Specter of Reason

I acknowledged physicist Sean Carroll's take on the Krauss debacle in my last post, and I was tempted to critique it at the time, but decided that doing so required a new post.  This is that post. Carroll is critical of Krauss, but he also tries to defend him by putting his work in context.  He says the physics Krauss is talking about does have something to add to "the atheism vs. theism popular debate."  I find that unlikely, and Carroll's argument offers a good opportunity to explore why. According to Carroll, quantum field theory shows that you don't need a Creator in a complete cosmological model of the universe.  Of course, we're talking about a complete and coherent scientific model of the universe.  But did we need quantum field theory to show us that?  Hardly. Does quantum field theory actually show it, even?  To do that, wouldn't it have to have an empirically definable notion of a Creator? Furthermore, is Carroll suggesting that you ...

This month, physicist and popular science writer  Sean Carroll weighs in  on the everlasting debate about free will. He says it's "as real as baseball," which means that it is not the sort of thing that we would expect to find in a detailed physical description of the universe, but that we can't imagine trying to talk about humanity without accepting it as a real phenomenon. I have to criticize Carroll for failing to explain what he means by the phrase "free will" (a phrase which, he explains, does not have an agreed upon meaning) and for failing to give us a reason to think it is as real as baseball. Carroll defends a pragmatic realism--a view that we should take as  real  whatever entities we benefit from postulating in a given language, regardless of whether or not we benefit from postulating them in our widest available language. So, we benefit from postulating the existence of baseball even though there is no need for it in the language of physics, and ...

The more I read Sam Harris on morality, the more annoyed I get. There has been a lot of good discussion in the blogosphere ( 1 , 2 , and 3 , for example), and I've written about this twice already, but there is more to say. I want to make two basic points here. First, Harris fails to offer a cogent response to the main criticisms leveled against him. In one case, he ends up embracing a view which contradicts his own: While Harris claims that moral facts are scientific facts, he accepts that justification ultimately lies outside the boundaries of science (see point 7 below). This completely undermines his proposed view of morality. Second, while Harris sets moral relativism up as the bogeyman in the debate over science and religion, his vision of a scientific morality is nothing other than a variety of moral relativism (see point 4 below). In sum, Harris' position is a self-contradictory mess. If this wasn't clear from his TED talk , it is blatantly apparent in his ...

Over the past several months or so, I've approached discussions of science by focusing on the concept of discovery. Science is the formalization of discovery. There are as many scientific methods as there are formal methods for discovering phenomena. Accidental discoveries can be utilized by science, in so far as they can lead to formal methods of discovery. It occurs to me that this view of science, while essentially valid, might be easier to communicate if I adopt another term: demonstration. Science deals in what is demonstrable. A method of discovery is a set of rules or procedures for demonstrating facts. A scientific method is defined by its rules and procedures for demonstrating facts about the world. We might ask, what is being discovered here? Is it the rules, or is it the facts? The answer is: both. A scientific discovery is defined in terms of the facts discovered as well as the rules/procedures for demonstrating those facts. It is the relationship between rul...