“The brain is the station where every railway line passes through.”

May 22, 2015 6:28 PM

Can evolution explain acts of kindness, and morality? [The Guardian]

We arranged a debate between a sceptical Tom Stoppard and the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. Stuart Jeffries acted as referee. We arranged for the two to meet recently in the grand boardroom of Wilson’s London publishers to discuss their differences, and reflect on two hard problems – what is the proper scope of science, and what is it to be human.

posted by Fizz (32 comments total)

Stoppard is a really excellent playwright but I don't see much in his position besides some hoary mind/body dualism and the fallacy of adverse implications. Maybe they should get someone with a background in one of the sciences to debate science? I don't think I'd do very well debating Stoppard on the writing of plays and he doesn't do very well debating Wilson on evolutionary biology.

The dualism is pretty hard to get past. I thought we'd put that to bed already.
posted by Justinian at 7:28 PM on May 22, 2015 [5 favorites]

That wasn't a debate, that was something else entirely. Stoppard certainly wasn't asking many hard questions or carefully examining what Wilson brought up. For example, the definition-of-spirituality-via-AA bit caused my eyes to roll so far back in my head I think I saw my own sinuses. I don't know that an organization with a 5-10% success rate at its stated goal is the best place to go looking for the most useful definition of spirituality. This was an advertisement for Wilson's book and Stoppard's play, not any serious (or at least, satisfying) discussion of the topics ostensibly at hand.
posted by axiom at 8:39 PM on May 22, 2015 [5 favorites]

I think Stoppard's participation here is limited because he's primarily familiar with the popular cultural portrayals of science, and less so of science as practiced and thought of by its practitioners. The clearest example is Stoppard saying:

What we’re talking about, and you clearly don’t suffer from it even potentially, is a sense of incompleteness in the explanation. All scientists say to me, as you do: “What is your problem? This is not merely complete, but beautiful both as an intellectual construct and as a physical construct – it has a grandeur beyond anything any artist has ever created.”

But of course that's not even remotely true, in terms of scientists thinking that the scientific view is "complete," or having more grandeur than any artistic creation. It seems to almost reflect an insecurity, that it may be true, a too-strong need to try to justify his existence when faced with the all-powerful SCIENCE!, when in fact he doesn't need to at all. Certainly some people that would say foolish things like that, such as the "sideshow" of the new atheists as Wilson very aptly put it, but they operate at the fringe of science. And there is hubris and triumphalism in this popular portrayal of what science is, but it's not what science actually is. I hope I'm not putting out that much of a "no true Scotsman" argument here, but the true scientists are the ones publishing in the primary literature, not those who are popularizing it as attempted bestsellers.

Science, in practice, is a complete embrace of the incomplete, an embrace of all possibilities and of not knowing which possibility may be right. Out of this uncertainty and swirling entwined possibilities, we feel around, and occasionally grasp one possibility that seems to be more real and likely. Even then, it is held onto lightly, ready to be dropped the moment that it's clear that it's not the right possibility. In stark contrast to that, the popular perception of science is "We discovered this, we know that, this is all explained, etc." Most people see the destinations that are reached by scientists, and assume that it's all that the scientists are looking for, but a scientist will pick and continue moving as soon as any destination is reached, because the scientist is after the journey itself.

All this is to say, is that as a scientist myself, I see Wilson's view of the science as for more common than Stoppard's view of what the scientists think. And now I have pretty much no inclination to see his work.
posted by Llama-Lime at 8:40 PM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

I don't know that an organization with a 5-10% success rate at its stated goal is the best place to go looking for the most useful definition of spirituality.

I don't think that spirituality is any way defined by its ability to accomplish concrete goals in the real world. The Hare Krishnas or members of Charles Manson's cult could potentially provide excellent descriptions of spirituality, and their descriptions of spirituality would need to be invalidated on the grounds of spirituality, not just the organization.
posted by Llama-Lime at 8:51 PM on May 22, 2015

The dualism is pretty hard to get past. I thought we'd put that to bed already.

Out of this uncertainty and swirling entwined possibilities, we feel around, and occasionally grasp one possibility that seems to be more real and likely. Even then, it is held onto lightly, ready to be dropped...

It's interesting that those who disagree with Stoppard do so for reasons that sit uneasily with one another.

In any case, I haven't read the play itself, but (at least here) Stoppard just seems to be issuing an explanatory demand, not suggesting that the explanatory demand can only be met via some sort of dualism. I thought the exchange at the end was most telling:

Stoppard: With value judgments, especially judgments of moral value, for them to be self-sufficient and absolute, one wants them to break out of this orbit you’re talking about. Otherwise, as Hilary says in the play, “We’re just correcting our own homework.”

Wilson: I think science is incomplete because it only tells you the facts of the matter and in that sense it’s devoid of value. Therefore if we want to make a meaning system that is respectful of science, then we need to be explicit about our values.

Stoppard is demanding that Wilson give some account of the source of values, and (in context) Wilson is just saying that science won't provide one. But this is an interesting question to ask whether or not you are a dualist or a monist about the mind/brain relationship. I suppose lots of scientists would disagree with one another about whether scientific inquiry can provide an account of values. And I bet it would be an interesting discussion!

I had been planning to give this play a pass, but now I think I might read it after all...
posted by voltairemodern at 9:01 PM on May 22, 2015

I don't think that spirituality is any way defined by its ability to accomplish concrete goals in the real world.

Well, of course it is, at least from a scientist's perspective. I would suggest scientists aren't calibrating their angel-o-meters to measure the population of pin heads, their only concern with spirituality (beyond personal) is its observable effect in people. Does spirituality affect people, and if so, how? And what is it about spirituality (a thing which surely must have more than one definition, I would argue) that has that effect? As a scientist, I don't see how you would go about defining anything other than by its real world effects.

I would also be leery of a scientist attempting to draw a definition of spirituality from any other single source, whether it be Charles Mansons' cultist or Christianity or Buddhism or Scientology. But I also don't understand the types of scientists who go to church on Sunday, either.
posted by axiom at 9:22 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

What we’re talking about, and you clearly don’t suffer from it even potentially, is a sense of incompleteness in the explanation. All scientists say to me, as you do: “What is your problem? This is not merely complete, but beautiful both as an intellectual construct and as a physical construct – it has a grandeur beyond anything any artist has ever created.”

But of course that's not even remotely true, in terms of scientists thinking that the scientific view is "complete," or having more grandeur than any artistic creation. ...

I agree very much with your point and with the general thrust of your comment, but I think we ought to give Stoppard credit here for a sly allusion to the famous last line of Darwin's Origin of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed (by the Creator) into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

I put "by the Creator" in parentheses because it was not present in the 1859 first edition, but was added by Darwin to the 2nd through 6th editions, which I hadn't known until I looked up the quotation just now to get the wording right.
posted by jamjam at 9:42 PM on May 22, 2015

Well, I certainly have an inner world that does not seem to directly affect the outer universe, but has significant impacts on my experience and perception of it. I would consider it a reasonable presumption that other people have the same, and that spirituality deals with that inner self.

And I'm not sure really how something wholly internal could be said to change someone's behavior in an objective, measurable way. I mean change relative to what? What someone would have done otherwise without a certain spirituality is an unknowable concept, not a control.
posted by Zalzidrax at 9:44 PM on May 22, 2015

Questions for Wilson (or people who've read him): how would a community of martyrs survive over time? If an individual life is valued so little, what would be the point of continuing such a society, how would that be articulated as a cultural rationale? The community (and its genes) might benefit from altruism, but what kind of psychological investment would motivate an individual's martyrdom, other than extended egoism? And so what if prosocial actions are "impure", accompanied by pleasure or self-interest? So what if it turns out there isn't such a thing as an absolutely selfless altruism, what's the cost of losing that purity? How well does it explain how things have actually gone so far, vs. how Wilson might like them to go? Maybe there's something I'm not getting, but he comes across as more religious/dogmatic than Stoppard does.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:54 PM on May 22, 2015

The dualism is pretty hard to get past. I thought we'd put that to bed already.

Out of this uncertainty and swirling entwined possibilities, we feel around, and occasionally grasp one possibility that seems to be more real and likely. Even then, it is held onto lightly, ready to be dropped...

It's interesting that those who disagree with Stoppard do so for reasons that sit uneasily with one another.

Not at all, the non-dualistic world is filled with uncertainty and unknowns, and the non-dualistic world is the purview of scientists. Even when scientists investigate dualism, if they find any evidence of it at all, it will be evidence of non-dualism, and that which was thought to be dualistic will assimilated with non-dualistic explanation into non-dualistic universe. That doesn't mean that scientists think they have the complete story or that they don't make their living by trying to continuously sort through uncertainty, it just means that dualism is not something that scientists can work with. I didn't find much evidence of dualism in Stoppage's comments, but then there's like 50 different definitions of duality, so we could all be talking past each other here.

I agree very much with your point and with the general thrust of your comment, but I think we ought to give Stoppard credit here for a sly allusion to the famous last line of Darwin's Origin of Species:

Excellent catch on the "grandeur." But Darwin, like any careful scientist, merely says that which can be supported. He says "there is," without ranking, and without the sweeping judgement "beyond anything an artist ever created," that Stoppage imagines. Appreciation of this grandeur is something that nearly all humans share, artist or scientist throughout history, and just as an artist gives us a perspective on that grandeur that enriches the audience, Darwin gave us another, quite excellent, angle on that grandeur. IMHO, I think that society has dramatically undervalued the artistic views of nature in recent generations, that the weight of art-as-pop-celebrity has so outweighed other types of art that some of the greats our generation find a much smaller audience than would appreciate their creations. So I could understand Stoppage feeling a bit put out by SCIENCE!, which gets the big money for research, and has strong economic power though not political power, while art gets short shrift. But I don't think he understands what actual scientists think.
posted by Llama-Lime at 11:15 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't know about Stoppard, but my problem with Wilson's account of morality is that it doesn't explain the thing that needs explaining.

It doesn't seem like there's any huge mystery to how altruistic behaviors could evolve. It's not hard to imagine circumstances that would select for populations that exhibit behavior we might call altruistic. But when philosophers talk about an account of morality, what they usually mean is a compelling description of what we ought to do and why we ought to do it.

If altruism is a behavior that has evolved to improve the overall survival of my gene pool, that doesn't seem like a very compelling reason for me to choose altruism when I'm inclined to act selfishly.

When we talk about how we value love and despise cruelty, we typically sound like we think those things are good or bad ends in themselves, not that they are a means to improve or threaten the survival of our species. Who would want a spouse who said they were kind, not because they cared about your happiness, but because they thought kindness was the best way to perpetuate the human race?
posted by straight at 11:53 PM on May 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

Exactly - Stoppard slipped into mystery and whatnot, yeah probably to get into his play, but I think that (motivation/psychological plausibility) was his challenge (which never got addressed): "Altruism is what you [not only an axis for consequentialist genetic or social imperatives, but a socially motivated human organism] do for somebody you love, and you don’t love good order and sociality in the same sense that you love your family."
posted by cotton dress sock at 11:58 PM on May 22, 2015

If altruism is a behavior that has evolved to improve the overall survival of my gene pool, that doesn't seem like a very compelling reason for me to choose altruism when I'm inclined to act selfishly.

Well, I would say, exactly. Science does not give us a way to live our lives as good people. In fact, you could make the case that its lessons are to be 'evil' - family above law, promiscuity is good, destroy the out group, and everything will die so who cares?
posted by alasdair at 1:09 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Stoppard just seems to be issuing an explanatory demand, not suggesting that the explanatory demand can only be met via some sort of dualism

Stoppard's desire to have moral explanations that come from outside "this orbit" of one's mind, explanations that are "self-sufficient and absolute", strongly suggests to me that he has a half-baked intuition that morality has to come from something non-physical. Everything Stoppard says—for example, when he talks about the "discontinuity when brain activity becomes content"—makes me think that he is a naive dualist.

I suppose lots of scientists would disagree with one another about whether scientific inquiry can provide an account of values.

I think that scientists are a rather heterogenous group with a lot of silly beliefs, but my understanding is that the is/ought distinction is pretty basic stuff for philosophy of science. Science is the study of what is; we must decide for ourselves what we think that means for what ought to be. (The funny part is that everybody else is playing this game too, even when they say they aren't. Conflicting reports of "God's will" are a great example of how pointing to an external source of morality doesn't change the fact that we are the ones deciding what ought to be.)

If altruism is a behavior that has evolved to improve the overall survival of my gene pool, that doesn't seem like a very compelling reason for me to choose altruism when I'm inclined to act selfishly.

I admit I don't understand this "challenge" that straight, cotton dress sock, and Stoppard are putting forth. What do you want with this definition of altruism? Describing how altruistic behavior evolved isn't meant (or shouldn't be meant) to stand as an argument to be altruistic. Nor should we conflate the fact that altruistic behavior patterns evolved with the preposterous idea that these altruistic behaviors would be logical.
posted by daveliepmann at 1:14 AM on May 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

OK, scientists.

1) Can you prove by means of science, logic, mathematics or otherwise the existence or non-existence of god?

2) Can you prove the existence of non-existence of "free will"?

That's what Stoppard is talking about. When Wilson is talking about "altruism" he is engaging in red queen-ism i.e. words mean exactly what I want them to mean... which is exactly the core of what is wrong with charlatans like Dawkins. But then Wilson goes a step further and actually advances a moral philosophy: is this based on science too?

Stoppard: It doesn’t matter how and why you’re good, the point is to be good?

Wilson: Exactly.

And Stoppard is exactly right that this is scientific "triumphalism." It's a version of "engineers disease." Wilson has some really firm and fairly unexamined moral views that he almost absolutely, "scientifically" confident about.

I think that scientists are a rather heterogenous group with a lot of silly beliefs, but my understanding is that the is/ought distinction is pretty basic stuff for philosophy of science. Science is the study of what is...

I say this as an atheist, or at least a radical agnostic, and I guess I am a card-carrying (PhD carrying) scientist as well but.... Science, ignoring what one actually means by science for the moment, is almost certainly the study of what appears to be not "what is", i.e. derived from empirical knowledge. Religion might be the study of "what is," whatever that could mean.

But, it's really all of a piece. You can only talk about "values" divorced from "science," if you believe that science entails some sort of absolute process towards knowledge i.e. the "scientific method." Otherwise, you are just left with plain old knowledge... What is the nature of knowledge? What is it possible to know by experience? Is all knowledge empirical? Your answers to these questions have moral implications. You can't divorce epistemology from moral philosophy unless, on the other hand, you believe moral philosophy is beyond human reason and knowledge...
posted by ennui.bz at 2:08 AM on May 23, 2015 [4 favorites]

Maybe they should get someone with a background in one of the sciences to debate science? I don't think I'd do very well debating Stoppard on the writing of plays and he doesn't do very well debating Wilson on evolutionary biology.

They aren't debating evolutionary biology. They're debating morality. And Wilson ends up admitting that he can't actually explain the everyday meaning of "altruism", despite claiming that exactly that explanation is the burden of his book.
posted by howfar at 2:37 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Describing how altruistic behavior evolved isn't meant (or shouldn't be meant) to stand as an argument to be altruistic.

I agree with you, and Wilson should stop doing that.
posted by cotton dress sock at 2:38 AM on May 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

Nor should we conflate the fact that altruistic behavior patterns evolved with the preposterous idea that these altruistic behaviors would be logical.

Here's where I'm at with it, and I welcome clarification or comment, sorry for 101ing. Although it may promote the survival of the group, pure altruism is suicidal for the pioneering altruist organism him/herself (and his/her genes). In order for that individual's altruistic behavioral patterns to survive the death of the organism, his/her genes have to be carried forward by his/her kin (offspring or other family). That individual (obviously prior to dying) should be sufficiently driven, presumably at the level of the whole organism*, through a complex of conscious and unconscious motivations, drives, etc., to have offspring (arguably a kind of extended egoism) or to care about kin (same again), enough to override the (almost universal among creatures, whole-organism-level) desire to not die. Looking at it this way, it's hard to see how egoism and altruism can be divorced.

*this is Stoppard's challenge, as I understand it
posted by cotton dress sock at 3:32 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

1) Can you prove by means of science, logic, mathematics or otherwise the existence or non-existence of god?

As I understand it, the rhetorical nature of this question again depends on assuming that Wilson thinks that he has a "complete" understanding of these phenomena. Even within the scientific realm, Wilson would only claim that he has a very very narrow view on the problem of altruism, it's only "solved" from the mental framework of the theory of evolution. Even within the scientific world, Wilson has no explanation of the anatomical/molecular/informational brain structures, that underly love, moral reasoning, and the other things that we associate with altruism as humans.

Stoppard: It doesn’t matter how and why you’re good, the point is to be good?

Wilson: Exactly.

And Stoppard is exactly right that this is scientific "triumphalism." It's a version of "engineers disease." Wilson has some really firm and fairly unexamined moral views that he almost absolutely, "scientifically" confident about.

Unless you're drawing on resources outside of this article, I can't agree at all with your view on this, and I don't see any evidence of Wilson's "triumphalism," and I'd really appreciate you pointing out what you think those moral views that you think he has, because I don't know what you're referring to.

Wilson is speaking only from the evolutionary perspective, and from that perspective of selective advantage it doesn't matter how/why you're good, only the end effects matter. From the perspective of selective advantage, it matters that you can see, it doesn't matter whether you see with a human eye, a compound insect eye, or a right-side back squid eye. There's the concept of the function of something as well as the actual physical embodiment of it, and the same goes for many aspects of human psychology. From the selection perspective, the common thread between humans and other species that exhibit altruistic behavior are that they have some structure in their brains and influencing their actions which bends those actions more towards the altruistic and away from the sociopathic, on the whole. Whatever this mechanism is, it doesn't have to be 100% perfect in order to provide the same benefit in group selection, and it's probably going to have variation between the individuals, with some bending more towards the altruistic and some bending more towards the sociopathic. In humans, we have names for these altruistic benders of action such as "love" and "morality" and "religion" and "attachment" and "group identity", just as we have names for those things that we use to collect visual descriptions of the world such as "retina" and "visual cortex".

Going back to the very early part of the interview, there's a key sentence that I know notice has an absolute massive ambiguity in it:

And so one of these things I think can be resolved, and in some sense has been, is: can altruism and morality be explained from an evolutionary perspective?

View 1, which just occurred to me, is "can altruism and morality be [completely] explained from an evolutionary perspective." Or, somewhat equivalently, "can altruism and morality be explained [away] from an evolutionary perspective," which is similarly reductive. This is not how I viewed Wilson's perspective at all, and I don't think that he would agree with it, but with this view of that sentence I can finally make sense of Stoppard and many of the comments in this thread that seem to be putting words into Wilson's mouth that make no sense to me.

View 2, was the one that I took, was "from the narrow perspective of evolutionary reasoning, can we make sense of altruism and morality as a natural phenomenon." That is, does the observation that individuals are altruistic and experience a sense of morality contradict the current precepts of evolutionary theory, and therefore require modification of those evolutionary precepts, or does it fit in well with some expansion of those precepts and understanding.

Can I remind people that it was Stoppard that makes all sorts of weird assumptions about Wilson and science, like "transcendence" being impolite? Accepting Stoppard's view of what Wilson thinks is not going to be reliable.
posted by Llama-Lime at 7:35 AM on May 23, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think the most charitable way to explain this conversation is:

1. Tom Stoppard, writing a play about the nature of morality, takes a look at Wilson's new book about altruism an evolution to see if it addresses any of the questions that interest him and concludes that it does not.

2. Wilson writes a book about evolutionary biology and altruism that makes no pretense of answering any of those questions.

3. Some journalist sits them down and there's not really much to talk about because their work is on two different topics without much overlap. So Stoppard takes a few shots at Wilson as a stand-in for people who would say science like Wilson's answers Stoppard's questions or dismisses them as irrelevant or unreal.
posted by straight at 9:49 AM on May 23, 2015 [5 favorites]

If God exists, God is going to exist whether we believe it or not.
posted by rankfreudlite at 10:01 AM on May 23, 2015

As an aside, the article does a terrible job of explaining the difference between Wilson and Dawkins. The article makes it sound like there's no scientific difference (both think evolution selects for genes that cause altruistic behavior because they benefit group survival) but just a sort of difference in the way you talk about those genes, whether you call them "selfish" or "genuinely altruistic."

Looking around for some better information on that topic, I read this from the introduction to Wilson's book, which makes it sound like maybe I was too charitable in assuming he's not making any pretense of making the sort of claims for evolutionary biology that Stoppard complains about:

My own inquiries took a practical turn in 2006 when I began to study altruism in the context of everyday life in my home-town of Binghamton, New York. A year later I helped to create the Evolution Institute, the first think tank to formulate public policy from an evolutionary perspective.

These endeavors have enabled me to explore topic areas such as economics and business, where the prevailing assumption is that people are motivated entirely by self-interest. Practices that follow from this assumption have had ruinous consequences, as we shall see. Yet well-meaning efforts to promote altruism can also have pathological consequences when they do not take basic evolutionary considerations into account, as strange as that might seem. By the end of this short book, if I have done my job well, the reader will understand why evolutionary theory is essential for accomplishing the altruistic goal of making the world a better place.

That sure sounds like Wilson's got engineer's disease.
posted by straight at 10:03 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

relevant!*

No small amount of the previous discussion is wrangling between why and how because the problem is that the general public doesn't really understand that science isn't teleological, it doesn't answer the why questions, but rather science is empiricism, it just attempts to rigorously describe what it sees. Even scientists have difficulty avoiding teleological language when talking about evolution, which is emphatically and crucially not teleological -- and they otherwise, about other topics, deploy teleological language regularly, because that's how humans think (and scientists are humans). It's no wonder that a child asks why the sky is blue and, with children when you attempt to answer such questions, it is usually much more apparent in the following back-and-forth that they want something that is explicitly teleological: what purpose does the blue sky serve? Which is the sort of questions about the natural world that religious belief has typically answered.

also btw :P
-Maynard Smith on the levels of selection question
-George Price, the Price equation, and cultural group selection
posted by kliuless at 10:21 AM on May 23, 2015 [6 favorites]

straight, I interpret "engineer's disease" to mean that somebody assumes that their oversimplified understanding of their area of expertise will provide them complete understanding of another field, leading to wrong conclusions. Is it that Wilson is willing to advance any evolutionary perspective into the realm of policy that makes you think he has engineer's disease? Or is there some specific conclusion that you think is wrong, or some is there some sentence to you that reads as though he thinks he's solved it all? He seems very careful to couch his claims there, even in the sense that he's admitting to the possibility that he's done an unconvincing job.
posted by Llama-Lime at 10:38 AM on May 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

kliuless - I didn't mean to imply any kind of teleological impetus with my "in order tos", careless language. Great links, looking forward to reading them - thanks :)
posted by cotton dress sock at 12:12 PM on May 23, 2015

Llama-Lime, to be fair I should read Wilson's book to see what he actually says, but when a biologist says his theories about evolution, theories that probably don't even represent a consensus within the discipline of biology, are going to fix our understanding of economics and business, as if current economic theories are based, erroneously, on the now-disproven evolutionary biology theories of Richard Dawkins, I strongly suspect I'm about to hear something stupid.
posted by straight at 2:23 PM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Imagine a literary theorist writing a book about how his new interpretation of Dubliners can safely put to bed all the thorny problems in Quantum Mechanics. Actually that would be an amazing work of the imagination, but not truly more presumptuous than any of these Evolution Explains It All screeds.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:34 AM on May 24, 2015

Yeah, that's not really what he's saying there at all. And if you think that theories of how populations of creatures behave is inapplicable to economics as Dubliners is to an abstruse equation driven field, then I'm not quite sure how to respond. It's like I'm encountering Poe's law in a very weird spot.

This thread is endemic with "hates engineers disease" where somebody is assumed to be an engineer (even if they're a scientist, and the two do not think at all alike), and thereafter supposed "engineer" is assumed to be a fool who can have no insight into the human experience at all, and if they dare share an idea their words will be twisted, or new words and ideas invented whole-cloth, so that they can again be safely dismissed and ignored, and their scary thoughts be put aside.
posted by Llama-Lime at 8:58 PM on May 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

1) Can you prove by means of science, logic, mathematics or otherwise the existence or non-existence of god?

Of course this is actually two completely different questions. One is a fallacy and the other, if proven in the affirmative, easily satisfies both.

Stoppard: There is a tendency to hubris in science as an enterprise, a tendency to triumphalism.

And yet, in the course of this debate, it is only Stoppard who engages in mind-reading, misinterpretation and misattribution. His opposition to science appears to be founded what he believes science to be, rather than what it is. (I have yet to see science celebrate itself with anything resembling the pomp or arrogance of the world's major religions -- notwithstanding the floppy hats worn at convocation.)

I really hate these debates. When you don't believe that there is a higher power pulling the strings, the only answer to "why?" is "why not?" which makes for a pretty short argument. There are plenty of human characteristics that don't need a reason to exist. Not everything is the way it is because of selective pressure or adaptation. If science can't prove that green eyes or female orgasms have an adaptive purpose, who cares? Let's just enjoy 'em. If there's an answer out there, we may find it. Or we may not. But we will keep looking. And having orgasms.

And why the obsession with magic and "higher" powers? If the universe and everything in it has no intrinsic value, it is left to us to create our own. Why should we think so little of ourselves that we can't own this responsibility? What is everyone afraid of?
posted by klanawa at 11:50 PM on May 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

If the universe and everything in it has no intrinsic value, it is left to us to create our own. Why should we think so little of ourselves that we can't own this responsibility? What is everyone afraid of?

Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life - "Teleotheism is the view that God comes at the end, not at the beginning, where I am defining 'God' as 'the greatest of all things that can come true'. In this view, the quest to discover what are the greatest things that are possible is of the utmost importance."
posted by kliuless at 9:41 AM on May 31, 2015

"Teleotheism is the view that God comes at the end, not at the beginning, where I am defining 'God' as 'the greatest of all things that can come true'.

First articulated by the great de Chardanselm.
posted by jamjam at 12:26 PM on May 31, 2015

I'm not sure how that stuff about teleotheism follows... Why must god come anywhere?
posted by klanawa at 5:06 PM on May 31, 2015