I have had the opportunity to exchange email and links with a man named Josh, who I invited to visit this blog. Josh’s initial comment was: “Thanks for the Invite! But I must say… you and I are in for many future debates!” I could also tell that Josh and I were different by looking at the homepage of his blog, where he writes: “I enjoy apologetics, studying the Bible, and reading various amounts of other important literature. My passion in life is to please Christ.”
Recently, Josh referred me to an article he wrote last year, an article entitled “The Scientific Truth” published on his blog: http://defendtruth.blogspot.com/ [1]. Below is my reaction to his article.
Josh:
Thank you for bringing my attention to your article [2]: I’m truly glad we can have this conversation. We certainly come from different perspectives. Different perspectives, but not necessarily different backgrounds. When I was young, I was told to fear God and to read the Bible. I was told that my questions were “just a phase” and that I would learn to simply love God and stop asking impertinent questions. I was sent to Christian (Catholic) schools for 15 of my years of education.
I don’t pretend to know all the answers. I am now an agnostic regarding many things. I believe that the evidence only goes so far and we need to be brave enough to repeatedly say “I don’t know.” I struggle to find explanations that make the most sense to me, but many of the best explanations available, the “winning” explanations, are not deeply satisfying. This doesn’t mean that the scientific method is flawed. It might just mean that we are limited creatures doing the best we can to understand our world. I see limitations in understanding everywhere I look. I would be a liar, though, to pretend that I understand something when I really don’t. In my mind, then, science should be humble. Nietzsche captured this idea in Daybreak, (§564)
Just beyond experience!– Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience – just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.
Scientists design airplanes that fly, to be sure, but science has not offered much (if any) guidance regarding matters of value and meaning. Should I donate one of my kidneys to a stranger? Should we keep people alive when they are in a persistent vegetative state? I don’t know any current version of science that gives me any helpful advice.
Science is certainly good at finding correlations and quantifying them through the use of math and machines. Science can also (once in a while) come up with a spectacularly elegant way of describing (and, depending on your terminology, “explaining”) a huge scope and diversity of phenomena. Exhibits A & B: relativity and evolution.
With the above as a prelude, I’ll try to address a few of the points from your article, piece by piece. For instance, you wrote:
[In the age of modern science] Facts now became theory, and man was now a machine in a closed universe. In a closed system (universe is a law-based machine), there can be no Creator, morals, love, or significance of man; there is no order, everything is relative and arbitrary, “chance” becomes god!
For many of us, there is no God to which to anchor things like morals, love, or significance. That doesn’t mean that non-believers don’t experience such things, however. I would challenge you to the following experiment: get to know some new people well enough to know whether they experience morals, love, or significance (but don’t initially ask whether they believe in God). Then, take a guess as to whether they believe in God. I think you would find this to be extremely difficult.
I assume that I experience morals, love and significance as much as anyone else. I would attempt (I emphasize “attempt”) to explain such things, however, in terms other than “God.” I am also convinced that we can find significant precursors to morals, love, or significance in other primates, based on spectacular findings by primatologists working in the field over the past few decades. I’m greatly influenced by writings such as the following: Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal (2005); Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, by Frans de Waal (1997) Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes, by De Waal, Frans (1983); The Human Story, by Dunbar, Robin (2005).
You also wrote:
“Survival of the fittest” made racism acceptable in the name of “science (20th century)” and thus, set the stage for the Nazi movement. Natural selection was the Nazi party’s whole ideology! Hitler said, “the ethics/concepts of Christianity should be replaced by strength over weakness, “the survival of the fittest,” let nature take its course.”
There’s no doubt that many people have referred to Darwin’s writings to bolster their racist arguments and decisions. This misuse of Evolution doesn’t mean Darwin was a racist or that his theories are racist, however. Admittedly, Darwin sometimes spoke of non-Europeans as being inferior. So did Abraham Lincoln [3], by the way (as did many other famous and benevolent people from years past).
Darwin’s occasionally statement of something we now interpret as racist does not mean that Evolution itself is a racist theory. Darwin’s position on race was much less egregious than the positions of most other people of his time. For example, in a letter to Asa Gray, Darwin stated [4], “Great God how I should like to see the greatest curse on Earth Slavery abolished.”
In fact, the scientific theory of evolution downplays even the possibility of race, as explained by Ernst Mayr [5]:
It was the great, and far too little appreciated, achievement of Charles Darwin to have replaced this typological approach by what we now call population thinking. In this new thinking, the biological uniqueness of every individual is recognized, and the inhabitants of a certain geographic region are considered a biopopulation. In such a biopopulation, no two individuals are the same, and this is true even for the six billion humans now on Earth. And, most important, each biopopulation is highly variable, and its individuals greatly differ from each other, thanks to the unique genetic combinations that result from this variability.
You wrote further:
Thus, laws of biogenesis (life cannot come from non-life), irreducible complexity, and basic physics were all (even in our time now) mere theories, and “pushed to the side.” This machine-man mentality produced by Darwin and Einstein caused others such as B.F. Skinner, to follow the same path. Skinner said, “Society can make people the way it wants them to be.” Skinner (in his fallen attempt to understand man) thought man as this machine that could be conditioned for every problem—”just pop a pill”. The removal of God’s absolute standards for sociological and psychological knowledge causes men like Skinner to become the “fixers of life” i.e. “god’s in white coats.”
It’s clear to me that Skinner overreached. Lots of people, including theists, overreach. There are arrogant scientists. But to blame arrogant personalities on the scientific method they try to employ is overbroad. It would be like blaming Hitler’s acts on his Catholicism [6].
Mendel (a monk) relied on the scientific method, as did Newton (an extremely devout man). I don’t hear anyone accusing Newton of playing “god” with physics. I’ve never heard of anyone arguing that Mendel’s examination and counting of pea plants was in violation of religion. In my understanding, Darwin was very much like Newton and Mendel in his approach to his studies, in that he followed the evidence where it led. Nor was Darwin arrogant, which anyone can see by the tone of any of his writings.
Here’s another point you made:
How do you explain anything in relation to epistemology, if all knowledge comes from people? Why, if there is no God, and we come from a closed system, do we have the concept or ideology of GOD, if it cannot be discovered other than our five senses? How do words like: good, bad, right, wrong, God, soul, morals, values, beauty, ugliness, emotion, intellect, and sin, even exist, if we are just a machine, or animal that relates all information from our own finite five senses? Maybe I should go and see a shrink, and he can tell me:)
We have concepts for lots of things that don’t exist, including phlogiston, unicorns and fairy dust. We have imaginations that can generate such thoughts and ideas. Children are especially able to generate images of non-existent things. None of this means that all such things exist.
How do machines think? No man-made machine can think to the extent that people can think. The brain is so marvelously complicated that we might never have a good grasp on the hard problem of consciousness. [7] Scientists all over the world are studying human emotions and cognition, though, and many are making inroads [8]. Scientists would be making big mistakes to claim that they have it all figured out when they don’t. That was Skinner’s mistake, as you’ve pointed out. In my opinion, that is also the mistake of many Believers, who utter the word, “God,” as if it was an explanation. In my experience, many of the people who utter the word God are actually using it to cut off further inquiry. They utter “God” to say stop trying, don’t be skeptical, don’t test, don’t experiment, don’t collaborate with other scientists, don’t ask difficult questions and don’t even ask easy questions.
How, then, do words like “good,” “bad,” “God,” “values,” etc exist if a human being is “just a machine?” By the way, the use of the phrase “just a machine” minimizes the incredible splendor of the human body. The human body is an extraordinary machine. How is it possible that our words have meaning? The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that our words derive their meaning experientially: we don’t just think with our brains. We think with our entire bodies. Our sensory-motor experiences constitute the foundation for our thoughts.
I have found the following books immensely helpful in my struggle to understand how it is that words can have meaning: Metaphors We Live By (2003) and Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, by Mark Johnson (1990); Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff (1987); Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics, by Mark Johnson (1993).
Until I encountered these writings by Lakoff and Johnson, I was dissatisfied by all of the explanations I had encountered regarding how words have “meaning.” Most theories of word meaning fail to ground word meaning. They hold (one way or the other) that words have meaning by reference to other words. But you can’t understand the meaning of words by constantly referring to other words! That argument is a fatally flawed eternal regress.
Meaning has to start somewhere else. I know from your own writings that you think that it come from “above.” I think it comes from “below.” I believe that all word meaning derives, directly or indirectly, from sensory-motor experience. For terms involving higher order thinking or subjectivity, I am convinced by Johnson and Lakoff that words are meaningful only insofar that we stretch our basic experiences (these exist in the form of what Johnson and Lakoff would term “image schemas”) through the use of the imagination, often through metaphor.
Many people would disagree with Johnson/Lakoff. They hold that our words have a permanent stable meaning associated with them; that words have “objective” meaning. Under this cover of “objectivism,” though, I believe that the widely-shared meanings of concepts are grounded in and constrained by our widely-shared biological, cognitive, social, and linguistic interactions. These interactions, which constitute our bodily existences, extend imaginatively and metaphorically to give substance to all meaningful high-level concepts, public policy or otherwise. “Objectivity,” can exist only to the extent that our interactions are widely shared.
In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff writes:
Thought is embodied, that is, the structures used to put together our conceptual systems grow out of bodily experience and make sense in terms of it; moreover, the core of our conceptual systems is directly grounded in perception, body movement, and experience of a physical and social character,” and 2) “Thought is imaginative, in that those concepts which are not directly grounded in experience employ metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery–all of which go beyond the literal mirroring, or representation, of external reality. It is this imaginative capacity that allows for “abstract” thought and takes the mind beyond what we can see and feel.
These are huge issues you’ve raised. I’ve sketched out for you the path that I have found to be fruitful. I hope this has been helpful to explaining why I think the way I do.
I hope to continue this dialogue.
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