Science does not need what it already has. There’s no moral gap in science that religion can fill. It’s the other way around. It’s religion that lacks the highest standards of honesty and integrity.
No morality at all that I can see, not that that is a deficiency of science. It just isn’t what science is about apart from ethical processes where human and animal subjects are concerned.
Nah, religion doesn’t have a different standard of truth so much as it has an entirely different definition of truth. It isn’t about empirical correspondence, it’s about what disposition toward the world and life best serves human flourishing.
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I agree here Paul. It is a very difficult problem though, because one cannot deny ones personal belief structure when interpreting anything that is observed through the senses.
The dilemma for me is, what should come first, “the eyes” through which we observe, or the mechanism by which we make those observations? How can I rationally make sense of observations if I haven’t yet asked the epistemological questions of how, why and where?
maybe i am missing a step in putting the epistemology first? i do not agree that one can make the claim that the science was already there…that is a bit of a straw man argument in my opinion…we know that God was already there too but he is very different to the principles of science…God is a conscious being…science is not conscious of anything. The rules of science we create…they didn’t create themselves. We compile those rules into our little science books only when those rules largely agree with each other. Those that do not agree seem to get left out.
“Oh but the general consensus” is often thrown in at this point…yes but the general consensus starts out with “there is no God”! So anything pointing to a God wont be included. That is exactly where my problem arises. I like that TEism sort of tries to find common ground, but it does not do this by staying consistent with both sides of the dice, it rewrites the self evident interpretation of bible theology in order to try to make it fit interpretations of the world around us that largely are based on the idea there is no God! That causes huge problems for Christians and it starts with the creation account, fall of man through sin, and the very real and physical crucifixion of our saviour. If the “wages of sin” is an allegory or merely a spiritual event, how do TEists reconcile a physical torture, death, and resurrection of the messiah? (i note it is documented in the Bible that about 500 people saw him after he was raised)
My point is, my science is one that is through the eyes of a Christian who believes in the 4th commandment in Exodus 20:8-11. I read that commandment exactly as written and its quite logically written the way i read it…there is no personal interpretation in my view there.
You think scientists are always honest?
Professionally of course not. But more so than accountants, doctors and other experts (whom I always test with the question what would you do if it were you; I found an honest lawyer that way) for obvious reasons.
Not in much of the religion on display here, or elsewhere in America or anywhere else really, As the lack of social justice everywhere shows. That is due to a fundamental dishonesty at the heart of human nature. We say that horrible, irrational religious and political beliefs are more valid than kindness and economic truth (wealth is theft) because that serves us in our groups. We live that lie.
No doubt more of an aspirational sort of thing.
On the contrary, science has the highest standards of honesty and integrity of any institution. As the result of social science we know exactly how much social injustice there is.
Well ideally, procedurally that is true. But since science draws from the same gene pool as YEC ID’ers, new atheists and every other niche, it too is not perfect. But where empirical matters are concerned it remains the gold standard as far as I’m concerned. But buyer beware of course. You still have to kick the tires to be sure the alleged science hasn’t been misappropriated for other purposes. But mainstream, peer reviewed science isn’t the ones you really have to be careful with.
I agree. Moral claims (especially teleological moral claims) are outside the realm of science. Science hasn’t been shown to be able to produce a “should” as Hume’s Is/Ought distinction illustrates. Once we decide what it is we want to achieve we can use insights from science to better achieve these goals.
I think the peer review process is one of the wonderful things about science. It allows it to interactively correct itself and revise its views. Unfortunately, this can also mean scientific theories always somewhat provisional. But one of the things I’ve come to realize about these theories in my own work is it’s less about whether a theory is “true” in an absolute sense. What matters instead is if it is useful for describing or understanding reality.
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No one has or ever will. Oughts aren’t proper ‘things’ nor manufacturable. More importantly oughts are in the lower wrung of moral concerns. We can do better.
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I’m curious how you mean “oughts” are in the lower rung when it comes to morality. I’m currently reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue who makes the case for the importance of teleology in morality. I found his overall point compelling, and I’ve recently come to believe that pretty much all moral claims are teleological in nature (at least in order for them to have any binding authority on our behavior). I’m new to the field of moral philosophy but have been reading some contemporary metaethics so I’m curious to hear your reasoning
It would seem to me the nature of moral obligations and duties are front and center to contemporary moral discourse.
No.
I believe in a bigger reality than physical universe governed by the laws of nature derived from its mathematical space-time structure. I believe in a spiritual reality which greater including an infinite God who created the physical universe as a womb in which His children conceived would grow before being born into that greater world to be with Him.
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It seems you have a very rose-tinted view of science and a very jaundiced view of religion. This is understandable round here since many of us have been bitten hard by either (a) not taking science seriously, or (b) the bits of religion that advocate not taking science seriously, or (c) both. But once again, be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
It’s some religious practitioners that lack the highest standards of honesty and integrity, not religion itself. Some religions do actually advocate for high standards. The Bible itself contains many, many calls to honesty and integrity over and over and over again for starters.
As for science, it may provide us with some powerful tools to help us determine what is real and what isn’t, and it may produce some awesome stuff such as the James Webb Space Telescope, Wikipedia, JustGiving and anything and everything that Mark Rober comes up with, but it’s not some kind of nirvana by any stretch of the imagination. Scientists, like anyone else, are people. Science in academia measures productivity in peer reviewed publications per year. Science in industry measures productivity in how much money your invention can earn for your employer. These can lead to all sorts of perverse incentives that encourage everything from cutting corners to outright fraud at worst. Even when these things aren’t at play, for every scientist and engineer working on a new medical robot or the latest AWESOME!, there are many more thousands working on stuff such as killer robots for the military, spyware, digital rights management, fossil fuels, or advertising. Advertising! You need to remember that science and technology are ethically neutral at best, so let’s not romanticise it all to some kind of ridiculous Arthur C Clarke degree. Science may give you a whole lot of tools and techniques, and it may open up a world of possibilities, but the one thing that it doesn’t give you is a moral or ethical compass.
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To piggyback on that, some of the bloodiest and most cruel conflicts in history had an explicit secular agenda and claimed to be backed by scientific methodology/results. Social Darwinism, eugenics, etc that found their way into the Nazi regime, Communism, etc. if we find these things morally reprehensible, we have to justify this reasoning in some other way than “trust the science”
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In a nutshell, I think traditionally conceived oughts are essentially explicit directives which are rarely simple to apply in lived contexts. What I think is needed is an empathic openness to the moral implications and opportunities of all our interactions and a resolve to act with kindness and generosity wherever possible. An explicit checklist would be easier but also less ambitious. It can’t be merely an intellectual regard for propositions, but of course I come at this as a non Christian without the benefit or weight of tradition.
Not to get too sidetracked in this thread, but I’ve come to a similar realization. I used to follow something similar to Kantian Deontology, but as I’ve gotten a bit older I’ve come to see more nuance and accepted something like Christian virtue ethics (thanks in part to the modern revival of virtue ethics in contemporary moral philosophy and people like MacIntyre, Foot, etc).
MacIntyre’s point is morality needs an idea of a “well functioning” human as its goal. This allows us to move from human nature “as it is” to human nature “as it ‘ought’ to be.” The reconciliation of Christianity and virtue ethics can be traced back to Aquinas and Thomson, who of course was heavily influenced by Aristotle. In this way, rather than there being explicit moral “rules,” we instead think of developing into a person possessing certain virtues like kindness, patience, etc, the practice of which helps us to be happy and moral.
Of course, science cannot give us the answer to what a “well functioning” human is. But if one is a Christian, they accept the person and teachings of Jesus as a model to live by. It also contains a lot of ideas in relation to stoicism thanks perhaps to Paul (though neostoicism is so heavily Christian influenced it is hard to separate the two).
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Agreed!
No. This does not follow because not everything in science is explainable – even according to science. Hidden variables do not exist. Some things just happen with no cause in the scientific world view determining those events. So… science may explain what thoughts are according to these physical natural laws, but cannot explain why those thoughts rather than completely different thoughts.
The scientific method was never proof but only what is reasonable to believe, and whether naturalism is true has nothing to do with it. It is simply reasonable to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow whether we can prove that it will rise or not. We can often estimate the probabilities of the failure of a scientific conclusion, just as we can estimate the likely lifetime of the sun.
Like our trust in science, our metaphysical and moral propositions are mostly a matter of pragmatism. We believe according to what makes us do well in life because otherwise the beliefs disappear with those who die.
The problem with naturalism is that the usefulness of science is limited. It is based on objective observations and life requires subjective participation. Therefore we need more than science to live.
This is like arguing that a umpire of a game has no reason to call an action “foul” because the rules of the game don’t have to be what they are. This is nonsense. The scientist has good reason to ignore arguments that are not valid scientific procedure, because that is not science. And if it is not about science then who are you to say what arguments we cannot ignore in choosing our own personal religious beliefs?
This is why we need to clearly define and hopefully agree on what science is. If certain explanations fall outside of scientific procedure, scientists are ignoring them because they fall outside of its methodology, not because these explanations are supported by evidence, reasonable, well argued, or even true. The frustrating thing to me is students in the US are required to take so many science classes (probably due to cold-war fears in the US) and no philosophy classes. Thus our students don’t learn to talk about truth at all, just methodology.
This wouldn’t be a problem if many scientists didn’t pretend what they were doing was an accurate reflection of reality unconstrained by a methodological bias that a priori rules out certain types of explanations, regardless of the quality of quantity of evidence for an alternative explanation. Scientists need to choose: either consider unfalsifiable explanations as part of their methodology, or admit that science has methodological constraints and thus may not be able to provide an accurate or true picture of reality due to these a priori constraints or assumptions.
I lean towards the latter here. The issue is people like Dawkins who hold positions as Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and use their immense platform (and ignorance of philosophy) to define what science is and is not. They consider ID to be pseudoscientific on grounds of it being unfalsifiable, and then turn around and grant special exceptions to unfalsifiable naturalistic explanations in fields like Evolutionary Psychology (which of course angers philosophers of science). They are quick to (rightly) point out “God of the Gaps” arguments, yet curiously silent when others or they themselves put forth “naturalism of the gaps” or “evolution of the gaps” arguments under the banner of “science.”
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Well said. As objects of faith, that rings true to me as well.
Ehhem… the science of philosophy (metaphysics or pure reason) still dispels the illusion of an infinite regress of natural causes.