Category: Scientism

Jerry Fodor’s Idiosyncratic Understanding of ‘Scientism’

Jerry Fodor's "Is Science Biologically Possible?" (in Beilby, ed. Naturalism Defeated? Cornell UP 2002, pp. 30-42) begins like this:

I hold to a philosophical view that, for want of a better term, I'll call by one that is usually taken to be pejorative: Scientism.  Scientism claims, on the one hand, that the goals of scientific inquiry include the discovery of objective empirical truths; and, on the other hand, that science has come pretty close to achieving this goal at least  from time to time.  The molecular theory of gasses is, I suppose, a plausible example of achieving it in physics; so is the cell theory in biology; the theory, in geology, that the earth is very old; and the theory, in astronomy,that the stars are very far away . . . .

I'm inclined to think that Scientism, so construed, is not just true but obviously and certainly true; it's something that nobody in the late twentieth  century who has a claim to an adequate education and a minimum of common sense should doubt.

Up to this point one might get the impression that Fodor is simply stipulating that he will use 'scientism' in his own perverse and idiosyncratic way.  But then he goes on to say that scientism is under attack from the left and from the right: "on the left, from a spectrum of relativists and pragmatists, and on the right, from a spectrum of Idealists and a priorists."

At this point I threw down the article in disgust and went on to something worthwhile.

If you want to take a term in widespread use, a term the meaning of which is more or less agreed upon by hundreds of philosophers, and use it in our own crazy-headed way, that, perhaps, may be forgiven.  But it is utterly unforgivable to  use one and same term with both the received meaning and your crazy-headed arbitrarily stipulated meaning.

What is scientism?  I expect some bickering over the particulars of the following definition, but I believe the following captures in at least broad outline what most competent practioners understand by 'scientism.'

Scientism is a philosophical thesis that belongs to the sub-discipline of epistemology. It is not a thesis in science, but a thesis about science.  The thesis in its strongest form is that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, the knowledge generated by the (hard) sciences of physics, chemistry, biology and their offshoots. The thesis in a weaker form allows some cognitive value to the social sciences, the humanities, and other subjects, but insists that scientific knowledge is vastly superior and authoritative and is as it were the 'gold standard' when it comes to knowledge. On either strong or weak scientism, there is no room for first philosophy, according to which philosophy is an autonomous discipline, independent of natural science, and authoritative in respect to it. So on scientism, natural science sets the standard in matters epistemic, and philosophy’s role is at best ancillary.  Not a handmaiden to theology in this day and age; a handmaiden to science.

One problem with strong scientism is that it is self-vitiating, as the following argument demonstrates:

a. The philosophical thesis of strong scientism is not an item of scientific knowledge.
b. All genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge.
Therefore
c. The philosophical thesis of strong scientism is not an item of genuine knowledge.

Hence one cannot claim to know that scientism is true if it is true.  Scientism falls short of the very standard it enshrines.  It is at most an optional philosophical belief unsupported by science. It also has unpalatable consequences which for many of us have the force of counterexamples.

If scientism is true, then none of the following can count as items of knowledge: That torturing children for fun is morally wrong; that setting afire  a sleeping bum is morally worse than picking his pockets; that raping a woman is morally worse than merely threatening to rape her; that verbally threatening to commit rape is morally worse than entertaining (with pleasure) the thought of committing rape; that 'ought' implies 'can'; that moral goodness is a higher value than physical strength; that might does not make right; that the punishment must fit the crime; that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true; that what is past was once present; that if A remembers B's experience, then A = B; and so on.  In sum: if there are any purely rational insights into aesthetic, moral, logical, or metaphysical states of affairs, then scientism is false.  For the knowledge I get when I see (with the eye of the mind) that the punishment must fit the crime is not an item of scientific knowledge.

Back to Fodor.  His definition of scientism has nothing to so with scientism as commonly understood.  The latter is a highly dubious philosophical thesis as I have just demonstrated.  But what he calls scientism is but a platitude that most of us will accept while rejectiong scientism as commonly understood.

Something and Nothing Again: Krauss Takes Another Stab at Defending His ‘Bait and Switch’

In the pages of Scientific American, Lawrence M. Krauss writes:

As a scientist, the fascination normally associated with the classically phrased question “why is there something rather than nothing?”, is really contained in a specific operational question. That question can be phrased as follows: How can a universe full of galaxies and stars, and planets and people, including philosophers, arise naturally from an initial condition in which none of these objects—no particles, no space, and perhaps no time—may have existed? Put more succinctly perhaps: Why is there ‘stuff’, instead of empty space? Why is there space at all? There may be other ontological questions one can imagine but I think these are the ‘miracles’ of creation that are so non-intuitive and remarkable, and they are also the ‘miracles’ that physics has provided new insights about, and spurred by amazing discoveries, has changed the playing field of our knowledge. That we can even have plausible answers to these questions is worth celebrating and sharing more broadly.

This paragraph is a perfect example of why I find Krauss exasperating.  They guy seems incapable of thinking and writing clearly.

First of all, no one can have any objection to a replacement of the old Leibniz question — Why is there something rather than nothing? See On the Ultimate Origin of Things, 1697 — with a physically tractable question, a question of interest to cosmologists and one amenable to a  physics solution. Unfortunately, in the paragraph above, Krauss provides two different replacement questions while stating, absurdly, that the second is a more succint version of the first:

K1. How can a physical universe arise from an initial condition in which there are no particles, no space and perhaps no time?

K2. Why is there 'stuff' instead of empty space?

These are obviously distinct questions.  To answer the first one would have to provide an account of how the universe originated from nothing physical: no particles, no space, and "perhaps" no time.  The second question would be easier to answer because it presupposes the existence of space and does not demand that empty space be itself explained.

Clearly, the questions are distinct.  But Krauss conflates them. Indeed, he waffles between them, reverting to something like the first question after raising the second.  To ask why there is something physical as opposed to nothing physical is quite different from asking why there is physical "stuff" as opposed to empty space.

One would think that a scientist, trained in exact modes of thought and research, would not fall into such a blatant confusion.  Or if he is not confused 'in his own mind' why is he writing like a sloppy sophomore?  Scientific American is not a technical journal, but it is certainly a cut or two above National Enquirer.

To make matters worse, Krauss then starts talking about the 'miracles' of creation.  Talk of miracles, or even of 'miracles,' has no place in science.  The point of science is to demystify the world, to give, as far as possible, a wholly naturalistic account of nature.  It is a noble enterprise and ought to be pursued to the limit.  But what is the point of bringing in a theological term with or without 'scare' quotes?  The same goes for 'creation.'   In his book he refers to the physical universe as creation.  But creation implies a creator.   Why the theological language? Is he trying to co-opt it?  What game is he playing here?  Whatever it is, it doesn't  inspire confidence in anything he says.

Go back to my opening point.  There can be no objection to a replacement of the Leibniz question with one or more physically tractable questions.  Unfortunately, Krauss is not clearly doing this.  He thinks he is answering the Leibniz question.  But he waffles, and he shifts his ground, and he backtracks when caught out and criticized.

Whatever merit his book has in popularizing recent cosmology, it is otherwise worthless.  The book is a miserable exercise in 'bait and switch.'    From the very title (A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing), Krauss purports to be  answering the old philosophical question using nothing but naturalistic means.  But having baited us, he then switches and waffles and backtracks and plays semantic games.

Related post:  "We're Just a Bit of Pollution," Cosmologist Says

Why Something Rather Than Nothing? The Debate Goes On

Ah yes, these big questions never get laid to rest, do they?  Man is indeed  a metaphysical animal as Schopenhauer said.  Here are some links courtesy of Alfred Centauri:

John Horton, Science Will Never Explain Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing.  Horgan and Krauss have at it in the ComBox.

Victor Stenger contributes a meatier piece, Nuthin' to Explain in which he replies to David Albert's NYT review of Krauss. One of the questions Albert raises is where the laws of quantum mechanics come from.  Strenger's thesis is that "the laws of physics arise naturally from the symmetries of the void."  So the void has symmetries and these symmetries give rise to the laws of physics.  I imagine Albert would simply reiterate his question: where do these symmetries come from?  Symmetries are not nothing.  And presumably they are symmetries in this respect or that, in which case one can ask what these respects are and where they come from.  And what about the void itself?  If it is nothing at all, then ex nihilo nihil fit.  And if it is something, then it is not nothing and one can ask about its origin.  Stenger opines:

Clearly, no academic consensus exists on how to define "nothing." It may be impossible. To define "nothing" you have to give it some defining property, but, then, if it has a property it is not nothing!

Maybe I can help Stenger out.  Nothing is the absence of everything.  Isn't that what everybody who understands English understands by 'nothing' is this context?  Have I just done the impossible?  Can one rationally  debate the sense of 'nothing'?  Is there need for an "academic consensus"?  Does Stenger understand English?  Stenger goes on:

The "nothing" that Krauss mainly talks about throughout the book is, in fact, precisely definable. It should perhaps be better termed as a "void," which is what you get when you apply quantum theory to space-time itself. It's about as nothing as nothing can be. This void can be described mathematically. It has an explicit wave function. This void is the quantum gravity equivalent of the quantum vacuum in quantum field theory.

Now Stenger is contradicting himself.  He just got done telling us that 'nothing' cannot be defined, but now he is telling us that it is precisely definable.  Which is it, my man?  The problem of course is that Krauss and Stenger want to have it two ways at once.  They want to use 'nothing' in the standard way to refer to the absence of everything while at the same time using it in violation of English usage to refer to something.

I have a suggestion.  What these boys need to do is introduce a terminus technicus, 'Nuthin' or 'Nathin' or 'Nothing*' where these terms refer to a physical something and then give us their theory about that.  But if they did this, then they wouldn't be able to play the silly-ass game they are playing, which is to waffle between 'nothing' as understood by everyone who is not a sophist and  who understands the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' and 'nothing' in their technical sense. If they stopped their waffling, however, they would not be able to extract any anti-theology out of their physics.  But that is the whole purpose of this scientistic nonsense, and the reason why Richard Dawkins absurdly compares Krauss' book to The Origin of the Species.

The latest on this topic seems to be Ross Andersen, Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete? This includes an interview with Krauss in which he responds to Albert. Some quotations from Krauss (which I may comment on tomorrow):

The religious question "why is there something rather than nothing," has been around since people have been around, and now we're actually reaching a point where science is beginning to address that question. [. . .]

 What's amazing to me is that we're now at a point where we can plausibly argue that a universe full of stuff came from a very simple beginning, the simplest of all beginnings: nothing. [. . .]

The fact that "nothing," namely empty space, is unstable is amazing. But I'll be the first to say that empty space as I'm describing it isn't necessarily nothing, although I will add that it was plenty good enough for Augustine and the people who wrote the Bible. For them an eternal empty void was the definition of nothing, and certainly I show that that kind of nothing ain't nothing anymore. [. . .]

What drove me to write this book was this discovery that the nature of "nothing" had changed, that we've discovered that "nothing" is almost everything and that it has properties. That to me is an amazing discovery. So how do I frame that? I frame it in terms of this question about something coming from nothing. And part of that is a reaction to these really pompous theologians who say, "out of nothing, nothing comes," because those are just empty words. [. . .]

 

A Universe From Nothing? Krauss Reviewed

I had fun back in January pilloring the scientistic  nonsense  Lawrence M. Krauss propagates in his recent book, A Universe From Nothing.  Meanwhile the book has shown up at the local library and tomorrow I will borrow it.  I would never buy a piece of crap like this, though, to be fair, I will first have to read it to be sure that it is crap.  That it is crap is an excellent bet, however, given what I quoted Krauss as saying and given David Albert's New York Times review of a couple days ago.

I won't quote from Albert's review.  Study it carefully and you will see why Krauss' book is junk. 

One mistake many people make is to think that any opposition to scientistic nonsense of the sort that Krauss spouts can only be religiously motivated. Carefully pointing  out the confusions to which Krauss and Co. succumb gets one labeled an 'apologist for religion.'   Now an affirmative answer to the question whether contemporary physics has the resources to explain why the physical universe exists does of course have negative implications for those forms of theism that posit a transcendent divine creator.  But the question itself is not a religious question but a metaphysical question.  Every clear-thinking atheist should reject Krauss's specious reasoning.  Rejecting it would not make our atheist an apologist for religion. 

People sometimes question what philosophy is good for.  Well, one thing it is good for is to debunk bad philosophy, Krauss' scientistic nonsense being a particular egregious example of bad philosophy.

Philosophize we must and philosophize we will.  The only question is whether we will do it well.

Can God Break a Law of Nature?

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Plantinga's new book.  They are  collected under the rubric Science and Religion.  In the third chapter of Where the Conflict Really Lies, Plantinga addresses questions about divine action and divine intervention in the workings of nature.  A miracle is such an intervention.  But aren't miracles logically impossible?  Plantinga doesn't cite Earman, but I will: 

John Earman, Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (Oxford 2000), p. 8, writes:

 . . . if a miracle is a violation of a law of nature, then whether or not the violation is due to the intervention of the Deity, a miracle is logically impossible since, whatever else a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.

According to one way of thinking, miracles are violations of laws of nature. And so one may argue:

1. A miracle is an exception to a law of nature.
2. Every law of nature is an exceptionless regularity (though not conversely).
Therefore
3. A miracle is an exception to an exceptionless regularity.
Therefore
4. Miracles are logically impossible.

 Please note that (2) merely states that whatever a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity. Thus (2) does not commit one to a regularity theory of laws according to which laws are identified with exceptionless regularities. The idea is that any theory of (deterministic) laws would include the idea that a law is an exceptionless regularity.

The above argument seems to show that if miracles are to be logically possible they cannot be understood as violations of laws of nature. To avoid the conclusion one must deny (1). How then are miracles to be understood?  Plantinga supplies an answer:

Miracles are often thought to be problematic, in that God, if he were to perform a miracle, would be involved in 'breaking,' going contrary to, abrogating, suspending, a natural law.  But given this conception of law, if God were to perform a miracle, it wouldn't at all involve contravening a natural law.  That is because, obviously, any occasion on which God performs a miracle is an occasion when the universe is not causally closed; and the laws say nothing about what happens when the universe is not causally closed.  Indeed, on this conception it isn't even possible that God break a law of nature. (pp. 82-83)

As I understand him, Plantinga is saying that a miracle is not a divine suspension of a law of nature, but a  divine suspension of causal closure.   Conservation and other natural laws apply to isolated or closed systems (78).  God cannot intervene without 'violating' closure; but that does not amount to a violation of a law since the laws hold only for closed systems.  "It is entirely possible for God to create a full-grown horse in the middle of Times Square without violating the principle of conservation of energy.  That is because the systems including the horse would not be closed or isolated." (79)

Plantinga is maintaining that it is logically impossible, impossible in the very strongest sense of the term, for anyone, including God, to contravene a law of nature.  But it is logically possible that God contravene causal closure.  This implies that causal closure is not a law of nature.

But isn't it a proposition of physics that the physical universe is causally closed, that every cause of a physical event is a physical event and that every effect of a physical event is a physical event?  No, says Plantinga.  Causal closure is a "metaphysical add-on," (79) not part of physics.  That's right, as far as I can see.  I would add that it is the mistake of scientism to think otherwise.

Whether or or not God ever intervenes in the physical world, I do it all the time.  It's called mental causation.  That it occurs is a plain fact; that mental causes are not identical to physical causes is not a plain fact, but very persuasively arguable, pace Jaegwon Kim.   So if a frail reed such as the Maverick Philosopher can bring about the suspension of causal closure, then God should be able to pull it off as well.  (This comparison with mental causation is mine, not Plantinga's.)

More on Jerry Coyne on Free Will

This is a sequel to an earlier discussion.  You should read it first.  Coyne writes,

There's not much downside to abandoning the notion of free will. It's impossible, anyway, to act as though we don't have it: you'll pretend to choose your New Year's resolutions, and the laws of physics will determine whether you keep them. And there are two upsides. The first is realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains, and contemplating the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the idea of "me" are but convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection. Further, by losing free will we gain empathy, for we realize that in the end all of us, whether Bernie Madoffs or Nelson Mandelas, are victims of circumstance — of the genes we're bequeathed and the environments we encounter. With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world.

This, Coyne's concluding paragraph, has it all: scientism, incoherence, and liberal victimology.

1.  Coyne realizes that we cannot deliberate, choose, and act without the belief in free will. He realizes that one cannot, say, choose to eat less in the coming year without believing (even if falsely) that one is freely choosing, without believing that the choice is 'up to oneself.'    But then Coyne immediately confuses this unavoidable false believing with pretending to choose.  He seems to think that if my choice is determined and not free (in the libertarian sense explained in the earlier post), then it is not a genuine choice, but a pretend choice.  But that is not the case.  A choice is genuine whether or not it is determined. 

People deliberate and choose.  Bicycles don't. That's part of the pre-analytic data.  It is also part of the pre-analytic data that people sometimes pretend to deliberate and pretend to choose.  It is a grotesque confusion on Coyne's part to think that if one is determined to choose then one's choice is not genuine but pretend.  (Note also that if determinism is true, then one's pretending to choose is also determined without prejudice to its being a real case of pretending to choose.)

Coyne is making a mistake similar to the one he made at the beginning of the piece.  There he implied that if a choice is not free then it is not a choice. But a choice is a choice whether free or determined.  Coyne was confusing the question, Are there choices? with the question, Are there free choices?  He now thinks that if a choice is determined, then it not a real, but a merely pretend, choice.  That is doubly confused.  Just as a pretend choice can be free, a real choice can be determined.

2. We are then told that consciousness, free choice, and the idea of the self are "illusions fashioned by natural selection."  This is nonsense pure and simple.

First of all, consciousness cannot be an illusion.  Consciousness cannot be an illusion for the simple reason that it is a presupposition of the distinction between reality and illusion. An illusion is an illusion to consciousness, so that if there is no consciousness there are no illusions either. There simply is no (nonverbal) distinction between the illusion of consciousness and consciousness. If one is under the illusion that one is conscious, then one is conscious, really conscious, and therefore not under any illusion about the matter.

The thesis that consciousness is an illusion is self-refuting.  If I merely seem to be conscious, but am not conscious, then I am conscious.  And if I do not merely seem to be conscious, but am conscious, then (of course) I am conscious.  Therefore, necessarily, if I seem to be conscious, then I am conscious. Here we bite on granite, and "our spade is turned" — to mix Nimzovich and Wittgenstein metaphors.  Or in the words of a German proverb, Soviel Schein, soviel Sein. 

Consciousness, in this regard, is analogous to truth.  If you try to say something about truth, you presuppose truth.  For if you try to say something about truth, presumably you are trying to say something true about truth.  So if you say that truth is an illusion, and that there are no truths, then you are saying that in truth there are no truths — which is self-refuting.  If, on the other hand, you are simply making noises or perhaps aiming to say something false, the we ignore you for those reasons.

3. I don't believe that one can show in the same clean 'knock-down' way that free will is not an illusion.  That consciousness is an illusion is a plainly incoherent idea; the incoherence of the notion that free will is an illusion is harder to uncover.  But suppose we ask, "In which sense of 'illusion' is free will an illusion?"  It is nothing like a correctable perceptual illusion of the sort we are subject to on a daily basis.  The 'illusion' of free will, if illusion it be, cannot be thrown off.  I cannot function as an agent without taking myself to be free, and I cannot cease being an agent short of suicide.  Echoing Sartre, I am condemned to agency and to that extent "condemned to be free."  Even a mad-dog quietist who decided to renounce all action, would be deciding to renounce all action and thereby demonstrating willy-nilly the ineradicable reality of his agency.  An 'illusion' that it constutive of my very being an agent is no illusion in any worthwile sense of the term. 

It's a bit like an Advaitin (an adherent of Advaita Vedanta) telling me that the multiple world of our ordinary sense experience is an illusion.  "OK, but what does that mean?  When we are at the shooting range, you are going to take care not to be down range when the shooting starts, right?  Why, if the world of multiplicity, the world of shotguns and shells and targets and tender human bodies is an illusion?  Why would it matter? Obviously, you are playing fast and loose with 'illusion' and don't really believe that this gun and your head are illusions.)

One cannot distinguish (except verbally) the mere appearance of consciousness and the reality of consciousness.  Similarly, I suggest that one cannot distinguish between the 'illusion' of free will and its reality.  This thesis of course requires much more development and support!  But hey, this is a blog, just an online notebook! 

Those who claim that free will is an illusion are simply playing fast and loose with the word 'illusion.' There are not using it in an ordinary way, in the sort of way that gives it its ordinary 'bite'; they are using it in some extended way that drains it of meaning.  It is a kind of bullshitting that scientists often fall into when they are spouting scientism in the popular books they scribble to turn a buck.  Doing science is hard; writing bad philosopohy is easy.  By the way, that is why we need philosophy.  We need it to expose all the pseudo-philsophy abroad in the world.

We need philosophy to bury its undertakers lest there be all those rotting corpses laying about.

4.  Finally, Coyne tells us we are all "victims of circumstance."  But I've had enough of this guy for one day.  I shouldn't be wasting so much time on him. 

Tim Maudlin: Hawking “Just Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About”

In this Atlantic article on the philosophy of cosmology, Tim Maudlin states:

Hawking is a brilliant man, but he's not an expert in what's going on in philosophy, evidently. Over the past thirty years the philosophy of physics has become seamlessly integrated with the foundations of physics work done by actual physicists, so the situation is actually the exact opposite of what he describes. I think he just doesn't know what he's talking about. I mean there's no reason why he should. Why should he spend a lot of time reading the philosophy of physics? I'm sure it's very difficult for him to do. But I think he's just . . . uninformed.

This became evident to me in October of 2010 when I sat down to study Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design.  I soon discovered it was rubbish.  Here are my notes on Chapter One.  After studying Chapter Two I decide the trash-to-treasure ratio was so unfavorable as not to justify further discussion.  I mean, it's work writing these posts!

This Atlantic piece is well worth attention.  It is free of sort of nonsense I have criticized in Krauss and Coyne and Hawking and others.






Can Consciousness Be Explained? Dennett Debunked

To answer the title question we need to know what we mean by 'explain' and how it differs from 'explain away.'

1. An obvious point to start with is that only that which exists, or that which is the case, can be explained. One who explains the  phenomenon of the tides in terms of the gravitational effect of the moon presupposes that the phenomenon of the tides is a genuine phenomenon. One cannot explain the nonexistent for the simple reason that it is not there to be explained. One cannot explain why unicorns run faster that gazelles for the simple reason that there is no such explanandum. So if consciousness is to be explained, it must exist.

2. A second point, equal in obviousness unto the first, is that a decent explanation cannot issue in the elimination of the explanandum, that which is to be explained. You cannot explain beliefs and desires by saying that there are no beliefs and desires. A successful explanation cannot be eliminativist. It cannot 'explain away' the explanandum.  To explain is not to explain away.

3. Summing up (1) and (2): the very project of explanation presupposes the existence of the explanandum, and success in explanation cannot  result in the elimination of the explanandum.

4. Daniel Dennett points out that there can be no explanation without a certain 'leaving out': "Leaving something out is not a feature of failed explanations, but of successful explanations."  (Consciousness Explained, 1991, p. 454.) Thus if I explain lightning as an atmospheric electrical discharge, I leave out the appearing of the lightning to lay bare its reality. That lightning appears in such-and-such a way is irrelevant: I want to know what it is in reality, what it is in nature apart from any observer. The scientist aims to get beyond the phenomenology to the underlying reality.

5. It follows that if consciousness is to be explained, it must be reduced to, or identified with, something else that is observer-independent. Dennett puts this by saying that "Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all." (454) For example, if your explanation of pain in terms of C-fibers and Delta A-fibers (or whatever) still contains the unreduced term 'pain,' then no satisfactory explanation has been achieved. There cannot be a "magic moment" in the explanation when a "miracle occurs" and unconscious events become conscious. (455)

6. Now if a successful explanation must explain conscious events in terms of unconscious events, then I hope I will be forgiven for concluding that consciousness CANNOT be explained. For, as I made clear in #2 above, a successful explanation cannot issue in the elimination of that which is to be explained. In the case of the lightning, there is a reduction but not an elimination: lightning is reduced to its observer-independent reality as electrical discharge.

Now suppose you try the same operation with the sensory qualia experienced when one observes lightning: the FLASH, the JAGGED LINE in the sky, followed by the CLAP of thunder, etc. You try to separate the subjective appearance from the observer-independent reality. But then you notice something: reality and appearance of a sensory quale coincide. Esse est percipi. The being of the quale is identical to its appearing. This is what John Searle means when he speaks of the "first person ontology" of mental data.

7. It follows from #6 that if one were to explain the conscious event in terms of unconscious events as Dennett recommends, the explanation would fail: it would violate the strictures laid down in #2 above. The upshot would be an elimination of the datum to be explained rather than an explanation of it. To reiterate the obvious, a successful explanation cannot consign the explanandum to oblivion. It must explain it, not explain it away.

8. I conclude that consciousness cannot be explained, given Dennett's demand that a successful explanation of consciousness must be in terms of unconscious events. What he wants is a reduction to the physical. He wants that because he is convinced that only the physical exists. But in the case of consciousness, such a reduction must needs be an elimination.

9. To my claim that consciousness cannot be explained, Dennett has a response: "But why should consciousness be the only thing that cannot be explained? Solids and liquids and gases can be explained in terms of things that are not solids, and liquids, and gases. . . . The  illusion that consciousness is the exception comes about, I suspect, because of a failure to understand this general feature of successful explanation." (455)

Dennett's reasoning here is astonishingly weak because blatantly question-begging. He is arguing:

A. It is a general feature of all successful explanations that F items be explained in terms of non-F items
B. Conscious items can be explained
Ergo
C. Conscious items can be explained in terms of nonconscious items.

(B) cannot be asserted given what I said in #6 and #7. I run the  argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (C) to the negation of (B): conscious items such as pains are irreducible.

10. Recall from #4 that Dennett said that successful explanations must leave something out. But in the case of a conscious item like a pain, what is left out when we explain it is precisely what we needed to explain! For what is left out is precisely the sensory quale, the felt pain, the Feiglian "raw feel,' the Nagelian "what it is like."

11. Amazingly, on p. 455 he retracts what he said on the previous page about successful explanations having to leave something out. He now  writes:

     Thinking, mistakenly, that the explanation leaves something out, we
     think to save what otherwise would be lost by putting it back into
     the observer as a quale — or some other "intrinsically" wonderful
     property. The psyche becomes the protective skirt under which all
     those beloved kittens can hide. There may be motives for thinking
     that consciousness cannot be explained, but, I hope I have shown,
     there are good reasons for thinking it can. (455)

Do you see how Dennett is contradicting himself? On p. 454 he states that a successful explanation must leave something out, which seems plausible enough. Then he half-realizes that this spells trouble for his explanation of consciousness — since what is left out when we explain consciousness in unconscious terms is precisely the explanandum, consciousness itself! So he backpedals and implies that nothing has been left out, and suggests that someone who affirms the irreducibility of qualia is like a lady who hides her 'kwalia kitties' under her skirt where no mean neuroscientist dare stick his nose.

The whole passage is a tissue of confusion wrapped in a rhetorical trick. And that is the way his big book ends: on a contradictory note.  A big fat load of scientistic sophistry.

12. To sum up. A successful explanation cannot eliminate the explanandum. That is nonnegotiable. So if we agree with Dennett that a successful explanation must leave something out, namely, our epistemic access to what is to be explained, then we ought to conclude that consciousness cannot be explained.

Jerry Coyne on Why You Don’t Really Have Free Will

It does not inspire much confidence when a writer begins his piece with a blatant confusion.  But that is what Jerry A. Coyne does in Why You Don't Really Have Free Will:

Perhaps you've chosen to read this essay after scanning other articles on this website. Or, if you're in a hotel, maybe you've decided what to order for breakfast, or what clothes you'll wear today.

You haven't. You may feel like you've made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. . . . And those New Year's resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you'll have no choice about whether you keep them.

Suppose you have chosen to read Coyne's essay and have decided on scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Well then, you have made a choice and a decision and it is nonsense for Coyne to claim that you haven't just done those things.  It is also nonsense to claim that you had no choice concerning your New Year's resolutions.  It is a plain fact that one chooses, decides, and deliberates.  What is debatable, however, is whether one freely chooses, decides, deliberates.  Coyne gets off to a rocky start by conflating these two questions:

1. Do human beings ever choose, decide, deliberate?
2. Do human beings ever freely choose, decide, deliberate?

Only the second can be debated reasonably, and this, to be charitable, is the question Coyne is posing.  His answer is that we never freely choose, decide, deliberate.  His thesis is that "free will is a complete illusion."

Suppose you ordered the scrambled eggs.  No one held a gun to your head: your choice was uncoerced and in that sense free.  So you made a choice and you made a free (uncoerced) choice.  But there is another sense of 'free' and it is the one with which Coyne is operating:

3. Do human beings ever freely choose, etc.  in the sense that they could have done otherwise even if all the antecedent conditions up to the point of the choice, etc. were the same?

Call this the libertararian sense of 'free' and distinguish it from the compatibilist sense of the word.  To refine Coyne's thesis, he is claiming that libertarian freedom of the will is an illusion.  Why should we believe this?  Coyne says that there are "two lines of evidence."

Although Coyne uses the word 'evidence' and postures as if empirical science is going to step in, do some real work, and finally solve a problem that philosophers in their armchairs merely endlessly gas off about, the first "line of evidence" he provides is just a stock deterministic argument that could have been given in the 18th century. Determinism is the thesis that the actual past together with the actual laws of nature render only one present nomologically possible. Determinism has two consequences: it deprives the agent of alternative future possibilities, and it insures that the agent is not the ultimate source of any action. For if determinism is true, the agent himself is nothing other than an effect of causes that stretch back before his birth, so that no part of the agent can be an ultimate origin of action.  Hence when you chose the scrambled eggs you could not have done otherwise given the actual past: you could not have chosen oat meal instead.  You made a choice all right; it is just that it wasn't a libertarianly-free choice.

There 's nothing new here.  We are just complex physical systems, and determinism is true.  So everything that happens in our bodies and brains is necessitated, and libertarian freedom of will cannot exist.  Hence our sense that we are libertarianly free is an illusion.

That's a nice philosophical argument that makes no appeal to empirical facts.  Amazing how so many of these scientistic science types with their contempt for philosophy cannot help doing philosophy (while disingenuously denying that that is what they are doing) and simply trotting out old philosophical arguments all the while displaying their ignorance as to their origin and how to present them rigorously.

The argument is only as good as its premises.  Even if we assume determinism, it is scarcely obvious that we are just complex physical systems:  "Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics."

Really?  I am now enjoying a memory of hippy-trippy Pam from the summer of '69.  So my memory state is identical to a brain state.  But that  is arguably nonsense: the one exhibits intentionality ,the other doesn't, and so by the  Indiscernibility of Identicals, they cannot be identical.  No materialist has ever given a satisfactory account of intentionality.

So the first argument is rather less than compelling despite Coyne's scientistic posturing: "And what they're [neuroscientists] finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion."

The other "line of evidence" is from neurobiology:

Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject "decides" to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it. [. . .] "Decisions" made like that aren't conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we've made them, then we don't have free will in any meaningful sense.

This argument is hardly compelling.  For one thing, it appears to confuse predictability with unfreedom.  Suppose I am able to predict accurately how Peter will behave in a range of situations.  It doesn't follow that he does not act freely (in the libertarian sense) in those situations.  On the basis of my knowledge of his character and habits, I predict that Peter will smoke a cigarette within an hour.  That is a prediction about the future of the actual world.  Suppose he does smoke a cigarette within an hour.  My correct prediction does not entail that could not have done otherwise than smoke a cigarette within an hour.  It does not entail that there is no possible world in which he refrains from smoking a cigarette within an hour.

So if, on the basis of unconscious brain activity, it is predicted that the subject will make a conscious decision, and he does, that does not entail that the decision was not free.  Furthermore, why should 'decision' be used to cover the whole seven second brain process? If 'decision' is used to refer to the conscious pressing of the button, then no part of the decision is unconscious, and Coyne's argument collapses.  What scientistic types don't seem to understand is that empirical science is not purely empirical.  It cannot proceed without conceptual decisions that are a priori.

If Coyne thinks that contemporary neuroscience has proven that there is no libertarian freedom of the will, then he is delusional: he is passing off dubious philosophy as if it were incontrovertible science while hiding the fact from himself.

In the sequel I will will adress the question whether libertarian free will could be an illusion.  Does that so much as make sense?

Companion post:  Free Will Meets Neuroscience.

It’s Nonsense, but it’s True Nonsense!

Lawrence  Krauss writes:

Classical human reason, defined in terms of common sense notions following from our own myopic experience of reality is not sufficient to discern the workings of the Universe. If time begins at the big bang, then we will have to re-explore what we mean by causality, just as the fact that electrons can be in two places at the same time doing two different things at the same time as long as we are not measuring them is completely nonsensical, but true, and has required rethinking what we mean by particles. Similar arguments by the way imply that we often need to rethink what we actually mean by 'nothing', from empty space, to the absence of space itself.

Perhaps this passage that I just dug up answers or helps to answer the question I posed yesterday:  How can someone so intelligent spout such nonsense as I quoted Krauss as spouting?  Answer: he's a mysterian!  We have discussed mysterianism before in these pages in connection with the theologian James Anderson and in connection with the materialist philosopher of mind Colin McGinn.  With Krauss (and others of course) we find the mysterian move being made in the precincts of physics.  Marvellously manifold are the moves of mysterians!

Yesterday I quoted Krauss as saying, "Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur."  I commented:

This is just nonsense. Whatever the laws of physics are, they are not nothing. So if the laws of physics require that something arise from nothing, then the laws of physics require that something arise without there being laws of physics. [. . .]

So you've got this situation in which nothing at all exists, and then something comes into existence because the physical laws (which don't exist) "require" it.

This implies an explicit logical contradiction: the laws of physics both do and do not exist.  They do  exist because they govern the transition from nothing to something.  They do not exist because they are included in the nothing from which something arises.

Completely nonsensical (in the sense of being logically contradictory) but true nonetheless! 

Now this is either a mysterian position or a dialetheist position.  The dialetheist holds that, in reality, there are some true contradictions.  The mysterian does not hold this; he holds that there are, in reality, no true contradictions, but some propositions no matter how carefully we consider them appear to us as contradictory, or perhaps must appear to us as contradictory given our irremediable cognitive limitations.

This raises all sorts of interesting questions.  Here is one:  One task of science is to render the world intelligible to us (understandable by us).  But if natural science in one of its branches issues in propositions that are unintelligible (either because they are intrinsically contradictory or such that they appear or even must appear as contradictory to us), then how can one call this science?

Forgive me for being naive, but I would have thought that science, genuine science, cannot contain propositions that are nonsensical!  And would it not be more reasonable to take the apparent nonsensicality that crops up in the more far-out branches as a sign that something has gone wrong somewhere? 

Why Do Some Physicists Talk Nonsense about Nothing?

Sam Harris poses the following question to physicist Lawrence M. Krauss:

One of the most common justifications for religious faith is the idea that the universe must have had a creator. You’ve just written a book alleging that a universe can arise from “nothing.” What do you mean by “nothing” and how fully does your thesis contradict a belief in a Creator God?

The answer Krauss gives is such an awful mess of verbiage that I will not  quote a big load of it, but I will quote some of it.  The reader can read the whole thing if he cares to.

1. The "long-held theological claim" that out of nothing nothing comes is "spurious."  This is because "modern science . . . has changed completely our conception of the very words 'something' and 'nothing.' " We now know that " ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ are physical concepts and therefore are properly the domain of science, not theology or philosophy." 

Wow!  Modern science has completely changed our conceptions of something and nothing! That is something!   Something and nothing are physical concepts?  You mean, like mass and momentum?  Please tell me more!

2. "The old idea that nothing might involve empty space, devoid of mass or energy, or anything material, for example, has now been replaced by a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles, popping in and out of existence in a time so short that we cannot detect them directly. I then go on to explain how other versions of 'nothing'—beyond merely empty space—including the absence of space itself, and even the absence of physical laws, can morph into “something.” Indeed, in modern parlance, “nothing” is most often unstable. Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur."

There is no point in quoting any more of this stuff since it is obviously gibberish.  What is not obvious, and indeed what is most puzzling, is why anyone who is supposedly intelligent would spout such patent nonsense.  Or is he joking?  Pulling our leg?  Trying to sound 'far out' to sell books?  It surely sounds like a weird joke to hear that nothing boils and bubbles and 'morphs'  and is unstable with particles popping in and out of existence.  If a virtual particle popped out of existence would it be even more nothing than the nothing that it was a part of?

If I tell you that I met nobody on my hike this morning, it would be a bad joke were you to inquire, "And how is Nobody doing these days?"  'Nobody' is not the name of a person or the name of anything else. If you are confused by 'I met nobody on my hike,' then I will translate it for you: 'It is not the case that I met somebody on my hike.'  The same goes for 'nothing.'  It is not a name for something.

The point, of course, is that nothing is precisely nothing and not a weird something or even a non-weird something. Krauss is not stupid, and he is presumably not joking.  So he is using 'nothing' in some special way.  He and his colleagues are free to do that.  He and they are  free to stipulate a new meaning for an old word.  But then he is not using it in the sense in which it figures in the old principle, ex nihilo nihil fit, 'out of nothing nothing comes.'  Whether true or false, the meaning of the principle is clear:  if there were nothing at all, nothing could have come into being.  This obviously cannot be refuted by shifting the sense of 'nothing' so that it refers to a bubbling, boiling soup of virtual particles. 

The strong scent of intellectual dishonesty is wafting up to my nostrils from this bubbling, boiling cauldron of Unsinn.

If I make a tasty hamburger out of a lump of raw meat, have I made something out of nothing?  Sure, in a sense: I have made something tasty out of nothing tasty.  In a sense, I have made something out of nothing!  But one would have to have hamburger for brains if one that ought that that refuted ex nihilo nihil fit. 

"Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur."  This is just nonsense.  Whatever the laws of physics are, they are not nothing.  So if the laws of physics require that something arise from nothing, then the laws of physics require that something arise without there being laws of physics. 

Not only is the quoted sentence nonsense, it contradicts the rest of what Krauss says in quotation #2 above.  For he says that there is a sense of 'nothing' which implies the absence of physical laws.  So we are supposed to accept that physical laws require the emergence of something out of nothing even if there are no physical laws?

So you've got this situation in which nothing at all exists, and then something comes into existence because the physical laws (which don't exist) "require" it.  Bullshit!  Sophistry for the purpose of exploiting rubes to make a quick pop science buck.

Krauss spouted nonsense on a previous occasion when he said  in the New York Times that human beings  are just a bit of cosmic pollution. See "We're Just a Bit of Pollution," Cosmologist Says.

See also Do Physicists Bullshit?

Ed Feser has also done good work exposing this cosmological nonsense. 

Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism: Notes on the Preface

I now have Alvin Plantinga's new book in my hands.  Here are some notes on the preface.  Since I agree with almost everything in the preface, the following batch of notes will be interpretive but not critical.  Words and phrases  enclosed in double quotation marks are Plantinga's ipsissima verba. 

1. Plantinga is concerned with the relations among monotheistic religion, natural science, and naturalism.  His main thesis is that there is "superficial conflict but deep concord" between natural science and monotheistic religion but  "superficial concord but deep conflict" between science and naturalism. 

2. The great monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) affirm the existence of "such a person as God."  Naturalism is a worldview that entails the nonexistence of such a person.  "Naturalism is stronger than atheism." (p. ix) Naturalism entails atheism, but atheism does not entail naturalism.  One can be an atheist without being a naturalist.  John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart is an example. (My example, not Plantinga's.)  But one cannot be a naturalist without being an atheist.  This is perhaps obvious, which is why Plantinga doesn't explain it.  Roughly, a naturalist holds that the whole of reality (or perhaps only the whole of concrete reality) is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.  No one who holds this can hold that there is such a person as God, God being a purely spiritual agent.

To put it my own way, theistic religion and naturalism could not both be true, but they could both be false.  This makes them logical contraries, not contradictories.  Their being the former suffices to put them in real conflict.  For many of us this is what the ultimate worldview choice comes down to.

3. Plantinga rightly points out that while naturalism is not a religion, it is a worldview that is like a religion.  So it can be properly called a quasi-religion.  (p. x) This is because it plays many of the same roles that a religion plays.  It provides answers to the Big Questions: Does God exist? Can we survive our bodily deaths? How should we live?

I would add that there are religious worldviews and anti-religious worldviews, but that natural science is not a worldview.  Science is not in the business of supplying worldview needs: needs for meaning, purpose, guidance, norms and values. Science cannot put religion out of business, as I argue here, though  perhaps in some ways that Plantinga would not endorse.

4. Given that naturalism is a quasi-religion, there is a sense in which there is a genuine science vs. religion conflict, namely, a conflict between science and the quasi-religion, naturalism.  Very clever!

5. Plantinga's claim that "there is no serious conflict between science and religion" puts him at odds with what I call  the Dawkins Gang and what Plantinga calls the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris.  Plantinga, who never fails us when it comes to wit and style, suggests that the atheism of these four "is adolescent rebellion carried on by other means" (p. xi)  that doesn't rise to the level of the the old atheism of Bertrand Russell and John Mackie.  "We may perhaps hope that the new atheism is but a temporary blemish on the face of serious conversation in this crucial area."  That is indeed the hope of all right-thinking and serious people, whether theists or atheists.

6. Plantinga fully appreciates that modern natural science is a magnficent thing, "the most striking and impressive intellectual phenomenon of the last half millenium." (p. xi)  This has led some to the mistake of thinking that science is the ultimate court of appeal when it comes to the fixation of belief.  But this can't be right for two reasons.  First, science gives us no help in the areas where we most need enlightenment: religion, politics, and morals, for example. (p. xii)  There are worldview needs, after all, and science cannot supply them.  "Second, science contradicts itself, both over time and at the same time." (p. xii)  Indeed it does.  But no one, least of all Plantinga,  takes that as an argument against science as open-ended inquiry.  A question to ruminate on:  Should not religion also be thought of as open-ended and subject to correction?

7.  I would say that if there is demonstrable conflict between a religious belief and a well-established finding of current natural science, then the religious belief must give way.  Plantinga commits himself to something rather less ringing: if there were such a conflict, then "initially, at least, it would cast doubt on those religious beliefs inconsistent with current science."(p. xii).  But he doesn't think there is any conflict between "Christian belief and science, while there is conflict between naturalism and science." 

8. One apparent conflict is between evolution and religion, another between miracles and science.  Plantinga will argue that these conflicts are merely apparent.  Theistic religion does not conflict with evolution but with a "philosophical gloss or add-on to the scientific theory of evolution: the claim that it is undirected . . . ." (p. xii) As for miracles, Plantinga says he will show that they do not violate the causal closure of the physical domain and the various conservation laws that govern it. "Any system in which a divine miracle occurs . . . would not be causally closed; hence such a system is not addressed by those laws." (p. xiii)  That sounds a bit fishy, but we shall have to see how Plantinga develops the argument.

9. As for the "deep concord" between theistic thinking and science, it is rooted in the imago Dei.  If God has created us in his image, then he has created us with the power to understand ourselves and our world.  This implies that he he has created us and our world "in such a way that there is a match between our cognitive powers and the world." (p. xiv)  I would put it like this: both the intelligibility of the world and our intelligence have a common ground in God.  This common ground or source secures both the objectivity of truth and the possibility of our knowing some of it, and thereby the possibility of successful science.

10.  But when it comes to naturalism and science, there is "deep and serious conflict."    Naturalism entails materialism about the human mind.  It entails that we are just complex physical systems.  If so, then Plantinga will argue that "it is improbable, given naturalism and evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable."  If this can be shown, then the conjunction of naturalism and evolution is not rationally acceptable. "Hence naturalism and evolution are in serious conflict: one can't rationally accept them both." (p. xiv)  

Could Intentionality be an Illusion? A Note on Rosenberg

Could intentonality be an illusion?  Of course not.  But seemingly intelligent people think otherwise:

A single still photograph doesn't convey movement the way a motion picture does. Watching a sequence of slightly different photos one photo per hour, or per minute, or even one every 6 seconds won't do it either. But looking at the right sequence of still pictures succeeding each other every one-twentieth of a second produces the illusion that the images in each still photo are moving. Increasing the rate enhances the illusion, though beyond a certain rate the illusion gets no better for creatures like us. But it's still an illusion. There is noting to it but the succession of still pictures. That's how movies perpetrate their illusion. The large set of still pictures is organized together in a way that produces in creatures like us the illusion that the images are moving. In creatures with different brains and eyes, ones that work faster, the trick might not work. In ones that work slower, changing the still pictures at the rate of one every hour (as in time-lapse photography) could work. But there is no movement of any of the images in any of the pictures, nor does anything move from one photo onto the next. Of course, the projector is moving, and the photons are moving, and the actors were moving. But all the movement that the movie watcher detects is in the eye of the beholder. That is why the movement is illusory.

The notion that thoughts are about stuff is illusory in roughly the same way. Think of each input/output neural circuit as a single still photo. Now, put together a huge number of input/output circuits in the right way. None of them is about anything; each is just an input/output circuit firing or not. But when they act together, they "project" the illusion that there are thoughts about stuff. They do that through the behavior and the conscious experience (if any) that they produce. (Alex Rosenberg, The Atheists' Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions.  The quotation was copied from here.)

Rosenberg is not saying, as an emergentist might, that the synergy of sufficiently many neural circuits gives rise to genuine object-directed thoughts.    He is saying something far worse, something literally nonsensical, namely, that the object-directed thought that thoughts are object-directed is an illusion.  The absurdity of Rosenberg's position can be seen as follows.

1. Either the words "The notion that thoughts are about stuff is illusory"  express a thought — the thought that there are no object-directed thoughts — or they do not. 
2. If the latter, then the words are meaningless.
3. If the former, then the thought is either true or false.
4. If the thought is true, then there there are no object-directed thoughts, including the one expressed by Rosenberg's words, and so his words are once again meaningless.
5. If the thought is false, then there are object-directed thoughts, and Rosenberg's claim is false.
Therefore
6. Rosenberg's claim is either meaningless or false.  His position is self-refuting.

As for the analogy, it is perfectly hopeless, presupposing as it does genuine intrinsic intentionality.  If I am watching a movie of a man running, then I am under an illusion in that there is nothing moving on the movie screen: there is just a series of stills. But the experience I am undergoing is a perfectly good experience that exhibits genuine intrinsic intentionality: it is a visual experiencing of a man running, or to be perfectly punctilious about it: a visual experiencing AS OF a man running.  Whether or not the man depicted exists, as would be the case if the movie were a newsreel, the experience exists, and so cannot be illusory.

 To understand the analogy one must understand that there are intentional experiences, experiences that take an accusative.  But if you understand that, then you ought to be able to understand that the analogy cannot be used to render intelligible how it might that it is illusory that there are intentional experiences.

What alone remains of interest here is how a seemingly intelligent fellow could adopt a position so manifestly absurd.  I suspect the answer is that he has stupefied himself  by  his blind adherence to scientistic/naturalistic ideology.

Here is an earlier slap at Rosenberg.  Peter Lupu joins in the fun here.

Plato’s Cave and the Garden of Eden

An archeologist who claimed to have uncovered the site of Plato's Cave would be dismissed as either a prankster or a lunatic.  There never was any such cave as is described in the magnificent Book VII of Plato's Republic.  And there never were any such cave-dwellers or  goings-on as the ones described in Plato's story.  And yet this, the most famous allegory in the history of philosophy, gives us the truth about the human condition.  It lays bare the human predicament in which shadow is taken for substance, and substance for shadow, the truth-teller for a deceiver, and the deceiver for a truth-teller.

The reader will have guessed where I am going with this.  If the allegory of the Cave delivers the truth about the human predicament despite its falsity when taken as an historical narrative, the same could be true for the stories in the Bible. No reasonable person nowadays could take Genesis as reporting historical facts.  To take but one example, at Genesis 3, 8 we read that Adam and Eve, after having tasted of the forbidden fruit, "heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the Garden . . . ."  Taken literally, this implies that God has feet.  But if he has feet  was he shod on that day or not?  If shod, what was his shoe size?  10 1/2?    Obviously, nothing can have feet without having feet of a determinate size!  And given that the original parents heard God stomping around, then he had to be fairly large: if God were the size of a flea, he wouldn't have made any noise.  If God were a  physical being, why couldn't he be the size of a flea or a microbe?  The answer to these absurdities is the double-barreled denial that God is a physical being and that Genesis is an historical account.  I could give further examples. (And you hope I won't.)

This is why the deliverances of evolutionary biology do not refute the Fall.  (I grant that said deliverances refute some doctrines of the Fall, those doctrines that posit an original pair of humans, without animal progenitors, from whom the whole human race is descended.)  Indeed, it is quite stupid to think that the Fall can be refuted from biology.  It would as stupid as to think that the truths about the human condition that are expressed in Plato's famous allegory can be negated or disconfirmed by the failure of archeologists to locate the site of Plato's Cave, or by any physical proof that a structure like that of Plato's Cave is nomologically impossible.

And yet wasn't that what Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biologist, was quoted as maintaining? 

Earlier I quoted John Farrell quoting biologist Jerry Coyne:

I’ve always maintained that this piece of the Old Testament, which is easily falsified by modern genetics (modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals), shows more than anything else the incompatibility between science and faith. For if you reject the Adam and Eve tale as literal truth, you reject two central tenets of Christianity: the Fall of Man and human specialness.

 I suppose this shows that the wages of scientism are (topical) stupidity.

Addenda (10 September 2011)

1.  I said that the Allegory of the Cave "gives us the truth about the human condition."  Suppose you disagree.  Suppose you think the story provides no insight into the human condition.    My point goes through nonetheless.  The point is that the truth or falsity of the story is unaffected by empirical discoveries and nondiscoveries.  Anthropological and archeological investigations are simply irrelevant to the assessment of the claims being made in the allegory.  That, I hope, is perfectly obvious.

2.  There is another point that I thought of making but did not because it struck me as too obvious, namely, that the Allegory of the Cave is clearly an allegory, and is indeed explicitly presented as such in Chapter VII of the Republic (cf. 514a et passim), whereas the Genesis account is neither clearly  an allegory, nor explicitly presented in the text as one.  But that too is irrelevant to my main point.  The point is that biological, anthropological, and geological investigations are simply irrelevant for the evaluation of what Genesis discloses or purports to disclose about the human condition.  For example, at Gen 1, 26 we are told that God made man in his image and likeness.  That means:  Man is a spiritual being.  (See my post Imago Dei) Obviously, that proposition can neither be established nor refuted by any empirical investigation.  The sciences of matter cannot be expected to  disclose any truths about spirit.  And if, standing firm on the natural sciences, you deny that there is anything other than matter, then you fall into the easily-refuted mistake of scientism.  Furthermore, Genesis is simply incoherent if taken as presenting facts about history or facts about cosmology and physical  cosmogenesis.  Not only is it incoherent; it is contradicted by what we know from the physical sciences.  Clearly, in any conflict between the Bible and natural science, the Bible will lose.

The upshot is that the point I am making about Genesis cannot be refuted by adducing the obvious difference between a piece of writing that presents itself as an allegory and a piece of writing that does not.  Plato's intention was to write an allegory.  The authors of Genesis presumably did not have the intention of writing an allegory.  But that is irrelevant to the question whether the stories can be taken as reporting historical and physical facts.  It is obvious that Plato's story cannot be so taken.  It is less obvious, but nonetheless true, that the Genesis story cannot be so taken.  For if you take it as historical reportage, then it is mostly false or incoherent, and you miss what is important: the spiritual, not the physical, meaning.

3.  The mistake of those who think that biology refutes the Fall is the mirror-image of those benighted fundamentalists and literalists who think that the Fall 'stands or falls' with the historical accuracy of tales about original parents, trees, serpents, etc.  The opposing groups are made for each other.  The scientistic atheist biologist attacks a fundamentalist straw man while the benighted fundamentalist knocks himself out propping up his straw man.  Go at it, boys!  The spectacle is entertaining but not edifying.