AA's Critics, Pseudoscience, and Anti-Religious Bias: Considering a Recent Challenge to AA. (Part 3)

This is the third part of a consideration of Lance and Zachary Dodes' critique of AA. In the first part, I called into question their claim that AA helps only about 10% of those who pursue it, and is damaging to the other 90%. In the second part, I consider how they mischaracterize AA's twelve steps--in a way that parallels the distortion of Christian theologies of grace.

For the final installment in this series, I want to (briefly, for me) consider how the Dodes' suspicion of AA may be linked to the deeper science/religion wars. The Dodes' make claims about the ineffectiveness of AA that are far more confident than is warranted, and they impose an uncharitable interpretation of the twelve steps when a more charitable one is available. But why? What lies behind these kinds of errors?

My answer is admittedly speculative--a bit of an exercise in "psychologizing." But I think there are clues in what the Dodes' say that point towards a diagnosis

Let's begin with the title of the Dodes' essay: "The pseudoscience of Alcoholics Anonymous." This title is ambiguous. It might refer to pseudoscience in the study of AA, or it might be accusing AA itself of being a pseudoscience.

While concern about the former seems appropriate, calling AA pseudoscience is a category mistake. AA isn't an empirical study of the world, but a way of life and an underlying way of thinking about life that aims to help those who participate in it overcome addiction and live clean and sober lives.

Unfortunately, the Dodes appear to have more than just the former in mind. This comes out especially when they walk through the twelve steps. As they begin to examine the steps one by one, they set up their discussion by asserting, "Twelve steps sounds like science." That is, they begin their walk-through of the twelve steps by setting up a kind of straw man: AA should be considered a science and evaluated in those terms. But then it's found to be more like religion in its language and aims. And this becomes the basis for a kind of condescending dismissal.

Let's think about what's going on here in a broader context. A common feature of the modern culture wars is the tendency to pit science against religion as if the two were essentially opposed. I think this tendency is a disservice both to science and to religion--and it is, unfortunately, fueled by agendas on both sides.

It's a disservice to both because treating them as competitors leads to distortion: On the one side, it leads to a "scientism" that unjustifiably treats scientific descriptions of the physical world as if they were offering a metaphysical worldview--that is, a view about the fundamental nature of reality and the meaning of life. This happens when it is assumed without warrant that the limits of what science is suited to investigate are identical to the limits of what is real.

On the other side, the conflation of science and religion leads to a superstitious fundamentalism wherein something meant to provide a way of seeing and responding to the world of physical facts is instead reduced to a set of dubious factual claims. When religion sets itself up as offering the best path to answering empirical questions, it has lost touch with what religion is for. It is attempting to do the sort of thing that science does, except badly. In other words, it has devolved into pseudoscience.

For example, instead of offering a religious worldview that invites us to see and respond to the world (the one described by science) as a reality that springs from a vast and creative intelligence, we get the Young Earth Creationist claim that the best way to decide the age of the earth is to deduce it from clues left in the Bible. The creationist then has to scramble for some semblance of scientific credibility in the hopeless attempt to compete with the results of sober and objective research.

Some Young Earth Creationists even find themselves driven to say that their God has systematically deceived us by planting an overwhelming body of evidence for an ancient universe...as a test of our faith in what the Bible "teaches" (as if we should trust God after accepting their assertion that God is the perpetrator of the greatest hoax in history).

This is what happens when religion pretends to be science. And there's plenty of it going on out there. But some overreaching critics of religion have taken this distortion of religion for religion's essence, as if there could be no religion without pseudoscience. And this mistake leads to the prejudicial dismissal of ideas and approaches to life that smack of religion. Even those who pay lip service to the social value of religion will often fall prey to this unconscious prejudice.

Such prejudicial dismissal, when it happens, is rarely spelled out explicitly. But if you read through the Dodes' treatment of the twelve steps, what you find is a critique that relies extensively on invoking the labels of "unscientific" and "religious" as if they were equivalent--as if, in establishing that AA is pseudoscience, it is sufficient to show that the twelve steps retain much of their religious origins.

It's not sufficient. And one reason it's not sufficient is precisely this: In an effort to be ecumenical and welcoming to the diverse array of alcoholics within its fold, AA has needed to treat as inessential the very things that are at risk of turning religion into pseudoscience when treated as essential.

Consider: AA has seen the need to set aside specific doctrinal claims, including in the interpretation of its own twelve steps. In the same stroke, it has lost the need to be "right." It is that need that leads so often to assertions that a specific text or institution or prophetic leader is an inerrant authority. And it is the need to stick by this supposedly inerrant authority, to preserve its inerrancy even when that authority makes claims that are about empirical facts rather than transcendent meaning, that so often paves the way to pseudoscience.

Put another way, AA offers a good model of what religion can look like when it is freed from the propensity towards pseudoscience. Focusing on a general way of approaching life and responding to its challenges, but without the demand for doctrinal conformity that prevails in fundamentalistic religion, AA offers a broadly religious way of life that is resistant to the pseudoscience that springs from the insistence on inerrant authority (and the concomitant cries of heresy).

This is not to say that no such fundamentalistic leanings ever infect isolated AA meetings. It is not to say that individual AA members never bring their pseudoscientific ideas into their home groups. Rather, it is to say that AA overall is not a source of pseudoscience in the way that fundamentalistic religion has proven itself to be.

Of course, the same can be said for many progressive expressions of traditional religious faith, which are friendly to good science and its conclusions (even if they are not friendly to a scientism in which invalid inferences from science underwrite metaphysical claims). But too often, those who have been burned in one way or another by fundamentalistic religion see all religion through the lens of this species, and are prone to dismiss progressive faith as some kind of bad-faith attempt to cling to comforting ideas while throwing off religion's irrationality. "Real" religion is the stuff that stands in opposition to science.

My speculative hypothesis, then, is this: The Dodes' critique of AA, riddled as it is with the errors discussed in previous posts, is colored by an underlying prejudice (perhaps a quite unconscious one). That prejudice is born out of two things: first, the fact that AA is not only historically rooted in religion but retains religious and spiritual language and aims; and second, a derisive attitude towards religion springing from (a) the scientist's wholly appropriate disdain for pseudoscience, and (b) the unfortunate prevalence of pseudoscience in fundamentalist religion.

The problem, of course, is that not all religion is the same. And to the extent that AA is religious, it is (largely) a form of religion that can live happily alongside science done with integrity.

Of course, if that is true, then AA members should be willing to engage seriously with careful scientific study of the efficacy of AA's methods relative to alternatives. While I don't think the Dodes' have offered anything critical of AA that would qualify as such a study, should there be serious academic research that demonstrates ways of improving the outcomes of AA's efforts, the AA community ought to be willing to engage with that research.

But, of course, most AA members are not researchers qualified to assess the merits of such research. And they aren't in AA to do research, but to stay sober. To say that the AA community should be open to seriously engaging with such research is not to say that AA members should be skeptical of a way of life that has worked well for them personally.

If you've become a brilliant pianist through a distinct method, a study suggesting an alternative method works better for most people who learn to play piano shouldn't inspire you to jeopardize your achievement by switching to an approach that may not be suited to you. It might, however, mean that if other methods are available and comparably accessible to your students, and some of those students aren't flourishing with you, you might suggest that they try one of the alternatives.

But AA members routinely say, "If you find something that works better for you, go for it." AA is a way of engaging with and thinking about the world, not a scientific study of the relative efficacy of such ways. Furthermore, because of the interpretive flexibility built into AA, there is not a single monolithic approach that falls under AA's rubric. Even within AA, there is room for asking which approach works better, and for whom.

More often than not, the answer to that question comes from personal discovery rather than scientific study. This is not to say that the latter should not be attempted despite the range of practical difficulties discussed in my first post. But it is to say that AA isn't a science. And it is to say that personal decisions about the path to sobriety typically need to be made based on something other than the outcomes of scientific research. Sometimes that path with adopt the forms and language of religion, extracting from religious traditions the fruits of centuries of collective practical experience, fruits which have yet to be scientifically assessed.

And none of these facts imply that AA is pseudoscience.

Missing the Evolution/Creation Debate

I missed the recent exchange between Ken Ham (the Answers in Genesis Guy) and Bill Nye (the Science Guy). And I have no plan to correct that oversight. I tend to agree with Michael Schulson and Sarah Posner that it was a strategic mistake for Nye to agree to the debate in the first place. Other than offering those on Ham' side the chance to mug for a camera holding silly handwritten signs (and actually face a real prospect of having others look at the results), what exactly is a debate like this supposed to accomplish?

I'm not sure. Science education may have been Nye's goal--but it's not clear that this aim is served by the kind of theater that is expected in this kind of debate. Don't get me wrong. I think there is a place for thoughtful debate. I just don't think that this is what you're likely to get when a science educator who wants to talk about the evidence for evolutionary theory pairs off against a biblical fundamentalist interested in slinging scientifically empty zingers while waving a Bible around.

Misrepresenting Climate Science

The question of whether human activities contribute to global climate change is not a political question. It's not an ethical question.

It's a scientific question.

The question of what we should do about it is primarily an ethical question. But if it calls for anything, it calls for collective action and public policy changes, and so becomes a political question as well. Communities need to wrestle with alternative public policy responses, hopefully through public discourse shaped by a shared commitment to the welfare of society, an awareness and respect for diverse interests and worldviews and ways of life, an appreciation of what is feasible for the society to do given its resources and its history...and an understanding of the relevant science.

The political question about public policy comes after the scientific one, in the sense that we need to know what the science tells us about what's going on before we can make informed decisions about what to do about what's going on. To invert this order can be quite dangerous.

Some scientific conclusions call for public policies that are, to put it simply, painful and hard--sometimes hard for everyone, sometimes hard for a particular constituency. Nobody likes being called to do what is painful and hard. Hence, if we let political questions come before scientific ones, we are in danger of rejecting scientific discoveries because they're unpleasant. And so we don't do the hard thing that needs doing. The result is even greater pain and hardship in the long run.

This is what it means for a scientific question to become "politicized": Sometimes a proposed public policy is found by someone to be undesirable--maybe because it would force you to make life changes you don't want to make, or stop business practices that have proven quite profitable. But sometimes that same public policy would be clearly the right one to implement if a particular answer to a scientific question were correct. And so, in order to avoid facing an undesirable public policy, you try to convince yourself and others that the unpleasant answer to the scientific question is incorrect, and the more congenial answer is right...regardless of whether or not that's the direction in which the scientific research points. It's one thing when an individual does this, something else again when a political party does it on behalf of its constituency, marshalling resources to ensure that scientists won't say the "wrong" things or, if they do, will be discredited or go unheard.

You can bet that something like this is going on any time that public views about a scientific question are divided along party lines, and the political debate about the question is far more contentious than what one actually finds within the community of scientists. When something like that is going on, its a clear sign that one political party or both are letting the policies they find most attractive dictate their take on what the science says.

This is clearly going on with climate science. And we all know this. And neither political party denies it. What they deny is that they are the party guilty of doing the politicizing. Instead, each side accuses the other of being the one that has politicized climate science. When this happens, it seems as if the media gravitates towards giving each political view equal time in an effort to remain fair and balanced. Not wanting to appear biased, mainstream media outlets will do something they simply don't do with respect to scientific questions that haven't become politicized: They given equal time to dissenters from the scientific consensus, without much regard to whether the dissenters have comparable scientific credentials or have been hired by those with a vested interest in one answer being the right one.

Of course, there are those media outlets that buck this trend. Unfortunately, some buck the trend because they care about accurate scientific reporting, whereas others buck it because they really are biased.

In short, there are media outlets the bend over backwards not to appear as if they are politicizing an issue, even at the risk of misrepresenting science; there are media outlets that really have become politicized, both on the left and on the right; and there are media outlets that want to convey a clear and accurate understanding of our scientific knowledge to the public. But how is the typical citizen, who knows very little about science and has little time to devote to the matter, supposed to tell which is which?

A good chunk of the American population believes that most media outlets are biased towards the political left and that the only trustworthy source of news out there is FOX. Another chunk believes most media outlets are pretty centrist, and that FOX is a right-wing propaganda machine posing as a news organization. These respective views reflect political party affiliations pretty closely--and they also determine where people are inclined to look to get their views on scientific questions.

So: Climate science has become politicized. Each side claims the other side is doing the politicizing. To decide who is doing the politicizing and who isn't, we need to see what the science is. To do this we turn to the media. But the media has become politicized as well--and our views about which media outlets to trust are typically informed by our politics.

Recently, a group of socially engaged scientists sought to cut through this impasse by turning their scientific eye to the media's communication of climate science. Specifically, the Union of Concerned Scientists recently investigated News Corporation (which owns FOX News and the Wall Street Journal), and concluded that there is enormous misrepresentation on FOX News generally and on the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. The following video represents UCS's attempt to communicate its conclusions in an accessible way to the general public:



But, of course, the Union of Concerned Scientists is surely going to be represented as just another left-wing interest group spinning the facts to suit their politics. After all, was there a comparable effort to study the frequency of misrepresentation on CNN? In the New York Times opinion pages? Isn't this just another politicized interest group?

In short, how is the lay person going to decide whether the Union of Concerned Scientists actually represents the scientific community's attempt to cut through thepolitics and media noise? Who do you trust as an honest voice expressing non-politicized scientific consensus, and who do you dismiss as peddling politicized misrepresentations? I suppose you could do your own journalistic investigation of the scientific community--seek to understand not only what most scientists think but also why they think it, and how the methodologies of science work to keep politicization from systematically contaminating the findings.

But not everyone has the skills needed to pursue such an investigation effectively, let alone the time. While I think research could be done by the lay person well enough to conclude that most scientists are convinced that human-induced global warming is real, I'm not sure that most lay people have the resources to be able to determine for themselves whether this is because (as some on the right will argue) the scientific community has been compromised by politicization, but for a few heroic dissenters who have the science on their side; or whether, on the contrary, the few dissenters are the ones who have been compromised by the influence of those with a political agenda.

So let me offer a suggestion. Science tends to get misrepresented when the policy implications of accepting the science are going to be costly. It is not nearly as plausible to suppose that someone sees the policy implications of the best science, discovers that these implications are unproblematic and easy to implement without demanding sacrifices...and so decides to misrepresent the science so as to make it seem as if it places costly demands on all of us when really it doesn't.

This isn't a foolproof technique for deciding who to trust. There may be reasons why someone would want to convey the false impression that we need to buckle down and make very hard, long-term social and economic changes that are going to be deeply unpopular. Under the right conditions, telling people that the country and the world have to make substantial sacrifices and radical life-changes may be a winning political strategy, a way to get people flocking to vote for you on election day.

But generally not. And when it is to your advantage to convey such a message--as a way of getting people to vote for you out of fear, perhaps, that the other guy is leading us to the brink of ruin--the advantage typically evaporates once you're in power. The political incentive to use your power to demand needless and painful sacrifices of your constituents isn't all that great when you risk getting voted out of office.

So, following this strategy, chances are that those who are telling you that human induced global warming is bunk have more incentive to politicize than those who are telling you that human induced global warming is a real problem that we have to come to grips with. After all, those who say the latter are offering an unpleasant and unpopular notion: Our transportation industry, our energy grid, our way of life is contributing to a problem of potentially dire significance. There's enrmous reason for people to want this notion to be false even if it's true. The auto industry and energy industry don't want it to be true that their businesses depend on and perpetuate practices that threaten the integrity of our ecosystems and the future prospects of humanity. Ordinary citizens don't want to be told that their way of life--their cars and electric lights and air conditioners and on and on--is threatening future generations.

There's ample reason for people to want to deny human-induced global warming even if it's true. Is there comparable reason to suppose that those who support global warming science would have strong motivation to systematically fabricate sustained warnings that call for massive changes and world-wide sacrifice, even if there is no good reason to think such warnings are warranted?

There are reasons why scientists who are convinced of global warming science might downplay findings that would be jumped on by politicized opponents, out of fear that these findings would be misrepresented and used to mislead the public who don't understand their significance. Doing so would be a bad idea--and if you were caught doing it, it would actually hurt your cause. But that's not the same as having a motive to systematically mislead the public about conclusions that the science doesn't support.

Of course, there are those who argue that global warming science has become a kind of cottage industry, and that scientists who make their living in this cottage industry would lose out if it proved that human activities aren't contributing to global climate change. But on this issue we need to consider how and why such a cottage industry would develop in the first place. Where did the idea come from, if not from the conclusions reached by legitimate science?

But let's grant that the science initially pointed to human-induced global warming. One might suppose that the egos of those scientists who first introduced the global warming thesis would be invested in it not being disproved. I suppose one might think that ego is t force here that is keeping the scientific community from seeing that the initial evidence has been overturned.

But there are egos everywhere in every field of science, and science has been very good at devising a methodology and a community in which fidelity to scientific findings does more to shape the consensus in the long run than the egos on one side rather than the other. Looking at the trend in the scientific community, it hasn't been one of egotistical defenders of global warming science one by one bowing to the weight of contrary evidence. It's been the reverse.

Let's put it another way: Who do you think is more likely to have their views on science compromised by politics: Politicians who as a whole care primarily about political questions, or scientists who as a community care deeply about the integrity of science, and who work within a system designed to maintain the integrity of science?

I suppose that modern Luddites--opponents of technology--would have an incentive to misrepresent science in favor of a dire threat cause by our technological way of life. If scientists were largely Luddites, there might be a problem here. But scientists are not, in general, Luddites. It's not just that they make use of cutting edge technology in their work. It's also that the public support for the work they do rests to a great extent in the technological innovations that scientific research and discovery makes possible. There's at least a sense in which technology just is scientific findings put to use to solve human problems.

In short, there is a presumptive reason to suppose that those who deny global warming science are more likely than defenders to be engaged in politicization. And there is little reason to suppose that this presumption is defeated in the particular case at hand. And so, if you're wondering who to trust amidst all the media clutter and political grandstanding, I'd bet on the majority of climate scientists who say that, in fact, human activity is contributing to a serious problem of global climate change.

Of course, that doesn't tell us what we should do about it. Maybe if politicians were to stop debating the science, they could get to work on debating that.

Storytelling Animals

The traditional philosophical definition of 'human' is "rational animal," and while I think this definition works, it seems to me a case could made for defining us as storytelling animals. That's what is suggested in a recent article by Maria Popova, and also in the book Popova discusses in that article, namely The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, by Jonathan Gottschall.

There may actually be a close connection between rationality and storytelling. Perhaps defining us as storytelling animals, as opposed to merely rational ones, focuses in on a certain kind of rational thinking that is especially distinctive of who and what we are.

Reason makes connections. Some of those connections are logical ones--and certainly part of what human characteristically do is recognizing logical implications. But the most important connections people make have to do with the question "Why?" And as soon as we start saying why this or that is the case--as soon as we start making causal connections, teleological ones (roughly, connections based on purposes and aims), or what I'll call energent ones (accounts of how some higher level property arises out of the interaction of simpler elements)--we've started to tell a story.

Scientists, in their way, are in the business of telling stories. They aim not just to be collectors of facts and observers of patterns. They want to make sense of those facts and those patterns, weave them together into a coherent picture. This is the essence of narrative, what distinguishes a timeline from a story: Fitting the pieces together in a way that makes sense. The theoretic level of science might be construed as a distinctive refinement of the storyteller's art.

Arguably, the most influential scientists are those who have a knack for how to tell their story well, in a way that resonates with and makes sense to others. Darwin, in The Origin of Species, famously told the story of evolution in a way that connected with the common experience of people of the day--by, among other things, invoking the metaphor of animal husbandry to explain the process of natural selection.

Philosophy, too, can be seen as involving a specialized kind of storytelling. Philosophy has both a negative/critical side and a constructive/speculative one. The constructive side attempts to fit disparate elements of our experience together into a coherent way of seeing the whole--and the critical side is really in the service of the constructive one, assessing attempts at speculative construction to evaluate their internal coherence and their fit with our lived experience and the facts available. Philosophy in this sense becomes a kind of storytelling and vetting of stories in an attempt to piece together our human experience into a compelling account of what it all means.

Even those who resist speculation beyond "what science tells us" have a hard time resisting their own version of such holistic storytelling, which is why "scientism" so often emerges among those who are doggedly committed not to believe in anything beyond what science tells us. Scientism is what happens, we might say, when those who consciously refuse to tell a holistic story end up telling one subconsciously: They weave together a narrative picture of the whole premised on the idea that there is nothing beyond what science gives to us, and hence postulating that the picture of "the whole" cannot include any postulates beyond the very delimited ones that arise in the scientist's specialized form of storytelling.

Naturalism, in contrast with scientism, might be seen as the conscious attempt to build a narrative worldview around such a postulate--and hence as the effort to tell this story in a self-reflective and thoughtful way, as opposed to merely falling into a muddled story by accident.

Note: The above distinction might convey the impression that agnosticism is paired with scientism rather than naturalism, but that is a mistake. Agnostics might be very deliberate, thoughtful storytellers who are simply hesitant to give too much credence to their own stories. Telling a story isn't the same as believing it.

But this point raises some interesting questions which I think I'll take up in my next post. For now, however, let me ask it of my readers: What, exactly, are the different ways in which storytelling can be (or generally is) related to belief?

"Why is there something and not nothing?" A bit more on the question

I thought it might be useful to offer a few clarifying remarks concerning the philosophical version of the “cosmological question,” and the notion that this question operates (as I claimed in my recent “Science vs. Philosophy?” post) as a wellspring of belief in the transcendent.


First of all, as I noted in that earlier post, Leibniz put the question as follows: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” By “nothing,” here, Leibniz meant absolutely nothing, not even empty space, and certainly not empty space governed by empirically discovered laws that regulate the behavior of that empty space. By most standards of “somethingness” that I know of, to have rule-governed capacities is to be something. (In fact, as I understand one of Hermann Lotze's arguments, that is what makes something something).

Leibniz’s question, in other words, isn’t a question about why there is this kind of something (a vacuum governed by certain laws) as opposed to that sort of something (an expanding universe of quantum particles organized in a rich diversity of ways and governed by a set of basic constants). Leibniz is asking why there is anything at all.

In my earlier post I said that this “cosmological philosophical question” (borrowing the useful designator Burk offers in one comment) operates as a source of belief in the transcendent. I want to clarify what I mean by that. “The transcendent” refers to some reality beyond the empirical world but fundamental to determining its character, much in the way that the reality into which Neo awakens (in “The Matrix” movies) is a reality beyond the virtual reality matrix but fundamental to shaping the latter’s character. Put simply, “the transcendent” refers to a level of reality in principle beyond the scope of scientific inquiry but which, if it existed, would serve as the ultimate “explainer” of the reality that falls within the scope of science.

My claim is that the cosmological philosophical question (hereafter CPQ) helps give rise to belief in such a realm. Note, however, that belief in the existence of such a realm is distinct from any beliefs about what that realm of reality is like (e.g., whether or not it is personal or impersonal, monistic or dualistic, etc.), and also from any beliefs about the scope or lack thereof of human access to such a realm (e.g., whether introspective reflection on the content of consciousness can give us some insight into this realm that outward, disinterested examination of empirical objects cannot). To say that the CPQ gives rise to belief in the transcendent is not to say that it offers any particular answers to these other questions.

But even if belief in the transcendent is divorced from any beliefs about the transcendent or any beliefs about our ability to get in touch with the transcendent, it doesn’t follow that such belief is insignificant. At a minimum, such belief implies that there are important outer limits to what science can discover about reality, even in principle. If we were to imagine that science had completed its work (which it never will), discovering and understanding everything that it is possible to discover and understand about reality through broadly scientific means, belief in the transcendent entails that the most fundamental truths about reality would remain unknown.

To be clear, believing that there are orders of reality that fall outside the scope of scientific inquiry is not to say that, within its scope of inquiry, science shouldn’t be trusted (or shouldn’t be regarded as the go-to method for gaining knowledge). It isn’t to hold that some purported revelation from a purportedly transcendent source should be trusted above the direct evidence of sustained scientific inquiry. I think much scientific hostility to the postulate that there is a transcendent realm is rooted in these sorts of confusions about what positing the transcendent does (and does not) involve.

But at least some of the hostility is surely rooted in something that the postulation of the transcendent does imply—namely, that no matter how vital and amazing science is in furthering our knowledge, it cannot plumb the deepest and most important mysteries of existence. Whatever science learns, and however important or useful its teachings, the ultimate nature of reality will remain beyond its grasp. At best, some scientists bristle at this suggestion because they don’t want to place a priori philosophical limits on science’s reach. At worst, they want to believe that they are part of the ultimate project of unearthing the deepest mysteries that there are, and belief in the transcendent undercuts that narrative.

In any event, my claim in the "Science vs. Philosophy?" post was that the CPQ operates as a basis for belief in the transcendent. Now this is different from saying that the CPQ operates as a good basis for such belief, but as it happens I also think that the CPQ can serve as the starting point for a powerful philosophical argument for the transcendent—a point I make at length in Chapter 6 of Is God a Delusion?

I won’t repeat what I argued there. Instead, I will simply summarize the heart of the argument, which is this: In order for the CPQ to have an answer (in order for there to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing, as opposed to the existence of the universe being a brute fact), there must exist something that possesses the property of self-existence, that is, something whose nature renders it such that it could not have failed to exist—something whose nature sufficiently explains its own existence.

This is a property that, as Hume argued, is inconceivable of anything in the empirical realm (or any empirical entity we could hypothetically construct with our imaginations). His principle, in effect, is that the formal nature of empirical reality is such that anything which can be conceived to exist can also be conceived not to exist. And so, no empirical thing we can conceive would be such that it’s empirical nature necessitated its existence.

And so, if the CPQ is to have an answer, we must posit something beyond the empirical—something transcendent. And if the transcendent is posited to answer the CPQ, it is posited as the ultimate explanation for the existence of things.

Of course, we could say that the CPQ lacks an answer. We could say that there is no reason why there is something and not nothing—that, instead, it’s just a brute fact. That’s what Bertrand Russell did. But could a reasonable person reasonably disagree with Russell? Could a reasonable person believe in the Principle of Sufficient Reason—that everything admits of an explanation, even if we can’t discern what it is? If so, a reasonable person, reflecting on the CPQ, would come away believing in the transcendent.

I don’t think this “cosmological argument” is irresistible. I don’t, in other words, regard it as a proof of the transcendent. My own view is that this argument, like many other philosophical arguments, shows why it is that a reasonable person can reasonably believe in the transcendent—even if that does not preclude the possibility that other reasonable people might reasonably believe otherwise.

Now it is important to be clear that certain questions superficially similar to CPQ do not serve as any sort of basis—good or otherwise—for believing in the transcendent. That a vacuum is inherently unstable (given certain empirically discovered laws regulating vacuums) may explain why a vacuum in a universe governed by the basic laws that prevail in this universe would resolve into more interesting “stuff”—and thus answer the question of why our universe is a universe full of protons and electrons and stars and planets rather than an endless void. But while that might answer an interesting and important question in physics without invoking anything beyond what is accessible to physics, it does not answer the CPQ.

For the reasons I've given here and elsewhere, I’m pretty sure that if the CPQ has an answer—if there is a reason why there is anything at all—that answer in principle can’t be discovered by physics or any of the other sciences (although I’m open to being proved wrong about this).

There are some (and Krauss seems to be one of them, at least given some remarks he makes in his recent apology about his earlier dismissiveness towards philosophy) who, on the basis of this fact, are dismissive of the CPQ, regarding it as an absurd or meaningless question—as if a condition for a question’s significance is its capacity to motivate a scientific inquiry. But I am very skeptical of such dismissals. If you were a physicist trying to do physics and you confronted a question that wasn’t a question that physics could begin to address, then you might not as a physicist be interested in the question. But it doesn’t follow that no human being, as a human being, should be interested in the question. Nor does it follow that the question is incoherent—unless you adopt a logical positivist philosophy of language, which I’d advise against on the grounds that doing so renders the logical positivist philosophy of language incoherent.

In any event, my own conclusion is that the question can be addressed to some extent philosophically, insofar as it can be shown that on the assumption that the CPQ admits of an answer, we are forced to the conclusion that the answer is something that transcends the reality we encounter empirically.

Whether philosophical arguments can take us any further than reasonable belief in a “something-I-know-not-what” beyond the limits of science—that is a much more challenging question that I won’t explore here (and didn’t explore in Is God a Delusion?). What I will say is that people who (reasonably, in my judgment) believe in the transcendent can and do and should speculate about it. And these speculations are susceptible to philosophical scrutiny, in the sense that philosophers can assess such things as their internal coherence, their consistency with what we know about the empirical world (since certain views about the transcendent have implications for what the empirical world would look like), and their pragmatic implications for human life.

Philosophers can and should engage in such assessments, since such assessments help us to discern what could be true and what can’t be true about a transcendent reality that defies the grasp of specific human knowledge. Knowing what could and could not be the case about X is better than nothing, even if we cannot know precisely what is the case about X. And I think philosophers can and should address questions such as whether there are conditions under which it is objectionable to live one’s life as if one or another speculative vision about the transcendent were true—and whether there are conditions under which doing so is not objectionable.

The Science of the Violin and the Subjective/Objective Distinction

Readers of this blog--especially those intrigued by the issues raised in the last couple of posts--may enjoy a recent article in Science, "Probing the Secrets of the Finest Fiddles." In it, accoustics engineer James Woodhouse is quoted as saying, "We know pretty well how to distinguish a really bad instrument from a really good one. What distinguishes a pretty good instrument from a stratospheric instrument, I think we still don't know."

What particularly interests me here is that scientists have been able to discern measurable physical properties that distinguish instruments whose tone most listeners find lovely from instruments whose tone most listeners find tinny or in other ways less than beautiful. While a similar achievement hasn't been realized with respect to the differences between good and truly great instruments, scientists are not without hope or resources for making headway.

One implication of this fact is the following: Our aesthetic judgments in this area have been shown to track scientifically measurable differences. In this respect, even if we set aside the question of whether there are any realities beyond the physical ones scientists study, it seems that aesthetic judgments can and sometimes do track differences in the physical world.

This raises some questions about the sharp line that is often drawn between "objective" and "subjective" claims. Aesthetic judgments are routinely classified as "subjective," especially by naturalists. But on naturalist assumptions, is this entirely right? After all, that an object has a certain color is usually taken to be an objective claim (asserting something about the object that is true of it), even though color is ordinarily understood to be something that exists only "in our heads." Despite this, we treat color attributions as objective because our color experiences correlate with physical realities, tracking changes in the physical world. By contrast, calling a pizza tasty is said to be a subjective claim--that is, a claim which is really saying something about the speaker rather than about the pizza.

Could it be that this distinction is far muddier than we usually treat it as being, more a matter of degree than of differences in kind, even from a naturalist perspective?