The following video, part of the world famous Veritas Forum series, is a brilliant lecture by Oxford Professor of Mathmatics John Lennox, who ardently defends the existence of God and rescues Science from the danger of being made the pawn of materialistic worldviews to fuel the already existing antagonism between popular culture and religion.
So in Kant's view skepticism is the abdication of reason, all be it for a season. Isn't it high time the holiday was over?
05/02/2016 0902hrs
As an update to this piece, I recently came across a brilliant quote by Christian philosopher Dallas Willard who was renowned for his gentle, humble approach. As the following quote shows that doesn't mean he was a pussy:
'Paul Davis, a brilliant physicist at ASU says "that the right scientific attitude" now listen to this, Paul Davis is not a theist- "the right scientific attitude is essentially theological, science can only proceed if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a law-like order in nature that is, at least in part, comprehensible to us." Einstein said " I cannot imagine the scientist without that profound faith"- note the word" John Lennox
Readers may be interested that I included the above quote in an online discussion forum called "What about religion?" - part of the "mooc" course, "The Science of Everyday Thinking" here is the dialogue which followed:
'Paul Davis, a brilliant physicist at ASU says "that the right scientific attitude" now listen to this, Paul Davis is not a theist- "the right scientific attitude is essentially theological, science can only proceed if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a law-like order in nature that is, at least in part, comprehensible to us." Einstein said " I cannot imagine the scientist without that profound faith"- note the word" John Lennox
Kerry26 days ago
To hear the veritas address:
"Is Anything Worth Believing In" Professor John Lennox- The Veritas Forum
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0Healthy-skeptic 4 days ago
Busy still cherry picking quotes from scientists to support your fundamentalist religious beliefs? 422 comments on religion on a science of everyday thinking discussion forum, woohoo go Kerry2.Report Misuse- Talk about, to use your turn of phrase: rolling on the floor laughing, do you really think that just by using the phrase "cherry picking" or "fundamentalist" that you thereby prove anything? Your influence will have no effect except on those who have no interest in openmindedness.If I am "cherry picking" is it then, because I can afford to? The whole tree will bear fruit according to its nature. Ultimately true science cannot speak a lie, if Christianity is true, then all of science will continue to prove it.Report MisuseDelete CommentEdit-posted 4 days ago by Kerry2
0Donstim 4 days ago
Ha ha, very funny Kerry2. Just what parts of Christianity has science proven to be true. Let's see: virgin birth - no; resurrection from the dead - no; the bible's origin of life story - no; Noah's flood - no.The Christian bible, the Koran, the book of Mormon, the sayings of Yahweh, etc. are all essentially the same. An attempt to "tribalize" (i.e., unify) a group by giving them a common purpose in life and an explanation (however wrong as it turns out) for things they did not understand.Report Misuse- Science, while it has not proven the things you mention, neither has it disproven them either.To say that:The Christian bible, the Koran, the book of Mormon, the sayings of Yahweh, etc. are all essentially the same.Shows just who it is that- "did not understand". But even if it were true, that this was a way to "tribalize" people, that would turn back on yourself. I could just as easily say that atheism was how people were "unified". What does it prove? What is the point? Of course people who think the same way are unified by their beliefs, atheists just as much as theists. But it proves nothing. The real point being- which view is true ? And you have done nothing to further that understanding.You really need to brush up on logic and science.Science does not make philosophical claims. It just makes the assumption that "matter" is the starting point for doing science. Any claim from a scientist, or whoever, that claims science proves that nothing exists beyond matter, is making a philosophical claim, that in fact goes beyond what science actually proves. That's all it is- an assumption. Science has not disproved spiritual realities, like God, or the human soul. What others are beginning to see is that science doesn't even give a good account for why science works, why maths is applicable to the real world, why we have a conscious mind, why all these things exist.Science does well, just that it doesn't give a good account or reason for why it does so well. Honest, and objectively thinking people can see this."The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." Albert Einstein.Now, don't panic guys, I'm not saying that Einstein was a Christian, or religious. (Although some things he said looked like he couldn't make up his own mind on this issue). But even he- as an eminent scientist, and by many accounts an atheist- even he saw it as a great mystery that the Universe was comprehensible to the human mind. That is a sign of cognitive dissonance, he was aware of the reality that the comprehensibility of the universe demanded a logical explanation, but he was unwilling to venture that it was the result of being logically and intelligently designed. I venture to say that is also why he inserted his famous "fudge" factor into his equations also. A Universe that did not fit the "steady state" paradigm that he would have preferred also had uncomfortable ramifications for his belief that no intelligence was behind it. If the Universe had always existed, that would have neatly done away with the need for a Creator. Thus he "bent" the figures to fit his philosophical worldview and he got caught out badly.So tell me guys- what is your version of the origin of the Universe?Now that science has continued to gather more evidence that the Universe had a beginning the question again has to be asked: How did it begin?Now you- even if you wanted to come up with an explanation to exclude God- will have a lot of difficulty.Why do I say this?Because I don't think you two would be so silly to pretend that you know more than Stephen Hawking. Hawking, one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in history, has made a collossal error, like Einstein, and possibly for the same reason- because of his atheist philosophy.I suppose you have heard enough, but if you want to check it out, just have another look through my posts and you will find reference to it and one of the clever people who saw through his error and is helping to expose it. But by all means Professor John Lennox of Oxford University is not the only one, there are others, not necessarily religious either, go check it out.-posted 3 days ago by Kerry2
0Kerry2 a day ago
There are some important considerations that I think the detractors are missing. First the accusation of cherry picking. What are they really saying? What the intention is, is to disparage the authenticity of this non-theistic voice. They are saying: "ok- here is a scientist prepared to speak up on behalf of faith, and that is a departure from the majority of scientists, so therefore he cannot be right."Historically of course this can be proven to be dangerous and nonsense. Dangerous because to make it some sort of law that a scientist cannot be saying something true- unless every other scientist agreed- is a criteria of acceptance that would in fact be a science stopper. Every scientist whoever made a significant discovery, and progressed the goal of science towards truth and reality had to speak at odds to the ruling scientific paradigm of the day. Again and again the history of science has proved that progress in understanding often only happens as those scientific views that had "ruled" were only replaced as those scientists who had invested in the "status quo" died off or were "converted" to the new understanding. If you listen to Donstim and Healthy-skeptic what you would get in science is exactly expressed in the utube video here: The Asch Experiment Hilarious! Or Is It? What it points out is that humanity is already prone to follow the general consensus. Therefore Dunstim and Healthy are guilty of the availability or representative heuristic.It takes courage and an ability to look at the same phenomena as every other scientist but see something different, and to go against the flow of the ruling view. That is the mark of a true scientist. So the accusation of cherry picking is both dangerous towards the scientific goal of objective truth, and historically speaking, science has already disproved the nonsense of their accusation.My next point is an obvious one. Here is a scientist that is not a "God-botherer" prepared to speak up on behalf of "God-botherers". What gives?If you are new to a town and want your troublesome auto fixed, but don't know a reputable repair shop- whose opinion are you going to listen to? Are you going to go to a repair shopowner and ask if they are a reputable dealer? Well you might if you have no other alternative, but how much credibility are you going to give to her opinion about her own shop? Clearly the sensible person is going to go to some one who is very knowledgeable about repair shops, or at least to someone personally experienced with the shop but is not likely to profit from their opinion. In fact the best person to ask is one whose objectivity and independence would be beyond question. Who better than a person who is speaking at risk to their own reputation?. And this is the exact case of the brilliant ASU physicist. No doubt in the current climate, that was a risky and courageous statement to make- because he doesn't, as a non-believer, have an axe to grind, in fact it is at the expense of ridicule and animosity that he makes this statement. Therefore- contrary to Donsimn and Healthy-skeptic's views- it enhances and adds weight to his view, and every unbiased and open minded person will acknowledge this.The next point I wish to make is related to the mark of a real scientist that I alluded to earlier.Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.Albert Szent-GyorgyiNow, having dispensed with the obfuscatory remarks that simply were a smokescreen to distract us, we look directly at the veracity of what Paul Davis has to say.Right now if you are reading this you are quite likely to be sitting down, with a computer screen in front of you. I want to ask you three simple questions that will relate to Paul Davis's statement about the faith that every scientist is disposed to.- Before you sat down did you question whether you believed the place you were about to sit was indeed able to support your weight? Unless you are a really really big person, most would answer "no", therefore it was largely an unconscious or at least sub-conscious assumption.
- Was your belief in its ability to support you based on an immediate and conscious evaluation of the evidence? Again, I would expect that most would answer "no", previous experience would have given the confidence that it would support you, so no new evidence was looked for or expected, it was based on the past uniformity of experience.
- Did the seat in fact betray the unconscious expectation or trust and confidence that you placed in it before your butt took up residence? Did it let you down, did it collapse? Again I would say that most would say "no", your confidence or trust was rewarded with the reality of a safe place to sit. I venture to say all of this process took place with no conscious effort, or in the spirit of "The Science of Everyday Thinking" and Daniel Kahneman, it all took place in the instinctive "level one" area of the mind.
All of this is precisely adding up to what Paul Davis has said about the practice of science.Every scientist simply assumes as a matter of course, that the Universe, or that particular part of it that is their peculiar field, will yield its secrets with due effort and diligience. The assumption, the trust and confidence, the evidence of past experience are all the hallmarks offaith.Thus that adds up to precisely what Einstein has already said many years ago, and what has been reitirated by Paul Davis."even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a law-like order in nature that is, at least in part, comprehensible to us."Report Misuse- When cherry picking the words of scientists, Kerry2 could have chosen a different quote from Paul Davies. In his book "The Mind of God" (page 203) Davies says "Darwin's theory of evolution demonstrated decisively that complex organisation efficiently adapted to the environment could arise as a result of random mutations and natural selection."When Hawking, Davies and Hoyle write about god and theology, they don't use these words the same way religious fundamentalists use them. Hoyle ( in Davies p229) when discussing how he solved a difficult and novel maths question, describes it as a religious event, meaning he felt like super intelligence from the distant future acting at the quantum level implanted thoughts into his brain.There is a difference between what science says and what scientists say outside their speciality. There is evidence supporting the quantum mechanics Hoyle was writing about, but no evidence about a super intelligence implanting ideas from the future. How system 1 solves problems our system 2 has been working on is a mystery, but when scientists speculate about it, they have no more credibility than the authors of the bible had when discussing scientific issues.-posted about 23 hours ago by Healthy-skeptic
0Kerry2 23 minutes ago
Healthy-skeptic: When cherry picking the words of scientists, Kerry2 could have chosen a different quote from Paul Davies.But just who now, is doing the cherry picking? It is one thing to say that Paul Davies may use the occasional word in a different sense than that which is commonly applied, but it is altogether another to take the comprehensive statement he made, that I quoted, and say that he didn't mean what he said. But about that quote of Paul Davis, aren't you putting words in his mouth when you attempt to say that by "theological" he didn't actually mean what he said? What is your evidence for saying that? What are we to think of people who decide that "authorial intent" is not to be taken seriously? That is a recipe for relativizing language that has already made serious and disastrous inroads into our understanding of reality. If you do that in science then it will undermine the credibility of science.Why do you equate the adaptation of species with the idea that therefore there cannot be a God?Healthy-skeptic: "There is a difference between what science says and what scientists say outside their speciality."Now wouldn't you describe that as "cherry picking?" So what you want to do is ascribe those sayings of these scientist as true, when it fits your worldview, but when they say things that are contrary to your view, they no longer count.Healthy-skeptic: When Hawking, Davies and Hoyle write about god and theology, they don't use these words the same way religious fundamentalists use them.Here is an excerpt from an article about Hawking, and the Big Bang, and what is important to notice, is it's a demonstration of what happens when people, and in this case eminent scientists, try to get away with changing the meanings of words, and relativizing language. In this instance the word "nothing" gains an extraordinary significance:Although no one would deny that spectacular advances in our understanding have been made by science and, importantly, that these do sometimes confound the philosophers, the main problem with this suggestion, argues [William Lane] Craig, is that the most important conclusions of The Grand Design [Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow] are themselves philosophical. He suggests that the reason behind this sleight of hand is that it allows the authors “to cloak their amateurish philosophizing with the mantle of scientific authority and so avoid the hard work of actually arguing for, rather than merely asserting, their philosophical viewpoints.”But, he continues, the problems go deeper than this, because the authors are claiming that ‘because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing.’ The first issue with this statement is that they are clearly not referring to “nothing” as we would understand the term, but are instead meaning a quantum vacuum. If it truly were nothing, says Craig, then it could not be constrained and there would be no more reason to expect a universe to pop out of it than, for example, a bicycle. Nor does the work, therefore, address why there is something instead of nothing. The second problem is that the statement is logically incoherent. [John] Lennox points out that it is all very well to state that X can bring Y into existence, but they are instead making the tautological argument that Y is in some way responsible for the creation of itself.Another issue with this is that they are offering a false set of alternatives, it is either God or the laws of physics. [John] Lennox points out that this is a category mistake akin to asking us to choose between Frank Whittle and the laws of physics, in order to explain the jet engine. This would be an error, because there are two levels of explanation that are both needed, agency and mechanism. The latter, such as the laws of nature, may be able tell you what will happen if you hit a snooker ball across a table, but, as Lennox explains, they won’t create the table or the cue in the first place. As Rowan Williams has stressed, “Physics on its own will not settle the question of why there is something rather than nothing.” Instead, as Lennox points out, “atheist scientists are forced to ascribe creative powers to less and less credible candidates like mass/energy and the laws of nature.”Nevertheless, even if you were to find a “natural” explanation for the process, this would not rule out God, as Alister McGrath pointed out on Channel 4 news. He stressed that if you emphasise the importance of the laws of nature then:"You are really inviting the obvious question of where did these come from, why are they so reassuringly fine-tuned to values that led to the existence of life? That itself requires explanation and therefore the debate is just shifted back one step." Alister McGrath (My emphasis)I hope you will notice here that it is philosophy that is criticising these widely acclaimed scientists. They have made philosophically inept statements that they are being pulled up for, and their worldview is more responsible for this ineptitude than their science, in other words a faulty worldview is causing some faulty thinking.Science is dependent on the ability to think according to the rules of logic, which means that Science is only possible on the assumption of philosophical rigour, such as the application of the "laws of non contradiction". Now if you use words such as "nothing", in an ambiguous way- you are denying the first principles of logic. You are denying the law of non contradiction.There is nothing "scientific" about that.President Clinton made the same appeal when he said:"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is", in regards to the truthfulness of his statement that "there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship." WikipediaWell thank you for that interesting story about Hoyle. Of course, what he experienced as a "religious event" could of course, have been just that. It is only his interpretation, (or yours) that concluded it could not be believed to be a "super intelligence implanting ideas from the future". In other words, it is just as valid to say that the prior commitment to a strictly materialist view of reality, a worldview, that did not permit the event to be viewed as a truly religious event. I for instance would be happy to interpret it as such. And who is to say that one way is true and the other not? In the end it is a commitment to viewing things a certain way by which we interpret the evidence.The very fact that he even toyed with the idea of using religious sounding language, speaks to me of this very human and universal appreciation and hunger for religion. Are we to think that there is absolutely no basis for this in reality? People are happy to use religous terms so long as we don't go so far as to let the idea of a personal God in the door. We might then have to suffer the scary thought that our very existence entails some obligation on our part, and we can't have that can we?But you remind me of a conversation I had with a guy from Texas after church the other day. He was telling me how one of the first inventors of the mechanical sewing machine went to bed perplexed with the problem of the needle. That night he dreamt of a tribe of savage people chasing him with spears, all of which had a hole near the pointed end of the spear. He woke up and immediately recognized the significance of his nightmare, and promptly solved the problem he was perplexed by. Now you can call it what you will, it again depends on your worldview how you interpret that.Then I told him what I had learned about the discovery of the molecular shape of "the benzine ring" which I had come across a few days earlier. This was significant because the guy from Texas was in New Zealand as a chemical engineer involved in a substantial investment to upgrade our only oil refinery. Anyway, the man who was recognized widely by his scientific peers as discovering this, published scientific papers justifying his discovery on several occasions and slowly the scientific community evaluated them and accorded them the distinction of being accurate and true. Peer review at work. Several years after his theory became widely accepted and it had gone beyond the danger of being accused of quackery, he told the story of how he came to this knowledge via a dream. I think as part of the surveys in this course we were asked if dreams could tell the future. Well, yes they can, apparently. Now from a religious view, this makes perfect sense, but not from a strictly materialistic view. Of course, we could always fall back on a "faith" in science- and say "not yet"! Science of the gaps.It depends on your worldview.Oh and by the way, you have not yet addressed the issue of giving us a plausible, natural explanation for "the existence of a law-like order in nature". If you are content to leave it as simply "a matter of faith" then I too will do the same for your questions of Noah.- As an anecdote to the above, after reading an interesting article on the impeachment of President Clinton, it appears he also adopted a relativist view of the word "alone". In his, no doubt quickly revised meaning of the word, he could not have been "alone" with Monica Lewinsky. To be "alone" in Clinton's revisionist view of history and language, is to be in a room solitarily. Therefore is was not true that he was alone with Lewinsky!Now wouldn't that be a wonderful way to conduct science?Also fascinating in the article was this comment:"the analysis of academics--people trained to look objectively at evidence--who threw themselves into the impeachment fray was, if anything, even more partisan than that of the politicians."Hardly the stuff of neutrality and objectivity or openmindedness.-posted less than a minute ago by Kerry2
Immanual Kant wrote: "Skepticism is a resting place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings, but it is no dwelling place for permanent settlement. Simply to acquiesce in skepticism", Kant wrote " can never suffice to answer the restlessness of reason."
So in Kant's view skepticism is the abdication of reason, all be it for a season. Isn't it high time the holiday was over?
05/02/2016 0902hrs
As an update to this piece, I recently came across a brilliant quote by Christian philosopher Dallas Willard who was renowned for his gentle, humble approach. As the following quote shows that doesn't mean he was a pussy:
“The test of character posed by the gentleness of God's approach to us is especially dangerous for those formed by the ideas that dominate our modern world. We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel -- or one desperate for another life -- therefore stands any chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.”
