If Dan Dennett gets Krauss to recant (mostly), does that count? Is Dennett a Good Guy because he’s a fellow atheist, or a Bad Guy and not to be trusted because he’s a smelly philosopher?
Lawrence Krauss: Another Scientist with an Anti-philosophy Complex]
Chris
From the byline: David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience."
You said “fellow physicists".
There are too many assumptions in your questions and I generally don’t care for your tone. So I won’t be answering the rest of your post.
From the byline: David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience." You said “fellow physicists". There are too many assumptions in your questions and I generally don't care for your tone. So I won't be answering the rest of your post.And he's a PhD physicist. Did he get dumber when he switched to a philosophy department? Fine by me. This is a sub-thread about, well, nothing.
From the byline: David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience." You said “fellow physicists". There are too many assumptions in your questions and I generally don't care for your tone. So I won't be answering the rest of your post.And he's a PhD physicist. Did he get dumber when he switched to a philosophy department? Fine by me. This is a sub-thread about, well, nothing. Okay, I read his wikipedia entry too fast. Never know who's looking over my shoulder at work! No, he didn't get dumber, and quit being such a snot. I noted also in his wiki entry that only he is mentioned in his tiff with Krauss. Your posts indicated a gaggle of physicists were piling on this ado about nothing. I remain unconvinced.
From the byline: David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience." You said “fellow physicists". There are too many assumptions in your questions and I generally don't care for your tone. So I won't be answering the rest of your post.And he's a PhD physicist. Did he get dumber when he switched to a philosophy department? Fine by me. This is a sub-thread about, well, nothing. Okay, I read his wikipedia entry too fast. Never know who's looking over my shoulder at work! No, he didn't get dumber, and quit being such a snot. I noted also in his wiki entry that only he is mentioned in his tiff with Krauss. Your posts indicated a gaggle of physicists were piling on this ado about nothing. I remain unconvinced. You should check out the Cartalk guys (from public radio) website. They used to have a Boss Button; you pressed it and instantly a fake business-letter, spreadsheet or graph popped up. I was more of a snot in the other thread. Pax? I put down my axe, you put down your club? I didn't mention a *gaggle* of other physicists. Yeah, I noticed the Wikipedia entry is slim too, but he's hardly as worthy of a long entry as OJ Simpson or Bert Lahr, now is he, heh heh. Daniel Dennett disagreed with Krauss' premise. *Jerry Coyne* disagrees with it. (I called him 'Jeff' in the other thread.) Dawkins called it the best blow to theists since Darwin. With enemies like that, christians hardly need friends! Other physicists who do talk this way include Hawking, and Steve Weinberg. I'm not dissing their expertise in physics. But why do expert physicists think they can do anything beyond physics? I'd no more care what a philosopher innocent of physics says about quantum theory. And I are one! None of the rest of us believe we can tell other experts what they should be doing outside of our own fields? (doctors seem an exception, if cocktail parties I've attended count as 'gathering evidence'.) That should be another ethical behavior; if you're an expert and a popularizer, you need to be *extra* careful about what you print. Chris
Thank you for completely derailing this thread, Chris. I was hoping this would be an interesting discussion.
Thank you for completely derailing this thread, Chris. I was hoping this would be an interesting discussion.You could have spent the time you spent on complaining to me, by giving something you think more relevant. And while true, Lausten and I have fallen into a wrangle, it's very relevant to this thread to speak of a major and influential popularizer of science who trashes other fields (who's he to say philosophy is useless just because he's innocent of philosophy? Is history useless to physics?), plays fast and loose with definitions to sell books and sound edgy, and calls experts who disagree with them 'moronic' and other nasty terms, and accepts without irony a 'puff' that compares a hash of yesterday's physics with Darwin's *Origin of Species*. That's intellectual immorality. Even Dan Dennett's unhappy; even Jerry Coyne shakes his head slowly. Here's another example of possibly unethical behavior. Dawkins accepted the title (and the money - let's not forget that) as the head of a 'Center for the Public Understanding of Science' or something like that. He was at that position for twenty years, supposedly doing something for the public understanding of science. Apparently this involved reminding us a lot about religion as he sees it. When he stepped down a couple years ago he sadly shook his shaggy, handsome head to regretfully report that the public understanding of science had *decreased* since he took the job. He blamed, of course, religious folk and the general intellectual corruption of people who don't get it. What's shameful - and potentially, intellectually unethical belief as you put it - is that he didn't blame himself: he took this job, accepted its grand title - and let's not forget he took someone's money - and at the end of two decades admitted he had nothing to show for it, but of course it's all the *other* guys' fault. If he were the CEO of a company, the board of directors would be up in arms; especially the part about blaming the clients - for religious people are a big part of the public, and Dawkins in his tenure basically spit in their eyes for twenty years. It's no surprise public understanding decreased (in his opinion) when you've told 40% or so of your clientele to stuff it. Chris
Chris;
I see your offer of peace, but then I see you expecting Dawkins to solve a problem that he did not create and that is much larger than any one man or one position. When we were putting men on the moon and curing polio, scientists had a pretty good reputation. Something happened, maybe it was the new way of fighting wars, maybe it was Francis Schaeffer and the dominionism movement, maybe it was just a lack of good marketing.
If you have a solution for how to better communicate the value of science, please offer it. Meanwhile, don’t make offers of peace, then toss grenades.
Chris; I see your offer of peace, but then I see you expecting Dawkins to solve a problem that he did not create and that is much larger than any one man or one position. When we were putting men on the moon and curing polio, scientists had a pretty good reputation. Something happened, maybe it was the new way of fighting wars, maybe it was Francis Schaeffer and the dominionism movement, maybe it was just a lack of good marketing. If you have a solution for how to better communicate the value of science, please offer it. Meanwhile, don’t make offers of peace, then toss grenades.I did give one substantive point: one cannot claim to advance science among the 'public' by drubbing a very large proportion of that public and making most of the rest wonder what the fuss is about. (Most even non-religious people don't see an obvious contradiction between believing in god and knowing biology.) For one thing, you shove that religious public into a false dichotomy, their churches or science, but not both. It's a false choice, but many people don't know that - and they eagerly make their choice. And then the supposed keepers of the scientific flame wonder what happened. If Dawkins, or Dennett, or Coyne, or Hawking, or Harris, or Hitchens, really sincerely believes the natural sciences and the average man's religous belief are mutually exclusive, then they just aren't really fitted to be popularizers of science. At best - and good luck - their true role is destroyers of religion. The two are not identical. If I spent large chunks of a biology class, for example, fulminating about the dangers of religion, I would not really be a teacher of biology. If i claimed that most all of my religious students were abused by their parents, I'd be called crazy and removed angrily - unless of course I can get called the head of some Institute for the Public Understanding of Science. Maybe that last point is whining about a truism; if you're powerful enough in almost any area and run with the 'right' people you can get a pass on ten times the wickedness of ordinary men. But I'm assuming this thread is about what's in fact unethical behavior, not who can get caught at it and punished. Chris
If Dawkins, or Dennett, or Coyne, or Hawking, or Harris, or Hitchens, really sincerely believes the natural sciences and the average man's religous belief are mutually exclusive, then they just aren't really fitted to be popularizers of science. At best - and good luck - their true role is destroyers of religion. ChrisTrying to look past your incendiary language and lack of acknowledgment that the debate of overlapping magisteria is old an unresolved. You probably just don't see the internal debate within the atheist community regarding this issue, but it is going on. Personally, I spent a couple years not understanding what the big deal was. I was a member of a very liberal church and saw only the good it did in the community. I didn't like fundamentalist either and couldn't understand what atheists were so angry about. How could teaching kids some old stories be wrong? Well, long story short it is. Kids want to please, and you can teach them to repeat the right answer pretty easy. We used words like "creator" but we were still telling them that there is something out there controlling the world and you should believe that. That's cruel. We should teach kids to observe and use their brains and tell them they can decide for themselves about creators and gods when they're older. The other thing that led me away from church was that they lied. I was UM, so we talked about John Wesley. But no one mentioned his prediction of the end of the world. We were liberals, so we only talked his serving the poor and what not. These are pretty mild lies, compared to many mainline churches that teach bad archaeology and bad history and generally ignore genocide and rules about eating lobster. It's sad they feel they can't repeat what they learned in seminary. It puts faith on shaky ground, so someone like me, with just a little free time, could accidentally happen on corrections to these falsehoods, while researching for a lay sermon, and bomb, I'm an atheist.
inthegobi - 08 October 2013 10:06 AM
If Dawkins, or Dennett, or Coyne, or Hawking, or Harris, or Hitchens, really sincerely believes the natural sciences and the average man’s religous belief are mutually exclusive, then they just aren’t really fitted to be popularizers of science. At best - and good luck - their true role is destroyers of religion.
Chris
If that’s true then what theists say that is contradictory to science must mean that their true role is to destroy science (and reason and free thought). It works both ways.
Lois
Thank you for completely derailing this thread, Chris. I was hoping this would be an interesting discussion.I was thinking exactly that, Darron - except that Chris didn't derail this thread on his own. He had to have help, and he got it. In my view, two things we secularists need are discipline and focus. The discipline has to come from within each of us but so long as we remain rudderless, we will be easy pickings for our adversaries. Could that be construed as a comment on the ethics of belief? Not quite, probably, but I share your interest in getting back to the subject.
Thank you for completely derailing this thread, Chris. I was hoping this would be an interesting discussion.I was thinking exactly that, Darron - except that Chris didn't derail this thread on his own. He had to have help, and he got it. In my view, two things we secularists need are discipline and focus. The discipline has to come from within each of us but so long as we remain rudderless, we will be easy pickings for our adversaries. Could that be construed as a comment on the ethics of belief? Not quite, probably, but I share your interest in getting back to the subject. In a way, inthegobi may have led to something about ethics. The question he raises is; how do you get people to believe something without requiring that they dedicate their lives to the same pursuit of knowledge as you? For centuries, priests claimed that they had that privilege, and simply because of their dedication, you must believe. They also had the power to hand out the consequences of non-belief. So obviously setup for corruption, it's amazing it lasted as long as it did. An alternate university system was created to counter this. One with some checks on the quality of the knowledge, some ability to review it now and then, an openness to being questioned. At least it is supposed to work that way. And when it doesn't work, it is considered unethical. The consequences of not believing in medical science are not always immediate, but can be lethal. The consequences of not believing in quantum psychics are almost non-existent. Global warming, dire, but long term. So, getting people to believe in science requires showing results. Unfortunately, some people want the results of better weapons systems, and others want to live to be 150, and others just want clean drinking water. Science can only offer solutions to problems, and in its own time. Politics decides how to use them, but politicians then blame science when their decisions go bad.
I was thinking about starting this thread a few days ago but was bogged down with school work, then a thread in the Religion forum drifted this way. I've pasted PLaClair's post to start the discussion.Paul got my viewpoint right. I am attending a Catholic University in Austin, TX, and the school requires each student take a Critical Thinking class and an Ethical Analysis class. I have also taken Intro to Ethics at a local community college and Business Ethics at St. Edward's. While researching a paper for my Ethical Analysis class I ran across William Clifford's essay from 1877, The Ethics of Belief]. Those who are interested can click the link. My takeaway from Clifford's essay, and other ethical studies, is that believing something without evidence is harmful individually and to society as a whole. Clifford states this in his essay. As Paul mentioned, believing things without evidence leads to irresponsible thinking, as we can see in our society with right wing Republicans denouncing AGW as a hoax. We saw it when the Bush administration concluded Saddam Hussein had WMDs, then built a case for war on dubious evidence while ignoring the CIA analysts' recommendations. We see it now as our government is shut down by a few Tea Party elected Republicans who want to defund the Affordable Health Care Act, even though both houses of Congress approved it in 2010, the Supreme court affirmed it, and the American people reelected the President who guided the act into law. Basing your beliefs on empirical evidence is the ethical stance versus basing your beliefs on what you want to be true. Most Catholic universities, surprisingly, teach critical thinking. It may be the Jesuit influence. I wonder, though, what their response would be if critical thinking were applied to Christianity and Catholicism. Of course, Jesuits are notorious for twisting and arguing a point to death. They love the opportunity to display their argumentation "skills." LoisDarron,Maybe you think you addressed Darron's point but to me and I suspect to him, you missed the key word - ethical - and thereby missed the point entirely. Sure, you can start from any point you like, including a flying spaghetti monster but you'd be making it up. Darron can speak for himself but I think I understand what he's saying, and I agree with him: in an ethical worldview people shape their opinions about facts based on what we can reliably know. This includes what we can see and measure, and also what we can deduce but it must be grounded in objective reality. You're making it out as though we can appropriately learn about facts by mere assertion. Both reason and experience say that is not true. We should conform our fact claims to what we can reliably know, not insist that the universe must conform to what we wish to believe. Humans have invented thousands of gods. The literalist Christian believes in one of them and disbelieves in the rest, which means that the literalist Christian admits the point by her actions. There are many reasons why many of us secularists insist that belief in imagined gods - and all of them are imagined - is unethical: 1. It's mere wish fulfillment, as Freud observed, which is a form of self-indulgence. 2. It leads to irresponsible thinking, which leads in turn to irresponsible acting. There can be no clearer proof of this than the plethora of ways in which people claim to know "the Word of God," then use it to justify anything they want to do, including the enslavement or annihilation of entire peoples. You can say such actions are aberrational but in point of fact, they are not. 3. It severs the connection between values and reality. You couldn't possibly be more anti-God than that, and here I'm using "God" as a word for what is ultimately real and true. There probably are other reasons but those should more than suffice. I don't think of myself as a radical at all. In fact, many of my fellow secularists think of me as too friendly to religion: I describe myself as a born-again Humanist, and a nephew by marriage - who I call the most Catholic man in Pennsylvania - says I am the most religious person he has ever met. I take religion very seriously, so when I see it bastardized by theism and theology, I get upset because theism and theology do violence to the human search for beauty and truth, and therefore for God.The ethical stance is to look at the available evidence then decide, not reach a conclusion then look for rationalizations to support it.No. You can logically start from any point. . . . Why argue against people who are a minority? That hardly scratches at the vast thing that is Christianity across time and space. It seems insane to me. Is it a clever tactic I don't understand? Chris
Most Catholic universities, surprisingly, teach critical thinking. It may be the Jesuit influence. I wonder, though, what their response would be if critical thinking were applied to Christianity and Catholicism. Of course, Jesuits are notorious for twisting and arguing a point to death. They love the opportunity to display their argumentation "skills." LoisJesuits schools are more secular than most universities affiliated with religious sects. Surprisingly, I've seen fewer evangelicals on St. Edward's campus than at the local public universities and community colleges. But it would be interesting to see the believers applying critical thinking to their beliefs. I haven't seen that, but I have seen a large percentage of self-declared atheists in my Environmental Policy classes. My Communication classes seem predominately Christian, but only a few students are outspoken about their religious beliefs; fewer than in the classes I took at Austin Community College. As Lausten noted, inthegobi had inadvertently shown the ethical problems with reaching a conclusion without evidence, and the rhetorical skills to twist a conversation to s desired route. As I mentioned early in this thread, equating theoretical science with real-world beliefs is a category error. Having reached the conclusion that proposing a controversial theory is unethical, inthegobi has stretched logic past its breaking point to back that assertion. If Chris' assertion were true then Albert Einstein would have been acting unethically when he challenged quantum mechanics. Einstein's objections led to QM theorists refining the theory and making great discoveries in physics. As many people have noted on these forums over the years, science is our best method of acquiring knowledge. This requires and open-minded approach to research, following the empirical evidence, rejecting theories which do not agree with experiments, and accepting those which experiments support. We have also seen over the years any theists who proclaim faith is somehow better than science because science changes but faith does not. They have that exactly backwards. Science's greatest strength is new theories replacing old ones when new evidence comes available. Faith is a moral and intellectual failure.
In a way, inthegobi may have led to something about ethics. The question he raises is; how do you get people to believe something without requiring that they dedicate their lives to the same pursuit of knowledge as you?I'm not sure what "the same pursuit of knowledge" is but the general import of your question seems clear enough. I'm interested in what people believe are facts. There are established methods for verifying fact claims. There's wiggle room within certain parameters but not to the extent of making up our own imaginary universe. That seems to be the method employed by Smith and others here: if x is your perspective, that's entitled to as much consideration as a perspective grounded in known fact. Well, no, it isn't. We're entitled to expect that people will subject their fact claims to established methods of verification and falsification; and we are ethically obligated to conform our beliefs to the evidence instead of shaping our concept of reality around what we've chosen to believe.
Paul,I think this is largely an argument over semantics. I have no problem saying someone can take immoral/unethical actions without being an immoral/unethical person. In more colloquial terms, I think someone can cause harm without sinning. Also, I don't think there's any consensus on the difference between morals and ethics. An online source defines morals as "Principles or habits with respect to right or wrong conduct. It defines how things should work according to an individuals' ideals and principles. Individual - Internal" (emphasis mine). I'm pretty sure about 100% of theologians would disagree that morals come from within rather than from God. And pretty much anyone who is religious (a large majority of the population) would feel the same way. That being said, what you're saying makes perfect sense to me inthegobi. Same goes for DarronS. Mother Theresa is a good example of this conundrum. I think there's little doubt that she was a truly compassionate and altruistic person. She was also tragically misguided, telling poverty-stricken Africans that using condoms or any form of birth control might just land them in Hell, and consequently condemning tens or even hundreds of thousands of them to agonizing (and completely unnecessary) deaths from AIDS and other STD's (not to mention the births of countless children condemned to equally agonizing deaths from AIDS and other STD's, and starvation/malnutrition). Was she an immoral person? Again, I think it comes down to semantics. She was a good person at heart (i.e. a moral/ethical person) who was unwittingly misled into doing inestimable harm (immoral/unethical actions). Which leads me to one of my favorite quotes: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." ~Steven Weinberg Though I would add that it doesn't have to be religion per say. Any ideology that inspires "True Belief" can be just as harmful as religion. I would say that those ideologues who have absolute faith in an unfettered, unregulated free market are True Believers of the highest order. (I'm talking to you Republicans and Ayn Rand-worshipping Libertarians!) edit: I just realized this thread has been dead for over seven months. Oh well.Any reasonably intelligent person who uses the internet has access to a vast body of information. There's no excuse . . .Wilful ignorance involves intent, just not direct intent: the Internet blogger barrels along without doing due diligence, and he knows what due diligence is. He doesn't intend to darken counsel with ignorant words, but he knows that's the usual effect of not doing due diligence. If I really were ignorant of due diligence - one poster here, after all, innocently asserted that posters here *shouldn't have to* do more than state their private opinions - then what i've done is hard to class as *unethical*. On a side note, there is a difference between *immoral* and *unethical*. Example: Even if abortion is immoral, doctors who properly perform abortions are not just because of that acting unethically. Chris
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Darron,Again, I know this thread has been dead for some time, but I just couldn't resist. inthegobi, I think the fuss about Krauss' definition of "nothing" is much ado about, err, nothing. If one actually reads Krauss' book, he makes it very clear that he is aware that his definition of "nothing" is debatable. I recall him pointing out that it's perfectly reasonable for people to think of "empty" space as "nothing", but he understands how theologians and theist philosophers might object--despite the fact that such a definition was perfectly fine with them until science advanced our knowledge about the nature of this "nothingness" we call empty space. Such theist thinkers have always shifted the goalposts when science blows their dogma out of the water. There's no subterfuge on Krauss' part. It's only controversial if one is dead set on making it so. ]>You question Krauss on theoretical physics, then defend McCarthy when she is indirectly responsible for children dying. You are being unethical.Well, yeah, maybe I am a little - if we ignore consequences for a moment (those of McCarthy are obviously more serious.) Krauss is much more educated. McCarthy is mistaken and sincere; Krauss he seems to know that he's spitting in the eye of common English and serious philosophy, and has gotten stubborn in the face even of his fellow physicists. It's not just the title of the book (at the risk of getting all Rumpelstiltkin about it); Krauss has organized the whole book on how cool it is that physicists have 'discovered' that something - in fact everything - really does come from 'nothing'. Chris
Again, I know this thread has been dead for some time, but I just couldn't resist.PlaClair left in a huff a couple months ago and I haven't heard from inthegobi in a while either. I can't say I'm up to re-reading his posts, but OP was a good one and deserved better discussion.
PlaClair left in a huff a couple months ago and I haven't heard from inthegobi in a while either. I can't say I'm up to re-reading his posts, but OP was a good one and deserved better discussion.I noticed Plalair's tagline: "I cannot in good conscience support CFI under the current leadership. I am here in dissent and in support of a Humanism that honors and respects everyone." I hope it wasn't over the (I suspect extremely overblown) allegations of sexism that have pervaded the secular movement as of late. Actually, nobody uses the word "sexism" anymore. I've noticed that it's almost exclusively misogyny now. If you inappropriately hit on a woman in an elevator late at night, it is now considered proof that you literally hate all women--not simply that you're an insensitive idiot (and I'm not even sure it should qualify you as that). Okay then.