Why I don't think I'll read "The God Delusion"

There's a book which has been out for 2 years by Richard Dawkins called The God Delusion. It is, as its name implies, an attack on God. It is, in short, a polemic. I feel that I should read it for the sake of intellectual honesty, if nothing else. But the more I read about it, and the more short excerpts I read, and the more I hear/read from Dawkins, the less I care. And here's why.

Dawkins quite clearly rejects out of hand the possibility that any other world view than his is right. When I say "any other worldview" I don't mean the possibility of God-- that's what he's arguing against-- but any philosophical starting point besides logical positivism. He is a strict materialist, and a logical positivist, and everything else is flatly not worth mentioning.

He makes, I won't doubt (at least until I read his book... if I read it) a convincing argument that a l.p. framework implies that God is a god of the gaps, and that those gaps will quickly disappear, and God with them. But by doing this and only this, he sidesteps the issue completely. He misses the epistemology, which is the most important part in deciding the possibility of God. You cannot tell someone they have come to a false (moreover delusional) conclusion when you refuse to discuss the framework by which they establish truth. The utter arrogance and ignorance of trying to tell me I'm delusional without even so much as mentioning my epistemological groundings makes it impossible for me to take anything Dawkins says seriously.

He (sort of) rebuts such arguments in the preface with "Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in leprechauns?" This is a fantastic point, but few people are asking him to go through a detailed study of the theology of Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Lewis and Chesterton to argue that God does not exist. What we are asking is for him to discuss their epistemological basis, rather than a priori tossing them aside. To quote Terry Eagleton "What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?" The question is not about theology, but about philosophy.

Let me expand upon that point; I don't care what Dawkins has to say about scriptural justifiability of The City of God, Fear and Trembling or Mere Christianity. I care about what he as to say about the way Augustine, Kierkegaard and Lewis establish Truth. What do they consider to be evidence of the truth of a statement? What grounds do they use to justify the existence and character of God? Why is this wrong?

Moving past his naive dismissal of several thousand years of epistemology, his caricature of religion shows how little he has even attempted to understand the religious mind. There is far too much to say on this topic, and I could hardly do it justice, so I will limit myself to a one sentence summary of his feelings on the morality of religion: He finds it to be dangerous and evil. If religion is defined to be "irrational, self-righteous, hate-filled zeal", I agree wholeheartedly. But in his religious (in that sense of the word) intolerance he refuses to accept that the source of such religion can be anything besides religion as it is normally defined and he also refuses to accept that religion (as it is normally defined) can create anything apart from such closed-mindedness.

By so vehemently rejecting everything that isn't is worldview, he is making the most absurd straw-man of himself. He claims that atheism will lead to a more peaceful society overall, but he proves himself, through his self-righteous intolerance, to be a poor example of this "truth". So, I'm not going to read The God Delusion unless someone convinces me that his argument does discuss the epistemological "failings" of a religious view, and that he doesn't caricature religion as I claim...

****
My first point reminds me of a quick exchange that was made a while ago... I tend to be bad at "arguing" points, so this is my esprit d'escalier. A friend of mine (who is also very logical positivist, and can't understand other worldviews-- although he tries, at least) made a comment about science solving some sort of subtle and difficult to determine system. Another friend responded with "that's assuming the scientific method is infallible, which it's not." to which the first friend responded "If it were possible to get machines, which cannot make the same mistakes we do, to do it, it would be." Before a rebuttal could be made (or at least before one was made) we got distracted with something else.

Besides the "you're assuming a logical positive, blah, blah..." I realized that the truth of this statement requires that the universe be objectively observable from within the universe-- otherwise there will always be irreconcilable error in any measurement, hence, science is limited. Given our current understanding of the universe, objective observability is absolutely impossible: "Einstein says so." Any observation can only be made with respect to a given object, and at a high enough resolution, everything about that observation is different for any other object.
Further, if we accept a logical positivist view on the universe, and hence, a Fregean view on math, it makes sense that the universe is governed by some mathematical system. I'm getting to a point I've made before, but.. If the universe is governed by a mathematical system, then we must accept Tarski's undefinability theorem and Gödel's incompleteness theorems. In other words, there are limits to how much we can mechanically discover about the universe. Hence, science has limits.

On evolutionary models...

I was thinking about evolution on the way home this morning. It bugs me, because Darwin really didn't say anything at all. There's nothing profound, nothing insightful about it. It is a general model for change. "The object most suitable to it's current environment will be the one that survives best, and small changes accumulate (somehow), such that new objects will have traits which suit the new environment better, thus prospering." The object can be an animal, a theory, or anything else; the environment can be any type of environment; the changes can form and be accumulated based on any set of rules.
In essence, it says things change, and certain things change "better" than others.

This is why there is social darwinism, memetics, Popper's Knowledge evolution, etc. I realize that rather than falsifying evolution it provides some circumstantial evidence, but that's not the point. The point is: it doesn't say anything. What we now call social darwinism actually predates the theory of evolution-- in fact, Darwin made an argument that can roughly be summarized as "We all know this sort of change happens in the economic realm, why not here? It's really the same sort of evolution."

You can apply the idea to literally anything that changes. Philosophy, science, marketing, pop culture, art, etc, etc-- Figure out the (intellectual/cultural/economic/political) environment, and you can see why the "victors" are the things that grew.

Is it easier to believe that the universe precisely follows simple, elegant and human discoverable laws, or that we impose simple and elegant structures on an unstructured (or weakly structured... or, dare I say, inelegantly structured) universe? What happens if the universe is simply, but inelegantly structured? If the different pieces sort of "klunk" together, rather than flowing smoothly? Can we really, actually, imagine our universe working that way? Or working according to rules that humans can't discover?

We do it because we need to impose structure on our universe in order to understand it. We cannot cope with-- cannot advance in-- a world without order. So we impose structures on our universe. Obviously, the elegant ones are the easiest to deal with. And this is where memetics/knowledge evolution come from: we learn to use more advanced structures to model the phenomena we are seeing, thus allowing us to account for more of the intricacies.

It's the smart ones who can impose structures on anything that go crazy and search for codes in the newspaper. The idea that there are a few simple laws in the background of all of the workings of the universe isn't that different from the idea that there are a few people in the background of all the workings of man, is it? What's the difference between Templar conspiracies and the search for the TOE? Humans are fickle, while universal laws can't decide-- they can only act?

***
On another note, I'm finally creating a "science" tag. I'll retroactively place posts in it at some point.

Imagination

I was thinking in the shower about a comment my physics professor made regarding funding for scientific research. "If the government doesn't fund it, who will?" I'll leave an argument for how stupid this question is for someone else to make, because I just don't care, but it got me thinking. We humans are so (read; sooooo) incapable of believing that things can work any way besides the way they do. We have really no imagination.

This set me thinking (since it was a physics professor) about quantum theory, and 20th century physics in general. I have no trouble accepting wave-particle duality, quantization, super-positioning, entanglement, the Uncertainty Principle, or all of the other fun names we have for physics concepts. I can accept them and understand them without the slightest twisting of my brain, because I can say with absolute conviction that a donut makes the same shape as a coffee cup; I can say with absolute conviction that 2*3=1; that 4*4 = 6; And I can say with a straight face that 4 or 5 dimensional space is "easy", and is just a special case of d-dimensional space. Imaginary numbers are as real as negative numbers are as real counting numbers (real in the intuitive sense, not the well-defined). I won't bet that a coin which has landed heads 1000 will land heads or tails on the next flip, unless I'm betting less money than you are.

I can turn a hollow sphere inside out. I can split a solid sphere into two spheres the same size and density of the first. And I have no super powers.

All of these different facts and systems that I've mentioned have different rules, follow different patterns, have different truths. Also, I'm expected to understand all of this before I leave college. So why would it not be the same with physics? Why could it not be the same with funding? Or art? Or the future? Why could it not be true that God follows rules which don't make sense to us?

We humans have such poor, poor imaginations. "Capacity for abstract thought," no! Where is the abstract thought?

There are times when I still think I should have been a physicist. It's so mind-numbingly intuitive; the math is easy, even at the quantum level. Oo! Group theory! I need to know that to get into graduate school; as well as ring theory and field theory, analysis, topology, and anything else you physicists have tried to play with. One of these days physicist will start using category theory to start kludging all these half-baked ideas of theirs together into a "coherent" whole, and that's when the rest of the world will know they're just making it up as they go along.

At lest mathematicians know their making it up; and are expected to.

Maybe I should still be a physicist; Maybe physics need someone who thinks they're all a bunch of idiots.

Why I'm Not a Scientist

Science, I've come to realize is not necessarily about "discovering Truth" as most people see it. Rather, it is a way to further the human study of the universe. By this I mean that a good scientific idea asks more questions than it answers-- allowing human questioning to continue forever. Correctness from the scientific perspective does not mean "It is absolutely true." Instead, it means "It fits the data (roughly), and it leads to a new area of study."
As an example (and I realize the absurdity in it), suppose it were proven, absolutely, that God exists, and everything happens only because "God says so"-- there is no discernable logic, no actual pattern to predict in God's plan. It allows for only one question "Why this way?" which is to question to ineffable will of God.
Science, cannot and would not accept this conclusion; our pursuit of knowledge about the universe would be pointless. Doubtless, people would still continue to practice science, creating mathematical models of the phenomenon around them.

What's interesting here is that they would likely continue to find ever more "accurate" models of the working universe, even though they would know that these models do not, in truth, contribute to any understanding of the universe-- it is already understood. This implies a couple of things:
1)We find patterns in everything, whether they exist or not.
2)Any sufficiently complex language can model anything; even if there is no pattern to model.
3)The link between science and math is artificial.

Ramsey theory suggests that in any large random system (which the universe described about would be, for all practical purposes) there will be some sort of pattern, even if it is not inherent in the design or mechanism of the system. The real problem arises when we ask "Which pattern is it?" This question cannot be answered without enumerating the entire system, an obviously impossible task when confronted with the universe.

Science then, would be conducted in absolutely the same way if it were both useless and contrary to truth, yet scientists trumpet Logical Positivism as something that will ultimately unlock the key to Life, the Universe, and Everything.