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.
Mardy,
You misunderstand the point that I was making. I was just trying to imagine how Einstein thought up relativity at the time he did. At that time I was imagining that it must have been wild speculation. I know that now it is well accepted and I accept it.
I was actually trying to make the point of the value of “wild speculation”.
Special and General relativity are not wild speculations, they are well tested scientific theories. Quite a distance between speculations about infinite numbers of universes and relativity theory? Yes, but these speculations are well accepted by cosmologists. Ask a respected astrophysicist about the Anthropic principle and he or she will give you multiverse theory as an explanation. This is not theological speculation, it’s scientific speculation done by scientists, albeit astrophysicists; it is certainly not on the same footing as special and general relativity but is accepted by atheist scientists nevertheless. Heard of the Boltzmann brain? Quite comical but taken seriously by some of them.
Oh come on, Steve, Wright is not preaching new age mysticism like Chopra, he’s trying to reconcile religion and science through an admittedly circuitous route. He doesn’t even come down on one side or the other. You can’t turn him into just another believer in God who accepts a higher purpose without examining it. His whole NYT Op-Ed is one such an examination. It may be wrong but it is an examination.
Hey, I just thought his approach was an interesting one. I didn’t mean to get into a theological argument with you. I’m basically an agnostic rather than a pure atheist and find speculations such as Wright’s interesting.
Looking for a higher purpose just a way the brain is wired? Well, I haven’t read those two books you describe, but I actually do believe in mysteries that are not resolvable scientifically. Like, why is there something rather than nothing? Like, when did things begin? These are limits to human reason, limits philosophers have been speculating about for millenia. I don’t accept that there are scientific explanations for these mysteries. Why, we haven’t even an explanation for consciousness yet. Not that we won’t find one some day, but it’s possible new mysteries will then be encountered, just like what’s going on now in the realms of cosmology and physics. In physics, the Large Hadron Collider may provide verification for the standard particle theory but also it will likely point to further mysteries.
Mardy,
I have read the NYT piece you mentioned.
Maybe what turns me off about Wright is his very attempt to reconcile his concept of what God might be with science. I guess I just don’t find it necessary.
This and his constant search for higher purpose are what turns on my skepticism that has been tuned up by reading “The Black Swan” book.
There is nothing wrong with searching, but one has to keep in mind that looking for a higher purpose may just be the way our brain is wired. There isn’t necessarily a higher purpose. The idea that our mind is wired this way also comes from the book “How We Decide.”
As open minded as Wright seems to be, he seems to be utterly convinced that there is a higher purpose. He seems to assume that existence of a higher purpose is a given that does not need to be examined.
Mardy,
Thanks for the long explanation of your take on Robert Wright.
My only comparison of Wright to Chopra was in the use of parallels between the search for God and the search for scientific truths.
I suppose that scientists have to make some pretty wild speculations in order to come up with such concepts as special relativity and general relativity, to name just two.
Saying “who knows what “forces” have evolved in some universes in the infinite array of such universes?” may seem somewhat akin to this scientific speculation. Still there seems to me to be quite a distance between this kind of speculation and scientific speculation.
By the way, what is it that Chopra says that makes you label him as a whacko as opposed to what Robert Wright is?
Well, speak of the devil, here’s Robert Wright again with a four page Op-Ed in the NYT this morning, a Grand Bargain Over Evolution. I read through it just now and found it pretty intriguing.
Steve, it’s hard for me to conflate Robert Wright with Deepak Chopra. The latter is a New Age guru promoting God as spirit or some such thing while the former is bending over backwards to reconcile religion and science. He does this in the Afterword to his book while the main thrust of the book appears to describe a moral order arisen through a cultural evolution. You may not agree there is such a moral order or that if there is it’s explained by a cultural natural selection with no need to invoke a deity behind it, but to simply write him off as another New Age whacko – like Chopra – I can’t support.
His Afterword is a closely reasoned account giving both the believer and atheist side in considerable depth and ending on an ambiguous note. He’s not discounting Darwin in the slightest and he promotes a strictly materialist view of evolution with no cop outs to “intelligent design”. What does he know about physics? Enough to point out its baffling and paradoxical underpinnings while fully recognizing its profound predictive value. He’s not writing a scientific book; he’s an historian writing about human evolution.
His idea of God – if there is one, which he’s not definite about – is certainly in no way anthropomorphic but rests on some kind of mysterious force behind history. If an asteroid hits earth that would simply put an end to the “force” on earth but would not disprove there was one. He’s not implying any ultimate control by a God. He doesn’t say, but one can easily speculate on the basis of multiverse theory that other universes would arise or have already arisen to take the place of ours if ours is obliterated. He’s not defending a made up story ruling millions if not billions. The main thrust of his book appears to be historical and traces evolution of the God concepts in the three major religions of mankind from an historical not a religious perspective.
To say that God is Love is not a preposterous statement in my mind. It’s definitely a problem to explain love. In a Richard Dawkins interview of the atheist writer, Ian McEwan, several of whose novels I’ve enjoyed, McEwan points out the human capacity to feel empathy as a motivating force in history. Mirror neurons have evolved to facilitate this but it’s not immediately obvious how moral progress is made. I’m curious about Wright’s arguments but, actually, I’m not sure I’ll take the time to read the book. However, as I said, I can’t write him off as a Deepak Chopra who I consider basically a charlatan.
If Wright knew more about physics would that disprove his suggestion there might be a “force” behind a moral order? It would probably give support to it, if anything. You’ve heard of the idea of the Boltzmann brain I assume (I have a slightly humorous post on it). Well, anything is possible in multiverse theory! It’s about the only thing capable of explaining how our universe appears to be fined-tuned for conscious life. So, who knows what “forces” have evolved in some universes in the infinite array of such universes?