Core Questions In Philosophy Sober Edition 5000

Alan Saunders: Hi, I'm Alan Saunders, this is The Philosopher's Zone, and we begin with some musings from the very early 19th century. 'In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there. I might possibly answer that for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground. There must have existed at some time an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, and designed its use.' The words of the English philosopher and clergyman, William Paley, who in short, thought that nature was a watch and that a watch has to have had a watchmaker. This is still an issue, and Paley's greatest fans today are the proponents of what is known as Intelligent design.

1. Core Questions In Philosophy Pdf

But does Intelligent design have philosophical legs, or is it just a way of smuggling in Creationism? That's the concern of my guest this week.

He's Elliot Sober, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of Evidence and Evolution: The Logic behind the Science. Elliot Sober: The fundamental idea driving both Creationists, the philosophical ideas, the argument from design, which has a long history, Paley wrote at the beginning of the 19th century and gave the famous argument about the watch on the heath that you just described, but it goes back centuries before that. Aquinas espoused a version of it in the Middle Ages, and the difference is that when Paley and his predecessors wrote in 1809, they didn't know anything about Darwin's theory. Darwin came on board with The Origin of Species in 1859.

What they were able to think about in the time of Paley was chance versus intelligent design, and the intellectual landscape changed fundamentally after Darwin, because the theory of evolution by natural selection is not the same as the old idea of chance. There's a non-chance element in the theory of natural selection that's very important. The theory that Darwin invented and which is still all the standard picture that evolutionary biologists have now, is that mutations arise by chance, but then there's a non-random, non-chance process called natural selection in which characteristics that help organisms survive and reproduce are going to be spread in a population, and less fit traits will disappear. That's not a matter of chance, that's driven by our greater survival and reproduction of some traits, lesser in others. Alan Saunders: In writing about intelligent design, you distinguish between the full theistic version of intelligent design and what you call 'mini-ID', mini intelligent design.

So what is mini-ID? Elliot Sober: OK, mini-ID, like maxi-ID, rejects evolutionary theory as an adequate explanation of what we see in the living world, and so in that respect it's not any different from creationism. The mini part is you don't use the G-word, you don't say God made organisms and their adaptation, you say an intelligent designer whose identity my theory is officially neutral about, you back off from God to an intelligent designer, that's the modesty of mini-ID, and secondly you drop a lot of other standard creationist claims for example the idea that the earth and life on it is less than 10,000 years old.

You also drop a standard creationist denial that all living things share common ancestors. This is a very important idea in evolutionary biology from Darwin down to the present, that everything alive now on earth traces back to common ancestors. We and chimps, we and all animals, we and all plants, we are all stemmed from someone or a small number of what Darwin called original progenitors.

And creationists hated that idea, and mini-ID is officially neutral on that one, too. Alan Saunders: An argument against ID is that it is not falsifiable. That is to say that you cannot specify a finding that would prove it to be wrong. How do you respond to that argument against ID? Elliot Sober: Well there's something that I agree with in that criticism, and something I disagree with. So what I agree with is that intelligent design advocates do not really have a substantive theory, and in that sense their theory can't be tested because they don't have a theory.

What they have is a sentence that they can add to anything they please. The sentence is, 'An Intelligent designer made that', and you can add that to anything you observe after the fact. What they don't have is a theory that makes predictions about what you should find or what you should not find in the natural world. That's what I mean by saying they don't have a theory, they just have a slogan.

So it's not testable because there's nothing that's really making a prediction there. It's unlike evolutionary biology which makes many testable predictions. So that's a fundamental difference. So I agree that if that's the thought when people bring up falsifiability, I certainly agree that that's an important criticism.

There's a more detailed idea that comes along with the phrase, 'falsifiability'. Falsifiability was made popular in philosophy by Karl Popper who claimed that falsifiability is the demarcation criterion, the principle that separates scientific statements from unscientific statements. And Popper to his credit, did not simply use the word 'falsifiable' in a kind of informal vague way, he was very precise about what that meant. And many philosophers of science, myself included, think that when you look at the details of what Popper meant by 'falsifiability,' it turns out that it's not a good account of what testability really means, it's not a principle that really succeeds in separating science from non-science.

So falsifiability as a technical idea from Popper, I don't agree with, the looser idea that scientific theories should be testable, which was Popper's starting point, I agree with that. Alan Saunders: What's wrong with Popper's idea of falsifiability? Elliot Sober: Here's one thing that's wrong with it. No probability statement will be falsifiable in the technical sense that Popper defined. So let me explain what I mean. Now consider the statement that a certain coin has a probability of.5 of landing heads when you toss it - it's a fair coin.

That's a statement. Now you might think that that's a testable statement, we can just toss the coin a bunch of times and see how frequently heads occurs in that run of 100 tosses, let's say. But when you look more carefully at this experiment that you're contemplating, you'll see that every possible outcome of the experiment is logically consistent with the hypothesis that the coin is fair. It's logically possible for a fair coin to land 100 heads in a row. It's also logically possible for a fair coin to land 100 tails in a row, and 50-50 is possible, 49-51 is possible, all possible observations in this experiment are consistent with the statement that the coin is fair. Therefore, Popper is obliged to conclude that the statement about probability, that the probability of heads when you toss the coin is one half, is unfalsifiable, and according to him, that means it has to be unscientific. But science is filled with probability statements, including the theory of evolution, which is a probabilistic theory.

So you can see where the Popperian idea of falsifiability goes wrong. It counts probability statements as unscientific, where it's perfectly obvious that they are scientific, they are testable, and at some loose sense that philosophers struggle to characterise clearly, but they're not falsifiable in strict sense that Popper defined, which means that the statement is logically inconsistent with some possible observation. Alan Saunders: In fact Popper himself was very, very interested in evolution, but he had serious problems with Darwin, didn't he?

Elliot Sober: This is an interesting episode in Popper's career, which I'd like to know more about. But I'll tell you what I know about it. He published a paper in the 1970s saying that evolutionary theory was not a scientific theory, but was a scientific research program and I think he said a metaphysical research program. Alan Saunders: Yes, he did.

Elliot Sober: And what he meant by that is that the theory of evolution is not really a scientific theory, but it's suggestive, and helps scientists to think of other theories, other more specific hypotheses that are themselves falsifiable and therefore by his lights, scientific. A year later he published a retraction of this paper, and said, 'Oh, no, no, I got it wrong, I was misunderstood. Evolutionary theory is a genuine scientific theory.' He didn't go into a lot of details about why he changed his mind, and I think it would be fascinating for a historian of recent philosophy to find out why did Popper say what he said initially, and why within the space of a year, did he back away from that?

Popper didn't change his mind very often in public, that's one of the few cases. It would be fascinating to learn why. Alan Saunders: Yes, as a huge admirer of Popper I have to say one of his problems was he didn't change his mind often enough. What for you are the knockdown arguments against the minimalist version of intelligent design? Elliot Sober: Well if 'arguments against' meaning, Can I prove that it's false?

Well no, I think that it's so flimsy and modest that the main flaw is not that it's demonstrably false, but that it's not a scientific theory. If people want to believe that for religious reasons, I have no problem with that, but the idea that this is an alternative to evolutionary biology I think is preposterous. So that to me is the fundamental fact about intelligent design, quote 'theory'. It's not a theory, it's not a substantive scientific theory at all. Alan Saunders: So why are the reasons for being for concerned about intelligent design, are they as it were, purely political?

Are they because school boards are trying to smuggle creationism on to the curriculum by calling it intelligent design? Is that all there is to be concerned about? There's actually no serious intellectual issue to be addressed here? Elliot Sober: I think that's basically right. It's a political problem. It's a problem that has a philosophical dimension, it calls for thinking about what science is, what testability is, Popper pro and con, these are all philosophical questions.

There's a philosophical dimension which I find interesting as a philosopher, but people who aren't philosophers of science probably won't, and for them it's really a political question. Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National you're listening to The Philosopher's Zone, and I'm talking to Elliot Sober from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, about evolution and intelligent design. Elliot, we've been talking about intelligent design, we've been talking about whether intelligent design is a way of smuggling in creationism. Creationism of course needs a creator. Is a belief in the theory of evolution by natural selection, is that consistent with a belief in God? Elliot Sober: I think it is.

And here I have to part ways with a group of individuals that are now being called the neo-atheists who argue that the theory of evolution is just inconsistent, logically inconsistent with the proposition that God exists. Alan Saunders: So we're talking here about people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchins and so on?

Elliot Sober: Exactly. I think there's room to believe in God and to think that evolutionary theory is a good scientific theory, the best we have now. One way to do this which is kind of obvious, but it needs to be remembered is the idea that God starts the universe, he creates the universe, he creates the laws that will govern the universe, and then he mostly stands aside and lets natural processes play themselves out. This was the view that Darwin himself defends in The Origin of Species. Many people think that Darwin was an atheist, and I'm happy to come back to what Darwin's personal religious views were, but the so to speak, official position described in The Origin of Species is that he's investigating these laws of nature that govern biology the way Newton was investigating the laws of nature governing physical objects and matter in motion. And in both cases it's emphasised that these laws must come from somewhere, and that's where God comes in.

There's a second way to reconcile belief in God with the theory of evolution, which is not as visible and perhaps not as obvious, but I think it's logically consistent, and let me emphasise, I'm not saying that it's true or that I believe it, but I'm mentioning it because I think it's an option that people who believe in God should consider. It's the idea that there's more going on in the universe than evolutionary biology or science in general describes. And some of the things that go beyond what science is describing are acts of divine intervention. I don't personally believe that this is true, but I think someone who does believe that God at certain times in human history has intervened in human affairs, should realise that that's not inconsistent with scientific theories in physics or in biology. We have to be careful to distinguish a theory as being true, from its being complete. I think the theory of evolution is true, is that all there is? I don't think the theory says that.

Alan Saunders: I suppose something one might want to say to somebody who accepts the natural selection and also believes in God, might be, Well what's your God been doing lately? He established the ground rules and then he went off, and hasn't been very active, and also everything that you believe about the natural world indicates a more or less self-sufficient natural world. You don't need God, why do you bring God into it? Elliot Sober: I personally do not. I'm not a theist, and I think you've raised good philosophical questions about the tenability of theism and as a philosopher I'm very interested in these questions, I'm happy to discuss them, but let me emphasise we're now doing philosophy.

This is not what the theory of evolution or biological theory has anything to say about. So the theory of evolution does not tell you how you ought to reason about the existence of God, it's just not on that subject. Alan Saunders: So what position is the rational one to adopt towards the world? There is a position which is known as naturalism, and naturalism basically amounts to the observations of science, the observations of the natural world, are fully explanatory of everything we want to explain. Elliot Sober: The word 'naturalism' as you know, has had many different meanings in philosophy, so I have to say a little bit about some distinctions here. One thing that naturalism sometimes is taken to mean is the idea that everything that exists, exists in nature. There are no supernatural beings, and let's define nature as the totality of events and processes and things that exist inside of space and time, they have spatial- temporal locations.

So you and I are natural objects, Australia is a natural object. So naturalism is - there's nothing else, that's it, just the things that exist with spatial temporal location. So if you think that God is a supernatural being, something that exists outside of nature, you're not a naturalist. But here's a more puzzling problem, at least puzzling to me. And it comes from the philosophy of mathematics.

One very important view about the nature of mathematics is that mathematics describes things like numbers which do not have spatial temporal location. Where is the number 13? It doesn't exist in a place and it doesn't have a temporal location either. But this philosophy of mathematics called Platonism holds that numbers exist, they just don't have spatial temporal locations. So that's an anti-naturalistic philosophy of mathematics.

I am not saying right now that this is the best or the only or the true philosophy of mathematics, but it's a serious contender, and it's something that naturalists have trouble with, because it's hard to give a naturalistic account of what mathematics is about, what mathematical knowledge consists in. So I regard that as a serious philosophical question. It has nothing whatever to do with the existence of God, but it's another dimension about naturalism, and it's not obvious that a naturalistic account of mathematics is going to be better than a Platonistic account of mathematics. Alan Saunders: Although presumably I could if I wanted to, defend naturalism, I could say 'Well we can give a sort of reductionist account of mathematics.

We can say that it's basically about the way in which we, natural beings, with spatio-temporal location, the way we manipulate ideas, the way we manipulate symbols, that's the story.' Elliot Sober: That's one kind of naturalistic reply to mathematical Platonism. For me, what's unsatisfying about that naturalistic reply is it seems to me that mathematical propositions would be true even if we didn't exist, even if there were no thinking things in the universe. Even then, two plus three would still equal five. No-one would have been able to think of it, but these mathematical propositions seem to have a kind of mind independent objectivity to them that to me stands in the way of that kind of naturalistic reduction you describe. Alan Saunders: What about God?

Can you be a naturalist and a believer in God? Can you simply say, 'Well God is one of the forces in nature, he operates in a way that we cannot explain in the way that we can explain force or gravity or something like that, but nonetheless, in principle, we could'.

Elliot Sober: Yes, good. So the way I was describing naturalism a few minutes ago was it's a doctrine about what exists. And if you're prepared to say that God exists inside of space and time, you are a naturalist.

So Spinoza thought that God and the universe were identical. He was a naturalist. The Ancient Greeks thought that the Gods lived on Mount Olympus, they were naturalists too. So there is nothing that stands in the way. W hat keeps theists from being naturalists is that they think that God is a supernatural being. If he dropped out, you could be a naturalist. There's another dimension to naturalism.

It's very different from this question about what exists, and it's the idea that the only things that are true or that can be known are the things that can be known through the methods of natural science. And that's a doctrine about knowledge, not a question about what exists or not.

Core Questions In Philosophy Pdf

Say for example a naturalist in this kind of methodological sense might think that mathematics is fine, because the methods used in mathematics are the methods of natural science, so there's no puzzle about naturalism about mathematics in this sense, though of course there is in the first sense I was just describing where naturalism is a doctrine about what exists. But there's a problem with this kind. If I could just mention this is another dimension. And it's ethics. If you think that propositions about right and wrong, what's permissible and what's not permissible are true, you have to ask yourself Are these propositions discoverable by the methods of natural science? And if you think the answer is No, then you're going to reject this kind of naturalism.

If you think there are facts about right and wrong, but science can't find out about them, it's some other kind of knowledge that we have, it's not scientific knowledge but ethical knowledge; a different thing. Then you're not a naturalist, of this second kind, because you're saying there's more to knowledge than scientific knowledge.

Alan Saunders: Well there's of course quite a lot of activity these days by people trying to discover the evolutionary basis for our ethical beliefs, but putting them to one side for a moment, I suppose if I wanted to defend a naturalistic position, I could say Yes, there are moral beliefs that we have, and moral impulses that we have, they arise from human sympathies, they arise from our sympathy with our fellow human beings, our sense of being a member of a community, we can actually give a naturalistic explanation for that. If I say that, is there a bigger story that I'm not telling? Elliot Sober: Well I completely agree that there is a naturalistic account of how our moral feelings and convictions arise.

This is part of the history of human culture and biology, so this is something that science will continue to investigate. We've already made progress on it, more progress will come. That's a naturalistic subject through and through, and naturalists will say that I completely agree. But here's a different question: Science can explain why we have the beliefs we do about right and wrong perhaps.

Are any of those beliefs actually true and can science tell us which of them are true? My personal view is that science can help explain why we form the beliefs we do about right and wrong, but I don't think any scientific theory that I know about, or any discipline in science that I know about, is in the business of figuring out what's right and what's wrong. That's not a subject for science now, and as I understand it that's just not on the agenda for scientific research. So I'm drawing a very sharp distinction, someone might not like it for that reason, maybe it's too sharp, between explaining why we believe something and whether what we believe is in fact true. And now we're doing philosophy. I don't see that as a kind of problem that the sciences are addressing.

Alan Saunders: Well just to close, you clearly are addressing very significant and pressing philosophical issues, but as far as you're concerned, would it be true to say that intelligent design is just a sideshow, when we're talking about these things? Elliot Sober: Absolutely. Alan Saunders: Elliot Sober, thank you very much indeed for joining us. Elliot Sober: My pleasure. Alan Saunders: Elliot Sober is giving a lecture as part of the Sydney Ideas Series at the University of Sydney. He'll be speaking on the 22nd April on Darwin and Intelligent design.

The Philosopher's Zone is produced by Kyla Slaven with technical production by Charlie McKune. I'm Alan Saunders, and I'll be puzzling my way through the world again next week.

Comments (23). Kamal Singhe: 03 Apr 2010 11:22:16pm I write as a non-religious person who only has a purely philosophical (not scientific) interst on the God question: I am not a Christian, creationist or a person who believe in ID. It was refreshing to hear Dr Sobel's 'balanced' views on the subject, after having been bombarded recently by the extremist views of Richard Dawkins. Vedic philosophers concluded delightlfully, over 5000 years ago, following speculation and debate for roughly the same length of time,that'There may be God; or indeed there may not be'. The Hindu view finally was that the concept is an 'unknowable', at least through the human perceptive capabilities limited to time and space.

Dawkins' problem is that he is trying to 'see' and 'touch' God the same way he'd do with his pet budgie! As a result, he is writing and speaking like one of the 'blind men who tried to figure out what an elephant resembles'! His 'certainty' on the non-existence of God is founded on his apparent ignorance of the basics of philosophical introspection; his extremist views are full of difinitional errors and erros in logic (such as his use of Bertrand Russel's 'parody' of the tea pot in orbit as a comparison). Dawkins and other 'scientists' are trying to take Darwin's hypothesis much further than he himself was ever prepared to do.Dawkins'position is curious in view of the weakening blows the 'theory' has received lately from the expanding science of molecular biology! There may not be a watchmaker, and Payley may have been wrong.

But cynics like this amateur philosopher finds the 'reluctant' Darwin and extremist Dawkins much less convincing! It is unlikely that we may be able to resolve the issue in the near future either. Thank you for presenting Dr Sobel. Rufus t Firefly: 10 May 2010 6:08:52am 'Vedic philosophers concluded delightlfully, over 5000 years ago, following speculation and debate for roughly the same length of time,that'There may be God; or indeed there may not be'. The Hindu view finally was that the concept is an 'unknowable', at least through the human perceptive capabilities limited to time and space.' The problem with this 'delightful' remark is that it is empty meaningless rubbish (like so much of the various eastern philosophies I was naive enough to fall for in my youth). These claims would apply as much to pixies, alien abductions and daleks as they would to such an all purpose empty concept as 'god'.

In regard to the 'basics of philosophical introspection' - time to wake up and smell the roses! Try reading some Hume on identity or Dan Dennett on consciousness - it may be confronting but you might actually learn something. Greg Brown: 03 Apr 2010 11:34:15pm Thank you all for quality programming.According to David Attenborough (DVD Darwin & the Tree of Life)it all started ages ago in the primordial swamp when inorganic chemicals clumped together & (hey presto,abracadabra) we got a single cell life form capable of respiration,metabolism & photosynthesis.In other words we got life from non-life.Believe that & you'd believe in Santa Claus.When the Darwinists can effectively explain how single celled life forms began then they can exclude 'God' or a Divine Agency from Evolution by Natural Selection. Rufus t Firefly: 10 May 2010 6:18:20am Of course life came from non-life - where else could it come from?? That's a lot more plausible than positing a meaningless concept like 'divine agency' (and where did that come from Greg?) to make you feel comfortable with the unknown.

As Cameron pointed out in an earlier post, wherever there's no evidence for anything (eg god) you can suggest anything (tooth fairies, Zeus, anything at all), but without evidence none of it is plausible or rational to believe. 'Deep' intuitions and introspection won't help as they are among the most unreliable truth finding techniques of all - just ask a psychiatrist. Cameron: 04 Apr 2010 12:33:34pm It strikes me as a bit disingenuous to insert a deity into the mix just because it may be possible. Why not just insert fairies, Zeus or intelligent mucus?

Is this really philosophically valid? It's telling that no-one promoting these points of views believes the intelligence to be some form of cosmic snot. I think their bias shows.

sean: 02 Jun 2017 7:36:11pm You could do that or you could call the universe boo boo. It doesn't change the fact that we can describe so much of the world and the known universe amounting neither to a argument for or against a god theory. BARRIE MCMAHON: 05 Apr 2010 2:44:25pm Intelligent design pops up in surprising places.

Philip Adams associates with the best athiests, but also with James Lovelock, whose GAIA theory is ID in drag. It has retarded global warming mitigation for decades with the assurance that the planet (as an intelligent being) will correct for our warming actions. Of course it wont and we are slowing down our actions to the point of 'too little too late' for many reasons, one of which is Lovelock's ID fantasy. Christine Price: 20 Apr 2010 2:11:14pm The planet WILL correct for our warming actions, but we and many other organisms may not survive its corrections.

Other organisms will evolve to survive the changed conditions. Ben X: 07 Apr 2010 1:10:21pm Although attempting to be balanced and fair to differing viewpoints (and probably genuinely feeling this way), I thought Mr Sober - who clearly stated several times there is no room for I.D. In rigorous debate, and who does not believe himself in any god because it is unbackupable - while entertaining the baseless (though technically possible) idea that a god or a 'designer' exists or instigated life and evolution in the universe, to be, in my opinion, although having a heart in the right place, perhaps a touch patronising.