Balancing Skepticism and Faith

[GDon]

Here is what IanS said:

Thanks for that. Not really "God of the gaps", just the strawman version. I've actually come across only two examples: one by Isaac Newton, who thought the reason that planets circling the Sun didn't interfere with each others' orbits was God acting on the planets; and I forget the second one (though it is also from 500 years ago IIRC). But it would be unfair to IanS and you to argue through proxy so lets leave it there.

You miss all kinds of good stuff when you put people on your sh** ignore list.

True.

Have to take your word on the differences here. Generally though I think it can be accepted as proven that higher education generally means lesser religiosity.

Yes, I have no problem with that. But the question then is, WHY? If higher education means less religiosity, then why do hard sciences have less believers than soft sciences (which IIRC is the case)? Both are examples of higher education, both are about teaching and utilizing research methods, neither are about investigating the questions of the existence of God.

This is not a question of tribalism. I'm not trying to support "my side (theists) is smarter!" "my side is more educated!", because I accept that that isn't true as a general statement. I'm genuinely asking why higher education results in less religiosity, when that higher education isn't about questioning religiosity.

If it is because the sciences teach critical thinking somehow has an effect, then why the difference between the hard sciences and the soft sciences? Do the hard sciences teach more critical thinking, and how does that manifest itself? (I'm not expecting anyone here to have the answer to this, just wondering what people think.)

I think you are drawing a long bow in suggesting those preachers way back then, were doing this sort of thing rather than telling literal stories. No way to prove it one way or the other though I suppose.

Again: they probably were taught as things that literally happened. But the reason they were preached was to highlight some theological, philosophical or moral point. Their *value* in the sermon was in their symbolism, not their historicity.

 

[kellyb]

Re: the god of the gaps, I'd say:
1) Over the last 50 years, a lot of progress has been made in explaining our moral instincts from an evolutionary POV
2) the debunking of the "irreducible complexity" argument for ID
3) intercessory prayer research

 

[Pixel42]

If it is because the sciences teach critical thinking somehow has an effect, then why the difference between the hard sciences and the soft sciences? Do the hard sciences teach more critical thinking, and how does that manifest itself? (I'm not expecting anyone here to have the answer to this, just wondering what people think.)

Maybe it's just that the less satisfied people tend to be with supernatural answers to the big questions the more likely they are to seek out education and careers in the harder sciences. That initial tendency might be more influenced by nature than nurture.

 

[Pixel42]

Re: the god of the gaps, I'd say:
1) Over the last 50 years, a lot of progress has been made in explaining our moral instincts from an evolutionary POV
2) the debunking of the "irreducible complexity" argument for ID
3) intercessory prayer research

I'd add the progress in neuroscience in showing how the brain generates mind, making the idea of separate minds/souls (and their afterlife) less and less plausible.

 

[GDon]

Re: the god of the gaps, I'd say:
1) Over the last 50 years, a lot of progress has been made in explaining our moral instincts from an evolutionary POV
2) the debunking of the "irreducible complexity" argument for ID
3) intercessory prayer research

Interesting examples, but I wouldn't really call these "God of the gaps" arguments. According to Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

"God of the gaps" is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence.​

1) I don't think that morals themselves were ever thought to be evidence for God. Absolute moral values have been proposed to only have value if there is a God, but IIUC no-one doubts that morals exist and no-one has claimed that their existence in themselves is evidence for God. A GotG argument might be "moral instincts exist and only God explains their existence."

(2) & (3) are not examples of gaps in scientific knowledge that was thought to be evidence for God, but ideas that have been debunked. E.g. a 6000 year old Earth created by God has been debunked, but that was never really a 'GotG' argument because it was never part of established scientific knowledge. For there to be a GotG argument, you need a gap that has been established by science but not yet explained.

Irreducible complexity has never been part of established scientific knowledge so there are no gaps to be explained through the existence of God (if I am using the term 'GotG' correctly). GotG arguments might be "science can't explain why there is Irreducible complexity and only God explains it" or "science can't explain why praying really works in healing people and only God explains it."

But perhaps I'm wrong. How would you define GotG? How would you phrase your examples such that they are GotG examples?

 

[David Mo]

But to be clear: I wasn't saying that the stories told from the pulpit weren't presented as non-literal, but that they weren't told as part of a history or science lesson. They were told to highlight whatever theological, philosophical or moral point that the pastor was wanting to point out.
For example, a pastor wouldn't say "Today we will learn about whales. According to the Bible, people can live in whales for 3 days." Instead, it would be something like "A whale swallowed Jonah for 3 days, symbolizing Jesus being in Hades for 3 days after death." Your average believer throughout history would then go home and promptly not worry about it.

Fundamentalism is not trying to give scientific courses with the Bible. But it says that the facts described in the Bible were real. They don't pretend given lessons about whales, but they say that if the Bible says that a man lived three days in the stomach of a whale there was a man that lived three days in the stomach of a whale. It is amazing, then it is a miracle. But it happened as the Bible said that it happened.

Of course, the fact of Jonas living three days into the whale was a prophetic fact. God made with Jonah a prophetic advance of Jesus' death and resurrection on the third day. But it is the symbolic contents of facts. No fundamentalist opposes this. And this is very different of the symbolic content of the words of the Sacred Book.

This fundamentalism was the official doctrine of the Church for centuries. The total symbolization of the Bible, defended by Origen of Alexandria, was condemned in the third century CE. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas also defended de literal reading of the Bible. And so things were until the Enlightenment came to remove them.

As I said in another comment I was told twenty times the story of Jonah and nobody told me that it was a myth.

Again: they probably were taught as things that literally happened. But the reason they were preached was to highlight some theological, philosophical or moral point. Their *value* in the sermon was in their symbolism, not their historicity.

This is other discussion. Now it's about moral or philosophical (sic) value . But this is not the symbolic. That the Bible is a source of moral and theological teachings is not denied by any fundamentalist.

What are we discussing? I believed that the belief that what the Bible narrates is real.

What distinguishes a fundamentalist from a symbolist is that the former thinks that the facts narrated in the Bible are significant and the latter says that biblical legends are significant.

 

[GDon]

Maybe it's just that the less satisfied people tend to be with supernatural answers to the big questions the more likely they are to seek out education and careers in the harder sciences. That initial tendency might be more influenced by nature than nurture.

Yes, it might be something along those lines.

(ETA) I've been looking at some stats, and found the Pew Research Center poll of scientists in 2009. Interestingly enough, it showed more scientists (51%) believed in a higher power than not (41%).

 

[Pixel42]

But perhaps I'm wrong. How would you define GotG? How would you phrase your examples such that they are GotG examples?

The three gaps in scientific understanding identified by kellyb are:

1. why are people often instinctively altruistic when it would seem to be to their advantage to be selfish?
2. how can certain complex organic mechanisms evolve when there are apparently no useful intermediate steps?
3. why are prayers answered more often than would be expected by chance?

(1) and (2) were things that science couldn't explain, therefore God filled that gap, but for which scientific explanations are now available; (3) was shown to be false, so no gap to fill

The example I added was like kellyb's first two examples: "science can't explain minds therefore they must come from God" -> "actually it looks like science can explain minds".

 

[GDon]

Pixel42, I guess I would actually have to see some religious group making the argument that "God is the explanation" for some phenomenon unexplained by science. Bill O'Reilly famously argued with American Atheist president David Silverman that "the tide goes in, the tide goes out, you can't explain it." (I love the expression on Silverman's face at 2 mins!) That is technically a modern "God of the Gaps" argument, but the question of tides has not been an unexplained phenomenon for 500 years. The view of one ignorant man like O'Reilly isn't a GotG argument as generally used IIUC (though if it becomes defined as such then of course I'm wrong and it is a GotG argument.)

In any case, I followed the Intelligent Design argument fairly closely, and the point was made clearly that the explanation didn't have to be God, at least by proponents like Michael Behe; though it was pretty clear Creationists were pushing it for their own agenda. From Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Behe

"… 'designer' is often seen as a not-too-subtle code word for God, both by those who like the implications and by those who don't. …Like it or not, a raft of important distinctions intervene between a conclusion of design and identification of a designer. … The designer need not necessarily even be a truly 'supernatural' being.​

 

[Pixel42]

Sorry GDan, but it seems to me that you're being a bit disingenuous. Every time a believer in the supernatural declares that "science can't explain X" the conclusion the listener is expected to draw could not be more obvious. They rarely spell it out, probably because they think the listener will be more likely to give it credence if they reach it unaided, but we all know what they themselves have concluded from it.

 

[GDon]

Sorry GDan, but it seems to me that you're being a bit disingenuous. Every time a believer in the supernatural declares that "science can't explain X" the conclusion the listener is expected to draw could not be more obvious. They rarely spell it out, probably because they think the listener will be more likely to give it credence if they reach it unaided, but we all know what they themselves have concluded from it.

Fair point.

 

[IanS]

If it is because the sciences teach critical thinking somehow has an effect, then why the difference between the hard sciences and the soft sciences? Do the hard sciences teach more critical thinking, and how does that manifest itself? (I'm not expecting anyone here to have the answer to this, just wondering what people think.)

I have no idea why I should be on your ignore list. I don't recall ever having any serious altercations with you. I can only imagine it must have been something in the Historical Jesus threads, where quite a few people were deliberately being confrontational and personalising things in rude or abusive ways, though I was certainly never doing that … the only people here that I've ever responded to in anything remotely approaching even a fraction of that sort of attitude is with 3 or 4 regular posters who had already been constantly posting in that way for page after page before I might have eventually asked them to stop it and stick to polite constructive discussion.

However, as far as "hard science" is concerned, where I assume you mean what I would call "core science", ie physics, chemistry, biology, maths + some direct offshoots, such as astronomy, then the answer is “yes”. Yes, core science research does have higher more rigorous standards – it's much more difficult and demanding if you want to publish research in the top physics and chemistry journals (such as Phys. Rev. and JACS) than it is to get papers published in areas like psychology or engineering etc.

But note that if you do a BSc degree, or even a PhD in physics or chemistry, you are not actually taught so-called “critical thinking” (or at least you were not taught that when I was doing all that stuff). Instead it was just the case that the subjects themselves forced you to think logically and present really solid well researched evidence with truly convincing explanations, otherwise you'd never get anything passed for publication.

But that's all getting away from the subject of this thread. In which respect – if you are not aware of the different research standards in something like quantum cosmological physics vs. (say) psychology studies of “consciousness”, then you may be falling into the trap which I've noticed many times here before from theists (and some philosophers), who seem to think that research in core science has no more authority or validity than the personal opinions of ordinary people who argue such things as “evidence for the existence of God”, or evidence from “personal experience and anecdotes” etc.

 

[Thor 2]

Thanks for that. Not really "God of the gaps", just the strawman version. I've actually come across only two examples: one by Isaac Newton, who thought the reason that planets circling the Sun didn't interfere with each others' orbits was God acting on the planets; and I forget the second one (though it is also from 500 years ago IIRC). But it would be unfair to IanS and you to argue through proxy so lets leave it there.

Yes Isaac Newton was a good example of a good mind screwed up by religion. It was just about compulsory to be religious back in those days so I guess it's understandable. Newton was into alchemy I read as well so his intellectual rigour was not uniform.

Yes, I have no problem with that. But the question then is, WHY? If higher education means less religiosity, then why do hard sciences have less believers than soft sciences (which IIRC is the case)? Both are examples of higher education, both are about teaching and utilizing research methods, neither are about investigating the questions of the existence of God.

This is not a question of tribalism. I'm not trying to support "my side (theists) is smarter!" "my side is more educated!", because I accept that that isn't true as a general statement. I'm genuinely asking why higher education results in less religiosity, when that higher education isn't about questioning religiosity.

If it is because the sciences teach critical thinking somehow has an effect, then why the difference between the hard sciences and the soft sciences? Do the hard sciences teach more critical thinking, and how does that manifest itself? (I'm not expecting anyone here to have the answer to this, just wondering what people think.)


Again: they probably were taught as things that literally happened. But the reason they were preached was to highlight some theological, philosophical or moral point. Their *value* in the sermon was in their symbolism, not their historicity.

Don't know why you are persistent with this. I would think it quite self evident, that if what you studied was in direct conflict with scriptural nonsense, then it would impact on your faith more than if what you studied did not.

 

[Thor 2]

Yes, it might be something along those lines.

(ETA) I've been looking at some stats, and found the Pew Research Center poll of scientists in 2009. Interestingly enough, it showed more scientists (51%) believed in a higher power than not (41%).

[qimg]http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2009/11/Scientists-and-Belief-3.gif[/qimg]

Two things should be noted about these figures given that they are about USA scientists.

1. Religion is fed to infants along with the teat to a large extent in the USA, so residual bias towards it and inclination to not be in conflict with family, are factors to be considered.

2. Scientific funding is often in the control of non scientists who must not be aggravated.

 

[kellyb]

Yes Isaac Newton was a good example of a good mind screwed up by religion. It was just about compulsory to be religious back in those days so I guess it's understandable. Newton was into alchemy I read as well so his intellectual rigour was not uniform.

My understanding is that alchemy was a completely reasonable thing to explore before the basics of chemistry were figured out. Alchemy just kinda morphed into chemistry over time, actually.

 

[kellyb]

Interesting examples, but I wouldn't really call these "God of the gaps" arguments. According to Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

"God of the gaps" is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence.​

1) I don't think that morals themselves were ever thought to be evidence for God. Absolute moral values have been proposed to only have value if there is a God, but IIUC no-one doubts that morals exist and no-one has claimed that their existence in themselves is evidence for God. A GotG argument might be "moral instincts exist and only God explains their existence."

(2) & (3) are not examples of gaps in scientific knowledge that was thought to be evidence for God, but ideas that have been debunked. E.g. a 6000 year old Earth created by God has been debunked, but that was never really a 'GotG' argument because it was never part of established scientific knowledge. For there to be a GotG argument, you need a gap that has been established by science but not yet explained.

Irreducible complexity has never been part of established scientific knowledge so there are no gaps to be explained through the existence of God (if I am using the term 'GotG' correctly). GotG arguments might be "science can't explain why there is Irreducible complexity and only God explains it" or "science can't explain why praying really works in healing people and only God explains it."

But perhaps I'm wrong. How would you define GotG? How would you phrase your examples such that they are GotG examples?

1) Yes, they were. It was one of the key arguments in CS Lewis' "Mere Christianity", which he wrote to be "a gospel for the skeptics". His argument actually was "moral instincts exist and only God explains their existence."

2-3) "Irreducible complexity" was a name the theists came up with for what they saw as gaps in proposed evolutionary development.

 

[kellyb]

Here's Lewis using the existence of morals as "proof" of god, a very classic "god of the gaps" argument:

https://www.dacc.edu/assets/pdfs/PCM/merechristianitylewis.pdf

The laws of nature, as applied to stones or trees, may only mean "what Nature, in fact, does." But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a different matter. That law certainly does not mean "what human beings, in fact, do"; for as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely. The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not.

In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave). In the rest of the universe there need not be anything but the facts. Electrons and molecules behave in a certain way, and certain results follow, and that may be the whole story. (*) But men behave in a certain way and that is not the whole story, for all the time you know that they ought to behave differently

Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are unselfish,
nor that they like being unselfish, but that they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human behaviour in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave.

4. What Lies Behind The Law
Let us sum up what we have reached so far. In the case of stones and trees and things of that sort, what we call the Laws of Nature may not be anything except a way of speaking. When you say that nature is governed by certain laws, this may only mean that nature does, in fact, behave in a certain way. The socalled laws may not be anything real—anything above and beyond the actual facts which we observe.
But in the case of Man, we saw that this will not do. The Law of Human Nature, or of Right and Wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behaviour. In this case, besides the actual facts, you have something else—a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.

The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it.
There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely our own case. And in that one case we find there is. Or put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe— no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves.
Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions?

The only packet I am allowed to open is Man. When I do, especially when I open that particular man called Myself, I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way.

 

[GDon]

Don't know why you are persistent with this. I would think it quite self evident, that if what you studied was in direct conflict with scriptural nonsense, then it would impact on your faith more than if what you studied did not.

I persist in this because I find the question interesting. Look at the figures for Chemistry above -- 55% believe in a higher power, 39% don't. How much do studies in chemistry directly conflict with scriptural nonsense, and does that explain the score? We don't have enough data to even have a guess, but I'd love to see a study investigating this.

Two things should be noted about these figures given that they are about USA scientists.

1. Religion is fed to infants along with the teat to a large extent in the USA, so residual bias towards it and inclination to not be in conflict with family, are factors to be considered.

2. Scientific funding is often in the control of non scientists who must not be aggravated.

Sure, those reasons also probably contribute to the figures.

 

[GDon]

1) Yes, they were. It was one of the key arguments in CS Lewis' "Mere Christianity", which he wrote to be "a gospel for the skeptics". His argument actually was "moral instincts exist and only God explains their existence."

No, his argument was that only God explains why morals have value, that gives a difference between an 'is' and an 'ought'.

I agree it is an argument for God, but it isn't a GotG argument as far as I can see. At least as how I define the term, as I describe below.

Here's Lewis using the existence of morals as "proof" of god, a very classic "god of the gaps" argument:

https://www.dacc.edu/assets/pdfs/PCM/merechristianitylewis.pdf

I might be wrong, but I define a "God of the gaps" argument as the following:
1. A gap is identified in scientific knowledge, where the science of that time can't explain some phenomenon that has been observed.
2. Someone declares that the gap is evidence for God.

I take Pixel42's earlier point that a theist simply pointing to a gap can imply that God is the cause, even if they don't explicitly say that. So I agree that there is a grey area there that I should keep in mind. Still, I don't think that this makes Lewis's argument a GotG one. But if you have a different definition for GotG, then it may be more prudent to agree to disagree on this.

The reason I don't see it as a GotG argument (as I define it) is first we need to see what phenomenon that science is claiming has been validated without being able to explain. Has science validated "The Law of Human Nature, or of Right and Wrong"? Does scientific literature validate "a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey"? Not that I know of. There is no gap in science on the question because science does not address the question.

Again, if your definition of GotG differs from mine, you might validly disagree.

 

[David Mo]

Here's Lewis using the existence of morals as "proof" of god, a very classic "god of the gaps" argument:

https://www.dacc.edu/assets/pdfs/PCM/merechristianitylewis.pdf

The problem with God as explanation of anything is twofold: a) God doesn't explain anything and b) God doesn't exist.

First: To explain is to reduce the unknown to the known. But when you ask how is God, the ultimate answer is always the same: "a mystery". God is not like that and so on. God is not good, in the human sense of the word, because he is the creator of evil. God is not intelligent, because his rationality is not argumentative. God knows all but all is not determined... and so on. Do you know the "negative theology" or "the silence of God"? Exactly. God doesn't fulfil any gap. He is void in himself.

Second: To postulate the existence of God to resolve the problem of Absolute Values is to believe that Absolute Values are an Absolute Fact. If you deny that Absolute Values are facts the existence of God is superfluous. You can explain the existence of human values by human reality.