Part 3 of my series on the new Macmillan reference Theism & Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy: my discussion of the Argument from Science, which holds that the collective consequence of the advance of the sciences is the substantial reduction in the epistemic probability of theism. I’ll also discuss the other atheist contributions on the subject, and compare all of it with the theists’ entry. (For a description of the entire volume and my role in it see Part 1.)
Science
This volume has a large section on the subject of “Science.” The atheist side spans some thirty pages, tackling such questions as: “Does Science Favor Theism or Atheism?” by Herman Philipse of Utrecht University; “Religious Experience and Neuroscience” by Kenneth Williford of the University of Texas; “Near-Death Experiences Are Not Evidence for Either Atheism or Theism” by Keith Augustine, Editor-in-Chief of Internet Infidels and a leading published expert in that subject; “Arguments Involving Cosmology and Quantum Physics” by Taner Edis of Truman Sate University; and of course my contribution: “The Effect of Scientific Progress and the Science of Religion on the Credibility of Theism” (pp. 588-90).
The chapter as a whole is described as:
A proper assessment of the bearing of scientific inquiry on theistic religion requires recognition that conflict, mutual consistency, independence, or concilience are possible but depends on the methods accepted and the claims made in each domain at particular times and places—which can, and have, varied. This chapter, therefore, focuses on questions relating to whether the best methods, findings, and theories in contemporary scientific disciplines support, cohere with, or conflict with commitments made by theistic theologies
Philipse covers the general point well, establishing three propositions: (1) “scientific progress has caused a gradual theistic retreat…in all domains of science, from cosmology to medicine,” which is more probable if theism is false than if it is true, therefore it is evidence against theism; (2) this same advancement in the sciences has caused a continual decrease in reliance on religious sources of information about humans and the world, which is again more probable if theism is false than true, and thus again evidence against theism; and (3) “many scientific results…make it improbable that theism is true,” which is all again less likely on theism than atheism (e.g., “it is unlikely that God would have created such an inhospitable universe” as cosmically we’ve found ours to be; it’s unlikely we’d have found “all mental phenomena depend on complex brain processes”; it’s unlikely God “would…have created humans by means of biological evolution”; it’s unlikely God “hid himself to humanity during many millennia,” including some 200,000 years, as we now know, of their prehistorical existence; and it’s improbable “that monotheism or theism in the sense defined started to appear quite late in human history” as in fact we now know it did), which is thus all evidence for atheism.
This amounts to in effect what I called the Basic Argument for Naturalism and the Basic Argument to Naturalism as the Best Explanation, which through those links you can find a formal presentation of.
And indeed I take all of that, expand on it, and develop it into a singular argument (p. 588):
Theology has responded by continually “redefining” God or beliefs about God to fit these newly revealed facts [from the sciences]. Nonetheless, the singular fact that theism (in any form, worldwide) never anticipated any of these developments and always has to be changed to accommodate them demonstrates that this evidence has lowered the probability that theism holds true. If that evidence hadn’t been lowering its probability, theism would not have had to continually change to fit what was being revealed. In the logic of probability, the more a theory’s predictions are disconfirmed and, consequently, the more that theory has to be revised with more additions after the fact to fit those disconfirmations, the less likely that theory is to be true (Carrier [Proving History] 2012)—unless evidence is acquired that independently confirms that those ad hoc additions are true. That, however, has never happened in the history of theism.
I then address all attempts at rebutting this observation, in particular claims such as “that scientific progress may have failed to vindicate theism but nevertheless requires a foundation of assumptions dependent on theism”; “that theistic hypotheses are the only ones viable for answering a certain few as yet unanswered questions” (such as in cognitive science and cosmology); and “that theism has occasionally made successful scientific predictions.” All of which I show are never founded on true facts. I then close with a counter-argument:
That religious experience is never scientifically verified to contain any knowledge not already possessed by percipients or the cultures they are influenced by and thus routinely conforms to the ignorance and factually false beliefs of that culture and time further verifies this conclusion. The very evidence needed to verify that a religious experience came from any superhuman source is never to be found outside unverifiable legends and popular tales. This is to be expected in atheism but not in theism, thereby increasing the probable validity of atheism over theism. The authors of the Bible and Qurʾan, for example, despite claiming a channel to the divine, never learned of the immorality of slavery or gender inequality or of the truth of heliocentrism or the germ theory of disease or anything at all remarkable for their time. For all these reasons, the science of religious experience actually supports atheism over theism.
Williford then supports our points by surveying the current state of the science of religious experience, concluding that “a naturalistic explanation that combines neuroscience, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and perhaps evolutionary biology [that] can explain the wide variety of [religious or mystical experiences] seems to be both more parsimonious and more comprehensive” and “is therefore to be preferred, on elementary, well understood, and generally accepted explanatory grounds, to a theistic explanation.” Which I point out is improbable on theism; but exactly what we expect on atheism.
Augustine then extends the same point to “Near Death Experiences.” Although he rightly explains there’s no reason to expect the specific phenomenon of NDEs on theism, so their being naturally explicable is also not evidence for atheism. The true facts of the matter simply argue for neither conclusion. But he nevertheless shows that NDE’s cannot be used as evidence for theism, without embracing false or inaccurate descriptions of the discovered or documented facts. Which you’ll note is a recurring theme.
Edis likewise debunks a lot of mystic and theist myths about cosmology and quantum mechanics, showing there isn’t any god to be found there either. Indeed, he points out, “Religions usually take a top-down view, starting with an irreducible mind to shape the material world from above” whereas “Physicalism, whatever form it takes, supports a bottom-up understanding of the world, where life and mind are the results of complex interactions of fundamentally mindless components,” and “the current state of science, including quantum mechanics, supports chance-and-necessity physicalism.” So the “burden of proof” for theism is now in consequence “very high.” A point I’ve also made before.
The Pope’s Astronomer Weighs In
All of that is preceded by the theists’ section on science, taking up almost as many pages again, entirely written by Guy Consolmagno, Director of the Vatican Observatory. He describes his chapter as describing:
[T]he relation between religion and science, providing an overview of contemporary science and the very nature of scientific knowledge. Predominant methods of science are detailed as well as its proper subject matter and goals, which are essential for addressing questions about whether scientific knowledge seems to support or to conflict with the sacred texts of theism.
Consolmagno’s position is that the advance of all the sciences does not favor theism or atheism. He thus rightly excludes prayer studies and cosmological science and all sorts of religious claims to find evidence of God in science. But he won’t go the next step of course and admit that this is itself evidence against the existence of God. Because he never addresses the strong cases made (which I just summarized above, but are laid out in more detail in my section of this volume) that these scientific results in fact do favor atheism. Instead he only addresses straw men. A common problem with formats like this, where each side is asked to simply write a position paper without seeing the others’, is that it invites the careless to argue against their own imaginary opponents rather than any real ones. And that’s what happens here.
Most of Consolmagno’s chapter is an arduous pile of useless rigmarole. Firstly, about how neither faith nor science produces certainty or finality in knowledge, which could have been covered in just a few sentences rather than several pages. Lastly, about how motivations to advance the sciences can be compatible with theism, which could have been covered in just a few sentences rather than several pages. And in between he goes on page after page about how “three axioms” essential to science only come from religion because ‘some religions advocate them’.
Which is a straight up fallacy. Just try it out: “because some fascists have always advocated these axioms, therefore these axioms come from fascism”; “because some pagans advocated these axioms, therefore these axioms come from paganism.” Etc. Why does this sound like bollocks? Because it’s the fallacy of false generalization: “If some P support Q, then only P support Q.” Wrong. Atheism and the irreligious also support these same axioms. Therefore they no more “come from religion” than rules against theft and murder or the belief that stars are far away.
Consolmagno means “the axioms of the existence of reality, the existence of scientific laws, and the innate value of the scientific enterprise itself.” I demonstrate in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire that in our Western tradition all three of these axioms derive from pagan and secular Greek philosophy, not from any religion, certainly not the Bible. I also show that Christendom was originally deeply resistant to the third of these axioms (until after a thousand plus years it rediscovered and finally absorbed that pagan value), and remained quite disinterested in the second (doing nothing with it for over a thousand years), and subverted the first with a belief that an imaginary world that doesn’t exist is nevertheless far more important than the one that does, which is hardly a respectable axiom conducive to science. And lo, history proves it wasn’t.
In actual fact, none of these are actually axioms. The first two are empirically verified theories; and the second is a value for pursuing them. And truth is:
- Pagans came to believe in the existence of a discoverable reality because that theory resulted in a more successful engagement with the world than any contrary thesis. We came to believe it, in other words, because it works. And as ancient philosophers—not the Bible—demonstrated, it would not likely work, if it was not likely true.
- The same happened with scientific laws: gradually it became clear the universe behaved in such orderly ways that it can be described quantitatively with mathematical relations. The first law of physics humanity discovered was likely the law of the lever, (d1)(W1) = (d2)(W2), discovered shortly after Aristotle, possibly by Archimedes, who likewise himself discovered the law of equilibrium, Wi = Wo — Wd, all before the New Testament even existed—which contains not a single reference to even the concept of a mathematical law of physics, much less the scientific principles needed to discover one, or even the value of doing so. All of those things came from heathen philosophers, who argued to them from evidence and reason, not from religion.
- And their discovery of those things led many philosophers to sing the praises of pursuing this knowledge, lauding the beauty of curiosity and knowledge for its own sake as well as its many demonstrated practical uses, which value for empirical progress in scientific knowledge of the world Christianity rejected and abandoned for well over a thousand years, and only reacquired by being infected by a literal “renaissance” of dead pagan philosophy.
In Scientist I demonstrate and document all of this.
By contrast, Consolmagno falsely claims “atheism” is agnostic about these values. That’s no more true than that “religion” is agnostic about these values. For every version of atheism that doesn’t adopt them, there is a version of religion that doesn’t adopt them. So there is simply no correlation here. In fact he has reality backwards: atheists don’t adopt these principles because of their atheism; they adopt them because of evidence and reason—hence, regardless of religion. So, too, any religion that adopts them. No religion adopts them “because of” the religion. A religion only incorporates them into itself when reason and evidence compels it to. And the fact that this is how we had to learn these things is evidence against theism. God would just tell us the value of these things. That he didn’t is yet one more way we know there is no God.
But notice that’s just one evidence against theism. One that Consolmagno completely missed and never addresses; because he has a false understanding of history, due to his religion duping him with a fake narrative it invented for itself. Which he gullibly never fact-checks. Because, religion. And on and on it goes. The argument from theistic retreat? He never addresses it. The argument to physicalism as the better explanation? He never addresses it. The argument from the persistent diversity and cultural evolution of religious experience? He never addresses it. The argument from all scriptures’ persistent scientific ignorance? He never addresses it. This is what theism does: ignore reality. And that is why it’s irrational.
Getting History Embarrassingly Wrong
The theists, I suspect, peer reviewed their own sections. I cannot otherwise explain how Consolmagno got so many false statements about history through peer review in this volume. For example, he shockingly says:
Arguably, it was Aristotle [who first thought there were laws of physics to discover and looked for and found some]. But it is interesting that for a thousand years after him no further progress was made in physics.
Holy balls of Batman. He just erased the entire history of ancient science! In his fabricated history, Archimedes never existed. Hero never existed. Ptolemy never did any work in optics or harmonics or mechanics or geography or cartography. Herophilus never launched neurophysiology as a field. Galen never advanced the study of human anatomy, mapping out the correct operation of the renal system or the vocal system. Roman-era controlled drug dosage experiments never happened. Aristarchus and Seleucus never launched the heliocentric school of astronomy and discovered the mathematical system of lunisolar tide theory. And everything else.
In actual fact, continuing advances in the sciences did not stop until the Roman economy collapsed in the third century A.D. and Christianity took over society in the following century, putting an end to scientific progress for a thousand years, East and West. (My book covers the details thoroughly, but for a taste, see my article on The Mythical Stillbirth of Science in Greece.) Consolmagno’s version of history is a naive fiction invented by prior Catholic apologists who didn’t actually study what they made assertions about. They are likely the ones who fed him all the baloney he repeats, such as:
The Romans were great practical engineers; … [but that] is not the same as science, or studying simply for knowledge. The Romans made no progress at all in asking questions of how the natural universe works, much less why it works the way it does.
All false. The Romans extensively praised and pursued knowledge for its own sake and made continual advances in many sciences. This includes even Italians like Seneca and Pliny, as consumers of and dabblers in science. But those weren’t the only Roman citizens under the Roman government doing science.
Consolmagno advances an inadvertently racist view of history, whereby if you weren’t an Italian, you weren’t a Roman, no matter what government you are funded by or citizenship you hold. This is like saying Americans have never advanced the sciences because Einstein and Feynman were actually Jews, and “really” only German and Lithuanian. It’s just as silly to claim Ptolemy and Galen weren’t Roman. Yet so he does:
Indeed, the one name in Roman astronomy who is remembered today, Ptolemy, was actually a Greek living in Egypt, not a Roman. He worked out the motions of the planets with all their epicycles as a mathematical trick to let him cast horoscopes, which is as close as astronomy gets to engineering.
Egypt was as Roman as Texas is American. And Ptolemy was a Roman citizen who was almost certainly a member of a Roman-funded scientific academy and served the Roman government in the production of maps and technologies for its military and trade. So this attempt to “exempt” him and erase him from history is perverse.
It’s equally perverse to use this trick to make it seem as though there weren’t hundreds of other scientists under the Roman empire—only a small fraction of which we have surviving writings from, because medieval Christians were disinterested in preserving hardly any of it. It’s even more perverse to ignore every achievement Ptolemy made, such as experimentally developing the index of refraction we still use today, inventing the system of latitude and longitude and several systems of cartographic projection we still use today, or formulating the first law of planetary motion (“equal angles in equal times,” which Kepler would tweak into “equal areas in equal times”). And just to put a cherry on top, Consolmagno mocks Ptolemy as an astrologer in the same chapter he praises Kepler as the better astronomer—who was also an astrologer!
So we get total crap history here. All in aid of a racist, Catholic-supremacist false narrative Consolmagno apparently needs in order to maintain his faith. Welcome to theism. In the process he gets practically every other detail wrong. As I show in Scientist, Ptolemy did not invent the epicyclic system he used to demonstrate geocentrism; and there were still heliocentrists in his own day he had to argue against (we just don’t get to read them); and Ptolemy advanced the epicyclic system he inherited into a more reliable model that would later crucially inspire Kepler.
In fact it was the great Hellenistic scientist Hipparchus who developed epicyclic geocentrism in the second century B.C. Ptolemy improved on that system with the first known law of planetary motion, which actually made his system observationally superior, far better even than the heliocentric model of Copernicus which was full of arbitrary aesthetic assumptions that proved false. Ptolemy was right, and Copernicus was wrong: planets do move at inconstant velocities, and do not trace perfect circles but follow complex eccentric orbits. Kepler had to go back to Ptolemy to get these advances he needed to make Copernican heliocentrism actually work. And even Kepler did not then discover the principles of universal gravitation his new system made probable; whereas ancient astronomers were already debating theories of universal gravitation in Ptolemy’s day. All of which I show in Scientist.
Moreover, Ptolemy himself said that the epicycles his model uses might not even exist—they were only a device to simplify calculations and ease the construction of mechanical computers to make celestial predictions with. He well knew (and outright says, following Hipparchus who said it himself) that the principles of relative motion entailed that epicyclic motion merely recreates a singular quasi-elliptical motion.
Ironically the only reason Ptolemy gave for even thinking the epicycles real was that surely God, being a great engineer, would make it that way; otherwise, he admitted, we might prefer the simpler variant of direct complete motions that epicycles merely reproduce. Kepler simply took his advice, having a different idea of which model God would think aesthetically “beautiful.” Which turned out to have nothing whatever to do with why the planets moved that way (as Newton would demonstrate a century later). So Kepler and Ptolemy were pretty much indistinguishable in their methods and respective number of scientific advances.
Consolmagno knows none of this. Consequently his image of history is completely incorrect, and thus so are the conclusions he draws from it. And yet here we are. Again and again we see theism depends on such systems of falsehood. That’s why it’s irrational.
It’s False History All the Way Down
It’s only by erasing the entire history of ancient science that Consolmagno can absurdly claim “pagan gods or the physics of Aristotle” stalled science because they produced false certainty. They did neither. In fact the contrary. Pagan “theological certainty” is precisely what the ancient Greek philosophers rejected when they originated empirical science—first with the presocratics, who argued for evidence and reason over myth and theology, then culminating in Aristotle’s formalization of science, which then spawned many subsequent centuries of continuing scientific advance.
And advance it did. Aristotle actually claimed his conclusions might be false and needed to be tested and verified. Consequently, far from Aristotle’s system stalling progress, subsequent scientists got busy questioning and empirically refuting Aristotle. Herophilus proved the mind was located in the brain, not the heart as Aristotle claimed, and even began studying the neurological localization of function; Hipparchus disproved Aristotle’s theory that nothing changes in the heavens by recording the first observation of a supernova; Archimedes proved lightness and heaviness were relative properties caused by projecting forces, and not innate elemental properties; Hero proved circular motion was no more natural than rectilinear and that the only thing that actually made a vacuum difficult to create was air pressure, which increased and decreased with temperature. Even Seneca made observations confirming the post-Aristotelian theory that, contra Aristotle, comets were not atmospheric phenomena but distant planets in wide eccentric orbits; and he explained why geocentrism was not a settled conclusion against heliocentrism and that only some future discovery could tell the difference between them.
Consolmagno repeats many other bogus myths. “Where did science get started?” He asks; then answers, “The medieval universities for the first time had the magic combination.” Wrong. No actual scientific advance ever occurred in a medieval university. In fact they stood in the way of scientific advance with an ardent dogmatism and antiquarianism that scientists continually argued against and had to work outside of to bypass.
Only by the late 1500s, well after the Middle Ages had ended, did some universities at least employ as teachers some scientists making real advances on their own time; but even then the university system was avoided or came in for criticism by those very scientists as not particularly conducive to making advances (just look at he writings of Vesalius, Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey, Boyle). Separate institutes eventually had to be created to bypass the universities and finally push for scientific progress as an actual agenda, like the Royal Society, the Académie des Sciences, and the short-lived Academia dei Lincei, none of which had university support. Universities only really came around to supporting scientific progress after that. Likewise the Vatican.
More real science was done in ancient universities than in their medieval counterparts. In fact, as I demonstrate in Scientist, the methods that were taken back up in the Scientific Revolution and ultimately defined it did not originate in universities at all, but were already invented and used in pagan antiquity. And what the Scientific Revolution did was merely complete a course toward refining those methods that was already being recommended by the last ancient scientists, like Galen, Hero, and Ptolemy. Had it not been for the Christian Middle Ages stalling all such advances, we would not have had to wait a thousand years for someone to listen to them and actually begin what likely would otherwise have soon followed them. Meanwhile, when it came to real empirical scientific research, the ancient Greeks and Romans had already “decided that it was worth doing.”
This is the truth of what happened. Consolmagno’s narrative is a lie. A lie he gullibly believes. Because he never checked if it was true. Because, religion.
Consolmagno likewise doesn’t know that even the speculations he lists as innovations (which are not really science, just creative philosophy) actually all originated in the ancient world and were merely rediscovered in the Renaissance (not, really, the Middle Ages). A rudimentary impetus theory, and the theory that stars were distant suns with planets and civilizations, for example, were developed by Hellenistic Epicurean atomists and their Aristotelian sympathizers like perhaps Strato and Menelaus. They likewise correctly surmised the “elements” of which stars and everything else were made were not four in number but much more numerous, actually being defined by the shape and structure of the atoms comprising them. And many more things they guessed right as well. Far more things than the Medievals did. Until they rediscovered the Epicureans in the Renaissance and borrowed their ideas back into popularity! And that was just philosophy, not even science—but neither were the same Medieval musings Consolmagno lists. None of which he can credit to Christianity. The pagans were always better at it. Whereas Christians didn’t even do it until finally borrowing the idea from pagans.
Conclusion
Consolmagno does not actually address the question posed him at all. He asserts scientific advances have had no effect on the epistemic probability of theism. But he never addresses the many potent arguments to the contrary, which the atheist section summarizes. And the only argument he makes that even attempts to come close to saying anything relevant—that the existence of science today is more probable if theism is true—he rests on completely false premises about what happened in human history, replacing the truth with a bigoted and fictional Catholic propaganda narrative.
Consequently, like many a theist, Consolmagno never discovers the truth: that the only reason science exists today was because some pagan philosophers once noticed, and then decided to argue, that only reason and evidence, independent of all theology, is a valid and worthwhile way to learn the truth about reality. Which fact, as well as that it came from no religion, and that it came tens of thousands of years after religions even began, combined with the subsequent retreat of theism with every era of resulting advance, and the continually growing support for physicalism that has likewise resulted, is simply far less likely if theism were true. Therefore the advance of the sciences affords considerable evidence for atheism. And Consolmagno makes no relevant argument to the contrary.
According to universal Darwinism, everything in the cosmos will be eventually evolutionarily conserved and play a role in the self-reproduction of the universe/multiverse. This means that also science will become evolutionarily conserved and that all the phenomena with an evolutionary age that is greater than the evolutionary conservation of science will become methodologically supernatural. This may include afterlife and miracles. I explained this in my paper published in Symposion:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337713458_EMAAN_An_Evolutionary_Multiverse_Argument_against_Naturalism
I don’t see any conventionally valid definition of supernatural there. Nor any way to get to one from even your own premises. For a corrective see The God Impossible and The Argument from Specified Complexity Against Supernaturalism. You seem to have a perverse definition of naturalism that matches no actual naturalist’s definition of naturalism (a similar mistake to that made by Michael Rea).
If all you mean is that given a long enough timeline any civilization that doesn’t get wiped out can produce forms of near immortality in virtual paradises which can simulate virtual supernaturalism (as we do now in video games and movies already), your paper isn’t making an argument against naturalism but in fact supporting what naturalists have already been saying for decades now.
If you think your paper somehow demonstrates something else, feel free to email it to me for examination.
I use methodological naturalism as opposed to methodological supernaturalism. This can be found in section five of the Wikipedia page about naturalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#Methodological_naturalism. I do not believe in those theories that say our current world is unevolved, but that it will evolve to incredible degrees in the future. Instead I argue that what we see got evolutionarily conserved through infinity, so an infinitely long time ago. The world is therefore already maximally evolved today, including miracles and afterlives.
I will send you my paper by email.
Please do send me the actual paper. Because I don’t know what you could be saying here.
I’ll read the paper soon. But what you are saying so far doesn’t make any sense.
First, you are talking about ontology not methodology; so your confusion between what is and what we can study is throwing me for a loop. Methodological naturalism is simply the presumption of naturalism in adducing hypotheses to test (on the grounds that other hypotheses are untestable or unlikely, not factually untrue); ontological naturalism is the conclusion that only natural objects exist. The latter makes claims about what is. The former does not. You don’t seem to have any coherent grasp of the distinction.
Second, it does not follow that the world would be maximally evolved in such a sense as you mean today. As Aristotle observed two thousand years ago, if civilization were maximally evolved, he should have been living among robots and other advanced technologies and all scientific knowledge would be available to him. It wasn’t. So clearly a re-set button had been hit sometime in the past and he was not at a maximally evolved end state.
The same holds for our universe. We already know our universe has several more stages of cosmic evolution to pass through (so it isn’t at its end stage), and that any information (e.g. civilizations and their achievements, like afterlife technology) that may have preexisted it on the same timeline (other parallel timelines would never lead to us and so are irrelevant; we cannot access them, nor they us) will have been vaporized and thus destroyed during our Big Bang event. Otherwise we’d be living immortally in a technological paradise already. We aren’t. So we clearly are not maximally evolved. Any attempt to explain that observation away collapses fatally into the Cartesian Demon fallacy.
If instead all you mean to argue is that though we are in a re-set bubble ourselves and far from maximally evolved, maybe some other bubble universe survived long enough in which some other civilization has reached the proposed technological stage of immortality and superpowers and so on, that still isn’t supernaturalism, by any coherent definition of the term actually in use. It’s naturalism. Per the articles I linked you to before.
A glance at your paper and I don’t see any response to these fatal objections. I’ll look more closely, but it isn’t looking good so far.
I read your paper. My observations above are confirmed. Indeed I cannot even fathom how this passed peer review. More evidence that philosophy journals have no discernible standards, I guess.
There is a lot of nonsense and pseudoscience in it. But I’ll just focus on the two most fatal errors:
Problem 1:
Your paper defines the supernatural as:
“the negation of (3) [is] a necessary and sufficient condition for methodologically supernatural entities.” (p. 115) whereby “(3) [entities] are methodologically necessary (i.e., are either subjects of observations in the empirical sciences or are necessary to explain the observations of the empirical sciences).” (p. 114)
That is not the definition of supernaturalism in any actual use. You thus are talking nonsense here.
It is possible for natural objects to be unobservable. Therefore being unobservable is not what makes an entity supernatural.
You also misdefine methodological naturalism, which is actually a position regarding what hypotheses are able to be or worth testing, not whether natural or supernatural entities do or do not exist; yet your paper is making an existence claim. It is therefore actually about ontological, not methodological, naturalism and supernaturalism. This confusion renders the paper’s entire argument incoherent.
Problem 2:
You assert “After some time, the development of the empirical sciences will be evolutionarily conserved” (p. 114). Yet nowhere in your paper do you prove this even likely, much less probable.
Universes in any current multiverse cosmology have finite lifespans and there is no known way the kind of information you are talking about can be conserved in transitions between them. We observe this with our own Big Bang: no civilization, much less database, predating the Big Bang can have survived the Big Bang on any presently known physics. It is thus presently a physical impossibility.
Meanwhile, if a civilization is able to develop a means to prevent the death of the universe sustaining it, it will remain in a singular bubble of maximal technological achievement, i.e. it will be observably an immortal paradise. As we do not observe ourselves in such a universe, we clearly are not in such a universe. We can only be one of the continually randomly generated universes there will always continue to be in any multiverse. This the more so because, contra Bostrom 2003, few civilizations will be so evil and wasteful as to produce and curate earth civilization as we’ve observed ours to be; they will not likely be that evil, and will almost certainly more efficiently expend available processing space to games and paradises, not mass-horror-producing sims that serve no purpose. So it is extremely unlikely we are in a sim or are in any other way a product of an advanced civilization.
Meanwhile, there might be a paradise universe somewhere in the multiverse (maybe even to 100% certainty), but (a) it will still be entirely natural, no supernatural entities involved (contrary to your paper’s entire thesis), and (b) on current physics there will be no way to communicate with or visit it or even locate it (and vice versa). It is therefore useless to us and can have no effect on the contents of our universe (ergo, we cannot look to this inaccessible universe to “save” us in any fashion—they won’t even know we exist, nor could help us if they did).
Therefore the central premise of your paper is pseudoscience; indeed worse, as it contradicts all known science—as well as having no evidence supporting it.
Journals that publish pseudoscience are pretty much thereby discredited. As is your paper. Shame on Romania and its apparently crank journal Symposion.
For anyone interested in reading a good response to Near Death claims and New Age BS, read: “The Near-Death Experience Argument Against Physicalism A Critique”
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/bb16/388b3a0645b1adf3e414d7496a64121227b1.pdf
I already sent it by email on January 3th around 21:40 PM. But it is open access. You can access it here:
http://symposion.acadiasi.ro/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2019.6.2.1.-Blonde-1.pdf
Or via Google: “emaan eaan”
Thanks.
Okay. Read that. It seems to be making two arguments.
The first, the argument that some supernaturalism must result somewhere in a multiverse, I refuted already in The God Impossible and The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism. Also relevant is Defining the Supernatural vs. Logical Positivism.
The second, the argument that physicalist afterlives are supernatural, is simply a category mistake in semantics. That’s not what anyone really means by the supernatural (per the same links above, which in turn link to my articles on defining the supernatural and my anthropology of naturalism in my response to Michael Rea). For example, you write:
This sentence confuses two different things and misreports the beliefs of naturalists (methodological or ontological).
First, no naturalist thinks “a system that makes backups of the healthy bodies of biological beings and that transports them to an afterlife world when they die” is supernatural. To the contrary, most naturalists are interested in designing exactly such a system, using natural entities to construct it (the computer simulation afterlife model). They agree no such system exists yet around here (Earth), but admit such systems may or even likely already exist elsewhere in our universe (much more so other universes), as there is a high statistical likelihood some civilization in some galaxy somewhere has already done this. But the mechanism would be entirely natural.
Perhaps you mean a particular “kind” of such a system, one that would be supernatural, but you never say that, nor explain what would make a system supernatural as opposed to the natural afterlife systems humans are currently working on.
Second, a multiverse itself does not need to be “finely tuned” to make such systems possible. Nor do universes need to be, per your own point that multiverses eliminate the need for fine tuning, as a plurality of possible universes will then simply exist by inevitable consequence and not “tuning.” You thus appear to be confusing two things: finely tuning a universe, and finely tuning an afterlife system. The latter will obviously be finely tuned—by the organisms that build it—but the universe that produced those organisms (and thus made possible their building afterlife systems) does not thereby need to be finely tuned. Multiverse theory in fact negates any such expectation or requirement.
You then seem to confuse “aliens that did this probably exist somewhere in the multiverse,” a proposition all naturalists accept as true, with “those aliens have access to us now, or vice versa,” which is contrary to all known physics, i.e. it is effectively impossible for any relevant form of communication or transportation to cross between universes in a multiverse, and effectively as impossible to do so across intergalactic or even large interstellar spaces within a single universe. Thus observation confirms we aren’t near any such civilization nor likely to be (any attempt to explain away that data amounts to a Cartesian Demon fallacy).
And yet accepting they do exist is not supernaturalism: all naturalists already accept such worlds probably exist somewhere (just not around here) and even believing they were around here (though not on present evidence rational to believe) would still be naturalism, not belief in the supernatural.
Good to see that an afterlife is compatible with some of your ideas.
I agree with you that my idea of the supernatural is uncommon, and even unique. According to my theory, miracles always come in pairs: 1) the miracle itself, and 2) arranging everything in such a way that the miracle does not spread to anything that will have a permanent influence on openly accessible documentation. That is the only way how a miracle can occur in the presence of the evolutionary conservation of science, or more precisely, our future technological footprint. Without 2) the miracle would disrupt science and our future technological footprint, and thereby also disrupt all the complexity that got evolutionarily dependent on us. For example the following statement; “They [naturalists] agree no such system exists yet around here (Earth)”, is a statement that is also evolutionarily conserved. It was true in the very first big bang universes with human intelligence, but it is false in the vast majority of places like Earth. It is even infinitely unlikely in a sufficiently large and diverse multiverse.
The fact that we observe roughly the minimum fine-tuning for intelligence (see also my paper “Can an eternal life start from the minimal fine-tuning for intelligence?”) corroborates my theory. This is the first place to become evolutionarily conserved. But the actual world is maximally evolved, not minimally evolved (even though it looks minimally evolved for naturalists). So all the most incredible evolutions actually took place already, however, in a concealed manner.
Call all of this natural if you like. But then it follows that most natural things cannot be observed by the empirical sciences.
Part (2) of your assertion entails a Cartesian Demon fallacy.
There is no logical basis for your third assertion that “that is the only way how a miracle can occur in the presence of the evolutionary conservation of science, or more precisely, our future technological footprint.” That is nonsensical.
The rest of your comment is unintelligible and sounds, frankly, like insane babble.
Apparently it is you who fail to make a distinction that is carefully explained in my paper, since you confuse observability with methodological necessity. In particular, there are many unobservable universes that are methodologically necessary to explain the observable fine-tuning in our big bang unviverse. Do you acknowledge this difference, namely that some universes in a maximal multiverse will be methodologically necessary, while other universes will not be methodologically necessary?
I’ll give you another example you must be acquainted with: Jesus showing himself after he died is very much observable, but it is not methodologically necessary for the empirical sciences, since his appearance can be explained away in other ways. So the Jesus-pop-up-after-death may be ontologically natural, it is, according to my careful definition, methodologically supernatural.
You also keep using empirical evidence as evidence against EMAAN. This means you haven’t understood the logic-based argument. The observations of the empirical sciences themselves are evolutionarily predestined to develop according to a plan. Therefore making observations is useless as a method to refute EMAAN.
There are myriad ways in which universe DNA can be transmitted from a parent universe to a child universe. For example, hyperdimensional aliens can do the job. But an elementary volume of vacuum space also brings the laws of physics from the parent universe to the child universe. In any way, cosmological natural selection is a theory sustained by naturalists. I consider it a victory if you abandon this theory because you realize that methodological supernaturalism follows from it. Because you seem to realize that, right, that the empirical sciences developing according to a plan is big trouble for a naturalist; it renders them useless with respect to the truth.
By the way, it seems you forgot to accept and display my previous comment.
That’s not the issue. Methodological naturalism simply is not the position that unobservables don’t exist (necessary or not). You fail to correctly describe even that. That’s why your paper is nonsensical on this point. You simply don’t have a valid definition of “methodological” and confuse “methodology” with “ontology.”
For the same reason, you have no valid definition of “supernatural” either.
That’s problem 1.
Problem 2 is even if we corrected your screwed up vocabulary, the conclusion of your paper, that civilizations and databases would survive Big Bang events, is pseudoscience. You present no evidence for this, and it presently contradicts all known science.
Wrong. EMAAN without auxiliary hypotheses is refuted by observation (we observe no conserved super-technologies). You then fabricate an auxiliary hypothesis for which you present no evidence and which is automatically extremely improbable, in order to “explain away” that falsifying evidence. This is the Cartesian Demon fallacy. It’s invalid. And would never have passed any real peer review. Which is why I am becoming convinced Symposion is a sham journal.
You present zero evidence for this. And it contradicts all presently known science. Dimensional contents like that are not “preserved” by Big Bang events, or even heat deaths or Big Rips. They are destroyed.
That’s why you are just promoting psuedoscience here.
Wrong. The existence of ultra-advanced civilizations is no trouble at all for a naturalist. It’s already a given in naturalism that such civilizations exist. We just observe none are around here. Making up bullshit reasons why they are “hiding” is not rational behavior. It is, in fact, by definition an irrational response to the evidence. This is not naturalism you are offending, but epistemology.
I am not aware of any comments that have not been displayed.
Ok, fine, you seem to know that our empirical sciences are not evolutionarily conserved, but on the other hand, you seem to believe in a multiverse that realizes all the possibilities. So there must be regions in the multiverse in which the local empirical sciences got evolutionarily conserved and develop according to a predetermined plan. How would you then call the phenomena that enter the scene only after the evolutionary conservation of the empirical sciences because they have a greater evolutionary age? And second, how would these empirical scientists know that their sciences are predetermined to develop according to a plan? Because if they cannot know, you cannot exclude that our empirical sciences are such a case.
What I know is that on current physics that kind of conservation is physically impossible. Also what I know is that to maintain on present observations that such conservation has nevertheless still occurred requires a Cartesian Demon fallacy (which tanks the prior probability of the hypothesis).
No. No Big Bang can conserve databases and civilizations from a preceding state to a subsequent state. So nowhere in the multiverse will this have happened.
What’s possible is a civilization that maybe somehow figures out a way to prevent their universe from becoming destroyed. It might still produce new bubble universes, but they will not share the information gleaned by that civilization—they will be new universes, that that civilization cannot communicate with or journey to. Meanwhile that civilization’s home universe could conceivably continue forever. But that means it will suffer no subsequent Big Bang; and will essentially be an observable immortal paradise. Since we do not live in an observable immortal paradise and reside only a mere 14 billion years away from a recent Big Bang, we know we cannot be in such a universe. So that such universes exist somewhere in the multiverse is irrelevant. We can never visit them. They can never visit us. We can never communicate with them. They can never communicate with us. We won’t ever even be able to find them. Nor they us. That’s what current physics entails. And to argue against current physics requires evidence. Not speculation.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Give me an example of such an entity that we are currently able to observe.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Who are these scientists? Where are they? What plan? Who developed that plan? Where? When? Why would anyone ever think their science was predetermined by any prior plan? And how do you know any of these things?
I’ll do my best to explain my theory more clearly, because you haven’t understood it from the paper. I see two reasons why our big bang universe is biological in nature, instead of mathematical in nature: 1) the universal applicability of Darwin’s theory, and 2) that self-reproducing entities will outnumber non-reproducing entities in any sufficiently large and diverse multiverse. So even though the big bang may look like a singularity, it must be the exponential growth of an embryo that carries its DNA on a microscopic level. Part of this DNA is observable for us, since an elementary volume of vacuum space carries the laws of physics in its internals. So instead of a singularity, there must be some sort of biological cell (with a size below Planck scale) from which our big bang universe started to develop.
Over time, namely over many big bang generations, the technological footprint of intelligent organisms (like us) must have started to play a role in the reproduction cycle of the big bang universe. Any form of complexity is welcome in a reproduction cycle, especially to fulfil all kinds of signalling functions. The same is true for complex molecules in a normal biological cell. The inevitable consequence is that this technological footprint becomes evolutionarily conserved over time, just like the processes in the nucleolus during the cell cycle of a normal biological cell. The technological footprint being conserved, implies that also our scientific insights about the big bang universe must be conserved. So that is the plan. Both the technological footprint and our scientific insights must develop according to the plan in which the earliest (in multiverse time) intelligent organisms started to make footprints and insights. Each new big bang generation must follow this plan in order to reproduce itself correctly. So the earliest Richard Carriers may have been right about Jesus being a myth, the later ones may be wrong in this respect, because a real Jesus can probably be added without disturbing the plan. So that explains my claim that miracles always come in pairs: 1) the miracle itself, and 2) the cover-up in order not to disturb the development of the empirical sciences. And in order not to disturb the debates between theists and atheists. Eventually everything becomes evolutionarily conserved in this way.
I don’t think you know what the word “biological” means.
That they exist in greater numbers is irrelevant. Beings in those universes cannot communicate with or travel to other universes. It’s physically impossible. So counting them is useless to your thesis and cannot produce your conclusion.
The DNA of the Big Bang is a set of mindless physical parameters (the fundamental constants and resulting standard model of fundamental particles). Not a bunch of angels and shit. Fundamental parameters cannot be intelligent, and cannot contain intelligent beings. This is why your thesis is crackpot nonsense. When a universe forms through a spontaneous inflation event from another universe, only fundamental properties survive the transition (and possibly not even that). No signals can be sent through, no aliens can fly through. They would be disintegrated or scrambled into noise if they even tried. Thus, no conservation can occur from one universe to another. Conservation can only occur in a single continuous universe. And we observe we are not in one of those universes.
That’s pseudoscientific nuttery. Which means Sympiosion is definitely a nutters journal and not a real one.
There is no evidence that’s true. By far most universes will be generated by spontaneous inflation, not intelligent design. There isn’t any reason a civilization would even bother generating Big Bang universes. It’s extremely unethical and totally useless (as they can gain no information from it nor do anything in it or with it). They would instead generate games and paradises. Which we observe we are not in. Therefore there is no evidence for your thesis. No evidence of any intelligent design at any level of our universe. To the contrary, the evidence extensively supports the lack of it. This universe is more conducive to generating and sustaining black holes than life, for example, which is more likely to be the case if reproduction was through inflation events originating in black holes as Smolin argued; and that’s not even the most likely hypothesis, but vastly more likely than yours—and hypotheses are not facts.
To add to this not only the crank idea that there is secret intelligent design in the fundamental constants that somehow preserved a vast database of knowledge we somehow still can’t access or do anything with or even confirm exists, the totally wacko idea that invisible aliens also traveled through the Big Bang to “cover up” all miracles they somehow illogically nevertheless allow to keep happening (if they need to “cover them up,” why not just program the universe not to have them?), is full on insane. There is zero evidence of this. And no plausibility to it. It is, indeed, on present science, impossible.
Smolin, by the way, was a real cosmologist who published his cosmological theory in a real peer reviewed journal. Not a crank publishing in a crank journal. Let’s see you get your cosmological theory published in a real cosmology journal. Then we’ll talk. Otherwise, please go away. I don’t see the point in conversing with the insane.
Blondé: Why do you believe this is the case? In a maximal multiverse it is provable that everything is causally related (in both directions). Physically impossible? Do you believe that the laws of physics that we observe are universally applicable? Even in other universes? With such cosmological intuitions you will not even enter a crackpot journal, I think.
Blondé: Did you even think of the possibility that these aliens might have one extra spatial dimensionality? Those aliens can see everything happening from the outside. They can fly directly from the parent big bang universe to the child without ever coming close to the big bang. For them these universes are just surfaces. And please don’t explain that extra-dimensional aliens are not observed by science. Because then you miss the point of EMAAN entirely.
Blondé: According to my theory, we only get involved in sustaining the reproduction cycle of a reproducing big bang universe that was already self-reproductive without any intelligence around. Proteins in a cell also play some minor role all by themselves. They have to use the fact that lipid cells can duplicate, independent of proteins. So the idea is that some technological events have some signalling impact on the extra-dimensional space in which the whole reproduction is taking place. The same space in which the extra-dimensional aliens are flying. No need to go through the big bang. Translated to cell biology it are proteins and protein-products that give signals to the uterus of the woman that it should prepare for an embryo growing inside.
Blondé: EMAAN explains that present science is useless. The universal validity of Darwin’s theory has preference on present science.
A theory that works against (empirical) science is not easily published. It is a paradigm shift. That’s why we need marginal philosophy journals. Five hundred years ago, I would have been burnt. Now I just get a lot of rejects.
I just told you: the established science of the Big Bang.
The effect of near-infinite heat and density is so extreme it disintegrates even fundamental particles…databases wouldn’t have a chance. Much less whole organized beings.
That still doesn’t permit transit through crushing densities or sending signals through destructive noise.
There is no evidence they are ever suspended in any way relevant to your thesis. And all the evidence we have indicates they would not be.
Thus to go against this finding is pseudoscience.
All dimensions are crushed and melted in a Big Bang. There is no “secret trap door.” There is no way to prevent the heat and density from spreading to all accessible dimensions; and inaccessible dimensions are, by definition, inaccessible and thus cannot transmit signals or equipment.
No. They can’t. There is no “extra spacetime” in which Big Bangs occur that allow maneuvering around them. Big Bangs are spacetime. All of it.
The idea of an “extra spacetime” in which our spacetime “floats” is a rejected theory disproved by Einstein. Extra domensions will either be disconnected from ours (and thus not permit the transmission of information or entities) or connected to ours (and thus be crushed and melted whenever spacetime is crushed and melted, because there is no way to “separate itself” away from those effects, as it is all one continuous whole).
And there is (a) no known science that makes this possible and (b) no evidence whatever it has happened here.
Moreover, again, “creating” a universe like this is extremely evil and purposeless; no aliens would bother. They would devote their resources to building games and paradises, not wayward horror shows.
This is why it’s bogus. You are declaring all modern science false, and inventing entirely new science, without any evidence. That’s pseudoscience.
Natural selection does not lead to your thesis. Because your thesis requires things (new laws of physics, irrationally complex and implausible motives) that are not probable. Natural selection does not “get you” those things. So it cannot lead to your conclusion.
It remains that even if natural selection occurs in universe generation, almost all universes thus produced will be naturally produced, and thus isolated from any distant universes that may have universe-building civilizations in them. And even if they were contiguous, which would require an extraordinary coincidence (and thus not, again, a probable outcome for us), nothing can survive a Big Bang. No information. No equipment. Such aliens would thus not build that way. They would build eternal games and paradises. And since we observe we aren’t in one of those, we know we aren’t near any such aliens. If they existed at all prior to the Big Bang, they are inaccessible to us, and we to them. They could be living comfortably still in their parent universe. But they’ll know nothing of us, and be unable to do anything for us. And if they did, we’d observe it.
No. That is not a paradigm shift. A paradigm shift requires evidence. Declaring new science without evidence is by definition pseudoscience. Not “philosophy.” Philosophy is subordinate to science in all matters of fact (because science is simply philosophy with more data; thus philosophy can never contradict science in matters of fact).
There are two roads to metaphysical knowledge: the logic road and the empirical road. It is clear that you have chosen the last instead of the first. However, this cannot be the right road. You can never exclude certain possibilities, such as the simulation possibility or the possibility of solipsism. If you are simulated in a transcendent reality, then you can be provided with any beliefs and observations. If solipsism is true, then you cannot trust in any authority, such as Einstein or Hawking. So you really have to think twice before bootstrapping the empirical sciences above the logic road. According to my theory both possibilities are true: being simulated and being a solipsistic, deterministic mind. And reasoning via good and evil does not work either, since the presence of evil is evolutionarily conserved. Given solipsism, after all, observed evil does not necessarily make the world evil.
You call my arguments pseudo-science. A better name to call it would be meta-science. Logic, mathematics, and the theory of Darwin are meta-scientific, not pseudo-scientific. They can be validated as true without the need for any non-trustable observations, by logical reasoning alone.
If empiricists were a biomolecule, they would claim that the cell is all of reality and the genes are the laws of physics. If they were an embryo they would claim that nine months is the maximal life span of a being and there is no afterlife. So your idea that there are no spatial dimensions apart from those that are described by physicists is worthless. You should have learned from your experiences as a fertilized cell and as an embryo. There is always more to come.
The “logic road” cannot generate facts. It’s the other way around. It must use facts to reach conclusions. The facts in this case (a) do not logically lead to your conclusion and (b) your conclusion at present contradicts the known facts.
I’ve explained this to you repeatedly.
Does The EAAN Refute God’s Beliefs https://link.medium.com/WehSay2dQwb
All your links are broken. I assume you meant to refer to: “Does the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism Defeat God’s Beliefs” in the journal Sophia.
That relates to formulations of the EAAN that rely on objective probabilities, whereby Plantinga must assume God’s existence and properties are logically necessary to get the EAAN to work; but such an assumption voids any point to the EAAN, rendering the argument hopelessly circular: you simply have to assume “God” exists to argue that “God” exists.
I charitably side with Plantinga who says his EAAN should be understood in terms of epistemic, not objective probabilities. So it avoids that previous objection, and we have to actually deal instead with its epistemic claim: that evolved faculties would probably be unreliable. And it is that claim that proves false. See my summary and: Plantinga’s Tiger and Other Stupid Shit, Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience, and The Argument from Reason.