A brief reminder
'There is no God,' says Stephen Hawking in final book (link)
Man, these guys never quit. You win a couple of awards for your description of the physical plumbing of the universe, and now you're an expert on God. Skipping the 'There is no Hawking, says God' jokes, this is a problem for two reasons.
First, and it pains me to have to repeat it, the magisteria do not overlap. I just think Stephen Jay Gould settled this. I was out in the street shouting it at strangers just now. But still these science types persist. (link)
Given that, perhaps another tack might be advisable. The other prominent character who has taken the trouble to investigate these issues is the philosopher Jim Holt, who is very smart. Perhaps he is too smart, as - due to his variety of interests - he has not staked out a clear brand for himself. He needs to get glasses and a pipe or something. Anyway, he has a 2012 New York Times piece on this:
Mr. Weinberg has attacked philosophical doctrines like “positivism” (which says that science should concern itself only with things that can actually be observed). But positivism happens to be a mantle in which Mr. Hawking proudly wraps himself; he has declared that he is “a positivist who believes that physical theories are just mathematical models we construct, and that it is meaningless to ask if they correspond to reality.” Is Mr. Hawking’s positivism the same positivism that Mr. Weinberg decries? That, one supposes, would be an issue for philosophical discussion.
The physicist Sir Roger Penrose is certainly not a positivist. He is a self-avowed “Platonist,” since he believes (like Plato) that mathematical ideas have an objective existence. The disagreement between Mr. Hawking the positivist and Mr. Penrose the Platonist — a philosophical one! — has hard scientific consequences: because of it, they take radically opposed views of what is going on when a quantum measurement is made. Is one of them guilty of philosophical naïveté? Are they both?
I take physicists' pronouncements about God about as seriously as the late Bobby Fischer's opinions on race relations. Philosophy is 4,000 years old. People have thought about these things, some of them smarter than you.
- Holt wrote a bestselling book called Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, which I plan to read before taking up Tina Turner's new work on the Higgs boson. (link)
- Here is an interesting interview with John Updike that Holt did back in 2012. (link)
posted by The Other Front at 8:05 AM
7 Comments:
"Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve."
Stephen J. Gould didn't settle this because what he claims is demonstrably not true.
From a historical perspective, it's laughable. Was the Inquisition operating in a non-overlapping magisterium when they showed Galileo the instruments of torture to get him to falsely reject his observations about the planets?
The idea of religion limiting itself to the realm of ethics and aesthetics is pure fantasy. If you don't believe me, visit the Creation Museum in Kentucky and "prepare to believe."
I'm curious: do you know of a religion that claims God exists, but only in in the realm of meanings and values, and not in the realm of fact? I can't think of one off the top of my head. Perhaps non-overlapping magesteria applies to that religion -- and only to that religion.
Stephen Hawking's assertion lays firmly in the realm of fact. As does any religion claiming God exists as an entity outside of the shared fantasies of human beings.
Nothing against shared fantasies! They're incredibly useful in creating coherent societies with shared morals, norms, and values. But that utility is irrelevant to factual questions like what exists or doesn't exist in the physical universe.
Modern Buddhism (at least in North America) and Confucianism, to name two. I believe the primary function of modern religion is to teach values and behavioral norms, not explain the physical universe. In my Lutheran confirmation studies (about the time of that picture) no one tried to tell me how the universe worked. The whole thing was about appropriate conduct and how I was supposed to pray etc.
You can make the argument that "God told me to do it" is a very poor reason for doing something, and I would agree. But I'd point out that it's not easy to come up with a better one (Adam Smith has a good run at it in the underrated Theory of Moral Sentiments).
In any case, positivism a la Hawking and Dawkins' has no normative implications. They can explain how a cannibal's digestive track works, but they have no basis for comment on whether cannibalism is good or bad. Those types of judgments - for which well-developed frameworks exist elsewhere - are just outside their expertise. My criticism of them - which I admit flirts with the Appeal to Authority - is based on their refusal to acknowledge that.
Wittgenstein tried to address this dispute at the end of the Tractatus by demanding silence on matters that transcended the factual world and its descriptors. I've always found that admirable because, as the man said, at least it's an ethos. But even Wittgenstein had to recant that position - religion may not be provable in the world, but good luck preventing people from talking about it.
I have an incomplete sonnet on this that rhymes "napping" with "non-overlapping"...
Do the Lutherans doctrine take a position on whether God exists? Or was it merely operational instruction on how to behave as if God existed?
As to whether God exists, maybe the distinction to make here is between Descarte's "I think therefore I am" and an alternative formulation, "there is experience." The first presupposes identity and existence, the second merely acknowledges that something's playing on the screen. I'm silent on identity and existence, but the movie is definitely playing. For some people God is in that movie - they will attest (as I alas cannot) to direct personal experiences with the deity. But I cannot imagine any standard by which an outsider can judge their testimony to be valid or invalid, authentic or inauthentic. Kierkegaard explores some of these themes in his Fear and Trembling.
I'll save the long response for another day.
That'd be great. In the meantime I'll put the Lutherans down as a YES for "God exists."
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