Stanley Fish on Atheism and Evidence
As a follow-up to the previous post and responses on “Hitchens, wrong, wrong, wrong,” Stanley Fish’s blog on “Atheism and Evidence” may be of interest. In discussing Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, Fish writes:
“This is a remarkable sequence. A very strong assertion is made – we will “undoubtedly discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness [and] our modes of conduct” – but no evidence is offered in support of it; and indeed the absence of evidence becomes a reason for confidence in its eventual emergence. This sounds an awfully lot like faith of the kind Harris and his colleagues deride – expectations based only on a first premise (itself asserted rather than proven), which, if true, demands them, and which, if false, makes nonsense of them.”
For the entire post, click here. (This may require a NYTimes subscription)
While Harris may have over stated things with the term “undoubtedly”; we are discovering more and more about our brain and how consciousness, behavior, and ethics are rooted in neurology and not divinity. You take the intellectually weak position that, just because science has not definitively proved you wrong, that your version of the biblical god must be regarded as fact. Unfortunately, there is no empirical evidence that your position is correct or even remotely valid. In fact, there is much evidence that religion is NEGATIVELY correlated with morality and ethics in society. It is tragic and dangerous that, in theistic circles, dogma is more revered than evidence.
I hold this truth to be self-evident: Society is ALWAYS better served when decisions are better made based on real, observable evidence instead of mythology.
It is up to the believer to demonstrate that their faith is something more than mythology. So far, none have.
OOPS. Typo. It should have read:
I hold this truth to be self-evident: Society is ALWAYS better served when decisions are based on real, observable evidence instead of mythology.
You seem to be confusing a couple of things here. You talk about empirical proofs for the existence of god and you talk about morality and ethics. You seem to be making the claim that there is no empirical proof that god exists and that it somehow follows that inputs for making moral or ethical decisions should come from some empirical place.
If we put aside the question of the existence of god for a moment, I think that if you thought about it you would find that there are all sorts of things that all of us believe in (including yourself) that have the same burdens of proof as the existence of god. These things include love, courage, integrity and a great number of other things that share one main property; they express a quality that can’t be quantified. All of these things have a basis in metaphysics (by which I mean here non-provable a-priori assumptions). All of them, or almost all of them, would also enter into moral or ethical decisions. In fact, to say something is ethical or moral as such involves a non-quantifiable quality statement. I think you would agree that it is immoral to murder someone. I think that you would also agree that it is nonsense to say that someone who murders four people is fifty percent less moral than some who murders two people. I don’t think that you could construct an empirical experiment that tests whether an act is ethical or not. By your definition, morality and ethics are also myths.
My point is that it is a massive leap to go from an empiricist denial of the existence of god to your statement that there is some sort of empirical, evidence based ground for moral or ethical statements that doesn’t appeal to the same sorts of metaphysical things that theists appeal to. You may say that you have freed yourself of god, but you have not freed yourself of metaphysics, unless you can come up with an ethics that does not refer to qualities. I wonder what something like that would look like?
Mike: Your self-evident truth is not self-evident. On what grounds will you defend it? If your answer is that all knowledge is empirically demonstrated, I wonder how you might demonstrate THAT claim empirically. That some (much) truth is demonstrated empircally is certainly defensible, but that all truth must be empirically demonstrated is rather difficulty to show empirically.
unagidon,
My very brief post probably lost some nuance in favor of brevity. By way of ‘proof’ of a god I neither demand nor expect anyone to reveal their god in any unimpeachable way. I merely wish someone would demonstrate something that we cannot provide natural explanations for. For instance, much has been made of the ‘power or prayer’, but the reality is that it has been shown to be completely and utterly without effect in the most rigorous and empirical ways.
When you speak of metaphysics and things that “can’t be quantified”, I think you give up too easily. We are in our infancy of gaining an understanding of the brain and it’s workings. I am not saying that we will be able to do a brain scan and numerically determine how much you love your child compared to your neighbor, but we are gaining tremendous insights into many of the minds workings. I expect that we will amass empirical evidence on some aspects of ethics, love, etc..
You say that I make a massive, unsupported leap of faith on our discovering the source of ethics. I do not make my assertion based on faith. I use evidence that we have now. There is NOTHING that bears out the claim that [your] religion is the sole source of ethics/morals. There IS evidence, however, that core ethics appear irrespective of creed and seem to transcend our species. One of my favorite examples is a Creighton University study (a christian school) that studied ‘prosperous democracies’ and compared religiosity to violent crime, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and more. The results are very clear and are not at all flattering to belief. View it at http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n03_are_religious_societies_healthier.html
If the link got broken because of line wrapping, you may have to piece it back together.
My reason for being on these boards is because it is offensive to me personally when some claim (either directly or with broad generalizations) that I am amoral and immoral because I am non-theist. It is insulting to me that some can make these baseless claims when, quite honestly, the evidence would demonstrate that non-theists are AT LEAST as ethical as theists. It is all because religion has unjustly been immune from criticism for too long.
Joe Pettit,
I make no claims that ALL knowledge is empirical knowledge. I posit that empirical knowledge is the highest standard for knowledge in that it is testable, repeatable, falsifiable and removes human interpretation and bias (to the extent that it can). Knowledge gained through philosophical discussion, meditation and [chuckle] ‘revelation’ is merely the starting point. Empiricism is the intellectual dry land.
Quote [When you speak of metaphysics and things that "can't be quantified", I think you give up too easily. We are in our infancy of gaining an understanding of the brain and its workings. I am not saying that we will be able to do a brain scan and numerically determine how much you love your child compared to your neighbor, but we are gaining tremendous insights into many of the minds workings. I expect that we will amass empirical evidence on some aspects of ethics, love, etc..]
Your faith that these things will be quantified is impressive. However, they have not been quantified as of yet. Or to put it another way, their (potential) quantifications are not available to us yet. However, you nonetheless use these things to make your moral and ethical judgments. So those judgments would seem to lack the objectivity that you required of them in your first post. You are still thrown back on your own metaphysics.
Quote [You say that I make a massive, unsupported leap of faith on our discovering the source of ethics. I do not make my assertion based on faith. I use evidence that we have now. There is NOTHING that bears out the claim that [your] religion is the sole source of ethics/morals. There IS evidence, however, that core ethics appear irrespective of creed and seem to transcend our species. One of my favorite examples is a Creighton University study (a christian school) that studied ‘prosperous democracies’ and compared religiosity to violent crime, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and more. The results are very clear and are not at all flattering to belief.]
Interestingly, I didn’t say leap of faith. I said, simply, leap. I meant leap of logic. You keep referring to some sort of evidence that we have now with which to construct an ethics. Let’s look at this.
You say that there are core ethics that appear irrespective of creed and seem to transcend our species. Not sure what you mean by “transcend our species”, but from the way that you have written this, you seem to be saying that that there are core ethics that we share with non-humans. Now unless you are also saying that those non-humans possess self consciousness, I think you would have to say that these core ethics that you are talking about are somehow innate. But if they are innate for non-humans, why aren’t they innate for humans? In other words, why would we need to talk about, think about, or theorize about these trans-species core ethics if they were indeed innate? The fact is, they don’t seem to be innate in this way at all, which is probably why humans have been talking (and fighting) about them for thousands of years.
I think you might be confusing ethics and morality on one hand, with recent scientific speculations that say that altruism and things like that play a positive role in evolution. Whether this is true or not, it does not seem to follow that some general thing like this translates into any kind of argument about what I myself need to do in a particular situation. And that’s a second problem with what you are saying. You seem to believe that general moral and ethical rules will simply and easily come from empirical observations and that this is turn will solve the moral and ethical problems that most people face, which are not “what are the core ethical values” but rather “what should I do about this particular situation that faces me at this particular moment”.
Quote [My reason for being on these boards is because it is offensive to me personally when some claim (either directly or with broad generalizations) that I am amoral and immoral because I am non-theist. It is insulting to me that some can make these baseless claims when, quite honestly, the evidence would demonstrate that non-theists are AT LEAST as ethical as theists. It is all because religion has unjustly been immune from criticism for too long.]
I don’t know about religion being “unjustly immune from criticism for too long,” since just the latest round of criticism of religion has been going on in the West for several hundred years at this point. And on this particular board, I don’t think you will find many people who think that you are amoral or immoral just because you say you don’t believe in god. You might be arguing with the wrong people about that.