Ah, more concepts that you have implicit faith in: "sufficient", "evidence" and "truth".
You assume that there is "truth"; that there is some universal and objective reality. Then you assume that you can discover facts about this truth using "evidence". But of course you can't gather all the relevant evidence to establish those facts, so you assume a third concept of "sufficient" to describe your threshold for establishing a fact.
None of these things can be proved to have any relationship to reality at all. Therefore, you must have faith in them.
This idea might offend you, so I must hasten to point out that I'm not accusing you of being in any way religious. There is a distinction between faith and religion. For example, you have faith in the naturalistic assumptions that lead to what you call "proof", but this does not mean you have faith in anything else.
You have an implicit faith that this term is meaningful.
Really, if you're going to only believe things that are proven, you should believe nothing at all, because everything you imagine to be "proven" ultimately relies on some assumption that is not "proven" and moreover cannot be "proved".
I've heard this before, and sorry, I'm not convinced. I can argue that ARM's ISA is just as complex and crufty as x86, what with multiple ISAs, heaps of extensions, and features that must have seemed like a good idea at the time. It's cursed with the same problems you wrongly imagine to be x86-exclusive. If you really wanted to design an ISA to minimise energy use and eliminate all need for backwards compatibility, then you certainly could, but it wouldn't be much like ARM, which was intended as a high-performance ISA when it was developed in the mid 1980s (contemporaneously with 386, I might add).
Anyway, most of the "active" transistors in an x86 or ARM core are cache.
That's fine, and actually I think we agree on many things. Your notion of the objective nature of reality is guided by your experience, but it is more than that, because if you were to see something that didn't fit your previous experiences, your first conclusion would not be that the universe is an irrational and arbitrary place. You would naturally (and correctly) expect some other explanation. Having observed a counter-example to the "theory", you conclude that the theory is incomplete and imperfect.
This is all good, but this is an intuition, an assumption, the non-materialistic foundation of materialism. The assumption may be hidden inside something like Occam's Razor, but it's still there; a leap of faith lurking within rationalism.
It is possible to do better. Consider how limited this notion of objective reality is. We can apply it to physical laws, to testable facts about reality (e.g. the iron is hot), but we can't apply it to higher-order phenomena that indirectly result from these laws, because eventually things become too complex to be grounded in testability. So, it works for physics and chemistry, but not very well for biology, and really badly for sociology, psychology and other higher-order sciences. There, truth really is a popularity contest, as consensus is everything, and nothing can be disproved. It is there that the materialist approach becomes most shaky, with the highest potential to strongly differ from reality, and lead along a false path.
Having made one leap of faith (as above), why not make more? Why not assume that objectivity extends to higher-order phenomena, like biology, or society itself? If you're already on the slippery slope of faith, why not go further? Perhaps this is why materialists don't, on the whole, like thinking about foundational assumptions and prefer to keep it all as simple as possible. They know where that slippery slope leads.
You concluded by asking how a universe according to me would differ from a universe according to you. I don't know if I can answer that question, because only one of these actually makes sense to me. But if I tried, I'd start by pointing out that the universe itself does not change at all just because we apply different mental tools to understand it. But some tools are better than others, and lead to better understanding and better science.
Thankyou for an interesting and informative discussion.
Indeed. And the ARM ISA isn't even RISC anyway. In fact, which ARM ISA are we even talking about here? Thumb, Thumb2, ThumbEE, Jazelle or the 32-bit ISA? And which extensions, I wonder? NEON, maybe? Or one of the two different sorts of FPU? That's already a significantly complex instruction decoder. The x86 microcode-for-uncommon-instructions approach is probably better.
Whenever this topic comes up, the discussion is immediately flooded with ARM fanboys insisting that x86 can never compete for magical reasons that don't stand up to sensible analysis. And as Intel approaches ARM's level of power consumption, as they inevitably must (for there is no magic in ARM and there is nothing physically preventing parity), what we hear is denial: the insistence that Intel is playing dirty tricks.
At least, post OnLive, nobody is claiming that there is no demand for x86 applications on mobile devices. I suppose the "ARM = magic" power claims will have a similar lifetime, and one day will look as silly as claims that Windows XP will be a failure because everyone will be using Linux by 2005. Hope is a good thing, but this is just foolishness.
Having thought further about the matter, I conclude that we mean entirely different things by the word "truth". You regard my argument as logically fallacious because your definition of truth is different to mine. This is a communication failure on my part. A word other than "truth" might be helpful to me.
However. You keep changing the subject of the argument to "Why is...", "Why does..." and "What is...". That's not it at all. The argument is actually nothing to do with God or the purpose of the universe. The argument is unrelated to the answers to these questions.
I argue only this: that there are answers.
These may not be answers we can ever discover. But that does not matter. Knowing (assuming, having faith) that these answers do exist makes the search for them meaningful, and hence science is actually worth doing, because a better understanding of reality is known (assumed, believed) to be possible. There is a standard that may be approached.
With the assumption, you can only do good science, because anything that does not advance understanding of reality is excluded by definition. The truth (or falsehood) of a claim is determined by comparison with reality: the scientific method.
Without the assumption you can do almost anything and call it science, provided that other people accept it as such, because there is no standard. Scientific reality is subjective and relative, and defined only by our perception of it, so the truth (or falsehood) of a claim is determined by consensus amongst other scientists. To qualify as science, something needs only to be "less wrong" by some generally accepted definition, because the very possibility of any higher ideal is actively denied.
Ah, but. The point here is not to gain any insight into the contents of that objective, absolute truth. "What God knows" is not relevant to the argument, nor is exactly what the truth is. The point is the assumption that such truth must exist, since this is the assumption that makes the search for any part of it meaningful.
What do we assume reality actually is?
As materialists we can certainly search for statements that are more true, or less wrong, but what can we mean by "true" or "less wrong"? How are these even meaningful concepts, if you don't believe in truth? What are you assuming in order to apply them, and why?
The truth that you acknowledge exists only in an abstract model universe of axioms and statements. Is it difficult to imagine that truth might also exist in our universe?
I think it's difficult not to. Of course, truth would not be a material thing, but certainly it would be something real, extant, that exists independently of what any of us might observe. While this is certainly an assumption, it is a necessary one, because without it ideas like "less wrong" are completely meaningless. Without it, everything is equally true and equally false, because the difference is entirely subjective. It would be quite difficult to do any sort of scientific research if we started from this assumption, which is essentially that nothing is true.
I think you are making the assumption that truth does exist, but you are making this assumption on such a deep and intuitive level that you don't notice, and when you try to define what truth is, the definition is limited to mathematics. You may very well be limiting yourself unnecessarily here.
Ah, the incompatibility of science and religion. Of course, it depends which religion you mean, but if you're picking on one of the Abrahamic monotheisms, then the assertion of incompatibility is dead wrong. Actually, science depends on religion in order to be meaningful.
Before I go further I urge you to regard the following as a philosophical point rather than an attempt to get you to believe in sky wizards or vote for a Republican or some other villian. This is because its intention is academic; a point in debate. I should not really need to say this, but some people here appear to regard each critical post as an attempt at activism, and respond accordingly.
The first and most important thing for science is truth. If scientists are not seeking to discover the truth about things, then they are hardly scientists at all.
So, what is truth? Is there such a thing as absolute, final, objective truth?
If you are religious (as defined above) then this is an easy question. As you have presupposed the existence of God, truth is just "what God knows". Then, the purpose of science is to discover parts of this truth, with the understanding that science is limited to the physical realm of materialism, and truth exists outside of that.
If, however, you are a materialist, then you are faced with a problem - because in order to operate as an effective scientist, you are forced to believe in something non-material that you cannot prove exists, namely truth. You have to have faith that truth exists, even though it is metaphysical rather than material, and you cannot test it. You have to believe that the material universe is rational, testable, operating to fixed and discoverable rules. And unlike the religious person, you cannot claim that any of this was revealed to you. It is an assumption from nowhere, and if you make it, you cannot properly be called a materialist.
In discussing this with others, I have found that materialists often appear to confuse the real, underlying truth of something with scientific attempts to approach it. So, instead of (say) Einstein's laws being an attempt to approximate some real fact about reality, they instead become that fact. This is wrong. The most accurate theory about X is never the same as X.
I presume that it is easier to think in these terms rather than make leaps of faith. If we are to be materialists, we cannot have the reality of things that are not material, and that includes truth as well as God. Thus we are led to "modern" forms of philosophy, in which there is no such thing as truth, and everything is relative and based on the balance of probabilities. Whatever this is, it isn't science. In fact, it is more like a denial of reality, which as far as concepts go, could hardly be any further from science. There is no point discovering anything about the world if the world is not really real.
It appears to me that religious people are at a great advantage when it comes to science, because they believe in truth and reality in a way that materialists can't. And here is where I must once again say that this only applies to religions as defined above - because if someone is religious in some other way (Scientologists, pagans) then they may not believe in God as transcendental and non-material, and thus they will need to deal with the problem of scientific evidence that contradicts their religious beliefs. Whereas religious people (as defined above) do not have that problem, because God is elsewhere, in a realm that is unreachable by science.
Well, I don't know what is so hard to understand about my actual argument. You have one standard for belief systems that you like, and another standard for belief systems that you don't like, and when this is pointed out, you try to justify your inconsistency rather than correct it. I'm not an atheist but I don't pretend that the actions of atheists such as Stalin, Chairman Mao or even Ayn Rand are somehow representative of all atheists.
That's pretty much what I'm saying. The CH argument is that the atrocities of the Soviet Union's atheists are not the fault of atheism but rather communism, or to be more exact, Stalinism. He said, in effect, that no true atheist would do such things. There had to be something else.
Now, this is all well and good, but if this is your principle, then you don't get to blame all Christians for things done by specific Christians, or indeed, things done in the name of Christianity. Unless, that is, you are willing to bend your principle whenever it suits you to do so.
I suppose atheists have to be drawn to the idea that free will, and its close relative, consciousness, are imaginary. Other possibilities are problematic if you explicitly deny the existence of the non-material. By what material process does this so-called "free will" arise? What is "consciousness" if it is not an illusion? Endless articles in New Scientist attempt to answer these questions using science, and presumably succeed in convincing those who wish to be convinced.
When I was an atheist I was derided by other atheists for thinking that free will and consciousness were real because they appeared to be so (and there was no reason to think they were not). The other atheists were right, in that such ideas involve an inherent assumption of the reality of the non-material, and thus they are incompatible with any belief system that denies the non-material. They are far too close to dualism.
A curious thing is that materialism itself has untestable assumptions, grounded in something that is not materialism, such as the reality of reality. But for some reason these are considered to be fine because they help with science and engineering and so on. Whereas assumptions such as "people have souls" are considered a terrible secular sin, even though they are enormously helpful on a personal level in terms of making sense of the world and living meaningful lives.
CH used the "no true scotsman" argument to explain why atheism is not to blame for atrocities in Soviet Russia. According to him, those people weren't atheists but actually a sort of religious cult with Stalin as their God-king.
If you're going to rule out the "no true scotsman" argument as a defense of Christianity, then you should be fair and rule it out for atheism as well. Then, atheists are responsible for the gulags, which isn't fair, but no less fair than blaming Christians for crusades and witch hunts.
Here is my attempt to win my own prize. When Lech Walesa was starting his work in the Polish shipyards and the Polish militia, the outer ring of the Polish army were closing in on Gdansk, he was interviewed with his then-fairly small group, and he was asked, aren't you frightened, aren't you afraid? You've taken on a whole all-powerful state and army - aren't you scared? And he said, I'm not frightened of anything but God or anyone but God.
This came back to me. I thought, well, this meets my two criteria. It's certainly a noble thing to have said, a distinguished thing to have said, and I certainly couldn't have said it. So it does meet both my criteria.
To me, this is very impressive. To write a book asserting that "religion poisons everything", and then say that there might sometimes be a few things that religion does not poison, and that belief in God might sometimes inspire great courage in ways that atheism cannot... well, wow. It shows great courage on the part of CH, motivated purely by intellectual honesty as far as I can tell. Who could not admire that?
One could reply that the distinction between a tax (paid to government) and some other fee (paid to a private corporation with a government-granted monopoly) is pretty minimal. But that undermines the argument that it is a tax rather than a licence fee, for if the difference is truly so small and indistinct, then why mention it at all? Why not accept that this particular tax is called a licence fee and forget about it?
The answer is, as you say, that there is some other motive for calling it a tax. A tax is mandatory, and a tax is not something that people necessarily want to pay. While any educated person will observe that taxes pay for things that are certainly important, it is rare to find anyone who is entirely happy with everything their tax money has been spent on. And yet, what choice do they have? None at all. Tax money is spent on bank bailouts and foreign wars whether we like it or not.
These comparisons - a mandatory payment, partly spent on things that are unhelpful or immoral - are not things we want to hear applied to the BBC. It is insulting to suggest that the BBC is not funded by the voluntary choices of the people. It is also insulting to suggest that any significant proportion of the funding is wasted. But most of all, it is insulting to criticise the BBC in the same terms used to criticise government. The BBC transcends government, the BBC defines government. To suggest that the BBC is nevertheless subject to the same problems as government is a high form of blasphemy. No wonder people get upset.
What is the big deal with calling the TV licence a tax?
If there was a "road fund licence", and you had to pay it in order to take your car on a public road, would you get really annoyed if people started calling it a "road tax"? If people called the little paper licence discs "tax discs"? If even the DVLA started calling it "road tax"?
The licence fee is plainly a tax. The BBC has a government-granted monopoly and is funded by tax levied via the licence fee.
This is not to say that such taxes are a bad thing. Tax money also pays for museums, art galleries and theatres. These are things that most people would not pay for if given a choice, but which are nevertheless recognised as important, culturally speaking. The BBC fits into this category. So, next time you are listening to Radio 1, or watching Strictly Come Dancing, just remember that it's culture, it's good for you, it's important, and it couldn't possibly exist in any form without the licence tax.
Aren't Bolsheviks the people who insisted on government registration for every typewriter? They weren't merely interested in preventing unauthorised reproduction of copyrighted works. They were interested in preventing reproduction of unauthorised ideas. All this copyright stuff is really tame next to any form of Marxism.
Conversely, anyone thinking that Israel's actions are in any way justified is also exactly like Hitler, because Hitler liked war, annexing other countries and oppressing minorities.
And that is what the Israelis supposedly do, at least according to the incredibly well-informed masses who have somehow found out the Truth, despite the best efforts of the pro-Israeli media and politicians to cover it up.
So you can't win. If you have any opinion about Israel at all, you are Hitler. And probably if you don't have any opinion, you are still Hitler, because by not being part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
You argue that anything beyond empiricism is beyond truth. The error here is your assumption that truth and human knowledge are the same thing, as if truth does not exist unless humans can observe it.
There is a higher sort of truth, a universal variety, that encompasses not just the things that humans can observe as true, but also the things that cannot be observed but are true nonetheless. For instance, there are stars and planets that will never be seen by humans due to their distance from Earth. We cannot see them, we know nothing about them, and yet they exist. This is an example of truth beyond empiricism, to go alongside the mathematical example given previously. Just because we have not observed a counterexample does not mean that none exists, and this is why exhaustive search is no substitute for proof.
The category of error is the same as that of geocentrism, though rather than believing the stars turn around the Earth, you appear to believe that truth turns around humans. It does not. It exists independently of what we know, what we can test, and what we believe. Scientists can only hope to determine an incomplete approximation of this truth.
Some parts of universal truth are known, others are yet to be discovered by humans, and still more are very much in the realm of speculation, philosophy and theology, far beyond the reach of any sort of observation or experiment. We cannot know all the answers, but non-observable facts are still facts.
Truth is not necessarily empirical. Consider mathematical proofs. These are a demonstrable example of "higher" truth beyond experimental investigation.
That aside, the answer to your question is "no". All scientific knowledge has a scope. Within that scope, the law or theory applies. Outside of the scope, it does not. It is like a logical implication: if X, then Y.
For instance, the second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. If you have a non-closed system, then the second law does not apply, and is not useful. That is, "closed system" implies "second law".
However, the second law does not assert that all systems are closed, just as "if X, then Y" does not mean "if Y, then X", or "X is true".
Empiricism is similar. Its scope is the material universe, where it applies and is useful. If we are dealing with something material, then empiricism applies. If we are not, then it does not apply, and is of no use.
This is why it is perfectly possible to both accept empiricism along with higher truths beyond the reach of experimental science. It is easy - you simply acknowledge that empiricism is not always applicable. In particular, it is not applicable when we are dealing with anything that transcends materialism, such as mathematical proof, or the (non-)existence of God.
I hoped that somewhere within that topic, someone would be posting a rational, intelligent response. I'm sorry that the signal to noise ratio was too low for me to see it.
Irrelevant. The agreement should have been in place beforehand. Coyne had no business accusing his opponent of cowardice and censorship for reneging on an agreement that never existed.
Incidents like this make atheists look like witless morons. Here we have a group of people who see themselves as "rational" and say they'll believe nothing without evidence. And yet they immediately believe Coyne over Haught, even though Coyne's story makes no sense and is not supported by any evidence. Shame, I say again.
Right, taping academic debates is common practice, but if talks might be recorded, then speakers must give their permission in writing for (1) the recording and (2) subsequent publications of that recording. I think the TV industry calls this a "release". It's important to have such a thing to make it clear who has ownership of the recording... and, as in this case, to head off any disagreement that might arise over the right to publish it. Academic conferences now ask for video permission regardless of whether any video recording will actually take place. I've signed many forms of this sort.
A signature on a piece of paper. That was all that was needed. Can you explain Coyne's failure to get such a written agreement? Can you explain why, knowing that there was no evidence that Haught had ever agreed to any publication, he nevertheless used his blog to accuse Haught of suppressing the video?
This whole story was fishy from the beginning, but nobody cared because it fitted into a truthy narrative.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, more concepts that you have implicit faith in: "sufficient", "evidence" and "truth".
You assume that there is "truth"; that there is some universal and objective reality. Then you assume that you can discover facts about this truth using "evidence". But of course you can't gather all the relevant evidence to establish those facts, so you assume a third concept of "sufficient" to describe your threshold for establishing a fact.
None of these things can be proved to have any relationship to reality at all. Therefore, you must have faith in them.
This idea might offend you, so I must hasten to point out that I'm not accusing you of being in any way religious. There is a distinction between faith and religion. For example, you have faith in the naturalistic assumptions that lead to what you call "proof", but this does not mean you have faith in anything else.
What do you mean by "proven"?
You have an implicit faith that this term is meaningful.
Really, if you're going to only believe things that are proven, you should believe nothing at all, because everything you imagine to be "proven" ultimately relies on some assumption that is not "proven" and moreover cannot be "proved".
I've heard this before, and sorry, I'm not convinced. I can argue that ARM's ISA is just as complex and crufty as x86, what with multiple ISAs, heaps of extensions, and features that must have seemed like a good idea at the time. It's cursed with the same problems you wrongly imagine to be x86-exclusive. If you really wanted to design an ISA to minimise energy use and eliminate all need for backwards compatibility, then you certainly could, but it wouldn't be much like ARM, which was intended as a high-performance ISA when it was developed in the mid 1980s (contemporaneously with 386, I might add).
Anyway, most of the "active" transistors in an x86 or ARM core are cache.
No last word necessary. This has been a most civilised discussion. Thankyou.
That's fine, and actually I think we agree on many things. Your notion of the objective nature of reality is guided by your experience, but it is more than that, because if you were to see something that didn't fit your previous experiences, your first conclusion would not be that the universe is an irrational and arbitrary place. You would naturally (and correctly) expect some other explanation. Having observed a counter-example to the "theory", you conclude that the theory is incomplete and imperfect.
This is all good, but this is an intuition, an assumption, the non-materialistic foundation of materialism. The assumption may be hidden inside something like Occam's Razor, but it's still there; a leap of faith lurking within rationalism.
It is possible to do better. Consider how limited this notion of objective reality is. We can apply it to physical laws, to testable facts about reality (e.g. the iron is hot), but we can't apply it to higher-order phenomena that indirectly result from these laws, because eventually things become too complex to be grounded in testability. So, it works for physics and chemistry, but not very well for biology, and really badly for sociology, psychology and other higher-order sciences. There, truth really is a popularity contest, as consensus is everything, and nothing can be disproved. It is there that the materialist approach becomes most shaky, with the highest potential to strongly differ from reality, and lead along a false path.
Having made one leap of faith (as above), why not make more? Why not assume that objectivity extends to higher-order phenomena, like biology, or society itself? If you're already on the slippery slope of faith, why not go further? Perhaps this is why materialists don't, on the whole, like thinking about foundational assumptions and prefer to keep it all as simple as possible. They know where that slippery slope leads.
You concluded by asking how a universe according to me would differ from a universe according to you. I don't know if I can answer that question, because only one of these actually makes sense to me. But if I tried, I'd start by pointing out that the universe itself does not change at all just because we apply different mental tools to understand it. But some tools are better than others, and lead to better understanding and better science.
Thankyou for an interesting and informative discussion.
Indeed. And the ARM ISA isn't even RISC anyway. In fact, which ARM ISA are we even talking about here? Thumb, Thumb2, ThumbEE, Jazelle or the 32-bit ISA? And which extensions, I wonder? NEON, maybe? Or one of the two different sorts of FPU? That's already a significantly complex instruction decoder. The x86 microcode-for-uncommon-instructions approach is probably better.
Whenever this topic comes up, the discussion is immediately flooded with ARM fanboys insisting that x86 can never compete for magical reasons that don't stand up to sensible analysis. And as Intel approaches ARM's level of power consumption, as they inevitably must (for there is no magic in ARM and there is nothing physically preventing parity), what we hear is denial: the insistence that Intel is playing dirty tricks.
At least, post OnLive, nobody is claiming that there is no demand for x86 applications on mobile devices. I suppose the "ARM = magic" power claims will have a similar lifetime, and one day will look as silly as claims that Windows XP will be a failure because everyone will be using Linux by 2005. Hope is a good thing, but this is just foolishness.
Having thought further about the matter, I conclude that we mean entirely different things by the word "truth". You regard my argument as logically fallacious because your definition of truth is different to mine. This is a communication failure on my part. A word other than "truth" might be helpful to me.
However. You keep changing the subject of the argument to "Why is...", "Why does..." and "What is...". That's not it at all. The argument is actually nothing to do with God or the purpose of the universe. The argument is unrelated to the answers to these questions.
I argue only this: that there are answers.
These may not be answers we can ever discover. But that does not matter. Knowing (assuming, having faith) that these answers do exist makes the search for them meaningful, and hence science is actually worth doing, because a better understanding of reality is known (assumed, believed) to be possible. There is a standard that may be approached.
With the assumption, you can only do good science, because anything that does not advance understanding of reality is excluded by definition. The truth (or falsehood) of a claim is determined by comparison with reality: the scientific method.
Without the assumption you can do almost anything and call it science, provided that other people accept it as such, because there is no standard. Scientific reality is subjective and relative, and defined only by our perception of it, so the truth (or falsehood) of a claim is determined by consensus amongst other scientists. To qualify as science, something needs only to be "less wrong" by some generally accepted definition, because the very possibility of any higher ideal is actively denied.
Ah, but. The point here is not to gain any insight into the contents of that objective, absolute truth. "What God knows" is not relevant to the argument, nor is exactly what the truth is. The point is the assumption that such truth must exist, since this is the assumption that makes the search for any part of it meaningful.
What do we assume reality actually is?
As materialists we can certainly search for statements that are more true, or less wrong, but what can we mean by "true" or "less wrong"? How are these even meaningful concepts, if you don't believe in truth? What are you assuming in order to apply them, and why?
The truth that you acknowledge exists only in an abstract model universe of axioms and statements. Is it difficult to imagine that truth might also exist in our universe?
I think it's difficult not to. Of course, truth would not be a material thing, but certainly it would be something real, extant, that exists independently of what any of us might observe. While this is certainly an assumption, it is a necessary one, because without it ideas like "less wrong" are completely meaningless. Without it, everything is equally true and equally false, because the difference is entirely subjective. It would be quite difficult to do any sort of scientific research if we started from this assumption, which is essentially that nothing is true.
I think you are making the assumption that truth does exist, but you are making this assumption on such a deep and intuitive level that you don't notice, and when you try to define what truth is, the definition is limited to mathematics. You may very well be limiting yourself unnecessarily here.
Ah, the incompatibility of science and religion. Of course, it depends which religion you mean, but if you're picking on one of the Abrahamic monotheisms, then the assertion of incompatibility is dead wrong. Actually, science depends on religion in order to be meaningful.
Before I go further I urge you to regard the following as a philosophical point rather than an attempt to get you to believe in sky wizards or vote for a Republican or some other villian. This is because its intention is academic; a point in debate. I should not really need to say this, but some people here appear to regard each critical post as an attempt at activism, and respond accordingly.
The first and most important thing for science is truth. If scientists are not seeking to discover the truth about things, then they are hardly scientists at all.
So, what is truth? Is there such a thing as absolute, final, objective truth?
If you are religious (as defined above) then this is an easy question. As you have presupposed the existence of God, truth is just "what God knows". Then, the purpose of science is to discover parts of this truth, with the understanding that science is limited to the physical realm of materialism, and truth exists outside of that.
If, however, you are a materialist, then you are faced with a problem - because in order to operate as an effective scientist, you are forced to believe in something non-material that you cannot prove exists, namely truth. You have to have faith that truth exists, even though it is metaphysical rather than material, and you cannot test it. You have to believe that the material universe is rational, testable, operating to fixed and discoverable rules. And unlike the religious person, you cannot claim that any of this was revealed to you. It is an assumption from nowhere, and if you make it, you cannot properly be called a materialist.
In discussing this with others, I have found that materialists often appear to confuse the real, underlying truth of something with scientific attempts to approach it. So, instead of (say) Einstein's laws being an attempt to approximate some real fact about reality, they instead become that fact. This is wrong. The most accurate theory about X is never the same as X.
I presume that it is easier to think in these terms rather than make leaps of faith. If we are to be materialists, we cannot have the reality of things that are not material, and that includes truth as well as God. Thus we are led to "modern" forms of philosophy, in which there is no such thing as truth, and everything is relative and based on the balance of probabilities. Whatever this is, it isn't science. In fact, it is more like a denial of reality, which as far as concepts go, could hardly be any further from science. There is no point discovering anything about the world if the world is not really real.
It appears to me that religious people are at a great advantage when it comes to science, because they believe in truth and reality in a way that materialists can't. And here is where I must once again say that this only applies to religions as defined above - because if someone is religious in some other way (Scientologists, pagans) then they may not believe in God as transcendental and non-material, and thus they will need to deal with the problem of scientific evidence that contradicts their religious beliefs. Whereas religious people (as defined above) do not have that problem, because God is elsewhere, in a realm that is unreachable by science.
That would be a good point, if I was actually arguing that it had nothing to do with Christianity. Which I'm not.
Well, I don't know what is so hard to understand about my actual argument. You have one standard for belief systems that you like, and another standard for belief systems that you don't like, and when this is pointed out, you try to justify your inconsistency rather than correct it. I'm not an atheist but I don't pretend that the actions of atheists such as Stalin, Chairman Mao or even Ayn Rand are somehow representative of all atheists.
That's pretty much what I'm saying. The CH argument is that the atrocities of the Soviet Union's atheists are not the fault of atheism but rather communism, or to be more exact, Stalinism. He said, in effect, that no true atheist would do such things. There had to be something else.
Now, this is all well and good, but if this is your principle, then you don't get to blame all Christians for things done by specific Christians, or indeed, things done in the name of Christianity. Unless, that is, you are willing to bend your principle whenever it suits you to do so.
I suppose atheists have to be drawn to the idea that free will, and its close relative, consciousness, are imaginary. Other possibilities are problematic if you explicitly deny the existence of the non-material. By what material process does this so-called "free will" arise? What is "consciousness" if it is not an illusion? Endless articles in New Scientist attempt to answer these questions using science, and presumably succeed in convincing those who wish to be convinced.
When I was an atheist I was derided by other atheists for thinking that free will and consciousness were real because they appeared to be so (and there was no reason to think they were not). The other atheists were right, in that such ideas involve an inherent assumption of the reality of the non-material, and thus they are incompatible with any belief system that denies the non-material. They are far too close to dualism.
A curious thing is that materialism itself has untestable assumptions, grounded in something that is not materialism, such as the reality of reality. But for some reason these are considered to be fine because they help with science and engineering and so on. Whereas assumptions such as "people have souls" are considered a terrible secular sin, even though they are enormously helpful on a personal level in terms of making sense of the world and living meaningful lives.
CH used the "no true scotsman" argument to explain why atheism is not to blame for atrocities in Soviet Russia. According to him, those people weren't atheists but actually a sort of religious cult with Stalin as their God-king.
If you're going to rule out the "no true scotsman" argument as a defense of Christianity, then you should be fair and rule it out for atheism as well. Then, atheists are responsible for the gulags, which isn't fair, but no less fair than blaming Christians for crusades and witch hunts.
Here is my attempt to win my own prize. When Lech Walesa was starting his work in the Polish shipyards and the Polish militia, the outer ring of the Polish army were closing in on Gdansk, he was interviewed with his then-fairly small group, and he was asked, aren't you frightened, aren't you afraid? You've taken on a whole all-powerful state and army - aren't you scared? And he said, I'm not frightened of anything but God or anyone but God.
This came back to me. I thought, well, this meets my two criteria. It's certainly a noble thing to have said, a distinguished thing to have said, and I certainly couldn't have said it. So it does meet both my criteria.
To me, this is very impressive. To write a book asserting that "religion poisons everything", and then say that there might sometimes be a few things that religion does not poison, and that belief in God might sometimes inspire great courage in ways that atheism cannot... well, wow. It shows great courage on the part of CH, motivated purely by intellectual honesty as far as I can tell. Who could not admire that?
Yes, I'd thought it might be something like that.
One could reply that the distinction between a tax (paid to government) and some other fee (paid to a private corporation with a government-granted monopoly) is pretty minimal. But that undermines the argument that it is a tax rather than a licence fee, for if the difference is truly so small and indistinct, then why mention it at all? Why not accept that this particular tax is called a licence fee and forget about it?
The answer is, as you say, that there is some other motive for calling it a tax. A tax is mandatory, and a tax is not something that people necessarily want to pay. While any educated person will observe that taxes pay for things that are certainly important, it is rare to find anyone who is entirely happy with everything their tax money has been spent on. And yet, what choice do they have? None at all. Tax money is spent on bank bailouts and foreign wars whether we like it or not.
These comparisons - a mandatory payment, partly spent on things that are unhelpful or immoral - are not things we want to hear applied to the BBC. It is insulting to suggest that the BBC is not funded by the voluntary choices of the people. It is also insulting to suggest that any significant proportion of the funding is wasted. But most of all, it is insulting to criticise the BBC in the same terms used to criticise government. The BBC transcends government, the BBC defines government. To suggest that the BBC is nevertheless subject to the same problems as government is a high form of blasphemy. No wonder people get upset.
What is the big deal with calling the TV licence a tax?
If there was a "road fund licence", and you had to pay it in order to take your car on a public road, would you get really annoyed if people started calling it a "road tax"? If people called the little paper licence discs "tax discs"? If even the DVLA started calling it "road tax"?
The licence fee is plainly a tax. The BBC has a government-granted monopoly and is funded by tax levied via the licence fee.
This is not to say that such taxes are a bad thing. Tax money also pays for museums, art galleries and theatres. These are things that most people would not pay for if given a choice, but which are nevertheless recognised as important, culturally speaking. The BBC fits into this category. So, next time you are listening to Radio 1, or watching Strictly Come Dancing, just remember that it's culture, it's good for you, it's important, and it couldn't possibly exist in any form without the licence tax.
Ah, yes, the Bolsheviks were all sweetness and light until Lenin/Stalin took over. What rubbish.
Aren't Bolsheviks the people who insisted on government registration for every typewriter? They weren't merely interested in preventing unauthorised reproduction of copyrighted works. They were interested in preventing reproduction of unauthorised ideas. All this copyright stuff is really tame next to any form of Marxism.
Conversely, anyone thinking that Israel's actions are in any way justified is also exactly like Hitler, because Hitler liked war, annexing other countries and oppressing minorities.
And that is what the Israelis supposedly do, at least according to the incredibly well-informed masses who have somehow found out the Truth, despite the best efforts of the pro-Israeli media and politicians to cover it up.
So you can't win. If you have any opinion about Israel at all, you are Hitler. And probably if you don't have any opinion, you are still Hitler, because by not being part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
You argue that anything beyond empiricism is beyond truth. The error here is your assumption that truth and human knowledge are the same thing, as if truth does not exist unless humans can observe it.
There is a higher sort of truth, a universal variety, that encompasses not just the things that humans can observe as true, but also the things that cannot be observed but are true nonetheless. For instance, there are stars and planets that will never be seen by humans due to their distance from Earth. We cannot see them, we know nothing about them, and yet they exist. This is an example of truth beyond empiricism, to go alongside the mathematical example given previously. Just because we have not observed a counterexample does not mean that none exists, and this is why exhaustive search is no substitute for proof.
The category of error is the same as that of geocentrism, though rather than believing the stars turn around the Earth, you appear to believe that truth turns around humans. It does not. It exists independently of what we know, what we can test, and what we believe. Scientists can only hope to determine an incomplete approximation of this truth.
Some parts of universal truth are known, others are yet to be discovered by humans, and still more are very much in the realm of speculation, philosophy and theology, far beyond the reach of any sort of observation or experiment. We cannot know all the answers, but non-observable facts are still facts.
Truth is not necessarily empirical. Consider mathematical proofs. These are a demonstrable example of "higher" truth beyond experimental investigation.
That aside, the answer to your question is "no". All scientific knowledge has a scope. Within that scope, the law or theory applies. Outside of the scope, it does not. It is like a logical implication: if X, then Y.
For instance, the second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. If you have a non-closed system, then the second law does not apply, and is not useful. That is, "closed system" implies "second law".
However, the second law does not assert that all systems are closed, just as "if X, then Y" does not mean "if Y, then X", or "X is true".
Empiricism is similar. Its scope is the material universe, where it applies and is useful. If we are dealing with something material, then empiricism applies. If we are not, then it does not apply, and is of no use.
This is why it is perfectly possible to both accept empiricism along with higher truths beyond the reach of experimental science. It is easy - you simply acknowledge that empiricism is not always applicable. In particular, it is not applicable when we are dealing with anything that transcends materialism, such as mathematical proof, or the (non-)existence of God.
I hoped that somewhere within that topic, someone would be posting a rational, intelligent response. I'm sorry that the signal to noise ratio was too low for me to see it.
Irrelevant. The agreement should have been in place beforehand. Coyne had no business accusing his opponent of cowardice and censorship for reneging on an agreement that never existed.
Incidents like this make atheists look like witless morons. Here we have a group of people who see themselves as "rational" and say they'll believe nothing without evidence. And yet they immediately believe Coyne over Haught, even though Coyne's story makes no sense and is not supported by any evidence. Shame, I say again.
Right, taping academic debates is common practice, but if talks might be recorded, then speakers must give their permission in writing for (1) the recording and (2) subsequent publications of that recording. I think the TV industry calls this a "release". It's important to have such a thing to make it clear who has ownership of the recording... and, as in this case, to head off any disagreement that might arise over the right to publish it. Academic conferences now ask for video permission regardless of whether any video recording will actually take place. I've signed many forms of this sort.
A signature on a piece of paper. That was all that was needed. Can you explain Coyne's failure to get such a written agreement? Can you explain why, knowing that there was no evidence that Haught had ever agreed to any publication, he nevertheless used his blog to accuse Haught of suppressing the video?
This whole story was fishy from the beginning, but nobody cared because it fitted into a truthy narrative.