Philosopher Defends B***s***

Stephen Asma argues that, because philosophers have failed to formulate a criterion to distinguish science from pseudo-science, the claims of traditional Chinese medicine cannot be dismissed. But it turns out that all that he thinks important is whether the treatments are effective—a question that he thinks immune to critical examination because it is not the sort of thing about which professional philosophers can engage in a lot of sophisticated-sounding talk.

The greater one-horned rhinoceros: one of the species being 

hunted to extinction to supply the market for traditional 

Chinese medicine (source: National Geographic)

Is The Stone, the philosophy blog of the New York Times, meant to be a platform on which professional philosophers can commit the intellectual equivalent of soiling themselves in public, or is my perception just biased by my attention to a few bad examples? I don’t know, but a piece by Stephen Asma published yesterday, “The Enigma of Chinese Medicine” (The Stone, September 29, 2013), certainly falls within the category of public trouser-fouling. Actually, it is an example of something even more contemptible than that: the employment of philosophical sophistication in the service of intellectual confusion.

The argument of Asma’s piece, to the extent that it has one, is that, because philosophers have failed to solve the problem of demarcating science from pseudo-science, one cannot reject the claims of certain “alternative” medical practices, specifically traditional Chinese medicine (“TCM”) and feng shui. After opening with an anecdote about how he recovered from a cold shortly after ingesting a Chinese preparation of freshly spilled turtle blood and strong liquor, Asma intimates that one cannot rule out the possibility that the Chinese concoction has curative powers because of the persistence of what philosophers of science call “the demarcation problem”:

The contemporary philosopher of science Larry Laudan claims that philosophers have failed to give credible criteria for demarcating science from pseudoscience. Even falsifiability, the benchmark for positivist science, rules out many of the legitimate theoretical claims of cutting-edge physics, and rules in many wacky claims, like astrology — if the proponents are clever about which observations corroborate their predictions. Moreover, historians of science since Thomas Kuhn have pointed out that legitimate science rarely abandons a theory the moment falsifying observations come in, preferring instead (sometimes for decades) to chalk up counter evidence to experimental error. The Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend even gave up altogether on a so-called scientific method, arguing that science is not a special technique for producing truth but a flawed species of regular human reasoning (loaded with error, bias and rhetorical persuasion). And finally, increased rationality doesn’t always decrease credulity.

We like to think that a rigorous application of logic will eliminate kooky ideas. But it doesn’t. Even a person as well versed in induction and deduction as Arthur Conan Doyle believed that the death of Lord Carnarvon, the patron of the Tutankhamen expedition, may have been caused by a pharaoh’s curse.

Setting aside the appeals to authority, Asma’s main claims here are these: (1) No one has identified a reliable criterion for distinguishing science from pseudo-science. (2) No one has given a credible specification of a method distinctive of science. (3) Increased rationality or practice in induction and deduction does not always decrease credulity toward kooky ideas.

The third claim seems pretty clearly irrelevant to Asma’s thesis. The case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s belief in the curse of Tutankhamen (it is disappointing that Asma does not cite the more instructive case of Doyle’s belief in the Cottingley fairies) might be of some relevance if it were an instance in which someone was led to supernaturalistic conclusions by sound deductive and inductive reasoning (supposing such a thing to be possible). But it is not; it is an instance of the distortion of judgment by cognitive bias. Such cases remind us that cognitive bias afflicts all human beings without exception. That is precisely why we need instruction in deductive and inductive reasoning, as well as knowledge of the cognitive biases themselves: only then can we, sometimes, rise above our worse selves and correct our judgment in empirical matters when it goes awry. But, as Asma makes no further reference to these observations in his piece, I will say no more about them.

What of the first two claims? Granted, for the sake of argument, that there is no known universal criterion or distinctive method demarcating science from pseudo-science, how is that supposed to lend credibility to the claims of traditional Chinese medicine? Asma never makes this clear, but the implied reasoning seems to be this: “Many people dismiss traditional Chinese medicine as pseudo-science; but there is no way to distinguish in principle between science and pseudo-science; therefore, one cannot dismiss traditional Chinese medicine.” If this is the intended argument, it fails on two scores. In the first place, the fact that one cannot give a universal criterion for distinguishing A from B does not show that there is no difference between A and B, or that one is unjustified in identifying something as an instance of A and not of B. There is, for example, no commonly accepted explanation of the distinction between right and wrong: it doesn’t follow that one can’t soundly and justly judge of some action that it is wrong. Second, even if Asma could show that traditional Chinese medicine escapes the charge of pseudo-science, it would not follow that its claims have the slightest degree of credibility. “Scientific” doesn’t imply “warranted” or “sound,” and “not pseudo-science” doesn’t imply “not a load of bollocks.”

I have said that this seems to be Asma’s argument, but in the end it is not clear that Asma even intends to make an argument. What we get instead in the conclusion of the piece is just a certain insinuation. After providing a second anecdote of his undergoing a treatment by traditional Chinese medicine and subsequently feeling decidedly better, he concludes the piece with these paragraphs:

It seems entirely reasonable to believe in the effectiveness of T.C.M. [traditional Chinese medicine] and still have grave doubts about qi. In other words, it is possible for people to practice a kind of “accidental medicine”—in the sense that symptoms might be alleviated even when their causes are misdiagnosed (it happens all the time in Western medicine, too). Acupuncture, turtle blood, and many similar therapies are not superstitious, but may be morsels of practical folk wisdom. The causal theory that’s concocted to explain the practical successes of treatment is not terribly important or interesting to the poor schlub who’s thrown out his back or taken ill.

Ultimately, one can be skeptical of both qi and a sacrosanct scientific method, but still be a devotee of fallible pragmatic truth. In the end, most of us are gamblers about health treatments. We play as many options as we can; a little acupuncture, a little ibuprofen, a little turtle’s blood. Throw enough cards (or remedies), and eventually some odds will go your way. Is that superstition or wisdom?

If this is the summation of Asma’s position, then the preceding references to the demarcation problem, far from being an argument, are just a sort of preparatory entertainment and are inessential, if not altogether irrelevant, to his main point. According to what Asma says here, it makes no difference whether traditional Chinese medicine is science or pseudo-science, because the legitimacy of its theoretical claims—about qi and so forth—is irrelevant to claims of its effectiveness. The “fallible pragmatic truth” of such claims is what really matters.

Notice what has happened here. Having spent most of the piece considering the theoretical claims of traditional Chinese medicine and invoking the demarcation problem to argue—by a villainous non sequitur—that because we can’t solve the problem, we can’t dismiss such claims, he now says that it is only the claims of effectiveness that matter. And with regard to such claims, he coyly suggests, we are wise to take a chance on the treatments because we can’t know that the claims for them are false.

What sort of claim is Asma talking about here? And how are such claims to be assessed? Notice that there is a world of difference between claims of the following two sorts:

(1) I underwent treatment T, and subsequently my headache went away.

(2) Treatment T is effective against headache.

Obviously, the second claim is much stronger than the first. For one thing, it has a generality to it that the first lacks. But more than that, it asserts a causal connection that the first one does not. To establish claim (1), all that is needed is evidence that the speaker had a headache before she underwent T and ceased to have it afterward. To establish claim (2), we require evidence (a) that quite generally people with headaches who undergo T lose those headaches after undergoing T and (b) that this is not due to factors extraneous to T, such as the headaches going away by themselves. Anecdotes on the lines of claim (1) can support point (a), and many people content themselves with finding evidence of this nature—a manifestation of confirmation bias. But such anecdotes, no many how many in number, fail to establish, or even to support, claim (2) if they are not supplemented by evidence supporting point (b). That sort of evidence is by far the more difficult sort to procure. It requires experimental controls, such as blinding and, optimally, even double-blinding (arranging that neither the administrator nor the recipient of the treatment knows whether T is being administered or not). And, of course, in any study of such matters, the significance of the results must be assessed according to the size of the sample, the basis of selection, possible sources of bias, and so forth. Such considerations are the ABCs of the “scientific method” on whose existence sophisticated philosophers of science like Feyerabend (invoked by Asma in the passage quoted earlier) would cast such scornful doubt.

What is exasperating about Asma’s piece is that he proceeds as if none of this elementary scientific method existed, or mattered. He seems to reason that, once the theoretical claims of traditional Chinese medicine are set aside, no critical assessment of the remaining claims is possible: anecdotes are all the evidence that anyone has or needs, because the choice of a treatment is always a gamble anyway. Well, of course there is an element of uncertainty in any medical treatment; in that respect, any choice of treatment is a gamble. But the fact that we don’t know exactly what is going to happen in any specific instance does not entail that we don’t know a great deal about the effectiveness of treatments. And of course it is possible that one or another Chinese treatment will eventually be found to be genuinely effective (i.e., more effective than placebo); that does not entail that we don’t already know a lot of them to be ineffective, or that we have as much reason to believe as to disbelieve the claims of effectiveness made for others of them. (See, e.g., Joe Nickell, “Traditional Chinese Medicine: Views East and West,” Skeptical Inquirer, March–April 2012.)

Pondering the “demarcation problem” is a professional specialty of philosophers. Evaluating the effectiveness of “alternative” medical treatments is not: it is a matter for medical scientists, though the results of their research can be judged and appreciated by persons without medical or other scientific training. Asma, having gotten to the end of his professional expertise by reflecting—uselessly and irrelevantly, as it emerges in the end—on the demarcation problem, proceeds as if there is simply no further basis for a critical assessment of the claims of traditional Chinese medicine. But there manifestly is: it just isn’t a matter of philosophical expertise. The specifically philosophical elements of Asma’s piece turn out in the end to be nothing but a blind for making it look as though claims of effectiveness made for traditional Chinese medicine and feng shui were beyond reach of critical examination.

More on Thinking Probabilistically

We typically use the plural noun “probabilities” only when speaking of events that are potentially repeatable, like throws of a pair of dice. But the notion of probability has another aspect, namely the degree of strength of belief warranted by evidence. This seems to apply, at least potentially, to the question of divine existence. But one may doubt whether the “God” about which some reason probabilistically can be identified with the God worshiped and served in any actual religion.

According to this page, these actually work

My previous entry addressed, but—characteristically, I confess—did not answer, the question “Is the existence of God a matter of probabilities?” I wish now that I had used the singular form of the noun “probability” rather than the plural, as the latter has associations that I don’t welcome. The plural form “probabilities” tends to suggest numerical values or measures of probability, which in turn (and this is the most unwelcome part) suggests the sort of case in which an event of a specific, repeatable type occurs under specific conditions—for instance, the event of a hand of five playing cards containing a pair, given that the five cards are dealt randomly from a deck of 52. Even if we are speaking, say, of the probability that candidate So and So will win the upcoming election, which is not a repeatable event-type but a single occurrence, we may consider that outcome as belonging to a type specifiable more or less broadly according to country, locale, time period, type of office, characteristics of the candidate, and so on; and we can then calculate the chances accordingly.

But what if we are speaking of the probability of a possible fact that is not an instance of a repeatable type? Discussions of the existence of God would be a case of this. The idea of assigning the existence of God to some type of repeatable event seems senseless. Perhaps some diligent analytic metaphysician somewhere has reckoned the probability of divine existence as the proportion of God-made possible worlds to Godless ones; but I don’t care to take account of all conceivable products of academic invention. If the concept of probability applies only to repeatable event-types, and if, as seems plain, the existence of God is not an event of a repeatable type, then the answer to the question “Is the existence of God a matter of probability?” is a flat and rather uninteresting “No.”

But the concept of probability is not restricted to such cases. When Bishop Butler remarked in the “Introduction” to his Analogy of Religion (1736) that “to us, probability is the very guide of life,” he was not referring to the calculus of chance, which was then in its infancy. He was speaking of probability in contrast with absolute certainty, and of the condition of finite intellects in contrast with that of an infinite one:

Probable evidence is essentially distinguished from demonstrative by this, that it admits of degrees; and all variety of them, from the highest moral certainty, to the very lowest presumption. . . .

Probable evidence, in its very nature, affords but an imperfect kind of information, and is to be considered as relative only to beings of limited capacities. For nothing which is the possible object of knowledge, whether past, present, or future, can be probable to an infinite Intelligence; since it cannot but be discerned absolutely, as it is in itself, certainly true, or certainly false. But, to us, probability is the very guide of life.

Probability is our guide in life because our knowledge of the world is, by our nature, limited. To follow probability in the pertinent sense is not to reckon odds but to weigh what Butler calls “presumptions,” or reasons for belief. There is more to probability than mere chance. As Ian Hacking remarks in his historical study The Emergence of Probability,

Probability has two aspects. It is connected with the degree of belief warranted by evidence, and it is connected with the tendency, displayed by some chance devices, to produce stable relative frequencies.

Hacking dubs the first aspect of probability the “epistemological” (from Greek epistēmē, “knowledge”) and the other the “aleatory” (from Latin ālea, “die” or, by derivation, “game of chance”). I think “epistemic” is a more widely used term for the former, although, since it is belief and not knowledge that is in question, “doxic” (from Greek doxa, “belief”) would be more apt. Whatever the terminology, and however we may try to understand the relation between these two aspects of probability, it is the doxic or epistemic aspect that is pertinent when the existence of God is treated probabilistically. The fundamental thought is not that we can calculate the chance that God exists as we can the chance of getting a certain result from throwing a pair of dice, say, but that some degree of strength of belief that God exists is warranted by the evidence available to us.

The question “Is the existence of God a matter of probability?” is a question about a question. It concerns how the question “Does God exist?” may be answered—what sort of thing one has to do, or may do, to answer it. Anyone who assumes that the question must be, or may be, answered by weighing what Butler terms “probable” evidence (meaning empirical evidence, as contrasted with the “demonstrative” evidence of proofs a priori) assumes that the answer to the first question is “Yes”—that the existence of God is a matter of probability.

Most writers who argue for atheism seem to make this assumption. They typically argue either that there is no evidence that God exists or that there is evidence that God does not exist. It seems to go without saying for them that to answer the question of God’s existence otherwise than by evaluating the available evidence would be incompatible with intellectual integrity. For instance, Richard Dawkins entitles one chapter of his book The God Delusion “The God Hypothesis” and another “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God.” For Dawkins, to treat belief in God as a “hypothesis” is what it means to take the proposition “God exists” seriously as a contender for truth. As for the probabilistic qualification “almost certainly,” it is not for him a sign of weakness but a point of strength, as it shows that he, like any good scientist and in contrast to the great majority of theistic believers, founds his opinion in the matter on where the preponderance of evidence lies. “What matters,” he says at one point, “is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable”; which, of course, it isn’t, according to him.

I am inclined to agree, in a certain guarded fashion, with Dawkins that the existence of God is not probable—not, however, because it is improbable, as he thinks, but because it is not a matter of probability at all. I said in my previous entry that it is not easy to defend this claim. This evoked some interesting comments from Tommi Uschanov, who does not share my sense of difficulty on this point. The following two observations, which, he says, “have been presented often in Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, by O. K. Bouwsma or D. Z. Phillips, for instance,” he finds “do the work so well that nothing more needs to be said”:

1) If someone has lived his life atheistically or otherwise irreligiously through a wrong assessment of probabilities, due to an innate lack of talent for mathematics and statistics, this would seem to mean that God condemns him to perdition through a failure to endow him with sufficient talent to make the required calculations. But this is obviously contrary to the moral teaching of the religion itself. And indeed to the whole official self-image of the religion.

2) The importation of the probabilistic way of speaking to properly religious language makes this language (not unintelligible, which would be the positivist critique, but) uproariously funny.

For instance, . . . Psalm 23 does not say: “The Lord is probably my shepherd; I probably shall not want. . . .” [Other examples follow.]

The first argument seems to me an effective objection to anyone who, like William Lane Craig, uses probabilistic arguments to defend the reasonableness of Christianity; but only because Christianity, at least in some of its varieties, holds the non-acceptance of Christian doctrine to be a sin subject to divine retribution. There are, of course, interpretations of Christianity that reject this belief, but it has been a part of Christian doctrine historically and is, so far as I know, not found in any other major religion. In any case, it is not a part of theistic belief per se. The objection, therefore, tells only against probabilistic defenses of some varieties Christianity and not to probabilistic approaches to the question of divine existence in general. Further, the objection seems to be just a variant of the ancient one that if God makes human beings sinful that he cannot justly punish them for their sins: so if he makes someone inept at forming beliefs, he cannot justly punish that person for failing to arrive at the right beliefs. In any case, the most that this objection can show is that it is imprudent for a Christian to try to make probabilistic arguments for the existence of God. It doesn’t show that there is anything inherently wrong with doing this in general or with treating the question of God’s existence probabilistically in the first place.

Uschanov’s second argument may seem even less effective, as it can be rebutted on several grounds. For one thing, to make a probabilistic argument means only that the premises from which one argues provide reasons to accept one’s conclusion without entailing it with logical necessity. It does not mean that the conclusion has to include a probabilistic qualifier. For instance, if I know that Smith fell into a piece of industrial machinery and was ground to bits, and I conclude on that basis that he is dead, I am reasoning probabilistically; that does not mean that I am obliged to say only, “Smith is probably dead.” In such a case, my premise warrants my conclusion with moral certainty, which is certainty beyond a reasonable doubt (though not beyond all logically conceivable doubt). For another thing, if someone tries to show that there is sufficient empirical evidence to conclude that God exists, it does not follow that she is bound to import probabilistic language into her religious practices, such as prayers, or to rephrase scriptural passages to include such language. Finally, to advance a probabilistic argument for belief in the existence of God does not commit one to holding that theistic believers should base their belief on such a justification. One might offer the argument purely for the purpose of refuting skeptical doubts of God’s existence and showing that theistic belief is rationally warranted. (As I said in my reply to Tommi’s comment, William Lane Craig seems to be trying to do something parallel to this, but specifically for certain Christian doctrines, not for bare theism.)

With all that said, I think that there is at least potentially more to Uschanov’s objection (or to the sources from which he draws it) than such replies recognize. The point of the objection, as I understand it, is not to argue, “To defend theism probabilistically commits you to saying things like these; these things are patently ridiculous; therefore, it is misconceived to defend theism probabilistically.” At least, I think that the objection is much more effective if it is taken differently, as an attempt to bring out something incoherent in the probabilistic approach to divine existence precisely by taking it seriously. It is as if one were to say: “You want to treat the existence of God as a matter of probability? Fine! Let’s do that consistently and see what happens!”

The suggestion, in other words—at least, this is the suggestion that I derive from the objection as stated—is that if you adopt a probabilistic approach to the question of God’s existence, the “God” that you reason about, no matter whether your conclusion is theistic or atheistic, will be a philosophical fetish or idol and not that which is worshiped and served in any of the world’s religions. Probabilistic reasoning and religious practice are not two different ways of relating oneself to the same entity; rather, one is a way of relating oneself to God, if God exists, and the other is a way of relating oneself to a figment of the intellect mistakenly called by the same name. To put the point another way, a possible object of religious devotion is not a possible object of probabilistic reasoning.

That, at any rate, is the idea that Uschanov’s comment suggests to me. I think it can also be taken as a development of the objection that Duncan Richter was making in the blog entry that I discussed in my previous entry here, when he said that a probabilistic approach to the question of divine existence “treats God as the same kind of thing as a fluke gust of wind, i.e. something whose odds we might calculate or at least estimate, i.e. as something natural, however super.” If the objection can be satisfactorily worked out, it should be applicable to polytheistic religions as well as to monotheisms—or rather, not to the religions, but to probabilistic treatments of the question of the existence of their gods. It may even be applicable to probabilistic would-be defenses of revealed religion, such as that offered by Craig, who incorporates scripture into his evidence base.

I find it an attractive idea, but I don’t entirely trust it, and I certainly don’t have a defense of it ready. So, once again, I close with unfinished business.

REFERENCES

Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, ed. by G. R. Crooks (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1860), p. 84.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, paperback ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 77.

Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 1.

Ancient Polytheism and the Concept of Evidence

Gary Gutting offers a double-layered agnosticism about the existence of the gods of ancient Greece: we are in no position to say with assurance that the ancient Greeks did not have good evidence for the existence of Zeus and company, he argues, and therefore, we are in no position to say with assurance that their gods did not exist. The first claim is mistaken, and it is mistaken because the facts that Gutting marshals to support his case have nothing to do with evidence at all.

 In a piece recently published in The Stone, a part of the Web site of the New York Times, Gary Gutting poses the question whether we are in a position to deny the existence of the gods of ancient Greece. If, he says, we cannot “eliminate the very real possibility” that for the ancient Greeks “divinity was . . . a widely and deeply experienced fact of life”—and he goes on to assert that we cannot—then “shouldn’t we hold a merely agnostic position on Zeus and the other Greek gods, taking seriously the possibility that they existed but holding that we have good reason neither to assert nor deny their existence?” After considering and rebutting several arguments for a negative answer to this question, he opts for an affirmative one: a denial of the existence of Zeus, he says, is “ungrounded,” and, although “there is no current evidence of his present existence,” we have no reason “to assume that there was no good evidence for his existence available to the ancient Greeks.”

Gutting recommends agnosticism, and even what one might call adoxism (absence of belief one way or the other), on two distinct questions: (1) whether Zeus and the other gods of ancient Greece existed and (2) whether the ancient Greeks had good evidence of their existence. He holds that we lack sufficient evidence for either an affirmative or a negative answer to the second question, and that for that reason we lack sufficient evidence for either an affirmative or a negative answer to the first. In other words, we are, according to Gutting, in no position to answer the question of whether the ancient Greeks had good evidence of the existence of their gods, and in consequence we are in no position to affirm or deny that the Greek gods existed. (Gutting has further considerations on the question whether we are in a position to affirm or deny that Zeus and company do (now, still) exist, but they seem to me secondary and I prefer to leave them aside for the sake of simplicity.)

Clearly, then, the weight of Gutting’s position falls on his claim that, for all we know, the ancient Greeks may have had good evidence of the existence of their gods. His argument for this claim is contained in a paragraph that begins thus:

Why did belief in the gods persist in spite of critical challenges? What evidence seemed decisive to the ancient Greeks? Robert Parker, in his recent authoritative survey, “On Greek Religion,” emphasizes the role of what the Greeks saw as experiences of divine actions in their lives. “The greatest evidence for the existence of gods is that piety works . . . the converse is that impiety leads to disaster,” with by far the most emphasis given to the perils of ignoring the gods.

One might wonder whether Parker, in the quotation within this quotation, is making an assertion of his own about evidence or is merely reporting on what the ancient Greeks took for evidence. Is he saying that, in ancient Greece, piety toward the gods produced good effects and impiety or disregard of the gods bad effects? Or is he saying merely that the Greeks experienced the world as if it worked in this way? The first, stronger claim surely goes beyond anything that can be justified by historical evidence. Presumably Parker is making only the second, weaker claim—and so, presumably, is Gutting. No doubt, ancient Greeks, like other theistic believers, took note of instances in which pious conduct was followed by good fortune or the lack or the opposite of it by ill fortune, and tended to disregard counterinstances. No doubt, like other theistic believers, they were very resourceful in finding correlations where none was obvious, and in positing unobserved acts of piety or impiety to make sense of occurrences of good or ill fortune that seemed to lack the required antecedent. But these are simply the common tricks of confirmation bias, not instances of following evidence in any serious sense.

So far, if this is the kind of “evidence” of the existence of the gods that “seemed decisive to the ancient Greeks,” it does not support Gutting’s recommended agnosticism at all. The cited observations of Parker concern how the theistic beliefs of the ancient Greeks influenced their perception of the workings of the world. They do not provide the least reason to believe that the Greeks actually had anything that merits the description “evidence of the existence of gods,” much less “good evidence” thereof. If what the Greeks thought of as evidence was just their perception of correlations between one’s comportment toward the gods and one’s fortunes, then agnosticism about whether they had such evidence is not warranted at all: rather, we have good reason to conclude that they had no such evidence.

However, Gutting offers further observations, still drawing on Parker’s work:

There were also rituals, associated with the many cults of specific gods, that for some worshippers “created a sense of contact with the divine. One knows that the gods exist because one feels their presence during the drama of the mysteries or the elation of the choral dance.” More broadly, there were “epiphanies” that could “indicate not merely a visible or audible epiphany (whether in the light of day or through a dream . . .) but also any clear expression of a god’s favor such as weather conditions hampering an enemy, a miraculous escape, or a cure; it may also be used of the continuing disposition of a god or goddess to offer manifest assistance.”

I take it that in the passages quoted within the quotation Parker is, once again, adopting a kind of disguised indirect speech. That “one knows” that the gods exist because “one feels” their presence in the course of ritual observances is what “one” would say if “one” were an ancient Greek. Of course, we moderns, speaking of and for ourselves, will say no such things, and not only because we do not participate in ancient Greek religious rituals or have seeming epiphanies of their gods. Setting aside all ironic, disguised, or “inverted comma” modes of expression, surely what we will say of the ancient Greeks’ experience of their rituals and their epiphanies is not that they (really, literally) felt the presence of their gods but only that they experienced these activities as if the gods were present in them, or that they took them to be experiences of divine presences.

What, then, if anything, in these facts can constitute, or even be a candidate for constituting, evidence of the existence of the Greek gods? Some, perhaps most or even all Greeks, it seems, had certain experiences, which they attributed to the influence of their gods. Is the mere fact that they attributed these experiences to divine influence supposed to be evidence that this attribution was correct? Surely such a suggestion would rob the term “evidence” of all meaning: it would amount to making a belief count as “evidence” for itself.

Perhaps what Gutting has in mind is this: The ancient Greeks had certain experiences which they described in terms of the presence and the influence of their gods. If their gods really existed, then those experiences were evidence of the existence of their gods; if their gods did not exist, then those experiences were not evidence of the existence of their gods. Although we moderns do not believe that their gods existed, we do not know that they did not exist. Therefore, we do not know that the Greeks had no evidence of the existence of their gods. For all we know, they may have had such evidence.

But that won’t do: it reverses the order of argumentation that Gutting sets out. Gutting argues first that we don’t know that the Greeks had no evidence of the existence of their gods, and then in consequence that we don’t know that their gods did not exist.

Rather than try out further interpretations I will simply confess at this point that, if Gutting has a coherent position in this matter, I have been unable to find it. In fact I believe that he has made a coherent position impossible for himself by introducing the term “evidence” where it does not belong. The point in whose service Gutting quotes Parker, namely that for the Greeks “divinity was . . . a widely and deeply experienced fact of life,” has nothing to do with evidence at all. I can gather from Parker’s statements that if I were an ancient Greek, I would experience religious observances as involving the presence or the influence of Zeus and company. That does not mean that I would regard my experiences as having a sort of divine-presence quality to them and then, from the fact that I had experiences of this character, draw the conclusion that I had genuine experiences of divine presence. Such a manner of thinking would be a bizarre case of self-dissociation. In any case, it is certainly not what Parker is describing in the passages that Gutting quotes. If the Greeks commonly had what they interpreted as experiences of the presence and the actions of their gods then it would have been idle and pointless for them in addition to cite those experiences as evidence that their gods existed.

“Very well,” one might reply in defense of Gutting: “the Greeks themselves did not regard their religious experiences as evidence of the existence of their gods, but they could have done so. They could have cited the fact that they had certain experiences as evidence that their gods existed.” Could they indeed? How could they have identified and described the pertinent experiences? If they had done so in terms of the presence of their gods, then they would be building into their statements of the so-called “evidence” the very claim for which those statements are supposed to constitute evidence, namely that their gods exist. To avoid doing that, they would have had to describe their experiences in terms that were completely neutral with regard to the existence of their gods. But how could they have gone about doing that? Would they even have been capable of doing that? As I understand what Parker is telling us, it is in the very nature of the experiences that the Greeks had of their religious observances that, to those who had  them, they seemed to be experiences of the presence of gods. So it is doubtful that those who had such experiences could ever describe them in non-theistic terms. It is therefore doubtful that the ancient Greeks could ever have cited such experiences as evidence of the existence of their gods. Their belief in their gods was not derived from evidence, and Gutting provides no reason to believe that it ever was or even could have been supported by any evidence.

So what comes of Gutting’s argument for agnosticism about the existence of the gods of the ancient Greeks? Its main premise, that we are in no position to say whether the Greeks had good evidence of the existence of their gods, is false: we have in fact good reason to conclude that they had no such evidence. There may be grounds for agnosticism about the existence of the Greek gods, but agnosticism about the existence, in ancient times, of evidence for the existence of those gods is not a support for it.

REFERENCES

Gary Gutting, “Did Zeus Exist?”, The New York Times on line, July 31, 2013.

Robert Parker, On Ancient Greek Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011)

The Non-Consolations of Biology

A scientific theory that says nothing about the meaning, purpose, or value of human life is not for that reason a denial that there is any meaning, purpose, or value in human life.

Kenneth R. Miller reports being asked, after giving a public lecture on evolution, the following question by a member of the audience: “How can you tell me that I’m just an animal? How can you say that I’m no better than the beasts? That the only things that matter in life are to struggle, survive, and mate? There’s just got to be more to life than that” (Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 135).

It seems to me that such questions rest on the fallacy of moving from the premise “Biology says nothing about the value, meaning, or purpose of human life” to the conclusion “Biology says that there is no value, meaning, or purpose to human life.” That this inference is fallacious I take to be obvious. Biology says nothing about these things because they are outside its bailiwick. They are not scientific matters at all. (In an earlier series of posts—“Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion,” “More on Gould on Science and Religion,” and “A Dilemma for NOMA”—I subjected Stephen Jay Gould’s conception of “non-overlapping magisteria” to extensive criticism; but on this particular point, I have had no disagreement with him.)

Of course, people do not commit this fallacy concerning chemistry, say, or physics, which also say nothing about the value, meaning, or purpose of human life. Perhaps that is because those sciences do not concern “life,” while biology does. And perhaps this is what made Miller’s questioner feel that he was being somehow diminished by the theory of evolution. But biology concerns “life” in the sense of what distinguishes organisms from the rest of nature and makes them all akin to one another, not in the specific sense of conscious human existence, with all its attendant aspirations.

This is presumably the very feature of biology that rubbed Miller’s questioner the wrong way: that biology regards human beings as just another species of living thing. But so does physics regard human beings as just so many physical things; chemistry, as so many chemical things. These sciences treat of “actions” and “reactions,” as biology treats of “life,” but they say nothing of what makes human actions and reactions, or human life, so much different from the merely physical, chemical, or biological sort, and so interesting to us. Questions of the value, meaning, or purpose of human life simply go unanswered in science. Why should anyone take that to imply that science, or one science in particular, gives a nihilistic answer to such questions?