A short rant on "explanatory power"

This was sparked off by this week's Atheist Experience TV show, in which Matt Dillahunty encapsulated in very few words why I find intelligent design wholly unsatisfactory:

"...we tend to explain things in terms of things that we understand."

This is science, this is maths, this is software development, this is education in general. This is how we find out how things work and why.

What Matt is describing in that almost throwaway line is the progressive method of explanation. When faced with something complex, which as a whole we might not understand, we tend to break it down into its component parts and seek to understand them. If these components parts are also complex, we will further break them down until we get to a level we do understand. This is a lot like maths. Higher mathematics can be complicated, but it's built up from lesser principles, all of which can be ultimately reduced to something basic and comprehensible.

Likewise engineering, technology, and indeed all of education can be seen as a series of hierarchical steps based on something lower down the tree of complexity. We explain things in terms of other things for which we already have explanations.

Intelligent design proponents don't use this method, so their claim of "explanatory power" is bogus. Trying to explain something in terms of something else that we don't understand is clearly a non-starter. It's not helpful, and it's not explanatory.

http://blip.tv/the-atheist-experience-tv-show/atheist-experience-719-greg-paul-and-the-problem-of-evil-5408591

God among the blog-battles — an atheist rises to a challenge

As a result of something Paul Baird mentioned on the latest Skepticule Extra I listened to a discussion between Alex B and Matt Slick, which was precipitated by a challenge from another blogger (of whom more later). Alex B's conversation with Matt Slick was notable for the latter's insistence that Alex is a god-hater, to which Alex understandably responded that he couldn't hate someone whom he doesn't believe exists. There was also the tiresome insistence that Alex B had a belief — a belief that God doesn't exist. This latter point can be argued over at length, but surely its significance here is that Matt Slick clearly thinks that Alex really does believe that God doesn't exist. So how can he be a god-hater?

Alex seems to be getting a taste for the religious call-in show — he's had another go (which I've yet to hear), but so far his counter-challenge to Stormbringer, the blogger who challenged him to call Matt Slick, has brought forth no fruit. Whether Stormbringer does or does not eventually call the Atheist Experience is of little consequence. Such a call might prove entertaining, but judging by Stormbringer's blog — a few recent posts of which I've perused — the call would probably be short and inconclusive, and would likely highlight the true worth of his arguments and the level of his intellect.

The Comfort zone of a fundagelical Christian

Well, it happened. Ray Comfort was on the Atheist Experience last Sunday. I listened to the podcast, and it was one of the fastest hours I can remember.



I didn't know what to expect, although I thought it likely, given the professionalism of the Atheist Experience hosts, that it would be a civilized affair. Ray is a decent chap, that's clear, though plainly misguided and lacking intellectual rigour when it comes to matters of science — especially biology. At one point he started in with his argument about male and female evolving separately; that he still proposes this as a refutation of evolution demonstrates that he has minimal grasp of what the theory of evolution actually states, and that he's willfully ignoring patient explanations offered to him in the past (P. Z. Myers', for example).

One problem the Axp has with a discussion like this, is that an hour is nowhere near long enough to address all the various nonsense that Ray continues to come out with over the years. Matt Dillahunty and Russell Glasser did a good job, but the show could easily have been three times as long and just as packed.

If I have reservations, these would be about the wider effect of a match like this. Though it was hugely entertaining, the show let Ray appear as pleasant but deluded — not as a raving fundagelical who actively promotes a hellfire and brimstone version of Christianity that he wants everyone else to adopt. Which of these portrayals is more likely to motivate active opposition? When two members of the Rational Response Squad debated Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron the latter were shown up as creationist loons. When Ray Comfort and Thunderf00t took part in a video-recorded discussion, Ray came over as sincere but disastrously wrong. And here on the Axp he seemed to be a regular guy with some wonky ideas about evolution and nature.

Whether this show motivates opposition to Ray's wrong-headed views or not, it's necessary to challenge such views wherever and whenever they threaten to impinge on people's rights, and on that score the Axp hosts continue to be supremely competent.

An agnostic manifestly confused

Via the New Humanist blog I came across this Slate article by Ron Rosenbaum: "An Agnostic Manifesto". Paul Sims (NH editor) describes it as "excellent", but I can only hope he's being ironic. He invited comments on the New Humanist blog, so I posted the following:

Much of this comes down to definitions. Agnosticism and to a lesser extent atheism are oft-misunderstood terms. Even theism as a description of a certain kind of religious belief leaves a lot undefined.

With this article Ron Rosenbaum is engaging heavily in the straw man fallacy. Richard Dawkins, forever portrayed as the ArchAtheist, says clearly in The God Delusion (in his chapter entitled "The God Hypothesis") that he is agnostic on the matter of the existence of God.

Rosenbaum is also mistaken if he thinks that science purports to "know everything". If that were the case there would be no point in science continuing, as there would be nothing left to discover. There's no evidence that scientists the world over are quitting their jobs and attempting to find something else to do. Science isn't yet — nor is it ever likely to be — redundant.

Faced with the fundamental question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing.

Whether "most" atheists have or have not considered this is a moot point, but it has been addressed, by Lawrence Krauss, Adolf Grünbaum and others. There's also the entirely acceptable response, "We don't know," which Rosenbaum rightly describes as the agnostic position, and which most of the so called "New Atheists" (or to use a term I've seen recently, "Gnu Atheists") would embrace wholeheartedly as valid. Their position on the existence of God is derived not from a dogmatic stance, but on the balance of probabilities. It's a position based on evidence, and on logic. And most important, given this discussion, it's open to revision in the light of new evidence and new arguments.

Rosenbaum on Aquinas:

His eventual explanation entailed a Supreme Being standing outside of time and space somehow endowing it with existence (and interfering once in a while) without explaining what caused this source of "uncaused causation" to be created in the first place.

When someone talks about a source of "uncaused causation" they're unlikely to feel obliged to explain the cause of that source. It's in the description.

I should point out that I accept all that science has proven with evidence and falsifiable hypotheses but don't believe there is evidence or falsifiable certitude that science can prove or disprove everything.

I don't believe there's a reputable scientist that does believe science can prove or disprove everything.

Straw man, straw man, straw man.

(Rosenbaum's confused article was picked up by Jen Peeples on yesterday's Atheist Experience  TV show (#669) The mp3 audio of the show is available for download, and the Blip.TV video version is embedded below.)

http://blip.tv/file/3984616