DWill wrote:Robert Tulip wrote:DWill, you are saying here that we should extend intellectual respect to creationists. …
I can't imagine where you get that idea. You're mistaking my analysis for advocacy.
No, I’m not suggesting at all that you are advocating for creationism, but that is the unintended implication of your comment. Your argument is that certainty is always open to doubt. To illustrate this, you pointed out that many people are certain about claims that are false, with creationists as Exhibit A. You then falsely infer from this correct observation that all claims of certainty may be wrong. The leap from ‘some people are wrong’ to ‘everyone may be wrong’ is fallacious, implying that the scientific understanding of evolution may be incorrect. Science does not need to know everything about evolution in order to be certain about core facts. It muddies the debate between truth and error by failing to clearly demarcate between correct science and incorrect creationism, thereby giving succour to the error.
DWill wrote:Saying natural selection is right because it's certain is circular reasoning.
No, that is an incorrect use of the concept of circular reasoning. Science says natural selection is right/certain because it consistently explains all available evidence. The situation is that doubt is reasonable before a correct explanation is discovered, but once science has discovered how nature works, then doubting this truth becomes farcical. What we do have to guard against is evangelical science that extends its domain beyond its legitimate borders, for example with atheists who say that evolution indicates the need to abolish religion. But while science sticks to its knitting, it has a right and responsibility to proclaim certainty about major discoveries of the nature of reality such as the law of natural selection.
Dwill wrote:Saying that your certainty was correct only gives you personal credit for something you have no influence over, whether an idea is true or not.
I would get personal credit if I gave the correct answer in an exam, or if I acted on certain knowledge to save people’s lives. Beyond that, a basic understanding of reality is a norm in human life. Anyone who is not certain about how many beans make five won’t last long.
Yes, if the evidence is strong, you have every reason to to assert that with the emotional force that constitutes expression of certainty. But that emotion is not the indicator of truth, and you can be wrong when you express it, as, to me, creationists are obviously wrong in their certainty that nat. selection is false. The facts are all we have to go on.
Again, this comparison of objective scientific knowledge to emotional religious sentiment is fallacious. The processes are completely different. Science has abundant systematic corroboration through observation and evidence while religion relies on desire, fantasy and authority.
scientists would say the way must remain open to revision of what we know. Certainty, which in terms of science would be defined as, "these things are true, in just the way we now describe them, forevermore," acts as a roadblock to this openness.
This expresses a basic conceptual misunderstanding. Saying you are certain does not mean your knowledge is complete. I know the earth orbits the sun, but I have much more to learn about the detail of how and why this is the case. This basic fact contains a whole nest of further facts, some of which may not be certain, as in the technical astronomical difficulties of the three body problem, and whether earth’s orbit has patterns within it. But we don’t suddenly say we aren’t sure about the order of the planets because we don’t fully understand the mechanism of the seasons. Certainty is a foundation for further research, not a blockage for it.
There is no nihilism anywhere in sight.
Except that your inference: A: “Be open to revision” => B: “No certainty is possible” is entirely nihilistic, in the sense that it says nothing is certain. Science should be open to revision at its frontiers. But in its core knowledge, for example the order of the planets in the solar system, or the structure of the periodic table, or the outline history of life on earth, science is utterly certain. There simply is no room for doubt, so excluding certainty because of some fear of infection by faith appears odd.
You are afraid that unless we claim the absoluteness of certainty, we'll have no conviction. Well, there is a dilemma here that I won't deny. You know the lines from Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Yeats gives neither side his endorsement, clearly.
Thanks for mentioning The Second Coming. We have discussed it before. Yeats’ vision, as I read him, is that this context of uncertainty indicates a cusp of a new age of knowledge replacing the worn out old age of belief. He presents the image of the sphinx ending twenty centuries of stony sleep as a dream of the spirit of the world. It seems a deeply perceptive prophetic insight that the collapse of the old age is characterised by fanaticism on the part of the ignorant and impotent confusion on the part of the good. Yeats sees something unsustainable in that recipe.
To fight, putting oneself in physical or psychological danger, does require passion, I have no doubt of that. Is that passion only available if we don the mantle of certainty? But is that passion of certainty at the same time destructive of reasoned action, as Yeats believed?
Donning the mantle reminds me of Paul’s comment at 1 Thessalonians 5 about “putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet.” I don’t agree that Yeats thought certainty destroys reason. It is rather that certainty about error is very dangerous. If people could be certain of the truth that would be a good thing. My view is that science provides an excellent heuristic regarding truth, as we can accept that abundantly corroborated data that enables accurate prediction is true.
That C02 is a greenhouse gas has that high reliability that makes it seem a certainty, and there may be no harm at all in your looking at it that way. But certainty is not required for action, and it will a very good thing if that is true for global warming, because we need for people to agree to changes in lifestyle even absent a feeling of certainty about the issue.
It may be that new technology will enable minimal change in lifestyle even while bringing a shift in our global energy platform away from fossil fuels. If sustainable biofuel replaces petroleum and coal it need have no impact on lifestyle.
I think there is a sense in which certainty is required for action, simply because people have to choose if they want to back their own judgment. While people have the nagging sense ‘this is not real’ they can ignore the evidence. That seems to be the real meaning of the parable about faith moving mountains, that we can only attain momentum when people get together on a combined program for which they have a strong sense of loyalty and commitment. My view is that science justifies our loyalty regarding what it is telling us about our planetary future.
This may seem to have drifted away from the opening question whether evolutionary chance is impossible. I would say the relevance remains that the religious objection to evolution is its removal of core ethical virtues such as purpose, meaning and faith. Evolution is not random, but directional towards existing possibilities. That means we have a responsibility to identify possible evolutionary steps and seek to bring them about. It seems this involves accepting some of the virtues that science has come to deride for their religious associations, but that is hardly surprising since things that have succeeded for a long time must have some evolutionary benefit.