Nagel on Religion
25 October 2006 by Bob
A very interesting piece from Nagel on Dawkins. It’s a review of Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. Nagel is what we call a “mysterian” on the subject of consciousness, a position that also seems to infect his views on religion. Some highlights:
To be sure, the hypothesis of a divine creator is not yet a scientific theory with testable consequences independent of the observations on which it is based. And the purposes of such a creator remain obscure, given what we know about the world. But a defender of the argument from design could say that the evidence supports an intentional cause, and that it is hardly surprising that God, the bodiless designer, while to some extent describable theoretically and detectable by his effects, is resistant to full intuitive understanding. [...] The reason that we are led to the hypothesis of a designer by considering both the watch and the eye is that these are complex physical structures that carry out a complex function, and we cannot see how they could have come into existence out of unorganized matter purely on the basis of the purposeless laws of physics. For the elements of which they are composed to have come together in just this finely tuned way purely as a result of physical and chemical laws would have been such an improbable fluke that we can regard it in effect as impossible: the hypothesis of chance can be ruled out. But God, whatever he may be, is not a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world. The explanation of his existence as a chance concatenation of atoms is not a possibility for which we must find an alternative, because that is not what anybody means by God. If the God hypothesis makes sense at all, it offers a different kind of explanation from those of physical science: purpose or intention of a mind without a body, capable nevertheless of creating and forming the entire physical world. The point of the hypothesis is to claim that not all explanation is physical, and that there is a mental, purposive, or intentional explanation more fundamental than the basic laws of physics, because it explains even them.
Then Nagel takes some time to explain the concept of non-reductionism in scientific explanation (a position with which I happen to agree). But it’s not clear, given these comments, what the reader is supposed to do with them. Is it: Dawkins is wrong about religion because he (say) is wrong about reductionism in science, and tries to apply this misdirected method to critiques of religion?
I must be missing something here.
25 October 2006, on 11:56 am
LOL! The graphic you put on the story is perfect! That’s a school in Arkansas or Tennessee, no doubt.
I’m no intellectual, by any stretch of the imagination, but having ANY intellectual discussion about the existence of a divine creator is moot without A SINGLE SHRED of evidence that such a being even exists. It’s a pointless position to take, in my mind.
Does the Big Bang Theory do it for me? No, but it’s not dogma, it’s a theory which I can reject if I don’t feel it’s proven by the data. I feel the same about aspects of Quantum theory (as little as I understand it), such as the thought that a piece of matter doesn’t exist until it’s observed, or that observation has some sort of physical effect on the object in question. I just don’t get that.
Unlike religious dogma in which a creator is assumed. Nagel seems to take that stance. I mean, how can you say that the existence of a creator hasn’t been proven, and then go on to say that the purposes of such a creator (which hasn’t been shown to exist) are obscure?? The purposes of something that hasn’t been shown to exist?? To me the logic just falls apart on the second sentence in the excerpt. The rest is nonsense.
25 October 2006, on 12:58 pm
If a “gawd” dies, and no theists are around to witness it–is “he” really, really dead?
I guess not…
Naomi
25 October 2006, on 2:40 pm
It seems the whole point of the review is to bring up Dawkins work while acknowledging the possibility that there may be a gawd, so as not to offend anyone. The author seems to be taking great pains in this regard. All in all, the review really tells us nothing. Yeah, gawd can’t be completely disproven, but what does that prove? Also, evidence like the eye is more of arguing from a position of ignorance in that it says “well, I can’t understand how that happened so there must be a gawd.” This is one of the most useless arguments possible.
25 October 2006, on 3:01 pm
Good thoughts, KR. I guess those last two sentences in my Nagel quotation concern me — i.e., it seems as though Nagel is suggesting that “religious explanations” are just a different kind of explanation, ones that apply where physics and other scientific explanations leave off. Dawkins’ view, of course, is that they aren’t really explanations at all, but just some psychological crutch for comfort. They might sound like explanations, but in the end they’re just placeholders, waiting for real explanations to be inserted.
25 October 2006, on 3:45 pm
And they’re not even good explanations, that’s the bad part. If they had ANY reasong to them then sure, use them until something better comes along. But in reality, the explanation is already there. Evolution. It’s not necessary to map out how each and every organ was built over time, that’s really irrelevant.
25 October 2006, on 3:47 pm
Nagel wrote:
If the God hypothesis makes sense at all, it offers a different kind of explanation from those of physical science: purpose or intention of a mind without a body, capable nevertheless of creating and forming the entire physical world. The point of the hypothesis is to claim that not all explanation is physical, and that there is a mental, purposive, or intentional explanation more fundamental than the basic laws of physics, because it explains even them
Mighty big If – and the point is not if it makes sense to people (UFOs as alien spaceships make sense to some people), but whether there is evidence to back it up. I think a “mental, purposive, or intentional explanation” that is more fundamental than physics because it explains them is basic gibberish. He seems to be saying that if we can explain something (whatever he means by that, as his previous sentence suggests he has no real idea), then that is more fundamental than physical laws? WTF? It sounds like he’s saying that if it feels good to believe it, it’s real. Astrology claims to explain a lot of things, so that makes it more real than the second law of thermodynamics?
25 October 2006, on 8:03 pm
Wow
I’d say this is a crime scene but it is probably more of a mind-fucking. Then again on second thought, I think upon careful consideration that he was just masturbating on his cornflakes.
This guy sounds like an Ontologist. All the round about ways of explaining nothing and holding that explanation in high regard as well.
He says “For the elements of which they are composed to have come together in just this finely tuned way purely as a result of physical and chemical laws would have been such an improbable fluke that we can regard it in effect as impossible: the hypothesis of chance can be ruled out.”
When in fact chance is exactly what it is and over long eons of time chance will win out over any fantasy. So the hypothesis of chance can not be ruled out. I am curious as to what the hypothesis of chance states.
25 October 2006, on 9:34 pm
This summer, my wife and I took our two kids (girl 8, and boy 3) on a cross country drive to Maine and back (to Nevada). It was great to spend all that time alone with the kids, listening to the way they think, especially my 8 year old, who is, of course, full of curious questions. “Why are those mountains red” or “What are people made of” and so on. My wife and I carefully waded through our loose knowledge of the universe and answered as truthfully as possible, and during the three weeks that we were on the road, I was amazed at how many times I answered “I’m not sure, we’ll have to try to find the answer to that one.”
It would be so much easier to just say to the kids “that’s how godd did it, who are we to question his plan”, they’re young and will believe anything we tell them, that’s why it’s best to stick to the truth, even when it repeatedly is “i don’t know kids”.
25 October 2006, on 10:59 pm
I don’t understand why some folks are so afraid of the unknown. Gawds have first distilled from the many to the one and, then, that singular fuck has grown progressively smaller as our collective knowledge as a species has grown. We may never know everything there is to know and that doesn’t bother me at all. If anything, it motivates me to look harder. We haven’t completely eliminated the chance of there being a deity but we have conclusively determined that, if there is, it certainly didn’t act in the manner described by the monotheists in their holy books. Seeing as dead folks can’t be brought back to life, horses can’t fly, and large bodies of water can’t be parted with a staff, I think it’s safe to discount anything the unigodsters produce.
26 October 2006, on 1:32 pm
[...] Religion has always existed to answer the questions that people feel incapable of answering otherwise, but as Raindogzilla points out in Bob’s latest offering, there is a condensing that occurs as we gain a greater understanding of the universe around us. Many gods, first needed to explain wonderous natural phenomenon which was otherwise incomprehensible without a grounding in science, were eventually condensed into one, which was eventually whittled down to none as we began to understand more about biology, chemistry, physics, logic, geology, and astronomy. [...]