Dear Sweet Zombie Jesus, Michael Egnor just gets worse July 23, 2007
Posted by Evil Bender in Origins, Science, Skepticism, wingnuts.trackback
PZ’s pointed out that Egnor, without bothering to know what PZ actually said, has attacked PZ’s recent talk by the typical conservative troll “false concern” model. As usual, Egnor hasn’t bothered to address any real points, instead preferring to bring up strawmen and then pretend to have refuted the scientific method.* Though Egnor isn’t worthy of much space here, I couldn’t help respond to one ludicrous passage:
Avoid any reference to the self-refuting nature of materialist neuroscience. If your mind is merely an emergent property of your brain, then your opinions are completely determined by your neurophysiology. But neurophysiology is determined by physics and chemistry. Can physics and chemistry ascertain truth? Don’t remind your audience that by the very act of asserting your theory you inherently stake a claim to credibility not normally accorded to meat.
When we strip aside the phrasing designed to conceal his real argument, it goes like this:
1. The human brain is made out of material.
2. Alone, this material cannot think.
3. Therefore, the brain can’t think and there must be a spiritual something that does the thinking for us.
Let’s play this fallacious argument in reverse now. The “mind” in Egnor’s philosophy has no material existence nor any observable effect on the real world. Things that can’t produce effects can only be said to exist vacuously. Therefore, the mind/soul does not exist as Egnor understands it.
This argument is at least as credible as Egnor’s, and is in fact more so. After all, while we have no evidence–none–that things truly exist which are said to exist but produce no observable effects, we know that combinations of material working within the laws of the universe can produce effects that the elements individually cannot produce. Do human’s need a soul to eat, because individual molecules cannot break down a steak and use it to power a 150-pound body? Proteins cannot speak, so we must need God to let us do that, right?
Of course not! We know that combinations within the observable physical world give real, verifiable advantages. Evolution predicts exactly this–new combinations emerging which provide useful abilities. We do not need to evoke the unknowable “mind/god/soul” in order to explain consciousness. We don’t know everything there is to know about the brain, but we are making great progress, and we have no reason to abandon the scientific paradigm and accept a god-of-the-gaps argument in it’s place.
Egnor would have us forget that he’s claiming science can’t make useful strides in understanding consciousness while proposing a counter-position that makes no predictions and is completely useless at enhancing knowledge. Thanks, Egnor, for supporting ignorance in the face of knowledge, and mysticism in the face of evidence. You’re a real credit to the DI.
*That’s not what he says he’s doing: he claims to be attacking materialism. But what he’s actually doing is desperately trying to refute the idea that we can increase our knowledge of the brain without making vague and unfalsifiable evocations of mystical undefined “something.” That’s nothing less than an attack on science’s well-demonstrated explanatory power.
Egnor would have us forget that he’s claiming science can’t make useful strides in understanding consciousness while proposing a counter-position that makes no predictions and is completely useless at enhancing knowledge.
Why woos like him got to be such a downer, maaaaan?
If the mind does not strictly depend on the size, composition, and arrangement of the brain, it becomes difficult to imagine why an intelligent designer would make the bain so dangerously large and vulnerable. Perhaps our big brains are what was intended by the curse God placed on Eve for eating the bootleg fruit, that her “pain would be increased in childbirth”? To quote an anecdote in Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” “What a shit God is.”
A few words from your post: ‘doing’ ‘attacking’ ’something’. Take any one and try to decide what the post is about from the single parts. If you can’t, something in how the words are arranged provides meaning. Try measuring that in terms of science.
Anthony:
Yawn. I tell you what: I’ll keep defending evidence and reason, and you can make excuses for Egnor defending a mystical explanation that makes no predictions and evokes unseen movers.
[...] Dear Sweet Zombie Jesus, Michael Egnor just gets worse PZ’s pointed out that Egnor, without bothering to know what PZ actually said, has attacked PZ’s recent talk […] [...]
I’m not defending anyone. Just posing a question. You’ve got no explanation then.
Anthony: your half-articulated argument by analogy is wholly unpersuasive. But since you insist on using it, I’ll respond in kind.
A real theory of grammar would use syntax and word meaning to evaluate sentences–and such theories do so. Using reason and developing a testable theory. Yea!
The Egnor theory of grammar would posit that the word “something” must have a meaning given to it by an unknowable source whose methods and motivations are unknown.
Doesn’t really answer the question, but never mind.
Why is it that on one hand, we have theists like M. Egnor that are cherry picking on the wrong fruits, ie trying to misinterpret what is already well explained by science, and on the other hand people like Dawkins and PZ Myers that cannot understand that the following arguments could make sense :
1.the universe was created in a very special state of minimum entropy and its evolution obeys a set of very specific rules that man through science will gradually discover, and that this could have been the work of an intelligent creator. It would be very helpful to start trying to understand what was the “intent” of this creator, if any.
2. science does not understand all of these rules yet and that there are some key questions that it is still incapable of answering :
-what happens after death ?
-what happened at/before the big bang
-how did life appear from an inert assembly of atoms
3. that there may exist physical phenomena that are yet to be discovered that go beyond the standard model of particle physics
4. that the copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics is not yet complete. That the theory of evolution is not yet complete. That we do not yet fully understand gravity, the cosmological constant problem and the rotational speeds of galaxies being clear scientific evidence that some new physics will have to be discovered, and that these could have a huge impact on the answers to the points in 1., as well as on how the brain works.
4. that a hypothesis such as the existence of a “soul”, located in the brain is not necessarily a “crackpot” hypothesis. That this could be a physical concept to be derived from the new physics to be discovered. That it completes the theory of evolution as known today and renders it more efficient..That what happens with the “soul” after death could be goverened by a set of physical principles, in other words, that what happens after you die is conditionned by what happens during your life.
Isn’t it because theists on one hand, have become, at large, incapable of understanding the writings of science, and on the other hand atheist scientists are becoming as dogmatic as the theists.
I think the time has come that religion starts revising a bit its old habits and accepting the fact that the bible / coran …etc had been written at a time to be understood by the people of that time. That mankind has made some progress in its understanding of nature through science. And that science understands that as long as it cannot explain everything, there will be room for spiritual beliefs that will have to evolve as science makes progress in its understanding of the laws of nature.
That there should be a proper educated dialog between science and religion and not the series of insults that are so pervasive in the blogosphere.
…there will be room for spiritual beliefs that will have to evolve as science makes progress in its understanding of the laws of nature.
Unfortunately such beliefs are becoming increasingly unnecessary. That’s God-of-the-Gaps essentially. Of course, certain questions may never be answered, but I think the default position would be skepticism rather than certainty.
christian:
As Arbiter points out, you’re relying on gaps in our knowledge and attempting to place god within those gaps, which is at very least a precarious place for a supreme being to exist.
But my attacks on Egnor have more to do with his intellectual laziness than his religion. While I would disagree with his theism in any case, the first point you make (aside from the “understand what was the ‘intent’ of this creator” part) is why I have very little problem with deists. But that’s not what Egnor’s saying. Instead, he’s claiming that we MUST have a spiritual something–something we can’t understand, observe, or study–in order to understand how the human mind works. And he makes a terrible argument to refute it.
If he wants to believe in his personal Magic Man, he’s welcome to. But when he dishonestly portrays that position as one that has explanatory power equal to the scientific method, I object.
I suspect I am less hard on religion than PZ. Certainly religions that have gone out of their way to integrate the discoveries of science into their faith are welcome, as are those that teach individual conscience rather than dogmatic conversion. I have great respect for many Quakers and Buddhists, for example. But I cannot have “proper educated dialog” on the internet with anyone who would place faith and mysticism above reason and evidence.