What Is "Science?" (And thanks to Dr. Harold I. Brown)

(Dr. Harold I. Brown)

I am now reading through the best philosophy of science reader I've yet to find: Philosophy of Science - The Central Issues, by Martin Curd & J.A. Cover of Purdue University. Though 10 years old, is there a better text than this? What would make this even better would be to add seminal essays written in the past 10 years.

Here we have it all - Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend and many, many more. I was introduced to the philosophy of science as an undergraduate, studying with Harold I. Brown. The three texts Dr. Brown had us read were Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (of course!), and Imre Lakatos's Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. This was heady stuff for a young undergraduate like myself. But a lot of it stuck with me, thanks to Brown's excellent and passionate teaching. (Note: Of Brown's Perception, Theory, and Commitment Kuhn said “The best and most original aspect of the book is its overall conception.”)

Curd and Cover give us the big, important essays. Then they provide extremely valuable, in-depth commentary on the readings. What distinguishes science from pseudoscience? Is scientific change a rational process? In what sense is science objective? What are natural laws, and what do they describe? Are scientific theories to be understood as offering a true account of the world? These questions and a lot more are addressed. I find myself wanting to learn more and more, and wish everyone who uses the word "science" would have these readings under their belt.

It's 1300+ pages long. For me, it's like reacquainting with an old friend who still has much to say to me today.

The Fear-Virus & Swine Flu

Fear is a lie. Most fear, that is. By far, most of the fears I've experienced in my life have never materialized. I've laid awake at night listening to it storm, fearful that a tornado would strike. It never has. I knew a few people who were afraid to check their mailboxes because they might have envelopes containing anthrax. Those envelopes never came. Y2K inserted the fear of global, chaotic breakdown into the hearts of many people. Their fear was real, while Y2K was a non-event.

Fear is the emotion we feel when facing an uncontrollable harmful event. That event can be either known or unknown. When confronted with the known, fear is reality-based. That is, one not only fears, but the fear corresponds to an actual threat that is either impending or now actualized. Most fears are fears of the unknown. Fears about, not the actual, but the possible. These events mostly never happen. The fear is real but irrational.

Today's fear is about getting swine flu. It's about one's own possible demise, as well as the demise of family and friends. Possible scenarios are of an "outbreak," an "epidemic," and a "pandemic." Now insert "global" before each of these terms. Add "unseeable," since we're talking about a virus. Mix in some "unstoppable" and legitimate concern morphs into panic.

Some people are just flat-out more fearful than others. Their hearts and minds are fertile soil for anxiety and worry, and they pass these things on to others. For some, maybe many, maybe most, the swine flu will come and go. But the fearful heart that so debilitates remains unless it is cured. Which is worse, getting the swine flu and most likely surviving, or living constantly with irrational fears that never materialize? While I pray we won't have a flu pandemic, every week I see a "fear pandemic" in the souls of people, and on occasion I've caught this virus myself. Fear breeds more fear like a virus. I think that, if we could cure the globally fearful hearts of people, we'd deal with the physical virus better. Panic shuts people down, distracting and hindering them from being proactively precautionary.

The cure for fear is trust. People who trust don't fear. Fear and trust are like oil and water: unmixable. Trust is a relationship. One trusts in someone or in something. One leans on someone or something. A trusting heart has a foundation; a fearful heart is adrift. I've met trusting people. They are not naive or gullible. If a tornado warning is given they take shelter. But they do not live filled with fears that never materialize, and in that sense they experience a freedom fearful people do not have. They don't put their trust in Twitter, but in God. Proverbs 3:5 says, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Don't lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him. And He will make your paths straight." Psalm 62:6 says, "He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken."

God doesn't want you to live in fear today. Wash your hands. Fold them and pray. Open them to heaven. Let God heal your fearful heart.

Another Atheist Converts to Theism

Former atheist A.N. Wilson's "Why I Believe Again" appears here in The New Statesman. Wilson describes how he left Christianity for atheism, and how he has come back. He's a very good writer, and has some nice quotable sentences and ideas to ponder.

For example:

"My doubting temperament... made me a very unconvincing atheist. And unconvinced."

"But religion, once the glow of conversion had worn off, was not a matter of argument alone. It involves the whole person. Therefore I was drawn, over and over again, to the disconcerting recognition that so very many of the people I had most admired and loved, either in life or in books, had been believers."

"A life like Gandhi’s, which was focused on God so deeply, reminded me of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a bit like trying to assert that music is an aberration, and that although Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a musical sense. Attractive and amusing as David Hume was, did he confront the complexities of human existence as deeply as his contemporary Samuel Johnson, and did I really find him as interesting?" (Now that is funny...)

"The existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat."

"For a few years, I resisted the admission that my atheist-conversion experience had been a bit of middle-aged madness."

"When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion – prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue."

"Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct."

"My departure from the Faith was like a conversion on the road to Damascus. My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again. Gilbert Ryle, with donnish absurdity, called God “a category mistake”. Yet the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings."

The Coming Out of Atheism (& "Free Thinking" as Oxymoronic)

Yesterday's nytimes.com has an article about the coming out of atheism. I see this as potentially exciting for the reason that my philosophy of religion classes could be more lively.

There is a certain trendiness in the current "atheism." I've seen this in some students who take my philosophy classes. Most of the atheists I meet are "village atheists" analogous to nominal "Christians." They claim to not believe in God while borrowing much from Christian theism. Some of their atheism is a reaction to the deadness of nominal, hypocritical "Christianity." Some of it is a tiney "bandwagon" effect.

The article says that "local and national atheist organizations have flourished in recent years, fed by outrage over the Bush administration’s embrace of the religious right. A spate of best-selling books on atheism also popularized the notion that nonbelief is not just an argument but a cause, like environmentalism or muscular dystrophy." While of course not being a reason to become an atheist, perhaps ths has brought some atheists out of the closet. Most of the students I have are intellectually ignorant of the "religious right" but viscerally put off by it, as they should be, since the real Jesus spoke against the legalistic, judgmental, militaristic-nationalistic-political stuff that often characterizes it.

I think it will always be hard to find a really good, long-term committed atheist. One reason may be that atheism qua atheism is not for anything but against (a-) the existence of God. Hence "humanists," or "freethinkers" as alternative titles. This last phrase, to me, is especially funny, since philosophical naturalism finds "free will" and therefore "free thought" questionable. On real atheism "free thinking" is oxymoronic.

Richard Foster on Life With God #1

(Wyandotte, MI)

Last evening Linda and I went to Wyandotte - I picked up a coffee at my son Dan's favorite java place ("The Grind") and Linda got a Tahitian smoothie. We sat, talked, and read at Wyandotte's riverfront park that looks over the Detroit River to Canada.

I brought Richard Foster's Life with God: Reading the Bible for Spiritual Transformation. What a sweet book this is! Foster says the main God-thread running through scripture is a promise followed by a question; God says to us, throughout the ages, "I am with you, will you be with Me?" Foster writes: "This dynamic is the absolute unifying center of the Bible. Every story in the Bible, no matter its twists and turns, whether the human characters are trustworthy or untrustworthy, whether the story is sad or happy, is built on this clarion call to relationship. "I am with you. Will you be with Me?"

As I write this I'm now thinking of Bernard Ramm's commentary on Exodus. Ramm taught that the hermeneutical key to Exodus was the God-relationship. New Testament scholar Gordon Fee, in his massive commentary on the Holy Spirit in the letters of Paul, defines the "Holy Spirit" as "God's Empowering Presence."

As I read Foster last night I now only thought about how God has been and now is with me and Linda, but experienced God's presence. This ongoing experience (some, maybe much, of which is non-discursive) is but one of the things that assures me of the reality of God.

Embryo: A Defense of Human Life

Philosopher and jurisprudential scholar Francis Beckwith's Defending Life is the best book I've read re. the personhood of the conceptus. And, if you want a good read on the logical nonsense of philosophical relativism, Beckwith's book is for you.

University of S. Carolina philosopher Robert George has written Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. Beckwith gives it a review on amazon.com. Beckwith writes:

"This book, authored by two of my favorite philosophers, is perhaps the most sophisticated and clearly written defense of embryonic personhood that has come out since the onset of the biotech revolution.

George and Tollefsen are conversant with the scientific issues as well as the deep philosophical questions of nature and personhood that percolate beneath the surface. They are also well-versed in the arguments of those with whom the disagree. One of their adversaries, Lee Silver, a colleague of George's, is singled out for special treatment. What makes this analysis particularly enlightening is how it exposes how little care Silver takes in crafting his moral and metaphysical arguments. But Silver is not alone. This sort of philosophical negligence is symptomatic of an academic culture that churns out wonderfully smart technicians, like Silver, who have floated through their professional lives blissfully unaware of the cluster of moral and metaphysical beliefs they take for granted and make their projects possible, but for which their scientism can provide no grounding.

George and Tollefsen also critique Cartesian dualism as well as philosophical materialism, arguing for a Thomistic hylomorphism as the best account of the human person.

This is a wonderful book that should be in the library of any one who is serious about bioethics and the future of what it means to be human."

---Francis J. Beckwith, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies, Baylor University. author of Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Boyd's S.I.N. Hypothesis - A Link

Here's a link to a number of posts Greg has made re. his argument that, on Christian theism, "natural" evil is mis-named because it's best understood as caused by Satan. Go to the 7 links that begin with "The Argument..."

Philosophy of Religion Oral Exam #3

For my MCCC Philosophy of Religion students:

Oral exam #3 will be held 4/27 & 4/29.

ROOM: Z-271 (La-Z-Boy Center)

THE QUESTIONS:

1. Nietzsche
2. Bertrand Russell
3. Alvin Plantinga
4. William Lane Craig's metaethical argument for God

EXTRA CREDIT

The modal argument for the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom.

See you next week!

Defending Premise 2 Of the Metaethical Argument for God's Existence

DEFENDING PREMISE 2 OF THE METAETHICAL ARGUMENT FOR GOD’S EXISTENCE

William Lane Craig’s metaethical argument for the existence of God can be stated this way:

P1 – If there is no God then objective moral values and duties do not exist.

P2 – Objective moral values and duties exist.

C – Therefore, God exists.

When I present this argument in my Philosophy of Religion classes P1 is mostly if not entirely accepted. P2, however, is challenged. One reason for this is that I have not been able to present the argument as clearly as I should. In an effort to do this I’m drawing not only on Craig but on Paul Copan’s excellent essay “God, Naturalism, and the Foundations of Morality.” I am very impressed with this essay, and find Copan to be a clear writer. (Copan’s essay is in The Future of Atheism, 141-161)

Do objective moral values exist? Copan argues that they do. He writes: “We are wise to assume that our senses, our powers of reasoning, and our most fundamental moral instincts are not systematically deceiving us.” (142) Note these three: 1) our senses; 2) our powers of reasoning (Plantinga calls this “our belief-forming mechanisms); and 3) our fundamental moral instincts. They are all to be trusted in the absence of a defeater. Copan points out that even the most radical skeptic trusts in his sense experience and in logical reasoning. Thus statements like “I perceive a world external to myself” and “If P, therefore Q. P. Therefore Q.” are “properly basic.” While it’s certainly true that we can misperceive things and make logical mistakes, “such mistakes hardly call into question the general reliability of our sense or reasoning powers; indeed, they presuppose it. The ability to detect error presumes an awareness of truth.” (142)

We assume sense experience to be veridical. We cannot evidentially “prove” it to be so. That would require using our sense experience to “prove” its own veridicality. Likewise, we assume, e.g., modus ponens to be logical. We can’t prove it to be so by using logic, since that would require we trust in logic to “prove” that we can trust in logic. Copan’s claim (and Craig’s) is that we are to view our apprehension of objective moral values in juts this way.

Just as we can be mistaken re. our senses and our reasoning, so also we can by mistaken re. the making of moral judgments. In spite of this Copan says “there still are certain moral truths that we can’t not know unless we suppress our conscience or engage in self-deception. We possess an inbuilt “yuck factor” – basic moral intuitions about the wrongness of torturing babies for fun, of raping, murdering, or abusing children. We can also recognize the virtue of kindness or selflessness.” (142-143) What about people who can’t tell the moral difference between Mother Teresa and Joseph Stalin? “Those not recognizing such truths as properly basic are simply wrong and morally dysfunctional.” (143) It particularly this last statement that causes anger in some students when I make it. I’ll explain why I think this is so and why there’s no real need to be upset about this below.

Are moral values, like sense experience and logical reasoning, properly basic? Is our moral awareness epistemically foundational and “bedrock?” Some atheists think so. Copan cites atheist David O. Brink, who states: “Our commitment to the objectivity of ethics is a deep one.” Atheist Kai Neilsen writes:

It is more reasonable to believe such elemental things [as wife-beating and child abuse] to be evil than to believe any skeptical theory that tells us we cannot know or reasonably believe any of these things to be evil… I firmly believe that this is bedrock and right and that anyone who does not believe it cannot have probed deeply enough into the grounds of his moral beliefs.” (143)

If this is true, then basic moral beliefs are “discovered,” not “invented.” To explain this is to get at students’ complaints about the claim that, just as a person who cannot understand the logic of a disjunctive syllogism is logically dysfunctional, and just as a person who is skeptical that they are now eating breakfast when they are, so also are persons morally dysfunctional who cannot see that torturing and raping little girls for fun is objectively wrong. In my experience the person who protests against this usually does so because they think we have not discovered but invented moral values. The common explanation of the inventing of moral values is that of evolutionary theory.

Here Craig cites atheist Michael Ruse, who states that “morality” has evolved as an aid to survival and allows our species to perpetuate itself? (The Future of Atheism, 89) Craig says:

þ At its worst, this kind of reasoning is an example of the genetic fallacy.
þ At its best it only proves that our subjective perception of objective moral values has evolved.
þ Craig – “If moral values are gradually discovered, not invented, then our gradual, fallible apprehension of the moral realm no more undermines the objective reality of that realm than our gradual, fallible perception of the physical world undermines the objectivity of that realm.
þ Many of us think we do apprehend objective moral values.
þ Even Ruse writes: “The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says, 2+2=5.” (Ib., 92)

Further, what if there are objective moral values, and we evolved, without God guiding the process, to apprehend these moral values? Craig rightly says that such an idea is “fantastically improbable.” The odds of blind evolutionary processes evolving creatures that perceive objective moral values is hard to believe. It is more reasonable to believe we are created by God to apprehend moral values. (Ib.)

Daniel Dennett has written that, given that we have evolved, ethical decision-making “holds out scant hope of our ever discovering a formula or an algorithm for doing right.” (Copan, 145)

Students who freak out, when I say that a person who can’t see that torturing and raping little girls for fun are morally wrong, do so, I think, because they view such acts as personally invented subjective preferences, such as “I like Pepsi.” Surely the affinity for Pepsi is a subjective taste and not some objective truth. Philosopher Thomas Reid “claimed he did not know by what reasoning – demonstrative or probable – he could convince the epistemic or moral skeptic.” (Copan, 144) As for me, when I meet a person who thinks torturing and raping are only subjective preferences, I won’t let them near my kids. Copan puts it this way: “Although basic moral principles – to be kind, selfless, and compassionate; to avoid torturing for fun, raping, or taking innocent human life – are accessible and knowable to morally sensitive human beings, some improperly functioning individuals may be self-deceived or hard-hearted sophists.” (144)

Copan concludes: “Thus, we should reasonably believe what is apparent or obvious to us unless there are overriding reasons to dismiss it – a belief that applies to our sense perception, our reasoning faculty, and our moral intuitions/perceptions.” (144) Just as we perceive a world external to us, and intuit certain laws of logic that are properly basic, so also we apprehend certain moral truths to be objective.

Chalmers's Nonreductive Explanation of Consciousness

Australian National University's Centre for Consciousness has a nice collection of essays by U of Arizona philosopher David Chalmers and others. See, for beginners, Chalmers's essay "Facing Up To the Probolem of Consciousness." Chalmers in one of the leaders in this whole discussion, and nicely explains the "easy problems" of consciousness and the "really hard" problem of consciousness.

Re. the latter Chalmers writes: "The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field... If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as "phenomenal consciousness" and "qualia" are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of "conscious experience" or simply "experience"."

Chalmers says: "An analysis of the problem shows us that conscious experience is just not the kind of thing that a wholly reductive account could succeed in explaining." He says, at this point, some just give up. it's the kind of thing that makes one think the problem of consciousness is in principle unsolvable. Chalmers is not so pessimistic. He writes: "This is not the place to give up; it is the place where things get interesting. When simple methods of explanation are ruled out, we need to investigate the alternatives. Given that reductive explanation fails, nonreductive explanation is the natural choice." He goes on to outline his principles for a nonreductive explanation of consciousness. Very interesting!