Homo adorans

Here's a fascinating article about what appears to be an 11,000 year-old temple. That's before written language, before metal tools, before animals were domesticated, and even before agriculture. Recently, J.D. very cleverly suggested that humankind should be designated as homo ideologicus. I'm not so sure, though. Before we can create our ideologies, we have to have a basic experience of and response to what our ideologies eventually center around. It seems to me that man is a worshipping animal, and this discovery of an incredibly early temple may illustrate the point.


Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

The Multiverse agony aunt

As a compliment to Jim's informative series on the anthropic coincidences I would like to draw attention to Max Tegmark’s excellent page on multiverse theories here. The various multiverses fall into four distinct categories:

Level I: (Open multiverse) A generic prediction of cosmic inflation is an infinite ergodic universe, which, being infinite, must contain Hubble volumes realizing all initial conditions.

Level II: (Andrei Linde's bubble theory) In chaotic inflation, other thermalized regions may have different effective physical constants, dimensionality and particle content.

Level III: Each quantum possibility correspondes to a universe. Suppose your throw a die that contains 6 sides. When the die fall, one could ask why the outcome is the way it is. The answer is: All 6 possible ways the die can fall is actually actualized in 6 different universes.

Level IV: (The Ultimate ensemble theory of Tegmark) Other mathematical structures give different fundamental equations of physics. This level considers "real" any hypothetical universe based on one of these structures. Since this subsumes all other possible ensembles, it brings closure to the hierarchy of multiverses: there cannot be a Level V.

I am delighted to inform you that all of these theories have the effect of turning reality into a sick joke, as evidenced by Tegmark’s agony aunt section in which his baffled readership struggle to come to terms with the implications.

Question : The personally troubling aspect of the multiverse theory, which, fortunately and unfortunately, seems quite plausible, is that---if every conceivable universe exists---that means that your similar being, and mine, somewhere out there is (....to be gentle as I can be) an axe-murder and (not so gentle) worse! That is hard to accept for me in this universe, even if true. I guess the good news is that it isn't really me...but pretty darnn close to me since if every iteration is plausible then somewhere our "clone" has seen typed this email and then went out and robbed the local gas station, 7-11, next closest gas station, etc. etc.!

Tegmark : Things inconsistent with the laws of physics will never happen - everything else will. However, to cheer you up: even if some of your twins hold up gas stations, most of your twins certainly don't, given what I already know about your personality; it's important to keep track of the statistics, since even if everything conceivable happens somewhere, really freak events happen only exponentially rarely.

Quodlibeta Comment : Of course, the flip side of all that is, if you happen to be an axe murderer in this universe and this arises from a key flaw in your personality, the chances are that the vast majority of your other clones in the set of all possible universes will be axe murderers too, although statistically some will be peace loving hippies.

Question : Within the context of the multiverse, doesn't every conceivable physical possibility occur? If I'm driving my car and stop abruptly to keep from hitting a squirrel, don't I purposely run over that same squirrel in an alternate universe. And if so, isn't the number of universes that follow each outcome approximately the same?

Tegmark : No - and that's the crux. The laws of physics and your behavior evolved through natural selection create much regularity across the multiverse, so you'll try to spare that squirrel in the vast majority of all parallel universes where "you" are pretty similar to the copy reading this email (just as regards the above-mentioned gas station robbery). The fractions only split close to 50-50 for decisions that you perceive as a very close call.

Quodlibeta Comment : Why must these other versions of the questioner in the set of possible universes be driving cars?. Might they not be riding giant squirrels and swerving to avoid marsupials?.

Question : Doesn't the multiverse theory completely trivialize existence? It puts the burden for individual responsibility on the shoulders of the universe. Why do anything? If you decide to be a lazy slug, that just means that your particle clone elsewhere will be the one who wins the Nobel prize.

Tegmark : I'm not convinced that the existence of parallel universes implies that I should dramatically alter my behavior. Yes, some near-clones of me indeed win the Nobel prize, but only a very small fraction of them! As in the gas station question above, it's important to keep track of the statistics, since even if everything conceivable happens somewhere, really freak events happen rarely, in an exponentially small fraction of all parallel universes. It's these statistics that make existence complex and interesting rather than trivial.

Quodlibeta Comment : Great, now I don't just have to cope with the fact that most of my contempories are more successful than me, a large proportion of my clones in the multiverse are as well!. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing that statistically, a large percentage of them will be bums.

Having wiped the tears of laughter from my face, the question remains, should those of a monotheistic disposition believe in the multiverse?. I was delighted to discover that this topic came up during the Middle Ages when a number of clerics asked whether god could create more than one universe or whether he/she/it would be happy sticking with one?. In the event the Bishop of Paris was forced to intervene and said that yes, God could create as many universes as he wanted and there the matter was settled. Later John of Vassals said that God could create an infinite universe provided that it was not too infinite as this would be tantamount to creating another god. Thomas Bradwardine on the other hand (who later became archbishop of Canterbury) insisted that the universe was has to be infinite because god is infinite and exists in the universe. Moreover, present day commentators such as Peter Bussey of Glasgow University warn of the risk of ‘dumbing down God’. A multiverse is, after all, far harder for a deity to create than a single universe. On the basis of that it would be prudent to plump for a multiverse category, although you might want to 'fine tune' it to make it less silly.


Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

The Anthropic Principle for Misanthropes, part 1

One of the ways in which contemporary science has appeared to undergird religious belief is the Anthropic Principle. This is the investigation of the necessary conditions for the existence of life. It's an entire field of study, so obviously my treatment here is not even remotely exhaustive. There could easily be a blog entirely devoted to this subject reporting on new discoveries and studies on an almost daily basis.

The Anthropic Principle has its origins in the 1960s with scientists trying to determine the likelihood of other possible life-sites in the universe. It was thought at the time that the universe is so huge, there must be plenty of habitable planets, potentially with life and advanced civilizations already present.

What they have discovered is that the number of conditions that have to be met in order for a planet to be capable of supporting life are so numerous and so unlikely that, even when factoring the size of the universe into the equation, the odds of there being any planet anywhere in the universe that would meet all of the necessary conditions by chance is essentially zero. But this raised an obvious problem: there is a planet that meets all of these conditions. You're sitting on it. Since the Anthropic Principle demonstrates that it's improbable to the point of being impossible for this to have come about by chance, it suggests that these conditions are the way they are because someone intended that Earth should be able to support life.

There is debate as to whether the Anthropic Principle applies to all life or only to complex life. Many scientists argue that simple, unicellular life might be able to survive outside of the severe parameters necessary for advanced life, and could even be widespread. Probably the most popular book arguing this point is Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. If we grant this for the sake of argument, we're still left with a universe in which advanced life simply shouldn't exist, if left to its own resources. And yet, as you may have noticed, it does.

There are really two levels to the Anthropic Principle. The first is what has already been mentioned: the necessary conditions that must be met within the universe. For example, the planet must be in a particular part of a particular type of galaxy -- in a spiral galaxy and in between spiral arms. It must also have a particular interstellar history, such as nearby white dwarf binary stars that have lost some of their surface material to interstellar space in order to provide flourine. It must orbit a particular type of star with particular types of outer planets. The planet must have a particular axial tilt, a particular magnetic field, have a moon of a particular size and distance, etc., ad infinitum. Again, it's not an issue of individual criteria being met -- the universe is so big that there will be other places that meet even extremely improbable conditions. The point is that it has to meet them all, and when the conditions are combined it shows, even given the unfathomable size of the universe, that the odds are absurdly improbable that there would be a place that would be able to support life.

One of the properties on this level that has impressed me the most involves the Kuiper Belt. This is an asteroid belt outside the orbit of Neptune. A few years ago, scientists decided (ex cathedra) that Pluto isn't actually a planet, but is just a fairly large and fairly close Kuiper Belt Object.

The gravitational effects from the Kuiper Belt stabilize Neptune's orbit. If the Kuiper Belt's mass were any different (either less or greater), it would start a domino effect, throwing off Neptune's orbit, which would in turn throw off Uranus', then Saturn's, and then Jupiter's. Then the orbits of the inner planets, including Earth, would be disrupted to the extent that none of them would have an orbit stable enough to permit life. It just blows me away that life on Earth is dependent on an asteroid belt outside the orbit of Neptune.

Recently, astronomers have found that our dependence on the Kuiper Belt is even greater than was previously thought (see here, here, and here). Using computer modeling of our solar system's development, they discovered that early on, Uranus and Neptune were much closer to the sun (as was the Kuiper Belt) and possessed much more eccentric orbits. The gravitational effects between the Kuiper Belt Objects and Neptune and Uranus had to be very specific in order for all of them to drift further away from the Sun and then establish the stable orbits they have today.

The second level of the Anthropic Principle is the universe as a whole. Scientists have formed mathematical models with the laws of nature slightly tweaked, and used this to investigate what must be necessary for the existence of life. What they've discovered is that if most of the laws were different by very slight amounts -- if gravity was slightly weaker or stronger for example -- it would prevent any kind of life from existing anywhere in the entire history of the universe. This implies, again, that whatever Agency brought the universe into existence did so in such a way that it could support the existence of life.

The best examples of this are the universe's mass density and its space-energy density (or "dark energy"). The former essentially refers to how much matter the universe contains. As the universe expanded outward from the Big Bang, the amount of matter affected the speed, since the more mass there was, the greater gravity would slow it down. If the mass density was any greater by even a tiny amount, it would have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, causing the universe to collapse back on itself. If it was any weaker, then the expansion would overwhelm gravity enough that galaxies would never form, and without galaxies you don't have enough nearby stars to provide the heavier elements on which life depends. Specifically, the mass density has to be exactly what it is to within one part in 10⁶⁰ in order for life to exist in the universe.

The second factor mentioned above is dark energy. This refers to the "stretchiness" of the space-time fabric. This concept has its origins in Einstein's cosmological constant (symbolized by the Greek letter lambda), a force that counteracts gravity which he posited in order to escape the Big Bang singularity. He suggested that the further away two objects were, the more they would repel each other. However, no such force could be detected, much less at the strength required for Einstein's scenario. In the past several years however, scientists have managed to detect this force. It's far, far too weak to be used in the way Einstein intended -- to avoid a beginning of the universe -- but it does have a positive value. This force accounts for a very unusual phenomenon: that as the universe expands, it actually seems to be speeding up. The further the universe stretches, the more quickly it stretches. The reason this is called "stretching" is because it's not just a matter of stars and galaxies moving away from each other: the fabric of space-time is actually stretching out further. You yourself are getting slightly bigger each year as the universe expands. And you thought it was the donuts.

If the properties of dark energy were slightly different, it would affect the rate at which the universe expands, and this leads to the same problem as the mass density: either the universe would collapse upon itself (if it wasn't stretchy enough) or it would not form stars and galaxies and the heavier elements upon which life depends would not be available (if it was too stretchy). In fact, dark energy has to be fine-tuned to an even greater degree than the mass density is. It has to be exact to within one part in 10¹²⁰.

As far as I know, the fact that the universe is balanced on a knife's edge -- that if dozens of its properties were different in the slightest degrees, life (or at least advanced life) could never exist at any time and any place in its history -- is recognized by all scientists in the relevant disciplines. Accounting for this is a different matter. As I've suggested above, many scientists have thought that the fine-tuning of the universe demonstrates that, in Fred Hoyle's terms, "a superintellect monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology." But of course there have been many objections made against this inference. I'll deal with a few of the more common ones in future installments.

Update (13 Feb): See also part 2, part 3, and part 4.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Admin and some sad news

Two technical points first. Quodlibeta now allows comments. The congregation of regent masters voted that comments should be allowed and, as a humble clerks, we can do no more than execute their collective will.

Also, if you are as behind the times technically as I am, you may not have yet discovered the delights of feeds. If not, I can only recommend setting up an account on something like Google Reader and pressing the little orange button on the right of the screen on this blog. This means that you don’t have to check back to see if Quodlibeta has been updated since your last visit as any updates will, thanks the magic of feeds, be brought to you.

Finally, some news which anyone interested in medieval science will be extremely saddened to hear. John D. North has died at the age of 72. He was the leading scholar in the field of medieval mathematics and astronomy for the last thirty years. He will be best remembered for his work on Richard of Wallingford, recently repackaged for a popular readership as God’s Clockmaker.



Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Creation Myths

At the heart of the modern day science and religion debate is the conflict between the creation passages of Genesis and Titus Lucretius Carus’s poem ‘On the nature of things’, two competing visions of the meaning and the value of human existence. Both are in a sense cosmogonical myths, yet to recognize them as such is not to diminish their significance or truthfulness. Myths are not lies or detached stories. Rather they serve as imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that can present particular ways of interpreting the world and its meaning. As the British philosopher Mary Midgley argues, the myths we live by ‘shape our symbolism, our metaphysics and our understanding of what is real’. This is a point often missed when referring to Genesis which has come to be regarded as an inerrant repository of scientific truth. Yet to hold its message as literal is to ignore the reality of how we use language and literature in many different ways; as Origen puts it in 'On First Principles' :

‘What man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without the sun and moon and stars?....I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events’

Polanyi in ‘Personal Knowledge’ similarly reflects that:

'The book of Genesis and its great pictorial illustrations, like the frescos of Michelangelo, remain a far more intelligent account of the nature and origins of the universe than the representation of the world as a chance collection of atoms. For the Biblical cosmology continues to express - however inadequately - the significance of the fact the world exists and that man has emerged from it, while the scientific picture denies any meaning to the world, and indeed ignores all our vital experience of this world. The assumption that the world has some meaning which is linked to our calling as the only responsible beings in the world, is an important example of the supernatural aspect of experience which Christian interpretations of the universe explore and develop.’

On the nature of things is an epic which moves in lofty and conversational language through such themes as the universe, human beings, the soul, death and the Gods. Lucretius’s pretext for writing the poem is to convert his friend Memmius to Epicureanism; but also to strike a blow against antiquity’s teleologists, the Platonists, the Aristotelians and most of all, the Stoics. He chooses to do so in verse in order to sweeten this bitter pill of his rather dismal and dispiriting philosophy in which life is accidental both in the everyday and in the genesis. To Lucretius, his mentor Epicurius is the spiritual and moral savior of himself and mankind; a man whose teachings have the power to free humankind from the fear of the gods by demonstrating that all things occur by natural causes. The poem seeks to grandly proclaim the reality of humanity’s role in a universe ruled by chance, a cosmos in which we are decoupled from any cosmic master plan. It is a statement of personal responsibility in a world in which everyone is driven by hungers and passions with which they were born and do not understand, an expression of both defiance and hope in the face of philosophical despair. For Lucretius, one of the chief obstacles to the tranquillity of mind is the fear of death, the fear of punishment after death and the fear of the gods. By showing that the mind and spirit are mortal, and that they therefore cannot live on after we die, the poet seeks to banish these concerns;

‘Death..is nothing to us: when we exist death is not present; and when death is present, we do not exist. Consequently it does not concern either the living or the dead since for the living it is non existent and the dead no longer exist’

Phillip Larkin certainly didn’t find any scrap of consolation in Lucretius. As he stared into the abyss, the abyss stared back into him. In his great poem ‘Aubade’ he remarked:

‘This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says
No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round..’

If non existence is indeed the eventual state of affairs then Larkin presumably never had to experience the embarrassment of looking down from upon high as his friends and family discovered he had amassed the largest collection of hardcore pornography in the northern hemisphere. Nor did he have to watch on in horror as his biographers poured through his diaries to find he had written of the joys of ‘WATCHING SCHOOLGIRLS SUCK EACH OTHER OFF WHILE YOU WHIP THEM". Perhaps Lucretius was right and eternal annihilation has its plus side.

Of perhaps the most significance in the poem is its depiction of Epicurus’s version of atomism, in which the universe originates at some indefinite point in the past as an infinite number of small, hard, indestructible particles moving downward through void space in parallel. Ours is a world in which bodies composed of many atoms entangled with one another, then move in a variety of ways and interact with one another through collision. Superficially the depiction of reality contained in ‘On the Nature of Things’ would seem to be anathema to the picture contained in Genesis of an orderly Cosmos created and ruled over by an Omnipotent God, yet it was the creative tension between the two which gave birth to the mechanical philosophy of early modern science. The atomistic picture succeeded when it was wedded by Gassendi, Mersenne and Descartes to the purposive understanding of the cosmos derived from Genesis and biblical notions of God’s power. Descartes for example, expressed motion as follows:

‘From the mere fact that God gave pieces of matter various movements at their first creation, and that he now preserves all this matter in being in the same way as he first created it, he must likely always preserve in it the same quantity of motion’.

What we now recognize as a scientific principle was therefore formulated through a theological concept of divine immutability. The universe ran like a clock, but not autonomously; divine preservation shaped it and held it in being . Later theorists such as Boyle recognized the atomistic picture as an ally to Christian belief, divesting nature of all inherent powers and making brute matter subservient to God’s immediate Will, controlled in motion by laws externally imposed. In such a universe God’s sovereignty could be celebrated. Genesis and ‘On the Nature of Things’ appear strange bedfellows but molded together they provided a powerful interpretive framework capable of gaining great insight.

At first glance, the world around us is much as it was described in De Rerum Natura, which has become something of a creation myth for metaphysical naturalism, minus the magnificently indifferent Gods whom the materialists have long since evaporated with their animosity towards the supernatural. In the atomistic picture, the soul is just a collection of particles animated by blind chance, the discovery of the evolutionary process shattered Paley’s watchmaker argument, Laplace eliminated God from the heavens and natural theology retreated into talk of process.

And yet, as Francis Bacon was to write on the difference between the Aristotelian and Epicurean world pictures:

‘Nay, even that school which is most accused of atheism doth most demonstrate religion; that is, the school of Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus. For it is a thousand times more credible, that four mutable elements, and one immutable fifth essence, duly and eternally placed, need no God, than that an army of infinite small portions, or seeds unplaced, should have produced this order and beauty, without a divine marshal’.

The God has been eliminated by enlightenment doubt, yet the rational ordered universe remains as an inexplicable brute fact, its laws and regularities curiously permitting of our existence. As Bacon would say ‘It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism’. But when one steps back from creation and looks in wonder at the whole majestic sweep, at the finely balanced atomic structures, the infinity of stars across the night sky, a universe of mathematical beauty, and the unlikely emergence of Einstein, Newton and Michelangelo from the blind algorithmic workings of evolution and the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules; then one gets a dim sense of the mind behind this universal frame. We are nothing but atoms, but we are much more than just atoms. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Does religion make you nice?

If you want to see an example of academic double-think have a look at this article in Slate. It discusses whether religion makes us behave better or worse than we would do otherwise.

This is a complicated question which I don’t want to delve into too deeply here. Rather I am interested in the conclusions drawn by Professor Paul Bloom, the psychologist from Yale who wrote the article. He notes surveys report that, in the United States, atheists give less to charity and are less happy than religious people. However, in some secular countries (which he weirdly calls atheist countries) like Denmark and Sweden, people are generally as generous and happy as believers in the US. Bloom notes that although most people in Denmark and Sweden are not believers in an afterlife or a personal God, they nonetheless describe themselves as Christians. The Church regulates their lives through baptism, marriage and funerals.

He suggests, on this basis, that it is not religious faith that makes us charitable and happy, but the support of a religious community (this is an arguable point although it fails to ask how long a religious community can survive without any believers). Thus, says Bloom, American atheists are not miserable tightwads because they don’t believe in God, but because they are lonely and isolated. But then, he concludes that this is the fault of religious people! He claims,

The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones like Schlessinger, find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything, but it deserves part of the blame for this one.

I was just about keeping up with him until this point, but fell off my chair at how ridiculous his final sentence was. Bloom is actually saying that it is the fault of religious communities that Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers and the head bangers at Internet Infidels are not part of their group. Wow.

I’ve heard religion blamed for all sorts of things that it bears no responsibility for, but this takes the biscuit.



Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Debating God

On my other blog I wrote recently that, while I enjoy debates, I don't really trust them. My childhood experiences taught me that not being able to come up with a snappy retort off the top of your head in front of others does not mean that you're in the wrong.

However, perhaps a bit perversely, I do enjoy watching and listening to debates on Christianity. One of the most prolific debaters of the last two decades or so has been William Lane Craig, one of those annoying people who has two Doctorates. I recently discovered a link to nearly all of the debates he's taken part in. Some you can listen to, some you can watch, and for a few you can read transcripts. The two most common debate subjects are the existence of God and the historical Jesus. There are also others on meta-ethics, and a few more on Islam. It's worth checking out.


Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

A Time to Dance, A Time to Die

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So begins L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, with a first line that is both punchy and true. Historians always have to accept that we can never see the world through the eyes of the characters we study. But sometimes we do feel we can come close. I enjoy the connection I can feel with someone who lived five hundred years ago by reading their letters or just enjoying the doodles they’ve drawn in the margin of their books.

Every so often, though, things happened which were just so weird that it is extremely hard to make sense of them. One such occasion was the dancing plague that struck Strasbourg in 1518 and forms the subject of John Waller’s new book A Time to Dance, A Time to Die. The plague affected dozens if not hundreds of people, several of whom died as a result. The idea that people could dance themselves to death seems shocking and it is a relief to find that the people of Strasbourg were no less horrified than we would be.

Waller’s first task is to convince us that the dancing plague actually happened. He convincingly achieves this by lining up the sources and also showing that similar events had occasionally occurred over the previous three hundred years. His other task – to explain the plague – is far more difficult. He attributes it to extreme spiritual anxiety brought about by a series of disasters that afflicted the Strasbourg poor. While the sources rarely concern themselves with the common people, Waller is able to tease out a picture of their life from information on grain prices, chronicles of popular revolts and the sermons by the city’s preachers. He leaves us in no doubt that existence for the poor was always precarious and frequently became dire. Their material wants were exacerbated by the common belief that the disasters that befell the faithful were evidence that God had turned his back on them. It is easy to see how the radical theology of Martin Luther found so many ready listeners even if Strasbourg itself remained essentially Catholic through the Reformation.

Perhaps less convincing is the last chapter where Waller ventures into psychology. While he effectively debunks earlier the attempts to explain the dancing plague and similar phenomena, psychology itself is not yet able to provide the explanation that he seeks. Furthermore, at a distance of five hundred years, we do not have sufficient facts to make an accurate medical diagnosis of the victims of the dancing plague.

Overall, this book helped me understand the lot of the common people just before the Reformation. For historians like me who concentrate on high literary and scientific culture, this is a powerful and necessary corrective. I'd recommend it for anyone interested in the Reformation or religious practice in general. It also has the virtue of being a quick read.

Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Skepticism and Blind Faith

Dallas Willard is a philosopher at USC who's an expert in Husserl's phenomenology. His popularity in Christian circles, however, is due to his excellent books on spiritual living; I highly recommend them. In one of these books, Hearing God, he makes an interesting point near the end regarding skepticism.

The test of character posed by the gentleness of God's approach to us is especially dangerous for those formed by the ideas that dominate our modern world. We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel -- or one desperate for another life -- therefore stands any chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.

This is an interesting point. Skepticism is the refusal to believe; how exactly is this intellectual? How is it rational or wise? As he says, an unintelligent person can doubt something just as easily as an intelligent person; so how could doubting be a sign of intelligence or of rational method?

It seems to me that skepticism is essentially blind faith that something is false, and any form of blind faith is not rational. Of course, someone could come up with an ad hoc proposition that no one would believe, like Russell's orbiting teapot or a flying spaghetti monster. The rational response to such suggestions is not to remain undecided; it's to not believe them. Doesn't this prove that skepticism, doubt, is the fallback position in terms of rationality?

The problem with this is that we do have a reason to disbelieve such claims: they are ad hoc, and the more ad hoc or contrived a claim is, the less likely it is true. The degree to which it is ad hoc is the degree to which it is implausible. This is particularly evident with the absurdly ad hoc propositions mentioned above: we react against such suggestions because they are completely contrived. It's not merely that we have no reason to think they are true; we think, for whatever reason, that they are just "made up," and this is a specific reason to think they are not true.

However, this gets into burden of proof issues, and my understanding is that these issues are notoriously difficult to resolve. It's food for thought, though.



Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

The New Charles Simonyi Professor

The new Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford is the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. Judging by his website, he has done lots of worthy media work to promote mathematics and he is colour-blind (if you doubt that, click on the link but make sure you are wearing shades). The website isn’t terribly up-to-date but he does appear to have plenty of experience communicating with the public. He is also an A-list academic.

And that, folks, is the last you will ever hear about him, on this site or anywhere else, unless you watch educational programmes on British television. To prove my point, consider what you know about the other Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Kathy Sykes at Bristol University. She works hard to make fun programmes about science that pull in a niche audience on the box. But the press have no interest in her and none of her books have troubled the bestseller lists. I mean no disrespect to Professors Sykes or du Sautoy when I say this. But for the wider public and those who thrive on controversy, they provide thin gruel.

The fact is, it was Dawkins who created headlines and not the post he occupied. He was, and is, a much bigger fish then the Charles Simonyi chair. When Dawkins speaks, the press take notice. So do we at Quodlibeta. The same will not be the case for Professor du Sautoy. It appears that he is an atheist but is bored by religion. As he is a mathematician, a subject that simply lacks media appeal, I suspect we will hear little from him.

Luckily, Richard Dawkins is still going strong. We must wish him a long and productive retirement.

Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.