nameandnature

Over at Ex-apologist's blog, the former apologist links to a paper and a response to it which straddle the boundary between physics and theology. I'm a sucker for this sort of stuff. The paper is J. Brian Pitts's Why the Big Bang Singularity Does Not Help the Kalam Cosmological Argument for Theism, and the response comes from William Lane Craig, who revitalised the Kalam argument for the existence of God.

There are some real physicists reading this, so I'd be interested to know what you think of this stuff. I've left a comment over on the ex-apologist's blog, which I've pasted below:

I love this stuff: it combines physics, philosophy and religion. I don't think Craig's response addresses Pitts's paper terribly well: they appear to be talking past each other. I have a physics degree gathering dust and a passing acquaintance with the philosophy of science, and I don't find Craig terribly convincing (but then, I'm also an ex-Christian atheist, so I wouldn't, would I?)

Craig seems to have misunderstood Pitts. Craig says the Kalam does not rely on a singularity but merely on the universe having a finite age, but as a matter of fact, Craig does appear to argue that the Big Bang singularity represent divine intervention, so Pitts's Cosmic Destroyer argument seems to have some force. When Pitts makes this argument, he accepts, for the sake of the argument, Craig's own claim that the past singularity of the Big Bang represents God's creative intervention, and asks why someone who accepts that claim would not also say that God intervenes destructively in black holes. The idea that God would do so probably seems silly to Christians, but Pitts says that on Craig's own argument, this feeling of silliness isn't well motivated. On the other hand, if the feeling of silliness is correct, perhaps Craig is wrong about singularities. A third possibility is for Craig to find some way to distinguish between the singularities, but Craig does not address this directly in his response.

Pitts's thoughts about possible other theories aren't necessarily an expression of Pitts's theological commitments (whatever those may be). The reference to van Fraassen is a clue (and the fact that this stuff is published in a philosophy of science journal): Pitts is talking about the arguments between scientific realism and more empiricist philosophies of science which owe something to logical positivism, such as van Fraassen's own constructive empiricism. He's taking a middle position: the unobservable objects posited by theories are meaningful but we ought to be careful about how far we believe they are real (van Fraassen says we can have no grounds to do so, though, contra positivism, we can accept that our theories meaningfully make such claims about unobservables; realists say there are grounds for believing in unobservables). Craig appears to be quite a bit more of a realist about General Relativity than Pitts, or indeed than working physicists like Sean Carroll.

The references to Bach-Weyl and so on are waved away (I'm no expert, but I think in that specific case, rightly, since as far as I can tell Pitts is talking about an early, failed attempt at a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism), but the possibility of a theory which does not give lengths (durations) to curves should worry Craig, unless he is completely committed to GR. What does it mean to say "the Universe began to exist" on such a theory, or if the universe looks like Carroll thinks it does? Dennett: "What Professor Craig does, brilliantly and with a wonderful enthusiasm, is he takes our everyday intuitions—our gut feelings about what’s plausible, what’s counterintuitive, what couldn’t possibly be true—and he cantilevers them out into territory where they’ve never been tested, in cosmology where whatever the truth is, it’s mindboggling." (thanks to Daniel Fincke for that one).

A while back Andrew Brown over at the Grauniad posted a list of the 6 Points of New Atheism. There was a bit of a bun-fight among the atheists about this, because, though Brown's an atheist, he was criticising Dawkins Our Leader. It got even more fun when Dawkins turned up in the comments. (My own contribution was to treat the 6 Points as one of those internet quiz memes: I score 2.5/6 for New Atheism, which makes me slightly more Old Skool than New, I suppose). It's a bit like that Southpark episode where the Unified Atheist League fights the Allied Atheist Allegiance. What's the fuss about? Here's part of it.

Most Christians say God is omniscient and omnipresent. Yet the Christian woman whom Yellow blogged about, the one who wrote to a Christian problem page with her self-pleasuring problem, clearly doesn't really believe God is present and watching her all the time. But she at least believes that believing those things is virtuous for a Christian. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls this latter sort of faith belief in belief.

This doesn't just apply to religion. palmer1984 posted a poll which suggest similar things apply to moral beliefs. It is virtuous to say that we should care for people in other countries as much as we do for those in our own, but most people don't really believe it.

Some people, especially those with a scientific education (or a certain sort of evangelical Christian background), think of belief as affirmation of a set of propositions. To those people, it's obvious that these propositions should not be internally contradictory or conflict with reality. But, as Saunt Yudkowsky observes "it is a physical fact that you can write "The sky is green!" next to a picture of a blue sky without the paper bursting into flames". The same applies inside our heads. Dr Vilayanur Ramachandan's fascinating experiments on anosognosia patients seem to show that explaining why a belief is valid and changing your beliefs are separate systems in the brain.

I take Yudkowsky's point that speaking of belief doesn't capture the psychology here precisely because "beliefs" are often taken to be propositional sentences, but our brains don't deal in those much. Instead of talking about what someone "really believes", I suppose he'd prefer to say that the woman speaks-as-if she believes God is omnipotent and omnipresent, but, at least in some instances, behaves-as-if God is not.

Brown says he's annoyed with neo-atheist rationalist fundamentalist sceptics because neo-atheists think that all brains work like theirs or can be convinced to do so, but that thinking is wildly optimistic. This is the point of Brown's Freud vs God post, which you should all go and read. See you in 5 minutes.

Back? Brown's getting this stuff from Dennett and from anthropologists who study religion, such as Pascal Boyer. Boyer details his views over at a sceptics' website, where he tells sceptics off for their narrow understanding of religion. Another anthropologist, Scott Atran, does a similar thing on edge.org, responding to Sam Harris and others in the wake of the Beyond Belief conference back in 2006.

The anthropologists say that religious beliefs should not be understood as propositional statements about the world, however much they resemble them. What of God's omnipresence and omniscience? One thing religious people do with this belief is check whether an action is morally right by imagining what their model of God would think of it. This might be done retrospectively, if a religious context provokes thoughts of God. They certainly don't anticipate-as-if God is in the room and watching.

Brown has linked the ideas of the anthropologists with the observation that most people don't try to formulate coherent propositions on anything, including religion. I don't know whether the anthropologists would agree with this, I'd need to read more of their stuff to tell. It's clear that most religious people do try to draw a map of the real world. As Yudkowsky illustrates with his dragon-believer example, most believers already know what excuses to make for the apparent absence of dragons or gods, even as they claim belief in them, so they're keeping a map of the real world somewhere. The believers without the map are the ones other believers regard either as shiny-eyed lunatics, like the folk who don't go to doctors because God will heal them; or as heroes of the faith for showing such belief, like the monks and martyrs. I'd paraphrase Brown's argument as "most people don't see the virtue of having one map for all occasions, or of being able to articulate it".

Of course, if you're a religious believer, you might find the anthropologists' approach a little patronising. Some of you seem to have beliefs which are propositions about how the world is. As I said over on robhu's journal a while back, Dawkins at least does believers the courtesy of taking them at their word. What do you think?

robhu linked to a post on convert_me in which pooperman realises he's an atheist after reading Dawkins, Dennett and Harris. There's some interesting reflection on the origins of scriptural literalism, which is related to the stuff about science and truth in my last post. pooperman writes:

Basically, Harris' has ceded--on behalf of religion, apparently--the hermeneutic of scripture to the fundamentalists. What Harris fails to understand is the scriptural basis for a more-moderate and more-metaphorical (as well as through the changing lens of historical contexts) interpretation of much of scripture. Also, Harris presumes that the literal approach to scripture is more-primitive, more-fundamental--that the "first" believers in these ancient religions understood and interpreted the texts in a straightforward and unquestioningly literal way. ... There is a good chance, IMO, that Harris has this completely backwards. It is entirely possible that religious moderation is more primitive, and that literalism is a more modern corruption of religion--a corruption from the outside, not from within. What is the source of this corruption? It is reasonable to suggest that the rise of science and the increasing rhetorical value of the "objectively true" that science (and, more to the point, engineering) has infected the religious mindset and caused some of the religious to prematurely devalue the indirect truths and insights of a beautifully-complex metaphorical image and to seek to replace these images as images with a direct, parsimonious, and straightforward representation of Truth, without sacrificing the images themselves. The literalists have, I think, slit their spiritual wrists with Ockham's razor.

I've often heard that evangelicalism is a modern heresy, but I've never seen the historical evidence for it. Does anyone have any references for that idea?