I keep having to remind myself that science is self-correcting …

_{Denyse O'Leary

May 20, 2009

Ethics}

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I have often been wearied by legends in their own lunchroom huffing that science differs from other endeavours because it is “self-correcting.”

To which I reply: Aw come off it, fellas. Any system that does not go extinct is self-correcting – after it collapses on its hind end. This is true of governments, businesses, churches, and not-for-profit organizations. I’ve seen enough of life to know.

Here’s a classic: At The Scientist’s NewsBlog, Bob Grant reveals (May 7, 2009) that

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted.

Elsevier is conducting an “internal review” of its publishing practices after allegations came to light that the company produced a pharmaceutical company-funded publication in the early 2000s without disclosing that the “journal” was corporate sponsored

[ … ]

The allegations involve the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a publication paid for by pharmaceutical company Merck that amounted to a compendium of reprinted scientific articles and one-source reviews, most of which presented data favorable to Merck’s products. The Scientist obtained two 2003 issues of the journal — which bore the imprint of Elsevier’s Excerpta Medica — neither of which carried a statement obviating Merck’s sponsorship of the publication.

The linked related stories and comments are most illuminating, and bear out my critique of “peer review” here. Let’s just say that peer review started out as a good idea, but …

(Note: There is no paywall, but you may need to register to view the story, .)

Also, today at Colliding Universes

Neutrinos: Sudbury Neutrino Observatory does the sun’s bookkeeping

Origin of life: The live cat vs. the dead cat

Cosmology: Wow. It takes guts to wage war with Stephen Hawking … he appeared in Star Trek

Universe: Arguments against flatness (plus exposing sloppy science writing)

Origin of life: Latest scenario gives RNA world a boost

Colliding Universes is my blog on competing theories about our universe.

Comments

----herb: "I’m going to have to side with BZ on this matter. Even speaking as a Christian, I don’t have any beliefs that I am 100% certain of." It's not a question of being 100% certain of religious belief, which, by definition does not lend itself to philosophical certitude. It is a question of acquiring sufficient information to make a reasonable judgment about what deserves to be believed and then making that judgment. Everyone makes a judgment and everyone settles on something, even if it is the dubious position of insisting that no one should ever settle on anything---as if we should always be seeking and never be finding. What is rational about that?StephenB_{May 26, 2009
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----Diffaxial: “The statement that an effect cannot occur without a cause is not “only” tautologically true. It is indeed tautologically true, and your insistence that it is an eternal, “Self-Evident Truth about the world” mistakes that tautology for the certainty that it speaks to facts in the world.” If an effect can occur without a cause in the real world, then the world is not rational and no logical law of non-contradiction would be of any use. Such a state of affairs would leave the law of non-contradiction talking to itself in a world that has nothing to do with rationality. I am amazed that you do not see this. ----Diffaxial: “The tautological component of a tautology, the only component that confers your desired “self-evidence,” does not establish anything at all outside of itself.” It isn’t the tautology that establishes anything; it is the self evident truth which can be perceived by all rational people. It was you that tried to reduce self-evident truths to “tautologies,” not me. It should be obvious that, in the real world, an effect cannot occur without a cause. If you would stop questioning that fact by trying to reduce it to mere tautological status, all would be well and rationality would be resorted. But, alas, your postmodernism will not permit you to concede that which almost everyone else knows to be the case. ----“ Moreover, we can empirically observe at a meta-level that the conceptual tool “cause and effect” can be powerful in a great many circumstances, indeed in the vast majority of cases. In which cases would it not be a powerful tool? How do you differentiate between those events which are subject to the law and those that are not? If any event if the real world can, at one time or another, evade the principle of cause and effect, then why cannot all events evade the laws of cause and effect? If there is any exception, the entire rational enterprise breaks down. How would you know whether you were attributing cause and effect when no such law was in effect or whether you had failed to attribute it to an event in which it was operative? It would be a cosmic madhouse. You do not appear to have thought this thing through. ----“Does it follow that all events are profitably described as “effects” that necessarily have causes? It does not. In particular, we directly observe that the notion breaks down at the quantum level, and it is also not at all clear that it is applicable to the universe as a whole, because we know that time came into being with that universe.” This is precisely what is at issue. The laws of cause and effect DO NOT break down at the quantum level. You do not believe that the principles of right reason apply to the real world, so, immediately, you misapply the principle of logic to quantum mechanics. Indeed, you are trying to use quantum mechanics to provide a rational justification for an irrational position, apparently not realizing that quantum physics, nor any other science, can violate its own foundational logic. All science, including quantum mechanics is based on the laws of cause and effect. ----Diffaxial: “And the notion that universes may appear out of the (quantum) void has genuine scientific currency.” Yes, I know that you believe that something can come from nothing, but, alas this is must more evidence that you do not comprehend the metaphysical foundations for modern science. ----“Your concern with Self-Evident Truths self-evidently reflects anxieties that arise for you at these very junctures, not out of concern for unexpected walls: you want to hang an air-tight proof of your personal god upon them. Unfortunately, your hook is a sky-hook.” Your open contempt for self evident truths reflects anxieties about a rational universe that just may have some kind of purpose behind it. In any case, you have already acknowledged that you think at thing can both be and not be, that effects can occur without causes, and that something can come from nothing. By definition, that makes you impervious to reason, which must disallow such possibilities in order to function as a tool. And yes, in spite of your protests to the contrary, it must disallow these possibilities both in the world of though and in the real world. ----Diffaxial: From the forgoing it should be clear that your caricature of what you think I must believe and expect in light of my philosophical preferences is ridiculous in the extreme, ridiculous assertions that apparently arise from the straightjacket of your dichotomous and absolutist thinking.” It should be obvious that my caricature of your philosophy @208 reflects perfectly your foundational philosophy, which is that the laws of logic do not apply to the real world. There is nothing dichotomous about holding that a rational mind can comprehend a rational universe. There is, however, something seriously wrong with the postmodernist proposition that neither the rational mind nor the rational universe exists. ----“I don’t need to accept that these two forms of regularity are eternal Self-Evident Truths to expect the world to unfold in much the same manner that it apparently has over the last 13.7 billion years. Your assertion that my philosophical viewpoint requires that I must expect water to freeze on the stove and walls to leap out of the void displays complete ignorance of the fact that there are ways of attaining confident knowledge of the world and its regularities by empirical means.” We have no empirical means of verifying the fact that something cannot come from nothing. It is the basis by which we judge our empirical observations. The understanding of the self-evident truth precedes the observation and not the other way around. Here is the difference: I understand that tomorrow, walls will not leap out of the void, water will not freeze in hot weather, and water will not boil in cold weather. You, on the other hand, cannot say that. On the contrary, you conceive that it may even be possible, which means of course, that you have no rational standard for making judgments about anything that you observe. For you, anything can happen at any time, which means, of course, that, for you, there is no order, rationality, or purpose. At best, you acknowledge “regularity,” which, in the long run, reveals little or nothing. For you, the cosmos is nothing but a giant cluster of molecules bouncing around without direction and purpose. Rationality is not even conceivable in a world like that, and as long as you perceive it that way, well, need I finish the sentence. ----“Yours is a private definition of “rational” to which I don’t subscribe.” I say that the law of non-contradiction applies to the real world, and you say that it does not. Guess which position is currently held by all rational people and has been held by all rational people since the beginning of time. It is not your position.StephenB_{May 26, 2009
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Beelzebub, you now seem to be saying that Scripture (and God) condone human sacrifice. . . .I don’t believe that the God of the Old Testament is real, so I’m not saying anything about a real God (if such a thing exists). I thought you don't believe in any god? What you don't address is your implication that scripture -- written words easily accessible whether divinely revealed or not -- condones human sacrifice. If you can convince yourself of this you can convince yourself of anything, which, btw, I suspect you can do. Quick quiz: why do we think human sacrifice is bad? You seem to write that with no sense of irony whatsoever. There is no irony whatsoever. I'm convince you are immune to reason.tribune7_{May 26, 2009
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Scott, I agree that it would be inconsistent for God to both prohibit and condone human sacrifice. The story of Jephthah is just one of many problematic stories suggesting that the Old Testament is not the inerrant word of an omnipotent, omniscient, loving God. You suggest that Jephthah did not sacrifice his daughter. If so, then you are admitting that Judges 11 is in error when it states the following...
Jephthah made a vow to the LORD : “If you give the Ammonites into my hands, whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the LORD’s, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.
...and then concludes:
...he did to her as he had vowed.
Either way, it's a problem for those who believe that the Old Testament is the inerrant word of God.beelzebub_{May 26, 2009
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As regards Jephthah and his daughter: God punished other nations for such horrendous acts as child sacrifice. It would be inconsistent for him to grant Jephthah victory in return for a human sacrifice. He is mentioned later in the Bible as a faithful man. His daughter wept over her virginity, not her death. This indicates that she would live an unmarried life. In addition, there were specific instructions for animal sacrifice - what to cut, what to burn, etc. It was impossible to offer a valid human sacrifice. One could read that chapter and conclude that he burned his daughter. You have to read the whole book, and keep reading it, not just citations from atheist web sites.ScottAndrews_{May 26, 2009
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Clive writes:
Why not reject all women if we have to reject all the rest of them but one? Why get married if we reject 99%?
Clive, I was hoping I wouldn't have to spell it out explicitly, but I suppose that was silly of me. Tribune7 commented that I was risking my soul by rejecting Christianity. My point in reply is that all of us, including Tribune7 and every other Christian, risk our souls every day by rejecting hundreds of religious beliefs. As Richard Dawkins wrote,
We are all atheists about most of the gods humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
beelzebub_{May 26, 2009
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Clive writes:
I’ve shown you the black swan, it is in your statement that you believe that you should question all beliefs, including that belief, which means that you don’t question all beliefs.
I've already explained why questioning a belief is not the same as asserting its falsehood. If you still don't understand that, then please ask someone you know to explain it to you. I can't think of any way to simplify the concept further.
So, if not all revealed knowledge is wrong, as you’re admitting, then you’re admitting that some is right.
Clive, this is getting very tiring. For the fourth time, this is what I wrote:
“...most (if not all) ‘revealed knowledge’ is wrong.”
That is not an admission that some revealed knowledge is right. Again, please ask someone to explain it to you. By the way, why are my comments being held up in the moderation queue?beelzebub_{May 26, 2009
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beelzebub, ------"All of us risk our souls (if we have them) every day by rejecting a huge number of religious beliefs. What will you do when you die and find yourself facing the judgment of Ma’at?" Why not reject all women if we have to reject all the rest of them but one? Why get married if we reject 99%?Clive Hayden_{May 26, 2009
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I think that all beliefs should be questioned, including my belief that all beliefs should be questioned.
I'm going to have to side with BZ on this matter. Even speaking as a Christian, I don't have any beliefs that I am 100% certain of. So I consider all of my beliefs open to question. Maybe someday I'll change my mind and decide that I have absolutely certain knowledge on some topics, and hence those beliefs would be beyond question at that point. I doubt that will happen anytime soon, though LOL.herb_{May 26, 2009
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beelzebub, ------"Because God didn’t intervene to stop a human sacrifice that was sincerely being offered to Him. How do you explain that?" That's easy. We cannot move God to intervene by committing evil acts, no matter how heinous. Otherwise, if we could, God would become our puppet, always dancing to our strings of the threat of violence. That's not to say that God doesn't intervene, we just cannot provoke it, and even if we did provoke God to intervene, I am not sure we would ever be told by God that He acted as a result of being provoked. So there is the obvious problem of knowing either way why God did or did not intervene, even if we knew there was in intervention, which is not likely. In short, we cannot summon the miraculous by evil acts. Besides, we have free will, and God will allow us to use it. The onus and responsibility is on Jephthah, not God, unless the God you have in mind is one that should always intervene in evil acts, or maybe just in acts you consider "evil enough" to warrant God's intervention. In which case God would constantly be correcting all of His creatures, effectively nullifying free will.Clive Hayden_{May 26, 2009
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I wrote:
Others on this blog have claimed that faith does not amount to believing something without sufficient evidence for its truth.
StephenB replied:
I doubt that others have characterized faith in exactly that way. I suspect that you are either leaving something out that should be there or smuggling something in that should not be there.
Stephen, Note the word "not" in my statement, emphasized for your convenience.
If you don’t accept the law of non-contradiction and several other truths unquestioningly, you cannot reason in the abstract.
Sure you can. Just accept them provisionally. Example: Let's assume provisionally that the laws of logic are correct and that the wife of the President (if he or she has a wife) is defined as the First Lady. Then we can reason provisionally as follows: Given that X has a wife, W, and that X is the President, then we can conclude (provisionally, of course) that W is the First Lady. Nothing prevented us from reasoning even though every assumption was made provisionally.beelzebub_{May 26, 2009
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beelzebub, I've shown you the black swan, it is in your statement that you believe that you should question all beliefs, including that belief, which means that you don't question all beliefs. As soon as you question that you should question, you are no longer questioning, for your conclusion, the negation of questioning all beliefs, means that you don't question all beliefs, so you're conclusion is that you shouldn't question all beliefs. Yet, you won't revise or amend. This is the irony of the situation; the one person who claims to be ready to revise their beliefs is the least willing to do so, even in the face of a black swan. So, if not all revealed knowledge is wrong, as you're admitting, then you're admitting that some is right. I agree that some particular truth is indeed revealed truth. And I agree with you that it should be considered by reason, but I would also add experience. Sometimes we need an experience in order to have something to reason about. It would be odd reasoning about love by someone who had never been in love. Also, when we meet a proposition in religion, we meet a personality, which has its own particular ways of being trustworthy, which are separate and apart from scientific endeavors. You would not subject what your loved ones tell you to the rigor of science in a lab before you will believe what they say. This is partly why this business about comparing science with religion is so misguided. In religion you meet another personality, and if we do not subject our loved ones to the scrutinies of science, before we will believe them, why would we think it appropriate to do with another personality in a religious context? The point is borne out in this essay, The Efficacy of Prayer, by C. S. Lewis: Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for our experiment. You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery. But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance. In other words, whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying. The experiment demands an impossibility. Empirical proof and disproof are, then, unobtainable. But this conclusion will seem less depressing if we remember that prayer is request and compare it with other specimens of the same thing. We make requests of our fellow creatures as well as of God: we ask for the salt, we ask for a raise in pay, we ask a friend to feed the cat while we are on our holidays, we ask a woman to marry us. Sometimes we get what we ask for and sometimes not. But when we do, it is not nearly so easy as one might suppose to prove with scientific certainty a causal connection between the asking and the getting. Your neighbor may be a humane person who would not have let your cat starve even if you had forgotten to make any arrangement. Your employer is never so likely to grant your request for a raise as when he is aware that you could get better money from a rival firm and is quite possibly intending to secure you a raise in any case. As for the lady who consents to marry you—are you sure she had not decided to do so already? Your proposal, you know, might have been the result, not the cause, of her decision. A certain important conversation might never have taken place unless she had intended that it should. Thus in some measure the same doubt that hangs about the causal efficacy of our prayers to God hangs also about our prayers to man. Whatever we get we might have been going to get anyway. But only, as I say, in some measure. Our friend, boss, and wife may tell us that they acted because we asked; and we may know them so well as to feel sure, first that they are saying what they believe to be true, and secondly that they understand their own motives well enough to be right. But notice that when this happens our assurance has not been gained by the methods of science. We do not try the control experiment of refusing the raise or breaking off the engagement and then making our request again under fresh conditions. Our assurance is quite different in kind from scientific knowledge. It is born out of our personal relation to the other parties; not from knowing things about them but from knowing them. Our assurance—if we reach an assurance—that God always hears and sometimes grants our prayers, and that apparent grantings are not merely fortuitous, can only come in the same sort of way. There can be no question of tabulating successes and failures and trying to decide whether the successes are too numerous to be accounted for by chance. Those who best know a man best know whether, when he did what they asked, he did it because they asked." The Efficacy of Prayer, C. S. LewisClive Hayden_{May 26, 2009
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allanius writes:
Hey, Beelzebub! (Or may we call you “Bub” for short?)
I prefer "Master", but "Beelz" will do.
Jephthah vowed publicly to make a human sacrifice in the manner of his Pagan neighbors—never thinking the first person he met would be one of his own—and is made to pay for this boastfulness literally with his own blood.
It sounds like you take satisfaction in this. That's creepy. And even if the vow constituted "boastfulness" (though I don't see how it does), that hardly justifies the death of an innocent girl.
And that compromises the implacable opposition of the Bible to human sacrifice exactly how?
Because God didn't intervene to stop a human sacrifice that was sincerely being offered to Him. How do you explain that?beelzebub_{May 26, 2009
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Barb writes:
If you’d bother to read the entire chapter regarding Jephthah’s daughter, you’d notice that her sacrifice wasn’t a literal burnt offering. It clearly states that other women would visit her annually at the temple, where she rendered service to God. That was her sacrifice: to remain a virgin in an environment that bestowed honor on married women with children.
I have read the entire chapter (Judges 11) and it says nothing of the kind. What chapter are you referring to? What Bible translation?beelzebub_{May 26, 2009
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tribune7 writes:
Beelzebub, you now seem to be saying that Scripture (and God) condone human sacrifice.
I don't believe that the God of the Old Testament is real, so I'm not saying anything about a real God (if such a thing exists). My point is that it is disingenuous for believers to take the story of Abraham and Isaac as evidence that God disapproves of human sacrifice if they are unwilling to see the story of Jephthah as evidence for the opposite conclusion. And my larger question is this: What do you make of a God who refuses to intervene to save the life of an innocent girl being sacrificed in His name?
You can’t be reached through reason. You have a belief and you want this belief to be true you are willing to pretend anything.
You seem to write that with no sense of irony whatsoever. Remarkable.
And I suppose risk everything, including your soul, of which you pretend you don’t have.
All of us risk our souls (if we have them) every day by rejecting a huge number of religious beliefs. What will you do when you die and find yourself facing the judgment of Ma'at?beelzebub_{May 26, 2009
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allanius: If you'd bother to read the entire chapter regarding Jephthah's daughter, you'd notice that her sacrifice wasn't a literal burnt offering. It clearly states that other women would visit her annually at the temple, where she rendered service to God. That was her sacrifice: to remain a virgin in an environment that bestowed honor on married women with children. Seriously, reaading comprehension can't be that hard, can it?Barb_{May 26, 2009
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Clive writes:
Scott’s quote doesn’t answer my question as to what standard you use to judge “all” revealed truth wrong as being wrong. What standard do you use?
Clive, Pay attention. For the third time, I said: “most (if not all) ‘revealed knowledge’ is wrong.” How do I know that most of it is wrong? It's contradictory, as Scott explained. What standards do I use in judging individual religious beliefs? The same standards that I use for judging any belief: evidence and reason.
Your difficulty lies in the word “all”. You make your position absolute, in which case it exempts itself from its own criterion, but then also defeats the purpose of itself. It’s obvious beelzebub, obvious.
Clive, I explained this to kairosfocus way back in comment 170. Pay particular attention to the role of the word 'all':
I will point out that your lengthy argument is undermined by a fundamental confusion: you believe that a universal statement cannot be held provisionally. This is easily refuted by a well-known example. Suppose I state the following:
All swans are white.
You show me one of Australia’s famous black swans. I revise my belief accordingly. All of this is perfectly coherent. I really did believe that all swans were white. It was a universal belief. I amended my belief in response to contrary evidence. Thus it was a provisional belief. No incoherence. No contradiction. It works the same way with the following statement of mine that is the focus of so much of your interest:
We’re never absolutely sure, which is why we should always continue to question our beliefs, even the most fundamental ones.
Is this a universal belief? Yes, because I do think that we’re never absolutely sure. Is it a provisional belief? Yes, because I will amend it if you demonstrate that we can be absolutely sure at times. No incoherence. No contradiction.
beelzebub_{May 26, 2009
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That's "all religious claims."ScottAndrews_{May 26, 2009
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Which means either that all questions should be questioned, or that all questions shouldn’t be questioned. Either way, you’re making an unquestionable claim. Because the positive and the negative both lead to the same place, and that is “not all questions should be questioned.”
I really believe we can negotiate a version of the original statement that everyone will agree with. I don't think this is very controversial. What if we say that all religious and claims should be considered open to question? Is that agreeable? (We could throw in "and scientific" after "religious" in the interests of being evenhanded. True, but not relevant.)ScottAndrews_{May 26, 2009
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beelzebub, Scott's quote doesn't answer my question as to what standard you use to judge "all" revealed truth wrong as being wrong. What standard do you use? ------"I think that all beliefs should be questioned, including my belief that all beliefs should be questioned." Which means either that all questions should be questioned, or that all questions shouldn't be questioned. Either way, you're making an unquestionable claim. Because the positive and the negative both lead to the same place, and that is "not all questions should be questioned." Your difficulty lies in the word "all". You make your position absolute, in which case it exempts itself from its own criterion, but then also defeats the purpose of itself. It's obvious beelzebub, obvious.Clive Hayden_{May 26, 2009
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Clive asks:
Revealed knowledge is wrong? And you know this how?
I said: "most (if not all) 'revealed knowledge' is wrong." Scott Andrews explained it just a few comments ago:
No one likes to admit it, but most if not all religions have beliefs incompatible with those of other religions. That includes the major religions and all of their divisions. In order to be intellectually honest and rational, we must admit that if any of them are correct, most of them can’t possibly be. If I receive 100 contradictory answers to a question, I know that at least 99 are wrong, even without knowing the correct answer.
Clive continues:
You claim that all claims should be questioned, except the claim that all claims should be questioned, for if you question your claim, then all claims shouldn’t be questioned.
Clive, I'm flabbergasted that after so much discussion, you still don't understand what it means to hold a belief provisionally. I think that all beliefs should be questioned, including my belief that all beliefs should be questioned. Questioning a belief is not the same as asserting its falsehood. I believe that Obama is the President. I can question that belief by asking my friends, checking the newspapers, navigating to whitehouse.gov, visiting Washington, etc. None of that amounts to asserting that Obama is not the President. If you understood that, you wouldn't write things like this:
...for if you question your claim, then all claims shouldn’t be questioned.
beelzebub_{May 26, 2009
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Diffaxial, ------"Fortunately, propositions can be ascertained to be true with great confidence without having to be Self-Evident Truths about the world. They can, for example, be found to be empirically true, some with enough regularity to be regarded as lawful. Moreover, we can empirically observe at a meta-level that the conceptual tool “cause and effect” can be powerful in a great many circumstances, indeed in the vast majority of cases. Does that make it a “Self-Evident Truth?” No, it does not. Do we need the increment of additional certainty that its attaining that status of “Self-Evident Truth” would confer to usefully and correctly apply the concept of cause and effect as we do science? We do not. Can we be confident that our reasoning thereby is almost certainly correct? We can. Should we, having rejected your notion of “Self-Evident Truth” expect walls to leap up and roads to wet themselves? We should not, due to our long experience with the empirical regularities that make these events vanishingly improbable." This bit of wisdom may clear up the discussion: "It might be stated this way. There are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences...But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened--dawn and death and so on--as if THEY were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not...These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike. We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities. The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall"; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other...But the scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching the ground. They do really talk as if they had found not only a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts. They do talk as if the connection of two strange things physically connected them philosophically. They feel that because one incomprehensible thing constantly follows another incomprehensible thing the two together somehow make up a comprehensible thing. Two black riddles make a white answer. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince. As IDEAS, the egg and the chicken are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears. Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the "Laws of Nature." It is not a "law," for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen. It is no argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility, but because it is a miracle, and therefore an exception. All the terms used in the science books, "law," "necessity," "order," "tendency," and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from another; that there is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs. It is the man who talks about "a law" that he has never seen who is the mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together." G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/ortho14.txtClive Hayden_{May 26, 2009
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Hey, Beelzebub! (Or may we call you “Bub” for short?) Nice nose for irony there! Jephthah vowed publicly to make a human sacrifice in the manner of his Pagan neighbors—never thinking the first person he met would be one of his own—and is made to pay for this boastfulness literally with his own blood. And that compromises the implacable opposition of the Bible to human sacrifice exactly how? Funny, we thought Beelzebub would be a little more playful.allanius_{May 26, 2009
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So God is okay with human sacrifice as long as it is done randomly? Beelzebub, you now seem to be saying that Scripture (and God) condone human sacrifice. You can't be reached through reason. You have a belief and you want this belief to be true you are willing to pretend anything. And I suppose risk everything, including your soul, of which you pretend you don't have.tribune7_{May 26, 2009
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beelzebub:
In effect, a “revealed truth” is just a hypothesis like any other, subject to acceptance or rejection on the basis of reason and evidence.
In essence, I agree. And my intention isn't to take sides against religion in its entirety. Rather, I'm pointing out that the whole of religion as we know it is a big, squishy mass of contradictory ideas. How many people are willing to claim that their religious beliefs are correct, and that any and all contradictory beliefs are therefore incorrect? How can anyone expect to persuade an atheist with any less certainty? (I'm not going to try. I may dance around the edges, but I prefer to leave religious debates one-on-one in the real world.)ScottAndrews_{May 26, 2009
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beelzebub, ------"Unfortunately, most (if not all) “revealed knowledge” is wrong, as you point out in your comment. That means we’d be foolish to believe something just because someone claims that it is “revealed”. That is why we should question all claims, including dogmatic ones." Revealed knowledge is wrong? And you know this how? What comparison do you use? Another obvious error here, is that you treat your holy proclamation that all claims should be questioned without question. You claim that all claims should be questioned, except the claim that all claims should be questioned, for if you question your claim, then all claims shouldn't be questioned. You're back in the old dilemma with your provisional truth fiasco. It becomes self-referentially incoherent----what it claims for authority, it excludes itself from that same methodology. I don't think I've ever come across someone so dogmatic about not seeing this obvious point as you are.Clive Hayden_{May 26, 2009
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beelzebub, Four things are lost in your comparison: 1. Who ordered or offered the sacrifice? 2. Was there really a sacrifice at all? 3. What was the purpose of the act? 4. The object of who was to be sacrificed was determined how? It is the difference of all of these points, is my point. In Jephthah's case the cause of the sacrifice was himself, and in God's case the cause of the non-sacrifice was Himself. If you have a problem with Jephthah's sacrifice, then you have a problem with Jephthah, not God. And notice, that only in Jephthah's case was there actually a sacrifice. You're trying to blame God for a promise that a man made. This error should be obvious.Clive Hayden_{May 26, 2009
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ScottAndrews writes:
Most religion is held to be revealed knowledge. No revelation, no religion. Why should it follow that improvements upon it should result from our corrections?
Scott, If we knew without a doubt that some bit of dogma was genuinely revealed knowledge, straight from God, and that there was absolutely no possibility that we had misinterpreted it or that God was deceiving us, then I would agree that corrections would be pointless, because any "correction" would really be a deviation from truth. Unfortunately, most (if not all) "revealed knowledge" is wrong, as you point out in your comment. That means we'd be foolish to believe something just because someone claims that it is "revealed". That is why we should question all claims, including dogmatic ones. In effect, a "revealed truth" is just a hypothesis like any other, subject to acceptance or rejection on the basis of reason and evidence.beelzebub_{May 26, 2009
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Addressing something that passed by a few hundred posts ago: Is religion self-correcting? Should it be? Science is involves the discovery of knowledge. Corrections are also discovered and add to that knowledge. Most religion is held to be revealed knowledge. No revelation, no religion. Why should it follow that improvements upon it should result from our corrections? That's one more reason why it's pointless to compare religion and science. As for the statements that religions and theists disagree on many basic questions, it's true. God can't send bad people to hell but also not send them. He can't save only members of one religion except that he only saves another, or everyone. Gay marriage is okay. Or it's not. No one likes to admit it, but most if not all religions have beliefs incompatible with those of other religions. That includes the major religions and all of their divisions. In order to be intellectually honest and rational, we must admit that if any of them are correct, most of them can't possibly be. If I receive 100 contradictory answers to a question, I know that at least 99 are wrong, even without knowing the correct answer.ScottAndrews_{May 26, 2009
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Clive writes:
the parallel with Isaac is not a parallel.
Of course. There are obviously no parallels between a) the story of a man who dutifully but sorrowfully prepares to sacrifice his beloved son as a burnt offering to God, and b) the story of a man who dutifully but sorrowfully prepares to sacrifice his beloved daughter as a burnt offering to God. What was I thinking?
Jephthah, himself, offered a sacrifice by chance, not know who the recipient would be, whereas with God told Abraham to kill Isaac...
So God is okay with human sacrifice as long as it is done randomly? If that's not your point, then what is?beelzebub_{May 26, 2009
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