I made some short remarks on this subject a while back and meant to expand them in that thread, but I am a layabout by nature...
I mentioned that David Hume destroyed the idea of Facts. What he did was show that the inductive reasoning that science is based
on-- is itself based on illogical grounds. His radical skepticism no philosopher has come close to refuting, even so
positivist one such as Bertrand Russell admitted this in 1912.
Russell was so upset when he learned, as a child, that the beautiful proofs of mathematics are based on axions that aren't
proved---he set out to fix this. He published his Principia Mathematica in 1910 (vol 1), demonstrating these fundamental proofs, but
it wasn't too much longer when Kurt G?del demonstrated these not to be true. This little area (tho mathematics is fundamental
to all scieces now) that Russell attempted to show was solid all the way down, wasn't. It, like science's inductive
causation, is based on axioms that can't be proved, even within their own systems, and these axioms must just be accepted as true (i.e accepted on
faith)
This doesn't stop science from being instrumentally true in many narrow areas, providing us with a plethora of useful insights, predictions
and machines. But that doesn't demonstrate the truth or claims of the whole. Indeed, some scientific theories that have produced
much improved predictions and wonders have, by science's own investigations, been found to be wrong or incomplete. Such as the
Ptolemy's astronomical system or Newton's physics.
Thus the minister experiences no contradiction in calling science faith-based as he visit his physician or boards the airplane.
No more than the atheist who appreciates the beauty of Mozart's "Requiem". Accepting part doesn't mean you must accept all the
claims made in it's behalf.
Religion has contributed to production of many fine works of art, literature, civilizations and such also. Not that this has proved the
truth of it in totality either. Certain religions even produced the cultures that science grew up in and flourished, tho when Aquinas
declared and worked toward showing that Christian dogma must be reconciled with Aristotle's logic and science and opened a big bowl of serpents, I bet he regretted that endeavor later.
Anyway, I searched around and found an article that addresses and explicates some of these points, tho I don't agree with it all (more on that
later):
What's Good About Atheism
By Frederick Turner
02 Nov 2006
The recent small spate of atheist writings by the likes of
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, noticed in
the pages of Wired and The Guardian, revives an old and rather
quaint controversy. It is one which, I believe, is good for
religion; but to unearth the genuine value of atheist beliefs
we need first to dispose of the clutter of illogic and absurd
claims that have washed up around them over the years.
The figure of the village atheist is a rather comic one. He
proves his superior intelligence by mocking the sheeplike
conformity of the poor benighted believers. The old word
"enlightened" has now been replaced by the word "bright" as
the self-description of this sort of atheist. He is a variant
of the "Cliffie the mailman" wonk who knows it all, or
Sportin' Life the cynic in Porgy and Bess. An older version is
Flaubert's character Homais the bourgeois anticlerical
pharmacist in Madame Bovary, and an even older one is
Thersites the scurrilous doubter in Shakespeare and Homer.
Much pleased by their own originality, they take their mishaps
as the martyrdom of the bold intellectual pioneer, and they
have produced a group of arguments that should probably be
taken apart.
One is that religious ideology is a unique inspirer of
terrible wars. In the current perspective, such an opinion
sounds plausible. But anyone with an historical sense will
recognize that the few hundred people who die each month in
religious conflicts are absurdly dwarfed by the tens of
millions, almost all of them religious believers, who died,
within living memory, under the savage atheistic regimes of
Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong and the various dialectical
materialist dictators of eastern Europe. We have seen what
atheism looks like on the large scale, and it is not pretty:
the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing
Fields. Religion has indeed been a cause of appalling
slaughter during the course of human history; but it must take
fifth place behind atheist ideology, nation-state aggression,
mercantile colonialist expansion, and tribal war in the
carnage sweepstakes.
Another argument brought by the village atheist type is that
to base one's life on faith is intellectual suicide. This
argument might be persuasive if there were any alternative,
but there is not. Reason is not a basis for thought, but a
method of thought. Kurt G?del showed conclusively that every
system of reasoning contains self-referential statements of
the form of "This statement is unprovable", which are
correctly formed propositions that must be true or false, and
must, if reason is fundamental, be provably one or the other.
Analysis quickly shows that the statement must be true, but
cannot be proved to be true. Reason is a process of proof, but
reason is incapable of proving a certain true proposition, one
that must take its place among the axioms of any logical
system. Rationality cannot prove itself. The fundamental
validity of reason therefore must be taken on faith; the only
difference from a purely logical point of view between an
atheist who believes in reason and a religious person who
makes a primary act of faith is that the religious person
recognizes the pre-logical basis of his beliefs, while the
atheist does not.
If the village atheist dismisses this sort of thing as
logic-chopping and takes his stand on the empirical
down-to-earth evidence of the senses, the ground similarly
disappears from under his feet. David Hume is rightly hailed
as a hero of atheism, for his dismissal of the traditional
arguments for the existence of God. But what his atheistic
admirers miss is that his argument against empirical knowledge
is even more devastating. Hume showed that the concept of
cause has no logical necessity?that just because one event has
often followed another, that does not mean that the same
sequence must necessarily happen again, or that there is any
necessary causal connection between them. Our expectation of
causal connections in general, not just those that attribute
the cause of events to God?is at best an emotional and
practical habit. The religious person, by this logic, is
actually more aware of the shaky basis of his commonsense than
is the confident atheist.
Hume's insight has actually proved remarkably prescient. In
Hume's time cause?courtesy of Newton's magnificent discovery
of the predictability of matter in motion?was seen by the
scientific-minded as the only true relationship among events.
In questioning cause, Hume anticipated the current multitude
of relations now known to obtain among physical happenings.
Quantum events, such as the emission of a particle by a piece
of radioactive matter, are to a large extent purely random.
Quantum coherence is different from cause?it is more like the
existence of a harmonic between two vibrating violin-strings
than like anything we would call cause. Nonlinear dynamical
systems are so tangled and often so autonomous in their
interrelations that any assignment of cause becomes virtually
theological. For the initial conditions of the current state
of turbulence are irrecoverable and irrelevant, and the
outcome is, beyond the immediate future, increasingly
unpredictable even if we had perfect knowledge, a condition
impossible in this universe. And since the assignment of cause
is in empiricist terms provable only by successful prediction,
whatever cannot be predicted cannot be proved to be caused.
And even prediction is tainted in some parts of the universe
by second-guessing, rational expectations, theories of mind
and self-fulfilling prophecy. Living social organisms are
always involved in wildly idiosyncratic predicting contests
with each other whose results are ecosystems that are both
influences of their own and freely reinvented year by year.
Human minds are causes of their own causes, or else the whole
structure of legal and moral responsibility, which has built
societies that have greatly altered the surface of the planet,
is an illusion. And if something can be a cause of its own
cause, the meaning of the word "cause" has evaporated. So
cause, which is the basis of any empirical understanding of
the world, must in itself be taken on faith.
I mentioned that David Hume destroyed the idea of Facts. What he did was show that the inductive reasoning that science is based
on-- is itself based on illogical grounds. His radical skepticism no philosopher has come close to refuting, even so
positivist one such as Bertrand Russell admitted this in 1912.
Russell was so upset when he learned, as a child, that the beautiful proofs of mathematics are based on axions that aren't
proved---he set out to fix this. He published his Principia Mathematica in 1910 (vol 1), demonstrating these fundamental proofs, but
it wasn't too much longer when Kurt G?del demonstrated these not to be true. This little area (tho mathematics is fundamental
to all scieces now) that Russell attempted to show was solid all the way down, wasn't. It, like science's inductive
causation, is based on axioms that can't be proved, even within their own systems, and these axioms must just be accepted as true (i.e accepted on
faith)
This doesn't stop science from being instrumentally true in many narrow areas, providing us with a plethora of useful insights, predictions
and machines. But that doesn't demonstrate the truth or claims of the whole. Indeed, some scientific theories that have produced
much improved predictions and wonders have, by science's own investigations, been found to be wrong or incomplete. Such as the
Ptolemy's astronomical system or Newton's physics.
Thus the minister experiences no contradiction in calling science faith-based as he visit his physician or boards the airplane.
No more than the atheist who appreciates the beauty of Mozart's "Requiem". Accepting part doesn't mean you must accept all the
claims made in it's behalf.
Religion has contributed to production of many fine works of art, literature, civilizations and such also. Not that this has proved the
truth of it in totality either. Certain religions even produced the cultures that science grew up in and flourished, tho when Aquinas
declared and worked toward showing that Christian dogma must be reconciled with Aristotle's logic and science and opened a big bowl of serpents, I bet he regretted that endeavor later.
Anyway, I searched around and found an article that addresses and explicates some of these points, tho I don't agree with it all (more on that
later):
What's Good About Atheism
By Frederick Turner
02 Nov 2006
The recent small spate of atheist writings by the likes of
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, noticed in
the pages of Wired and The Guardian, revives an old and rather
quaint controversy. It is one which, I believe, is good for
religion; but to unearth the genuine value of atheist beliefs
we need first to dispose of the clutter of illogic and absurd
claims that have washed up around them over the years.
The figure of the village atheist is a rather comic one. He
proves his superior intelligence by mocking the sheeplike
conformity of the poor benighted believers. The old word
"enlightened" has now been replaced by the word "bright" as
the self-description of this sort of atheist. He is a variant
of the "Cliffie the mailman" wonk who knows it all, or
Sportin' Life the cynic in Porgy and Bess. An older version is
Flaubert's character Homais the bourgeois anticlerical
pharmacist in Madame Bovary, and an even older one is
Thersites the scurrilous doubter in Shakespeare and Homer.
Much pleased by their own originality, they take their mishaps
as the martyrdom of the bold intellectual pioneer, and they
have produced a group of arguments that should probably be
taken apart.
One is that religious ideology is a unique inspirer of
terrible wars. In the current perspective, such an opinion
sounds plausible. But anyone with an historical sense will
recognize that the few hundred people who die each month in
religious conflicts are absurdly dwarfed by the tens of
millions, almost all of them religious believers, who died,
within living memory, under the savage atheistic regimes of
Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong and the various dialectical
materialist dictators of eastern Europe. We have seen what
atheism looks like on the large scale, and it is not pretty:
the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing
Fields. Religion has indeed been a cause of appalling
slaughter during the course of human history; but it must take
fifth place behind atheist ideology, nation-state aggression,
mercantile colonialist expansion, and tribal war in the
carnage sweepstakes.
Another argument brought by the village atheist type is that
to base one's life on faith is intellectual suicide. This
argument might be persuasive if there were any alternative,
but there is not. Reason is not a basis for thought, but a
method of thought. Kurt G?del showed conclusively that every
system of reasoning contains self-referential statements of
the form of "This statement is unprovable", which are
correctly formed propositions that must be true or false, and
must, if reason is fundamental, be provably one or the other.
Analysis quickly shows that the statement must be true, but
cannot be proved to be true. Reason is a process of proof, but
reason is incapable of proving a certain true proposition, one
that must take its place among the axioms of any logical
system. Rationality cannot prove itself. The fundamental
validity of reason therefore must be taken on faith; the only
difference from a purely logical point of view between an
atheist who believes in reason and a religious person who
makes a primary act of faith is that the religious person
recognizes the pre-logical basis of his beliefs, while the
atheist does not.
If the village atheist dismisses this sort of thing as
logic-chopping and takes his stand on the empirical
down-to-earth evidence of the senses, the ground similarly
disappears from under his feet. David Hume is rightly hailed
as a hero of atheism, for his dismissal of the traditional
arguments for the existence of God. But what his atheistic
admirers miss is that his argument against empirical knowledge
is even more devastating. Hume showed that the concept of
cause has no logical necessity?that just because one event has
often followed another, that does not mean that the same
sequence must necessarily happen again, or that there is any
necessary causal connection between them. Our expectation of
causal connections in general, not just those that attribute
the cause of events to God?is at best an emotional and
practical habit. The religious person, by this logic, is
actually more aware of the shaky basis of his commonsense than
is the confident atheist.
Hume's insight has actually proved remarkably prescient. In
Hume's time cause?courtesy of Newton's magnificent discovery
of the predictability of matter in motion?was seen by the
scientific-minded as the only true relationship among events.
In questioning cause, Hume anticipated the current multitude
of relations now known to obtain among physical happenings.
Quantum events, such as the emission of a particle by a piece
of radioactive matter, are to a large extent purely random.
Quantum coherence is different from cause?it is more like the
existence of a harmonic between two vibrating violin-strings
than like anything we would call cause. Nonlinear dynamical
systems are so tangled and often so autonomous in their
interrelations that any assignment of cause becomes virtually
theological. For the initial conditions of the current state
of turbulence are irrecoverable and irrelevant, and the
outcome is, beyond the immediate future, increasingly
unpredictable even if we had perfect knowledge, a condition
impossible in this universe. And since the assignment of cause
is in empiricist terms provable only by successful prediction,
whatever cannot be predicted cannot be proved to be caused.
And even prediction is tainted in some parts of the universe
by second-guessing, rational expectations, theories of mind
and self-fulfilling prophecy. Living social organisms are
always involved in wildly idiosyncratic predicting contests
with each other whose results are ecosystems that are both
influences of their own and freely reinvented year by year.
Human minds are causes of their own causes, or else the whole
structure of legal and moral responsibility, which has built
societies that have greatly altered the surface of the planet,
is an illusion. And if something can be a cause of its own
cause, the meaning of the word "cause" has evaporated. So
cause, which is the basis of any empirical understanding of
the world, must in itself be taken on faith.
