Commentary on Richard and GoodK's Debate

[_EAllusion]

Stalin was a Darwinist. Without Darwinism, Stalin would not have become an atheist and millions would have not been slaughtered.

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Stalin was into Lysenkoism and had scientists who supported Darwinian evolution sent to their death for that. I repeat, Stalin was so committed against it, that he had people sent to die for their support of Darwinism. They weren't, as you imply upthread, murdered scientists that just happened to be Darwinists. They were killed for their belief in Darwinian thought. Western evolutionary biology was suppressed. Stalin supported and enacted a number of policies based explicitly on the Lamarkian science of Lysenko which, as one would expect, did not work out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

The upshot of all this is this is clear-cut evidence you are getting your information from fundamentalist Christian sources, as that's where these kind of statements are almost exclusively found.

e.g.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creatio ... stalin.asp

[_Trevor]

I'd say the problem is a belief that morality doesn't exist or that we can create our own morality. Without morals, immoral behavior is more likely to follow. Without moral teachings, immoral behavior is more likely to follow.

For dart, when he returns to full functionality. Since scientists, even atheist ones, recognize the existence and utility of human morality, the conversation has moved past this. We can get into a real chicken-and-egg debate on this, but arguably the inculcation of morality comes from multiple sources, and thus is not unique to religion. The Romans, for example, defined what was moral as the "mos maiorum," or ancestral practices. This suggests that they did not credit the gods as the source of their morality, but their forebears.

[_JohnStuartMill]

*bump*, now that Kevin's back.

[_JohnStuartMill]

Sure, but the Founders who were best known for their intellectual contributions to the idea of individual liberty were the most deistic.

You'd have to be more specific than that.

Jefferson was probably the most interested in individual liberty of any of the politicians directly involved in the revolution, and there weren't many people who held more radical religious views at the time than he did. There would have been significantly less philosophical foundation for the American Revolution without David Hume, a noted freethinker. It's hard to think of anyone who advanced the ideas of the Revolution in the popular mind more articulately or effectively than Thomas Paine, whose disdain for religion was notorious.

I don't know about that. If church attendance is any indicator, then the colonists, as a whole, were not markedly religious, as I recall.

Perhaps not, but they certainly weren't hippy-dippy freethinkers a la Jefferson and Paine.

People don't feel accountable to leprechauns. That's why people are always after their gold (or lucky charms).

If people thought that leprechauns existed and could punish and reward behavior, they'd feel accountable to them. Allow me to rephrase: how did their atheism inform their crimes against humanity any more than their lack of belief in a panopticon run by extraterrestrials?

Bad ideas can and have been weeded out of religion as well.

After decades and centuries of kicking and screaming, yes. The fact is that religion is not as amenable to self-correction as secular morality is, by dint of their very natures. Morality that is grounded on rationality has no reason to not change if the underlying rationale of one of its precepts is found to be false. Because religious ethics is not grounded in this way, however, its erroneous prescriptions can linger on for a very long time after they have been found to be unsubstantive.

[_JohnStuartMill]

From the Terrestrial thread:

Damn you for getting me of track! (grin)

Seriously, I'm not as versatile as some might think. I can discuss certain topics when I'm in the mood, and right now I'm back in a Book of Abraham phase. I'm sure I'll get back into this topic soon enough, so I won't get into heavy debating right now. These kinds of discussions usually lead to CFRs, so they require books I left back in Brasil. I'm going back in July. Anyway, I'll just offer a quick response below and then let the thread get back on topic.

When in the hell have I ever said "God did it" just because science hasn't explained it? This response is scripted. Surely you guys can come up with something better than this.

No, but it would have to include them, or else virtually every theist would be categorized as ID. This is wrong, and serves no purpose but to dismiss arguments out of hand via guilt of association, which in and of itself is fallacious anyway.

No they don't. You just take it for granted that our reasoning is so simplistic and absurd as this. These claims have been addressed on many occassions, whether you're aware of them or not. In a nutshell, cosmological arguments strongly point to an intelligent source behind the laws of the universe. It could not have been an accident that the universe accomodates our life as it does. It isn't relying on "God of the Gaps," because science hasn't explained how it is an accident. It is just that science can't explain it as an accident because it can't be an accident. It defies logic to say it was an accident or that we won the cosmological jackpot. To that extent, I know a God exists. It isn't based on "Oh, well science can't explain XYZ, so I'll assume its God." That is surely idiotic. I know it/he/she is responsible for the universe because the universe is governed by certain, mathematically intertwined laws that cannot have come about by accident. It requires an intelligent source. As Einstein said, we are like children walking into a massive library. We don't know the language in which these books were written, but we know that they had to have been written by some intelligent source. To that extent, I know a God exists.

So, simply because science hasn't explained why the laws are what they are, doesn't mean it can eventually. And even if it can, Stephen Hawking said an ultimate unifying theory would only consist of equations, and then said the question, "So what breathed life into these equations?" would still remain. It is the fact that these laws are what they are so we can exist! The universe is what it is so life on earth can exist. This places humanity back at the center of the universe, albeit not literally.

It isn't a scientific understanding, but rather a materialistic understanding that has problems. New Atheists conflate the two as if they are synonymous, pretending they aren't holding to some form of dogma themselves. They are, and it isn't called science.

I've already addressed this argument in the "Methodological Atheism of Science" thread (see my stuff about puddles). Because I don't want to just restate my position, I'll post an elaboration of the concept I first posted on the other board a few years ago in response to the fine-tuning argument.

I just want to set the record straight for anyone who has never heard of the anthropic principle. This is a principle that says basically that the unverse exists in a way specifically to make life possible. This is often called a fallacy because we make the observation after the fact so it is a little bit of an a priori conclusion, in other words we really do exist so the principle must be true (the conclusion justifies the conclusion but it should be obseration justifies the conclusion).

I think the fallacy of the anthropic principle lies more in its reversal of the true order of causation, and in its illegitimate leap of teleology. Human beings are able to exist because of the very specific conditions of the universe and biosphere, yes, but that in no way implies purpose in general. Nor does it imply that specific kind of purpose which we call design.

I think a clarification of Douglas Adam's parable will help explain what I mean when I say that the anthropic principle has gotten the order of causation wrong. For starters, the analogy is much more abstract than what you seem to think -- the puddle isn't concerned with weak nuclear forces, or rates of evaporation, or humidity, or anything like that. Rather, the puddle is astonished only that it fits into its respective hole so well, and concludes from that observation that the hole was therefore made for the puddle. The part of this soliloquy that elicits a chuckle from the audience is that we, unlike the puddle, are aware that the puddle assumes its shape because of the shape of the hole, not the other way around. Likewise, human beings are what we are (a certain height, a certain metabolism, certain tolerance for heat and cold, etc.) because any variation of organism that didn't occupy this cosmological niche wouldn't survive long enough to reproduce, not the other way around.

The problem with comparing the anthropic principle as it applies to the existence of the universe to the existence of a puddle that feels that its existence is a foregone conclusion is that the universe depends upon a set of constants for its existence (gravitational force, EM force, strong force and other nuclear forces, etc.), whereas the puddle depends upon a set of variables for its existence (relative humidity, the wind, temperature, the presence of shade). Change gravity even a tiny bit and the universe doesn't exist. A little more gravity and the big bang wouldn't have amounted to very much, everything would have collapsed back on itself and there would be no universe as we know it. A little less gravity and the big bang throws particles out faster and farther than they can group into the things our universe is made of. Minute changes of any of the constant forces that govern our universe similarly nullify our existence.

Yes, it would have nullified our particular existence, but I think that using this as an argument for design is still weak. Depending on which cosmologist you ask -- there's obviously a lot of dissension in the field, and I'm not trying to gloss over that -- universes are being created and destroyed all the time, and the only reason our universe has existed in its recognizable form for so long is because it happened to be one in which this fortuitous assemblage of universal constants popped up. To illustrate:

A little more gravity and the big bang wouldn't have amounted to very much, everything would have collapsed back on itself and there would be no universe as we know it.

Such a collapse probably wouldn't go on indefinitely, though -- there are good reasons for the universe to start expanding again. This might have happened billions of times before the universe finally got it 'right'.

Even denying the previous possibility -- which would be understandable given the controversy involved -- there would still be problems in using this "universal" anthropic principle. For why does existence, in the form we narrowly conceive of it, have to be so? Let's say that the second of your hypotheticals occurred:

A little less gravity and the big bang throws particles out faster and farther than they can group into the things our universe is made of.

This precludes natural selection based on chemistry, on assemblages of molecules, but it doesn't preclude natural selection based on, say, differential propagation of electromagnetic radiation. Natural selection is not substrate-specific, so the existence of DNA or even of particles in general is not necessary to its existence. True, this conception of "life" is very foreign to us, but that's the point of criticisms to various anthropic principles.

The universal anthropic principle is precisely the same type of argument as "if Earth's orbit were just a little further from the sun..." and falls prey to a similar criticism, namely that we're conceiving of existence itself (instead of biological life, as in the first argument) anthropocentrically.

[_EAllusion]

I agree with the gist of what you are saying, but I don't like the terms you pick to describe it. The issue isn't really the order of causation per se. It's picking a target after the fact, defining God as wanting to obtain that, and then trying to argue because that target is unlikely amongst all the possibilities, it means that God likely did it. It's like drawing a bullseye around whereever a random gunshot happens to hit, then claiming an expert marksman must be about because a bullseye has been hit dead-on and that would be highly unlikely given all the other spots that could've been hit.

There is a separate issue that part of why we are so acclimated to our environment is because we evolved to suit it. There are variations in our environment that are well-suited to other living creatures, not to meant other potential organisms, that are not us. In that sense, the order of causation is backwards. We're adapted to tolerate a narrow range of UV radiation because those are the ecological pressures we evolved under. There's no reason to think a narrow range of UV radiation is adapted to fit us. Kevin is the type of fine-tuner who really focuses in on human beings, but you really could pick just about anything you observe, as it all exists within a relatively narrow range of conceived, if not actual, cosmological possibility. The fine-tuning argument is a very old one, but the precise object of "fine-tuning" used in popular arguments does change through time.

[_JohnStuartMill]

I think that the anthropic fallacy can be understood entirely in terms of your second paragraph, EAllusion, given that the fine-tuning argument appeals to the inhabitability of the universe in general. We had to adapt to a certain level of environmental radiation, yes, but we had to adapt to a certain kind of logic about molecular behavior as well, and it's not clear that the molecular logic we observe isn't just an accident. If the cosmological constants were different, precluding the existence of chemistry, some other mode of life could have arisen, or not. (Remember that natural selection isn't substrate-specific; it doesn't even need chemistry to work.) My point is that the cosmological constants are the reason that life utilizes chemistry to function properly, and not the other way around.