Reply #172: I begin to suspect that you deliberately misunderstand Gould's position and mine [View All]

[struggle4progress]

Gould explicitly describes himself as a "Jewish agnostic" in his piece: he is not convinced by any Christian theology and probably not much interested. His discussion with Catholic theologians (for example) mainly concern evolutionary matters, and related questions about US politics, that DO interest him. His view (apparently based on such Catholic theology as he learns from such discussions) is that the theological views could not determine the science nor the science the theology

My criticism of Dawkins' argument (the "scientistic critique") is even more specific: it is that Dawkins' argument is intellectually dishonest and "begs the question," a sophomoric mistake in argumentation. The scientific method sets aside certain irrelevancies in the course of evaluating the natural material world: the honest investigator puts his or her religious or political or philosophical or artistic preferences at arms length and concentrates on reproducible material phenomena. The object is to discover and/or use "natural laws" to obtain predictable results in well-defined circumstances. Whether or not such "natural laws" actually exist and are simple enough to be found and to be applied, is an interesting philosophical question -- but the scientific enterprise does not concern itself with such a philosophical questions: it simply assumes as a pragmatic working hypothesis that such laws can be found and sets out to find them, not because it is intellectually certain that the whole of the world can be described by discoverable "natural laws" but simply because the scientific project IS NOTHING OTHER THAN the effort to describe the natural world by discoverable "natural laws." There is no scientific attitude towards "supernatural phenomena" because it is the scientific presumption that all phenomena are natural and material. If, in a long series of experiments, the investigator at one point were to see a bright shining being who announced "I am an angel from beyond the realms of space and time, and I have been sent here to show you that there is something more than the natural material world that you study," and if that one particular experiment then produced very strange results, with all other experiments in the long series producing the results expected by the theory, the experimenter might (as a human being) have various personal reactions, but if the experimenter is a good scientist, the angel would be omitted from the published account, but the single odd result would not be omitted in publication: it would be published with the other results, and there would be a bit of discussion along the lines that the outlier did not accord with the well-established physical theory, was not yet properly understood, and was therefore disregarded in the analysis section of the paper. No matter how the investigator were to explain to him/herself this strange vision, an "angel from beyond the realms of space and time" really just cannot play a serious role in any scientific paper, since such beings (if they actually existed) would not be natural material phenomenon reproducibly subject to natural laws. If over many decades a scientist published tens of thousands of experimental results, which other people were able to reproduce, and by these experiments advanced a physical theory, no one could complain of the scientific work if that person later remarked in his/her memoirs that three earlier outliers (discussed briefly in his/her published papers) had been associated with strange visions of angels: whether or not one "believes" the person "actually saw" angels, such visions obviously do not belong in a scientific work, and any person who attempted to include such visions in a physical paper has somehow failed to understand the scientific enterprise. But for exactly the same reason, it would be a sophomoric begging of the question to argue A review of the scientific literature reveals no evidence of angels, so angels are unlikely to exist, since "angels" -- not being natural material phenomenon reproducibly subject to natural laws -- simply could not possibly be discussed scientifically. It is entirely possible for a very bad argument to reach by accident a correct conclusion, but the argument itself must be judged on its on merits and not according to whether we like the conclusions of the argument. I am NOT discussing whether angels exist or not, nor am I discussing how one might decide whether or not to believe in angels. I am simply objecting to the childish intellectual incoherence of a particular sort of argument Dawkins makes

A: There's no real evidence in the newspaper I read every day that Fidel Castro speaks Spanish: in all the quotes I've seen, he's speaking English
B: Do you ever look at the Spanish language papers?
A: No, I think that here in America everyone should read and write in English