About ten years ago I decided to take a deep dive into young-earth creationism (YEC). I was curious to find out how people maintain a belief in something that, to me, was so obviously wrong. Notice that this project was itself an application of the the scientific method to everyday life. I was faced with a Problem, an observation for which I could not (at the time) provide an adequate explanation: a fairly large group of people who professed to believe something that seemed like transparent and easily debunked nonsense to me. If the YEC hypothesis were so easily debunked, why had no one simply provided the definitive debunking that would persuade everyone that it was nonsense?
So I decided to do an experiment and produce the Definitive Debunking of young-earth creationism myself. How hard could it be? The YEC hypothesis is so radically at odds with the data that there are mountains of evidence against it. All I had to do was pick a few choice data points, assemble them into a slick YouTube video, and all the YECs would behold and be amazed at my erudition, and immediately see the light.
Needless to say, that did not happen.
The first problem I ran into was one I mentioned in the previous installment: direct access to scientific data is very hard to obtain, even for scientists. Nearly all scientific data is published, if not actually in the form of testimony (a.k.a. a scientific paper), then at least with some kind of testimonial baggage attached regarding its provenance: how the data was collected, whether or not it has been processed or edited in any way, whether the proper procedures were followed to calibrate the instruments and insure that the reagents all had the right concentrations, or whatever. And one common thread among YECs is that they did not (and do not) trust scientists. YECs believe that there is a wide-ranging scientific conspiracy to promote Darwinism and conceal the truth, which is that God created the world in seven days, that Noah's ark really existed, and so on.
How do you persuade someone like that? Distrust in the scientific establishment eliminated at a stroke 99% of the arguments I might have offered. I had to come up with a way to demonstrate that the earth was old using only data to which people could have direct access, and that turned out to be quite the challenge. If you are not a YEC you might want to tackle this yourself. It's even more challenging than showing that the earth is not flat without any appeal to testimony or authority.
You can judge the results of my efforts yourself, but the details don't really matter all that much. The unsurprising result that my argument failed to persuade anyone doesn't really matter all that much either. What matters is why my argument failed to persuade. There turned out to be two reasons, one superficial ostensible reason, and a much deeper real reason.
The superficial ostensible reason was that my argument relied on the assumption that geological processes in the past operated more or less the way they do now. That seemed (and still seems) like a reasonable assumption to me, but it was an assumption, and I didn't justify it. It didn't even cross my mind at the time. It just seemed obvious to me that it was true, and equally obvious that it would seem obvious to everyone. Which was, obviously, wrong.
But the deeper reason that my argument failed to persuade was that it was based on a much deeper false assumption: that a YEC's subjective experience of scientific data is the same as mine and that, therefore, any argument that would persuade me would persuade them if properly presented. It turns out (and it took me a few years to figure this out) that the divergence between my mindset and a YEC happens long before either one of us actually looks at any scientific data, even before we become aware of the existence of such things as science or data. It probably happened before we learned to read, or even speak.
As humans, there are two fundamentally different ways we can approach the project of making sense of our subjective experience. The first is to ask: how does this work? As babies we flail around randomly for along time until one day we manage to figure out that there seem to be causal connections between things happening inside of us and things happening outside. If we make certain noises, or flail around in particular ways, good things happen, and if we make different noises or flail around in other ways, bad things happen. Eventually we get to the point where we are in a position to wonder explicitly about what the fuck is going on, at which point we can ask one of two fundamental questions. The first is: how does all this stuff work? What are the rules or the mechanisms that control the behavior of the things around me? The second is: why is all this stuff happening? What is the point?
The first question leads to science; the second, to religion.
Note that each of these questions makes a different, tacit assumption. The first question assumes that there are rules that govern the behavior of the things around us, and the second question assumes that there is a point. Making the first assumption turns out to be fruitful because it turns out that there are in fact rules, and, fortuitously, that these rules are discoverable and tractable even to our puny little brains, and putting effort into figuring out what the rules are pays handsome dividends. But it leads to a problem: the more we understand the rules, the more it seems like there is no point, no satisfying answer to the question of why. And many people find that a bitter pill to swallow.
But here's the thing that many secular people don't appreciate. I know I didn't. Asking the second question is also fruitful, but in a very different way. If you start with the assumption that there is a point, then you can find a lot of corroborating evidence for that. Now, no religious person would put it like that. They would use different words, words like, "You have to open your heart to God" or something like that. But it turns out that what those words mean is more or less the same. In order to find the point, you have to first accept the possibility that there could be one. If you have spent a lifetime in pursuit, not of the point, but of the rules, and the rules indicate that there is no point, then it's going to be very, very hard for you to ever see the point.
This thing that I am calling "the point" is actually called "purpose" or "teleology". I intend for these words to all be synonyms. I'm going to keep calling it "the point" just because I think it's a little pithier. But whenever I say "the point" what I mean is "purpose" or "the meaning of life" or "teleology" or whatever your favorite label is for this somewhat ineffable concept. (I will sometimes refer to these as the "teleological worldview" and the contrasting "mechanistic worldview".)
Now, a secular person may say that it's perfectly OK not to ever see the point if in fact there is no point. But it is not perfectly OK. If the reason that you fail to see the point is that you were asking the wrong questions, then this might blind you to an actual truth, and this might cause you to fail to achieve some pretty big goals. If the reason you fail to see the point is that the assumption that there is no point was tacitly assumed by your foundational question, then your conclusion that there is no point is not a sound logical conclusion. It is begging the question.
There is another problem with simply accepting the apparently-true conclusion that there is no point. It fails to account for some of the data, which is that part of many people's subjective experience is a deeply-rooted conviction that there must be a point. For many people, this subjective experience is every bit as real as the subjective experience of stubbing your toe on a rock. Even if you yourself do not accept it, surely you can understand how someone can look around them at all the beauty and the ugliness and the striving and the struggling and the suffering and come away with the conviction that there just has to be something more going on behind the scenes, that all this cannot just ultimately come down to a roll of some cosmic dice. It cannot just be that life-sucks-and-then-you-die-the-end. Giving this widely-held conviction some respect as a possible indicator of an actual phenomenon (rather than writing it off as a collective delusion) is analogous to someone in the ancient world looking at the retrograde motion of Mars and thinking that, just maybe, there is something more to that than just the gods pushing it around capriciously.
Can we reconcile these two world views? Yes, I believe we can, but it's not easy because the divergence happens long before any argument can even begin. Humans start to wonder, "How does it work?" or "What is the point?" long before they learn how to render those wonderings into words. By the time a person gets to the point where they have enough command of language to even begin to engage in a discussion about such things, they have almost certainly already travelled a long way down one or the other of these philosophical roads. As a result, when discussing such things people often talk past each other, believing falsely that they share a set of tacit foundational assumptions, including the meanings of words like "point" and "purpose" and "meaning" and "good" and "exist" and, the elephant in the room, "God." A lot of disagreements I see between secular and religious people boil down to misunderstandings over the meanings of words.
So in order for this project to have any hope of success we have to start by finding some common ground between the mechanistic and the teleological worldview to serve as a starting point. As I just pointed out, this is quite challenging because these worldview start to diverge even before humans acquire a facility for language. How can we reach agreement about whether or not God exists if we can't even be sure we agree on what the words "God" and "exist" mean?
Despite these deep-seated differences, there are some things that (according to my subjective experience) humans almost universally agree on, starting with the fact that we are humans. We have bodies made of flesh and bone and blood. We are born, we live, we die. We have arms and legs and eyes and ears and brains. We live on a planet we call Earth that is inhabited by things that are not humans, like animals and plants and rocks. All of these things exist in three-dimensional space, and behave according to a set of rules. I may not know exactly what these rules are, but it's pretty clear that there are rules. For example, objects move along continuous trajectories. They do not suddenly disappear from one place and reappear someplace else. Sometimes these rules appear to be broken, but on closer examination it always turns out that this apparent breaking of the rules is some kind of illusion, sometimes accidental, but sometimes created deliberately for the purpose of entertainment.
There are some other aspects of my subjective experience that seem to be shared by other humans. For example, I sleep, and sometimes when I sleep, I dream, and usually when I am dreaming I am not aware that I'm dreaming. While they are happening, dreams feel every bit as real to me as being awake. It is only after I wake up that I look back and realize that what I experienced was not real, or at least, a very different kind of reality than the one I experience when I'm awake. In my dreams, objects do spontaneously appear and disappear. Monsters appear out of nowhere. All kinds of weird shit happens regularly in my dreams that never happens when I'm awake.
Dreams are different than my waking experience. When I'm awake, I have a lot of evidence that the things I perceive are actually real. I can see things. I can touch them. I can take photographs of them. Other people behave as if they can see and touch the same things that I can see and touch. The most parsimonious explanation of all of these observations is that these things are actually real, that there is an objective reality "out there" and distinct from me.
But not all of my subjective experience is like that. For example, my dreams are purely private. No one experiences them but me. No one else has ever reported experiencing the same dream as me. There are some common themes (like monsters appearing out of nowhere) but the details are always different.
There are other subjective experiences that I have that appear to be private in this way even when I'm awake. For example, I feel emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, love. Other people report feeling these too, but I can't verify this in the same way that I can verify the existence of material objects. I can't demonstrate to you that I am happy or sad or afraid. You might be able to guess based on how I behave, but it's hard. If I say, "There is a chair over there" you can verify that I am telling you the truth by looking over there to see if there is a chair or not. But if I say, "I love you" or "I think you're beautiful" it's much harder to tell if I'm being truthful or not. Sometimes it's hard for me to tell! Is this feeling that I'm feeling really love, or just lust? What even is love?
These kinds of private experiences are actually a huge part of my subjective sensations, and the span a very wide range of feelings: joy, despair, fear, love, loathing, passion, and a host of others. The difference, the thing that makes the private experiences private, is that I can build a machine that can see and feel a chair. I can't build a machine that experiences joy.
So how can I know that what I mean when I say the word "joy" is the same thing that you mean when you use the same word?
There is no simple answer to that question. There is a complicated one, but that is beside the point at the moment. The point is that English speakers invariably behave as if they accept that the word "joy" means the same to their interlocutors as it does to them. They just assume that the question has an answer despite not having a clue what that answer actually is. And they do the same thing with words like "God" and "exist" and "forever" and so on. And that gets them into trouble.
Now, recall the Zeno's paradox puzzle from the end of the previous installment. It began:
Imagine you have a series of ordered tasks that you have to complete. Before you can start the second task you have to complete the first one. Before you can start the third, you have to complete the second, and so on. It is self-evident that in order to complete all of the tasks, you have to complete the last task.Notice that at this point I have said nothing about how many tasks there are. In particular, I have not mentioned the possibility that the list of tasks could be infinite. Humans are not used to dealing with infinite things. By default, when we envision a "list of tasks" we naturally think of a finite list, a list of things we could potentially write down on a sheet of paper. And for a finite list of ordered tasks it is indeed true that to complete all of the tasks you have to complete the last one.
But then I pull a fast one in the next paragraph:
Now consider the task of moving from point A to point B some distance apart. This task can be decomposed into sub-tasks. In order to move from A to B you first have to move half-way from A to B. Then you have to move from the half-way point to a point that is three-quarters of the way from A to B, and so on.Did you see the trick? It's in the words "and so on." With those three simple words I have made the list of tasks infinite, and an infinite list of tasks has no last task.
Is it still true that to complete an infinite list of tasks it is necessary to complete the last task? Well, maybe. There are certainly some infinite lists of tasks for which this is true. For example, if I were to ask you to move to A to B, and then back to A, and then back to B again, and so on, that would also be an infinite sequence of tasks, and there it is indeed impossible to complete all of the tasks (at least for a mortal being like you). But moving from A to B once is obviously possible. So what is the difference?
The trick is to notice that completing the last task is not the only way to describe how to complete a list of tasks. The other way to complete all of the tasks is to complete every task. And for the sub-tasks of moving (once) from A to B, you can complete every task despite the fact that you can't complete the last one (because there is no last one).
In modern mathematical parlance we would say that it is possible to produce a one-to-one correspondence between the infinite sequence of sub-tasks of moving from A to B, and a finite interval of time. Yes, there is an infinite sequence of tasks, but for any one of them I can tell you exactly when it will be complete, and for every task, the completion time will be less than some finite time. This is possible because, although the list of tasks is getting longer and longer, the tasks themselves are getting shorter and shorter, and the rate at which the tasks are getting shorter undoes the effect of the list getting longer and longer.
The point here is not to force you to relive your high school algebra nightmares about the mathematical properties of infinite sequences. The point is that Zeno's paradox is not a deep philosophical insight, it is a linguistic trick. It sets up the problem using words that lull you into thinking about finite sequences, then pulls the rug out from under you by making you think about infinite sequences in the same terms as you were thinking about finite ones.
A lot of religious rhetoric uses similar linguistic tricks. Consider Genesis 1:3 "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." What does the word "said" mean here? Does it literally mean that God spoke, i.e. expelled air through his lungs to vibrate his vocal cords to produce sounds? It seems a little absurd, right? Does God even have lungs? I mean, humans were created in God's image, so it's not completely out of the question, but it seems more than a little odd and pedestrian for God to make light by literally casting a Lumos spell, no?
If we can get ourselves into this much trouble with the words "last task" and "said" imagine the damage we can do with things like "essential nature" and "the word became flesh". In order to avoid fooling ourselves the way Zeno's paradox did, we shall have to proceed with the most extreme caution.
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