I think Behe is wrong. People can be wrong without being liars. In fact, I am sure I am wrong about many things.
The problem is they argue against evolution/abiogenesis without giving positive evidence for their own beliefs. They are essentially using a God-of-the-Gaps argument in the form of “evolution can’t do it, therefore Intelligent Design”.
Oh right, the God of the gaps! Believe it or not, I forgot about that argument. I’m not being sarcastic at all; I really did forget. Anyway, I watched Dave Dreamer’s talk and found it very interesting. I must admit I was a little annoyed when he said, “Apologies to Michelangelo, but I think this is how life began.” On the one hand, it was just a light, unnecessary quip. On the other hand, it reflects an extremely loud message coming from the universities: scientists are not just doing science, but are also buttressing a worldview in which God is not necessary and in which religious faith should be blind. In fact, there is often the very patronizing message that the blinder someone’s religious faith is, the stronger it is. That is completely opposite from the faith that the Bible calls for. So I can still sympathize when a chemist like Tour reacts to the establishment. I don’t think his arguments should be necessary, and I agree that they can fall prey to the God-of-the-gaps view. Nevertheless, at worst he is just presenting the other side of the coin of the view that says science reveals the irrelevance of a Creator.
Regardless of where they came from, the point is that they are immaterial. Even calling them “emergent properties” is still dealing in pure (immaterial) abstractions. Nobody can articulate, much less test, any theory in which they have any physical properties–such as theorizing that they are little clumps of neurons or that they are a fifth phase of matter, etc.
By contrast, it is perfectly coherent to say that they have no physical properties whatsoever, that they are immaterial. That is an objective, testable, falsifiable fact.
And by the way, that is not a God-of-the-gaps argument. The mystery is not that we don’t know what mathematics (and the physical laws, etc.) are. It is that we can know, to the extent that we know anything at all, what they are not. They are not physical.
That worldview seems to come from the religious side much more often than the scientific side. Implicit in the arguments for ID/creationism is a claim that if nature does it then God doesn’t exist. There are thousands of Christian biologists who accept evolution and also believe that God created, so what gives?
To cite a BioLogos article:
Is the science of meteorology atheistic? Does it say that God is irrelevant because we can explain rain through natural means? How is meteorology any different than evolution or abiogenesis?
Right, I’m not disagreeing with you on any of that. But I do disagree that creationists are louder than the naturalists. I doubt we could to really quantify that, or would want to. But there is no doubt that our universities are firmly entrenched in a materialistic worldview that is not at all neutral in regards to God or spirituality. As Dr. Richard Lewontin, Evolutionary Biology Professor at Harvard, put it:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. ("Billions and Billions of Demons,” a review of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World in the The New York Review of Books.
That was over 20 years ago. Things have only gotten more entrenched since then. And I’ll point out again that the stance is, in particular, materialistic. The presence of nonphysical phenomenon in the universe (such as, for example, the entirety of mathematical equations and data) was such an overwhelming impasse for naturalists that their only solution was to arbitrarily declare science to be materialistic. As Lewontin explained, the reason to presuppose materialism is that nonphysical phenomena will clearly point to spirituality and thus to God. The trouble is that we know, to the extent that we know anything at all, that there are many nonphysical phenomena in the universe. Now, this hadn’t really been an issue for scientists until they confronted the mystery head-on with the advent of quantum mechanics (although Maxwell’s Demon touched on the mystery). Here is world-class quantum physicist Henry Stapp expressing his frustration on this matter:
“It is exactly this problem of the connection between physically described small-scale properties and directly experienced large-scale properties that orthodox quantum theory successfully resolves. To ignore this solution, and cling to the false precepts of classical mechanics that leave mind and consciousness completely out of the causal loop, seems to be totally irrational. What fascination with the weird and the incredible impels philosophers to adhere, on the one hand, to a known-to-be-false physical theory that implies that all of our experiences of our thoughts influencing our actions are illusions, and to reject, on the other hand, the offerings of its successor, which naturally produces an image of ourselves that is fully concordant with our normal intuitions, and can explain how bodily behavior can be influenced by felt evaluations that emerge from an aspect of reality that is not adequately conceptualized in terms of the mechanistic notion of bouncing billiard balls?” (Henry Stapp, “Minds and Values in the Quantum Universe,” in Information and the Nature of Reality , ed. by Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen.
Stapp asks “what fascination with the weird” impels the presupposition of materialistic explanations. What squelches the only coherent resolution not just to the measurement problem but to the mind-body problem? (Again, the naturalistic alternatives are as incoherent as declaring that numbers and equations and wave functions are, literally, physical things.) Lewontin had already given the answer a dozen years earlier: “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” For everything else, they could use the God-of-the-gaps argument. But for this, they simply have to presuppose that it cannot be true. Their “a priori” adherence to materialism is completely arbitrary and, as it turns out, just plain, flat-out incorrect.
In my experience, they are entrenched in a scientific worldview which includes thousands of Christian scientists. I have worked with and interacted with many Christian scientists over the years, and they have no problem working in these departments, nor are their religious beliefs a problem for the career or science.
More to the point, there is ample scientific evidence for evolution, as much as there is for all of the other natural causes you already accept. ID/creationists have yet to offer anything approaching a scientific theory. You accept materialism all of the time, such as the natural cause of rain. Since there is mountains of evidence for evolution, why should scientists reject it?
That’s not what I read at all. Stapp supports the materialistic explanation of quantum mechanics.
The presupposition of materialism is not at all necessary to explain the natural cause of rain. I can’t imagine it being a factor at all. Nor is materialism necessary for evolution science–at least not the evolution of organisms via random mutation and natural selection. (But of course, it would be meaningless to talk about the evolution of an immaterial mind. So materialism does become necessary when they talk about the evolution of consciousness and presuppose that we are our brains.)
And then Stapp’s whole point is that quantum mechanics disqualifies the presuppositions of materialism because it reveals, as Jon von Neumann put it in 1932, an “extra-physical” distinction between the observer and the observed. Neumann and his colleagues were not at all ideologically driven when they found that materialistic explanations failed. Nor, Stapp explains, were they at all trying to overthrow materialism. In the beginning, they were just following the data and summarizing the principles that it revealed. This is way over my head and the arguments for all this are much more complex than the simple argument that mathematics (such as Euler’s Identity) is immaterial, so I’ll just point to where they are summarized here: How Do We Perceive Words? | Excellent News
According to what I have found, Stapp supports the view that our minds are nothing more than the natural outcome of quantum physics:
I fail to see how quantum mechanics is non-material, especially given the fact that any particle can serve as an observer.
Well here is Stapp in his own words, as opposed to someone else’s interpretation of his view (taken from the very end of that link I gave):
This situation is concordant with the idea of a powerful God that creates the universe and its laws to get things started, but then bequeaths part of this power to beings created in his own image, at least with regard to their power to make physically efficacious decisions on the basis of reasons and evaluations. I see no way for contemporary science to disprove, or even render highly unlikely, this religious interpretation of quantum theory, or to provide strong evidence in support of an alternative picture of the nature of these ‘free choices’. These choices seem to be rooted in reasons that are rooted in feelings pertaining to value or worth. Thus it can be argued that quantum theory provides an opening for an idea of nature and of our role within it that is in general accord with certain religious concepts, but that, by contrast, is quite incompatible with the precepts of mechanistic deterministic classical physics. Thus the replacement of classical mechanics by quantum mechanics opens the door to religious possibilities that formerly were rationally excluded. This conception of nature, in which the consequences of our choices enter not only directly in our immediate neighborhood but also indirectly and immediately in far-flung places, alters the image of the human being relative to the one spawned by classical physics. It changes this image in a way that must tend to reduce a sense of powerlessness, separateness, and isolation, and to enhance the sense of responsibility and of belonging. Each person who understands him-or herself in this way, as a spark of the divine, with some small part of the divine power, integrally interwoven into the process of the creation of the psycho-physical universe, will be encouraged to participate in the process of plumbing the potentialities of, and shaping the form of, the unfolding quantum reality that it is his or her birthright to help create. (Henry Stapp, “Minds and Values in the Quantum Universe,” in Information and the Nature of Reality , ed. by Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen (2010)).
There are several other quotes of his there that contradict that Springer’s version of Stapp’s stance.
The wave function itself is immaterial. That was not the kicker though because that’s not any different from saying that all of mathematics is immaterial. The kicker was that the scientists themselves could effect the outcome depending on their choices. This is where, Stapp in the quote above, talks about people having been bequeathed some power.
I still see nothing about the immaterial. Stapp is saying that quantum mechanics has replaced classical mechanics, but that says nothing about materialism.
How so?
How does that relate to materialism? Would humans have no effect on their environment in a materialistic universe?
I have to say that in ~35 years in science I have never heard a scientist express any position remotely like Lewontin’s – not in public, not in private, not over beer. All the scientists I’ve known have been diligently looking for material causes for observable phenomena, but (as you point out) prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism is a very different thing, and it’s not a thing I ever see promoted or assumed among working scientists.
FWIW, I have never heard this expressed either, not even from the few scientists I have come across that were vocal atheists. I’ve always found that Lewontin quote to be an odd outlier.
Schaffner and Venema, I’m so glad to hear that and I don’t doubt what you’re saying. I believe the majority are focused on their science and trying to avoid the fray. However, I can give you many more current-day quotes that may not be as brazen as Lewontin’s, but are definitely toeing the line with him. I’m a bit self-conscious that I’ve redirected this thread, but I think it’s safe to say that it started off talking about how Behe was biased in his science. And so I’m saying that, most definitely, the establishment (and most universities) are zealously biased in favor of metaphysical naturalism, and they are especially brazen when it comes to neuroscience and the study of consciousness and the mind. That’s what I pay particular attention to. (I’m just a pastor, not a scientist, so I worry about what my kids are being fed.) They presuppose that we are our brains and that we will eventually discover, as a recent Scientific American article title put it, “How Matter Becomes Mind”. Many branches of science have taken an interest in consciousness and they all start with this same assumption.
Here is Kenneth R. Miller, professor of biology at Brown University:
“Let’s assume the obvious, which is that human consciousness is a product of the workings of our nervous system as it interacts with the rest of the body and with the outside world. In other words, that consciousness is a physiological function in the broadest possible sense. What that means, of course, is that consciousness, like every other human characteristic, is a product of evolution.” ( The Human Instinct (2018), 150.)
Now, BTW, he says he’s a devout Catholic, but it’s not at all uncommon for people to embrace materialism and religion at the same time. Some key figures in the Bible were Jewish leaders called Sadducees, who did not believe in spirituality or angels or an afterlife. Anyway, later Miller writes, “Consciousness is a process generated by the hugely complex interactions of highly active cells within the brain and associated nervous tissue.” (p. 168)
And then there’s Michael S. Gazzaniga, professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and head of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, takes the same position. He wrote a book last year in which he sought “to examine how matter makes minds”. ( The Consciousness Instinct (2018), p. 7).
Many physicists have taken an interest in the issue since it has everything to do with the perception of information (and information itself being the golden egg of physics). Michio Kaku and Sean Carroll have both written books in which they theorize about mind being matter. And here is MIT physicist Max Tegmark:
“I approach this hard problem of consciousness from a physical point of view. From my perspective, a conscious person is simply food, rearranged. So why is one arrangement conscious, but not the other? Moreover, physics teach us that food is simply a large number of quarks and electrons, arranged in a certain way. So which particle arrangements are conscious and which aren’t?” ( Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence . 2017. (p.284-285)
Linguist Noam Chomsky operates on the same assumption:
“Assuming that we’re organic creatures, and not angels, we have certain fixed capacities which yield the range of abilities that we have—but they impose limits as well…[Thought] is an aspect of matter, just as electrical properties are an aspect of matter.” ( Noam Chomsky on the unsolved mysteries of language and the brain - ABC listen)
Here is Dr. Werner Loewenstein, former professor of physiology and biophysics at Columbia University and director of its Cell Physics Laboratory:
“What is it that pulls all those scattered sensory-information pieces together? What draws the results of the information processings in the various brain compartments into a whole? This is what among students of consciousness is known as the ‘binding problem.’ We will assume that Evolution solved it by standard neuronal communication, presupposing that conduction of information in digital form along axons or dendrites between the compartments is fast enough for the binding.” ( Physics in Mind , 2013, pp. 221.)
Of course there’s an older couple of quotes by Francis Crick the lead the way:
“‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” ( The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994), p. 3.)
Did you notice the quotation marks he put around “You”?
“The view of ourselves as ‘persons’ is just as erroneous as the view that the Sun goes around the Earth,” he explained in an interview with The New York Times . He said he hoped that “this sort of language will disappear in a few hundred years.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/scientists-work-francis-crick-christof-koch-after-double-helix-unraveling.html)
There are thousands of Christian scientists spread out across these universities, so I don’t think it is nearly as strident or zealous as you may think. I suspect that you are being improperly influenced by the polarizing political rhetoric that is flying around in today’s culture. As I and other scientists have noted, religious beliefs or metaphysical axioms really aren’t something that comes up in the day to day work of scientists, or in their interactions. I think we would all agree that there are isolated cases, but I have never seen field wide pressure on scientists to adopt metaphysical naturalism. In fact, I have worked with quite a few undergrad interns in summer programs that came from Christian universities (not wishy-washy Christian universities, but overtly Christian universities). I have also worked with professors on research programs at Christian universities. We were all focused on the science, and the topic of metaphysical naturalism never comes up, and it doesn’t need to be brought up. All we need is methodological naturalism.
The reason that the scientific community has not adopted Intelligent Design is because of methodological naturalism, not metaphysical naturalism. ID has failed to explain the scientific evidence in a scientific manner. At the same time, the theory of evolution does a spectacular job of explaining the evidence. It has nothing to do with hostility to religious beliefs or a need to reject the idea of a creator. It has everything to do with the facts.
I think that’s a promising approach and I say this as a Christian. Why do you think this is a bad quote? It’s clear that our minds are made up of matter and it is made up of particles that follow certain physical laws. It’s complicated sure, but I have no idea why you propose metaphysical mechanism will ultimately underlie such thing. It’s obvious that you have some belief that leads you to that conclusion. What specifically are your expectations for the topic based on your theism?
What do you base this on? In all my years in the sciences, I think I’ve maybe run into one or two metaphysical naturalists. That’s it. And it was their private belief that they didn’t impose on anyone, though one prof did like to make vocal critiques of creationists. I don’t know your background, but I suspect I’m in a better position to make this judgment than you are; and Steve even more so. The vast, vast majority of scientists just want to do science.
Okay, on the one hand, I’m sorry that I might have overstated the case of bias though, on the other hand, in regards to consciousness you all seem to agree with the presupposition that “matter makes mind”—in line with all those quotes I gave you. (Two scientists, Koch and Tolino, have a quasi-spiritual theory that they say embraces panpsychism, but they still hold to the presupposition that we are our brains.) And if you want to say that this presupposition is rooted not in metaphysical naturalism but rather in methodological naturalism, that’s fine, I won’t disagree.
But when I say that the presupposition is wrong and that it demands blind faith, I truly think my own religious beliefs are completely irrelevant to why it is wrong. Because if we set aside the presupposition that matter makes mind, then we are allowed to ask some very good questions and draw some very clear conclusions (and this has nothing to do with Intelligent Design):
Am I biased to think those are valid arguments? If you toe the line with methodological naturalism, then you will presuppose that these arguments must be invalid.
A better way to approach it is to ask how you could use the scientific method to test Dualism (i.e. separation of the mind and brain). If Monism is all that science can test for then it isn’t surprising that scientists tend to focus on Monism.
I tend to treat mathematics the same way I treat language. They are abstractions of concrete and physical things. Logic may exist one layer down from mathematics, so it might be more interesting to ask if logic exists in a physical sense.
Well see that’s just it: I think science can test for dualism or, more accurately, test for the absence of physical qualities in mathematics, language, or any other form of information. That’s what this other blog stream (What Words Are Not) is all about. I’m sorry for invading this bog stream as well. I’m obsessed. It’s all I ever think about. If I’m in a trance, my poor wife usually doesn’t ask me what I’m thinking about because I might say something like, “I’m thinking about what exactly the number eleven is and how we can test for its lack of physical qualities.”
No matter what you call them–“abstractions” or “qualia” or “memes”, etc.–you can’t articulate a theory (much less test one) as to what physical qualities they may have. I don’t know of anyone who actually tries to say they’re composed of neurons.
Thanks for the encouragement to look at the other thread. We should probably move this discussion over to the other thread. Thanks for the replies, and I may take a look at what you have presented elsewhere.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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