, which I first saw and posted a comment at Sunday evening after I got home from the Preserving Western Civilization conference, I initially made two brief points.
The first was a simple correction for the record: I said that I do not have “doubts” about Darwinism, as a commenter had said about me, but consider the Darwinian theory of evolution to be inherently impossible. Second, I objected to the statement that I have an “emotional barrier” against the truth of Darwinism; I said that I have given reasons for my position, and that that ought to be acknowledged. I was not trying to get into a big discussion on the subject. However, my relatively simple points set off a flurry of further and worsening insults, bringing VFR readers Kristor and Alan Roebuck into the fray as well. Now Kristor has posted a very long comment there in which he really lets the atheists have it. He sticks the implications of their belief in randomness and a radically non-teleological universe right in their faces and doesn’t leave them any escape. His arguments also make it impossible for them (or, rather, such would be the result in a just universe) to continue justifying their insults of, and their refusal to engage in reasonable dialog with, theists and critics of Darwinism.
To make the discussion easier to get into, I’ve posted Kristor’s long comment below. You can then read further at the original thread.
February 11th, 2009 at 01:26 | #47
Kristor
Daniel Dare: you say, “For myself I have no interest in debating with prerationals.”
1. So you have no interest in this debate, but you have posted to it in the most irate and insulting terms, several times, because … why? Why didn’t you just ignore it? Why did it bother you so much? Is there something about theism that really cranks your adrenal glands—something you fear? I’m not trying to score points on you here, honestly; I’m asking you some questions that maybe you should ponder in your heart.
2. Understand that in hurling insults like this, you sound … prerational. Puerile, to be precise; like a little boy who, mastered in a game of the dozens, can think of nothing better than, “Yeah, well you’re stupid!” Again, I don’t mean to score points, just to make sure that you understand that this sort of speech makes the Darwinian side look irrational. Surely you can do better. Surely you realize that this is not a game of the dozens?
Daniel Dare: You quote my statement that an extreme reluctance to consider alternative hypotheses is unscientific, and then you say, “But I understand your science perfectly Kristor: GOD DID IT.”
But how do you know that’s what I think? You don’t know me from Adam. So far as you can tell from what I have so far written on this thread, I am myself a Darwinian.
You have not actually responded to my statement at all. Do you disagree with it? I would guess not, or you would have said so, and marshaled an argument or two. In that case, the criticism of the discursive conduct of some naturalists on this thread implicit therein stands unchallenged. If on the other hand you do disagree, I urge you to pick up any history of science. You might also want to check out Karl Popper, probably the best source for the actual philosophy of science, particularly with respect to its epistemological credentials.
Polichinello: You say that Auster needs to present an alternative to Darwinism if he is going to critique it. Why? I mean, I understand that hypotheses are grist for the scientific mill, but why ask the mill to supply more grist? Is it not possible to notice a defect in a theory before one has perfected an alternative? Is it not rather true that the discovery of a defect in a theory is the very thing that precipitates the search for an alternative—or, if the defect is not fatal to the theory, for a patch? If one detected no defect, why would one search for an alternative? See Popper, James, Dewey, Kuhn on this. The discovery of theoretical defects is the engine of scientific inquiry, and their repair its nisus (NB that this means science is teleological).
Polichinello: You say that Darwinism still holds together. So did Newtonian mechanics—until it didn’t.
Polichinello: You say that mutations are not random, but commonplace. Commonness and randomness are not mutually exclusive, so the “but” is inapposite. If mutations are as you say not random, then they are organized, raising the question of the origin of that organization. What do you mean here, really, by random?
Grant Canyon: You say that Auster should have discussed the reproductive behavior of the bonobo and the shark, in order to make his essay, “An Absolute Refutation of Darwinism” at all adequate. But in critiquing a theory, one need not reiterate all the cases in which it seems adequate, one need only discuss the cases in which it does not. That Darwinism seems adequate to explain 99% of the phenomena under consideration doesn’t help it at all when it comes to the last 1%. It’s the stubborn counterexample that kills a hypothesis—and forces us to search for a more comprehensive and adequate theory.
Grant Canyon: You quote Auster’s criticism of your insults as unsuited to civilized discourse, and respond by mocking him. I hope it is superfluous for me to point out that you have proved his point. Look, if you want to make his arguments look bad, you have to respond to them with arguments, not insults. Huffing and puffing doesn’t work; you have to reason in public. In mocking Auster, or his arguments, you only make yourself look bad.
Daniel Dare: You say that if Auster is correct that his arguments against Darwinism are wholly rational, he should debate with evolutionary biologists at gnxp or Pharyngula, rather than at Secular Right. Does this constitute an admission that no one at Secular Right is competent to deal with Auster’s arguments? Why is it that only professional evolutionary biologists are allowed to be rational critics? Is there then no such thing as an intelligent layman? If not, how can any posters at Secular Right justify saying anything on subjects that fall outside the domains of their dissertations?
Polichinello: You say that Auster’s case against evolution is more metaphysical than scientific. Thanks for your calmness. Lawrence does indeed point out that Darwinists, and naturalists in general, inveterately make use of teleological language and concepts, even though they insist that “nature never sucks.” He argues that such diction radically vitiates naturalism. Dennett’s suggestion that the intentionality we attribute to nature is a sort of computational heuristic does not surmount the difficulty. The difficulty arises because minds and all their intellectual products—theories, knowledge, information, heuristics, and so forth—are intentional through and through, by definition (actually the technical term is “intensional,” but intention is a species of intension). If there is no intention in nature, there just is no intention anywhere in nature; and that includes those portions of nature we call our minds and our scientific journals. But the naturalist who argues thus is reduced in the end to insisting that however much it appears that he thinks, really he doesn’t (this is what Dennett’s suggestion boils down to). Unfortunately for the naturalist, we intend with everything we think. We cannot think, “there is no such thing as intention,” without intending to think something true, or to understand, or to explain. Thus the fact that the statement, “there is no such thing as intention,” is meaningful refutes the meaning thereof.
There are two ways to respond to this discovery that “there is no such thing as intention” is self-refuting. One is to pretend that there is no defect in the theory that nature is utterly ateleological. Why this seems like a good move to anyone is beyond me. The other is to admit that there is such a defect, that it is fundamental, and that ateleology should be abandoned as incoherent—“not even wrong.” I don’t get why there is so much resistance to that move. Probably for the same reason Marxists don’t want to abandon socialism despite its manifest failures and incoherence, or that Einstein resisted quantum indeterminacy to the last. One has enjoyed one’s elegant, parsimonious theory—one has found it utile—and one would rather not abandon it, is all I can think of.
Daniel Dare: you raise the idea that if you put a [population of replicators] in a selective environment, you get a feedback loop, because the population ends up tracking the configurations that are best suited to survive therein; you point out that this is a primitive kind of purposefulness. This is good, a useful contribution. But primitive purposefulness is still purposefulness, no? Note your language: “selective,” “feedback,” “tracking.” No need to preach to me about how this works, I read Design for a Brain back in ‘75 (what a great book!), and I agree with Ashby. No argument that if you design a system, it can behave the way it was designed to behave. Constrain a solution space, put a stochastic string generator to work inside it, and sooner or later it will chance upon the solution whose characteristics informed your decisions about the constraints on the solution space. I get that. Where do the constraints come from in the first place? In the very first place, I mean. That was the question Aristotle was working on. Democritus the atomist posited the clinamen, a random current in chaotic motion, to explain the world and its apparent orderliness. But a random current isn’t a current at all, it is just chaos. I.e., it doesn’t actually exist. What doesn’t exist can’t explain anything. If Democritus and the naturalists are correct about the fundamentally random nature of reality, then the world is wholly chaotic, there is no order in it to discover, and thus no possibility of thinking or knowing, or doing philosophy, science, or politics.
Kevembuangga: You say that no one can prove that a theory in natural history is incorrect by formal or analytic means. But the doctrine that evolution is not informed by any order—that it proceeds from utter randomness—is, not a theory in natural history, but a theory in metaphysics. That’s because there is no way that any part of a world can be totally chaotic unless that whole world is totally chaotic (unless, that is to say, it is not a world at all, properly speaking). The proposition that biological novelty proceeds from a purely chaotic source is thus a proposition about the nature of existence as such—it is a proposition in metaphysics. Thus it is vulnerable to analytical or metaphysical refutation. That refutation is rather simple. If everything in nature proceeds from mere chaos, then there is no such thing as “evolution,” or “change,” no such thing as math, logic, bodies, mass, causation—you name it, it ain’t. If the world is generated by nothing more than chaos, then the world just is chaos, and there is nothing at all other than chaos. Chaos excludes all other concepts. It is the zero of being, of experience, and of thought.
Furthermore, the random element in Darwinist theory (NB that “random” does not mean “probabilistic:” probability is a species of orderliness) is not necessary to the viability of the theory of natural selection, making it a good candidate for excision by Ockham’s Razor.
If we say that the world is not totally chaotic, then it is just not possible for any part whatsoever of that world to arise in an utterly chaotic process. If, that is, the world is really a world—if it coheres and is causally ordered—then every aspect of its operation is, precisely, not random (NB again that “random” is the opposite of “probabilistic”). Thus evolution presupposes, arises from, and supervenes upon the orderliness of the world. It cannot explain the orderliness that it presupposes.
Desmond Jones: You say that God is not falsifiable, and therefore qualifies as rigid superstitious dogma. But you are not falsifiable either. That is to say, your body may exist—we can push it around and so forth—but the existence of your conscious awareness is not testable. You might be an exquisitely programmed robot. Indeed, under a naïve physicalist doctrine, that is precisely what you are. You may respond perfectly to all the Turing tests in the world, and we could never ascertain whether you actually felt or knew anything. So I guess that makes your existence a rigid superstitious dogma?
Of course not. It makes you our best inference from the general pattern of our experience. The pragmatic reliability of the scientific method is founded upon just such an inference. We can’t prove that science works; we can only infer that it does, because it seems to; thinking that science works accords with our experience better than thinking it doesn’t.
What all this means is that falsifiability is not the sine qua non of knowledge. In fact—obviously, when you think about it for a moment—it takes quite a bit of a priori reasoning to arrive at the conclusion that falsifiability is an important criterion of knowledge in natural history. The doctrine of falsifiability makes a great deal of sense, but is not itself a scientific theory. You can’t design an experiment to falsify the proposition that falsifiability is necessary to scientific knowledge.
Daniel Dare: Your comment time-stamped 2/10/09 at 20:35, #42, is your best yet. You ask some good questions. Why do we come over to Secular Right and bother you with silly theistic arguments, in which you have no interest? Well, I think it is fair to say that Auster, Roebuck and I are doing it for charitable reasons. We see you guys making some basic category errors (such as, e.g., confusing natural history with metaphysics), and blundering about shooting yourselves in the foot with your rhetoric, and it just pains us, you know? We are conservatives, you see, and we want the Right side to be as coherent and systematic as possible. We think that atheism is a big problem for conservatism. Why? Well, if God doesn’t exist, then nowhere is there perfect knowledge. If no one has perfect knowledge, then no one knows perfectly what is good. But if no one truly knows the Good, then in effect it just doesn’t exist. Instead, all goodness is merely subjective—i.e., illusory. In that case, the contest between socialism and capitalism, or between the West and Islam, are just “he said she said.” No one is right, except in their own illusions. If no one is right, there is no intersubjective justification for any given social outcome; no Justice out there to be had. In that case, what can it matter—what can it matter really, that is, outside your own head—whether you live or die, or your children live or die, or whether your country lives or dies? It can’t. In that case, all society is just a power play, an amoral grab for utility, and nothing more, nothing more whatsoever.
Now this constitutes a weak foundation for any argument that we should be vigilant about things like socialism or the fall of the West. We are to get all worked up over those abstract things, and even perhaps sacrifice our lives to prevent them, for … no reason at all? No; I think I’ll have another beer and watch American Idol instead. See what I mean?
This is why Auster, Roebuck and I all think that the recovery of widespread religious faith is crucial to the long term success of our culture, particularly in its competition with a culture that is burning with faith. And that is why we take the trouble to respond to all of you at Secular Right.
I won’t need to spend too much time on your argument that, because the brain is a protein computer, there is no such thing as truth. If it is correct, then—as it argues—it is not true.
The Kat: You do get right down to it. Thanks for a pertinent comment. You say that “it is not possible to make a rational argument for belief in God, because reason and faith-based belief are fundamentally incompatible.” But “faith-based belief” is just a way of writing “belief-based belief.” What you’ve written, then, is, “reason and belief are fundamentally incompatible.” But if this were true, you couldn’t perform the act of believing something you had logically demonstrated to be true.
Belief is not ipso facto unreasonable. Even things we believe, not by having thought them through, but as a result of a direct delivery of the senses—such as that fire is hot—are not therefore necessarily unreasonable. Beliefs are unreasonable only if they contradict our experience or our reason.
But with respect to the existence of God, that is precisely the question. Does the proposition that He exists contradict our experience or our reason? In arguing about that we are not yet arguing about belief in God. St. Thomas argued that faith, properly construed, is, not credence in a proposition you cannot rationally support, but rather an act of the will to adopt as true the propositions you have demonstrated to be true by a process of ratiocination. The credence that follows upon a logical demonstration of the truth of a proposition does not come into play until one has reached the conclusion.
We all have faith in this Thomistic sense all the time. We believe we are standing on the outer surface of a ball, when if we look around us that idea seems just whacked. But, when we reason carefully about our experience, we are forced to admit that the floating ball cosmology makes more sense, however improbable it might have seemed on its face. It was in just this sense, for example, that Planck, in contravention to his deepest intuitions about nature, admitted that it had to be fundamentally discontinuous. He forced himself to believe in this conclusion, even though he didn’t want to believe it, even though he hated the idea.
Does God exist? We examine the arguments as honestly and carefully as possible, and follow where they lead. If at the end of the day we find that they indicate His existence, then we decide to believe in His existence. In terms of the volitional experience, it’s just like deciding that we really do live on a floating ball.
I would be interested to hear how you make moral realism agree with atheism. But perhaps you only meant to say that, while you are convinced of moral realism, you are not convinced of theism, so that you can’t see how the two doctrines either agree or disagree.
Sorry for the long comment. Just trying to be thorough, and do everyone proper honor.