Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion Forum » William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp

Greg · 4/16/2016 1:16 pm

John West wrote:
Greg wrote:
I suspect Kevin is just going to say that the deism/concurrentism distinction relates to causes and (perhaps) natural laws, while he cares about scientific theories and generalizations. The generalizations are false if they do not describe how the world evolves from t1 to t2.
It's easy to make this conclusion into a bigger deal than it is.

Suppose strong versions of best scientific theories P, Q, and R are correct. P, Q, and R say that even in a concurrentist universe, certain things must occur in certain ways. Hence, by reductio, P, Q, and R aren't correct. If P, Q, and R are our best scientific theories, this sounds like a big deal.

But when we add that we're replacing them with nearly identical theories, S, T, and U, that are for all practical purposes indiscernible from P, Q, and R, we realize we at first overreacted. That is, our “best scientific theories are false” sounds like a much bigger deal than “Our 'best scientific theories' are false, but replaced by nearly identical theories that are for all practical purposes indiscernible from them.”[1]

I agree.

But my point is more this: Let P, Q, and R be correct scientific theories in the sense that they always yield correct predictions if no miracles occur. Perhaps God could intervene in the universe quite radically, so that the modified theories that actually describe what happens in the universe are substantially different from P, Q, and R. I think the mistake here is to think that, if God intervenes, we should replace P, Q, and R at all.

Kevin's argument has a very strong presupposition. He does not assume that theism is false. So suppose theism is true and God can intervene in the world. Kevin seems to think that in such a world that God intervenes, the "best scientific theories" would be ones that take account of God's anomalous interventions. That is just radically mistaken and cannot be the point of scientific theories. If one makes the assumption of theism per impossibile, by assuming physicalism, then this might make sense--but Kevin does not want to beg all of the important questions, so he is not going to assume physicalism in a debate against a theist.

One might say that in such a world in which God intervenes, scientific theories might be overwhelmingly well-supported, so that as long as the evidence for the miracle were not truly compulsory, one could not rationally believe in it. This is familiar Humean territory and faces the same problem as Hume's arguments against miracles.

KevinScharp · 4/16/2016 1:52 pm

Greg wrote:
KevinScharp wrote:
Pragmatism about scientific theories is the controversial position -- its an extreme minority view. The view I've expressed is the consensus, but that doesn't mean it should be taken as authoritative. If you have some argument that my view is wrong and some other one is right, then I'm happy to hear it. Moreover, iwpoe is making a basic mistake, the pragmatist isn't. The pragmatist and I agree on what the scientific theory says. We disagree about the standards for what counts as a good theory. Iwpoe and I disagree about what the scientific theory says. Those are very different. So I don't think you analogy between the two disputes is apt.
This is not correct; one topic in the philosophy of science is the meaning of scientific statements. Not all pragmatists agree with realists about what scientific statements say. Some do not even think scientific statements should be read truth-functionally. Honestly, some realists do not think all scientific statements should be read truth-functionally (for instance, Nancy Cartwright, as well as realists who admit that some sciences invoke theoretical fictions).

That was the point of bringing up pragmatism, just to point out that it is entirely legitimate--and a question of philosophy of science, not science--to dispute that scientific theories mean exactly what they seem to say, read literally.

I have posted a few times about what I take to be the relationship between scientific theories and natural laws, and why I think that account undermines the argument you are trying to make. You haven't responded to them.

Great response! Now we're cooking. I'm sorry I haven't responded to your earlier posts -- I'll go back and look at them next. I agree with you that, historically, debates between realists and antirealists have sometimes been cast in terms of the content of the sentences or theories in question. I'm thinking especially of Dummett's emphasis of assertibility conditions over truth conditions or the emotivist position that moral sentences express sentiments, not propositions. Let's call this semantic antirealism. I want to pause there and consider two paths from this point. One is to think hard about whether a semantic antirealism about scientific theories would help the theist (or the Christian in particular) deal with my confidence argument. The second is to consider the fate of semantic antirealism. I'll do the second now, and do the first later.
Semantic antirealism has fallen deeply out of favor since the early 20th century when it was popular. From Dummett's work in the 50s-80s and Crispin Wright's development of it in the 90s, the hasn't been nearly as much emphasis on these views in debates about realism and antirealism. Instead, there has been a significant trend away from thinking of realism and antirealism in semantic terms and toward thinking of them in metaphysical terms. One can see this especially in the work of Kit Fine in the early 00s, but it has intensified with people like Ted Sider and Cian Dorr and John Hawthorne. Why has that happened? One reason is that the people engaged in the debate have realized what lots of other philosophers have realized -- semantics, as a topic, has been outsourced to the science of linguistics. It's their job to tell us the semantics of natural language constructions. We, philosophers who care about realism and antirealism, should take the linguistics of scientific theories as a default. Moreover, Fine and Sider and company have shown how to formulate realism / antirealism disputes as disputes about metaphysics, that is, what the world is like, rather than disputes about language. So, when I said that the realist and the antirealist should agree on the meanings of the scientific theories in question, I was taking this bit of history for granted. Good on you for pushing me on it.

KevinScharp · 4/16/2016 1:58 pm

John West wrote:
Greg wrote:
I suspect Kevin is just going to say that the deism/concurrentism distinction relates to causes and (perhaps) natural laws, while he cares about scientific theories and generalizations. The generalizations are false if they do not describe how the world evolves from t1 to t2.
It's easy to make this conclusion into a bigger deal than it is.

Suppose strong versions of best scientific theories P, Q, and R are correct. P, Q, and R say that even in a concurrentist universe, certain things must occur in certain ways. Hence, by reductio, P, Q, and R aren't correct. If P, Q, and R are our best scientific theories, this sounds like a big deal.

But when we add that we're replacing them with nearly identical theories, S, T, and U, that are for all practical purposes indiscernible from P, Q, and R, we realize we at first overreacted. That is, our “best scientific theories are false” sounds like a much bigger deal than “Our 'best scientific theories' are false, but replaced by nearly identical theories that are for all practical purposes indiscernible from them.”[1]

All this assumes classical theists have made independent arguments for a concurrentist universe.

[1]Some Quineans would still dislike it, but that has to do with certain meta-ontological rules they set down for themselves at the start of their inquiries.

What are the "nearly identical theories that are for all practical purposes indiscernible from them"?

KevinScharp · 4/16/2016 2:02 pm

Greg wrote:
Kevin's argument has a very strong presupposition. He does not assume that theism is false. So suppose theism is true and God can intervene in the world. Kevin seems to think that in such a world that God intervenes, the "best scientific theories" would be ones that take account of God's anomalous interventions.

No, I don't think that. There is no way for a scientific theory to take account of God's interventions (I take this to be pretty obvious.)

Greg wrote:
That is just radically mistaken and cannot be the point of scientific theories. If one makes the assumption of theism per impossibile, by assuming physicalism, then this might make sense--but Kevin does not want to beg all of the important questions, so he is not going to assume physicalism in a debate against a theist.

Exactly right. I would never knowingly do that. Plus I hate physicalism.

Greg wrote:
One might say that in such a world in which God intervenes, scientific theories might be overwhelmingly well-supported, so that as long as the evidence for the miracle were not truly compulsory, one could not rationally believe in it. This is familiar Humean territory and faces the same problem as Hume's arguments against miracles.

I reject this position too. It's about which way the evidence points as a whole, not about forcing people to believe things.

Greg · 4/16/2016 2:06 pm

KevinScharp wrote:
So, when I said that the realist and the antirealist should agree on the meanings of the scientific theories in question, I was taking this bit of history for granted. Good on you for pushing me on it.

I think this is a fair response. My point is not really that the theist should be an antirealist, though--merely that the meaning of scientific statements is up for grabs. It could be up for grabs in more than one way. Thoroughgoing pragmatism was one alternative to realism that I don't personally endorse.

But one can qualify the meaning of scientific statements (as I said originally) more locally and less radically. And that is what I am proposing to do.

I want to develop my point from here:

Greg wrote:
Let P, Q, and R be correct scientific theories in the sense that they always yield correct predictions if no miracles occur. Perhaps God could intervene in the universe quite radically, so that the modified theories that actually describe what happens in the universe are substantially different from P, Q, and R. I think the mistake here is to think that, if God intervenes, we should replace P, Q, and R at all.

Kevin's argument has a very strong presupposition. He does not assume that theism is false. So suppose theism is true and God can intervene in the world. Kevin seems to think that in such a world that God intervenes, the "best scientific theories" would be ones that take account of God's anomalous interventions. That is just radically mistaken and cannot be the point of scientific theories. If one makes the assumption of theism per impossibile, by assuming physicalism, then this might make sense--but Kevin does not want to beg all of the important questions, so he is not going to assume physicalism in a debate against a theist.

One might say that in such a world in which God intervenes, scientific theories might be overwhelmingly well-supported, so that as long as the evidence for the miracle were not truly compulsory, one could not rationally believe in it. This is familiar Humean territory and faces the same problem as Hume's arguments against miracles.

Suppose in some world humans achieve a correct scientific theory. It is very well-supported--even better than our present scientific theories. Suddenly, though, counterexamples--or events that strongly suggest counterexamples--start showing up. It becomes apparent and indeed compulsory from the nature and frequency of these miraculous events that God exists and causes them, albeit anomalously.

What do the now-theistic scientists do in response to this change of course? Well, they might say, "Strictly speaking our scientific theory no longer generates predictions all of the time. However, we acknowledge that this might just be a problem of scope; before we did not think that God existed, but now we know better. There's no point to throw out our scientific theories, which accurately model natural phenomena, for, in any case, there is no hope of capturing God's anomalous interventions. Rather God's anomalous interventions don't constitute counterevidence to our scientific theories, which don't aim to explain such things."

I claim there's nothing wrong with the scientific practice in this imagined world. They might add a qualifier to their scientific theories after learning of God's existence, while we do not, but that is superficial--many of our scientists are atheists and naturalists. The point is that admitting a miracle with a cause beyond the natural order need not involve the rejection of any good scientific theories.

Greg · 4/16/2016 2:13 pm

KevinScharp wrote:
Greg wrote:
Kevin's argument has a very strong presupposition. He does not assume that theism is false. So suppose theism is true and God can intervene in the world. Kevin seems to think that in such a world that God intervenes, the "best scientific theories" would be ones that take account of God's anomalous interventions.
No, I don't think that. There is no way for a scientific theory to take account of God's interventions (I take this to be pretty obvious.)

By presupposition I mean "claim to which I believe you are committed"--I am not accusing you of having explicitly endorsed it.

And I maintain that you are so committed. You're right; it is obvious that a scientific theory should not have to take account of God's interventions. But if that's right, then a miracle need not be understood as showing a scientific theory that did not predict it to be bad.

So compare our world to the world I imagined in which miracles are frequent yet still anomalous. In the latter, I claim, the miracles are no cause for abandoning any scientific theory. I claim the same is true of the former world, our world.

There is of course a substantial difference between these two worlds: the frequency and obviousness of miracles. My sense is that emphasizing this difference as the salient one is what would basically lead one down the Humean trail:

KevinScharp wrote:
Greg wrote:
One might say that in such a world in which God intervenes, scientific theories might be overwhelmingly well-supported, so that as long as the evidence for the miracle were not truly compulsory, one could not rationally believe in it. This is familiar Humean territory and faces the same problem as Hume's arguments against miracles.
I reject this position too. It's about which way the evidence points as a whole, not about forcing people to believe things.

Maybe, though, there are other ways.

John West · 4/16/2016 4:09 pm

My definition of deism seems fine, Kevin. I wrote:

Deism says that God created the world, but doesn't need to conserve it in existence. It also says that after God creates the world, everything can operate through purely non-God causes.

The second sentence says only that on deism everything can operate through non-God causes, not that it can't operate through God causes.

John West · 4/16/2016 4:10 pm

KevinScharp wrote:
If I were a Christian I would take that as the default view. Also, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss occasionalism (again, if I were a Christian). It's not to dissimilar from the view that it's the particles that make up the sun that melt your ice cream, not the sun (a view familiar from heroic mereological positions like nihilism or organicism).

You're talking about defending occasionalism with a species of pantheism or panentheism, right? The reason I reject that approach, in a nutshell, is that I don't think God is the kind of being that is ontologically dependent on anything else.

Here's an old scholastic argument. If pantheism is correct, God has proper parts. If God has proper parts, God's proper parts are ontologically required for him to exist. It is, however, contrary to God's Nature as ontological ultimate for there to be anything that, on its own, isn't God, but which God requires to exist. Hence, it's contrary to God's Nature as ontological ultimate for him to be composed from proper parts. If God isn't composed from proper parts, pantheism isn't correct.

Mutatis mutandis panentheism. Hence, neither pantheism nor panentheism are correct.

The ice cream argument sits on top of this one.

KevinScharp · 4/16/2016 4:52 pm

John West wrote:
My definition of deism seems fine, Kevin. I wrote:
Deism says that God created the world, but doesn't need to conserve it in existence. It also says that after God creates the world, everything can operate through purely non-God causes.
The second sentence says only that on deism everything can operate through non-God causes, not that it can't operate through God causes.

Right, I agree. I was just saying that I understood the deist to claim something in addition to your definition, namely that God does not intervene, even though God can intervene but need not intervene (as you point out).

KevinScharp · 4/16/2016 5:58 pm

Greg wrote:
KevinScharp wrote:
Greg wrote:
Kevin's argument has a very strong presupposition. He does not assume that theism is false. So suppose theism is true and God can intervene in the world. Kevin seems to think that in such a world that God intervenes, the "best scientific theories" would be ones that take account of God's anomalous interventions.
No, I don't think that. There is no way for a scientific theory to take account of God's interventions (I take this to be pretty obvious.)
By presupposition I mean "claim to which I believe you are committed"--I am not accusing you of having explicitly endorsed it.

And I maintain that you are so committed. You're right; it is obvious that a scientific theory should not have to take account of God's interventions. But if that's right, then a miracle need not be understood as showing a scientific theory that did not predict it to be bad.

No, that does not follow. Worlds with miracles are unpredictable. The more miracles, the less predictability. You're assuming that there would have to be good unrestricted scientific theories for the phenomena of some world regardless of how many miracles happen in that world. I think that's wrong.