Ontology and the Easter Bunny
A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word—’Everything’—and everyone will accept this answer as true.
Willard van Orman Quine, “On What There Is”
I was reminded of Quine’s famous opening line by the following.
“I believe that one can be both a rigorous scientist and a believer in God. Don’t get me wrong — science is the only reliable way to draw conclusions about how the natural world works. But God cannot be defined in purely natural terms, or he wouldn’t be God,” argues Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, the US government program that sequenced the human genome and now works to unravel the coding errors of disease.
He ascribes the espousal of atheism by other leading scientists (the majority of biologists with the National Academy of Sciences) as coming from “some personal agenda” and not from “rational argument.”
“From a purely logical perspective, it will never be possible to disprove the existence of God, since the tools of science apply only to the natural world. Thus of all the possible worldviews, atheism is the most irrational choice,” Collins stated in an interview with TCS.
Dr. Collins claims that since God’s existence cannot be disproven, atheism is irrational. But which god is it whose existence cannot be disproven? If it is irrational to reject Yahweh, then it is equally irrational to reject Odin, Zeus, and Moloch. And why stop at gods? It is impossible to disprove the existence of ghosts, faerie, leprechauns, nymphs, dryads, and a host of other supernatural creatures. Is it ipso facto irrational to believe they do not actually exist? Dr. Collins lives in a very crowded world.
Posted on March 30th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: religion
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Thanks for the interesting post.
The boundaries of faith and reason are of particular interest to me. At the moment let me say that I also believe this to be true:
“I believe that one can be both a rigorous scientist and a believer in God.”
More to come….
Our host writes;
“Dr. Collins claims that since God’s existence cannot be disproven, atheism is irrational. But which god is it whose existence cannot be disproven? If it is irrational to reject Yahweh, then it is equally irrational to reject Odin, Zeus, and Moloch”
In what sense are these rejections “equally irrational”? Is there a function, of which I am unaware, which maps irrational arguments into the real numbers so that we can compare them. Dr Collins seems to know about this function as well, since he states, “…atheism is the most irrational choice.”
But enough of my ignorance of irrational mappings. On to Norse mythology:
“In the beginning there was Cold and Heat. On one side, Niflheim, the land of frost and mist. On the other, Muspellsheim, a sea of raging flames. Slowly, the snow began to melt and, shaped by the cold, but brought to life by the heat, a strange creature came into being - a huge giant named Ymer.As the ice melted, the drops formed yet another creature - colossal cow by the name of Audhumla. She immediately began to lick the salty, frost-covered stones that lay all around the giant and herself. Suddenly, the cow licked some long strands of hair from one of the stones! The next day a head and a face appeared from out of the stone. And on the third day the cow finally managed to lick the entire body free. It was a man, tall and handsome. His name was Bure, and from him descended the gods, whom we call Æsir.
The giant Ymer bore his own child. As he lay sleeping, he began to sweat, and suddenly, from his left armpit, a male and a female emerged. Refusing to be outdone by his arms, Ymer’s feet coupled and gave birth to a son with six heads. This was the origin of the Rime Giants, sometimes called trolls, but best known as Jotuns.
The various creatures must have managed to live in peace with one another for quite some time. At any rate, they had children together… Odin - who later became the chief of all the gods - was the son of Bestla, daughter of a Jotun, and Bure’s son Bor.
However, the Rime Giants steadily increased in number and the place was soon swarming with Jotuns. Then one day, Odin and his brothers, Vilje and Ve, rose in revolt against Ymer and his kin and they slew the giant. The Æsir dragged Ymer’s dead body into the middle of the huge void, Ginnungagap, positioning him like a lid over the abyss. From the body of the giant they then created the world. His blood became the sea, his flesh the land. His knuckles formed cliffs and peaks. His teeth and broken splinters of bone became stones and boulders. His hair turned into trees and grass. The gods threw his brains high into the air, creating clouds. And the sky? That was the giant’s skull, which was placed like a vaulted dome over all they had created.
One day, as Odin and his brothers were walking along the beach, they found two wooden logs that had been washed ashore. They set the logs on end, and brought them to life. Odin blew breath and souls into the logs. Vilje gave them the ability to think and move, while Ve gave them the powers of speech, hearing and sight. The gods infused them with warmth and colour. No longer mere driftwood, the logs had become Man and Woman. The Æsir called the man Ask and the woman Embla, from whom all human beings are descended. ”
borrowed freely, and then editted, from a Norwegian government website.
More to come….
I have no quarrel with the general claim that one can be both a scientist and a believer in god. Newton was both, and an alchemist to boot.
I addressed myself to Dr. Collins’ statement, which was just silly. Your comments I find hard to decipher. I’m not sure what your point is. The bit about real valued functions of arguments strikes me as willful obscurantism. My point was simple enough. There is no way to prove the non-existence of any supernatural entity. They are all alike and indistinguishable in that sense.
The onus of proof is on the one making assertions about the existence of controversial entities. You say perpetual motion machines exist? Produce one. Cold fusion is possible? Show the world your data. ESP is real? Prove it. It is not incumbent on non-believers to refute each and every claim of the supernatural. Scientology, anyone?
Sorry its taken me so long to get to the point. There is a point, I promise. ( I hope?)
1) For the purposes of this discussion, let’s say there are two types of scientific arguments, deductive and inductive. Let’s call a well formed deductive or inductive argument “rational”. Otherwise, ‘irrational”.
2) There is no measure that can determine how close an irrational argument is to a rational one. A small logical flaw in an otherwise sound argument may be unfixable. The entire sequence of steps may have to be abandoned.
Thus there is no “most irrational” or “equally irrational”. There is only rational or irrational.
3) There can be no deductive proofs for the existence of God. Deductive proofs require definitions and axioms. God is not definable, in any reasonable sense.
4) Inductive proofs require empirical evidence. I would argure they are best thought of as producing truth values p where 0
continued:
…as producing truth values p where 0
Damn, this is getting ridiculous. Apparently the symbol for “less than” is a special character that stops a post from continuing.
continued, once again:
…as producing truth values p where p is greater than 0 but less than 1. For example, “The evidence suggests the the statement “the sun will rise tomorrow” is true with probability p = .99.
There is no empirical evidence for either God’s existence or God’s nonexistence.
5) There is a great of empirical evidence that mythological figures such as Odin do not exist, just as there is a great deal of evidence that the Genesis story of creation is not literally true.
If you remove a mythological figure from its mythological framework and only attrbute to it properties such as being the creator of the world, then you are simple giving God another name.
In this case, see 3 aand 4 above.