think this is just another rant about those irrational religious people that won’t get with the times. Same as people that insist that evolution theorists are committing a horrible abomination because they won’t acknowledge the literal truth of the Book of Genesis.
D-Train, I think that by standards of truth, he means something more broad than “x is true if and only if y.” I think he means that there shouldn’t be such things as “Sunday truths.” Which is to say that the same sentence with the same meaning is true in one context but not in another.
Many Mormon intellectuals entertain Sunday truths. For example, they might know that Joseph translated the extant Book of Mormon by burying his head in a hat that contained a seer stone while the plates were in a box in the woods a few dozen yards from the house. But on Sunday in Gospel Doctrine or Priesthood or Relief Society, they’d never dream of referring to anything but the mythical notion that he wore the Urim and Thumim while touching the plates and reading them from behind a curtain (and I doubt you’d ever read anything in correlated manuals that refer to the seer stone, either.)
If the results (see comment #2) of Graffin’s Cornell Evolution Project are valid, then they say otherwise:
Even if you lump A, B, and D together you only come up with 20.13%–not even close to half of scientists.
Correction: Dave, Graffin’s study is a sample of specifically evolutionary biologists, so it doesn’t contradict you statement after all.
I agree completely with Dave’s comments (#4). Scientists also tend to have no sense of history, even though the history of science is one of its most interesting aspects. It was not all that long ago when all respectable scientists in the West agreed that you cured disease by “bleeding” people with leeches or that malaria was caused by “bad air.” Now, the majority of scientists believe that we are descended from apes. By what standard of truth (based on the history of science) can they all know they will still believe this, say, 50 years from now? It’s easy to prove many scientific theories, but proving that we descended from apes is empirically impossible. That’s why evolutional theories change literally on a monthly basis based on new discoveries.
There are parts of evolutionary theory — microevolution, for example — that can be proved. Species do tend to change and evolve if you study they long enough. Natural selection does tend to occur. This is incontrovertible, and biologists are right to concentrate on these interesting phenomena. But to take scientific truths and then turn them into pure speculation — well, if species A evolves today, then that must mean that species X evolved 10 million years ago — is not science. It enters into the realm of philosophy and, yes, religion.
That is why scientists get so upset when evolution is attacked — it has become a religion for them. They stop being scientific and become emotionally engaged. And then they go on jihads against people whose ideas they oppose.
Max, I have seen other studies that show something around 40-50 percent of all scientists (not evolutionary biologists who are overwhelmingly of the Darwinist religion) believe in God. No time to search for it now on a Friday afternoon, but I definitely have seen such polls.
BTW, I highly recommend the John Hawks post linked to by Clark (comment #1). Long Excerpt (since I know that many of you will not bother to follow the link :p ):
Geoff, I’m not sure I agree with your characterization about evolution. But I’ll not debate that here.
J. Max Wilson, is your point that religion and science really are enemies and scientificly inclined Latter-day Saints need to quit sitting on the fence trying to be everyone’s friend?
Those uppity know-it-all scientists will wish they’d bit their tongues when they unexpectedly find themselves burning in an eternal lake of fire and brimstone, while I and my more faithful, orthodox Mormon friends are looking down at them from our Celestial bliss, saying “I told you so.”
Not at all. But Harris’ point does seem to be exactly that.
I think that while science can become an substitute for religion, it does not have to be so. I believe that all members of the church should consecrate their labors and interests for building up the Church and establishing Zion–including Scientists.
DKL
Enlightenment rationality is much like laissez-faire economics.
Each of them can flourish only in a social order than prodigiously instills suitably conforming notions of honesty and fairness and common sense and record-keeping, a social order that does whatever a social order needs to do to preserve and transmit itself.
Each of them necessarily accomodates and is accomodated by the social order that is its host.
As for the social order, so for the integrity of any mind that would apply itself to reason. To reason here below, one must keep oneself rigorously ignorant of the experience of death, never know what it is to lose for good one’s powers of communication, forgo the loss of welcome of some understandible and trusted community of interest. Irreducibly, reason constrains and is constrained by each reasoning mind. To reason at anything, we must remain firmly ignorant of some things.
In short there is more to knowing than accumulation of ever better opinion.
And if some kinds of real knowledge destroy other kinds of real knowledge?
Character is intention is perception is fate.
That is also true of physics, mathematics, and probably what remains of psychoanalysis. It is customary to regard that as a mark of progress.
Geoff B, you’re mistaken if you believe that pointing out the errors that science has helped us to overcome constitutes evidence that science leads to errors. Indeed, science is a process of eliminating errors through systematic trails. Without errors, there would be no need to eliminate them, and hence no need for science.
Religion, on the other hand, pretends to have categorical truths, so that revising them is a major event–think Vatican II or the revelation on Blacks and the priesthood.
J. Max Wilson and Clark, based on the excerpt, I’m not going to bother to read the Hawks article. It’s quite superficial; in short, Hawks sounds like a complete moron. Just because some very preliminary study was touted in headlines as scientific truth doesn’t mean that science “tells us” that echinacea will prevent a cold. He’s playing fast and loose with facts if he puts that forth on the same footing with moon-landings.
And what Hawks describes as “scientific failures” are, in fact, scientific successes. It’s not as though science repeatedly failed and went off on some tangent and it was left to religion or some other belief system to correct it and set its course straight. On the contrary, it’s religion that has repeatedly failed and went off on some tangent, and it was left to science to correct it. Science, by contrast, corrects itself. Even so, I do appreciate the positivistic presuppositions made by those critics of science stupid enough to say that we know science is mistaken because science tells us when its mistaken.
His appeal to fairness is utterly meaningless. It reminds me of the politician who goes out on a limb by saying, “The working man deserves a fair shake.” Of course, everyone agrees that the working man deserves a fair shake (except the embittered old fool who shouts, “Screw the working man!” just to be contrary). The politician is just using a trite euphemism to give cover to his own beliefs that at least some people will surely disagree with. Likewise, Hawks is simply asserting his own personal views under the auspices of being fair. but there is no reason to privilege his beliefs over anyone else’s.
Alma Teao Wilson, you’re wrong on all counts. Enlightenment rationality even prospers in totalitarian systems. The Chinese and the Soviets were both good enough at science. And sciences are becoming more obscure, but no less concrete. For example, the chemistry of modern semi-conductors is exceptionally complicated, but the computer programs that they store (e.g., Microsoft Word) are no less concrete and or empirically testable or analyzable than simple mechanical technology (e.g., MS Word does have bugs and shortcomings and it is not a database or a spreadsheet). Decreases in empirical testability are no mark of progress.
Shame on you DKL for trying to fisk an article that you haven’t even read in its entirety. I may be wrong, but I think that if you read the whole thing you would find that Hawks is not saying what you think he is saying.
Here is a quote applicable to this thread. In a commencement speech he have in 1974 to the California Institute of Technology, the great physicist, the late Dr. Richard Feynman told the students to cultivate:
I don’t think that science as a discipline comes even close to living up to this ideal. I agree with Alma that science is heavily influenced by the politics, money, and attitudes of the culture in which it is practiced. The Self-Correcting Science you describe is a nice ideal, but it does not describe much of what actually goes on.
Many of the victories of science that we experience every day are the result of seemingly irrational leaps of inspiration and moments of serendipity as individuals spontaneously make connections in a way that is more reminiscent of revelation than anything else. Science and Scientists are no less subject to wish-fulfillment than are Religionists, and the progress that we have made has not been without the influence of the hand of God.
J. Max Wilson: Shame on you DKL for trying to fisk an article that you haven’t even read in its entirety.
If the article isn’t what I make it out to be, then shame on you for choosy such a lengthy excerpt in spite of how poorly it reflects on the author and his intellect. I stand by my assessment of your excerpt, and I’ll not be manipulated into reading the rest of it no matter how much of your shame I incur.
J. Max Wilson: The Self-Correcting Science you describe is a nice ideal, but it does not describe much of what actually goes on.
The self correcting science is actually what goes on. J. Max Wilson. I’m well aware that science is a human endeavor and therefore muddled in politics and mistakes and all the usual things that plague fallen man. But science corrects and refines itself so often we seldom even notice. Seven years ago, semi-conductor engineers were told unequivocally that copper was unsuitable for use with silicon in computer chips. Thanks to a new process invented by IBM, the finest and most complicated chips are now made with copper. This kind of thing is so routine that its trivial. You seem to have this idealized notion of science as a monolithic structure that does grand things and pursues all of these hot button issues, but most science deals with the minutia scattered throughout every small corner of our society, and almost all of it is very, very boring and mundane stuff.
And since I agree entirely with your Feynman quote, I don’t see how its relevant to anything I’ve said.
I think DKL that you may be misreading John Hawks. Read the article. It really was good. I don’t think your positions are as far separated as you seem to think. Further he makes some very astute critiques of how scientists have responded in all this.
Geoff B., I believe that you are gravely mistaken when you point to science’s mistakes. First, “bleeding” wasn’t a product of modern scientific medicine. It was a product of folk belief. Science has repeatedly proven itself resilinant by systematically removing such folk belief. Has Religion done the same? (grin)
When was the last time you saw religion purge itself of error? There are pleanty to purge in the world. When was the last time you saw religion publically introduce reproducable new insight into the human condition?
Religion is opperating in a smaller and smaller sphere and Science and ever increasing one. For most in the modern world Religion is superfluous because it is emperically proven to be so. Science has the opposite emperical result. I’m not saying that God is superfluous to the modern world, but most religious institutions are because they can’t compete with Science. I think Mormonism can compete (your history proclaims it), but it looks like we are too intractible so we simply accept a smaller sphere.
The most famous words in science are: “Scientists used to think X, but we now know that Y.”
Science is about discovering truth. But there are no absolute answers in science. Science is all about finding explanations which appear to fit the facts we have, with the knowledge that some new fact may emerge at any time which will render the explanation incomplete or even wrong.
Furthermore, when we get out of the realm of experimentation (where we can repeat the same experiment over and over, and get the same results–which is often cited as the Scientific Method), we enter the realm of theories which appear to fit the facts, AS WE KNOW THEM.
In my lifetime, I have seen theories which were taught in my college classes as facts, disproved by further facts which have emerged.
A little humility wouldn’t hurt scientists at all.
I think this is really getting at how our public policy decisions should be guided. People are free to use alternative medicine, or believe in the power of crystals, or even in the more mainstream Christian tradition of miraculous healing. But these things cannot be approved by the FDA unless they convincingly demonstrate efficacy. To me, it is self-evident why this must be.
This example can be applied to a number of issues such as education, stem cell research, ecology, homosexuality, and so forth. We have to make important and consequential decisions about how our laws and society should approach these things. What role should religious dogma, play in the formation of public policy?
It is one thing to live your life according to the dictates of your conscience, but it is another to enshrine the dictates of your conscience in the form of public policy–especially when those dictates are not open to independent and open investigation and verification.
First, “bleeding” wasn’t a product of modern scientific medicine. It was a product of folk belief. Science has repeatedly proven itself resilinant by systematically removing such folk belief.
J. Stapley,
I think that you’ve mischaracterized it somewhat. “Folk belief” does not automatically equate to “false belief” and science confirms some folk knowledge as true and rejects other folk knowledge as false. And some of the folk beliefs that science has rejected in an earlier time it has later revisited and found valid after all. If the resilience of science lay in its systematic dismissal of folk belief then science would be systematically dismissing some truth. (Ooh…did I just use the subjunctive?! I feel so Stapleyly!)
You don’t seem to be aware that the medieval practices of Bloodletting using Leeches and using Maggots to clean wounds and remove infections have, in recent years, been re-adopted by medical professionals as a valid and useful medical practice.
Sometimes something can be right for the wrong reasons. The reasons behind blood letting (which would have been the science) were wrong. That’s why we typically distinguish engineering from science. They blur sometimes. But the reasons are pretty important for something to be science.
LOL…touché. You are right that it is dynamic and some (if not much) folk belief is confirmed scientificaly. Once that happens, however, it ceases to be folk belief. I think that there is a lot of good folk belief out there, but I think that it should only remain that way for as short a period as posible.
KDL
Sure.
Of course it did and they were, because, like any system that survives longer than a few weeks, each of them “prodigiously instills suitably conforming notions of honesty and fairness and common sense and record-keeping”; nor were they entirely isolated social orders—they were always a part of the wider world that resembled them. My point is that even economies that describe themselves as laissez-faire depend on the social order that sustains them and largely serve the interests that run them. There ain’t no such thing as a free market. Same for professions, corporations, armies, religious groups and scientific disciplines.
What you actually said, and said pejoratively, was ‘abstract and difficult to test empirically’. As one pursues laws back and back, things that were five laws or two yesterday become a single law today. Theoretical work is exactly the hunt for abstractions that reveal. That is true not only of the big revolutions, but also of all the subsequent fidgety elaboration, interpretation, and tidying-up.
It doesn’t follow. You can become empirically quite sure, for instance, that a particular drug has a particular effect, without having the faintest guess as to the actual mechanism.
Limited geography Book of Mormon models are much more concrete than their predecessors. They are anything but retreats into allegory or mysticism. If IBM can elaborate and correct its understanding of sermiconductor chemistry, why cannot Mormons elaborate and correct their understanding of the Book of Mormon?
‘Difficult to test empirically’ marks progress not because it is sought, but because it means that all the easy tests have been done.
I also notice that you ducked the more difficult questions about bounded or incommensurable rationality. This is not postmodern backsliding. If you are prepared to reduce the mind to a machine, then similar questions arise even in the practical, classical problem of computing with limited memory, and they abound in algortihmic complexity theory, and quantum computing.
DKL wrote:
Why? Numerous references to seer stones can be found in the Ensign, the New Era, and even the Friend.
Whew, there’s so much crap to respond to, Alma, it’s hard to know where to start.
Alma Teao Wilson: My point is that even economies that describe themselves as laissez-faire depend on the social order that sustains them and largely serve the interests that run them.
Of course this is true. The economy is inseparable from the social order. But this point has nothing whatever to do with enlightenment reasoning.
Alma Teao Wilson: There ain’t no such thing as a free market. Same for professions, corporations, armies, religious groups and scientific disciplines.
This is only true if you insist on defining the term free market such that the function “x is a free market” can never be satisfied. I don’t see the point in doing this. It is quite fruitful to talk in terms of some markets being more free or less free than others. The same goes for the term objectivity, and there’s no practical reason to define that term out of existence either.
Alma Teao Wilson: What you actually said, and said pejoratively, was ‘abstract and difficult to test empirically’.
And I still stand by this. Since I understand the term concrete to be the antonym of abstract, I think that I am addressing this squarely when I say, “And sciences are becoming more obscure, but no less concrete.” If you like, I’m pleased to render it “And sciences are becoming more obscure, but no more abstract,” but what’s the point?
Alma Teao Wilson: As one pursues laws back and back, things that were five laws or two yesterday become a single law today. Theoretical work is exactly the hunt for abstractions that reveal.
The hunt is for generalizations, not abstractions. These are entirely different things, and it takes quite a few fairly controversial metaphysical presuppositions to identify them. Moreover, as laws (which are simply formulaic generalizations) get collapsed, they become more general and therefore more testable. The more general something is, the more specific instances it generalizes over. The more specific instances it generalizes over, the more possible counter instances there are to refute it. The more possible counter instances there are to refute it, the easier it is to test.
Looked at from another direction, every counter-instance that refutes the earlier multiplicity of laws will also refute the later, more general law. So that the later, more general law must be at least as testable as the ones that it subsumes. Thus, it’s easier to test Newton’s Law of Gravity, which stipulates a single formula to account for the gravitational attraction between any two bodies, than it is to test any of Kepler’s three Laws of Planetary Motion that Newton’s Law subsumes. And every instance that corroborates Newton’s physics also corroborates Einstein’s geometry of relativity, since that subsumes Newton’s physics.
Alma Teao Wilson: You can become empirically quite sure, for instance, that a particular drug has a particular effect, without having the faintest guess as to the actual mechanism.
The mechanism is beside the point. A primary method of testing computer code is known as “Black Box Testing,” because it purposefully disavows any interest in causal mechanisms. The testing is no less empirical and the results no less concrete than other forms of testing. One of most common mistakes that people make when commenting about science is assuming that science necessarily looks for causal mechanisms. Biology does. Chemistry doesn’t. Who cares?
Alma Teao Wilson: Limited geography Book of Mormon models are much more concrete than their predecessors.
Not if we take concrete to mean that they make meaningful claims about the location of BoM peoples. The hemispheric theory makes meaningful and easily testable claims about where Lehi’s descendants lived. The limited geography theories make no meaningful claims about where the BoM peoples lived, aside from saying that it was a small area located some place, and it’s either some place we haven’t looked or some place that has yet to yield up its corroborating evidence. No matter how you cut it, the limited geography theories are more difficult to test.
Alma Teao Wilson: Difficult to test empirically’ marks progress not because it is sought, but because it means that all the easy tests have been done.
Like I said above: Other things being equal, the broader generalization is always easier to disprove than the narrow one. This is why broader generalizations are more usually false than narrow ones–there are more possible falsifying instances, and therefore a higher anterior probability that one of them will obtain.
Alma Teao Wilson: I also notice that you ducked the more difficult questions about bounded or incommensurable rationality. This is not postmodern backsliding. If you are prepared to reduce the mind to a machine, then similar questions arise even in the practical, classical problem of computing with limited memory, and they abound in algorithmic complexity theory, and quantum computing.
I’m reluctant to call it backsliding, because I prefer to call it postmodern tripe. If you want to talk about Turing machines, information theory, and chaos, then that’s fine, too. Pointing to the continuing obstacles to the success of scientific reductionism is an effective way to identify potentially fruitful applications for research funding, but hardly a serious critique of the rational approach to matching means to ends.
Nat Whilk: Why? Numerous references to seer stones can be found in the Ensign, the New Era, and even the Friend.
Perhaps I’m mistaken. Do these magazines describe the accounts of Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon with a seer stone in his hat as opposed to the Urim and Thumim behind a curtain? If you read the comment that you quote of mine in context, I believe it’s rather obvious that I’m not discussing seer stones in general.
Sorry DKL, you lose on that one.
The Ensign carried an article by Elder Nelson, (an Apostle no less!), who read a lengthy quotation from David Whitmer on this topic.
See this article here
This is the second time that this particular quotation was used, indicating that Joseph translated with the seer stone in a hat.
Besides, there ARE references to Joseph SMith using the Urim and Thummim as well. IIRC, William Smith testified that they were slightly too broad for Joseph around the eyes, and they tired him out for that reason, and thus he preferred the seer stone.
Ben Spackman: Sorry DKL, you lose on that one.
Let me get this straight:
I claim that many Mormon intellectuals harbor special Sunday truths, and choose Joseph’s translation method as an example. Then I state parenthetically, “I doubt you’d ever read anything in correlated manuals that refer to the seer stone.”
Then in response to a very general objection to my parenthetical aside, I ask for more specifics: “Do [church] magazines describe the accounts of Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon with a seer stone in his hat as opposed to the Urim and Thumim behind a curtain?”
And all of a sudden I’ve “lost” the entire issue of whether many Mormon intellectuals harbor Sunday truths? Surely this is a non sequitor. Are you really that sloppy of a thinker, Ben? Or is it that you weren’t paying attention to the thrust of that part of the exchange, and you couldn’t pass up an opportunity to be obnoxious? I think that’s something you’d best leave to Kaimi, Ben. (For my part, I’m genuinely pleased to learn that this portion of our history has not been sanitized out of our rich Mormon heritage.)
At any rate, is it actually your position that many church intellectuals do not harbor Sunday truths?
BTW, the accounts that refer to Joseph translating behind a blanket with the Urim and Thummim are from people who witnessed the process during the period in which Joseph translated the lost book of Lehi. (This is usually referred to [even by Joseph] as the lost 116 pages; in fact, it was the printers manuscript for the translation of the small plates that was 116 pages; it is doubtful that the hand copied length of the lost pages was the same length as the hand copied replacement, and it is much more likely that Joseph simply conflated the length of the one with the other.) (And William Smith is among the least reliable witness for just about anything; one should only quote him when he’s corroborated by at least on solid, non-derivative source.)
At any rate, I stand by my statement that, “Joseph translated the extant Book of Mormon by burying his head in a hat…”
No, you lost on the sub-issue of whether the seer stone/hat issue has ever appeared in official Church publications.
You explicitly asked, “Do these magazines describe the accounts of Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon with a seer stone in his hat as opposed to the Urim and Thumim behind a curtain?”
I pointed out that it yes indeed, they did exactly that, at least twice, once by an apostle in an address to mission presidents. I find that many of the people who accuse the Church of sanitizing their history frequently overstate their case, as you did here.
On the larger issue of whether people harbor “Sunday truths,” I agree with you. There are, on the flip side, people who harbor “weekday-myths”, who believe the Church has suppressed anything even potentially controversial. Generally, I find that they aren’t terribly familiar with church sources.
I’m familiar with the translation accounts.
“At any rate, I stand by my statement that, “Joseph translated the extant Book of Mormon by burying his head in a hat…””
The Ensign articles support this and I didn’t attack it. I don’t understand why you need to reassert it.
Ben, your entire argument is very silly, and strikes me as a farce. Are you really petty enough to say these kinds of things, or are you just pulling my chain here? (If you are serious, you’ll make a great bureaucrat!)
At any rate, I’ll not deny you the pleasure of pulling my chain, so I’ll proceed as though you’re serious. Here’s my response:
Ben Spackman No, you lost on the sub-issue of whether the seer stone/hat issue has ever appeared in official Church publications.
As far as official church publications, all I did was asked a question You’ll have to say more to convince me that you’re not just thumping your chest over a non-issue.
And my original statement (it’s awfully self-serving of you to call it a “sub-issue”) was this: “(and I doubt you’d ever read anything in correlated manuals that refer to the seer stone, either.)” (parentheses in original). First, I do nothing more than express doubt here, and parenthetically at that; again, you’ll have to say more in order to convince me that I’ve “overstated” my case, as you insist that I do. Second, I’m expressly referring to manuals, and you haven’t come up with anything in the manuals yet; strictly speaking, you’ve done nothing to refute it. You’re insistence that I’ve somehow “lost” is premature at best.
As far as the different accounts, all I said was that the “extant Book of Mormon” was translated with head-in-hat. You insisted that “there ARE references to Joseph SMith using the Urim and Thummim” This is either irrelevant or was meant to attack my statement. Forgive me if I mistook your beside-the-point argument for an incorrect argument.
You doubted that such things appeared in Church sources. You specified “magazines” in comment #32. I pointed out a reference in the Ensign, a magazine.
Why the huffing and puffing?
No huffing and puffing, Ben. I say, “manuals”; you say “publications.” It’s called creating a straw man. I expected better from you (of all people).
DKL, look at your own comment. You said “magazines” in comment 32. I found a magazine. Not a strawman.
Have you even read comment 32? It simply asks a question. Since it makes no assertion about church magazines, it cannot be contradicted. You lose here on a simple point of logic.
In comment #8, I express doubt over whether church manuals discussed the head-in-hat account. Showing that a doubt is justified or unjustified does not contradict the expression of doubt. Again, you lose here on a simple point of logic.
Even so, you have yet to show that my doubt about church manuals is not justified, so you lose on the merits here, too–no matter how we construe the logic.
The only way in which you can be conceived to have won is if you (a) say “manuals” when I say “publications” and transform my expression of doubt into an assertion, or (b) you transform my question about publications into an indicative statement. Either way, you’ve created a straw man.
Face it, Ben: You’re a loser.
(This is great fun. My only concern is that people will think I’m bullying you; perhaps they’ll be justified)
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At this point, I put in a link to the Ensign to indicate that (reprasing your last comment) you were indeed mistaken on this point, and these magazines do describe the accounts of Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon with a seer stone in his hat.
I’m just trying to share relevant data. You, on the other hand, do indeed appear to be bullying simply for fun, or perhaps are simply uwilling to admit that your assumption or doubt about the Church publishing JS’ and his seer stone in their magazines was unjustified.
Ben Spackman: I’m just trying to share relevant data.
I’ve never disagreed with the data that you provided. The dustup that has ensued has concerned whether the data contradicts anything I asserted. Since I never asserted anything regarding the matter, it is impossible to contradict it.
Ben Spackman: You, on the other hand, do indeed appear to be bullying simply for fun, or perhaps are simply unwilling to admit that your assumption or doubt about the Church publishing JS’ and his seer stone in their magazines was unjustified.
The problem with your statement here is that you’ve failed to show that I’ve assumed anything (because, quite simply, I haven’t). Therefore, you have a fortiori failed to show that my assumptions are incorrect.
I’ll leave the question of whether you feel bullied for you. If I am having fun, it’s because you’re so anxious to thump your chest, and I can’t wait to see what zany thing you’ll write next. I’ve been laughing to myself as I’ve read your comments and responded. Like I said in my earlier response, I suspect that you’re actually just trying to pull my chain here.
I doubt DKL has stopped beating his wife. But I’m not asserting anything 🙂
LOL. Your doubt presupposes that I did something at some point (viz., beat my wife), and doubts whether that has stopped. My doubt makes no such presupposition. You’re even worse with grammar than you are with logic.
But, If you really think that’s a serious point, then I’m happy to give you the last word! Go ahead. Though I promise to read it, I won’t respond. So go crazy!
No strawmen here–just grasping at straws.
Glad to provide what seems to be much-needed amusement. Now you have an Ensign article to read so you can make different non-assertions in the future.
Now that this thread seems to be officially dead, may I ask a sincere question about one of DKL’s statements?
He says (yanked out of context), “Joseph translated the extant Book of Mormon by burying his head in a hat…”
Does this mean that O. Cowdrey’s assertions to the contrary have been relegated to the realm of myth? It seems to me that the general consensus is that both the interpreters AND the seer stone were used throughout the process. Or has someone recently dug up some new found bones on the subject?
Also (not to through fuel on the smoldering embers), I considered “magezines” to be in a different category than “manuals”.
Would everybody please stop talking about straw. I am very allergic and anti-histamines make me so drowsy that I will not be able to read M* for 72 hours or more. lol —added just in case you think I have actually gone completely off the deep end.
Jack, those are good questions. In my opinion, the definitive work on the method of translation of the Book of Mormon was done by RLDS researcher James E. Lancaster. His essay on the topic was published as “By the Gift and Power of God: The Method of Translation of the Book of Mormon,” in the November 15, 1962 Saints’ Herald (#109). It was reprinted in 1983 as “The Method of Translation of the Book of Mormon” in the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal (Volume 3), and again in 1990 as “The Translation of the Book of Mormon” in The Word of God: Essays on Mormon Scripture, published by Signature Books (which is still in print).
And Ben, I apologize for calling you a loser. I was laughing when I wrote it, but it came off rather more harshly in writing than it was intended. For the record, you’re no loser–no matter what I think.
Thanks, DKL, for the references. And thanks, too, for enduring my horrid misspells. I’m trying to kick the habit.
Barb, I agree with you about too much straw. But given the choice–I’d rather have too much straw than too many barbs. (nyuk, nyuk, nyuk) ;>)
“I doubt DKL has stopped beating his wife. But I’m not asserting anything :)”
Oh boy, now I have to get involved. I can assure you that DKL is certainly not the sort of man who would ever under any circumstance lay a violent finger on his precious bride.
And while he greatly enjoys these exchanges I hardly think tacit assumptions of wife abuse are in order 🙂
Ah, Ben was just using the silly old courtroom question–
“Sir, have you refrained from beating your wife today? Yes or no?”
–just to point out that our statements, though they be not assertions, may yet carry that weight of assertions. (though I’m not convinced that Ben is right in this specific instance)
Er, that is, I’m not convinced that Ben is right about judging DKL’s statements on this thread as assertions–not the wife beating gag. We know DKL is clear on that one.
Sheesh, I almost proved my point.
Thanks for the support, Jack.
You’re both very nice boys. Just not to each other. Children, please.
Harris seems to be claiming for (the dogmatists of) philosophical materialism just what he insists that (the dogmatists among) religious believers are demanding with respect to evolution: the right to tell The Definitive Version of The Story. In this, he furnishes an excellent example of what William James described as “that passion for certainty which is in some minds insatiate.” But as a physicist and a student of the history of science, it seems to me that the story has always been more complicated than this simple zero-sum game, in both science and religion. Harris attempts to certify science as authoritative by its methodology, but ignores the fact that science is unable to test many propositions even in science (just ask the people who are trying to figure out how to characterize dark matter and energy!), let alone the religious propositions that Harris enjoys ridiculing. Since it appears that we are stuck in this position of “seeing through a glass darkly,” those who would claim the unassailable right to tell The Story might wait a while before pronouncing final judgment on what is true.
Richard Haglund, we all know that there are propositions that are utterly untestable by scientific methods. The question is whether this reflects poorly on science or poorly on the propositions.
The positivist view is that it is bad for the proposition. Though it’s popular nowadays to run down positivism and scoff at positivists, there is a sense in which we are all knee-jerk positivists. Our culture teaches us to reflexively expect things to be repeatable and open to inspection. And if I told you that my neighbor cast a spell on me that caused me to be forgetful, you’d think I was losing my mind.
It must be pointed out that the two views (i.e., the view that blames science for failing to test the proposition and the view that blames the proposition for being untestable) are not on equal grounds—the positivist view is no mere dogma. In the history of battles between science and religion, science is the undefeated champion. Science has never has never had a single one of it’s laws or theories disproved by religious methods, though countless scientific propositions have been disproved by scientific methods. Religion, on the other hand, has repeatedly had to reverse, limit, qualify, or pare down its claims in light of scientific knowledge. All the while, science’s claims have grown more and more detailed and all-encompassing.
Also, science pretends to no definitive truths, only to a method of weeding out faulty propositions by showing that they cannot be used as a means to obtain the end that they pretend to. To recast the conflict between the two views as “the right to tell The Definitive Version of The Story” is to subsume the conflict under the assumptions of the religionist who is still fighting.
Harris is merely pointing out the obvious: Given that science has shown every significant testable religious proposition to be spurious, there is no reason to suppose that the remaining, untestable propositions are true. On the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that religion’s retreat into the realm of the untestable demonstrates its inability to match meaningful means to their purported ends.