How do you justify the Scientific Method? It works!

First meeting between Richard Dawkins and Deepak Chopra

H/T John Davison on Dorset Humanists Facebook group.

Is faith compatible with reason? Big Questions BBC1

source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_mOejHm_aQ

Stephen Law and Richard Dawkins at ThinkWeek 2013, Oxford

 Topics discussed: - Very brief notes

Threats to theism by reproducing naturalistically religious feelings.

Labelling children with religious beliefs. Schools should be teach about religion. Authoritarian Schools. Religious v Political schools. Accord Coalition.

Reasonable belief needs evidence, in most realms but is this an infinite regress? What about 'divinitas' belief, is that not reasonable belief? No! It is not cross checkable and Power of Suggestion. Evidence for your wife loving you.

Mind-body problem & conceptual problems. (43 minutes)

Questions: Scientific Method - Maths truths derived by deduction; science and ethics: science does not have last word; if X is a good value you are illogical if you dont believe Y eg point out inconsistencies if favour abortion but don't believe in Z.

Ben Stein duped Dawkins to talk about aliens creating life forms on Earth, editing discussion (@1 hr)

1hr 6min: Dawkins "religion comes from binding, binds together people of faith. Faith is one of the great evils in the world, to the extent that religion organises faith, its part of that"

Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?

source: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/

I've reproduced most of The Atlantic article here ("..." indicates deletions from the article).

The quotes are crabsallover highlights.

APR 23 2012, 3:41 PM ET 377

"I think at some point you need to provoke people. Science is meant to make people uncomfortable."

... (picture)

It is hard to know how our future descendants will regard the little sliver of history that we live in. It is hard to know what events will seem important to them, what the narrative of now will look like to the twenty-fifth century mind. We tend to think of our time as one uniquely shaped by the advance of technology, but more and more I suspect that this will be remembered as an age of cosmology---as the moment when the human mind first internalized the cosmos that gave rise to it. Over the past century, since the discovery that our universe is expanding, science has quietly begun to sketch the structure of the entire cosmos, extending its explanatory powers across a hundred billion galaxies, to the dawn of space and time itself. It is breathtaking to consider how quickly we have come to understand the basics of everything from star formation to galaxy formation to universe formation. And now, equipped with the predictive power of quantum physics, theoretical physicists are beginning to push even further, into new universes and new physics, into controversies once thought to be squarely within the domain of theology or philosophy. 

In January, Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and Director of the Origins Institute at Arizona State University, published A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, a book that, as its title suggests, purports to explain how something---and not just any something, but the entire universe---could have emerged from nothing, the kind of nothing implicated by quantum field theory (crabsallover Wikipedia link). But before attempting to do so, the book first tells the story of modern cosmology, whipping its way through the big bang to microwave background radiation and the discovery of dark energy. It's a story that Krauss is well positioned to tell; in recent years he has emerged as an unusually gifted explainer of astrophysics. One of his lectures has been viewed over a million times on YouTube and his cultural reach extends to some unlikely places---last year Miley Cyrus came under fire when she tweeted a quote from Krauss that some Christians found offensive. Krauss' book quickly became a bestseller, drawing raves from popular atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, the latter of which even compared it to The Origin of Species for the way its final chapters were supposed to finally upend the "last trump card of the theologian." 

By early spring, media coverage of "A Universe From Nothing" seemed to have run its course, but then on March 23rd the New York Times ran a blistering review of the book, written by David Albert, a philosopher of physics from Columbia University. Albert, who has a PhD in theoretical physics, argued that Krauss' "nothing" was in fact a something and did so in uncompromising terms: 

"The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields... they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story."

Because the story of modern cosmology has such deep implications for the way that we humans see ourselves and the universe, it must be told correctly and without exaggeration---in the classroom, in the press and in works of popular science. To see two academics, both versed in theoretical physics, disagreeing so intensely on such a fundamental point is troubling. Not because scientists shouldn't disagree with each other, but because here they're disagreeing about a claim being disseminated to the public as a legitimate scientific discovery. Readers of popular science often assume that what they're reading is backed by a strong consensus. Having recently interviewed Krauss for a different project, I reached out to him to see if he was interested in discussing Albert's criticisms with me. He said that he was, and mentioned that he would be traveling to New York on April 20th to speak at a memorial service for Christopher Hitchens. As it happened, I was also due to be in New York that weekend and so, last Friday, we were able to sit down for the extensive, and at times contentious, conversation that follows. 

I know that you're just coming from Christopher Hitchens' memorial service. How did that go?

Krauss: It was a remarkable event for a remarkable man, and I felt very fortunate to be there. I was invited to give the opening presentation in front of all of these literary figures and dignitaries of various sorts, and so I began the only way I think you can begin, and that's with music from Monty Python. That got me over my initial stage fright and my concern about what to say about someone as extraordinary as Christopher. I was able to talk about a lot of the aspects of Christopher that people may not know about, including the fact that he was fascinated by science. And I also got to talk about what it felt like to be his friend. 

I closed with an anecdote, a true story about the last time I was with him. I was reading the New York Times at his kitchen table, and there was an article about the ongoing effort to keep Catholic students at elite colleges like Yale from losing their faith. The article said something like "faced with Nietzsche, coed dorms, Hitchens, and beer pong, students are likely to stray." There are two really amazing aspects of that. For one, to be so culturally ubiquitous that you can be mentioned in a sentence like that without any further explanation is pretty exceptional. But also to be sandwiched between "Nietzsche" and "beer pong" is an honor that very few of us can ever aspire to. 

I want to start with a general question about the relationship between philosophy and physics. There has been a fair amount of sniping between these two disciplines over the past few years. Why the sudden, public antagonism between philosophy and physics? 

Krauss: That's a good question. I expect it's because physics has encroached on philosophy. Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then "natural philosophy" became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers. This sense that somehow physicists, because they can't spell the word "philosophy," aren't justified in talking about these things, or haven't thought deeply about them---

Is that really a claim that you see often?

Krauss: It is. Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, "those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym." 

And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it's fairly technical. And so it's really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't.

.... (picture) Lawrence Krauss, author of "A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing"

On that note, you were recently quoted as saying that philosophy "hasn't progressed in two thousand years." But computer science, particularly research into artificial intelligence was to a large degree built on foundational work done by philosophers in logic and other formal languages. And certainly philosophers like John Rawls have been immensely influential in fields like political science and public policy. Do you view those as legitimate achievements?

Krauss: Well, yeah, I mean, look I was being provocative, as I tend to do every now and then in order to get people's attention. There are areas of philosophy that are important, but I think of them as being subsumed by other fields. In the case of descriptive philosophy you have literature or logic, which in my view is really mathematics. Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics---it's not talking about things that have affected computer science, it's mathematical logic. And again, I think of the interesting work in philosophy as being subsumed by other disciplines like history, literature, and to some extent political science insofar as ethics can be said to fall under that heading. To me what philosophy does best is reflect on knowledge that's generated in other areas. 

I'm not sure that's right. I think that in some cases philosophy actually generates new fields. Computer science is a perfect example. Certainly philosophical work in logic can be said to have been subsumed by computer science, but subsumed might be the wrong word---

Krauss: Well, you name me the philosophers that did key work for computer science; I think of John Von Neumann and other mathematicians, and---

But Bertrand Russell paved the way for Von Neumann.

Krauss: But Bertrand Russell was a mathematician. I mean, he was a philosopher too and he was interested in the philosophical foundations of mathematics, but by the way, when he wrote about the philosophical foundations of mathematics, what did he do? He got it wrong. 

But Einstein got it wrong, too---

Krauss: Sure, but the difference is that scientists are really happy when they get it wrong, because it means that there's more to learn. And look, one can play semantic games, but I think that if you look at the people whose work really pushed the computer revolution from Turing to Von Neumann and, you're right, Bertrand Russell in some general way, I think you'll find it's the mathematicians who had the big impact. And logic can certainly be claimed to be a part of philosophy, but to me the content of logic is mathematical. 

Do you find this same tension between theoretical and empirical physics?

Krauss: Sometimes, but it shouldn't be there. Physics is an empirical science. As a theoretical physicist I can tell you that I recognize that it's the experiment that drives the field, and it's very rare to have it go the other way; Einstein is of course the obvious exception, but even he was guided by observation. It's usually the universe that's surprising us, not the other way around. 

"It's usually the universe that's surpising us, not the other way around."

Moving on to your book "A Universe From Nothing," what did you hope to accomplish when you set out to write it?

Krauss: Every time I write a book, I try and think of a hook. People are interested in science, but they don't always know they're interested in science, and so I try to find a way to get them interested. Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they're interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say. 

The religious question "why is there something rather than nothing," has been around since people have been around, and now we're actually reaching a point where science is beginning to address that question. And so I figured I could use that question as a way to celebrate the revolutionary changes that we've achieved in refining our picture of the universe. I didn't write the book to attack religion, per se. The purpose of the book is to point out all of these amazing things that we now know about the universe. 

Reading some of the reactions to the book, it seems like you automatically become strident the minute you try to explain something naturally. 

Richard Dawkins wrote the afterword for the book---and I thought it was pretentious at the time, but I just decided to go with it---where he compares the book to The Origin of Species. And of course as a scientific work it doesn't some close to The Origin of Species, which is one of the greatest scientific works ever produced. And I say that as a physicist; I've often argued that Darwin was a greater scientist than Einstein. But there is one similarity between my book and Darwin's---before Darwin life was a miracle; every aspect of life was a miracle, every species was designed, etc. And then what Darwin showed was that simple laws could, in principle, plausibly explain the incredible diversity of life. And while we don't yet know the ultimate origin of life, for most people it's plausible that at some point chemistry became biology. 

What's amazing to me is that we're now at a point where we can plausibly argue that a universe full of stuff came from a very simple beginning, the simplest of all beginnings: nothing. That's been driven by profound revolutions in our understanding of the universe, and that seemed to me to be something worth celebrating, and so what I wanted to do was use this question to get people to face this remarkable universe that we live in. 

... (picture of Socrates and Aristotle)

"Philosophy hasn't progressed in two thousand years."

Your book argues that physics has definitively demonstrated how something can come from nothing. Do you mean that physics has explained how particles can emerge from so-called empty space, or are you making a deeper claim? 

Krauss: I'm making a deeper claim, but at the same time I think you're overstating what I argued. I don't think I argued that physics has definitively shown how something could come from nothing; physics has shown how plausible physical mechanisms might cause this to happen. I try to be intellectually honest in everything that I write, especially about what we know and what we don't know. 

If you're writing for the public, the one thing you can't do is overstate your claim, because people are going to believe you. They see I'm a physicist and so if I say that protons are little pink elephants, people might believe me. And so I try to be very careful and responsible. We don't know how something can come from nothing, but we do know some plausible ways that it might. 

But I am certainly claiming a lot more than just that. 

That it's possible to create particles from no particles is remarkable---that you can do that with impunity, without violating the conservation of energy and all that, is a remarkable thing. The fact that "nothing," namely empty space, is unstable is amazing. But I'll be the first to say that empty space as I'm describing it isn't necessarily nothing, although I will add that it was plenty good enough for Augustine and the people who wrote the Bible. For them an eternal empty void was the definition of nothing, and certainly I show that that kind of nothing ain't nothing anymore.  

But debating physics with Augustine might not be an interesting thing to do in 2012.

Krauss: It might be more interesting than debating some of the moronic philosophers that have written about my book. Given what we know about quantum gravity (crabsallover Wikipedia link), or what we presume about quantum gravity, we know you can create space from where there was no space. And so you've got a situation where there were no particles in space, but also there was no space. That's a lot closer to "nothing." 

But of course then people say that's not "nothing," because you can create something from it. They ask, justifiably, where the laws come from. And the last part of the book argues that we've been driven to this notion---a notion that I don't like---that the laws of physics themselves could be an environmental accident. On that theory, physics itself becomes an environmental science, and the laws of physics come into being when the universe comes into being. And to me that's the last nail in the coffin for "nothingness."

It sounds like you're arguing that 'nothing' is really a quantum vacuum, and that a quantum vacuum is unstable in such a way as to make the production of matter and space inevitable. But a quantum vacuum has properties. For one, it is subject to the equations of quantum field theory. Why should we think of it as nothing?

Krauss: That would be a legitimate argument if that were all I was arguing. By the way it's a nebulous term to say that something is a quantum vacuum in this way. That's another term that these theologians and philosophers have started using because they don't know what the hell it is, but it makes them sound like they know what they're talking about. When I talk about empty space, I am talking about a quantum vacuum, but when I'm talking about no space whatsoever, I don't see how you can call it a quantum vacuum. It's true that I'm applying the laws of quantum mechanics to it, but I'm applying it to nothing, to literally nothing. No space, no time, nothing. There may have been meta-laws that created it, but how you can call that universe that didn't exist "something" is beyond me. When you go to the level of creating space, you have to argue that if there was no space and no time, there wasn't any pre-existing quantum vacuum. That's a later stage. 

Even if you accept this argument that nothing is not nothing, you have to acknowledge that nothing is being used in a philosophical sense. But I don't really give a damn about what "nothing" means to philosophers; I care about the "nothing" of reality. And if the "nothing" of reality is full of stuff, then I'll go with that.

"But I don't really give a damn what "nothing" means to philosophers; I care about the "nothing" of reality."

But I don't have to accept that argument, because space didn't exist in the state I'm talking about, and of course then you'll say that the laws of quantum mechanics existed, and that those are something. But I don't know what laws existed then. In fact, most of the laws of nature didn't exist before the universe was created; they were created along with the universe, at least in the multiverse picture. The forces of nature, the definition of particles---all these things come into existence with the universe, and in a different universe, different forces and different particles might exist. 

We don't yet have the mathematics to describe a multiverse, and so I don't know what laws are fixed. I also don't have a quantum theory of gravity, so I can't tell you for certain how space comes into existence, but to make the argument that a quantum vacuum that has particles is the same as one that doesn't have particles is to not understand field theory. 

I'm not sure that anyone is arguing that they're the same thing--

Krauss: Well, I read a moronic philosopher who did a review of my book in the New York Times (crabsallover link: David Albert in NYT) who somehow said that having particles and no particles is the same thing, and it's not. The quantum state of the universe can change and it's dynamical. He didn't understand that when you apply quantum field theory to a dynamic universe, things change and you can go from one kind of vacuum to another. When you go from no particles to particles, it means something.

I think the problem for me, coming at this as a layperson, is that when you're talking about the explanatory power of science, for every stage where you have a "something,"---even if it's just a wisp of something, or even just a set of laws---there has to be a further question about the origins of that "something." And so when I read the title of your book, I read it as "questions about origins are over."

Krauss: Well, if that hook gets you into the book that's great. But in all seriousness, I never make that claim. In fact, in the preface I tried to be really clear that 

you can keep asking "Why?" forever. At some level there might be ultimate questions that we can't answer, but if we can answer the "How?" questions, we should, because those are the questions that matter. And it may just be an infinite set of questions, but what I point out at the end of the book is that the multiverse may resolve all of those questions. 

From Aristotle's prime mover to the Catholic Church's first cause, we're always driven to the idea of something eternal. If the multiverse really exists, then you could have an infinite object---infinite in time and space as opposed to our universe, which is finite. That may beg the question as to where the multiverse came from, but if it's infinite, it's infinite. You might not be able to answer that final question, and I try to be honest about that in the book. But if you can show how a set of physical mechanisms can bring about our universe, that itself is an amazing thing and it's worth celebrating. I don't ever claim to resolve that infinite regress of why-why-why-why-why; as far as I'm concerned it's turtles all the way down. The multiverse could explain it by being eternal, in the same way that God explains it by being eternal, but there's a huge difference: the multiverse is well motivated and God is just an invention of lazy minds. 

In the past you've spoken quite eloquently about the Multiverse, this idea that our universe might be one of many universes, perhaps an infinite number. In your view does theoretical physics give a convincing account of how such a structure could come to exist?

Krauss: In certain ways, yes---in other ways, no. 

There are a variety of multiverses that people in physics talk about. The most convincing one derives from something called inflation, which we're pretty certain happened because it produces effects that agree with almost everything we can observe. From what we know about particle physics, it seems quite likely that the universe underwent a period of exponential expansion early on. But inflation, insofar as we understand it, never ends---it only ends in certain regions and then those regions become a universe like ours. You can show that in an inflationary universe, you produce a multiverse, you produce an infinite number of causally separated universes over time, and the laws of physics are different in each one. 

There's a real mechanism where you can calculate it. And all of that comes, theoretically, from a very small region of space that becomes infinitely large over time. 

There's a calculable multiverse; it's almost required for inflation---it's very hard to get around it. All the evidence suggests that our universe resulted from a period of inflation, and it's strongly suggestive that well beyond our horizon there are other universes that are being created out of inflation, and that most of the multiverse is still expanding exponentially. 

... (picture)

An artist's rendering of the multiverse.

Is there an empirical frontier for this? How do we observe a multiverse?
Krauss: Right. How do you tell that there's a multiverse if the rest of the universes are outside your causal horizon? It sounds like philosophy. At best. But imagine that we had a fundamental particle theory that explained why there are three generations of fundamental particles, and why the proton is two thousand times heavier than the electron, and why there are four forces of nature, etc. And it also predicted a period of inflation in the early universe, and it predicts everything that we see and you can follow it through the entire evolution of the early universe to see how we got here. Such a theory might, in addition to predicting everything we see, also predict a host of universes that we don't see. If we had such a theory, the accurate predictions it makes about what we can see would also make its predictions about what we can't see extremely likely. And so I could see empirical evidence internal to this universe validating the existence of a multiverse, even if we could never see it directly. 

You have said that your book is meant to describe "the remarkable revolutions that have taken place in our understanding of the universe over the past 50 years--revolutions that should be celebrated as the pinnacle of our intellectual experience." I think that's a worthy project and, like you, I find it lamentable that some of physics' most extraordinary discoveries have yet to fully penetrate our culture. But might it be possible to communicate the beauty of those discoveries without tacking on an assault on previous belief systems, especially when those belief systems aren't necessarily scientific? 

Krauss: Well, yes. I'm sympathetic to your point in one sense, and I've had this debate with Richard Dawkins; I've often said to him that if you want people to listen to you, the best way is not to go up to them and say, "You're stupid." Somehow it doesn't get through. 

It's a fine line and it's hard to tell where to fall on this one. 

What drove me to write this book was this discovery that the nature of "nothing" had changed, that we've discovered that "nothing" is almost everything and that it has properties. That to me is an amazing discovery. So how do I frame that? I frame it in terms of this question about something coming from nothing. And part of that is a reaction to these really pompous theologians who say, "out of nothing, nothing comes," because those are just empty words. I think at some point you need to provoke people. Science is meant to make people uncomfortable. And whether I went too far on one side or another of that line is an interesting question, but I suspect that if I can get people to be upset about that issue, then on some level I've raised awareness of it.

The unfortunate aspect of it is, and I've come to realize this recently, is that some people feel they don't even need to read the book, because they think I've missed the point of the fundamental theological question. But I suspect that those people weren't open to it anyway. 

I think Steven Weinberg said it best when he said that science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God, it just makes it possible to not believe in God. That's a profoundly important point, and to the extent that cosmology is bringing us to a place where we can address those very questions, it's undoubtedly going to make people uncomfortable. 

It was a judgment call on my part and I can't go back on it, so it's hard to know. 

You've developed this wonderful ability to translate difficult scientific concepts into language that can enlighten, and even inspire a layperson. There are people in faith communities who are genuinely curious about physics and cosmology, and your book might be just the thing to quench and multiply that curiosity. But I worry that by framing these discoveries in language that is in some sense borrowed from the culture war, that you run the risk of shrinking the potential audience for them---and that could ultimately be a disservice to the ideas. 

Krauss: Ultimately, it might be. I've gone to these fundamentalist colleges and I've gone to Fox News and it's interesting, the biggest impact I've ever had is when I said, "you don't have to be an atheist to believe in evolution." I've had young kids come up to me and say that affected them deeply. So yes it's nice to point that out, but I actually think that if you read my book I never say that we know all the answers, I say that it's pompous to say that we can't know the answers. And so yeah I think that maybe there will be some people who are craving this stuff and who won't pick up my book because of the way I've framed it, but at the same time I do think that people need to be aware that they can be brave enough to ask the question "Is it possible to understand the universe without God?" And so you're right that I'm going to lose some people, but I'm hoping that at the same time I'll gain some people who are going to be brave enough to come out of the closet and ask that question. And that's what amazes me, that nowadays when you simply ask the question you're told that you're offending people. 

But let me bring that back full circle. You opened this conversation talking about seduction. You're not giving an account of seduction right now. 

Krauss: That's true, but let me take it back full circle to Hitchens. What Christopher had was charm, humor, wit and culture as weapons against nonsense, and in my own small way what I try and do in my books is exactly that. I try and infuse them with humor and culture and that's the seduction part. And in this case the seduction might be causing people to ask, "How can he say that? How can he have the temerity to suggest that it's possible to get something from nothing? Let me see what's wrong with these arguments." If I'd just titled the book "A Marvelous Universe," not as many people would have been attracted to it. But it's hard to know. I'm acutely aware of this seduction problem, and my hope is that what I can do is get people to listen long enough to where I can show some of what's going on, and at the same time make them laugh. 

The Scientific Method - Radio 4 - In Our Time - Melvyn Bragg

source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01b1ljm/In_Our_Time_The_Scientific_Method/


From the link above:
'Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the evolution of the Scientific Method, the systematic and analytical approach to scientific thought.

In 1620 the great philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon published the Novum Organum, a work outlining a new system of thought which he believed should inform all enquiry into the laws of nature. Philosophers before him had given their attention to the reasoning that underlies scientific enquiry; but Bacon's emphasis on observation and experience is often seen today as giving rise to a new phenomenon: the scientific method.

The scientific method, and the logical processes on which it is based, became a topic of intense debate in the seventeenth century, and thinkers including Isaac Newton, Thomas Huxley and Karl Popper all made important contributions. Some of the greatest discoveries of the modern age were informed by their work, although even today the term 'scientific method' remains difficult to define.

With:

Simon Schaffer Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge

John Worrall Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science

Michela Massimi Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Science at University College London.'

In Defense of Naturalism: A Response to Timothy Williamson by Gary Williams

source: http://philosophyandpsychology.com/?p=1829 September 5, 2011

I think Gary Williams gets at the core of what is wrong about Timothy Williamson's objection to Naturalism: 'In my opinion, the essence of naturalism is not a defense of the “hypothetico-deductive method” as the only worthwhile method of inquiry. Rather, the essence of naturalism is the claim that there is no supernatural realm and no supernatural entities inhabiting that realm. The essence of naturalism is thus negative, in the sense that it denies that there is something beyond the natural world (whatever that might turn out to be). Gary Williams meaning of Naturalism agrees with how HASSNERS defines naturalism viz 'The natural world (i.e. the Universe) is all that exists. All observable events in nature are explainable only by natural causes. Nothing supernatural or mystical exists.'

In full Gary Williams says (with some bold emphasis by me):-

'In a recent article in The Stone, (with emphasis by HASSNERS & another critique by Alex Rosenberg posted on HASSNERS) Timothy Williamson has some strong opinions on the intellectual strength of naturalism as a comprehensive worldview. What does Willamson mean by naturalism? He says “ [Naturalists] believe something like this: there is only the natural world, and the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method.” This is supposed to be a bad thing. Why? Because, for starters, the current science of physics might be superseded by a different physics in the future. Hence, ”Naturalism becomes the belief that there is only whatever the scientific method eventually discovers.” And how does Williamson characterize the scientific method? “[Science] involves formulating theoretical hypotheses and testing their predictions against systematic observation and controlled experiment. This is called the hypothetico-deductive method.” What’s the problem? For one, Williamson doesn’t think this method can handle the science of mathematics. Moreover, “Which other disciplines count as science? Logic? Linguistics? History? Literary theory? How should we decide? The dilemma for naturalists is this. If they are too inclusive in what they count as science, naturalism loses its bite.”

Apparently, “I don’t call myself a naturalist because I don’t want to be implicated in equivocal dogma. Dismissing an idea as “inconsistent with naturalism” is little better than dismissing it as “inconsistent with Christianity.”

And coming to the crux of his attack on the intellectual respectability of naturalism, Williamson says “Where experimentation is the likeliest way to answer a question correctly, the scientific spirit calls for the experiments to be done; where other methods — mathematical proof, archival research, philosophical reasoning — are more relevant it calls for them instead…Naturalism tries to condense the scientific spirit into a philosophical theory. But no theory can replace that spirit, for any theory can be applied in an unscientific spirit, as a polemical device to reinforce prejudice. Naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit.”

 I find this whole article to be fantastically misguided in its attempts to attack naturalists as “dogmatic” or antiscientific in “spirit”. For one, I think Williamson has not adequately captured the intellectual core of naturalism as a worldview. In my opinion, the essence of naturalism is not a defense of the “hypothetico-deductive method” as the only worthwhile method of inquiry. Rather, the essence of naturalism is the claim that there is no supernatural realm and no supernatural entities inhabiting that realm. The essence of naturalism is thus negative, in the sense that it denies that there is something beyond the natural world (whatever that might turn out to be).

But contra Williamson’s caricature, naturalism, in my view, does not impose strict edicts on the best method for investigating the natural world. Naturalism is merely the view that the natural world is all there is, with nothing extra left over. Of course, one can step into dogmatic waters in trying to explicate what exists in the natural world. But I don’t think naturalism is required to say what the ultimate constituents of the natural world is, be that atoms or some kind of quantum foam.

Is there only one universal super object and all other objects are merely modes of that super object? Or are there a lot of fundamental objects? I take it that we can’t decide on these issues from the armchair. But this is not a failure of naturalism for naturalism is essentially a reactive enterprise. Our species’ religious history has caused us to inherit theological baggage such that many people would say that there exists both a natural world and a supernatural world. Naturalism is simply the thesis that the supernatural world is a figment of our overactive imaginations. In order to make this claim, the naturalist need not say anything substantial about the best method to inquire about the natural world. It is only a thesis about the fictive status of historically proposed supernatural realms like heaven and hell as well as the supernatural entities which inhabit these realms like angels, demons, and gods. 

Accordingly, we can see that Williamson has it exactly backwards in regards to the supposed “dogmatism” of naturalism and the scientific spirit. For who is more dogmatic? The naturalistic who “dogmatically” proclaims the supernatural realm is an illusion based on the latest and greatest brain science, or the supernaturalist who proclaims he “just knows” the supernatural realm exists because he has faith in it?

For this is the great advantage of naturalism: what it “dogmatically” proclaims to exist (the non-supernatural reality) is, in principle, discoverable or encounterable by means of our fleshy sensory apparatuses coupled with whatever tools we can harness, like the telescope or atom-smasher. In contrast, what supernaturalism dogmatically proclaims to exist is not, in principle, encounterable by such flesh for the supernatural is defined as being outside of time and space. Of course, supernaturalists often claim that supernatural entities do in fact interact with our world, but such claims cannot be brought into the respectable scientific arena of prediction and manipulation, so the claims are often left unprincipled and taken on faith. And of course, supernaturalists often report experiences of the supernatural.

But in regards to explaining such experiences, it strikes me as obvious that brain science and evolutionary theory (including theories of cultural evolution) does a better job of accounting for why people believe their experiences of the supernatural are veridical. A better explanation than “the experiences are accurate” is that the brain is capable of causing hallucinations that are triggered by specific cultural contexts such as being raised in a religious environment where the interpretational framework of supernaturalism exists. It remains to be seen if a far-future atheistic society would interpret hallucinations in the same way as most people do now.

In conclusion, I have attempted to argue that Williamson is wrong to claim naturalism’s most basic claim is about the hypothetico-deductive method being the only method of inquiry. Instead, naturalism’s most basic claim is that the supernatural realm implicitly and explicitly assumed to exist by religious people throughout history is in fact, fictive. All that exists is the natural world. But naturalism as a basic thesis makes no claims about about (1) what the natural world is most fundamentally or (2) what the best method(s) for inquiring about that world are. Both of these questions need not be completely resolved in order for us to see that supernaturalism (the only true opponent of naturalism) is intellectually bankrupt.'

What Is Naturalism? By TIMOTHY WILLIAMSON

source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/what-is-naturalism/

 September 4, 2011, 5:00 PM

Edited. My emphasis in bold.

Many contemporary philosophers describe themselves as naturalists. They mean that they believe something like this: there is only the natural world, and the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. I am sometimes described as a naturalist. Why do I resist the description? Not for any religious scruple: I am an atheist of the most straightforward kind.

But accepting the naturalist slogan without looking beneath the slick packaging is an unscientific way to form one’s beliefs about the world, not something naturalists should recommend. What, for a start, is the natural world? If we say it is the world of matter, or the world of atoms, we are left behind by modern physics, which characterizes the world in far more abstract terms. Anyway, the best current scientific theories will probably be superseded by future scientific developments.

We might therefore define the natural world as whatever the scientific method eventually discovers. Thus naturalism becomes the belief that there is only whatever the scientific method eventually discovers, and (not surprisingly) the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. That is no tautology. Why can’t there be things only discoverable by non-scientific means, or not discoverable at all? 

Still, naturalism is not as restrictive as it sounds. For example, some of its hard-nosed advocates undertake to postulate a soul or a god, if doing so turns out to be part of the best explanation of our experience, for that would be an application of scientific method. Naturalism is not incompatible in principle with all forms of religion. In practice, however, most naturalists doubt that belief in souls or gods withstands scientific scrutiny.

What is meant by “the scientific method”? Why assume that science only has one method? For naturalists, although natural sciences like physics and biology differ from each other in specific ways, at a sufficiently abstract level they all count as using a single general method. It involves formulating theoretical hypotheses and testing their predictions against systematic observation and controlled experiment. This is called the hypothetico-deductive method.

One challenge to naturalism is to find a place for mathematics. Natural sciences rely on it, but should we count it a science in its own right? If we do, then the description of scientific method just given is wrong, for it does not fit the science of mathematics, which proves its results by pure reasoning, rather than the hypothetico-deductive method. Although a few naturalists, such as W.V. Quine, argued that the real evidence in favor of mathematics comes from its applications in the natural sciences, so indirectly from observation and experiment, that view does not fit the way the subject actually develops. When mathematicians assess a proposed new axiom, they look at its consequences within mathematics, not outside. On the other hand, if we do not count pure mathematics a science, we thereby exclude mathematical proof by itself from the scientific method, and so discredit naturalism. For naturalism privileges the scientific method over all others, and mathematics is one of the most spectacular success stories in the history of human knowledge. 

Which other disciplines count as science? Logic? Linguistics? History? Literary theory? How should we decide? The dilemma for naturalists is this. If they are too inclusive in what they count as science, naturalism loses its bite. Naturalists typically criticize some traditional forms of philosophy as insufficiently scientific, because they ignore experimental tests. How can they maintain such objections unless they restrict scientific method to hypothetico-deductivism? But if they are too exclusive in what they count as science, naturalism loses its credibility, by imposing a method appropriate to natural science on areas where it is inappropriate. Unfortunately, rather than clarify the issue, many naturalists oscillate. When on the attack, they assume an exclusive understanding of science as hypothetico-deductive. When under attack themselves, they fall back on a more inclusive understanding of science that drastically waters down naturalism. Such maneuvering makes naturalism an obscure article of faith. 

I don’t call myself a naturalist because I don’t want to be implicated in equivocal dogma. Dismissing an idea as “inconsistent with naturalism” is little better than dismissing it as “inconsistent with Christianity.”

Still, I sympathize with one motive behind naturalism — the aspiration to think in a scientific spirit. It’s a vague phrase, but one might start to explain it by emphasizing values like curiosity, honesty, accuracy, precision and rigor. What matters isn’t paying lip-service to those qualities — that’s easy — but actually exemplifying them in practice — the hard part. We needn’t pretend that scientists’ motives are pure. They are human. Science doesn’t depend on indifference to fame, professional advancement, money, or comparisons with rivals. Rather, truth is best pursued in social environments, intellectual communities, that minimize conflict between such baser motives and the scientific spirit, by rewarding work that embodies the scientific virtues. Such traditions exist, and not just in natural science.

The scientific spirit is as relevant in mathematics, history, philosophy and elsewhere as in natural science. Where experimentation is the likeliest way to answer a question correctly, the scientific spirit calls for the experiments to be done; where other methods — mathematical proof, archival research, philosophical reasoning — are more relevant it calls for them instead. Although the methods of natural science could beneficially be applied more widely than they have been so far, the default assumption must be that the practitioners of a well-established discipline know what they are doing, and use the available methods most appropriate for answering its questions. Exceptions may result from a conservative tradition, or one that does not value the scientific spirit. Still, impatience with all methods except those of natural science is a poor basis on which to identify those exceptions. Naturalism tries to condense the scientific spirit into a philosophical theory. But no theory can replace that spirit, for any theory can be applied in an unscientific spirit, as a polemical device to reinforce prejudice. Naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit.

Timothy Williamson is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a visiting professor at M.I.T. and Princeton. His books include “Vagueness” (1994), “Knowledge and its Limits” (2000) and “The Philosophy of Philosophy” (2007).

Why I Am a Naturalist By ALEX ROSENBERG

Organised by WW Norton and Chris Street for AtheismUK, HASSNERS & Humanists4Science, Alex Rosenberg will talk about his book 'The Atheists Guide to Reality' at Conway Hall, London on 25th February 2011 at 2-3pm. Details at HASSNERS.org.

September 17, 2011, 3:00 PM
source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/why-i-am-a-naturalist/

Edited extracts.

Naturalism is the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge.

In a recent essay for The Stone, Timothy Williamson (with my emphasis here on HASSNERS) correctly reports that naturalism is popular in philosophy. In fact it is now a dominant approach in several areas of philosophy — ethics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and, most of in all, metaphysics, the study of the basic constituents of reality. Metaphysics is important: if it turns out that reality contains only the kinds of things that hard science recognizes, the implications will be grave for what we value in human experience.

The confidence that science can solve problems of naturalism shouldn’t be mistaken for “dogmatism.” Naturalism is itself a theory with a research agenda of unsolved problems. But naturalists’ confidence that it can solve them shouldn’t be mistaken for “dogmatism,” nor can its successes be written off as “slick packaging,” two terms Professor Williamson used in his essay to describe why he rejects naturalism.

 Before taking up Professor Williamson’s challenges to naturalism, it’s worth identifying some of this success in applying science to the solution of philosophical problems, some of which even have pay-offs for science. Perhaps the most notable thing about naturalism is the way its philosophers have employed Darwin’s theory of natural selection to tame purpose. In 1784 Kant wrote, “There will never be a Newton for the blade of grass.” What he meant was that physical science could never explain anything with a purpose, whether it be human thought or a flower’s bending toward the sun. That would have made everything special about living things — and especially us — safe from a purely scientific understanding. It would have kept questions about humanity the preserve of religion, mythmaking and the humanities. Only 25 years or so later, the Newton of the blade of grass was born to the Darwin family in Shropshire, England. “On the Origin of Species” revealed how physical processes alone produce the illusion of design. Random variation and natural selection are the purely physical source of the beautiful means/ends economy of nature that fools us into seeking its designer.

Naturalists have applied this insight to reveal the biological nature of human emotion, perception and cognition, language, moral value, social bonds and political institutions. Naturalistic philosophy has returned the favour, helping psychology, evolutionary anthropology and biology solve their problems by greater conceptual clarity about function, adaptation, Darwinian fitness and individual-versus-group selection.

While dealing with puzzles that vexed philosophy as far back as Plato, naturalism has also come to grips with the very challenges Professor Williamson lays out: physics may be our best take on the nature of reality, but important parts of physics are not just “abstract,” as he says. Quantum mechanics is more than abstract. It’s weird.

400 years of scientific success in prediction, control and technology shows that physics has made a good start. We should be confident that it will do better than any other approach at getting things right. The principles of natural selection are unlikely to be overtaken by events. Naturalists recognize that science is fallible. Its self-correction, its continual increase in breadth and accuracy, give naturalists confidence in the resources they borrow from physics, chemistry and biology.

The second law of thermodynamics, the periodic table, and the principles of natural selection are unlikely to be threatened by future science. Philosophy can therefore rely on them to answer many of its questions without fear of being overtaken by events. “Why can’t there be things only discoverable by non-scientific means, or not discoverable at all?” Professor Williamson asked in his essay. His question may be rhetorical, but the naturalist has an answer to it: nothing that revelation, inspiration or other non-scientific means ever claimed to discover has yet to withstand the test of knowledge that scientific findings attain. What are those tests of knowledge? They are the experimental/observational methods all the natural sciences share, the social sciences increasingly adopt, and that naturalists devote themselves to making explicit.

... what about other items on Professor Williamson’s list of disciplines it would be hard to count as science: history, literary theory? Can science and naturalistic philosophy do without them? This is a different question from whether people, as consumers of human narratives and enjoyers of literature, can do without them.

... That doesn’t mean anyone should stop doing literary criticism any more than forgoing fiction. Naturalism treats both as fun, but neither as knowledge.

What naturalists really fear is not becoming dogmatic or giving up the scientific spirit. It’s the threat that the science will end up showing that much of what we cherish as meaningful in human life is illusory.

Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor and philosophy department chair at Duke University. He is the author of 12 books in the philosophy of biology and economics. W.W. Norton will publish his latest book, “The Atheist’s Guide to Reality,” in October 2011 in USA and in the UK January 2012.

Prof. Colin Blakemore discusses Free Will and Faith with Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks

source: via Paul Dimmick.

I soon discovered this was part of Lord Sacks BBC programme 'The Case for God' in which he interviews four atheists / humanists / sceptics.


Colin Blakemore vs the Chief Rabbi
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Open-Mindedness and Scientific Evidence

source: Steve Ollington

Are all valid ideas derived from Rationalism? A palette of reason.

source: Zoonomian

HASSNERS.org highlights

HASSNERS.org comments: Tim Jones draws insights from a talk by Stephen Fry and expands on the meaning of Rationalism and its many synonyms. Read full article. Just as some concepts are grounded in the 'Scientific Method' so can other (equally valid?) ideas be derive from Rationalism and Empiricism.

...

Yet at an emotional level, attacks on rationality can grate, especially with scientists and technologists.  I bristled when Fry likened over-zealous support for rationalism to belief in religion.  Was this the same Stephen Fry whose debate trounced the Catholic Church, and who regularly shares platforms with the likes of Richard Dawkins? But rather than rejecting rationalism, I believe he made a valid point: that it is too easy to assume a rationalist approach in all situations – however complex – when sometimes the abstract premises from which we deduce knowledge for decision making are just not up to it.

...

A palette of reason

Moving on, but with an eye to Fry’s sentiments, there seem to be an awful lot of reasonable sounding words out there: like ‘rational’, ‘empirical’, ‘evidence-based’, ‘logical’; and indeed –  ’reasonable’.  Whether in the context of drugs policy, climate change, faith schools, or whatever;  these words sit like so many pigments on a palette of reason, wielded by individuals and governments alike, to convince us – and themselves – that a particular course of action carries some special sanction.  But why do the same words frequently lead to misunderstandings and angst?

...

It seems to be down to definition and interpretation.  Boiling our list down to rationalism and empiricism (subsuming ‘evidence-based’ into empiricism and  logic into rationalism) the dictionary definitions and learned philosophical commentaries leave plenty of scope for confusion.

The  Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines rationalism as:

‘the practice or principle of basing opinions and actions on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response’, and empiricism as

‘the theory that all knowledge is derived from experience and observation‘

which seems pretty clear. But  the Oxford Pocket English Dictionary muddies the rational water by including philosophical and theological interpretations that flex the definition of rationalism to a form no scientist could agree with.  It seems scientific rationalism is just one brand.  I’ve really no idea what to make of the theological interpretation given as:

‘the practice of treating reason as the ultimate authority in religion’.

but it put me in mind of this quote from the current Pope, relayed in this interview by the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno, and equally confusing to my concept of rationality:

“religion needs science to keep itself away from superstition“

...

 And when A.N.Wilson goes on to invoke the R-word:

‘Those who dare question scientists are demonised for their irrationality. Global warming may or may not be a certainty, but anyone who queries it has his sanity questioned. Cast doubt on these gods of certainty and you are accused of wanting to suppress free expression -…’

Are scientists certain about climate science? I don't think so. So anyone who questions it should surely not be demonised! For example IPCC Synthesis report pg 17 states "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations." On pg 5 the IPCC define 'very likely' and other terms viz. 

Where uncertainty in specific outcomes is assessed using expert judgment and statistical analysis of a body of evidence (e.g. observations or model results), then the following likelihood ranges are used to express the assessed probability of occurrence: virtually certain >99%; extremely likely >95%; very likely >90%; likely >66%; more likely than not > 50%; about as likely as not 33% to 66%; unlikely <33%; very unlikely <10%; extremely unlikely <5%; exceptionally unlikely <1%.

he’s right;  anyone who doesn’t comply with the scientific definition of rationality is demonised.  Personally I’d like the scientific definition to be universally accepted, but while there are powerful constituencies who benefit from and delight in wooliness defended as realism or flexibility  (politicians, theologians, dictionary compilers), I can’t see it happening.

...

 Likewise, the only kind of rationality under which a discussion on the virtues of faith schools makes sense is one that allows ethical and metaphysical propositions (e.g. is there a god).  Moreover, we’re left with politicians working up a drugs policy using an ethics-based ‘political rationality’, and an education policy that recognises and values a ‘religious rationality’.

Unfortunately, the transparency being called for concerning when and under what circumstances this flexing of scientific rationalism happens, also threatens politicians with the anathema of exposing less visible agendas traditionally played close to the chest.