SeevsPlace · BTW: What’s God? 6
Follow this link to an interesting post on Marden Seavey’s blog.
The video and the links to the author Robert Wright are intriguing. I have yet to figure out exactly what I think about these musings. They do approach some of the topics of my recent readings that are more from the scientific side of such a discussion. Wright takes a more sympathetic approach to the non-scientific side while not exactly subscribing to it.
As I said on Mardy’s facebook page:
This certainly makes you think. I haven’t decided yet what I think, but I think I am thinking about it.
Now that I have taken a long walk, I am beginning to know what I think about Robert Wright’s ideas. My thinking is much less favorable than before the walk. I’ll try to put some time aside to finish reading Mardy’s post and then put together an explanation of my reaction.
I now see what disturbs me about Robert Wright’s arguments. They are almost pure sophistry. Here is one definition of what I mean, “a seemingly plausible, but fallacious and devious, argumentation.”
The existence of a moral order, I’ve said, makes it reasonable to suspect that humankind in some sense has a “higher purpose.”
I keep wondering when he contemplates a huge asteroid striking the earth and making extinct all animals “higher” than a cockroach how he reconciles this with a “higher purpose”.
This moral order, to the believer, is among the grounds for suspecting that the system of evolution by natural selection itself demands a special creative explanation.
An explanation is not the same thing as making up a story with zero basis in fact and ruling millions, if not billions, of people based on the made up story.
Granted, we believe in the existence of the electron even though our attempts thus far to conceive of it have been imperfect at best.
Our belief in the electron may be imperfect at best, but the various theories have tremendous predictive value. There is a huge body of evidence that is easily measured and verified that comes from the theories about various aspects of the electron.
One concept that is not perfect but gets a large number of things right and only a few esoteric things wrong is not comparable to a concept that is almost perfectly wrong, predicts close to nothing that is measurable and verifiable (and falsifiable), and doesn’t do any better with the esoteric.
The types of arguments that Wright makes are the kind that made me stop reading Deepak Chopra. Chopra also uses scientific concepts that are out of the experience of non-physicists and conjectures that certain words used in that domain might mean something completely different in another domain yet prove something similar to what the physicists have proved. It is hard to imagine many arguments that have ever been put forth to more purposely deceive the gullible than these arguments.
For those who remember my stories of my college years, they might remember the story of how I got a “D” on a paper that explained the weaknesses of Plato’s similar style of exposition. I guess I was too stupid to realize that if the Professor had us reading this stuff, he had already fallen victim to the sophistry. He certainly did not appreciate me pointing out the flaws.
What Wright does not understand in physics is far more elegant and mind boggling than what he does understand. If he only knew about some of the issues that physicists are struggling with these days, then his worries about god would seem trivial to him.