This
is part of a larger framework that includes the theories of Thomas Kuhn
and argues that science is a social construct. That part of it will be
saved for another time. This section, although long is answering an
argument that I see atheist touting all the time. They always deny it
but it's unmistakably there.
I am doing it backwards. Yesterday I did part 2 as an addendum to the three observations so here is part 1.
Section one documents that there such an attitude among atheists and
gives some preliminary arguments. Section 2 shows the truly unscientific
nature of the attitude.
Nowhere
is the arrogance of humanity more apparent than in the many tendencies
to treat God as a big man in the sky and try to subject him to
scientific analysis. This is a move that most thinkers of the previous
century would have laughed themselves silly over. One cannot second
guess the nature of the divine by insisting that God operates under
rules like a biological organism? Richard Dawkins is a major purveyor of
this view but Victor Stinger is even more so. Stinger, in his God the Failed Hypothesis[1]
is the genius who stated the "who created God" thing, one of the
hallmarks of atheist ignorance. The method is super simple. Stinger does
mess not with trying to probe the heavens or reaching beyond our tiny
little sample of reality on this dust mote, he does it the "obvious way"
by creating a straw man argument for God then knocking it down. The
straw man is based upon a selective understanding guaranteed to denude
belief of a factual basis and to load a pile of facts in the unbelieving
camp so as to create the impression that atheism is a choice based upon
the full brunt of scientific fact, and religious belief has nothing
going for it but ignorance and superstition. This tactic I call the
“fortress of facts.” The fortress of facts is something atheists deny
vehemently but it’s obvious in almost every argument they make. Most
scientifically inclined observers know that science is not merely the
accumulation of a pile of facts. Science is not about proving facts or
manufacturing a pile of facts so much as it is about testing hypothesis
in a systematic fashion. Science is more about disproving than about
proving. There are aspects of reality that beyond the ability of science
to disprove. God is one of these. Yet, even though atheists will deny
the words “fortress of facts” if we observe the way they argument this
is undeniable consequence of their logic and their approach.
Science and the “God Hypothesis.”
The
whole idea of referring to God as an hypothesis in the first place is
an attempt to classify the God concept under the rubric of scientific
domain. If God is an hypothesis then he’s something science can dispute,
because science is about testing hypothesis. Of course the notion
weather or not God can be so classified is a theological question and
must be answered theologians. Since atheist denuded theology of any
valid content (through sheer mocking and ridicule) then there’s no one
to respond who atheists wont mock and ridicule. Thus truth by
stipulation is written into the atheist ideology. This overall move
turns upon the fortress of facts idea because a hypothesis without fact
can’t be maintained. Thus while denying up front that they think about
science in this manner we can see the fortress of facts as the basic
assumption in the over all atheist approach to belief. We see the
fortress of facts at work in the writings of Singer:
says
Victor Stenger in "God: The Failed Hypothesis." The book is subtitled,
"How science shows that God does not exist." Chapter by chapter, the
author shows that the existence of God would suggest certain realities
in the world that would be verifiable by scientific inquiry. But the
data don't support these would-be realities, thereby providing evidence
that no God exists.
Stenger,
retired professor of Philosophy at University of Colorado and of
Physics and Astronomy at University of Hawaii, is successful in this
line of reasoning because of his clearly stated definition that he is
not just talking about any kind of god, but specifically the capital-g
God of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.[2]
We can see the assumption of the fortress of facts in Skeptic Magazine article reviewing[3]
Stinger’s book: “conspicuous by his Absence.” "Stinger lays out the
evidence from cosmology, particle physics and quantum mechanics showing
that the universe appears exactly as it should if there is no creator."
This is a factual approach. The facts show God doesn’t exist because if
he did things would be different. To show this we use our tremendous
fact finding potential in science.
How
does he reckon it should if there is no God? He constructs his own
fundamentalist driven version of what God would be like. Of course he
has no knowledge of that. It's really a disproof of the atheist big
nightmare of the fundamentalist concept of God, in other words, a straw
man argument not a real disproof of anything valid. Beyond that, which
is a deal breaker--because how you set up the inquiry in the first place
determines everything-- there are other criticisms. For example his
take on the issue of prayer studies. This is also proof of the "fortress
of facts" concept which I am always pointing out that atheist ideology
teaches. No atheist has of yet accepted the notion when I point it but
it's clear that they argue from it all the time. The idea science gives
them a big pile of facts but we believers have no facts. The facts are
going to tell us if we can believe in God or not, of course the facts
are only facts if they are “scientific” (ie in this case that means if
they work against belief in God).
For
instance, he tackles the question of the efficacy of prayer, in which
the followers of these faiths fervently believe. If God exists, he
argues, prayers could be shown to have been answered, using verifiable,
replicable studies. And indeed, such studies have been conducted, with
universally negative results. (Some studies, which supposedly yielded
positive results, used flawed methodology and thus the conclusion is
dismissible.) "If prayer were as important as it is taken to be by Jews,
Christians and Muslims, its positive effects should be obvious and
measurable," Stenger concludes. "They are not. It does not appear -
based on the scientific evidence - that a God exists who answers prayers
in any significant, observable way."[4]
Here
again we have the same idea at work, science gives us a fortress of
facts that religion can’t match, never mind the fact that we have
selected which facts are important to observe and what assumptions about
God set up the facts we want to select. For example consider the flip
flop that has happened in regard to these prayer studies. Back in the day
when they were being done (late 80s, early 90s) they were big news the
atheists were on defensive grasping at whatever straws they could to
answer, since they had no counter studies and counter data. One of the
major arguments they used to make on every message board, every blog,
ever news group where this was debated was that you can’t control for
outside prayer. The defenders of the studies, such as Dr. Byrd and Dr.
Harris did their own straw-clutching to answer this argument about
control. Since that time, however, thing have turned around. A study
with the largest data base was done that showed very little or no
difference in the two groups. The atheists have gone ape making the
argument that “prayer is disproved.” The
study detractors (now the theists) argue “you can’t control for outside
prayer, the argument atheists used to make. The atheists say “O sure
you can.” When I point out that they used to make this argument
themselves many of them have said “no atheist ever argued that.” How
quickly we forget. I remember. I have the article. Gary P Posner did
argue it:
The
most striking flaw in this study's methodology is one forthrightly
acknowledged by Byrd. "It was assumed that some of the patients in both
groups would be prayed for by people not associated with the study; this
was not controlled for ... Therefore, 'pure' groups were not attained
in this study." In other words, the focus of the study - prayer - was
"not controlled for," except that three to seven intercessors were
assigned to pray daily for each patient in the IP group, and none was
assigned to the controls. Thus, although unlikely, it is nevertheless
theoretically possible that the control group received as many prayers
as did the IP group, if not more.
If
"intercessory prayer" was not controlled, except that each IP patient
was assumed to have received somewhere between X+3 and X+7 prayers
daily, as opposed to X+0 for the control patients, what are we to
conclude? That God is conditioned in a Pavlovian manner to automatically
respond to the side with the greater number of troops, even though the
assigned intercessors had no emotional ties to their patients, and even
though the IP patients were otherwise no more worthy of healing as a
group than were the controls? Does God not know that the side with fewer
troops is in just as much need of assistance? Where is the evidence of
his omniscience and compassion?
And
what can be said about the evidence for God's omnipotence? It is true,
assuming that Byrd's data are valid, that in the IP group, 5 percent
fewer patients needed diuretics, 7 percent fewer needed antibiotics, 6
percent fewer needed respiratory intubation and/or ventilation, 6
percent fewer developed congestive heart failure, 5 percent fewer
developed pneumonia, and 5 percent fewer suffered cardiopulmonary
arrest. But no significant differences were found among the other twenty
categories, including mortality, despite explicit prayers "for
prevention of ... death." And, reports Byrd, "Even though for [the six
seemingly significant] variables the P values were less than .05, they could not be considered statistically significant
because of the large number of variables examined. I used two methods
to overcome this statistical limitation ... [the] severity score, and
multivariant [sic] analysis" (emphasis added).[5]
So
what happens if we say Posner was right? These studies don’t measure
the truth of prayer because you can’t control for outside prayer? The
study that shows no difference is meaningless. Of course the atheists
will say but the theist still has no facts to back prayer. Of course
they are just selecting the facts that support there view. There are
facts that back prayer but they are ignored because they counter the
ideological assumptions of naturalism. That will be dealt with in
subsequent chapters.
The
assumptions that Stenger has to make to make his straw man work is that
God is exactly as he wants him to be. The reviewer at Simply Einstein (ibid) defends him against the charge of straw man.
The
logical purist may object that one can't "prove a negative," that one
can no more disprove God than disprove the existence of Santa Claus or
an invisible unicorn in the backyard. But the fact that most people do
believe in God while rejecting the latter two is part of the point.
Given no real reason to believe in Santa Claus or invisible unicorns,
people reject such beliefs. Yet they hold tenaciously not only to belief
in their God, but specifically to the tenets that their religion
teaches about him. It is really these tenets that Stinger is addressing.
By showing that they are wrong, like the efficacy of prayer or the
notion that God fine-tuned the universe specifically for the sake of
existence of humanity, the author demonstrates that belief in God is
equally unfounded.[6]
Yet
this is not much of a defense. The so called "tenets" are self selected
to be one's he picks out that he thinks he can beat. No religious creed
or Bible passage commands us to believe on the basis of the fine tuning
argument. No scientific argument can disprove the notion that God has
fine tuned the universe to bear life. The only thing science can prove
about fine tuning is that we can't prove it. On the other hand far
greater scientists than Stinger say his arguments against fine tuning
are not so good. The person answering mail for John Polkinghorne’s website (formerly physicist at Cambridge second only to Hawking, who retired to be a Christian minister) says:
Stenger
did some marginally useful scientific work but his claims are far too
dogmatic. As for his suggestion that Anthropic Fine tuning is a
non-problem because of his simplistic program MonkeyGod that purports to
simulate universes and “show” that anthropic universes are commonplace,
I know of no serious cosmologist who takes this seriously. Martin
Rees’s “Just Six Numbers” is a good guide to the real science.[7]
Polkinghorne himself says:
“I have read several of the books expressing the current outburst of
militant atheism, but not the two you mention. My impression is that
they are polemical rather than presenting reasoned arguments of a
truth-seeking kind, and that they largely depend upon attacking
caricature distortions of religious belief.”[8]
Others find the straw man to be Stenger's usual method:
Stinger—a
retired physicist who is leveraging his scientific background to try to
discredit anything and everything that smacks of spirituality—doesn’t
respect his intellectual opponents enough to get their positions right;
in some instances he appears to deliberately misrepresent their views;
and, most important, his own reasoning is characterized by unremitting
carelessness. Moreover, there is a method to his carelessness—it enables
him to systematically avoid addressing the tough arguments of his
opponents. Hence we find him frequently setting up a straw man by
misrepresenting the debate as a simple matter of science and reason
versus superstition. Once having defined this as the issue, all he needs
to do is assume the attitude of an outraged scientist and heap on the
ridicule. But if he had done his homework and taken the trouble to
really understand the science and logic supporting quantum spirituality,
he would have discovered that it is harder to dismiss than he had
imagined. Indeed, the more carefully—and yes, critically—one considers
the issues, the more one finds quantum spirituality to
be eminently
worthy of serious consideration, as a plausible and measured approach to
the most long-standing and intractable questions at the basis of
science.[9]
Stenger
doesn't deal with what I consider to be the major God arguments, the
ground of being stuff of Tillich and Schleiermacher. Like most of the
cult of atheism he's in thrall to his own version of science which is
laced with metaphysics. Like most of them they think they are being
scientific and philosophical when they denounce philosophy and theology
and talk about how science is the only form of knowledge, and then they
are bringing ontology in through the back door to put fiber into their
world view. Stenger's straw man making is standard procedure for the new
atheist. They are always spitting out some line with a dashing air of
how theology is stupid so they don't have to read it. They know it's
stupid even though they haven't read any. The whole point of showing
they haven't read is usually because they are getting the ideas wrong
but they never seem to care.
The fortress of facts concept is seen in the works of the high priest of New Atheism, Richard Dawkins.
An
atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no
explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a
good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a
better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though
logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and
that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.[10]
Intellectually
“fulfilled atheist” is code for “we have the facts.” What he’s clearly
saying is that it was unsatisfying when we didn’t have the facts, God is
still be rejected even though he has no real reason for it, but it’s
not satisfying. The only thing that makes it satisfying is when we get a
pile of facts. That’s because of the explanatory value. He makes it
quite clear this is his motive reason for saying these things that he’s
after is expletory power and what constitutes an explanation is a
scientifically verifiable fact that can’t be disputed.
An even clearer example:
-Faith,
being belief that isn't based on evidence, is the principal vice of any
religion. And who, looking at Northern Ireland or the Middle East, can
be confident that the brain virus of faith is not exceedingly dangerous?
One of the stories told to the young Muslim suicide bombers is that
martyrdom is the quickest way to heaven — and not just heaven but a
special part of heaven where they will receive their special reward of
72 virgin brides. It occurs to me that our best hope may be to provide a
kind of "spiritual arms control": send in specially trained theologians
to deescalate the going rate in virgins.[11]
As juxtaposed to the next paragraph:
Well,
science is not religion and it doesn't just come down to faith.
Although it has many of religion's virtues, it has none of its vices.
Science is based upon verifiable evidence. Religious faith not only
lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy,
shouted from the rooftops. Why else would Christians wax critical of
doubting Thomas? The other apostles are held up to us as exemplars of
virtue because faith was enough for them. Doubting Thomas, on the other
hand, required evidence. Perhaps he should be the patron saint of
scientists.[12]
The
implication is we have the facts, that are why we understand the world.
Further implication is that the world is only the surface level of
physical workings. The first paragraph is clearly arguing from guilt by
association. It’s asserting that if there are some brutal dangerous
religious people they must be that way because of religion; therefore
all religious people are potentially that way. If a Christian apologist
for example were to talk about the Nazis and how their scientifically
engaged members conducted inhumane experiments on Jews in concentrating
camps, and tried to drawn conclusions about the dangerous nature of
science based upon that association, the atheists would set up a howl.
It would not take the atheist long to see the fallacy of guilt by
association in that case. Never mind that, and let’s also skim over the
fact that he’s using a straw man version of faith tailored to make it
seem more stupid. While faith per se is not based upon facts there’s
nothing in the nature of faith that causes one to ignore facts. He tried
to incriminate the joy of discovery which is he hardly in a position to
critique since he’s never experienced and can’t understand it. That
sense of joy has nothing to do with ignoring facts. For me part of that
joy came form the realization that my faith is backed by facts. The more
important point is that he’s placing the tailored example of no facts
along side the self selected example of fact finding to create the sense
of the skeptic haing a huge pile of pile of fact that confirms his
world view while in fac the believe purposely rejects having facts. That
is a perfect example of the fortress of facts mentality.
While
it is anecdotal, evidence from the popular level shows, to some extent,
the effects of this kid of thinking upon the rank and file of the
atheist movement. There’s a popular website by one of the troops called
“God is Imaginary.” It’s far from special, just run of the mill message
board sloganeering and propaganda. It does express the fortress of facts
mentality clearly.
“God is imaginary: Proof no 11, notice that there is no scientific evidence.”
"There is no scientific evidence indicating that God exists. We all know that. For example:
• God has never left any physical evidence of his existence on earth.
• None of Jesus' "miracles" left any physical evidence either. (see this page)
•
God has never spoken to modern man, for example by taking over all the
television stations and broadcasting a rational message to everyone.
• The resurrected Jesus has never appeared to anyone. (see this page)
• The Bible we have is provably incorrect and is obviously the work of primitive men rather than God. (see this page)
• When we analyze prayer with statistics, we find no evidence that God is "answering prayers." (see this page)
• Huge, amazing atrocities like the Holocaust and AIDS occur without any response from God.
• And so on…
Let's agree that there is no empirical evidence showing that God exists.
If
you think about it as a rational person, this lack of evidence is
startling. There is not one bit of empirical evidence indicating that
today's "God", nor any other contemporary god, nor any god of the past,
exists. In addition we know that:
1. If we had scientific proof of God's existence, we would talk about the "science of God" rather than "faith in God".
2. If we had scientific proof of God's existence, the study of God would be a scientific endeavor rather than a theological one.
3.
If we had scientific proof of God's existence, all religious people
would be aligning on the God that had been scientifically proven to
exist. Instead there are thousands of gods and religions.
The
reason for this lack of evidence is easy for any unbiased observer to
see. The reason why there is no empirical evidence for God is because
God is imaginary."[13]
The
major thrust of that bit of flim flam is that “we” (our side) we have
all the facts in a great big pile and they don’t have a single one. Most
thinking atheists and most scientifically minded atheists put it in
terms of “explanatory power.” Appeal to God doesn’t explain the world as
well as does science. That’s a more sophisticated version of the
fortress of facts. Dawkins has a variation on this argument.
Unfortunately,
Dawkins pushes envelope too far. He tries to turn the simple desire to
know into a moral virtue in order to make it seem that science is more
moral than religion:
Humans
have a great hunger for explanation. It may be one of the main reasons
why humanity so universally has religion, since religions do aspire to
provide explanations. We come to our individual consciousness in a
mysterious universe and long to understand it. Most religions offer a
cosmology and a biology, a theory of life, a theory of origins, and
reasons for existence. In doing so, they demonstrate that religion is,
in a sense, science; it's just bad science. Don't fall for the argument
that religion and science operate on separate dimensions and are
concerned with quite separate sorts of questions. Religions have
historically always attempted to answer the questions that properly
belong to science. Thus religions should not be allowed now to retreat
away from the ground upon which they have traditionally attempted to
fight. They do offer both a cosmology and a biology; however, in both
cases it is false.[14]
He’s
saying that religion is trespassing upon questions of science, yet he
doesn’t even bother to point out that religion was there first. Just
because people in the prehistoric and ancient worlds mixed religious and
scientific explanations—not having developed science religion was all
they had to fall back on—doesn’t mean
that’s the reason religion came to exist. As science has developed
there is no reason why religious people can use it to understand
questions that fall into he overlap between the two domains. The
questions he’s discussing are overlap questions and modern thinking
religious people have used to science to help answer them. In
making this point he asserts that science is the fact giving endeavor
while religion is content to have faith and do without facts. Of course
that’s not a good description of most modern thinking religious people.
Dawkins
wants us to think in terms of the fortress of facts, nothing provides
scientific facts like science does. Of course he’s not mentioning the
fact that it’s only one kind of explanation. There are facets to the
question about the origin of life than just the physical workings of
evolution. There are questions people have asked for thousands of years
that science is not prepared to answer. There are questions that science
is not allowed to answer because they are out of its domain. These are
questions about the meaning of the life, the reason why life is, and the
ultimate “destiny” (for want of a better word) of humans. These are
things science can’t tell us they are the reasons religion exits. So the
kinds of facts that religion provides the uses for faith are in a
different area than those provided by science. The
nature of the atheist view point is self selected to focus only upon
the kinds of facts that science provides and it offers a biased,
fallacious and inaccurate view of religious thinking. It also provides a
distorted understanding of what science is. Science is not a pile of
facts. Science is not even about fact making. Science is about
hypothesis testing; it’s not about proving facts but testing for
verification and falsifying premises. The overall “big picture” painted
by science is a lot more dependent upon they a particular culture views
life than it is the demonstration f a pile of facts.
Not
only is this notion of science as a big pile of facts that guarantees
an accurate understanding of reality a view that most scientists don’t
take to the understanding of science, it’s specifically contradicted by
the vast majority of historians and philosophers of science. While there
is a great of contradiction between philosophers of science, the one
thing they all agree on is that this fortress of facts idea is nonsense.
First let’s turn to two major philosophers of science, Karl Popper and
Thomas S. Kuhn. These two are destined to be linked since they had a
major showdown to so speak over Kuhn’s theory, in the early to mid 60s.
In that day Kuhn was thought to have won, his views went on to define
philosophy of science for about three decades. I suspect that in this
day popper is more popular and is probably now thought to have won. In
reality, however, I think talk of who won is foolish because no only is
the field still evolving but it’s diversifying and moving away form
both, so neither of them won really. There is coming to be a plurality
of models. Before going into that I’m going to examine Popper first,
then Kuhn. What all of this evolving plurality agrees upon is that
science is too complex and problematic to be regarded as anything like a
fortress of facts!
[1] Victor J. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis:How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007.
[2] Jerry Petersen, Simply Einstein, Review “Victor J. Stinger, God the Failed Hypothesis.” Online web page:
[9] David
Sharf, “Pseudo Science and Stenger’s Quantum gods: Mistaken,
Misinformed, and Misleading.” NeuroQuantology, Vol 8, No 1 (2010),
online copy URL: http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/272 visited Jan 2 2012 Sharf received his Ph.D. in 1986 from Johns Hopkins University, in the philosophy of physics. The title of his dissertation was: Quantum Mechanics and the Program for the Unity of Science
[10] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker. Why The Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,inc. 2004, 6.
