In my first long comment, I tried to explain that even if science is devoid of moral explanations, this doesn't validate religious claims. It is entirely possible that neither science nor religion have the tools to explain/justify morality.
In my second long comment, I tried to respond to Andrew's inquiry about whether things like qualia disqualify physicalism.
Check 'em out below:
I think Ryan gave a nice explanation of his answer, and I just wanted to follow up your comment and clarify what I said above.
In regards to what you said:
1) Even if it's true that science doesn't supply any "oughts," that doesn't mean that we can invent them from religious mythology.
2) Science and common sense/logic supply analytical tools to evaluate what is the best thing to do in most situations -- that which serves "the greatest good for the greatest number" is always an easy benchmark. Infidelity and lying are examples of how we have to act at times against our baser instincts (of harm avoidance/self-preservation that make us want to lie, and impulse fulfillment that makes us want to be sexually promiscuous) in order to preserve important higher-order social structures that benefit us all in the long run. Ditto with crime: committing murder or theft leads to rips in the fabric of society; society supplies us with more "high end" goods than it is worth trading for "low end" momentary impulse satisfaction. So in a way, there need not be anything more to morality than that it just so happens that what is "best" = what we "ought" to do and therefore utilitarian ethics is self-contained and very consonant with science and logical analysis.
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To clarify a bit regarding what I said earlier:
Evolutionary biology is not (typically) about individuals. Evolution occurs in populations, not individuals, as Mayr spent a great deal of time explaining. Therefore, when we find very useful (true) models of how to scientifically explain adaptations with evolution as exploiting some aspect of an ecological niche, we are almost always referring to an entire species. Evolutionary biology is about principles that explain common descent with modification. It is much more difficult to use evolution to analyze one particular individual and its actions/adaptations to its environment, since part of evolutionary theory is that variation will occur within populations, and *only some of it will be beneficial* -- the way this relates to the examples this thread began with is that it may not be beneficial to be born a sociopath (no empathy or impulse control). That doesn't mean it isn't "scientific" or contradicts evolution.
It's just that being born in society means that there are selective pressures to have those things, so these may be *unfavorable* variants.
When we talk about why person X did some horrible act, it thus becomes necessary to abandon the concept that this act:
1) May be rationally justifiable. Insanity is organic and biology explains it well; it can sometimes be cured with pills, after all.
2) May be the result of something "beneficial" in evolution; evolutionary progress occurs through the weeding out of "bad apples" -- person X may be one of those, having mental disease or defect or etc.
Some animals are not social animals. If we look at non-social animals, the traits that person X exemplifies (selfishness, low impulse control, lack of priority...) may be *best* for non-social creatures. Because humans have to be social to survive, they *must* develop things like moral codes and laws. Some of the weirdness that arises out of the necessity for codes and laws includes religion, with things like animal sacrifice and body piercing and lots of other behaviors that don't seem to have any direct "survival value" and are therefore hard to fit in to general simple evolutionary explanations. These are the "culture" that I mentioned in my first comment -- they arise out of the primary survival pressures, but are not, necessarily, themselves survival-related, and are thus epiphenomena.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the thoughtful comments, and I apologize for the long delay in response.
You said:
That line of thinking reminds me to a very good article in the NYT last year; here's a good quote from that article:
Also, most theists ignore the really ugly consequences of some of these laws, from the heat death of the universe to the prevalence of birth defects like anencephaly.
You said:
1) The relationship of qualia to physicalism is vexing and takes up more pages of philosophy than I care to even begin to read, much the less explain here. Whether or not our perceptions and experiences relate to fixed brain states is not likely to ever be proven one way or another scientifically. Long story short, our first-person experiences probably don't reduce very well to reductionist explanations, but there is absolutely no explanatory value to saying, "therefore, a magical, invisible soul explains all this!"
2) The feelings that I feel when I look at my wife are indeed the end result of a cascade of neurological, physical, biological responses that were *caused* by the input of her image into my visual cortex. What you seem to dislike about that is that you feel it cheapens the experiences or value of marriage.
When we say something like, "that's all they are," we're making a value judgment. It's akin to you denying that a bullet through the gut is sufficient to explain your pain by saying, "it's just a tiny piece of lead, but I feel far too much for that to account for it."
Your pain is "more" than *just* bullet and its physical consequences, because your conscious experience of it leads to you assign it a great deal of (negative) value. In just the same way, my feelings for my wife are "more" than *just* a bunch of neurotransmitters, but only in VALUE. That doesn't mean that these physical things are not the *causes* and physical basis of what we come to assign *value* to. You admit yourself that you must wade off into mystical thinking ("...I don't have any empirical evidence here...") in order to ask me the question you asked.
You said:
You said:
In regards to what you said:
1) Even if it's true that science doesn't supply any "oughts," that doesn't mean that we can invent them from religious mythology.
2) Science and common sense/logic supply analytical tools to evaluate what is the best thing to do in most situations -- that which serves "the greatest good for the greatest number" is always an easy benchmark. Infidelity and lying are examples of how we have to act at times against our baser instincts (of harm avoidance/self-preservation that make us want to lie, and impulse fulfillment that makes us want to be sexually promiscuous) in order to preserve important higher-order social structures that benefit us all in the long run. Ditto with crime: committing murder or theft leads to rips in the fabric of society; society supplies us with more "high end" goods than it is worth trading for "low end" momentary impulse satisfaction. So in a way, there need not be anything more to morality than that it just so happens that what is "best" = what we "ought" to do and therefore utilitarian ethics is self-contained and very consonant with science and logical analysis.
"I am a fan of intellectual discussion for sure, but at some point I have to leave the white walls of a classroom, drop my pen onto the paper and live life."And you don't have to stop being logical/analytical/critically thinking as you do so. If you can justify acting morally using nothing but some pretty safe assumptions and solid logical relations, then you're fine. If not, then maybe you ought to abandon whatever aspect of morality you can't justify (I think of lots of religion-related "moral oughts" -- like sex before marriage, etc.).
_____
To clarify a bit regarding what I said earlier:
Evolutionary biology is not (typically) about individuals. Evolution occurs in populations, not individuals, as Mayr spent a great deal of time explaining. Therefore, when we find very useful (true) models of how to scientifically explain adaptations with evolution as exploiting some aspect of an ecological niche, we are almost always referring to an entire species. Evolutionary biology is about principles that explain common descent with modification. It is much more difficult to use evolution to analyze one particular individual and its actions/adaptations to its environment, since part of evolutionary theory is that variation will occur within populations, and *only some of it will be beneficial* -- the way this relates to the examples this thread began with is that it may not be beneficial to be born a sociopath (no empathy or impulse control). That doesn't mean it isn't "scientific" or contradicts evolution.
It's just that being born in society means that there are selective pressures to have those things, so these may be *unfavorable* variants.
When we talk about why person X did some horrible act, it thus becomes necessary to abandon the concept that this act:
1) May be rationally justifiable. Insanity is organic and biology explains it well; it can sometimes be cured with pills, after all.
2) May be the result of something "beneficial" in evolution; evolutionary progress occurs through the weeding out of "bad apples" -- person X may be one of those, having mental disease or defect or etc.
Some animals are not social animals. If we look at non-social animals, the traits that person X exemplifies (selfishness, low impulse control, lack of priority...) may be *best* for non-social creatures. Because humans have to be social to survive, they *must* develop things like moral codes and laws. Some of the weirdness that arises out of the necessity for codes and laws includes religion, with things like animal sacrifice and body piercing and lots of other behaviors that don't seem to have any direct "survival value" and are therefore hard to fit in to general simple evolutionary explanations. These are the "culture" that I mentioned in my first comment -- they arise out of the primary survival pressures, but are not, necessarily, themselves survival-related, and are thus epiphenomena.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the thoughtful comments, and I apologize for the long delay in response.
You said:
For me, I don't see evolution, on a grand or individual scale, as sufficient enough for our lives as human beings.That's an intriguing comment that I may be tempted to agree with, given certain constraints on the interpretation of that claim. If you mean "evolution as an explanation of the origin of the species homo sapiens," then I would disagree, of course. But given that so many other things are necessary to understand ourselves than "just" how we evolved from other apes, I would agree that evolution isn't "sufficient" in the sense that it leaves so much else out of the picture of what/who we are, where we've been and where we're heading.
That line of thinking reminds me to a very good article in the NYT last year; here's a good quote from that article:
"'We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,' Dr. Porco said. 'Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.'"You said:
I have met some men (George Bowes, Professor of Botany at UF for example) and have also listened to the director of the Human Genome Project who look at science on all levels as one of many means to show us more of who God is, actually explaining how much "life" is in science.This last part is quite an ambiguous statement (explaining how much "life" is in science). If you look at evolution on the scale of physics and biochemistry, then I'm afraid that "life" itself is rather difficult to define. See, for instance, this article on that topic. Here's a relevant excerpt from that piece:
Carol Cleland first began to mull the definition of life in the late 1990s. She had spent much of her career as a philosopher pondering fundamental, metaphysical matters such as cause and effect. But in 1996, when NASA scientists found what looked like microbe fossils inside a meteorite from Mars, Cleland was invited to speak on a panel about the mystery.Now, if you want to try to talk about how God = the natural laws of the universe, or some such thing, or is revealed through them, then I suppose we could have a good discussion on the implications of uniformity and what quantum theory does to that notion. The problem is that theists often only look at these laws and claim something akin to, "laws require a lawgiver." They often don't analyze the metaphysical issues at play: that a universe could not exist in the first place without certain properties; that these properties require relationships between space and matter; that these are the basis of our "laws"...
Looking into the matter, Cleland concluded that a lot of the controversy came out of confusion. Critics were treating the NASA report as if it were experimental science, with a hypothesis that could be tested with experiments. But it's impossible to do experimental science on a single 4-billion-year old rock. Instead, the NASA scientists were doing historical science, which Cleland argued was as legitimate a science as experimental science.
Cleland's talk resulted in an invitation to join the NASA Astrobiology Institute. There, as she learned how scientists at the Institute thought about the search for extraterrestrial life, something set off Cleland's philosophical radar. "Everybody was working with a definition of life," she says. Cleland began to feel that the concept of attempting to define life was deeply flawed, and she made her concerns public at a meeting called "The Nature of Life" hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001. Speaking to an audience of scientists, she said the search for a definition of life was beyond problematic, and they should simply stop looking for one. The quest could either be impossible or scientifically trivial. End of story.
"There was an explosion," says Cleland. "Everyone was yelling at me. It was really amazing. Everyone had their pet definitions and wanted to air them. And here I told them the whole definition project was worthless."
Not everyone in the audience was yelling, though. "What she said made a lot of sense to me," says Christopher Chyba, a professor of astronomy at Princeton University.
Also, most theists ignore the really ugly consequences of some of these laws, from the heat death of the universe to the prevalence of birth defects like anencephaly.
You said:
The strongest I believe is found in marriage. Be honest with me since you are married and I am not--is there something deeper and more profound in marriage that just physical, biological responses?I always try to be honest, and in doing so, I must point out that we've waded out here into two areas that are very difficult to talk about "scientifically": 1) qualia, 2) the fact-value distinction.
1) The relationship of qualia to physicalism is vexing and takes up more pages of philosophy than I care to even begin to read, much the less explain here. Whether or not our perceptions and experiences relate to fixed brain states is not likely to ever be proven one way or another scientifically. Long story short, our first-person experiences probably don't reduce very well to reductionist explanations, but there is absolutely no explanatory value to saying, "therefore, a magical, invisible soul explains all this!"
2) The feelings that I feel when I look at my wife are indeed the end result of a cascade of neurological, physical, biological responses that were *caused* by the input of her image into my visual cortex. What you seem to dislike about that is that you feel it cheapens the experiences or value of marriage.
When we say something like, "that's all they are," we're making a value judgment. It's akin to you denying that a bullet through the gut is sufficient to explain your pain by saying, "it's just a tiny piece of lead, but I feel far too much for that to account for it."
Your pain is "more" than *just* bullet and its physical consequences, because your conscious experience of it leads to you assign it a great deal of (negative) value. In just the same way, my feelings for my wife are "more" than *just* a bunch of neurotransmitters, but only in VALUE. That doesn't mean that these physical things are not the *causes* and physical basis of what we come to assign *value* to. You admit yourself that you must wade off into mystical thinking ("...I don't have any empirical evidence here...") in order to ask me the question you asked.
You said:
Also, I am not saying one must get rid of logic and reason, either.But all you offer here is a fallacy of "argument from ignorance": you think that if science cannot explain qualia, or the experiences of bonding in marriage, that you have, by default, an argument that validates your own presumed explanation of those things (that a God exists, that a soul exists, &c.). Unfortunately, your position of claiming that science is incapable of explanation is not the same as offering one; religion offers no evidence or explanation for these things at all. "It's spiritual," is not an explanation, but an avoidance of explanation -- you offer no mechanisms to explain conscious experience, no reason to choose dualism as a superior option. In fact, if our physical brains are not the sole reason for our consciousness and qualia, then we have a new can of worms that is opened by questions about how physical things can so easily change our states of mind and ability to remember and experience things; about why your own conscious experience only occurs from inside the perspective of your own body, &c., but those arguments are for another time...
You said:
...I will almost always argue from the perspective of "relationship."But your "relationship" is with an invisible purported creator of the entire universe, of 50,000 billion billion stars, with whom many other people also claim a quite different sort of relationship & with whom you have only one-way conversations & from whom a claimed bunch of "love letters" that date back thousands of years. To top it off, you have to account for things like the problem of evil. And so your "relationship" is not a terribly "living" one, irrespective of the rhetoric used to make it such. It is insolubly similar to the other Abrahamic religions (among others) in this way. Christianity is a pagan modification of Judaism that *claims* a new revelation and relationship with the God of the Jews, not an *actual* relationship.
