The Big Questions
The latest big question asked by the Templeton Foundation is Does evolution explain human nature?. Their page has the responses of 12 scholars to the question. Looking at the big question archive (the four previous questions), I saw a couple of questions I was more interested in ....
... one was Does the Universe Have a Purpose?. The responses to that question are made by some interesting people, including Jane Goodall and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Here's the response of John Haught, Catholic theologian and Senior Fellow, Science & Religion, at the Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University ..........
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Yes.
The fact that we can ask such a question at all suggests an affirmative answer. The impassioned search for meaning, perhaps our species' most distinctive trait, is not a longing that lifts us out of the universe, or that takes place outside of nature. We are, after all, as much a part of nature as roaches and rivers. So too is our thirst for meaning.
If we accept evolution, as indeed we must, our longing for meaning is nature–in the same sense that birdsong and the howling of wolves are nature.
But if our minds are nothing more than the accidental outcome of a mindless evolutionary process, why should we trust them at all? A Darwinian account of the mind's critical capacities–explanatory though such a narrative might be–is not enough to justify the confidence we spontaneously place in our cognitional powers.
Darwin himself would agree. He agonized over whether the theory of natural selection, taken by itself, might not undermine the actual trust we have in our mind's capacity to understand and know reality. "With me the horrid doubt always arises," he admitted to a friend, "whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
Darwin had no good answer to this question, but that does not mean it is unanswerable. We can embrace evolutionary science without losing confidence in our minds. For it is not by looking back at what our minds evolved from, I suggest, but only by looking forward at what our minds are now anticipating that we can validate our cognitional confidence and vindicate our trust in cosmic purpose.
But just what are our minds anticipating? What are they reaching for? If, along with me, you are asking this question, you are already closing in on the answer. Your mind is engaged at his very moment in nothing less than the search for truth. And simply by reaching toward truth both you and your mind's natural root system–the universe–are ennobled. As they are being taken captive by the most undeniable of values, truth itself, they are already participating in its empowering though always elusive presence. It is because this transcendent value has already taken hold of you, and in you the whole universe, that you can have faith in your critical intelligence and also trust that the universe has a purpose.
Purpose, after all, means quite simply the bringing about of something undeniably and permanently good. Is that what is going on in the cosmos?
As long as you are drawn toward truth, so also is the natural world that gave birth to your mind. The two, after all, are inseparable. As long as the search for truth persists, not only can you trust your mind, you can also trust the universe that has germinated such an exquisite means of opening itself to what is timelessly worth treasuring.
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... and the other question was Does science make belief in God obsolete? Some interesting guys answered this one too, including Robert Sapolsky and Christoph Schönborn, OP. Here below is the response given by Fellow of the British Academy, ordained priest in the Church of England, and a Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, Keith Ward .....
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No.
Far from making belief in God obsolete, some interpretations of modern science provide positive reinforcement for belief in God.
The methodology of the natural sciences requires the formulation of fruitful questions about the nature of the world that can be answered by careful and repeatable observations. The use of controlled experiments aids the construction of illuminating schemes of classification or of causal hypotheses that explain why things are as they are. The development of mathematical techniques for describing and predicting observable regularities is usually an important part of a scientific approach to the world.
There are many different sorts of natural science, from the patient observations of botany and ethology to the more theory-laden hypotheses of quantum cosmology. What is their relation to belief in God? The answer depends on how one defines God. I shall adopt the rather minimal view that God is a non-physical being of consciousness and intelligence or wisdom, who creates the universe for the sake of distinctive values that the universe generates.
If there is such a God, it follows that a non-physical conscious intelligence is possible - so a materialist view that all existent things must be physical, or must have location in space-time and must be subject to the causal laws of such a space-time, must be false. It follows that the nature of the universe must be compatible with being the product of intelligent creation, and must contain states that are of distinctive value and that could not otherwise exist. And it follows that there is a form of non-physical causality - the whole physical universe only exists because it is the effect of such causality. So some facts about the universe (minimally, the fact that the universe exists as it does) must be such that they cannot be completely explained by physical causal laws alone.
All these claims are subject to dispute. Such disputes are as old as recorded human thought. But has the spectacular advance of the natural sciences added anything significant to them? Some writers have supposed that science rules out any non-physical beings or forms of causality. Auguste Comte propagated the nineteenth century idea of a progress of humanity through three states of thought - religious, metaphysical, and positive or scientific. The final stage supersedes the others. Thus science renders belief in God obsolete.
But quantum physicists have decisively rejected Comte's philosophical proposal that human sense-observations provide the ultimate truth about objective reality. They more nearly vindicate Kant's alternative proposal that our senses only reveal reality as it appears to us. Reality in itself is quite different, and is accessible only through mathematical descriptions that are increasingly removed from observation or pictorial imagination (how do you picture a probability-wave in Hilbert space?).
It is almost commonplace in physics to speak of many space-times, or of this space-time as a 10- or 11-dimensional reality that dissolves into topological foam below the Planck length. This is a long way from the sensationalism of Hume and Comte, and from the older materialism that insists on locating every possible being within this space-time. Some modern physicists routinely speak of realities beyond space-time (e.g., quantum fluctuations in a vacuum from which this space-time originates). And some physicists, such as Henry Stapp, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann, speak of consciousness as an ultimate and irreducible element of reality, the basis of the physical as we know it, not its unanticipated by-product.
It is simply untrue that modern physics rules out the possibility of non-physical entities. And it is untrue that science has established a set of inflexible laws so tightly constraining and universally dominating that they exclude the possibility of other forms, including perhaps non-physical forms, of causal influence that we may not be able to measure or predict. It is more accurate to say that fundamental laws of nature are seen by many physicists as approximations to an open, holistic and flexible reality, as we encounter it in relatively isolated and controlled conditions.
An important fact about God is that if God is a non-physical entity causally influencing the cosmos in non-physical ways, God's mode of causal influence is most unlikely to be law-governed, measurable, predictable, or publicly observable. To the extent that the sciences describe regular, measurable, predictable, controllable, and repeatable behavior, acts of God will be outside the scientific remit. But that does not mean they cannot occur.
Even opponents of intelligent creation (not "intelligent design," which in America has come to designate a view that specific scientific evidences of design can be found) often concede that the amazingly fine-tuned laws and constants of nature that lead to the existence of intelligent life look as if they are designed to do so. The appearance, they say, is deceptive. But it could be true, as Steven Weinberg has suggested, that intelligent life-forms like us could only exist in a cosmos with the fundamental constants this cosmos has, that intelligent life is somehow prefigured in the basic laws of the universe, and that the universe "knew we were coming," as Freeman Dyson has put it. If so, then the hypothesis of intelligent creation is a good one because it makes the existence of intelligent life vastly more probable than the hypothesis that such life is a product of blind processes that may easily have been otherwise.
But this is not a scientific hypothesis. It posits no observationally confirmable entities, and produces no specific predictions. It is a philosophical hypothesis about the most adequate overall interpretation of a very wide set of data, including scientific data, but also including non-scientific data from history, personal experience, and morality. And that is the fundamental point. It is not science that renders belief in God obsolete. It is a strictly materialist interpretation of the world that renders belief in God obsolete, and which science is taken by some people to support. But science is more ambiguous than that, and modern scientific belief in the intelligibility and mathematical beauty of nature, and in the ultimately "veiled" nature of objective reality, can reasonably be taken as suggestive of an underlying cosmic intelligence. To that extent, science may make a certain sort of belief in God highly plausible.
*****************************
... one was Does the Universe Have a Purpose?. The responses to that question are made by some interesting people, including Jane Goodall and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Here's the response of John Haught, Catholic theologian and Senior Fellow, Science & Religion, at the Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University ..........
*************************
Yes.
The fact that we can ask such a question at all suggests an affirmative answer. The impassioned search for meaning, perhaps our species' most distinctive trait, is not a longing that lifts us out of the universe, or that takes place outside of nature. We are, after all, as much a part of nature as roaches and rivers. So too is our thirst for meaning.
If we accept evolution, as indeed we must, our longing for meaning is nature–in the same sense that birdsong and the howling of wolves are nature.
But if our minds are nothing more than the accidental outcome of a mindless evolutionary process, why should we trust them at all? A Darwinian account of the mind's critical capacities–explanatory though such a narrative might be–is not enough to justify the confidence we spontaneously place in our cognitional powers.
Darwin himself would agree. He agonized over whether the theory of natural selection, taken by itself, might not undermine the actual trust we have in our mind's capacity to understand and know reality. "With me the horrid doubt always arises," he admitted to a friend, "whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
Darwin had no good answer to this question, but that does not mean it is unanswerable. We can embrace evolutionary science without losing confidence in our minds. For it is not by looking back at what our minds evolved from, I suggest, but only by looking forward at what our minds are now anticipating that we can validate our cognitional confidence and vindicate our trust in cosmic purpose.
But just what are our minds anticipating? What are they reaching for? If, along with me, you are asking this question, you are already closing in on the answer. Your mind is engaged at his very moment in nothing less than the search for truth. And simply by reaching toward truth both you and your mind's natural root system–the universe–are ennobled. As they are being taken captive by the most undeniable of values, truth itself, they are already participating in its empowering though always elusive presence. It is because this transcendent value has already taken hold of you, and in you the whole universe, that you can have faith in your critical intelligence and also trust that the universe has a purpose.
Purpose, after all, means quite simply the bringing about of something undeniably and permanently good. Is that what is going on in the cosmos?
As long as you are drawn toward truth, so also is the natural world that gave birth to your mind. The two, after all, are inseparable. As long as the search for truth persists, not only can you trust your mind, you can also trust the universe that has germinated such an exquisite means of opening itself to what is timelessly worth treasuring.
*****************************
... and the other question was Does science make belief in God obsolete? Some interesting guys answered this one too, including Robert Sapolsky and Christoph Schönborn, OP. Here below is the response given by Fellow of the British Academy, ordained priest in the Church of England, and a Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, Keith Ward .....
***************************
No.
Far from making belief in God obsolete, some interpretations of modern science provide positive reinforcement for belief in God.
The methodology of the natural sciences requires the formulation of fruitful questions about the nature of the world that can be answered by careful and repeatable observations. The use of controlled experiments aids the construction of illuminating schemes of classification or of causal hypotheses that explain why things are as they are. The development of mathematical techniques for describing and predicting observable regularities is usually an important part of a scientific approach to the world.
There are many different sorts of natural science, from the patient observations of botany and ethology to the more theory-laden hypotheses of quantum cosmology. What is their relation to belief in God? The answer depends on how one defines God. I shall adopt the rather minimal view that God is a non-physical being of consciousness and intelligence or wisdom, who creates the universe for the sake of distinctive values that the universe generates.
If there is such a God, it follows that a non-physical conscious intelligence is possible - so a materialist view that all existent things must be physical, or must have location in space-time and must be subject to the causal laws of such a space-time, must be false. It follows that the nature of the universe must be compatible with being the product of intelligent creation, and must contain states that are of distinctive value and that could not otherwise exist. And it follows that there is a form of non-physical causality - the whole physical universe only exists because it is the effect of such causality. So some facts about the universe (minimally, the fact that the universe exists as it does) must be such that they cannot be completely explained by physical causal laws alone.
All these claims are subject to dispute. Such disputes are as old as recorded human thought. But has the spectacular advance of the natural sciences added anything significant to them? Some writers have supposed that science rules out any non-physical beings or forms of causality. Auguste Comte propagated the nineteenth century idea of a progress of humanity through three states of thought - religious, metaphysical, and positive or scientific. The final stage supersedes the others. Thus science renders belief in God obsolete.
But quantum physicists have decisively rejected Comte's philosophical proposal that human sense-observations provide the ultimate truth about objective reality. They more nearly vindicate Kant's alternative proposal that our senses only reveal reality as it appears to us. Reality in itself is quite different, and is accessible only through mathematical descriptions that are increasingly removed from observation or pictorial imagination (how do you picture a probability-wave in Hilbert space?).
It is almost commonplace in physics to speak of many space-times, or of this space-time as a 10- or 11-dimensional reality that dissolves into topological foam below the Planck length. This is a long way from the sensationalism of Hume and Comte, and from the older materialism that insists on locating every possible being within this space-time. Some modern physicists routinely speak of realities beyond space-time (e.g., quantum fluctuations in a vacuum from which this space-time originates). And some physicists, such as Henry Stapp, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann, speak of consciousness as an ultimate and irreducible element of reality, the basis of the physical as we know it, not its unanticipated by-product.
It is simply untrue that modern physics rules out the possibility of non-physical entities. And it is untrue that science has established a set of inflexible laws so tightly constraining and universally dominating that they exclude the possibility of other forms, including perhaps non-physical forms, of causal influence that we may not be able to measure or predict. It is more accurate to say that fundamental laws of nature are seen by many physicists as approximations to an open, holistic and flexible reality, as we encounter it in relatively isolated and controlled conditions.
An important fact about God is that if God is a non-physical entity causally influencing the cosmos in non-physical ways, God's mode of causal influence is most unlikely to be law-governed, measurable, predictable, or publicly observable. To the extent that the sciences describe regular, measurable, predictable, controllable, and repeatable behavior, acts of God will be outside the scientific remit. But that does not mean they cannot occur.
Even opponents of intelligent creation (not "intelligent design," which in America has come to designate a view that specific scientific evidences of design can be found) often concede that the amazingly fine-tuned laws and constants of nature that lead to the existence of intelligent life look as if they are designed to do so. The appearance, they say, is deceptive. But it could be true, as Steven Weinberg has suggested, that intelligent life-forms like us could only exist in a cosmos with the fundamental constants this cosmos has, that intelligent life is somehow prefigured in the basic laws of the universe, and that the universe "knew we were coming," as Freeman Dyson has put it. If so, then the hypothesis of intelligent creation is a good one because it makes the existence of intelligent life vastly more probable than the hypothesis that such life is a product of blind processes that may easily have been otherwise.
But this is not a scientific hypothesis. It posits no observationally confirmable entities, and produces no specific predictions. It is a philosophical hypothesis about the most adequate overall interpretation of a very wide set of data, including scientific data, but also including non-scientific data from history, personal experience, and morality. And that is the fundamental point. It is not science that renders belief in God obsolete. It is a strictly materialist interpretation of the world that renders belief in God obsolete, and which science is taken by some people to support. But science is more ambiguous than that, and modern scientific belief in the intelligibility and mathematical beauty of nature, and in the ultimately "veiled" nature of objective reality, can reasonably be taken as suggestive of an underlying cosmic intelligence. To that extent, science may make a certain sort of belief in God highly plausible.
*****************************
posted by crystal | 1:27 PM
3 Comments:
Crystal, THANK YOU----for moving on. The Templeton quotes ruined my dinner. Just words, with no meaning.Thank God for the "new physics". It gives every apologist a chance to throw together nonsense language and claim they are saying something?
A useful discusiion might be who/what is God. Does he walk and talk with you in the garden or is he the ground of all being--whatever in the hell that means.But it is interesting to know what 'real"people think. Not word stew thrown together by those, like Ward, who use their "learning" to babble nonsense. Incidentally his discussion of Kant was sheer dishonesty. Jack
I like Keith Ward very much, which is why I keep posting stuff he has to say.
Hey Mark,
I must compliment you cause you seem to be a good influence on Jack.
OK! I see that kissing UP did not succeed this time but you're on the right track Mark and remember that "Rome" was not built in "ONE" day. :)
I hear ya Jack! sinner vic, you're lucky that the cell you're in is in Victor's Body but keep going the way you are and Victor might just throw "IT" all UP and "IT" might come down and "IT" I mean hit you in the "Face" and I ask you sinner vic, who's going to face "IT?"
Come on, can't you take a joke Jack? :)
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