probably the closest thing to what you are looking for is Raising the Sanity Waterline which lists the ideas that ought to make discarding religions into one of the low-hanging fruits of any attempt at upgrading one’s rationality.
The thing is, if it really was such a low-hanging fruit, then it would seem likely that the most successful scientists would have done so already (there’s a lot in rationality which makes it good at science). Since the same article points out the existence of Nobel laureates who are religious in one or other way, I think it is not nearly as obvious a matter as the article suggests...
among very successful scientists than among scientists generally
especially if one defines “religious belief” in a way that makes it have actual consequences for the observable world (e.g., a god who actually affects what happens in the world rather than just winding it up and then leaving it alone).
See e.g. this summary of the results of asking scientists about their beliefs and the letter to Nature that the summary is mostly about. (Note: there’s some scope for debate about the interpretation of these results, though I find the arguments at the far end of that link extremely unconvincing.)
[EDITED to fix a wrong link; thanks to CCC for pointing it out.]
I notice that their definition of “greater scientists”—which seems to have been what you referred to as “very successful scientists”—was “members of the National Academy of Sciences”. While I have no doubt that one needs to be a pretty great scientist to become a member, the results lead me to wonder whether the membership process for joining the Academy has an atheist bias in it somewhere.
I notice that the figures for scientists generally are more constant from 1914 to 1996, with approximately 60% of scientists expressing “disbelief or doubt in the existence of God”—since the selection of respondents here is not subject to the (potentially biased) membership process of a single organisation, I would give this general figure far greater credence that it shows what it purports to show.
(Also, I think you may have linked the wrong page in your “scope for debate” link—it’s linking to the same page as your “this summary” link)
whether the membership process for joining the Academy has an atheist bias
It’s possible. (I suppose new members are nominated and elected by existing members, and people may tend to favour candidates who resemble themselves and be influenced by politics, religion, skin colour, etc., etc., etc.) It would need to be quite a strong bias to produce the reported results in the absence of a tendency for “greater scientists” to be less (conventionally) religious than scientists in general.
The last paragraph of the Larson-Witham letter to Nature looks to me like (weak) evidence against a strong atheistic bias in the NAS, in that if there were such a bias I would expect its public utterances and those of its leaders to be a bit less conciliatory. As I say, weak evidence only.
(There could also be a bias in responses; maybe atheists are more cooperative in surveys or something. I would expect any such bias to be small and it’s not obvious to me which way it’s more likely to go.)
you may have linked the wrong page
Yup, I did. I’ve linked the right one now. Sorry about that.
It’s possible. (I suppose new members are nominated and elected by existing members, and people may tend to favour candidates who resemble themselves and be influenced by politics, religion, skin colour, etc., etc., etc.)
Yes, that’s the sort of thing I’m thinking of. People (in general) are usually more comfortable associating with people who share their opinions.
The last paragraph of the Larson-Witham letter to Nature looks to me like (weak) evidence against a strong atheistic bias in the NAS, in that if there were such a bias I would expect its public utterances and those of its leaders to be a bit less conciliatory. As I say, weak evidence only.
Very weak evidence; it’s easy to be conciliatory if one can also be smugly superior in pointing out how wrong the other party is (which is one possible, not necessarily correct interpretation of the last sentence of that paragraph).
(There could also be a bias in responses; maybe atheists are more cooperative in surveys or something. I would expect any such bias to be small and it’s not obvious to me which way it’s more likely to go.)
That is a point which I had not considered. I’m not sure which way it would go either (unless they did the survey by phoning people at their homes on a Sunday morning, when many Christians would be at church, but that would just be stupid)
Yup, I did. I’ve linked the right one now. Sorry about that.
Ah, thanks.
...that Gallup evolution poll at the start seems quite telling. It suggests that the difference between scientists and the general public is entirely in the (much larger) rejection of young-earth creationism. This fits with my expectations (which is probably why I draw attention to it).
Sunday morning, when many Christians would be at church
Don’t forget that at that point the atheists are all out at orgies and baby-killing parties. (Seriously: yeah, that would be stupid, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t that stupid.)
that Gallup evolution poll
I don’t agree with your interpretation of it. The reported numbers (no god : theistic evolution : creationism) go 55:40:5 for scientists and 9:40:46 for the general public; both the no-god and creationism options are very different between those populations.
It’s hard to infer anything from only three numbers per distribution, but it looks to me very much like an overall shift, with the similarity of the “theistic evolution” numbers on both sides being basically coincidence.
Don’t forget that at that point the atheists are all out at orgies and baby-killing parties.
Really? I would have expected either sleeping late or watching the rugby.
I don’t agree with your interpretation of it.
Fair enough. It’s only three numbers, that’s consistent with thousands of possible reasons.
It’s hard to infer anything from only three numbers per distribution, but it looks to me very much like an overall shift, with the similarity of the “theistic evolution” numbers on both sides being basically coincidence.
It’s not impossible. I don’t see it as a spectrum, though; I see it as three entirely opposing positions. And the young-earth creationists either change their minds when becoming scientists (and since, in their minds, the concept of God is tied up with young-earth creationism, they abandon both) or fail to become scientists entirely.
...actually, now that I think of it, it should be possible to tell the difference between those two ideas, at least. Young-earth creationism is linked to geography in America, right? So if there are less scientists who grew up in in areas where young-earth creationism is more widely known, then that would imply that fewer young-earth creationists become scientists. That, in turn, would imply that my interpretation is incorrect, and there is something about becoming a scientist which makes theistic evolution also less likely than in the general population...
Do you have any idea where these stats can be found?
In case it wasn’t obvious: I was joking. (I, for one, spend very little of my time at orgies and baby-killing parties.)
three entirely opposing positions
I think actually both views are right. I mean, (1) there is definitely a spectrum there (there is no god—there is a god, who set up the universe and has left it alone since then—there is a god, who mostly leaves the universe alone but sometimes gets involved in subtle ways like inspiring people to do good—there is a god, who mostly leaves the universe alone but sometimes tweaks evolution a bit to arrange for the emergence of a species capable of loving relationship with him—there is a god, who made a world in which life evolves precisely so that he could steer that process in all kinds of ways, which he does—there is a god, whose influence on the variety of life on earth mostly operates through evolution but who also sometimes makes more dramatic changes—there is a god, who directly created lots of different kinds of living thing but who has let them evolve since then, which is responsible for much small-scale variation—there is a god, who created every species separately in recent history, and evolution is just a lie) but (2) the gap between theism and atheism is a particularly big one, and so is the gap between “life is old and basically has common ancestry” and “life is recent and involves lots of special creation” and (3) I’m sure quite a lot of people do flip from near one end to near the other when they change their minds about what gods, if any, exist.
these stats
I worry that they’d be hard to disentangle from other things (e.g., wealthier versus poorer areas, which would affect education and what kinds of jobs people do and so forth; socially entrenched attitudes to academic learning; etc.). I’d guess that (1) there are indeed fewer, and worse, scientists from areas with a lot of young-earth creationism but (2) this doesn’t really tell us much about direct influence of science on religion or vice versa, because of all those other factors. There are some US government statistics that might tell you some of what you want to know.
[EDITED to add: If anyone has a clue why this was downvoted, I’d be very interested. It seems so obviously innocuous that I suspect it’s VoiceOfRa doing his thing again, but maybe I’m being stupid in some way I’m unable to see.]
In case it wasn’t obvious: I was joking. (I, for one, spend very little of my time at orgies and baby-killing parties.)
I… occasionally find humour in taking things very, very literally even when clearly intended otherwise. (That, and accidental puns. Accidental puns can be hilarious.)
I think actually both views are right. I mean, (1) there is definitely a spectrum there
Alright, yes, you can create a spectrum between “there is a god, who set up the universe and has left it alone since then” and “there is a god, who created every species separately in recent history, and evolution is just a lie”—but I don’t think that you can really tack “there is no god” to one end of the spectrum and consider it part of the same thing. That’s like saying that there’s a spectrum from “planet teeming with life” to “lifeless planet” and then sticking “planet does not exist” onto the lifeless planet end of the spectrum.
but (2) the gap between theism and atheism is a particularly big one
...agreed.
and (3) I’m sure quite a lot of people do flip from near one end to near the other when they change their minds about what gods, if any, exist.
The way I see it, people decide where on the spectrum they think the universe is. And some of them sit on the “evolution is a lie” end. And, if and when they find evidence that evolution is, in fact, not a lie, they don’t generally just adjust their position on the spectrum; many of them will rather jump off the spectrum entirely, becoming atheists.
I worry that they’d be hard to disentangle from other things
...you’re probably right. A survey could be created to try to avoid these problems, but it would have to be specifically created, simply looking up old stats probably won’t do it.
That’s like saying that there’s a spectrum from “planet teeming with life” to “lifeless planet” and then sticking “planet does not exist” onto the lifeless planet end of the spectrum.
You can talk about a spectrum between “planet large enough for life to exist”, “planet which is a little smaller which makes it a little harder for life to exist” all the way down to “no planet with no life”. You can do that because in this spectrum, the extent to which the planet exists and the chance of life are connected. In the God example, the spectrum is “degree to which things can be explained without God”. If you have evolution, there is one less thing that you need God to explain, and you get one step closer to not needing God to explain anything. And with nothing to need God for you can then reject the existence of God.
You could do a planet-size-spectrum like that; but reversing the analogy would be—I don’t know, some sort of spectrum ranging from “God doesn’t exist” to “God exists”? That seems a pretty binary set of points to me—how can the state of “God 50% exists” make any sort of sense?
And with nothing to need God for you can then reject the existence of God.
Similarly, if nothing that you ever see requires the existence of Jim, then you can reject the existence of Jim, right?
how can the state of “God 50% exists” make any sort of sense?
Suppose it turns out that the skeptics are mostly right about Christianity, but that there really was an itinerant preacher called Yeshua in Galilee about 2000 years ago who talked about forgiveness and love and had a reputation for casting out demons and the like; but he didn’t really work any miracles, he didn’t get crucified, and he certainly didn’t rise from the dead.
Then: Did Jesus exist? Well, kinda. Someone existed who’s fairly clearly the person the gospels are about. No one existed about whom they’re actually accurate accounts. Many of the most important things about “Jesus” don’t apply to anyone. While it might feel a bit weird to say something like “Jesus 50% existed” in that case, I think it would give a reasonable idea of the situation.
I wouldn’t want to defend the “50% existed” claim too seriously, but note that the discussion here was never really about explicit claims of that kind. It was about whether it’s appropriate to consider, e.g., “there is a god who gets involved in biological evolution” intermediate between “there is no god” and “there is a god who created every kind of living thing ex nihilo”. I say yes; CCC says no. The affirmative answer doesn’t require, e.g., being willing to say that a god who never does anything “50% exists”; only regarding a less-active god as in some sense intermediate between a more-active god and no god.
You can definitely plot all three points on the same graph—you can even plot them such that the distance from “there is no god” to “there is a god who created every kind of living thing ex nihilo” is greater than the distance from “there is a god who gets involved in biological evolution” to either of the two aforementioned points. That can all be done perfectly sensibly.
My claim is simply that the three points can’t be colinear on that graph.
It seems to me that you can plot them wherever you want to, so this is really a question of aesthetics more than anything else. Or is there some actual consequence that follows from one or another answer to this question?
Yes, very familiar with complex numbers, thanks. But, I repeat, you can plot what you want however you want; the question is whether it’s helpful, and that will depend on the application. (Suppose the values taken by your dependent variable are all on the circle of radius 1/sqrt(2) centred at (1+i)/2. Then plotting 0, 1, and i collinearly may make a whole lot of sense, though you might actually want to call them −3pi/4, -pi/4 and pi/4 respectively.)
(Suppose the values taken by your dependent variable are all on the circle of radius 1/sqrt(2) centred at (1+i)/2. Then plotting 0, 1, and i collinearly may make a whole lot of sense, though you might actually want to call them −3pi/4, -pi/4 and pi/4 respectively.)
I reluctantly concede the point, but firmly maintain that calling them −3pi/4, -pi/4 and pi/4 respectively would make a lot more sense.
...I wouldn’t describe that as “God 50% exists”. I’d describe that as “someone with strong similarity to the biblical Jesus existed”.
To take an analogy, again, let us consider Dr. Joseph Bell. Dr. Bell was a medical school lecturer who emphasised the importance of close observation in making a diagnosis, and made a game of observing a stranger and deducing his occupation and recent activities. He was also the inspiration for the fictional character of Sherlock Holmes (who was famous for doing the same).
Does this imply that Sherlock Holmes 50% existed? No. Sherlock Holmes 0% existed; Dr. Joseph Bell 100% existed.
As I think I said somewhere else in this discussion, the way this issue arose wasn’t by anyone actually claiming in so many words that “God 50% exists” is a sensible thing to say. Although I’ve kinda-sorta defended saying some things of that kind, I agree that it’s not actually the best way to describe any state of affairs I can envisage. The actual question, IIRC, was whether it’s reasonable to regard theistic evolution as intermediate between special creation and naturalistic evolution. Those are all positions that can be held by theists (though in practice not many theists embrace naturalistic evolution) and seeing them as points on a continuum really doesn’t require one to endorse saying “God 50% exists” in any possible world.
The state isn’t “God 50% exists” but “there is evidence which indicates that God might exist, but the evidence is 50% as good (or there is 50% as much of it) as the evidence at the far end of the spectrum”. There’s a continuous line from lots of evidence for God, to some evidence for God, to no evidence for God.
Ah, OK. Yes, I do that too. I just thought I should check :-).
I don’t think you can really tack “there is no god” to one end of the spectrum
“No god” and “god who does nothing” are very different metaphysically but have the exact same observable consequences, and evidence for or against one will equally be evidence for or against the other. I don’t see that it’s obviously inadmissible to put them next to one another. Of course the more interesting notions of god are ones that do do something (even if only to create a universe according to their whims rather than according to the dictates of some “mindless” physical theory), but we’ve already agreed (I think) that those can be put on a spectrum that has “perfectly inactive god” on it.
The way I see it
My perspective is a little different. They decide the following three interlinked things: (1) where the observable features of the universe lie on that spectrum, (2) what their religious position is, and (3) how the universe should look if #2 is correct. They generally decide these so that they’re reasonably consistent with one another. Then if they learn new things about #1, they may change either #2 or #3 to make it match; if they change #2 they may convert or deconvert; if they change #3 they may change their theology or their ideas about physics or something.
No god” and “god who does nothing” are very different metaphysically but have the exact same observable consequences, and evidence for or against one will equally be evidence for or against the other.
“There is a single universe” and “we are in one branch of a multiverse, but can’t access the other branches” are very different metaphysically but have the exact same observable consequences, and evidence for or against one will equally be evidence for or against the other.
That’s a thing about metaphysics, not a thing about theology.
That’s a thing about metaphysics, not a thing about theology.
I agree. Were you expecting me not to?
(On the other hand, if some particular believer believes in a perfectly inactive god then that is a thing about theology as well as metaphysics. Is that meant to be a problem somehow?)
“No god” and “god who does nothing” are very different metaphysically but have the exact same observable consequences, and evidence for or against one will equally be evidence for or against the other.
While I agree that there will be no observable difference, you’re talking about two different axes here. One axis is “how much God does”, and most of your spectrum is running along this axis. The other axis is “whether God exists”, and treating that as part of the same axis is an error. (Admittedly, the axes are related—the idea of a universe where God doesn’t exist yet is nonetheless active is rather absurd—but they are still not the same axis).
My perspective is a little different.
...the way you’ve phrased #3 reduces your argument to a tautology on close reading (specifically, #1 and #3 must always match regardless of #2). I think (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) that a better phrasing for #3 would be “how the universe should look if God exists” (instead of ”...if #2 is correct”). Then, for theists, #2 would be “theist” and #1 would match #3; for atheists #2 would be “atheist” and #1 may or may not match #3.
Then my view is that those who start with creationist leanings (in #1 and #3, #2 being “theist”) but pursue a scientific career find, in the course of their studies, that #1 (the observable features of the universe) are not as they had thought; then #1 and #3 no longer match. #3 is complex and difficult to change without feeling like it’s being changed arbitrarily (and will probably need to be changed repeatedly as #1 changes with further study); but #2 is a switch, far easier to flick, and therefore far more commonly flicked.
I think we need to look back at why we’re asking how many axes to use. The question was how to interpret the differences between two populations in the proportions of “special creation”, “theistic evolution” and “naturalistic evolution” in their survey responses: we had something like 1:5:4 versus 4:5:1 and were trying to figure out whether what’s happened is more that equivalent people in the two populations have made different choices between SC and NE, or that equivalent people in the two populations have made different choices between SC and TE, or TE and NE.
Let’s stipulate that the difference between “no god” and “perfectly uninvolved god” is bigger than any difference between different theistic scenarios. Would that really do much to resolve our disagreement about how to explain the survey differences? I don’t think so.
reduces your argument to a tautology
No, I don’t think it does. It might if everyone always insisted on perfect consistency among their beliefs, but in practice most of us accept that we’re wrong about some things (even though we don’t know which things) and so when we find inconsistencies we don’t immediately change our minds. So someone may believe, e.g., that Christianity is right, and that in the absence of compelling contrary evidence Christianity would lead to creationism, and that there is in fact such evidence and therefore one should accept evolution. And there’s nothing terribly wrong with holding those views, though of course someone who does should make some effort to figure out where the mistake is.
For someone in that position, #1 and #3 don’t match. The same might be true for an atheist who reads a pile of creationist literature arguing that a godless universe should look very different from ours and is not currently able to refute it (either because actually creationism is right, or because they just happen not to have the relevant information and arguments at their fingertips).
I don’t think the god-switch (#2) is so easily flicked. My impression—which of course may be wrong, and for which I don’t have statistics or anything—is that if you take a generally-thoughtful creationist and show them compelling evidence for evolution, the most common responses are (a) rejection of the evidence and/or associated arguments and (b) transition to some sort of theistic evolutionary view, with (c) leaping to atheism some way behind.
Let’s stipulate that the difference between “no god” and “perfectly uninvolved god” is bigger than any difference between different theistic scenarios. Would that really do much to resolve our disagreement about how to explain the survey differences? I don’t think so.
The size of the difference has absolutely nothing to do with my point. My point is that the difference is of an entirely different kind.
To take an analogy; let us say you have a duck, and you are measuring the greyness of its feathers. This runs along a spectrum from snowy white to ebony black. There is no point on this axis where the duck is actually a swan.
the way you’ve phrased #3 reduces your argument to a tautology
No, I don’t think it does.
Both of your examples appear to me to show someone, having changed their ideas about #1, in the process of altering #2 or #3 to match. On consideration of this, I will admit that I was thinking only of the steady-state case (when someone’s beliefs are internally consistent) and not really thinking about the transitional period during which they are not (even though some people might spend a majority of their lives in such a transitional state).
I don’t think the god-switch (#2) is so easily flicked.
It’s not so much that it’s easily flicked as that it has less moving parts; flicking it requires adjusting one thing as opposed to many things. (Of course, changing either can be difficult—the default reaction would still be to reject any unwanted evidence and/or associated arguments).
There is no point on this axis where the duck is actually a swan.
The point I’m making is that actually the discussion was about the colour of the feathers, and swan-ness as such is a mere distraction.
in the process of altering #2 or #3 to match
As you go on to remark, this process may never actually get as far as altering either #2 or #3 to match, and there’s nothing terribly wrong with that (beyond the fact that we have unreliable information, finite brainpower, etc., all of which is simply part of the human condition). I suggest that most people’s beliefs, most of the time, are not internally consistent. This is boringly true if we count it as inconsistent when someone thinks probably-P1, probably-P2, …, probably-Pk, and P1,...,Pk can’t all be true—which doesn’t have to indicate any suboptimality in belief-structure—and less boring but surely still true if we only count it as inconsistent when someone’s probability assignments (so far as they can be said to have such things) can’t all be close to correct (e.g., thinking Pr(A)>=0.9, Pr(B)>=0.9, and Pr(A&B)<0.7).
The point I’m making is that actually the discussion was about the colour of the feathers, and swan-ness as such is a mere distraction.
So, to reverse the analogy, are you saying that the spectrum is “God exists but doesn’t touch evolution → God exists and guides evolution → God exists and created everything in the recent past”, with the “God exists/doesn’t exist” axis being a mere distraction?
I suggest that most people’s beliefs, most of the time, are not internally consistent.
...this does make your viewpoint a good deal less tautological.
with the “God exists/doesn’t exist” axis being a mere distraction?
Yes, that’s about it. (I guess “tough” was meant to be either “touch” or something like “work through”.) It happens that most people who believe evolution operates without divine intervention or design believe that there are no gods to intervene or design in the first place, but there’s no fundamental reason why a theist couldn’t hold pretty much the exact same view of evolution as an atheist.
The Vatican’s official position is less than perfectly clear. Humani Generis in 1950 grudgingly accepted that Roman Catholics scientists could work on evolution, provided they didn’t hold that evolution was definitely right and provided they accepted that souls are directly created by God. Then in 1996, addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, JP2 accepted that evolution is “more than a hypothesis” (but do see the footnote about that phrase), but he by no means said that evolution proceeds without any divine involvement, and indeed it seems he rather conspicuously avoids saying anything that could be taken as endorsing that view.
Believing in probabilities of 1 is bad practice here, right?
Vatican’s official position on evolution is likely empirically indistinguishable from what we can see with our own eyes (e.g. the scientific view). This has old precedent, see e.g. how transubstantation is handled in Christianity.
If you think there’s any real question about whether it was grudging, please actually read Humani Generis (it’s not very long) and come back and tell me whether you still think so.
(If you mean something else, then I’m missing your point; consider explaining?)
Believing in probabilities of 1 is bad practice
Oh yes. But, again: please by all means go and read the encyclical and then tell me whether you really think Pius XII meant anything much like that. Tell me, in particular, whether you notice any reluctance to state that points of RC doctrine are definitely right. (Spoiler: it says in so many words, e.g., that some “religious and moral truths” delivered by revelation “may be known by all men readily with a firm certainty and with freedom from all error”.)
I think it’s like trying to discern tone. Poe’s law says this is hard in the context of sarcasm, but it seems hard in general from text. Seems doubly hard for people coming from a different background from you, the more different the more difficult the problem (xenoanthropology). People use language differently, people parse things differently (dog whistles, etc.)
What do we really know about how someone whose life trajectory resulted in the Papacy uses language?
But let’s say you are even right. Why talk about tone at all? Are you trying to stick it to the Pope? What is the point of doing that? Why use emotionally non-neutral language?
What do we really know about how someone whose life trajectory resulted in the Papacy uses language?
This seems like an awfully general argument against interpreting anyone’s words. Encyclicals are intended to be widely read and understood. Is it really likely that some special papal quality makes them particularly difficult for others to interpret?
What is the point of doing that?
Because the question at issue is whether the official position (on evolution) of the Vatican is indistinguishable from the naturalistic evolution commonly held by unbelieving biologists; and the relevant documents are few and ambiguous and vague; and so attempting to extract whatever nuances one can from them seems worthwhile. Humani Generis is one of the key documents for understanding the RCC’s view of evolution, and it seems to me reasonable to draw different conclusions from the document as it actually is than we would from a document that was more unequivocally accepting of biological evolution.
This seems like an awfully general argument against interpreting anyone’s words.
Well, I am not saying we should not try to interpret what people say or write. But:
(a) This is hard to do for tone (Poe’s law, principle of charity, etc.)
(b) Meaning is a binary relation between text and interpreter, and isn’t always so simple (author is dead)
(c) Effective communication depends on shared cultural context and gets progressively harder as context gets less and less shared. In the limit, you get “communication is impossible” (a lot of Stanislav Lem stories are about this).
and the relevant documents are few and ambiguous and vague
Why not be charitable, then? From the CC point of view, there is no profit in making falsifiable claims, so they will probably retreat from making them. They don’t want to look stupid, and at any rate, science isn’t their business.
In the limit, you get “communication is impossible”
Sure. But I don’t see any reason to think we’re near the limit in this case. Pius XII was pope and I’m not, true enough. But we’re reasonably close in time (he was born a little less than 100 years before me), from reasonably similar cultures (both Western European), of at least overlapping religious backgrounds (my family was RC and I was a Christian although not an RC for something like 30 years) -- this all seems to me like the sort of situation in which interpretation should be less problematic than usual.
Why not be charitable, then?
I really don’t see that I’m being uncharitable. If you insist that I am and ask why, I suppose the answer is that in cases of conflict I’d rather be accurate than charitable; I see the PoC as (inter alia) a tool for avoiding wrongness that comes from assuming people who disagree with you are evil or stupid. But I’m not (I promise) assuming that either Pius XII or John Paul II were evil or stupid, and my real answer to your question is that I don’t see how I’m failing to be charitable.
there is no profit in making falsifiable claims
There is profit (if we must put it that way) in making correct claims, and if a pope thinks that theological considerations lead to a particular empirical claim then I don’t expect him to refuse to state it on those grounds. (It seems to me that expecting otherwise is the less charitable position.) And there is profit (again, if we must put it that way) in making claims that sound confident and informative rather than vague.
But, as it happens, I am not (I think) claiming that the RCC’s official documents make a falsifiable claim that is incompatible with naturalistic evolution. I am claiming that the position they state is deliberately less specific than naturalistic evolution; in particular, you will search in vain for any statement that evolution proceeds as if there were no god guiding it. Or that it probably does. Or, I think, even that it might do. And that the official documents give the impression (to me, at least) that their authors think it probably doesn’t.
I repeat that none of that seems to me uncharitable. I am saying that the RCC has declined to make official statements that would likely be interpreted as endorsements of godlessness and as incompatible with their past positions, and that the RCC’s position on aspects of evolution that are hard to get clear empirical evidence about is probably shaped by the religious doctrines that it endorses. All of which is as it should be, conditional on its being the sort of organization it is.
The closest you can get to an “official” statement on that would be in the document of the International Theological Commission “Communion and Stewerdship”. That is not technically considered a teaching document but it had to be approved by Ratzinger as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which at least means that he considered it acceptable.
Here is #69:
The current scientific debate about the mechanisms at work in evolution requires theological comment insofar as it sometimes implies a misunderstanding of the nature of divine causality. Many neo-Darwinian scientists, as well as some of their critics, have concluded that, if evolution is a radically contingent materialistic process driven by natural selection and random genetic variation, then there can be no place in it for divine providential causality. A growing body of scientific critics of neo-Darwinism point to evidence of design (e.g., biological structures that exhibit specified complexity) that, in their view, cannot be explained in terms of a purely contingent process and that neo-Darwinians have ignored or misinterpreted. The nub of this currently lively disagreement involves scientific observation and generalization concerning whether the available data support inferences of design or chance, and cannot be settled by theology. But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1). In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist because “the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles....It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence” (Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).
Notice what they are saying: “An unguided evolutionary process” cannot exist because nothing is unguided (according to the understanding of providence.) But this means that a falling rock is also not unguided, in that sense. So being “guided” in this sense is empirically indistinguishable from naturalistic evolution.
So they are recognizing pretty explicitly that the process of evolution might be indistinguishable from completely naturalistic evolution. And I suspect they are aware that it probably is, even if they didn’t make this particular statement, probably because they wish that it weren’t, and consequently don’t object if people believe that it isn’t.
You are failing to be charitable when you use fnords like “grudgingly.” It’s not emotionally neutral language, it conjures in the mind stupid old men blocking scientific progress for silly reasons, and getting Galileo in trouble, etc., being dragged forward, kicking and screaming by our side, the hero scientists.
The CC is not playing that game. They are not very interested in empirical falsifiabilty, and I think when you say:
There is profit (if we must put it that way) in making correct claims, and if a pope thinks that theological considerations
lead to a particular empirical claim then I don’t expect him to refuse to state it on those grounds. [...] And there is profit
(again, if we must put it that way) in making claims that sound confident and informative rather than vague.
you are misreading their culture. The CC has long ago evolved away from their doctrine getting them in trouble with science. Science will always beat them in a debate about falsifiable claims, and losing will make them lose prestige. This is what I mean by “profit.” The easiest thing for the CC to do is massage doctrine to make this not happen. This is precisely what had happened.
“Confident and informative” is language culture, and involves tone. How do we read confidence in text? What is informative in text? it’s all based on allusions and references in the end. Would you find my papers informative? Probably not, because you don’t share mathematical background with me. Do you share enough theological background with the Pope to peer review the Pope?
You are failing to be charitable [...] It’s not emotionally neutral language, it conjures in the mind stupid old men [...]
Have you noticed that you are doing to me exactly what you accuse me of doing to the Popes P12 and JP2?
I did not (so far as I can tell by introspection) write “grudgingly” in order to make people think of popes as stupid old men, or to summon up the spectre of the RCC blocking science for silly reasons, or to call Galileo to mind. I wrote it because CCC was saying that the RCC’s official position on evolution is indistinguishable from that of naturalistic scientists, and I don’t think it is, and the fact that the RCC’s official documents talk about evolution as they do is one reason why I think so.
The easiest thing for the CC to do is massage doctrine to make this [sc. having doctrine found incompatible with findings of science] not happen.
I have to ask: Did you read what I wrote above, explaining that I am not claiming that the RCC’s position on evolution makes empirical claims incompatible with the findings of science? Because you appear to me to be writing exactly as if I hadn’t written that.
Would you find my papers informative? Probably not, because you don’t share mathematical background with me.
I wonder on what basis you say that. (I work in industry as a mathematician; I have a PhD in pure mathematics from a top-rank university; reading mathematical papers that don’t lie right within one’s own areas of special expertise is hard work, but yes, I would expect to find your papers informative.)
Do you share enough theological background with the Pope to peer review the Pope?
I’m not attempting to peer review the Pope. But yes, I think I am sufficiently familiar with Christian thinking generally and RC thinking in particular to distinguish grudging from enthusiastic acceptance of an idea in a papal encyclical.
I am puzzled by what is happening in this thread. You are normally an outstandingly intelligent and sensible fellow, but here you have
adopted what seems to me an exceptionally combative approach
apparently failed to read what I wrote (not, I think, too obscurely)
accused me of a particular kind of uncharitable reading while simultaneously applying exactly that kind of uncharity to me
confidently stated things about me (“you don’t share mathematical background”) for which you have no good evidence, and which are in fact probably false
and I’m wondering what’s going on to make you (as it seems to me) behave in so uncharacteristic a manner. May I ask you to consider carefully whether there is anything that might possibly be pushing you to be more adversarial than usual? (I’d ask: are you in fact Catholic? but am fairly sure the answer to that one is no.)
I am not Catholic. I find LW attitudes about religion (and certain other things) kind of annoying, though, if you want to try to reverse engineer where I am coming from.
reading mathematical papers that don’t lie right within one’s own areas of special expertise is hard work
That’s mostly what I meant, I am not trying to pull math rank (I don’t think there is such a thing as math rank), merely that informativeness is a function of shared context. I am pretty happy to double down on “we don’t share math background.” I don’t study much pure math, I doubt you study causal inference. I could study pure math, and you could study causal inference, but that’s not the same thing.
I wrote it because CCC was saying that the RCC’s official position on evolution is indistinguishable from that of
naturalistic scientists, and I don’t think it is
explaining that I am not claiming that the RCC’s position on evolution makes empirical claims incompatible
with the findings of science
Sorry, getting lost. You think RCC does make empirically distinguishable claims or not? If the former, we have a factual disagreement. If the latter, I still think it is uncharitable to inject tone reading.
while simultaneously applying exactly that kind of uncharity to me
I think it is bad practice to read tone. First of all, it’s easy to be wrong, and second of all, it just increases room for misinterpretation of your own text.
Your word grudging conjured these things in my mind. Now you could say nothing could be further from the truth as far as your intentions were concerned. But that’s the thing with texts and authors. How texts come across to others (independently of what the author wanted) matter, and this is why I think injecting tone reading is so dangerous, and why academic papers are generally written in an emotionally neutral tone (to avoid these types of issues).
I favor bilateral disarmament as far as tone in texts (this is probably utopian thinking on my part, as humans are all about status and social dominance when it comes to communication, and playing with tone is a big part of this, and further it is really hard to coordinate to not do that).
I am pretty happy to double down on “we don’t share math background”
OK, fair enough. Maybe I have too optimistic a view of how deeply I need to understand something for it to be informative to me. Would you like to point me at one of your more interesting papers so we can try the experiment? :-)
Sorry, getting lost.
I think
the RCC surely does sometimes make empirically distinguishable claims, but
I am not claiming in this discussion that it does; rather
I am saying that its position on evolution differs from that of someone who accepts a naturalistic account of evolution, because
such a person would endorse propositions that the RCC conspicuously avoids endorsing
such as “evolution proceeds in a manner that shows no sign of divine intervention or guidance”.
I think it is bad practice to read tone. [...] Your word grudging conjured these things in my mind.
Yeah, but you demonstrably weren’t only talking about your mind; otherwise you wouldn’t have said ‘You are failing to be charitable when you use fnord words like “grudgingly”’. (And, y’know, you could have said “it conjures in my mind …” rather than “it conjures in the mind”, if you were really only intending to say what effect those words have on you. But you weren’t, really, were you?)
I favor bilateral disarmament as far as tone in texts
Pardon me if I am being dim, but are you now saying that you engaged in uncharitable misreading of the tone of my writing in retaliation for my allegedly doing likewise to two popes? If not, what exactly is your point about “bilateral disarmament”? (It can’t be that you did it to me because I did it to you first, because I’m pretty sure I made no comment on your tone until the grandparent of this comment, which came after your accusations against me.)
you demonstrably weren’t only talking about your mind
If I was speaking for someone else, I would be vulnerable to the charge of speaking for others. I am not that cognitively weird though: if this happened with me and your text, I am sure it will happen with people similar to me and texts similar to yours.
OK, fair enough.
My CV is online. I will mention some more things that should be done soon. But also: I would hate for you to read my stuff to prove a point, read if you are interested!
such a person would endorse propositions that the RCC conspicuously avoids endorsing
But that stuff is argument about taste. RCC’s insistence on “divine guidance” does not, as locals like to say, “pay rent in anticipated experience.” So they can say whatever they want, it boils down to their taste about how they phrase things, not an alternative empirically testable theory. People who get angry about theism (e.g. the flying spaghetti monster sneer club) will argue with them or mock them, but they are kind of wasting their time—there is no empirical content to the argument. So it’s just a bit of culture war playing out.
accusations
This entire rabbit hole would have been avoided if you didn’t try to reverse engineer whether the Pope was grudging or not, and just stuck to factual reading. The point is, maybe sticking to factual reading of texts avoids a lot of time-wasting traps.
I promise that I have no intention of reading your papers just to prove a point. That would be silly. I think it’s eminently possible that some of them might be interesting to me.
(I just looked you up in Google Scholar and grabbed the first paper it found, which I suspect is a little tangential to your main research; it was about parsing citations of scientific papers using a generative model of (part of) the citation process, allowing for errors in names etc. I think it was informative to me, though of course I may be overestimating how well I understood it. (In particular, one key element seems to be a trick you use to make your Metropolis-Hastings sampling actually generate a reasonable number of usable candidates, which is borrowed from another paper I didn’t look at and where I accordingly got only a very hazy idea of what it’s doing.)
But that stuff is argument about taste.
I don’t think that’s quite right. The RCC’s position is carefully “unempirical” in the sense that it doesn’t make any definite predictions, and that suffices to keep it from getting too badly embarrassed by future scientific discoveries. But it seems to me that, e.g., the position Pius XII laid out in Humani Generis involves somewhat different probability assignments from the position that would have been adopted by naturalist biologists at the time, and that if you had asked faithful readers of H.G. and naturalistic biologists questions like “How likely is it that in the next 50 years or so scientific investigation will find something plainly inconsistent with a purely naturalistic view of evolution?” you would have got different answers.
In support of this view, here’s a little extract from Humani Generis:
Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.
I’m not concerned right now to argue that this is wrong (especially as it’s not the latest official statement of the RCC on evolution); only that Pius XII clearly thought that divine revelation ought to shift faithful Catholics’ assessment of the probability of purely naturalistic evolution—even as regards only “the human body”.
Do I need to repeat that I’m claiming not that the RCC has an alternative empirically testable theory? Only that its position on evolution differs from that of a naturalistic evolutionist, by (in LWese) assigning more probability to hypotheses incompatible with naturalism.
This entire rabbit hole would have been avoided [...]
Maybe so. It would also have been avoided if you hadn’t taken such exception at such length to my use of the word “grudging”. These facts do nothing to indicate whether the better diagnosis is “attempting to go beyond literal meanings leads down rabbit-holes” or “complaining over-vigorously about going beyond literal meanings leads down rabbit-holes”.
(Just out of curiosity, is it you or someone else who’s been downvoting everything I say in this subthread?)
(Just out of curiosity, is it you or someone else who’s been downvoting everything I say in this subthread?)
Not me. Would be pretty rude of me.
You can ignore that citation matching paper, I was an undergrad back then. I don’t work on that kind of stuff anymore. If you email me, I will send you some stuff that’s paywalled.
That was my guess, FWIW. (I don’t think it’s necessarily rude to downvote someone you’re also arguing with, if you think their arguments are really bad. But I can’t recall the last time I did it, if I ever did.)
I was an undergrad back then
Yeah, I thought the paper seemed a little far removed from the sort of thing I thought you did now (and rather tame). I’ll drop you an email. If you don’t get one within the next day or so, feel free to remind me; I’m very good at forgetting to do things.
Your charitable interpretation is false on all counts, at least until the Vatican gets around to making a new statement on the nature of “Adam”.
However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.[11] Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.
When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.
The Catholic Church does not work the way you seem to think it does. They have made perfectly clear that polygenism is now acceptable, even without making a “new statement” in the way you that you suggest. And even Pius XII was deliberately suggesting the same thing in that very statement, by saying “it is in no way apparent” that a reconciliation is possible, rather than saying that one is not possible.
Could you say more about how the RCC has “made perfectly clear that polygenism is now acceptable”? E.g., is there something in the “Communion and Stewardship” document you’ve quoted from a couple of times? I had a quick look and didn’t find anything of the sort, but I could well have missed it.
(I briefly thought “that must be a typo for not acceptable”, but I’m pretty sure you did actually mean what you wrote.)
Yes, I meant what I wrote. I mostly agree with what you said about Pius XII and what he was and was not cautious about. However, I am pretty sure that he deliberately left room for polygenism to be accepted in the future by saying that it wasn’t clear how a reconciliation would be possible, rather than by saying that a reconciliation simply was not possible. He was pretty careful in that statement, even deliberately leaving room for aliens (by adding the clause “on this earth,” because if “man” is understood as “rational animal,” the existence of aliens would be the existence of other men.)
People saw this even at the time and started to speculate about how “reconcilations” would be possible. While still not accepting an opinion that polygenism is definitely true, Paul VI made clear that Catholics are permitted to think that way:
“In the attempt to rethink the Theology of original sin in the light of the scientific theory of evolution and polygenism, scholars have sought to determine the literary genre of the first chapters of Genesis, and in particular Gen. 1-3. And usually, following closely the documents of the Magisterium, they affirm that it is a theological aetiology, that is, a particular vision of history, a picturesque story which is largely symbolic, of an event which really happened (original sin). Consequently, they think that the bible is not concerned with the scientific question of evolution or polygenism and these are, therefore, not denied by Revelation.”
“Working on these premises, various hypotheses have been proposed to reconcile Revelation with science within the framework of a more modern theology of original sin. They are still only hypotheses, plausible to a greater or lesser extent, while the scientific theories are by no means certain and are in need of further completion and proof. The Magisterium of the Church in her latest documents has given clarifications of a specifically theological nature, while allowing those who are properly qualified to continue their studies.”
Link. This may be a bit “grudging,” as you described it, but it certainly does not forbid Catholics from thinking that polygenism is likely, and this was already in 1968.
This is from number 70 of Communion and Stewardship:
“With respect to the immediate creation of the human soul, Catholic theology affirms that particular actions of God bring about effects that transcend the capacity of created causes acting according to their natures. The appeal to divine causality to account for genuinely causal as distinct from merely explanatory gaps does not insert divine agency to fill in the “gaps” in human scientific understanding (thus giving rise to the so-called “God of the gaps”). The structures of the world can be seen as open to non-disruptive divine action in directly causing events in the world. Catholic theology affirms that that the emergence of the first members of the human species (whether as individuals or in populations) represents an event that is not susceptible of a purely natural explanation and which can appropriately be attributed to divine intervention.”
(The idea here is that if human beings have a spiritual and immortal soul which other animals do not, the creation of that soul requires God’s work; they are not saying that the physical development of humanity requires some special intervention.) In any case, “whether as individuals or in populations” basically refers to monogenism and polygenism, and the implication is that theology does not determine anything about this.
Lastly, obviously many Catholics think that polygenism is true and have said so in public works, and there has been no rebuke of this position at any time after Paul VI (as far as I know.)
I think the only real hard line the CC takes is on certain matters of faith when they invoke infallibility (and they only did that a handful of times on empirically unverifiable matters only).
edit: I suppose actually the hard line includes some other things that form the core of the faith but needed no clarification via infallibility pronouncements, e.g. Nicene Creed. The CC will not give ground there either.
Excommunication is a social punishment, a ritualized shunning, not a hill they are willing to die on. The CC is not in the business of making falsifiable claims. This policy was worked out long, long ago.
I think a lot of that is the Vatican being really really cautious. They’re ultra-cautious about just about everything they say (largely, I think, because they are well aware that (a) a lot of people will take what they say as gospel truth and (b) they don’t get to take anything back, or hardly ever, so if they endorse evolution in some form and then a few decades later a scientist comes back and presents some improvement on the theory that contradicts that form then they will look silly).
So, yeah. What I’m reading into that is that they’re not saying it’s definitely true (in the same way as they do say it’s definitely true that God exists) but they are saying it looks like it just might be.
As well as being ultra-cautious about evolution, Humani Generis says these things (emphasis mine):
divine revelation must be considered morally necessary so that those religious and moral truths which are not of their nature beyond the reach of reason in the present condition of the human race, may be known by all men readily with a firm certainty and with freedom from all error.
the many wonderful external signs God has given, which are sufficient to prove with certitude by the natural light of reason alone the divine origin of the Christian religion
(as well as many other things that don’t appear to me at all ultra-cautious, but where the language is less clear-cut). So this isn’t the result of any general policy of ultra-caution. They are being extra-ultra-cautious about evolution specifically. That was in 1950, and they are less cautious now, but still very cautious. This is why I say their position is notably different from that of naturalistic evolutionary biologists.
… Oh, wait. Have I misunderstood you? If so, we may be arguing at cross-purposes. Here’s our exchange from upthread:
there’s no fundamental reason why a theist couldn’t hold pretty much the exact same view of evolution as an atheist.
Not only is there no fundamental reason, but that’s also pretty much the official position of the Vatican, who are about as theist as you get...
When you said “that”, did you mean (1) “the exact same view of evolution as an atheist” or (2) “the idea that there’s no fundamental reason why a theist couldn’t, etc.”? I’ve been assuming #1 but maybe you meant #2, in which case our disagreement is less sharp than I thought. On #2, my impression is that the Vatican hasn’t said or implied much about what theists as such can reasonably believe about evolution; they’re concerned, rather, with what faithful Catholics can reasonably believe about evolution; and what they’ve said about the latter is, inter alia, that faithful Catholics mustn’t regard it as definitely right (a position that I don’t think is negated by JP2′s statement before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences), and from the things they are willing to call definitely right I don’t think it’s tenable to take this as meaning only that one shouldn’t literally take Pr(evolution)=1. So I don’t think the Vatican thinks it acceptable for Catholics to think about evolution in the same way as most atheists do. Again, what they think about theists more broadly is hard to tell.
From the same document (of the International Theological Commission) that I quoted earlier:
“Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism.” Given Ratzinger’s approval of that document I don’t think you can reasonably say that a Catholic who thinks that evolution is definitely right (in the ordinary sense of thinking that something is definitely right) is not a faithful Catholic.
Well … the very next sentence of that document is this:
Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution.
and while that’s pretty positive about evolution it seems not to be saying that evolution is definitely right. I think what’s going on here is that the authors of that document are happy being very confident about common descent but not so happy being equally confident about evolution.
As to just what sort of evolution, here’s an extract from further on in that document:
It follows that the message of Pope John Paul II cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe.
As the section of that document that you quoted before makes clear, giving God a “truly causal role” doesn’t necessarily mean endorsing divine intervention. Section 68 -- the one before the one you quoted before—suggests what alternatives the authors had in mind, most notably the idea that he designed the universe in such a way that its natural operation would produce particular results.
This, again, is quite far from any view of evolution that would be endorsed by naturalists.
Even in section 68, I don’t see them saying that God necessarily “designed the universe in such a way that its natural operation would produce particular results,” in any sense stronger than the one which would be absolutely necessary for someone who believes that God is omnipotent and omniscient and the cause of everything that happens. In other words, given that you believe such things about God, then if you see a rock fall and land on the ground, you must believe that God wanted it on the ground. But that wouldn’t necessarily imply that it would have bothered God if it landed in the water instead.
Obviously naturalists would not accept God’s design even in this sense. But it is not a scientific theory one way or another and makes no differences in what you expect to find in nature. So that would still allow for someone to say that naturalistic evolution is definitely true with respect to every prediction that it makes.
Also, I agree that in practice, at least in other places, there is the implication that the world was designed (at least by initial conditions) for the sake of some results rather than others. This comes up especially in regard to marriage and sexuality. However, I don’t see that proposed in any dogmatic way, and it seems to be wishful thinking: if it is objectively by chance that reproduction works the specific way it does, then it becomes harder or impossible to justify Catholic sexual morality. For example, if human beings had developed by evolution in such a way that sexual reproduction required one partner killing the other, it would be obviously justified for them to make technological changes in the way they reproduce.
[...] in any sense stronger than the one which would be absolutely necessary [...]
I’m not sure what sense you have in mind. It seems to me that taking seriously the idea that God is omniscient and the cause of everything that happens more or less commits one to seeing everything as designed by God to achieve whatever his purposes might be.
It is fairly common to say: no, despite having that power God conferred free will upon some of his creatures, so that what they do is not chosen by him. I’m not sure that actually makes sense when looked at clearly, but in any case it seems hard to apply this idea to the laws of nature.
In any case, the document we’re discussing seems to me to be saying that God may guide natural processes like evolution by being a “cause of causes”, and setting up the web of natural causation so as to achieve his ends.
(I don’t mean to imply that it’s saying he did so in such a way as to predetermine everything that happens, by the way; one can imagine God setting up a world that operates at random, and optimizing for a particular probability distribution or something of the kind.)
I’m not sure if we’re disagreeing about anything. I’m not saying that any Church authority has said that “the process of evolution looks exactly like a naturalistic process”, but that what they do say is consistent with this being true. Even assuming God had some motive for setting up things the way they are, how would that imply something in the process of evolution that doesn’t look naturalistic?
I certainly agree that if you say God is relevant at all, that is not something that naturalism would say. But it also doesn’t seem to mean anything concrete about the process.
in so far as the RCC has a position on the actual facts of biological evolution (as opposed to a position on what the Catholic faithful are supposed to think about them):
it seems to me fairly clearly distinguishable from any position a typical atheist evolutionist would adopt, even as regards observable questions like how likely it is that clear evidence of non-natural processes in evolution will ever turn up, though it’s hard to be certain because the official documents carefully avoid being too definite on such matters, and
I bet the senior RC clergy responsible for these documents hold positions more clearly distinguishable from those of typical atheist evolutionists, even as regards etc.; but
I suspect many of them have at least a suspicion that the scientific evidence for naturalist-looking evolution is only ever going to get better, and that clear signs of any kind of divine design in natural organisms are never going to show up.
as regards the RCC’s position on what the Catholic faithful are supposed to think:
I don’t think they are forbidden to adopt positions that, as regards etc., are indistinguishable from those of a typical atheist evolutionist, but
those official documents seem intended to discourage them from holding such positions, and
such positions seem permitted only (I insist on saying!) grudgingly. In particular:
until recently the Catholic faithful were explicitly forbidden to adopt such positions (on account of, e.g., what Humani Generis says about not regarding evolution as definitely correct), and
I strongly suspect that if even a modest amount of credible scientific evidence pointing in the direction of “intelligent design” were to show up, the RCC would return to that sort of stance.
(Not all of those things are directly related to the questions we were discussing.) Does that help?
Ok. I think I agree at least mostly with this summary, although I might qualify a few points.
In itself it’s likely that someone who believes in God will estimate a higher probability of evidence of non-natural processes in evolution than for an atheist. But there is also the third point you mention, namely that even theists may notice that there is currently no such evidence and may suspect that there never will be any. So this might mitigate the difference in their expectations somewhat.
Regarding what is grudgingly permitted or what is encouraged, I think this is less about probability assignments about the facts at issue, and more about the probability that a belief will tend to keep people in the Church or to lead to them leaving the Church. I think this is true even when the Church authorities are explicitly aware that a belief is probably false, at least in some cases. They still will not discourage that belief if it makes it more likely for someone to stay in the Church, unless there is some other motive for discouraging it (e.g. if the belief is very obviously ridiculous, they may discourage it because it could make the Church look bad.)
As well as being ultra-cautious about evolution, Humani Generis says these things (emphasis mine):
Yes; there are some things that the Vatican is extremely certain of (e.g. the divine origin of the Christian religion). Their ultra-caution extends to everything else—a rather large category which just so happens to include evolution.
That was in 1950, and they are less cautious now,
I don’t think they’re less cautious, I just think they recognise that there’s more evidence. At the very least, the fact that no-ones convincingly refuted it in the last sixty-odd years despite all the attention being paid to it counts for quite a bit.
When you said “that”, did you mean (1) “the exact same view of evolution as an atheist” or (2) “the idea that there’s no fundamental reason why a theist couldn’t, etc.”?
I meant that there’s no reason why a theist can’t hold a view of evolution that makes exactly the same predictions in all circumstances as an atheist does. Naturally, the theist’s view will incorporate God as having (at the very least) set up the natural laws that permit it, while the atheist will presumably have those laws simply existing with no particular cause; but they can both agree on what those laws are.
what they’ve said about the latter is, inter alia, that faithful Catholics mustn’t regard it as definitely right
I understand that as meaning that faithful catholics shouldn’t take Pr(evolution)=1.
and from the things they are willing to call definitely right I don’t think it’s tenable to take this as meaning only that one shouldn’t literally take Pr(evolution)=1
The thing is, the things that they are willing to consider as definitely right are things like the divine origin of Christianity; and as far as I understand it, they do expect faithful catholics to take Pr(Christianity has a divine origin)=1.
Unfortunately, I think what you’re clarifying isn’t what I was asking about :-). Let P be the proposition “as far as scientifically observable consequences go, evolution behaves as if it’s entirely natural and undesigned”. You and I agree that a theist can consistently believe P; call this thing that we believe Q. (Perhaps you also believe P, as I do, but that’s a separate question.) You made a remark about the RCC (which has spawned a discussion entirely out of proportion to the importance of that remark in anyone’s arguments, but no matter!) which I interpreted as saying that the RCC’s official position is P, whereas in fact perhaps you were saying that the RCC’s official position is Q (or perhaps the closely related Q’, which says that a good Catholic can consistently believe P).
So my question was: were you saying that the RCC’s position is (something like) P, or that the RCC’s position is (something like) Q?
Pr(...) = 1
I agree that HG can be read as saying faithful Catholics mustn’t take Pr(evolution)=1 but must take Pr(souls)=1 (where both “evolution” and “souls” are brief abbreviations for more complicated things, of course). I suppose what I was getting at is that saying “don’t take Pr(X)=1” effectively means quite different things depending on whether the community you’re addressing is in the habit of taking Pr(various things)=1 or scrupulously avoids it as e.g. LW tends to for good reason; and the fact that HG firmly endorses taking some probabilities to be 1 indicates that it’s in the former camp, which to me suggests that HG is saying not what an LWer would express by “don’t take Pr(evolution)=1″ but something more like “don’t treat evolution as definitely true in the same sort of way as you treat other ordinary things as definitely true”.
But it’s possible, as you say, that actually the position being sketched in HG would be, if written out with more care, something more like this: there are essential dogmas of RC faith, for which one must assign p=1; there are ordinary statements of fact, like (ha!) “the earth orbits the sun”, for which one would be ill-advised to assign p=1 but the RCC doesn’t take any particular position on that question; but for evolution the RCC specifically says not to take p=1 but leaves open the possibility of taking p=1-10^-20 or something.
I suspect these are questions that have no answers, in the following sense: senior RC clergy don’t generally think in terms that correspond so directly to the very quantitative probabilistic approach commonly taken here as to enable a clear distinction between p=1 and p=1-10^-20, etc., and any “translation” that makes them out to have been making statements in those quantitative probabilistic terms is liable to misrepresent their meaning. (E.g., p=1, as such, means that absolutely no possible evidence would change your mind, but I think Pius XII could probably have imagined possible happenings that would have convinced him that God doesn’t after all directly attach souls to human bodies.)
So my question was: were you saying that the RCC’s position is (something like) P, or that the RCC’s position is (something like) Q?
Something almost exactly like Q’.
But it’s possible, as you say, that actually the position being sketched in HG would be, if written out with more care, something more like this: there are essential dogmas of RC faith, for which one must assign p=1; there are ordinary statements of fact, like (ha!) “the earth orbits the sun”, for which one would be ill-advised to assign p=1 but the RCC doesn’t take any particular position on that question; but for evolution the RCC specifically says not to take p=1 but leaves open the possibility of taking p=1-10^-20 or something.
I get the impression they were hinting at something more like Pr(evolution)=0.9, which is a figure entirely unsupported by anything in the text and involves me taking a guess, but apart from that this is pretty much exactly how I read it, yes. (With the note that the only reason the RCC is specifically calling out evolution is because there’s been such a brouhaha over it from the protestant churches that staying silent on the matter would have been bad politics).
senior RC clergy don’t generally think in terms that correspond so directly to the very quantitative probabilistic approach commonly taken here as to enable a clear distinction between p=1 and p=1-10^-20, etc.
While there may very well be senior clergy who do think in such terms (I wouldn’t know, I’ve never met any seriously senior clergy) this is largely why I think that something like p=0.9 is probably closer to the intended reading. (Or p=0.95, or even p=0.99)
(E.g., p=1, as such, means that absolutely no possible evidence would change your mind, but I think Pius XII could probably have imagined possible happenings that would have convinced him that God doesn’t after all directly attach souls to human bodies.)
Even if so, I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t be the official Vatican position that that probability can ever be anything less than one. (Politics, again; if the Pope ever admits to that p being less than one and someone runs a headline based on it...)
And if he does see such evidence, he has to consider the possibility that he is hallucinating, or being intentionally tricked by someone; if p is high enough, then it may very well be the case that any sufficiently convincing evidence will merely convince him to report to the nearest psychologist with complaints of extraordinarily detailed and persistent hallucinations.
OK; then many of my earlier comments in this thread (which were essentially arguing that the RCC’s position is very different from P) have been entirely not-to-the-point and have wasted everyone’s time. I repent in dust and ashes.
p=0.9
Yeah, this is roughly my reading too. (Maybe more like p=0.7 or something back in 1950 with Humani Generis.)
it wouldn’t be the official Vatican position that that probability can ever be anything less than one.
So much the worse for the Vatican, then. (But I think you’re probably right.)
The Church has no official statements about probability one way or another. There are certainly Catholics who think that the probability of their beliefs is one (which is insane), but typically they do not hold this by saying that no possible evidence would convince them. They say, “such and such would convince me that Catholicism is false, but such and such is absolutely impossible, and I am absolutely certain that it is absolutely impossible.”
On the other hand there are many far more reasonable Catholics who admit that their probability is less than one, admit that there is evidence that would convince them their beliefs are false, and admit that they might later observe the evidence. The Church has never said anything against such opinions (or against the first kind of opinion).
One person I know, whom pretty much everyone considers to be a devout and orthodox Catholic, told me that he would be happy with a probability of 30% (that is, he would be happy to believe with that probability, based on Pascal’s wager type reasoning). I suspect that in practice his personal probability is around 50%.
The discussion about probabilities was all concerning the following specific question: How should we interpret the language in, e.g., Humani Generis about how faithful Catholics are required not to hold that some things are definitely true but the RCC teaches that some other things are definitely true? For sure, no translation into LW-style probabilityese is going to reproduce the meaning exactly, but one might reasonably hope to approximate what the RC documents say in terms that make some kind of sense to rationalists.
I think you need to understand that in terms of doxastic voluntarism. The Church holds that faith is voluntary, so that people can reasonably be praised or blamed for what they believe. They may not say it explicitly about other kinds of belief, but if they are right about religious beliefs, it would probably also be true that accepting or rejecting the theory of evolution (and any other similar thing) is also voluntary.
Given that account of belief, saying “you are obliged to say that this is definitely true and that this other thing is at least not definitely true,” is a statement about the choices you should make. You should choose to say (according to Pius XII), “Christianity comes from God,” and “Christianity definitely comes from God,” but not (according to Pius XII), “The theory of evolution applied to human beings is definitely true.”
Because it’s a question of choices, probability is not really relevant one way or another (except in the sense that the probability that something is true might be one reason that should affect whether or not you say something). That is why I gave the example of someone who estimates the chance of his beliefs being right, based on the evidence, to be about 50%. But despite that he chooses to say “this is simply true,” probably based on various moral considerations. Kind of like you might want to believe your brother about something rather than saying he is lying, not because of strong evidence for that, but because it’s hurtful to say “you’re lying.”
If this account is correct, the reason you can’t translate statements like that into statements resembling claims about probability is because that is simply not what they are about.
Rationalists say many things which have similar moral implications, and which don’t ultimately make a lot of sense apart from a similar doxastic voluntarism (e.g. “you ought to update on evidence,” which implies that you can and should choose to do so), but most people don’t accept an account like this explicitly. If you don’t accept doxastic voluntarism, you should simply say that the Catholic Church’s statements about such things are presuming an incorrect theory of belief, and just don’t make any sense apart from that theory.
(I agree with doxastic voluntarism, so such statements do make sense to me, whatever I happen to think about them on an object level.)
Rationalists say many things which have similar moral implications [...] e.g. “you ought to update on evidence”
When I say “you ought to update on evidence” I’m fairly sure I am neither endorsing doxastic voluntarism nor making a claim about the morality of updating (or not) on evidence. Rather, I mean that if you update appropriately on evidence then your beliefs will, over time, tend to grow more accurate compared with the beliefs you would hold if you didn’t update appropriately on evidence, and that this is likely to benefit whatever goals you may have. (I might add that it benefits other people for your beliefs to be accurate, so there is some moral import to whether you update on evidence, but that’s not what I would mean by “ought”.) Is it a pointless thing to say if we don’t get to choose what we believe? Not if we have more choice about what overall strategy to use when adjusting our beliefs than we have about individual beliefs, which I think may well be the case.
(As to the actual question of doxastic voluntarism, I think it’s clear that it comes in degrees and that the truth isn’t right at either extreme. I don’t believe either of us could, right now, decide to believe that grass is pink and forthwith start doing so; but I’m pretty sure either of us could incline ourselves more toward believing (say) that Charles Dickens was born in 1834 simply by repeating “Charles Dickens was born in 1834” in a confident tone of voice fifty times. Choose another example if you happen already to have a confident opinion about whether Dickens was born in 1834.)
I am fairly sure that many rationalists do in fact make claims about updating on evidence with moral implications, even if you do not intend those implications yourself. But in any case, even your response implies a certain degree of voluntariness, if it is possible to adopt an overall strategy of adjusting our beliefs; if it were totally involuntary, we could not affect the strategy (and in fact you agree in the second part that it is not totally involuntary.)
I agree that in the way people ordinarily mean it, I could not start to believe that grass is pink. But I also could not go and kill myself right now. That doesn’t make not killing myself involuntary, since the reason is that I think it would be bad to kill myself. The case of the grass might be different, and it might be impossible to start to believe that in a stronger sense. In other discussion of this issue someone compared it to holding your hand in a fire until it is burned off; that might well be a physical impossibility, not just a question of thinking that it is bad.
But even in the case of holding your hand in a fire, I would see that as a certain kind of desire (to pull your hand away), even if it is one that we cannot resist with our conscious desires, and the case of belief seems pretty similar. This might just be a question of how much you are willing to strain an analogy.
It’s not as if “belief” is a name for one objective thing in the world which is either there or not. There are a whole bunch of things, words, actions, thoughts, and feelings, and we call various patterns of these things a “belief.” Some of these things are voluntary and some are not. Simply for consistency I choose to call the voluntary parts of that pattern “belief” and exclude the other parts, at least when there is competition between them. According to this way of speaking, I could choose to believe that Dickens was born in 1834, even right now, if I had a motive to do so. But that would not affect the involuntary parts of my assessment, and you might prefer to call it something else (e.g. “belief in belief”).
It’s not so much that it’s easily flicked as that it has less moving parts; flicking it requires adjusting one thing as opposed to many things.
Your initial puzzling definition of what you believed had two parts (“omnipotent and omniscient”). You quickly added that you attributed many other traits to God, but were less certain of them (!) and thus presumably could change them more easily.
Are you saying that the whole set of claims has a common cause and they are therefore likely to go together?
Your initial puzzling definition of what you believed had two parts (“omnipotent and omniscient”). You quickly added that you attributed many other traits to God, but were less certain of them (!) and thus presumably could change them more easily.
Yes, that is correct.
Are you saying that the whole set of claims has a common cause and they are therefore likely to go together?
No. In the grandparent post here, I’m talking about (what I understand is) the average person’s idea of God. I recognise that my conception is not average, and some debate with other people has convinced me that a lot of people have far more complicated ideas of what God is, with far more moving parts.
OK, I looked at the first paragraph. I see the (attempt at) humour. I don’t see how it’s covering (or trying to cover) a bad argument, or indeed any argument at all. What bad argument do you think I was attempting to cover?
a higher standard
I don’t think “higher” is the right word here. That impression you have that no one else appreciates how awful your political opponents’ arguments are? That’s what being mindkilled feels like from the inside.
The thing is, if it really was such a low-hanging fruit, then it would seem likely that the most successful scientists would have done so already (there’s a lot in rationality which makes it good at science). Since the same article points out the existence of Nobel laureates who are religious in one or other way, I think it is not nearly as obvious a matter as the article suggests...
Religious belief is apparently much less common
among scientists than in the general population
among very successful scientists than among scientists generally
especially if one defines “religious belief” in a way that makes it have actual consequences for the observable world (e.g., a god who actually affects what happens in the world rather than just winding it up and then leaving it alone).
See e.g. this summary of the results of asking scientists about their beliefs and the letter to Nature that the summary is mostly about. (Note: there’s some scope for debate about the interpretation of these results, though I find the arguments at the far end of that link extremely unconvincing.)
[EDITED to fix a wrong link; thanks to CCC for pointing it out.]
I notice that their definition of “greater scientists”—which seems to have been what you referred to as “very successful scientists”—was “members of the National Academy of Sciences”. While I have no doubt that one needs to be a pretty great scientist to become a member, the results lead me to wonder whether the membership process for joining the Academy has an atheist bias in it somewhere.
I notice that the figures for scientists generally are more constant from 1914 to 1996, with approximately 60% of scientists expressing “disbelief or doubt in the existence of God”—since the selection of respondents here is not subject to the (potentially biased) membership process of a single organisation, I would give this general figure far greater credence that it shows what it purports to show.
(Also, I think you may have linked the wrong page in your “scope for debate” link—it’s linking to the same page as your “this summary” link)
It’s possible. (I suppose new members are nominated and elected by existing members, and people may tend to favour candidates who resemble themselves and be influenced by politics, religion, skin colour, etc., etc., etc.) It would need to be quite a strong bias to produce the reported results in the absence of a tendency for “greater scientists” to be less (conventionally) religious than scientists in general.
The last paragraph of the Larson-Witham letter to Nature looks to me like (weak) evidence against a strong atheistic bias in the NAS, in that if there were such a bias I would expect its public utterances and those of its leaders to be a bit less conciliatory. As I say, weak evidence only.
(There could also be a bias in responses; maybe atheists are more cooperative in surveys or something. I would expect any such bias to be small and it’s not obvious to me which way it’s more likely to go.)
Yup, I did. I’ve linked the right one now. Sorry about that.
Yes, that’s the sort of thing I’m thinking of. People (in general) are usually more comfortable associating with people who share their opinions.
Very weak evidence; it’s easy to be conciliatory if one can also be smugly superior in pointing out how wrong the other party is (which is one possible, not necessarily correct interpretation of the last sentence of that paragraph).
That is a point which I had not considered. I’m not sure which way it would go either (unless they did the survey by phoning people at their homes on a Sunday morning, when many Christians would be at church, but that would just be stupid)
Ah, thanks.
...that Gallup evolution poll at the start seems quite telling. It suggests that the difference between scientists and the general public is entirely in the (much larger) rejection of young-earth creationism. This fits with my expectations (which is probably why I draw attention to it).
Don’t forget that at that point the atheists are all out at orgies and baby-killing parties. (Seriously: yeah, that would be stupid, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t that stupid.)
I don’t agree with your interpretation of it. The reported numbers (no god : theistic evolution : creationism) go 55:40:5 for scientists and 9:40:46 for the general public; both the no-god and creationism options are very different between those populations.
It’s hard to infer anything from only three numbers per distribution, but it looks to me very much like an overall shift, with the similarity of the “theistic evolution” numbers on both sides being basically coincidence.
Really? I would have expected either sleeping late or watching the rugby.
Fair enough. It’s only three numbers, that’s consistent with thousands of possible reasons.
It’s not impossible. I don’t see it as a spectrum, though; I see it as three entirely opposing positions. And the young-earth creationists either change their minds when becoming scientists (and since, in their minds, the concept of God is tied up with young-earth creationism, they abandon both) or fail to become scientists entirely.
...actually, now that I think of it, it should be possible to tell the difference between those two ideas, at least. Young-earth creationism is linked to geography in America, right? So if there are less scientists who grew up in in areas where young-earth creationism is more widely known, then that would imply that fewer young-earth creationists become scientists. That, in turn, would imply that my interpretation is incorrect, and there is something about becoming a scientist which makes theistic evolution also less likely than in the general population...
Do you have any idea where these stats can be found?
In case it wasn’t obvious: I was joking. (I, for one, spend very little of my time at orgies and baby-killing parties.)
I think actually both views are right. I mean, (1) there is definitely a spectrum there (there is no god—there is a god, who set up the universe and has left it alone since then—there is a god, who mostly leaves the universe alone but sometimes gets involved in subtle ways like inspiring people to do good—there is a god, who mostly leaves the universe alone but sometimes tweaks evolution a bit to arrange for the emergence of a species capable of loving relationship with him—there is a god, who made a world in which life evolves precisely so that he could steer that process in all kinds of ways, which he does—there is a god, whose influence on the variety of life on earth mostly operates through evolution but who also sometimes makes more dramatic changes—there is a god, who directly created lots of different kinds of living thing but who has let them evolve since then, which is responsible for much small-scale variation—there is a god, who created every species separately in recent history, and evolution is just a lie) but (2) the gap between theism and atheism is a particularly big one, and so is the gap between “life is old and basically has common ancestry” and “life is recent and involves lots of special creation” and (3) I’m sure quite a lot of people do flip from near one end to near the other when they change their minds about what gods, if any, exist.
I worry that they’d be hard to disentangle from other things (e.g., wealthier versus poorer areas, which would affect education and what kinds of jobs people do and so forth; socially entrenched attitudes to academic learning; etc.). I’d guess that (1) there are indeed fewer, and worse, scientists from areas with a lot of young-earth creationism but (2) this doesn’t really tell us much about direct influence of science on religion or vice versa, because of all those other factors. There are some US government statistics that might tell you some of what you want to know.
[EDITED to add: If anyone has a clue why this was downvoted, I’d be very interested. It seems so obviously innocuous that I suspect it’s VoiceOfRa doing his thing again, but maybe I’m being stupid in some way I’m unable to see.]
I… occasionally find humour in taking things very, very literally even when clearly intended otherwise. (That, and accidental puns. Accidental puns can be hilarious.)
Alright, yes, you can create a spectrum between “there is a god, who set up the universe and has left it alone since then” and “there is a god, who created every species separately in recent history, and evolution is just a lie”—but I don’t think that you can really tack “there is no god” to one end of the spectrum and consider it part of the same thing. That’s like saying that there’s a spectrum from “planet teeming with life” to “lifeless planet” and then sticking “planet does not exist” onto the lifeless planet end of the spectrum.
...agreed.
The way I see it, people decide where on the spectrum they think the universe is. And some of them sit on the “evolution is a lie” end. And, if and when they find evidence that evolution is, in fact, not a lie, they don’t generally just adjust their position on the spectrum; many of them will rather jump off the spectrum entirely, becoming atheists.
...you’re probably right. A survey could be created to try to avoid these problems, but it would have to be specifically created, simply looking up old stats probably won’t do it.
You can talk about a spectrum between “planet large enough for life to exist”, “planet which is a little smaller which makes it a little harder for life to exist” all the way down to “no planet with no life”. You can do that because in this spectrum, the extent to which the planet exists and the chance of life are connected. In the God example, the spectrum is “degree to which things can be explained without God”. If you have evolution, there is one less thing that you need God to explain, and you get one step closer to not needing God to explain anything. And with nothing to need God for you can then reject the existence of God.
You could do a planet-size-spectrum like that; but reversing the analogy would be—I don’t know, some sort of spectrum ranging from “God doesn’t exist” to “God exists”? That seems a pretty binary set of points to me—how can the state of “God 50% exists” make any sort of sense?
Similarly, if nothing that you ever see requires the existence of Jim, then you can reject the existence of Jim, right?
Suppose it turns out that the skeptics are mostly right about Christianity, but that there really was an itinerant preacher called Yeshua in Galilee about 2000 years ago who talked about forgiveness and love and had a reputation for casting out demons and the like; but he didn’t really work any miracles, he didn’t get crucified, and he certainly didn’t rise from the dead.
Then: Did Jesus exist? Well, kinda. Someone existed who’s fairly clearly the person the gospels are about. No one existed about whom they’re actually accurate accounts. Many of the most important things about “Jesus” don’t apply to anyone. While it might feel a bit weird to say something like “Jesus 50% existed” in that case, I think it would give a reasonable idea of the situation.
I don’t think manipulating definitions can (or should) give rise to probability claims along the lines of “Jesus 50% existed”.
Jesus-the-Son-of-God and Jesus-the-itinerant-preacher are two very different people/concepts. No, they will not blend.
I wouldn’t want to defend the “50% existed” claim too seriously, but note that the discussion here was never really about explicit claims of that kind. It was about whether it’s appropriate to consider, e.g., “there is a god who gets involved in biological evolution” intermediate between “there is no god” and “there is a god who created every kind of living thing ex nihilo”. I say yes; CCC says no. The affirmative answer doesn’t require, e.g., being willing to say that a god who never does anything “50% exists”; only regarding a less-active god as in some sense intermediate between a more-active god and no god.
You can definitely plot all three points on the same graph—you can even plot them such that the distance from “there is no god” to “there is a god who created every kind of living thing ex nihilo” is greater than the distance from “there is a god who gets involved in biological evolution” to either of the two aforementioned points. That can all be done perfectly sensibly.
My claim is simply that the three points can’t be colinear on that graph.
...I hope that makes it a bit clearer.
It seems to me that you can plot them wherever you want to, so this is really a question of aesthetics more than anything else. Or is there some actual consequence that follows from one or another answer to this question?
...it would be a bit like plotting 0, 1 and i colinearly. (I assume you’re familiar with complex numbers?)
Yes, very familiar with complex numbers, thanks. But, I repeat, you can plot what you want however you want; the question is whether it’s helpful, and that will depend on the application. (Suppose the values taken by your dependent variable are all on the circle of radius 1/sqrt(2) centred at (1+i)/2. Then plotting 0, 1, and i collinearly may make a whole lot of sense, though you might actually want to call them −3pi/4, -pi/4 and pi/4 respectively.)
I reluctantly concede the point, but firmly maintain that calling them −3pi/4, -pi/4 and pi/4 respectively would make a lot more sense.
...I wouldn’t describe that as “God 50% exists”. I’d describe that as “someone with strong similarity to the biblical Jesus existed”.
To take an analogy, again, let us consider Dr. Joseph Bell. Dr. Bell was a medical school lecturer who emphasised the importance of close observation in making a diagnosis, and made a game of observing a stranger and deducing his occupation and recent activities. He was also the inspiration for the fictional character of Sherlock Holmes (who was famous for doing the same).
Does this imply that Sherlock Holmes 50% existed? No. Sherlock Holmes 0% existed; Dr. Joseph Bell 100% existed.
As I think I said somewhere else in this discussion, the way this issue arose wasn’t by anyone actually claiming in so many words that “God 50% exists” is a sensible thing to say. Although I’ve kinda-sorta defended saying some things of that kind, I agree that it’s not actually the best way to describe any state of affairs I can envisage. The actual question, IIRC, was whether it’s reasonable to regard theistic evolution as intermediate between special creation and naturalistic evolution. Those are all positions that can be held by theists (though in practice not many theists embrace naturalistic evolution) and seeing them as points on a continuum really doesn’t require one to endorse saying “God 50% exists” in any possible world.
The state isn’t “God 50% exists” but “there is evidence which indicates that God might exist, but the evidence is 50% as good (or there is 50% as much of it) as the evidence at the far end of the spectrum”. There’s a continuous line from lots of evidence for God, to some evidence for God, to no evidence for God.
That is a sensible axis, and you can move along it in a straight line, yes.
It’s just a different axis to either of the ones I was talking about.
Ah, OK. Yes, I do that too. I just thought I should check :-).
“No god” and “god who does nothing” are very different metaphysically but have the exact same observable consequences, and evidence for or against one will equally be evidence for or against the other. I don’t see that it’s obviously inadmissible to put them next to one another. Of course the more interesting notions of god are ones that do do something (even if only to create a universe according to their whims rather than according to the dictates of some “mindless” physical theory), but we’ve already agreed (I think) that those can be put on a spectrum that has “perfectly inactive god” on it.
My perspective is a little different. They decide the following three interlinked things: (1) where the observable features of the universe lie on that spectrum, (2) what their religious position is, and (3) how the universe should look if #2 is correct. They generally decide these so that they’re reasonably consistent with one another. Then if they learn new things about #1, they may change either #2 or #3 to make it match; if they change #2 they may convert or deconvert; if they change #3 they may change their theology or their ideas about physics or something.
“There is a single universe” and “we are in one branch of a multiverse, but can’t access the other branches” are very different metaphysically but have the exact same observable consequences, and evidence for or against one will equally be evidence for or against the other.
That’s a thing about metaphysics, not a thing about theology.
I agree. Were you expecting me not to?
(On the other hand, if some particular believer believes in a perfectly inactive god then that is a thing about theology as well as metaphysics. Is that meant to be a problem somehow?)
While I agree that there will be no observable difference, you’re talking about two different axes here. One axis is “how much God does”, and most of your spectrum is running along this axis. The other axis is “whether God exists”, and treating that as part of the same axis is an error. (Admittedly, the axes are related—the idea of a universe where God doesn’t exist yet is nonetheless active is rather absurd—but they are still not the same axis).
...the way you’ve phrased #3 reduces your argument to a tautology on close reading (specifically, #1 and #3 must always match regardless of #2). I think (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) that a better phrasing for #3 would be “how the universe should look if God exists” (instead of ”...if #2 is correct”). Then, for theists, #2 would be “theist” and #1 would match #3; for atheists #2 would be “atheist” and #1 may or may not match #3.
Then my view is that those who start with creationist leanings (in #1 and #3, #2 being “theist”) but pursue a scientific career find, in the course of their studies, that #1 (the observable features of the universe) are not as they had thought; then #1 and #3 no longer match. #3 is complex and difficult to change without feeling like it’s being changed arbitrarily (and will probably need to be changed repeatedly as #1 changes with further study); but #2 is a switch, far easier to flick, and therefore far more commonly flicked.
I think we need to look back at why we’re asking how many axes to use. The question was how to interpret the differences between two populations in the proportions of “special creation”, “theistic evolution” and “naturalistic evolution” in their survey responses: we had something like 1:5:4 versus 4:5:1 and were trying to figure out whether what’s happened is more that equivalent people in the two populations have made different choices between SC and NE, or that equivalent people in the two populations have made different choices between SC and TE, or TE and NE.
Let’s stipulate that the difference between “no god” and “perfectly uninvolved god” is bigger than any difference between different theistic scenarios. Would that really do much to resolve our disagreement about how to explain the survey differences? I don’t think so.
No, I don’t think it does. It might if everyone always insisted on perfect consistency among their beliefs, but in practice most of us accept that we’re wrong about some things (even though we don’t know which things) and so when we find inconsistencies we don’t immediately change our minds. So someone may believe, e.g., that Christianity is right, and that in the absence of compelling contrary evidence Christianity would lead to creationism, and that there is in fact such evidence and therefore one should accept evolution. And there’s nothing terribly wrong with holding those views, though of course someone who does should make some effort to figure out where the mistake is.
For someone in that position, #1 and #3 don’t match. The same might be true for an atheist who reads a pile of creationist literature arguing that a godless universe should look very different from ours and is not currently able to refute it (either because actually creationism is right, or because they just happen not to have the relevant information and arguments at their fingertips).
I don’t think the god-switch (#2) is so easily flicked. My impression—which of course may be wrong, and for which I don’t have statistics or anything—is that if you take a generally-thoughtful creationist and show them compelling evidence for evolution, the most common responses are (a) rejection of the evidence and/or associated arguments and (b) transition to some sort of theistic evolutionary view, with (c) leaping to atheism some way behind.
The size of the difference has absolutely nothing to do with my point. My point is that the difference is of an entirely different kind.
To take an analogy; let us say you have a duck, and you are measuring the greyness of its feathers. This runs along a spectrum from snowy white to ebony black. There is no point on this axis where the duck is actually a swan.
Both of your examples appear to me to show someone, having changed their ideas about #1, in the process of altering #2 or #3 to match. On consideration of this, I will admit that I was thinking only of the steady-state case (when someone’s beliefs are internally consistent) and not really thinking about the transitional period during which they are not (even though some people might spend a majority of their lives in such a transitional state).
It’s not so much that it’s easily flicked as that it has less moving parts; flicking it requires adjusting one thing as opposed to many things. (Of course, changing either can be difficult—the default reaction would still be to reject any unwanted evidence and/or associated arguments).
...though I could be wrong about that.
The point I’m making is that actually the discussion was about the colour of the feathers, and swan-ness as such is a mere distraction.
As you go on to remark, this process may never actually get as far as altering either #2 or #3 to match, and there’s nothing terribly wrong with that (beyond the fact that we have unreliable information, finite brainpower, etc., all of which is simply part of the human condition). I suggest that most people’s beliefs, most of the time, are not internally consistent. This is boringly true if we count it as inconsistent when someone thinks probably-P1, probably-P2, …, probably-Pk, and P1,...,Pk can’t all be true—which doesn’t have to indicate any suboptimality in belief-structure—and less boring but surely still true if we only count it as inconsistent when someone’s probability assignments (so far as they can be said to have such things) can’t all be close to correct (e.g., thinking Pr(A)>=0.9, Pr(B)>=0.9, and Pr(A&B)<0.7).
So, to reverse the analogy, are you saying that the spectrum is “God exists but doesn’t touch evolution → God exists and guides evolution → God exists and created everything in the recent past”, with the “God exists/doesn’t exist” axis being a mere distraction?
...this does make your viewpoint a good deal less tautological.
Yes, that’s about it. (I guess “tough” was meant to be either “touch” or something like “work through”.) It happens that most people who believe evolution operates without divine intervention or design believe that there are no gods to intervene or design in the first place, but there’s no fundamental reason why a theist couldn’t hold pretty much the exact same view of evolution as an atheist.
“Tough” was supposed to be “touch”, yes (and I’ve edited that correction into my previous post).
This axis makes sense to me as a single axis, then.
Not only is there no fundamental reason, but that’s also pretty much the official position of the Vatican, who are about as theist as you get...
The Vatican’s official position is less than perfectly clear. Humani Generis in 1950 grudgingly accepted that Roman Catholics scientists could work on evolution, provided they didn’t hold that evolution was definitely right and provided they accepted that souls are directly created by God. Then in 1996, addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, JP2 accepted that evolution is “more than a hypothesis” (but do see the footnote about that phrase), but he by no means said that evolution proceeds without any divine involvement, and indeed it seems he rather conspicuously avoids saying anything that could be taken as endorsing that view.
Fnord.
Believing in probabilities of 1 is bad practice here, right?
Vatican’s official position on evolution is likely empirically indistinguishable from what we can see with our own eyes (e.g. the scientific view). This has old precedent, see e.g. how transubstantation is handled in Christianity.
If you think there’s any real question about whether it was grudging, please actually read Humani Generis (it’s not very long) and come back and tell me whether you still think so.
(If you mean something else, then I’m missing your point; consider explaining?)
Oh yes. But, again: please by all means go and read the encyclical and then tell me whether you really think Pius XII meant anything much like that. Tell me, in particular, whether you notice any reluctance to state that points of RC doctrine are definitely right. (Spoiler: it says in so many words, e.g., that some “religious and moral truths” delivered by revelation “may be known by all men readily with a firm certainty and with freedom from all error”.)
I think it’s like trying to discern tone. Poe’s law says this is hard in the context of sarcasm, but it seems hard in general from text. Seems doubly hard for people coming from a different background from you, the more different the more difficult the problem (xenoanthropology). People use language differently, people parse things differently (dog whistles, etc.)
What do we really know about how someone whose life trajectory resulted in the Papacy uses language?
But let’s say you are even right. Why talk about tone at all? Are you trying to stick it to the Pope? What is the point of doing that? Why use emotionally non-neutral language?
Er, no. Why would I be trying to do that?
This seems like an awfully general argument against interpreting anyone’s words. Encyclicals are intended to be widely read and understood. Is it really likely that some special papal quality makes them particularly difficult for others to interpret?
Because the question at issue is whether the official position (on evolution) of the Vatican is indistinguishable from the naturalistic evolution commonly held by unbelieving biologists; and the relevant documents are few and ambiguous and vague; and so attempting to extract whatever nuances one can from them seems worthwhile. Humani Generis is one of the key documents for understanding the RCC’s view of evolution, and it seems to me reasonable to draw different conclusions from the document as it actually is than we would from a document that was more unequivocally accepting of biological evolution.
Well, I am not saying we should not try to interpret what people say or write. But:
(a) This is hard to do for tone (Poe’s law, principle of charity, etc.)
(b) Meaning is a binary relation between text and interpreter, and isn’t always so simple (author is dead)
(c) Effective communication depends on shared cultural context and gets progressively harder as context gets less and less shared. In the limit, you get “communication is impossible” (a lot of Stanislav Lem stories are about this).
Why not be charitable, then? From the CC point of view, there is no profit in making falsifiable claims, so they will probably retreat from making them. They don’t want to look stupid, and at any rate, science isn’t their business.
Sure. But I don’t see any reason to think we’re near the limit in this case. Pius XII was pope and I’m not, true enough. But we’re reasonably close in time (he was born a little less than 100 years before me), from reasonably similar cultures (both Western European), of at least overlapping religious backgrounds (my family was RC and I was a Christian although not an RC for something like 30 years) -- this all seems to me like the sort of situation in which interpretation should be less problematic than usual.
I really don’t see that I’m being uncharitable. If you insist that I am and ask why, I suppose the answer is that in cases of conflict I’d rather be accurate than charitable; I see the PoC as (inter alia) a tool for avoiding wrongness that comes from assuming people who disagree with you are evil or stupid. But I’m not (I promise) assuming that either Pius XII or John Paul II were evil or stupid, and my real answer to your question is that I don’t see how I’m failing to be charitable.
There is profit (if we must put it that way) in making correct claims, and if a pope thinks that theological considerations lead to a particular empirical claim then I don’t expect him to refuse to state it on those grounds. (It seems to me that expecting otherwise is the less charitable position.) And there is profit (again, if we must put it that way) in making claims that sound confident and informative rather than vague.
But, as it happens, I am not (I think) claiming that the RCC’s official documents make a falsifiable claim that is incompatible with naturalistic evolution. I am claiming that the position they state is deliberately less specific than naturalistic evolution; in particular, you will search in vain for any statement that evolution proceeds as if there were no god guiding it. Or that it probably does. Or, I think, even that it might do. And that the official documents give the impression (to me, at least) that their authors think it probably doesn’t.
I repeat that none of that seems to me uncharitable. I am saying that the RCC has declined to make official statements that would likely be interpreted as endorsements of godlessness and as incompatible with their past positions, and that the RCC’s position on aspects of evolution that are hard to get clear empirical evidence about is probably shaped by the religious doctrines that it endorses. All of which is as it should be, conditional on its being the sort of organization it is.
The closest you can get to an “official” statement on that would be in the document of the International Theological Commission “Communion and Stewerdship”. That is not technically considered a teaching document but it had to be approved by Ratzinger as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which at least means that he considered it acceptable.
Here is #69:
The current scientific debate about the mechanisms at work in evolution requires theological comment insofar as it sometimes implies a misunderstanding of the nature of divine causality. Many neo-Darwinian scientists, as well as some of their critics, have concluded that, if evolution is a radically contingent materialistic process driven by natural selection and random genetic variation, then there can be no place in it for divine providential causality. A growing body of scientific critics of neo-Darwinism point to evidence of design (e.g., biological structures that exhibit specified complexity) that, in their view, cannot be explained in terms of a purely contingent process and that neo-Darwinians have ignored or misinterpreted. The nub of this currently lively disagreement involves scientific observation and generalization concerning whether the available data support inferences of design or chance, and cannot be settled by theology. But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1). In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist because “the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles....It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence” (Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).
Notice what they are saying: “An unguided evolutionary process” cannot exist because nothing is unguided (according to the understanding of providence.) But this means that a falling rock is also not unguided, in that sense. So being “guided” in this sense is empirically indistinguishable from naturalistic evolution.
So they are recognizing pretty explicitly that the process of evolution might be indistinguishable from completely naturalistic evolution. And I suspect they are aware that it probably is, even if they didn’t make this particular statement, probably because they wish that it weren’t, and consequently don’t object if people believe that it isn’t.
You are failing to be charitable when you use fnords like “grudgingly.” It’s not emotionally neutral language, it conjures in the mind stupid old men blocking scientific progress for silly reasons, and getting Galileo in trouble, etc., being dragged forward, kicking and screaming by our side, the hero scientists.
The CC is not playing that game. They are not very interested in empirical falsifiabilty, and I think when you say:
you are misreading their culture. The CC has long ago evolved away from their doctrine getting them in trouble with science. Science will always beat them in a debate about falsifiable claims, and losing will make them lose prestige. This is what I mean by “profit.” The easiest thing for the CC to do is massage doctrine to make this not happen. This is precisely what had happened.
“Confident and informative” is language culture, and involves tone. How do we read confidence in text? What is informative in text? it’s all based on allusions and references in the end. Would you find my papers informative? Probably not, because you don’t share mathematical background with me. Do you share enough theological background with the Pope to peer review the Pope?
Have you noticed that you are doing to me exactly what you accuse me of doing to the Popes P12 and JP2?
I did not (so far as I can tell by introspection) write “grudgingly” in order to make people think of popes as stupid old men, or to summon up the spectre of the RCC blocking science for silly reasons, or to call Galileo to mind. I wrote it because CCC was saying that the RCC’s official position on evolution is indistinguishable from that of naturalistic scientists, and I don’t think it is, and the fact that the RCC’s official documents talk about evolution as they do is one reason why I think so.
I have to ask: Did you read what I wrote above, explaining that I am not claiming that the RCC’s position on evolution makes empirical claims incompatible with the findings of science? Because you appear to me to be writing exactly as if I hadn’t written that.
I wonder on what basis you say that. (I work in industry as a mathematician; I have a PhD in pure mathematics from a top-rank university; reading mathematical papers that don’t lie right within one’s own areas of special expertise is hard work, but yes, I would expect to find your papers informative.)
I’m not attempting to peer review the Pope. But yes, I think I am sufficiently familiar with Christian thinking generally and RC thinking in particular to distinguish grudging from enthusiastic acceptance of an idea in a papal encyclical.
I am puzzled by what is happening in this thread. You are normally an outstandingly intelligent and sensible fellow, but here you have
adopted what seems to me an exceptionally combative approach
apparently failed to read what I wrote (not, I think, too obscurely)
accused me of a particular kind of uncharitable reading while simultaneously applying exactly that kind of uncharity to me
confidently stated things about me (“you don’t share mathematical background”) for which you have no good evidence, and which are in fact probably false
and I’m wondering what’s going on to make you (as it seems to me) behave in so uncharacteristic a manner. May I ask you to consider carefully whether there is anything that might possibly be pushing you to be more adversarial than usual? (I’d ask: are you in fact Catholic? but am fairly sure the answer to that one is no.)
I am not Catholic. I find LW attitudes about religion (and certain other things) kind of annoying, though, if you want to try to reverse engineer where I am coming from.
That’s mostly what I meant, I am not trying to pull math rank (I don’t think there is such a thing as math rank), merely that informativeness is a function of shared context. I am pretty happy to double down on “we don’t share math background.” I don’t study much pure math, I doubt you study causal inference. I could study pure math, and you could study causal inference, but that’s not the same thing.
Sorry, getting lost. You think RCC does make empirically distinguishable claims or not? If the former, we have a factual disagreement. If the latter, I still think it is uncharitable to inject tone reading.
I think it is bad practice to read tone. First of all, it’s easy to be wrong, and second of all, it just increases room for misinterpretation of your own text.
Your word grudging conjured these things in my mind. Now you could say nothing could be further from the truth as far as your intentions were concerned. But that’s the thing with texts and authors. How texts come across to others (independently of what the author wanted) matter, and this is why I think injecting tone reading is so dangerous, and why academic papers are generally written in an emotionally neutral tone (to avoid these types of issues).
I favor bilateral disarmament as far as tone in texts (this is probably utopian thinking on my part, as humans are all about status and social dominance when it comes to communication, and playing with tone is a big part of this, and further it is really hard to coordinate to not do that).
OK, fair enough. Maybe I have too optimistic a view of how deeply I need to understand something for it to be informative to me. Would you like to point me at one of your more interesting papers so we can try the experiment? :-)
I think
the RCC surely does sometimes make empirically distinguishable claims, but
I am not claiming in this discussion that it does; rather
I am saying that its position on evolution differs from that of someone who accepts a naturalistic account of evolution, because
such a person would endorse propositions that the RCC conspicuously avoids endorsing
such as “evolution proceeds in a manner that shows no sign of divine intervention or guidance”.
Yeah, but you demonstrably weren’t only talking about your mind; otherwise you wouldn’t have said ‘You are failing to be charitable when you use fnord words like “grudgingly”’. (And, y’know, you could have said “it conjures in my mind …” rather than “it conjures in the mind”, if you were really only intending to say what effect those words have on you. But you weren’t, really, were you?)
Pardon me if I am being dim, but are you now saying that you engaged in uncharitable misreading of the tone of my writing in retaliation for my allegedly doing likewise to two popes? If not, what exactly is your point about “bilateral disarmament”? (It can’t be that you did it to me because I did it to you first, because I’m pretty sure I made no comment on your tone until the grandparent of this comment, which came after your accusations against me.)
If I was speaking for someone else, I would be vulnerable to the charge of speaking for others. I am not that cognitively weird though: if this happened with me and your text, I am sure it will happen with people similar to me and texts similar to yours.
My CV is online. I will mention some more things that should be done soon. But also: I would hate for you to read my stuff to prove a point, read if you are interested!
But that stuff is argument about taste. RCC’s insistence on “divine guidance” does not, as locals like to say, “pay rent in anticipated experience.” So they can say whatever they want, it boils down to their taste about how they phrase things, not an alternative empirically testable theory. People who get angry about theism (e.g. the flying spaghetti monster sneer club) will argue with them or mock them, but they are kind of wasting their time—there is no empirical content to the argument. So it’s just a bit of culture war playing out.
This entire rabbit hole would have been avoided if you didn’t try to reverse engineer whether the Pope was grudging or not, and just stuck to factual reading. The point is, maybe sticking to factual reading of texts avoids a lot of time-wasting traps.
I promise that I have no intention of reading your papers just to prove a point. That would be silly. I think it’s eminently possible that some of them might be interesting to me.
(I just looked you up in Google Scholar and grabbed the first paper it found, which I suspect is a little tangential to your main research; it was about parsing citations of scientific papers using a generative model of (part of) the citation process, allowing for errors in names etc. I think it was informative to me, though of course I may be overestimating how well I understood it. (In particular, one key element seems to be a trick you use to make your Metropolis-Hastings sampling actually generate a reasonable number of usable candidates, which is borrowed from another paper I didn’t look at and where I accordingly got only a very hazy idea of what it’s doing.)
I don’t think that’s quite right. The RCC’s position is carefully “unempirical” in the sense that it doesn’t make any definite predictions, and that suffices to keep it from getting too badly embarrassed by future scientific discoveries. But it seems to me that, e.g., the position Pius XII laid out in Humani Generis involves somewhat different probability assignments from the position that would have been adopted by naturalist biologists at the time, and that if you had asked faithful readers of H.G. and naturalistic biologists questions like “How likely is it that in the next 50 years or so scientific investigation will find something plainly inconsistent with a purely naturalistic view of evolution?” you would have got different answers.
In support of this view, here’s a little extract from Humani Generis:
I’m not concerned right now to argue that this is wrong (especially as it’s not the latest official statement of the RCC on evolution); only that Pius XII clearly thought that divine revelation ought to shift faithful Catholics’ assessment of the probability of purely naturalistic evolution—even as regards only “the human body”.
Do I need to repeat that I’m claiming not that the RCC has an alternative empirically testable theory? Only that its position on evolution differs from that of a naturalistic evolutionist, by (in LWese) assigning more probability to hypotheses incompatible with naturalism.
Maybe so. It would also have been avoided if you hadn’t taken such exception at such length to my use of the word “grudging”. These facts do nothing to indicate whether the better diagnosis is “attempting to go beyond literal meanings leads down rabbit-holes” or “complaining over-vigorously about going beyond literal meanings leads down rabbit-holes”.
(Just out of curiosity, is it you or someone else who’s been downvoting everything I say in this subthread?)
Not me. Would be pretty rude of me.
You can ignore that citation matching paper, I was an undergrad back then. I don’t work on that kind of stuff anymore. If you email me, I will send you some stuff that’s paywalled.
That was my guess, FWIW. (I don’t think it’s necessarily rude to downvote someone you’re also arguing with, if you think their arguments are really bad. But I can’t recall the last time I did it, if I ever did.)
Yeah, I thought the paper seemed a little far removed from the sort of thing I thought you did now (and rather tame). I’ll drop you an email. If you don’t get one within the next day or so, feel free to remind me; I’m very good at forgetting to do things.
Your charitable interpretation is false on all counts, at least until the Vatican gets around to making a new statement on the nature of “Adam”.
Where is the quote from?
Really?
It comes from the link in the great=grandparent, to the text of Humani Generis.
The Catholic Church does not work the way you seem to think it does. They have made perfectly clear that polygenism is now acceptable, even without making a “new statement” in the way you that you suggest. And even Pius XII was deliberately suggesting the same thing in that very statement, by saying “it is in no way apparent” that a reconciliation is possible, rather than saying that one is not possible.
Could you say more about how the RCC has “made perfectly clear that polygenism is now acceptable”? E.g., is there something in the “Communion and Stewardship” document you’ve quoted from a couple of times? I had a quick look and didn’t find anything of the sort, but I could well have missed it.
(I briefly thought “that must be a typo for not acceptable”, but I’m pretty sure you did actually mean what you wrote.)
Yes, I meant what I wrote. I mostly agree with what you said about Pius XII and what he was and was not cautious about. However, I am pretty sure that he deliberately left room for polygenism to be accepted in the future by saying that it wasn’t clear how a reconciliation would be possible, rather than by saying that a reconciliation simply was not possible. He was pretty careful in that statement, even deliberately leaving room for aliens (by adding the clause “on this earth,” because if “man” is understood as “rational animal,” the existence of aliens would be the existence of other men.)
People saw this even at the time and started to speculate about how “reconcilations” would be possible. While still not accepting an opinion that polygenism is definitely true, Paul VI made clear that Catholics are permitted to think that way:
“In the attempt to rethink the Theology of original sin in the light of the scientific theory of evolution and polygenism, scholars have sought to determine the literary genre of the first chapters of Genesis, and in particular Gen. 1-3. And usually, following closely the documents of the Magisterium, they affirm that it is a theological aetiology, that is, a particular vision of history, a picturesque story which is largely symbolic, of an event which really happened (original sin). Consequently, they think that the bible is not concerned with the scientific question of evolution or polygenism and these are, therefore, not denied by Revelation.”
“Working on these premises, various hypotheses have been proposed to reconcile Revelation with science within the framework of a more modern theology of original sin. They are still only hypotheses, plausible to a greater or lesser extent, while the scientific theories are by no means certain and are in need of further completion and proof. The Magisterium of the Church in her latest documents has given clarifications of a specifically theological nature, while allowing those who are properly qualified to continue their studies.”
Link. This may be a bit “grudging,” as you described it, but it certainly does not forbid Catholics from thinking that polygenism is likely, and this was already in 1968.
This is from number 70 of Communion and Stewardship:
“With respect to the immediate creation of the human soul, Catholic theology affirms that particular actions of God bring about effects that transcend the capacity of created causes acting according to their natures. The appeal to divine causality to account for genuinely causal as distinct from merely explanatory gaps does not insert divine agency to fill in the “gaps” in human scientific understanding (thus giving rise to the so-called “God of the gaps”). The structures of the world can be seen as open to non-disruptive divine action in directly causing events in the world. Catholic theology affirms that that the emergence of the first members of the human species (whether as individuals or in populations) represents an event that is not susceptible of a purely natural explanation and which can appropriately be attributed to divine intervention.”
(The idea here is that if human beings have a spiritual and immortal soul which other animals do not, the creation of that soul requires God’s work; they are not saying that the physical development of humanity requires some special intervention.) In any case, “whether as individuals or in populations” basically refers to monogenism and polygenism, and the implication is that theology does not determine anything about this.
Lastly, obviously many Catholics think that polygenism is true and have said so in public works, and there has been no rebuke of this position at any time after Paul VI (as far as I know.)
I think the only real hard line the CC takes is on certain matters of faith when they invoke infallibility (and they only did that a handful of times on empirically unverifiable matters only).
edit: I suppose actually the hard line includes some other things that form the core of the faith but needed no clarification via infallibility pronouncements, e.g. Nicene Creed. The CC will not give ground there either.
A common falsehood.
Excommunication is a social punishment, a ritualized shunning, not a hill they are willing to die on. The CC is not in the business of making falsifiable claims. This policy was worked out long, long ago.
You seem pretty angry.
I think a lot of that is the Vatican being really really cautious. They’re ultra-cautious about just about everything they say (largely, I think, because they are well aware that (a) a lot of people will take what they say as gospel truth and (b) they don’t get to take anything back, or hardly ever, so if they endorse evolution in some form and then a few decades later a scientist comes back and presents some improvement on the theory that contradicts that form then they will look silly).
So, yeah. What I’m reading into that is that they’re not saying it’s definitely true (in the same way as they do say it’s definitely true that God exists) but they are saying it looks like it just might be.
As well as being ultra-cautious about evolution, Humani Generis says these things (emphasis mine):
(as well as many other things that don’t appear to me at all ultra-cautious, but where the language is less clear-cut). So this isn’t the result of any general policy of ultra-caution. They are being extra-ultra-cautious about evolution specifically. That was in 1950, and they are less cautious now, but still very cautious. This is why I say their position is notably different from that of naturalistic evolutionary biologists.
… Oh, wait. Have I misunderstood you? If so, we may be arguing at cross-purposes. Here’s our exchange from upthread:
When you said “that”, did you mean (1) “the exact same view of evolution as an atheist” or (2) “the idea that there’s no fundamental reason why a theist couldn’t, etc.”? I’ve been assuming #1 but maybe you meant #2, in which case our disagreement is less sharp than I thought. On #2, my impression is that the Vatican hasn’t said or implied much about what theists as such can reasonably believe about evolution; they’re concerned, rather, with what faithful Catholics can reasonably believe about evolution; and what they’ve said about the latter is, inter alia, that faithful Catholics mustn’t regard it as definitely right (a position that I don’t think is negated by JP2′s statement before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences), and from the things they are willing to call definitely right I don’t think it’s tenable to take this as meaning only that one shouldn’t literally take Pr(evolution)=1. So I don’t think the Vatican thinks it acceptable for Catholics to think about evolution in the same way as most atheists do. Again, what they think about theists more broadly is hard to tell.
From the same document (of the International Theological Commission) that I quoted earlier:
“Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism.” Given Ratzinger’s approval of that document I don’t think you can reasonably say that a Catholic who thinks that evolution is definitely right (in the ordinary sense of thinking that something is definitely right) is not a faithful Catholic.
Well … the very next sentence of that document is this:
and while that’s pretty positive about evolution it seems not to be saying that evolution is definitely right. I think what’s going on here is that the authors of that document are happy being very confident about common descent but not so happy being equally confident about evolution.
As to just what sort of evolution, here’s an extract from further on in that document:
As the section of that document that you quoted before makes clear, giving God a “truly causal role” doesn’t necessarily mean endorsing divine intervention. Section 68 -- the one before the one you quoted before—suggests what alternatives the authors had in mind, most notably the idea that he designed the universe in such a way that its natural operation would produce particular results.
This, again, is quite far from any view of evolution that would be endorsed by naturalists.
Even in section 68, I don’t see them saying that God necessarily “designed the universe in such a way that its natural operation would produce particular results,” in any sense stronger than the one which would be absolutely necessary for someone who believes that God is omnipotent and omniscient and the cause of everything that happens. In other words, given that you believe such things about God, then if you see a rock fall and land on the ground, you must believe that God wanted it on the ground. But that wouldn’t necessarily imply that it would have bothered God if it landed in the water instead.
Obviously naturalists would not accept God’s design even in this sense. But it is not a scientific theory one way or another and makes no differences in what you expect to find in nature. So that would still allow for someone to say that naturalistic evolution is definitely true with respect to every prediction that it makes.
Also, I agree that in practice, at least in other places, there is the implication that the world was designed (at least by initial conditions) for the sake of some results rather than others. This comes up especially in regard to marriage and sexuality. However, I don’t see that proposed in any dogmatic way, and it seems to be wishful thinking: if it is objectively by chance that reproduction works the specific way it does, then it becomes harder or impossible to justify Catholic sexual morality. For example, if human beings had developed by evolution in such a way that sexual reproduction required one partner killing the other, it would be obviously justified for them to make technological changes in the way they reproduce.
I’m not sure what sense you have in mind. It seems to me that taking seriously the idea that God is omniscient and the cause of everything that happens more or less commits one to seeing everything as designed by God to achieve whatever his purposes might be.
It is fairly common to say: no, despite having that power God conferred free will upon some of his creatures, so that what they do is not chosen by him. I’m not sure that actually makes sense when looked at clearly, but in any case it seems hard to apply this idea to the laws of nature.
In any case, the document we’re discussing seems to me to be saying that God may guide natural processes like evolution by being a “cause of causes”, and setting up the web of natural causation so as to achieve his ends.
(I don’t mean to imply that it’s saying he did so in such a way as to predetermine everything that happens, by the way; one can imagine God setting up a world that operates at random, and optimizing for a particular probability distribution or something of the kind.)
I’m not sure if we’re disagreeing about anything. I’m not saying that any Church authority has said that “the process of evolution looks exactly like a naturalistic process”, but that what they do say is consistent with this being true. Even assuming God had some motive for setting up things the way they are, how would that imply something in the process of evolution that doesn’t look naturalistic?
I certainly agree that if you say God is relevant at all, that is not something that naturalism would say. But it also doesn’t seem to mean anything concrete about the process.
Neither am I. I think that
in so far as the RCC has a position on the actual facts of biological evolution (as opposed to a position on what the Catholic faithful are supposed to think about them):
it seems to me fairly clearly distinguishable from any position a typical atheist evolutionist would adopt, even as regards observable questions like how likely it is that clear evidence of non-natural processes in evolution will ever turn up, though it’s hard to be certain because the official documents carefully avoid being too definite on such matters, and
I bet the senior RC clergy responsible for these documents hold positions more clearly distinguishable from those of typical atheist evolutionists, even as regards etc.; but
I suspect many of them have at least a suspicion that the scientific evidence for naturalist-looking evolution is only ever going to get better, and that clear signs of any kind of divine design in natural organisms are never going to show up.
as regards the RCC’s position on what the Catholic faithful are supposed to think:
I don’t think they are forbidden to adopt positions that, as regards etc., are indistinguishable from those of a typical atheist evolutionist, but
those official documents seem intended to discourage them from holding such positions, and
such positions seem permitted only (I insist on saying!) grudgingly. In particular:
until recently the Catholic faithful were explicitly forbidden to adopt such positions (on account of, e.g., what Humani Generis says about not regarding evolution as definitely correct), and
I strongly suspect that if even a modest amount of credible scientific evidence pointing in the direction of “intelligent design” were to show up, the RCC would return to that sort of stance.
(Not all of those things are directly related to the questions we were discussing.) Does that help?
Ok. I think I agree at least mostly with this summary, although I might qualify a few points.
In itself it’s likely that someone who believes in God will estimate a higher probability of evidence of non-natural processes in evolution than for an atheist. But there is also the third point you mention, namely that even theists may notice that there is currently no such evidence and may suspect that there never will be any. So this might mitigate the difference in their expectations somewhat.
Regarding what is grudgingly permitted or what is encouraged, I think this is less about probability assignments about the facts at issue, and more about the probability that a belief will tend to keep people in the Church or to lead to them leaving the Church. I think this is true even when the Church authorities are explicitly aware that a belief is probably false, at least in some cases. They still will not discourage that belief if it makes it more likely for someone to stay in the Church, unless there is some other motive for discouraging it (e.g. if the belief is very obviously ridiculous, they may discourage it because it could make the Church look bad.)
Yes; there are some things that the Vatican is extremely certain of (e.g. the divine origin of the Christian religion). Their ultra-caution extends to everything else—a rather large category which just so happens to include evolution.
I don’t think they’re less cautious, I just think they recognise that there’s more evidence. At the very least, the fact that no-ones convincingly refuted it in the last sixty-odd years despite all the attention being paid to it counts for quite a bit.
I meant that there’s no reason why a theist can’t hold a view of evolution that makes exactly the same predictions in all circumstances as an atheist does. Naturally, the theist’s view will incorporate God as having (at the very least) set up the natural laws that permit it, while the atheist will presumably have those laws simply existing with no particular cause; but they can both agree on what those laws are.
I understand that as meaning that faithful catholics shouldn’t take Pr(evolution)=1.
The thing is, the things that they are willing to consider as definitely right are things like the divine origin of Christianity; and as far as I understand it, they do expect faithful catholics to take Pr(Christianity has a divine origin)=1.
Unfortunately, I think what you’re clarifying isn’t what I was asking about :-). Let P be the proposition “as far as scientifically observable consequences go, evolution behaves as if it’s entirely natural and undesigned”. You and I agree that a theist can consistently believe P; call this thing that we believe Q. (Perhaps you also believe P, as I do, but that’s a separate question.) You made a remark about the RCC (which has spawned a discussion entirely out of proportion to the importance of that remark in anyone’s arguments, but no matter!) which I interpreted as saying that the RCC’s official position is P, whereas in fact perhaps you were saying that the RCC’s official position is Q (or perhaps the closely related Q’, which says that a good Catholic can consistently believe P).
So my question was: were you saying that the RCC’s position is (something like) P, or that the RCC’s position is (something like) Q?
I agree that HG can be read as saying faithful Catholics mustn’t take Pr(evolution)=1 but must take Pr(souls)=1 (where both “evolution” and “souls” are brief abbreviations for more complicated things, of course). I suppose what I was getting at is that saying “don’t take Pr(X)=1” effectively means quite different things depending on whether the community you’re addressing is in the habit of taking Pr(various things)=1 or scrupulously avoids it as e.g. LW tends to for good reason; and the fact that HG firmly endorses taking some probabilities to be 1 indicates that it’s in the former camp, which to me suggests that HG is saying not what an LWer would express by “don’t take Pr(evolution)=1″ but something more like “don’t treat evolution as definitely true in the same sort of way as you treat other ordinary things as definitely true”.
But it’s possible, as you say, that actually the position being sketched in HG would be, if written out with more care, something more like this: there are essential dogmas of RC faith, for which one must assign p=1; there are ordinary statements of fact, like (ha!) “the earth orbits the sun”, for which one would be ill-advised to assign p=1 but the RCC doesn’t take any particular position on that question; but for evolution the RCC specifically says not to take p=1 but leaves open the possibility of taking p=1-10^-20 or something.
I suspect these are questions that have no answers, in the following sense: senior RC clergy don’t generally think in terms that correspond so directly to the very quantitative probabilistic approach commonly taken here as to enable a clear distinction between p=1 and p=1-10^-20, etc., and any “translation” that makes them out to have been making statements in those quantitative probabilistic terms is liable to misrepresent their meaning. (E.g., p=1, as such, means that absolutely no possible evidence would change your mind, but I think Pius XII could probably have imagined possible happenings that would have convinced him that God doesn’t after all directly attach souls to human bodies.)
Something almost exactly like Q’.
I get the impression they were hinting at something more like Pr(evolution)=0.9, which is a figure entirely unsupported by anything in the text and involves me taking a guess, but apart from that this is pretty much exactly how I read it, yes. (With the note that the only reason the RCC is specifically calling out evolution is because there’s been such a brouhaha over it from the protestant churches that staying silent on the matter would have been bad politics).
While there may very well be senior clergy who do think in such terms (I wouldn’t know, I’ve never met any seriously senior clergy) this is largely why I think that something like p=0.9 is probably closer to the intended reading. (Or p=0.95, or even p=0.99)
Even if so, I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t be the official Vatican position that that probability can ever be anything less than one. (Politics, again; if the Pope ever admits to that p being less than one and someone runs a headline based on it...)
And if he does see such evidence, he has to consider the possibility that he is hallucinating, or being intentionally tricked by someone; if p is high enough, then it may very well be the case that any sufficiently convincing evidence will merely convince him to report to the nearest psychologist with complaints of extraordinarily detailed and persistent hallucinations.
OK; then many of my earlier comments in this thread (which were essentially arguing that the RCC’s position is very different from P) have been entirely not-to-the-point and have wasted everyone’s time. I repent in dust and ashes.
Yeah, this is roughly my reading too. (Maybe more like p=0.7 or something back in 1950 with Humani Generis.)
So much the worse for the Vatican, then. (But I think you’re probably right.)
Something in that general order of magnitude is probably more-or-less right.
...I think we’ve pretty much come to agreement on these points, then.
The Church has no official statements about probability one way or another. There are certainly Catholics who think that the probability of their beliefs is one (which is insane), but typically they do not hold this by saying that no possible evidence would convince them. They say, “such and such would convince me that Catholicism is false, but such and such is absolutely impossible, and I am absolutely certain that it is absolutely impossible.”
On the other hand there are many far more reasonable Catholics who admit that their probability is less than one, admit that there is evidence that would convince them their beliefs are false, and admit that they might later observe the evidence. The Church has never said anything against such opinions (or against the first kind of opinion).
One person I know, whom pretty much everyone considers to be a devout and orthodox Catholic, told me that he would be happy with a probability of 30% (that is, he would be happy to believe with that probability, based on Pascal’s wager type reasoning). I suspect that in practice his personal probability is around 50%.
The discussion about probabilities was all concerning the following specific question: How should we interpret the language in, e.g., Humani Generis about how faithful Catholics are required not to hold that some things are definitely true but the RCC teaches that some other things are definitely true? For sure, no translation into LW-style probabilityese is going to reproduce the meaning exactly, but one might reasonably hope to approximate what the RC documents say in terms that make some kind of sense to rationalists.
I think you need to understand that in terms of doxastic voluntarism. The Church holds that faith is voluntary, so that people can reasonably be praised or blamed for what they believe. They may not say it explicitly about other kinds of belief, but if they are right about religious beliefs, it would probably also be true that accepting or rejecting the theory of evolution (and any other similar thing) is also voluntary.
Given that account of belief, saying “you are obliged to say that this is definitely true and that this other thing is at least not definitely true,” is a statement about the choices you should make. You should choose to say (according to Pius XII), “Christianity comes from God,” and “Christianity definitely comes from God,” but not (according to Pius XII), “The theory of evolution applied to human beings is definitely true.”
Because it’s a question of choices, probability is not really relevant one way or another (except in the sense that the probability that something is true might be one reason that should affect whether or not you say something). That is why I gave the example of someone who estimates the chance of his beliefs being right, based on the evidence, to be about 50%. But despite that he chooses to say “this is simply true,” probably based on various moral considerations. Kind of like you might want to believe your brother about something rather than saying he is lying, not because of strong evidence for that, but because it’s hurtful to say “you’re lying.”
If this account is correct, the reason you can’t translate statements like that into statements resembling claims about probability is because that is simply not what they are about.
Rationalists say many things which have similar moral implications, and which don’t ultimately make a lot of sense apart from a similar doxastic voluntarism (e.g. “you ought to update on evidence,” which implies that you can and should choose to do so), but most people don’t accept an account like this explicitly. If you don’t accept doxastic voluntarism, you should simply say that the Catholic Church’s statements about such things are presuming an incorrect theory of belief, and just don’t make any sense apart from that theory.
(I agree with doxastic voluntarism, so such statements do make sense to me, whatever I happen to think about them on an object level.)
When I say “you ought to update on evidence” I’m fairly sure I am neither endorsing doxastic voluntarism nor making a claim about the morality of updating (or not) on evidence. Rather, I mean that if you update appropriately on evidence then your beliefs will, over time, tend to grow more accurate compared with the beliefs you would hold if you didn’t update appropriately on evidence, and that this is likely to benefit whatever goals you may have. (I might add that it benefits other people for your beliefs to be accurate, so there is some moral import to whether you update on evidence, but that’s not what I would mean by “ought”.) Is it a pointless thing to say if we don’t get to choose what we believe? Not if we have more choice about what overall strategy to use when adjusting our beliefs than we have about individual beliefs, which I think may well be the case.
(As to the actual question of doxastic voluntarism, I think it’s clear that it comes in degrees and that the truth isn’t right at either extreme. I don’t believe either of us could, right now, decide to believe that grass is pink and forthwith start doing so; but I’m pretty sure either of us could incline ourselves more toward believing (say) that Charles Dickens was born in 1834 simply by repeating “Charles Dickens was born in 1834” in a confident tone of voice fifty times. Choose another example if you happen already to have a confident opinion about whether Dickens was born in 1834.)
I am fairly sure that many rationalists do in fact make claims about updating on evidence with moral implications, even if you do not intend those implications yourself. But in any case, even your response implies a certain degree of voluntariness, if it is possible to adopt an overall strategy of adjusting our beliefs; if it were totally involuntary, we could not affect the strategy (and in fact you agree in the second part that it is not totally involuntary.)
I agree that in the way people ordinarily mean it, I could not start to believe that grass is pink. But I also could not go and kill myself right now. That doesn’t make not killing myself involuntary, since the reason is that I think it would be bad to kill myself. The case of the grass might be different, and it might be impossible to start to believe that in a stronger sense. In other discussion of this issue someone compared it to holding your hand in a fire until it is burned off; that might well be a physical impossibility, not just a question of thinking that it is bad.
But even in the case of holding your hand in a fire, I would see that as a certain kind of desire (to pull your hand away), even if it is one that we cannot resist with our conscious desires, and the case of belief seems pretty similar. This might just be a question of how much you are willing to strain an analogy.
It’s not as if “belief” is a name for one objective thing in the world which is either there or not. There are a whole bunch of things, words, actions, thoughts, and feelings, and we call various patterns of these things a “belief.” Some of these things are voluntary and some are not. Simply for consistency I choose to call the voluntary parts of that pattern “belief” and exclude the other parts, at least when there is competition between them. According to this way of speaking, I could choose to believe that Dickens was born in 1834, even right now, if I had a motive to do so. But that would not affect the involuntary parts of my assessment, and you might prefer to call it something else (e.g. “belief in belief”).
Your initial puzzling definition of what you believed had two parts (“omnipotent and omniscient”). You quickly added that you attributed many other traits to God, but were less certain of them (!) and thus presumably could change them more easily.
Are you saying that the whole set of claims has a common cause and they are therefore likely to go together?
Yes, that is correct.
No. In the grandparent post here, I’m talking about (what I understand is) the average person’s idea of God. I recognise that my conception is not average, and some debate with other people has convinced me that a lot of people have far more complicated ideas of what God is, with far more moving parts.
Look at the first paragraph of your post. Using “humor” to cover bad arguments.
Yes, I tend to apply a higher standard to comments then just about everybody else.
OK, I looked at the first paragraph. I see the (attempt at) humour. I don’t see how it’s covering (or trying to cover) a bad argument, or indeed any argument at all. What bad argument do you think I was attempting to cover?
I don’t think “higher” is the right word here. That impression you have that no one else appreciates how awful your political opponents’ arguments are? That’s what being mindkilled feels like from the inside.
Including your own? I beg to differ.
Citation please.
For instance here, where you make one unsubstantiated claim after another.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/la5/neoreactionaries_why_are_you_neoreactionary/bnzn