"Scientific Skepticism": Is there such a thing; and if so, what does it look like?

(To your point, there is the anomaly of synesthesia that a few percentage of folks have. Are you familiar with it? Some love and enjoy their variety of it, but to others it can be at least a major annoyance.)

Can’t our intuition be correct about some things and incorrect about others? E.g., the wonderful subcellular molecular machines: intuitively they appear to be irreducibly complex (as preached by IDers), but neutral drift and the neutral theory of evolution in conjunction with exaptation and co-option produce at least an intuitively acceptable correlation with evolutionary reality. (Excerpted from the yet to be written Confessions of a Former YEC and ID Advocate. :grin:)

I do not think you can be too skeptical from a Christian perspective if skepticism is simply an honest look at the evidence and logic behind the arguments for a particular position, idea or explanation. If the prior definition of skepticism is used, I would say that it is one of the foundation of science. Part of doing science is being skeptical, honestly and carefully looking at your data and the logic of your arguments to make sure that they actually support your model or explanation. In this sense, to be a good scientist is to be skeptical. I think the suspicion some Christians have about the term “skeptic” or “scientific skeptic” is that the term seems to be used as if it simply means that you reject non-natural explanations. This would clearly be problematic from a Christian perspective. On the other hand, it could be argued that Christians might in some ways be better skeptics since Christians and other religious believers are open to explanations that strict metaphysical naturalists might reject simply because they are not natural explanations. I am not saying that Christians should accept astrology or psychics just because they imply a spiritual reality, but it would be inconsistent for Christians who believe in miracles and a bodily resurrection to reject an idea simply because it includes supernatural or preternatural elements. Because of this, Christians and other religious believers who are in science might be less biased in at least one area compared to their naturalist colleagues.

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Welcome!
I think that this is a valid argument not to enforce a given religious viewpoint on others–not to say that someone is not able to believe something based individually on their own experience. Am I interpreting what you are saying correctly? Thanks.

That you’re humble?

Hi Dale ~

Well, I just read the first of your two testimonies, which, if I remove anything referring to God, seems quite unremarkable: some of Rich’s friends thought he might be good at the new position, then another shared his admiration for an organization that had helped him with an adoption, and the organization turned out to be the same one Rich was considering (not especially surprising, since it was a large, well-established organization).

To me, Rich’s “shivers” indicate how primed he was to interpret ordinary coincidences as a message from God. This says a lot about Rich’s devotion, but nothing about the reality of its target. Please don’t take this as disrespect, but try re-reading his account and substituting the name “Rum-tum-tiggedy” for “God.” Without the latter label, and all the intellectual/emotional priors that accompany it, does Rich’s story feel different?

As for Maggie’s story, the lesson I draw is that scientists are people. Working for 84 hours a week (!) with the intellectual rigour and constraints that science imposes says nothing about how you think in your spare time. Saying that some scientists believe in god is no different than saying some people believe in God. The question remains: Why? It’s an honest question.

Maggie’s statement that “I had enough education and intelligence to eliminate some gods at the outset” is like saying “OK, you can be Creator Of The 13-Billion-Year-Old Universe, but only if you’re a white guy and not too short.”

Her suggestion that “There was no human way possible to meet any of these needs.” is a little extreme, don’t you think: basically she needed some money and a place to stay. She met an already-friend at the store, who happened to have a spare room available and was married to a biologist. Her bank made a mistake with her account (from my perspective that’s more of a certainty than a miracle!). She met a bank manager at another bank (!) who was impressed enough by her background to give her a loan.

Having decided that these events were miracles created specifically for her benefit must have been so comforting it justified 50 years of devotion to and intellectual buttressing of a seemingly very specific set of beliefs. Similar beliefs have provided hope and comfort for so many people in the most desperate of circumstances. But I knew a woman once who described how, as a poor single mom of four young kids, she shed dodged a lot of turmoil and pressure by simply flipping a coin to resolve any of the many fraught choices that came up relating to disciplining the kids, deciding which bills to pay, etc. As luck would have it, they muddled through (though my hunch is that part of whatever success she had was knowing - as a loving good-enough mother - when to cheat). And most people, whether Christian or Flippist, don’t rely on prayers or pennies when the car breaks down - they call a mechanic.

Miracles, it seems, are in the eye of the beholder. I’ve heard it said that any technology sufficiently beyond the ken of those newly exposed to it may be perceived as magic. Humans are notoriously bad at sensing probabilities but very good at filtering their experience according to prior expectations and biases.

Am I wrong in rejecting these two stories as providing evidence for a God? If so, can you suggest where? Maybe the criteria by which we judge evidence is different . . .

Yes. Rich did not want the job. Maggie’s providences were like winning five different lotteries in five different states, in the order that she bought the tickets… and she was the only one who bought any tickets.

But I am too well aware that accounts of God’s interventions, even entire sets of discrete independent incidents with the only thing connecting them is the induced or implicit (even explicit) imputed meaning particular to the individual, I am too well aware that they are not compelling (which is bizarre to me) for someone who is not ready to accept them.

The grounds of [true] belief in God is the experience of God*: God is not the conclusion of an argument but the subject of an experience report.
Roy Clouser

 


*That experience does not have to be multiple externally objective incidents though, although they are sweet. At least an internal one is, however.

They are effectively forensic evidence of God’s providential M.O., orchestrating timing and placing.

Read on.

Can we agree, though, that the reality is the same? Are we talking about day-to-day physical reality (as opposed to imaginary worlds)? If so, then surely we have to reach consensus on the meaning of the words we use and the validity of the evidence we interrogate?

If “the tools of science” refers to rational inference from empirical evidence," then what worlds are we talking about?

Obviously, empiricism can’t answer all questions (Can wookies read Latin?) My concern begins when what I see as imaginary worlds (with angels, demons, heaven, hell, miracles, dragons, whatever) seek to engage this world, with this-world consequences.

My take that empirical skepticism is the only appropriate stance for interrogating this physical world. is itself a proposition. Your rejection of it is based on what evidence? And if not based on evidence, then on what?

Agreed. But the conflict between science and religion, as I see it, is not based on the claims they make (science’s truths are always provisional), but on the process they use to support those claims: specifically an insistence on rational inference from empirical evidence. If religion’s “process” rejects that standard, it seems we have a conflict.

Why is that important? Because we’re not just talking about fun facts of the universe. Process is absolutely critical in making the innumerable choices life presents us with. How do beings like us, in a neighbourhood like ours, survive and flourish?

Yup. Life’s waters are choppy. The question is one of process: how do we navigate the waves?

Yes.

Reaching consensus on words happens in discourse communities of people contemporaneously using the same language. We can’t negotiate a consensus on what the 21st century English word ‘evidence’ means with Koine Greek speakers in the first century who used ἔλεγχος, which can also be translated “conviction,” so I have no idea how you think this relates to understanding how a Bible verse written in Koine Greek in the first century and translated to 21st century English corresponds to the same reality.

Hebrews 11:1 is defining faith as being confident in your hope. None of that speaks to any scientific claim about reality, as both faith and hope are abstractions, not aspects of the physical world about which one could theoretically collect empirical evidence anyway.

Science can examine and make claims about the physical world. Only the scientific naturalists claim that the physical world comprises all of reality.

What is not part of your experience of this world could be part of other people’s experience of this world. You do not have access to all of reality and you perceive a different reality than other people. I thought we already established that no one has objective access to absolute truth or absolute reality. It’s a kind of intellectual colonialism to say that you get to define reality for others based on what you can or cannot perceive. You don’t have to believe they are correct, but your perceptions aren’t the standard by which other people’s perceptions are objectively judged.

I agree with you. But my interests are not limited to the physical world and my definition of “this world” is not equivalent to “the physical world.” It is based on my experience of other dimensions of reality. It’s not scientific evidence, and it is subjective, but as I have said, empiricism is not the only path to knowledge and all knowledge is subjective to some degree, even empirical knowledge. At the bottom of every assertion about reality is some human construct. The question is how confident we are in our constructs, not what we have “proven.”

If a religious person is trying to make a scientific claim based on a faith-based epistemology. (“Humans lived with dinosaurs because the Bible tells me so” for example) they are applying the wrong source of knowledge to the quesiton at hand. We should use scientific epistemologies to answer scientific questions and faith-based epistemologies to answer other kinds of questions, like existential and relational and metaphysical and moral questions. So, if you are asking do I agree that religious people improperly reject evidence they should have confidence in when they reject scientific conclusions about scientific questions, absolutely.

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Why are physicists seeking a quantum model that incorporates gravity? Is there any empirical evidence that such a model can be formulated?

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5 minutes in the first commentary I grabbed and I think see the misunderstanding:

“The examples that follow demonstrate a posture of firm confidence in the promises of God even though the believers had not yet received the fulfillment of those promises (11:39).”

From “Hebrews” by George H. Guthrie

Um, I think that would make her odds pretty good. :smirk:

I agree that some personal experiences can be pretty compelling. But the growing awareness about how the mind is influenced by prior experiences, expectations and biases is precisely why skepticism is so appropriate.

I referred in my first post to evidence that suggests that all experiences are a kind of negotiation between bottom-up sensations and top-down mental models: what we experience is the modulated errors between what the brain expects its next inputs to be and what they actually are.

With the rotating mask illusion, you can experience this directly. The sensory input from your eyes faithfully transmits light bouncing off the concave surface of a mask, but your brain’s high-level model of faces insists that they are convex and literally over-rides the sensory input.

A YouTube presentation by neuroscientist Anil Seth (skip to the the 20:42 - 25:00 time segment if you’re in a hurry) further undermines the assumption that God experiences can be taken at face value, and demonstrates that our most private personal experiences are indeed open to scientific investigation.

What constitutes evidence for the way the world — including us — works, and what is our best guide in making our way through its moral landscape? “God is not the conclusion of an argument but the subject of an experience report” seems to me to beg a whole series of interesting questions. But is it evidence of a God’s reality?

If it seems to you that I am continually trying to sow doubt in your mind, you’re right! But doubt should be the flip side of curiosity, and I try to practice what I preach.

So where am I mistaken?

Your reading comprehension is different than mine. She won all five in the same order that she bought the tickets and she was the only one who bought a ticket in each (out of how many possible numbers?).

I trust ChatGPT’s comprehension better than yours.

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That’s all very well said!

Two things I’ve grown fond of saying in these kind of discussions when they get to this level.

All it takes is a single instance of a person acting or making a choice for determinism to be false.

The other is that there are only 3 possible statements to explain the world: from nothing, an infinite regress, or an uncaused cause (whether it is aware of its action or not).

You’re right — I was thinking more of a raffle. :sneezing_face:

Hey, does ChatGPT think God exists?

It would defer.    

Beyond astronomical probabilities, orchestrated from outside of time and space and miraculous – I’m okay with that and so was Maggie. They didn’t happen when she didn’t need it, either!

So the question is, do you want to find God? I take it that’s a no.

And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who approaches Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.
Hebrews 11:6

Or do you want him to find you, recognizing your lostness? Sometimes that’s what it takes, being desperate, as we have just seen. Here is another – being found by God:

During a dark time in her life, a woman in my congregation complained that she had prayed over and over, “God, help me find you,” but had gotten nowhere. A Christian friend suggested to her that she might change her prayer to, “God, come and find me. After all, you are the Good Shepherd who goes looking for the lost sheep.” She concluded when she was recounting this to me, “The only reason I can tell you this story is – he did.”

Tim Keller, The Reason for God, p.240