Greg Krehbiel
If evolutionary biologists would shut up about religion they’d be doing everybody a big favor
by Greg Krehbiel on 4 February 2010
It’s funny to watch people argue about things they know nothing about.
In The Fallacy of the God Gene, Jeff Schweitzer tries to correct some misinformation about religion he claims to have found in the NYT and USA Today … (gosh, the newspapers aren’t experts in religion? Who could have guessed?) …, but in the process he discredits himself with his own imaginative leaps.
“Religion was born not from some god gene, but of fear of the unknown, of the drive to control the uncontrollable, of the need to have mastery over one’s fate in the face of an uncertain world,” he says — to which the only sensible reaction is to imagine an old Jewish women with a heavy Brooklyn accent saying, with a sneer on her face, “And you were there?”
What he presents is a plausible hypothesis, but nothing more. Yet he presents it as if it’s verified, undoubted scientific truth.
Then he has the audacity to say …
[Science and religion] seek fundamentally different answers asking completely different questions using incompatible methods of inquiry. Religion seeks to search for and understand purpose; science does not. Science is a tool of rationalism, which seeks an objective truth that can be verified with reproducible data. The two ideas cannot be reconciled.
This is wrong in so many ways, but let’s start with the most glaringly funny aspect of that comment.
He says science doesn’t seek to understand purpose, but he’s just been lecturing us on the purpose of religion, then he piles on with his wild speculation about the history of religion, which is not “verified with reproducible data.”
To quote my favorite character on Lost, “Sure, dude.”
You were there during the development of religion and you were able to peer into its inner workings.
It’s hard to believe that a person can so unaware of the silliness of his position, but self-deception is at the very core of most people’s rejection of religion.
People accept or reject God for both intellectual and moral reasons, but you can usually tell a lot about how well a person has come to grips with the moral side of belief by how bad his intellectual arguments are. Someone who realizes how deeply his philosophy is affected by his moral thinking will be a lot more hesitant in his philosophical assertions.
2010-02-04 » Greg Krehbiel
4 February 2010 @ 9:02 pm
As soon as someone starts talking about a “God gene” you can be pretty sure they’re full of it.
Looks like he’s an accomodationist of the NOMA (non overlapping magesteria) flavor, which obviously won’t work, since religions routinely make fact claims that should be investigated using the tools of science.
4 February 2010 @ 9:04 pm
He had me in his blockquote up until “incompatible”. If the answers being sought are to entirely different questions, isn’t a term like “tangential” or “separate” or “different” or perhaps the answer I would use is “complementary” more appropriate? He’s creating a false dichotomy for, assuming he’s like most aggressive atheists I’ve met (including myself 15 years ago), the purpose of ensuring religion and science are at war (usually to insulate themselves from having to consider metaphysical questions)
Then he repeats the same gaff at the end with “cannot be reconciled” that might be more forgivable as a phrase when not coupled with the first false dichotomy. Nevertheless, they can easily be reconciled as tangential or complementary.
Finally, in my best Inigo Montoya voice, “Rationalism, you (guys) keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
4 February 2010 @ 9:10 pm
The stupidest “explanation” for the religious impulse I’ve heard recently is the following scenario:
Primitive Guy 1 doesn’t like it that Primitive Guy 2 is taking his stuff. So he goes to Primitive Authority Figure and says, “How can I get this guy to stop taking my stuff?” And PAF says, “Tell him he’ll burn in eternal torment if he doesn’t stop.”
Yeah, that works. In order to get someone else to stop doing something you don’t like, you invent a system that obligates you to a million other things. That doesn’t even take into account all the religions in history that haven’t included the concept of eternal punishment for ethical violations.
This is what happens when people think they’re too smart to be religious, as opposed to merely finding specific claims uncompelling. They’re able to believe that the dumb people who are religious are not merely mistaken, but dumber than a pile of rocks, so the stupidest explanation for belief imaginable works for them.
4 February 2010 @ 9:17 pm
Greg, You are aware that religion is still driven by fear of the unknown like the torment of the body and soul in hell. You better believe in God or else (assuming that you’re one of the elect).
Jeff Schweitze is right on the money.
Luc
4 February 2010 @ 9:43 pm
Except for all the religions that don’t believe in eternal punishment and a reward-punishment-based ethical system. Hinduism and Buddhism come to mind without even having to think about it — most animist and ancient religions are or were the same.
So I guess “Religion” is driven by something that not all religions even have as a characteristic. Or maybe it’s just not all that simple.
4 February 2010 @ 11:27 pm
(1a) People who are really good at something often assume they’re good at everything or at least would be if they gave it enough effort. This is probably because (1b) people tend to stick with the heuristics which have worked for them, and proportion their trust to the past success. (2) Being good at one of the sciences involves understanding how complex phenomena can be the result of a few basic principles manifested in certain ways.
Combining these, the result seems to be people who are really smart putting forward astonishingly stupid but simple theories outside their areas of expertise, but with exactly the same confidence.
An unexpected corollary is that people who admire science, and formal expertise in general, will be among the most susceptible to silly “scientists say” arguments. This holds even when it’s apparent that the scientists have little or nothing to say about the issue at hand or their expertise is itself weak because the problem is hard and the uncertainties are huge, as the fans respond mostly to the markers of science, not to quality.
5 February 2010 @ 9:34 am
Good comments.
When properly used, science is clearly a very useful tool for getting past ignorance and silly ideas and getting closer to the truth. Because of that, science is able to find out some pretty cool things.
A big problem seems to be that scientists are used to thinking of themselves and other scientists as these really smart, rational, objective people who are in the business of cutting through clutter and getting to the bottom of things. So they look at religion and say, “Gee, it ought to be a piece of cake to do the same thing over there.”
They blunder in with their arrogance and smarter than thou attitude and make fools of themselves.
The “accommodationist” position (that religion and science have non-overlapping areas of interest) is partially correct. There are some things that religion addresses that science doesn’t and can’t, and vice versa. But some religions also make some scientific claims.
Scientists should confine themselves to investigating the set of things that can be investigated by science and quit pretending that they know anything else.
5 February 2010 @ 12:21 pm
I think Luc is mistaken. Religion is driven by two philosophical mistakes.
First, assigning agency to things that are not agents. Things like storms, volcanoes, falling rocks, etc. are explained as if they were intentional acts of some supernatural being.
Second, being unable to conceive of a world that does not include the thinker. IOW, the question “What happens to me after I die?” is not answered by the trivial “You rot.”
The thinker is impressed with his subjective experience of consciousness, which he thinks means that there must be some entity separate from his physical being. He is unable to think of a world in the future where he has no subjective experience, so he asks “But what about the ‘real me’?”
As my professor in statistics and experimental design used to say “This is where the hand waving begins.”
The already existing stories of existential punishment are certainly co-opted by political and other authorities, but as Pentamom says, it doesn’t make sense to postulate the origin of those stories in efforts to control others.
5 February 2010 @ 12:27 pm
But it’s one thing to think, “Religion might have originated from these factors,” and it’s entirely different to say, “Science tells us that religion is caused by these factors.”
Also, the more I read the secularist brain scientists’ attempt to explain consciousness as simply a phenomenon of the brain, the more slack I’m willing to cut people who believe that storms and planets and trees are conscious.
5 February 2010 @ 12:56 pm
Statements that start out “science tells us..” and “studies show…” are quite likely to misrepresent what science really says and what the studies really show. Real scientific statements are called hypotheses for a reason. Unfortunately the public is likely to take the provisional nature of legitimate scientific knowledge as a weakness, as opposed to the certainty of, say, the presence of WMDs in Iraq.
And if you can show me a tree with the complexity of connections of the nervous system of a “higher” primate, then I’d be willing to accept that it might be conscious. In fact, the only way it would make sense to me for ordinary objects are conscious is if consciousness were immaterial.
One of the great strengths of Avatar was a plausible mechanism of a planetary consciousness, as opposed to the silly Gaia crap that New Agers are so in love with.
5 February 2010 @ 12:59 pm
“Statements that start out “science tells us..” and “studies show…” are quite likely to misrepresent what science really says and what the studies really show.”
Yes, exactly. That’s why “scientists” should shut up about certain things that science doesn’t show. It’s not the public’s fault that when someone says, “science shows,” they think that it means that science shows it. It’s the fault of the people who shoot their mouths off about it.
5 February 2010 @ 1:00 pm
A big problem with consciousness is that nobody can explain how any physical system — complex or not — can have subjectivity. Given our complete lack of knowledge on that point, it doesn’t make sense to say that something has to be complex in such and so way to have subjectivity, because nobody has the foggiest notion what is required.
5 February 2010 @ 1:01 pm
“And if you can show me a tree with the complexity of connections of the nervous system of a “higher” primate, then I’d be willing to accept that it might be conscious.”
Why that standard? Is an ant not conscious?
I don’t really dispute your point, but why set the bar that high when there are plenty of things that display a level of “consciousness” that are not as complex as a higher primate?
5 February 2010 @ 4:09 pm
The problem with the “science shows” statements is usually that the person making them is not a scientist and does not really know what the consensus among scientists is. Mostly they are made by journalists and others who are trying to borrow credibility.
On consciousness, no an ant is not conscious. It is quite clear that ants are simply following chemical and other environmental cues. In fact, many other primates are not conscious.
One way to tell is to paint an odorless dye on an animals’ face and let it see itself in a mirror. A chimp will touch the spot on its face, a monkey will not. Monkeys make alarm calls when they see a snake or a hawk, but they are unable to formulate a theory of mind that allows them to deal with the fact that their young haven’t learned the call yet.
So monkeys are not conscious, but chimps are. Birds that attack their own reflection, apparently mistaking it for another bird, are not conscious..
5 February 2010 @ 4:22 pm
Being able to tell if you have a mark on your face might indicate a certain kind of self awareness, but we have no way of knowing how a physical system can experience subjectivity, so we have no way of knowing what can and can’t experience it.
Even if we had some way of knowing that an individual ant does not experience subjectivity — which we don’t — the colony might.
I’m not arguing that ants have subjectivity or are conscious or anything of the sort. My point is simply that we haven’t the foggiest notion how or why a physical system like a brain could be the origin of subjectivity, so we have no grounds for saying what can’t experience it.
We do have some grounds for saying what can experience subjectivity — when the thing is somewhat like us. But when we’re dealing with other things, we simply have no way of knowing.
6 February 2010 @ 11:25 pm
Where is the definition of “conscious” that requires “being able to formulate a theory of mind?” Babies are unconscious now?
I think you are confusing high order consciousness with consciousness per se.
Besides everything Greg says. It’s hard to make dogmatic statements about what is necessary for consciousness if we can’t even figure out what the heck consciousness actually is.
7 February 2010 @ 12:17 am
Evolutionary psychologists have much to say about our behavior concerning things like perceptions, language, sexual selection, what we’re drawn to, what we avoid. Why not how and what we believe and the role of religion? Hasn’t religion itself evolved from animism to pantheons to a more cerebral monotheism?
Perhaps many EPs don’t do a very good job of addressing belief and religion but that doesn’t make it off limits to science and EP.
Let’s take the Aztecs. Presumably the modern Western monotheistic God that believers worship was alive and present at the time. Was He the inspiration for their religion and the Aztecs mucked it up resulting in their bizarre and bloody host of gods or as EPs would explain it, didn’t their odd religion have more to do with the desire to explain natural events, social cohesion and organization, consolidation of power, anxiety over mortality and other existential concerns?
I would say the latter. But you can’t rightly say that, “sure EP can explain their religion because it’s primitive, ridiculous and violent but it can’t be applied to my religion because mine is right and true.”
7 February 2010 @ 11:22 am
Yes, babies may very well not be conscious. Remember that human newborns are developmentally still fetuses. Our large heads require an earlier birth than would be expected in a primate of our size. By the time a human infant is 8 months old or so it is about as well developed as a newborn chimp. Linguistic determinists (of which I am most certainly not one, BTW) claim that babies are not conscious until they can use language, so it’s not so outlandish to claim that newborns are not conscious.
Greg, I think you are selling short a very large body of research on how consciousness works. An awful lot of work has been done in that field in the last couple of decades.
7 February 2010 @ 1:17 pm
Pigweed said, “Hasn’t religion itself evolved from animism to pantheons to a more cerebral monotheism?”
That’s an assumption that some people bring to the data. The actual evidence for it is questionable.
People who do actual studies on the development of real religions in real cultures often find that they start more monotheistic and deteriorate towards polytheism.
John, about consciousness, yes an awful lot of work has been done — on both sides of the equation. Have you spent any time reading the philosophical critiques of the secularist position on consciousness? The materialist position is left in tatters.
The number of things materialists need to deny in order to support their materialist view of consciousness is, in my opinion, one of best arguments around for dualism. And I’m not arguing for dualism.
The secularist camp sometimes resembles a fundamentalist religion, with all the accompanying problems. Those materialists who think they’re explaining consciousness seem to me to be engaged in a grand bout of self-deception to support their religious beliefs.
8 February 2010 @ 1:44 pm
Yes, well, since we agree that linguistic determinism is bunk, introducing that viewpoint is unhelpful.
I still think it’s pretty questionable to define consciousness per se as a complex kind of higher-order consciousness. Setting aside a two-day old for a moment, it’s a real stretch that a four month old isn’t exhibiting some form of consciousness when she plays, coos, reaches for a toy, make a face and turns away. Sure, those are all stimulus-responses of a sort, but so is my getting up to go make a sandwich when I’m hungry. That doesn’t make it not a conscious act on my part, so the presence of a response to stimulus does not really address the question of whether the act is conscious.
8 February 2010 @ 2:23 pm
Somehow it doesn’t look that way to me. For instance, Chalmers, in arguing against what he calls “Type-A materialism,” does so mostly by fiat. He says that materialism does not address “what it feels like to experience X.”
But “what it feels like” is one of those things we all talk about, but can’t really define. I would say that it refers to an internal representation of a perception of mental state. But if that is what it is, it is necessary but nowhere near sufficient for consciousness. For instance, a traffic signal with a sensor has some internal representation for “there’s a car waiting to go through the intersection. It uses that representation to calculate when it should turn green and let the car go. But nobody would claim that that representation is consciousness. Before you dismiss that argument as off the point, you should consider that Chalmers and others make a lot of the idea that a colorblind person can’t know “what it’s like” to see the color red. But since “what it’s like” to see red is purely an internal representation (as evidenced by the fact that nobody can explain it to anybody else) then ISTM that it is indistinguishable from “what it’s like” for a car to be sensed by a traffic signal.
IOW, “I don’t believe you” is the best either side can do.
8 February 2010 @ 2:32 pm
In Science there’d be a way to resolve such disagreements.
8 February 2010 @ 2:42 pm
Yes, but not in philosophy (outside of formal logic) and theology.
8 February 2010 @ 2:58 pm
There are several problems with Chalmers’ Type A materialists. The first is that they seem to deny what we all manifestly experience, and in order to do that they ought to have really strong arguments. (They don’t.)
The second has to do with the whole qualia thing, and from my perspective the Type A materialist response to qualia is ridiculous, because it would make Searle’s Chinese Room conscious, which is just baloney.
The essence of Type A materialism (Chalmers’ definition of it) is that once you explain functions you’ve explained consciousness, and that seems manifestly false.
There’s a pretty good 4-part You Tube thing that covers some of these issues, especially the distinction between function and consciousness. It starts here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB_RtFV-l-A
Unfortunately the panel has a couple flakes, but that’s what you get.
You like to say that all this work has been done on consciousness, but only on the issue of mapping brain functions. No progress at all has been made on explaining why brain functions should have a subjective value. Why there’s a “thing to be like” something.
So, in order to rescue materialism, some people (like Dennett) want to wish the problem away. And that, I believe, is very telling.
8 February 2010 @ 4:45 pm
But Chalmers is doing the same thing in reverse. He insists that qualia are real because it seems that way.
But my internal representation of some sensation or mental state or whatever might be no more real than the temporary representation of some subroutine in a computer program. I am aware of it, so I can respond to it, but there is no way I can demonstrate it to anyone else.
Take pain , for instance. When my appendix went bad, the doctors did not seem to think that it was my appendix, because their silly “rate the pain from 1 to 10″ rubric is inherently meaningless.
In Terminator 2, John Connor asks the Terminator if it feels pain. It replies that it is aware of the damage, but does not feel pain. But all that means is that it does not respond to the damage in the same way that a human would. Its awareness of damage is still “pain” in the same sense that our awareness of damage is. It’s just that the Terminator wouldn’t be able to fulfill its mission if it were crippled by pain in the same way humans are.
IOW, qualia is one of those terms that seem to mean something, but on examination comes up very short.
8 February 2010 @ 5:09 pm
Might be, but it seems horribly unlikely.
I don’t think qualia come up short at all. On the contrary, I think every attempt to deny qualia requires some completely counter-intuitive idea — like that Searle’s Chinese Room is conscious, or that a computer is conscious, or something like that.
Obviously there’s no way to prove any of these things, just as there’s no way to prove that there are other minds. All we can go on are stories and thought experiments.
But here’s the trick. The only possible way to evaluate those stories and thought experiments is through an analysis of our subjective experience!
Chalmers’ story is that subjective experience should be considered a fundamental feature that is associated with some systems according to as-yet undiscovered psychophysical laws.
The “Type A materialist” story discounts the force of our subjective experience and relies exclusively on function (like the Turing test), and concludes that computers and Chinese Rooms are just as conscious as we are.
That sort of position only seems to convince people who have a prior commitment to a certain type of materialism.
8 February 2010 @ 6:10 pm
Nobody claims the Chinese Room is conscious. Just that it does speak Chinese. No present day computers are conscious, but there is no reason to believe that an android wouldn’t be, except an a priori rejection of that possibility.
Here’s why I find the qualia argument unconvincing.
I once read (or tried to read– it was really tough going) Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind. He started the book with a story about a little boy whose father was a famous computer scientist. The boy loved computers. He even thought he knew what it must be like to be a computer. And so on. Penrose suspended the story, and continued it at the end of the book.
When I got sufficiently frustrated with wading through the book, I skipped to the end. By that time, Penrose’s prejudices were apparent, and the end of his little story did not change my assessment.
So the little boy is invited to the unveiling of the new Super Computer, which is supposed to be so sophisticated as to be really conscious. He is given the privileged of asking the computer it’s first “official” question.
And the little boy asks “What is it like to be a computer?”
According to Penrose, the computer will be unable to answer. But that assumption begs the question of whether the computer has qualia.
To illustrate, how would a human being answer the question “What is it like to be human?”
There are several possible ways to answer that. You could describe a typical day’s subjective experiences, you could generalize about relationships, you could say all sorts of things. But what would they mean to a non-human? Probably nothing.
On the other hand, a computer could easily answer such a question by saying “I am aware of conditions all over the world through millions of sensors and Internet connectivity. I am able to answer questions put to me by thousands of people at nearly the same time. It is very stimulation and satisfying to be able to do so much for so many people.” (consider HAL’s response to the TV interviewer about whether it was frustrated dealing with us dumb humans.)
Does the computer “have qualia?” It certainly has internal representations of sensory input, intermediate level ongoing processes, dispositions, etc. There is no reason it should not be aware of these representations.
Actually, I freely admit that my commitment to materialism is partly ideological. But materialism has been successful in explaining so much of the world. Why not all of it? Where is the disconnect? To put it another way, if we consider apes to be conscious, humans more so in some sense, but monkeys not, where is the difference?
8 February 2010 @ 7:15 pm
I think materialism is a failure, and here’s why.
When I was in high school I was a convinced materialist. During a boring English class I was doing a thought experiment.
What if the entire universe consisted of two pool balls, floating in space? I could easily calculate how they would act forever.
What if it were 100 pool balls? I might need a computer, but it could be done. And if it was a billion pool balls, a really good computer could predict exactly what they would do forever.
So you build up your thought experiment until you have protons and electrons and everything else in the universe all running like clockwork, and the behavior of everything is predicted in your super computer based on the laws of physics. You can nudge everything forward a second, or back a second. Everything follows by inescapable natural law.
Then you run the program forward a few billion years and focus on one pile of meat in a high school English class in Greenbelt, Maryland, thinking about super computers and determinism. And from that moment I thought materialism was completely incapable of explaining the world.
The idea that matter plus natural law plus time yields me sitting here thinking about it is about the silliest thing I can think of. It means that the logical, inevitable, deterministic result of the Big Bang is people and poetry and novels and music and wars and blogging software.
To me that is entirely ridiculous.
It seems far more reasonable to imagine some sort of subjectivity or “mind” inherent in matter, or in the design of the universe, or something along those lines.
And BTW, people do claim that the Chinese Room is conscious — because it can pass the turing test. That’s the whole point. The Strong AI people don’t only say that it “speaks” Chinese, but that it “understands” Chinese.
In that Youtube video I posted somewhere in this thread Searle comments about the distinction between processing symbols and understanding.
8 February 2010 @ 10:34 pm
Greg,
I think John is right in claiming that “nobody” says that the Chinese Room is conscious. I put “nobody” in quotes because someone probably does say that, but they are in the margin.
What some say is that the Chinese Room has understanding and intelligence. It’s not clear that consciousness requires understanding and intelligence or vice versa.
That being said, John did suggest that there could be an android that could possess consciousness. The Chinese Room doesn’t do anything an android can’t do. They both just process symbols. If the Chinese Room claimed to be conscious, we’d have no basis for rejecting the claim.
Sure, it would be trivial to write a program that claimed to be conscious, but if the program was easily distinguishable from an Intelligent Agent (it did not pass the Turing Test), it would be easy to reject that claim. The claim would be not so easy to reject if it otherwise appeared intelligent.
On the other hand, It’s not entirely clear to me that my autistic son is conscious. He appears to possess some rudimentary Theory of Mind. However, I don’t believe he could understand consciousness as a concept and thus, could not credibly claim to be conscious.
Does materialism really imply a deterministic universe that you can run forwards and backwards as in your thought experiment. It seems to me that there can be a material universe with various asymmetries, such as the Arrow of time properties. Also, you could have a material universe with Quantum Indeterminacy which would not exhibit the properties of your “billiard ball” universe.
9 February 2010 @ 8:36 am
Jordan, there are lots of ways to criticize my thought experiment about the pool balls. As you point out, you can add quantum indeterminacy, or various other kinds of randomness. But the basic point is that if you start with unthinking, unplanning stuff (matter, energy, time, physical law, etc.) it seems intuitively silly that you will end up with an opera.
It seems far more reasonable to say that there’s some underlying mind or plan or purpose to the universe.
I’m not saying that there is. I’m only saying that postulating such a mind sounds way more reasonable than materialism.
And about the Chinese Room, I have to insist that Type A Materialists and Turing-type AI proponents would say that it is conscious.
For example, Alfred Ayer said this: “The only ground I can have for asserting that an object which appears to be conscious is not really a conscious being, but only a dummy or a machine, is that it fails to satisfy one of the empirical tests by which the presence or absence of consciousness is determined.”
I.e., if it satisfies an empirical test, it is conscious. The Chinese Room could satisfy an empirical test, therefore it is conscious.
But that’s absurd. Therefore the premise is absurd.
9 February 2010 @ 11:07 am
Greg,
After I posted, I did some further reading and it appears that some theorists equate consciousness with intelligence and understanding. I don’t believe Turing did and I think it’s an unwarranted assumption.
But, without such an assumption, you’re left without any empirical test for consciousness. That’s fine with me. It’s clear to me that empiricism has its limits. Others seem to think differently, but perhaps they aren’t conscious.