Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole (6 page)

This is a fairly typical example of how people
Play the Mystery Card
in order to deal with compelling scientific evidence against their beliefs in miraculous or supernatural phenomena. The scientific method has a fantastic track record when it comes to revealing what lies beyond the visible spectrum of light and is hidden from our ordinary five senses. As I say, scientists have discovered not
only X-rays, but also subatomic particles, distant galaxies, and so on. We are given no reason to think the scientific method is not suitable when it comes to investigating the alleged powers of crystals. Indeed, many of the claims made about crystals clearly
are
scientifically investigable because they have observable, empirically testable consequences. Moreover, science has produced good evidence that at least some of these claims are false.

Still, our commentator sweepingly dismisses such scientific findings, misrepresenting them as a mere “absence of evidence.” On no grounds whatsoever, and in the teeth of evidence to the contrary, our commentator insists that scientific methods are far too “narrow” to refute the various claims made about crystals. And of course, his dismissal of such scientific evidence is delivered with an air of humility and superior wisdom in contrast to the implied know-it-all attitude of the scientific critics.

THE SKEPTIC DAMPING EFFECT

A version of “it's beyond science to decide” that often crops up in defense of supernatural claims is an appeal to the so-called
skeptic damping effect.
When those claiming to have extrasensory perception (ESP)—for example, a supernatural ability to psychically read minds, to view things remotely—are tested under rigorous, experimental conditions, their claimed abilities tend to mysteriously vanish. Why is this? Those who insist ESP is real sometimes claim that the presence of skeptical observers has a damping effect on ESP, as Geoffrey Munroe, a psychologist working in this field, notes in his paper “The Scientific Impotence Excuse: Discounting Belief-Threatening Scientific Abstracts”:

Proponents of extrasensory perception (ESP) sometimes discount failed attempts to support the existence of ESP by claiming that the phenomenon disappears when placed “under the microscope,” especially the cold microscope of ESP nonbelievers.
That is, there is a kind of observer effect where ESP is changed or eliminated when attempts to observe and measure it are taken. Thus, scientific methods, including careful observation and measurement, are impotent to reveal answers to the question of whether or not ESP exists.
⁵

The skeptic damping effect provides a convenient excuse for the failure of experimental studies to produce convincing evidence of such abilities. But does the suggestion that the presence of skeptical observers somehow suppresses ESP really succeed in immunizing the claim that it exists against scientific refutation? Not necessarily. In fact, if it is merely the presence of skeptical observers that supposedly has the damping effect, then, interestingly, a controlled scientific experiment could be conducted to establish this. Those claiming ESP could be tested, sometimes with a hidden skeptic observing them, and sometimes not, to see if their ability varied in the way they claim (as my friend Jon Cohen pointed out to me). If, on the other hand, it is the involvement of controlled laboratory conditions designed to minimize the chances of trickery, and so on (whether or not a skeptic happens to be present) that supposedly produces the damping effect, well, that excuse would then place ESP beyond the ability of such laboratory-based studies to either confirm or refute. However, we could still have good empirical grounds for being highly skeptical about the reality of ESP if, for example, we know that (1) all the claimed effects can be faked by trained magicians, (2) several of those claiming such powers have actually been caught faking them, (3) the evidence for the existence of such powers is almost entirely anecdotal (see
Piling Up the Anecdotes
for more on this), (4) there are also several known, nonfraudulent mechanisms by which individuals might become convinced that people have ESP when in truth they don't, (5) there is no known mechanism that would account for ESP, and so on.

A similar move is sometimes made in defense of certain religious claims. When a scientific study into the efficacy of, say, petitionary prayer on heart patients (see
Piling Up the Anecdotes
)
reveals that prayer has had no effect, defenders of belief in the effect of prayer will sometimes say, “God will not be tested.” God does answer petitionary prayers, just not under controlled experimental conditions.

SCIENTIFIC REFUTATION OF GOD CLAIMS?

Let's now turn to the claim that God exists. Might this claim be scientifically confirmed or refuted? We have already seen that the belief that there exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, supremely benevolent creator God faces a serious empirical challenge—that raised by the evidential problem of evil. However, I suggested it would be odd to describe the evidential problem of evil as a
scientific
argument against the existence of God.

Still, why shouldn't a scientific refutation of a god claim at least be possible? The extent to which god claims are refutable depends largely on which particular god is under consideration. If, by “god,” I mean nothing more than a mysterious, transcendent something-or-other, then the claim that “god exists” is certainly difficult to refute scientifically. That's because, in order for science to have a chance of refuting it, a hypothesis must have observable consequences, and it's not clear what observable consequences, if any, this particular god claim has.

However, as we begin to add more to our concept of god, there's potentially more for critics—including scientific critics—to get their teeth into. We have seen, for example, that if you claim god is a nontemporal person or agent, then you run up against certain conceptual objections. If you claim there's a Godwith-a-capital-G (an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good creator God), then you run up against empirical evidence—such as that involved in the evidential problem of evil. Go further still and claim, as many do, that your God created the entire universe about six thousand years ago, and science can establish beyond reasonable doubt that no God of that sort exists.

The claim that science can indeed establish beyond reasonable doubt that “there is no god” is a view currently most closely associated with Professor Richard Dawkins, author of
The God Delusion.
Let's take a closer look at his central argument.

The God Delusion

The God Delusion
was a worldwide best seller that provoked a huge storm of criticism from many religious people. Dawkins was, and continues to be, accused of all sorts of confusions, muddles, and bad arguments. One of
The God Delusions'
central contentions is that what Dawkins calls the
god hypothesis
—the hypothesis that there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us—is very probably false.

Dawkins notes how some theists attempt to bolster their belief in the god hypothesis by insisting that it appears to neatly explain features of the universe that, they suggest, would otherwise be deeply and puzzlingly
improbable.
For example, it seems the laws of nature and starting conditions of the universe have the Goldilocks property of being “just right” to produce life. Had those starting conditions been only slightly different, life would have been impossible. That the universe does appear to have such “finetuned” properties has been noted by many eminent scientists, including, for example, astronomer Royal Martin Rees, who says:

A degree of fine tuning—in the expansion speed, the material content of the universe, and the strengths of the basic forces—seems to have been a prerequisite for the emergence of the hospitable cosmic habitat in which we live.
⁶

Some theists, noting the universe has such fine-tuned properties, then argue like so: Surely the probability of the universe having such Goldilocks features
by chance
must be extraordinarily low. So low, in fact, that it's much more likely that some sort of
intelligence deliberately designed the universe this way. That intelligence, many suggest, is not just a god, but God (with a capital “G”). This kind of fine-tuning argument is not typically supposed to constitute a conclusive proof of God's existence, but it is held to be, in the words of John Polkinghorne, “strongly suggestive.”
⁷

Actually, before we proceed, it's worth noting that this finetuning argument, by itself, is no more “strongly suggestive” that John Polkinghorne's God exists than it is “strongly suggestive” that there is, say, an evil god. The argument, as it stands, is entirely neutral so far as the moral properties of the designing intelligence are concerned. The fine-tuning argument faces all sorts of serious objections (including, for example, the conceptual objection raised in my introduction: that the very idea of a nontemporal, intelligent agent that designed the universe makes no more sense than a nonspatial mountain), but perhaps the most obvious objection is that even if the universe does show signs of having been produced by some sort of intelligence, it is a huge and, as it stands, unwarranted further leap to the conclusion that this intelligence is even a god, let alone the very specific God love that Christians like Polkinghorne believe in. As the physicist Paul Davies notes at the end of his book
The Goldilocks Enigma
:

The other main problem with intelligent design is that the identity of the designer need bear no relation at all to the God of traditional monotheism. The “designing agency” can be a committee of gods, for example. The designer can be a natural being or beings, such as an evolved super-mind or super-civilization existing in a previous universe, or in another section of our universe, which made our universe using super-technology. The designer can also be some sort of superdupercomputer simulating this universe.
⁸

However, let's set this problem to one side and get back to the issue at hand, which is Dawkins's criticism of such arguments. Dawkins argues that, when theists appeal to god to explain such
otherwise supposedly improbable features of the universe, they overlook the fact that the god to which they appeal
must be at least as complex, and thus at least as improbable, as that which he is invoked to explain
:

A designer god cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any god capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us escape.
⁹

If the existence of the universe having such organized complexity is highly improbable, then, says Dawkins, the existence of any god having the kind of complexity to account for it must be even more improbable. So postulating a God doesn't solve the problem of the complexity of the universe. Rather, with god, we merely postpone the problem of accounting for such complexity. But then the complexity we observe in the universe provides no justification for introducing god. Worse still, if the theist is right and the probability of such complexity just happening to exist is very low, then surely
the probability of god existing must be even lower.

Dawkins's argument is intriguing and worthy of closer study. However, I won't assess its cogency here. My focus is not on whether Dawkins's argument is any good (I'm not sure it is) but on some of the dubious moves some theists have made in response to it. While there are theists who have responded to Dawkins's argument in a fairly intellectually rigorous and straightforward way, others have instead reached for the usual bag of immunizing tricks, in particular “Ah, but this is beyond the ability of reason and/or science to decide!”

Alister McGrath's Response to
The God Delusion

Theologian Alister McGrath is a long-standing critic of Dawkins. In his article “The Questions Science Cannot Answer—The Ideological
Fanaticism of Richard Dawkins's Attack on Belief Is Unreasonable to Religion—and Science,”
¹⁰
McGrath attempts to defend religion against Dawkins's attack. He begins by pointing out that even scientists like Peter Medawar acknowledge there are questions science cannot answer:

In
The Limits of Science
, Medawar reflected on how science, despite being “the most successful enterprise human beings have ever engaged upon,” had limits to its scope. Science is superb when it comes to showing that the chemical formula for water is H
₂
O. Or, more significantly, that DNA has a double helix. But what of that greater question: what's life all about? This, and others like it, Medawar insisted, were “questions that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer.” They could not be dismissed as “nonquestions or pseudoquestions such as only simpletons ask and only charlatans profess to be able to answer.” This is not to criticise science, but simply to calibrate its capacities.

McGrath then goes on to do several things. First of all, he accuses Dawkins of being
ideologically wedded to scientism.
Dawkins, claims McGrath, simply assumes that “science has all the answers.” But of course, scientists need to show a little humility. There are “questions science cannot answer.”

This first line of attack on Dawkins, though popular with his critics, entirely misses its mark. Even within the book McGrath is here attacking, Dawkins quite unambiguously acknowledges, “Perhaps there are some genuinely profound and meaningful questions that are forever beyond the reach of science.”
¹¹
Indeed, Dawkins seems happy to concede that moral questions may well fall into this category. Dawkins says, “We can all agree that science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic to say the least.”
¹²
McGrath is attacking a position Dawkins does not hold.