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| 2004/9/8 [Reference/Religion] UID:33415 Activity:very high |
9/7 Why is it that religious ideas are not a legitimate subject for
debate or questioning? It's as if all intellectual concepts are
open to criticism, but as soon as you say you believe something
"because of your faith," its beyond the pale to question it. This
seems particularly pertinent today, with Islamic fundamentalists
trying to kill us because of their beliefs, and Christian
fundamentalists at home trying to derail science.
\_ Check out 'The End of Faith' by Sam Harris --aaron
\_ Who said that religious ideas are not a legimitate subject
for debate?
\_ Here's an extreme example. If someone claims to be able to talk
to ghosts, we think they are crazy and they are marginalized. If,
however, someone believes that the Bible is the literal revealed
word of God, that we are ruled by a giant heavenly father in the
sky, etc. etc...then we elect them President.
\_ So Newton and Maxwell were crazy then? Anyway, not all
conservatives are bible thumping kooks:
http://tinyurl.com/67qsy (Washington Post, George Will)
BTW, I agree that many people are closed minded kooks,
but that doesn't stop long held religious beliefs from
being overturned: the birth of Buddhism in 500 BC Hindu
India, the conversion of Rome to Christianity, the
Protestant reformation, the reforms in Hinduism btw
700 and 1300 AD. Some consider the Enlightenment and
the restoration of the Greek ideals of Science and
Mathematics to the forefront of human thought as the
latest religious movement.
\_ Actually, yes Newton was crazy. His primary scientific
love was alchemy and the mercury appears to have done him
in.
\_ I think Newton is a good aguement for the "it doesn't
any practical difference to a scientist" point of
view. I am a scientist, and most of my friends are
scientists. I would say that about half or maybe
more than half of the people I work with are
religious. Some are catholic, some are protestant,
some are jews and some are muslims, and as far as
I can tell it makes *zero* difference in anything
they do as scientists. I would also point out that
kooky random beliefes like alchemy are pretty
common among scientists. A good scientist has
an open mind, but even the best sicentist can only
have a knowledge of a limited number of subjects, which
can lead to beliefs pretty far from the mainstream.
\_ Yeah, but do they believe in the bible as the
literal word of God or the inspired word? It
makes a big difference.
\_ If it's not literal, then it's imperfect. You
allow all sorts of things to be open to wide
interpretation. At what point does it fall into
the same category as Greek mythology?
\_ It wasn't meant to be an attack on the current President,
by the way - I was just pointing out that it is nearly a
requirement these days that a candidate mention "God"
in order to be elected. My point also wasn't that Newton
was crazy, but that religious beliefs and their relative
merits are not allowed as a subject for debate - any
sentence beginning, "I'm a Muslim, so..." automatically
makes any debate an "attack on their faith." If anything,
religion was MORE likely to be a subject for genuine
intellectual thought in Newton's day, or even around the
time of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Note that I do not consider
myself to be an atheist.
\_ I guess we were talking about different aspects.
Certainly I agree w/ you that the current use of
one's religion as a sheild against any arguments
is very disturbing.
The worst manifestation of that (imo) is the trend
in some courts to allow a defense of religion or
culture to serious crimes. (My religion said that
it was okay to rape that woman, &c.).
Personally, I'm mostly a deist. I think that there
might be an impersonal force (Einstein's God if
you will) whose intention is manifest as the laws
of physics, &c.
\_ I guess we aren't in disagreement about much then.
What's wrong, this is the motd!!! Anyway, I'd
put myself in a somewhat similar undecided camp,
although their are certain strains of Eastern thought
I've found very appealing - i.e., the Bhagavad Gita's
appeal to reason as a guide, rather than "because
the sky god said so."
\_ Impersonal force eh? What's the point of that? I mean
what's the practical difference between "some extra-
universal force designed everything" versus
"everything just happens to be as it is"? The story
with the deity doesn't explain the deity itself, so
you're not better off.
\_ These are very different ideas. Belief in an
impersonal force which refrains from direct
interaction with the universe admits for the
possible existence of other metaphysical
constructs, such as an afterlife. If you deny
the existence of anything metaphysical, you are
stuck with just the physical.
\_ It's like the zero-th commandment, the one implied but never
actually stated: "thou shalt not question"
\_ That actually reminds me of how I heard one priest interpret the
story of the garden of Eden. God doesn't punish man because he
disobeyed God or attained knowledge. God punishes man because
man took the word of someone else over the word of God.
\_ http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns24631
Search down to "harsh on religion"
\_ Nice link, thanks. |
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| tinyurl.com/67qsy -> www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34026-2004Aug25.html All RSS Feeds Will George Heavenly Searching By George F Will Thursday, August 26, 2004; The wind contains dust, gases and other possible evidence of the dynamics of the solar system, dynamics that have somehow given rise to the splendor of -- us. NASA's name for the canister project: the Genesis mission. JPL -- an appendage of, but not contiguous to, Caltech -- may be the only place on the planet where you can gather around a lunch table with people who, in a sense, work on another planet. News Alert On a recent day some of them were behind a laboratory at a pile of sand that resembles the surface of Mars. They were trying to drive a rover, like the two currently on Mars. The JPL scientists were trying to operate one with the kind of mechanical defect -- an inoperative drive wheel -- that is giving a slight limp to one of the rovers on the red planet 110 million miles away. One Mars rover was landed in a crater -- what one scientist calls "an interplanetary hole-in-one." Both were expected to rove about 600 meters, but they have covered 3,000. they already have lasted twice as long as had been expected and may last 10 times longer. Earth, which is constantly changing, became home for life 4 billion years ago. We know neither the conditions then nor the processes by which life ignited. However, Mars may have had an early history like Earth's. One question the rovers may answer is: Were there, long ago, pools of standing water -- standing for hundreds of millions of years -- where life could have developed? The rovers' arms, manipulated at JPL, put instruments in contact with rocks and read their mineral contents. By drilling into rocks, through several billion years worth of settled dust, the rovers have found sediments that were formed in bodies of water. Within the next decade samples may be put robotically in canisters and launched off Mars to rendezvous with an orbiting spacecraft for a six-month trip to Earth. It would be understandable if the people at JPL were jubilant, having just -- after a seven-year flight -- precisely inserted the Cassini spacecraft into the rings of Saturn. This multinational project will include putting instruments on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, which may have some tantalizing similarities to Earth of 4 billion years ago. But people here know that all their marvels -- JPL's deep-space control center is monitoring 35 space ventures -- are performed against a backdrop of deepening public indifference. And cosmology's human capital is declining as young scientists choose other career paths. The public's diminishing capacity for astonishment is astonishing. Curiosity is why a Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 is now 85 billion miles away. It is, in the scheme of things, just next door: traveling now at 1 million miles per day, it would have to continue for 40,000 more years just to be closer to another star than to our sun. Still, here in our wee solar system -- our little smudge on the skies of uncountable billions of galaxies -- Voyager's and JPL's other undertakings must be measured against Einstein's axiom: "All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have." Does that mean space exploration amounts to species narcissism? It is noble to strive to go beyond the Book of Genesis and other poetry, to scientific evidence about our origins, and perhaps destiny. The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79), an early authority on Saturn's rings, had, as cosmologists should, a poetic bent: At quite uncertain times and places, The atoms left their heavenly path, And by fortuitous embraces, Engendered all that being hath. The phrase "fortuitous embraces," although lovely, is not explanatory. Knowledge, tickled from the heavens, is the business of a small band of possible explainers -- the people of JPL and NASA, government at its best. |
| www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns24631 Jocelyn Carlin Jamie Whyte describes himself as "Outraged of Highbury" - someone who endlessly sends furious letters to newspapers complaining about sloppy thinking, logical errors, fallacies and muddles. Fortunately he's a professional philosopher or he might have attracted the attention of the authorities long ago. Liz Else and Alun Anderson asked what gets him steamed up and what errors they could commit that would make him explode How long have you been angry about bad thinking? It has always driven me mad to see people saying things that are well known to be rubbish. But at the same time I can see that it doesn't affect their lives materially so they can't understand why I get so hysterical. But you are a philosopher who left academia to work in financial markets, of all things. Or should we trust your views on truth because you have published a book? There are indeed some very suspicious things that go on in the financial markets. But you are already plunging straight into the authority fallacy, which these days appears in a variety of perverse forms. One of the worst is trusting someone simply because they have acquired a measure of celebrity, which might include publishing a book. First, there is nothing wrong with deferring to genuine expertise. You need to defer to some people because you simply can't do all the research on everything yourself. The basis on which you defer to people should be that they are reliable, and by reliable I don't mean nice or good or that they have their hearts in the right places. Now what makes somebody reliable is the way that they acquire their beliefs - ultimately it all comes back to the correct methods for acquiring beliefs. So you should identify people who are doing it the right way and defer to them. The really big mistake comes when you treat people as authority figures when they are not expert but simply well known. There is a terrible tendency to treat people as reliable sources of fact when in fact they are simply "important" people or people who happen to be in the news. It is doubly perverse when you consider who gets counted as "important". For example, the victims of train accidents appear on television as authorities on rail policy and celebrities endorse presidential campaigns as though they are expert on politics. With their emphasis on transparency and method, surely they'd be immune from the authority fallacy? Scientists are vulnerable to this kind of celebrity issue. Some scientists have a certain amount of star quality that gives their opinions more weight than they ought to have. Worse, scientists have a terrible tendency to pronounce on issues where they don't recognise that they are not expert. Take the British Medical Association, which is always making policy recommendations. A recent example was that the government should tax the fat content of food. Why does the BMA think it knows anything about how we should live? It may know that if I live a particular way I'll become unhealthy, but why does it think that it can tell me that I should value my health more than my chosen way of life? What makes its members think that they are in any privileged position to answer questions like that? Also, how do they know what the effects of a tax on fatty food would be? They're not specialists in the way that prices affect consumption and the way the economy will be affected by redistribution of spending from one part to another. They can't even anticipate the health effects of these things. The BMA is one of these organisations that commits the authority fallacy. It seems to think the fact that it may be an authority on medical issues means that it is also an authority on the politics of medical issues. The BMA's output should be an input to the decision making of somebody else. I think you get a lot of this false authority in science. Let the BMA commission a report from somebody who knows what they're talking about. It has just got this blind assumption that health is everything. Health seems to me to be reasonably important, but we are all mortal and doctors often seem to forget that. It is fair to say that the BMA represents doctors and as such it is just another pressure group acting for its own constituency, and its opinions will be no better than anyone else's. Too many people see truth as just a game between groups, as a kind of tribalism. Far too many people are not prepared to say: "I don't believe this and here's my argument why I don't." Instead, they will say something like: "Economists are just part of the capitalist conspiracy so I don't have to listen to their arguments about free trade." Thus they dismiss all economists' views on the grounds that they are members of a particular group. These days, scientists are increasingly seen as part of various tribal groups, so when you read about their views the newspapers will go to great lengths to ask who they are working for, what their backgrounds are, and what are their political views are, and so on. Someone's motives may reasonably make you suspicious that that person has an incentive to mislead you, but their arguments are no better or worse than the evidence put forward to support them. So ultimately the question of whether something is true or false can't be settled by a question of motives. And just to dismiss somebody on the basis of "it pays them to say that" isn't a good argument. An interesting change has happened, at least in the west. It used to be that people would argue for a particular religious dogma or a clear religious doctrine. The world is increasingly dividing into those who have "faith" and those who don't. That is why you now get "faith groups" coming together from all kinds of different religions. The weirdest manifestation of this new tendency is when people say: "I'm not a Christian but I believe in something." Then I say: "Of course, I believe in many things, like there is a chair there and a table. What they mean is something more than we have any good reason to believe in. What amazes me is that they like to set themselves up as having a slightly finer sensibility than you or me but in fact they are completely intellectually irresponsible. They used to come up with very bad arguments for their faiths but at least they felt that there was something they should provide. This is what I describe as the egocentric approach to truth. You are no longer interested in reality because to do that you have to be pretty rigorous, you have to have evidence or do some experimentation. You've got a style and how dare anybody tell you that your style isn't right. Ideology is seen as simply a matter of taste and as it's not right to tell people that they've got bad taste, so it's not right to tell them that their opinions are false. I'm afraid that the cast of mind of most people is the opposite of scientific. When people say "there is an awful lot we don't understand" and use that as an argument for believing in something... The mystery fallacy: it's a mystery therefore I can think whatever I want. Isn't there a reverse of that where scientists will ignore or deny the existence of anything they don't understand? Scientists have a strange tendency to be insufficiently empirical sometimes. For a long time, scientists found it impossible to explain how bowlers could deliver a ball that swerved. So their first defence was to say that it's not really swinging but only appears to be. Sometimes in science theory pushes you ahead of observation - the theory will suggest some observations that you previously wouldn't have made. But sometimes there are things you can observe that you can't explain which should drive theory. The way you learn physics these days is so lacking in observation that it's got a lot of scientists out of the habit. Physicists don't take observation as seriously as they should and sometimes they get this arrogance that if the theory can't accommodate it then it isn't there, instead of letting the observation push them. Talking of cricket, you also use cricketing scores to show up some of the ways people try to explain patterns that don't need an explanation at all... An example I use in Bad Th... |