GKMARH@IRISHMVS.BITNET (steven horst) (09/03/88)
X-Delivery-Notice: SMTP MAIL FROM does not correspond to sender. Date: Thu, 1 Sep 88 12:24 EDT To: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu From: steven horst <GKMARH%IRISHMVS.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU> Subject: science, religion, rationality (long) Much of the ongoing discussion of rationality, science and religion has been of admirably high quality. Some things, however, just cry out for response. William Wells has taken the lead role as religion-bashing gadfly, so it is to his comments that I shall address myself. (Professor Minsky's surprisingly shrill _ad hominem_ has received sufficient attention, I think.) e Back in V8 #50 of the Digest, Mr. Wells writes: >Whether you like it or not, the religious entails something which >is outside of reason. It isn't clear what he means by reason. Religion certainly requires more than the rules for deduction in the predicate calculus, and probably more than any empirical method one might think adequate for the physical sciences. I.e., it requires more than reasonING. Of course it is quite a different thing to say that religious belief cannot be reasonABLE. Practically none of our beliefs are truths of logic, and we believe all kinds of things that we do not subject to double blind tests or measure with instruments. (Am I unreasonable in believing that my parents care about me? A paranoiac could find alternative interpretations for all of their behaviors. But ONLY someone with grave problems would require rigorous empirical tests.) The rationality of ANY kind of belief is a tricky thing to analyze. (Epistemologists have an almost perverse love for bizarre scenarios in which some belief we would normally consider to be aberrant would turn out to be perfectly reasonable.) Yet Mr. Wells seems to treat "reason" as some well-established and commonly-agreed-to set of principles which have some special connection with another monolithic entity of great prestige called "science". Having spent some deal of time around people who spend most of their time thinking about epistemology and the history and philosophy of science, I find it hard to think of more than one or two of them who share his view. (Though this sort of Enlightenment mythos is admittedly very widespread in contemporary Western cultures.) A number of fine philosophers of science are, however, practicing Jews (e.g. Shimony) and Christians (e.g., van Frassen, McMullin, Quinn), and not doubt other religious traditions are represented among them as well. But perhaps Mr. Wells merely means to argue against proponents of "natural theology" (the attempt to deduce God's existence and attributes from observations of the world), and against those who believe that religion can proceed wholly upon the deliverances of reason. (Kant argued to this effect.) Sufis, Thomists, fundamentalis ts and many others would agree that more than reason and observation of the physical world are needed. Some candidates for the "more" are (a) personal religious experience, or (b) trust in some authority (usually grounded in someone else's especially intense religious exprerience), or (c) some special "sense" which is attuned to apprehending matters divine. (All of these have parallels in other areas of human knowledge.) But Mr. Wells goes further. In V8 # 72 he decries "revealed knowledge". Responding to post, he says > Note the confusion in this individual: he talks about "revealed > knowledge" as if it had some relationship to knowledge; however, > there is *no* relationship. By what means do I distinguish this > "revealed knowledge" from an LSD overdose? If I am to depend > wholly on divine revalation, then I know *nothing*. If not, then > I must reject "revealed knowledge" in favor of evidence. I'm not sure I see a cut-and-dried distinction here. It seems to me that people who have vivid religious experiences have good reason to believe things on the basis of them. (They may also have reason to reassess their mental health.) Beliefs based on hallucinations are not necessarily unreasonable, even if they are false. It isn't the reasoning that has gone awry but the input system. Since I don't see any reason to rule by fiat that religious experiences MUST be hallucinatory, it doesn't seem absurd to suppose that beliefs based on religious experience COULD be true AND reasonably arrived at AND arrived at through a dependable process. There are, of course, special difficulties with evidence that is not repeatable or public, and this would be a very real difficulty if we had to do science by trusting someone's mystical insights. But of course we routinely trust other people's reports of what they have seen and heard - individual events are by nature not repeatable - and the kinds of doubt we might have about another person's religious experiences also arise for any experiences he reports that are very different from our own. There can be no question of rigorous tests of most religious claims along the lines of the tests performed to confirm or disconfirm a scientific theory because religious claims, unlike the most familiar paradigms of scientific claims but like the great bulk of our beliefs, are not about universal laws ranging over classes of physical phenomena. This isn't evidence against the truth of religious claims. Indeed, it is quite consonant with the way most religious traditions view their own claims. Now I agree that science is probably best off when not bound by the fetters of some particular religiously inspired cosmology. (Arguably religion is better off when it abstains from too much cosmology as well, and arguably science is better off once one becomes aware of dangerous basic assumptions, such as the assumption that space MUST be Euclidean, or that theories in the special sciences must be reducible to theories in the proprietary vocabulary of physics, or that all theories must be expressible as universally quantified sentences in Principia logic.) But surely it is a bit rash for Mr. Wells to say: >Science, though not scientists (unfortunately), rejects the >validity of religion: it requires that reality is in some sense >utterly lawful, and that the unlawful, i.e. God, has no place. First, I take it that science is a practice, and hence cannot literally accept or reject anything. (Though if one were to reject something, one would do well to reject the attribution of validity to anything other than a proof or argument.) But the assumption of the lawfulness of nature is more the WORKING ASSUMPTION of the sciences than some PRINCIPLE upon which science is predicated. Lots of physicists DON'T believe that all physical events can be subsumed under universal laws. (At least if I've been listening carefully enough at conferences on cosmology and on quantum theory.) But suppose that there is some measure of anomic behavior in the universe - that wouldn't vitiate the success of most scientific achievements. It would at most impose a limit upon the scope of scientific inquiry. Similarly, a God who is not a part of a deterministic universe would fall outside of the scope of science. Who claimed otherwise? Certainly not orthodox Jews, Christians or Moslems. (I suspect the whole issue is different with Eastern religions.) The claim that an ideally completed physics could tell us EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING is at best a cosmological speculation. (Certainly not verifiable - lots of events we can't test!) It is no refutation of any religious cosmology, just an old-fashioned disagreement. And why is it unfortunate that many scientists believe in a god or practice some form of religion? They didn't seem to think it was hurting them. Did it hurt their ability to perform as scientists? Well, Aristotle, Descartes, Darwin, Leibniz, and Einstein (to name a handful) seem to have done pretty well. (And since this is an AI newsletter, perhaps we should add Alonzo Church to the list as well.) Finally, Mr. Wells describes his view as > all elementary philosophy, to which religion seems to have > blinded that author. Elementary philosophy? Perhaps. But only in the sense that the Greeks who believed that solid objects fall because the Earth in them is seeking its own level were doing "elementary physics." Steven Horst gkmarh@irishmvs.bitnet Department of Philosophy Notre Dame, IN 46556 219-239-7458