1

i might be wrong, but doesn't "having belief" require there be no need for proof ?
faith and belief have to extend beyond rationality to have any meaning.

2

The comment from Dawkins is surprisingly frank. I am in the middle of reading The Design Revolution by William Demsky (I ask for strange Christmas gifts, my family says). Demsky and Dawkins trade barbs frequently over the competing theories of Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Of course, it is a rare thing for a doctrinaire Darwinist to admit that what he supports is, indeed, a theory...and one he cannot prove, at that.

Boiled to their essence, the competing theories simply have this as their difference: Darwinism believes in a closed system of natural processes, with no external interference. Intelligent Design looks for evidences or 'fingerprints' indicating deliberate intervention in the naturalistic process. While ID doesn't seek to identify or characterize the 'intelligence' behind such intervention, the fact it presupposes something beyond the closed naturalistic system gives the scientific establishment the heebie-jeebies.

I have long said that I am nearly willing to grant naturalists all of their premises, if they could explain to me how impersonal, unintelligent processes could give rise to a consciousness (human) that is capable of deliberate action that is frequently irrational, unpredictable and self-destructive. Even if all other processes in the universe are finally described and become predictable, Man will always be the bull in the china shop...which suggests there is something quite UNnatural about him.

Belief and faith are the beginning of all knowledge, whether some are willing to admit it or not.

3

Dennet: "I believe, but cannot yet prove, that acquiring a human language (an oral or sign language) is a necessary precondition for consciousness–in the strong sense of there being a subject, an I, a 'something it is like something to be.'"

I'm with Dennet (and Kojeve).

4

JPE I'm with Dennet...

Really? So would you tell Helen Keller that she wasn't “conscious” until she learned a "human language?"

5

Maria Spiropulu (a physicist, no less) has a problem: The law of noncontradiction and the law of causality, basic to the scientific method, are axioms of rationality and not provable. According to her own statement she believes nothing that cannot be proven. She has just declared herself irrational.

6

Hurrah for hesitancy and humility, the hallmark of the scientific attitude. Many of the entries could be titled "I believe, but cannot yet prove..."

7

The comment from Dawkins is surprisingly frank. I am in the middle of reading The Design Revolution by William Demsky (I ask for strange Christmas gifts, my family says). Demsky and Dawkins trade barbs frequently over the competing theories of Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Of course, it is a rare thing for a doctrinaire Darwinist to admit that what he supports is, indeed, a theory...and one he cannot prove, at that.

The belief part looking frank may come from the fact that he's talking about, "all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe." I don't think he was stating he had belief but no proof for that process on this planet. He has no physical basis for making it in the general sense because we do not have, nor can we have, information about all life everywhere in the universe. Hence it is only a belief of his with no facts backing it up when it is generalized beyond the planet earth.

I thought they were very insightful. Mine would have been pretty much the same as Venter's and Davies. I think the universe is packed full of life, from simple microbes all the way through self-aware intelligent beings like homo sapiens, throughout. I have no proof of that of course, but that's what I believe.

8

Joe,
Just curious, when did Mr Petranek first state his belief about finding life in the next decade. More to the point I wonder if it was more than a decade ago? If so, does he still hold to his belief? :)

9

"So would you tell Helen Keller that she wasn't “conscious” until she learned a "human language?"

As I recall, Helen Keller didn't lose her sight and hearing until after she could speak.

In any event, you smartly put "conscious" in quotes, as Dennett has given the term his own definition.

As always, Dennett bores. Yawn.

10

"we will find another Earth-like planet within a decade.” -- STEPHEN PETRANEK, Editor-in-Chief, Discover Magazine

The recent planets that have discovered are believed to be ROUND. Does that qualify as "earth-like"?

What a moronic prediction. Anything to sell more copies of his pop science rag.

11

What a moronic prediction. Anything to sell more copies of his pop science rag.

Larry, you know what they mean by earth-like. Planets with about the same mass as earth, in an orbit that places it far enough away to have an atmosphere and the possibility of having liquid water on the surface.

12

Mark O Just curious, when did Mr Petranek first state his belief about finding life in the next decade. More to the point I wonder if it was more than a decade ago? If so, does he still hold to his belief? :)

All of the responses are recent (Petranek's can be found here). What's amusing about his answer is that part of his belief is based on:

The mathematics alone ought to be proof to most people (billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each galaxy and around most of those stars are planets). The numbers suggest that for life not to exist elsewhere in the universe is the unlikely scenario.

But Paul Davies wrote in his response:

So why do I think we are not alone, when we have no evidence for life beyond Earth? Not for the fallacious popular reason: "the universe is so big there must be life out there somewhere." Simple statistics shows this argument to be bogus.

I guess that's the difference between a science writer and a scientist. ; )

13

Ken Abbott:

Um, that's wrong actually. Try again.

(Hint: Logic is a language. You don't need "faith" to prove rules of a language.)

14

Larry:
As I recall, Helen Keller didn't lose her sight and hearing until after she could speak.

Helen Keller's autobiography is available through Project Gutenberg and well worth reading. Prior to her illness, she had started to learn some words, but she rapidly lost them all. She retained the ability to communicate crudely through gestures.

The fact that she had memories of the time after she lost her early spoken language and before she learned sign language suggests to me that she was conscious no matter how Dennett cares to define it.

15

As I recall, Helen Keller didn't lose her sight and hearing until after she could speak.

If I remember correctly, she was deaf/blind from birth. As such, everyone thought she was unteachable.

16

Moreover, Hellen Keller, featured on the Alabama Quarter, was a keen Socialist.

17

Read Clifford's Dictum by Inwagen at my site.

Hard foundationalism is simply logically untenable.

18

Forgot to give the link. Helen Keller's memoir is at: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2397

19

Mumon:

Umm, *who's* wrong here? Nobody said anything about "faith." This is a matter of definition. Am I wrong to call these laws axioms?

If you would like to demonstrate a proof of the law of causality I would love to read it.

20

There is no "proof." Logic is a language, and axioms are elements therein. As such it has conventions, and is "provable" simply by assertion of said convention.

So the physicist is right- there is no "faith" needed, as I said, and you're, uh, wrong.

21

Or, to put it better:

Axiom A.

Proof: A -by axiom.

QED.

22

The fact that she had memories of the time after she lost her early spoken language and before she learned sign language suggests to me that she was conscious no matter how Dennett cares to define it.

Just because she couldn't express herself through language doesn't mean she didn't possess language. She thought in language, for instance, and for the linguistic theory of consciousness, that's enough.

23

Helen Keller was one of my first heroes (along with Thomas Edison). An amazing human being.

There is also a fantastic Werner Herzog documentary called "Land of Silence and Darkness" which concerns the efforts of a woman in Germany to communicate with people who are blind and deaf. Among the people she meets are a young man who was blind and deaf from a very young age. Among other interesting habits, he appears to enjoy launching inflatable balls at his face and making fart noises. There is a very interesting scene when he is presented with a radio, whose vibrations he can feel.

There is a bootleg video company named "5 Minutes to Live" which carried an okay copy (the only one available and the 16 mm print rarely circulates).

Check it out. It's your world, and mine.

24

Mumon:

Speaking of language, I sense a failure to communicate here. When I use the word "proof" I mean a systematic demonstration of the validity of a proposition using bedrock concepts (axioms--that which is self-evidently true or true by definition). There is a distinction between proof and definition.

Why do you keep bringing "faith" into this?

25

Ken Abbot:

When I use the word "proof" I mean a systematic demonstration of the validity of a proposition using bedrock concepts (axioms--that which is self-evidently true or true by definition). There is a distinction between proof and definition.

In the case where one is asked to "prove" the vailidity of an axiom, there is proof by statement of the axiom.

All proofs are basically consistent logical expressions, based on the conventions used in formulating logic and the particular set of axioms. That is, a proposition is shown to be "true" in a logical sense if it can be constructed from a set of logical operations upon axioms.

Whether or not it is "true" in existential or metaphysical sense is quite another matter entirely.

I keep bringing "faith" into this because that is precisely the subject of what Maria Spiropulu was speaking. She was answering the question “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"

26

Mr. Moderate writes

"Larry, you know what they mean by earth-like. Planets with about the same mass as earth, in an orbit that places it far enough away to have an atmosphere and the possibility of having liquid water on the surface."

It's still a silly prediction. I grant you that planets that are incredibly far away from any source of light or heat or are way to close are extremely unlikely to have life forms on them. But the existence of "earth-like" planets elsewhere in the universe is a no-brainer. So "finding" one with a decent telescope is not terribly exciting in my opinion and doesn't affect the possibility that life exists on other planets. And when I say life, I mean microbial life -- the most successful form of life on our planet.

The rub is that unless life on Earth and life on Mars is related by some early asteroid incident, it would seem to me to be virtually impossible to detect whether life ever existed on Mars.

If life on Earth and Mars were related, then we'd expect to find embedded in some ice patch on Mars, where it was once hot and wet, and then moist and tropical (for example), some microbial life forms with something resembling nucleic acids in them. And we can come up with ways to detect such life.

On the other hand, if life arose independently on Mars but it is no longer there, what the hell do we look for? I think that pointing to a bunch of microbe-shaped fossils or even microbe-shaped globules of microscopic ... something ... is not very compelling under those circumstances. But if we don't know what the atomic basis is for the genomes of such critters or how their metabolism functions, I don't know how we would determine that they were ever "alive".

I suppose maybe we could look to see if they had "organelles" using scanning tunnelling microscopy and various stains, but that would only work if we found them frozen in ice (and not fossilized).

Note that the same difficulties apply to detecting independent abiogenesis on Earth.

Which brings me to my belief that I cannot prove: abiogenesis is happening all the time somewhere on earth, but the nascent life forms die out or are consumed by DNA-based microorganisms before they reach sustainable populations and before they can be detected.

27

Oh, and I also believe that Joe Carter knows that "ID theory" isn't science. :)

28

Seems to me that believing in anything without proof should be considered as heresy to the non theist/skeptic crowd. If you could be so "irrational" in little, you could be such on a paramount scale.

I dated an atheist in college. When we debated to a standstill, finally I asked her, fine, how do you think we got here? Her response was, "Well, I think it has something to do with a grand experiment by alien life forms." Good enough. What could I expect, Pesto was one of her favorite foods. Too bad for me, she was beautiful....(sigh)

29

OK, I'll second Larry's contention about "ID" "theory" and science and Mr. Carter.

Otherwise, I really don't give that much thought to what I believe and can't prove. Too busy practicing.

30

But, thanks Joe, you've given me another idea for another post...

31

What I found interesting was how so many of these scientists reduced the entirety of reality down to - big surprise - what they were studying. Granted, they're in that field because they find it the most interesting thing to study, but it seems self-serving in most cases. It's a trend not only in science, but in virtually every academic field these days. One studies politics, and things politics is the center of all human social activity. Another studies all things cognitive, and therefore believes that thought and consciousness are all that exists.

Amusing.

32

Oh, heck I'll put it here:

"Which poison is it?" This is a good practice to figure out what the origin of a distraction, an obstacle, that keeps us from our practice. When distracted, we consider whether the distraction is connected to greed, hatred or ignorance. Often it's a combination.

This topic reminds me of Shokai's response to me on this post on ID (thanks Larry).

This looks like, "What do we want to be true?"

Or, to put it another way, what do we covet to be true, because it would make "us" think we were more ... whatever?

Can you tell which poison?

33

Mumon:

ISTM that your "proof" of an axiom is actually a tautology. That which is true by definition within any given system of logic cannot be demonstrated or proven true by that same system. You cannot legitimately use the axiom to prove the axiom--that's a petitio principii--but you can define axioms and use them to demonstrate the validity of propositions. That was the whole point of my objection to Ms. Spiropulu's statement. She cannot prove the axioms of rationality but must use them if she is to practice the scientific method with meaning. Therefore, she must accept some things that are beyond proof within the system she employs.

QED. ;)

By the way, I disagree with your use of "faith," but that's grist for another mill.

34

And my point is she need not prove them, because they're axiomatic.

BTW, some have stated that all proofs boil down to tautologies.

35

"This topic reminds me of Shokai's response to me on this post on ID (thanks Larry)."

Your welcome but I'm not sure what for. ;)

I can't find the quote, but Paul Bowles once wrote an interesting line or two regarding how sillly it is to spend one's limited time on earth answering the question "why am I here"?

36

Larry:

You made a connection between this post and ID.

Which made me make the connection...

... how sillly it is to spend one's limited time on earth answering the question "why am I here"?

And if we were to get the "answer" right, as per if we were to achieve the perfection of the science and technology studied by Masters and Johnson, wouldn't we still be missing the point?

37

Personally, I thought the most intriguing "belief that I can't prove" was Williamson's speculation that the Cambrian Explosion was the result of hybridization. The highest life forms before the Cambrian, corals, reproduce sexually and undergo both a medusa stage and a polyp stage. Williamson spins an idea about how lack of genetic selectivity would operate on such creatures, and does so quite compellingly, I thought.

Sex was a big innovation in evolution, and we know that no God would invent something so nasty.

38

mumon,

Is laziness not one of the poisons? I can't see how it's connected with one of the three you cite to, yet it would seem to be a poison, at least to yours truly--or am I missing your intent?

Joe, Nice post that generates a decent amount of conversation without much axe grinding (he says hesitatingly knowing that Larry's gauntlet on ID remains on the field of battle).

Mark

39

So "finding" one with a decent telescope is not terribly exciting in my opinion and doesn't affect the possibility that life exists on other planets. And when I say life, I mean microbial life -- the most successful form of life on our planet.

Actually until the mid-1990's we had never seen a single planet outside the solar system. Our theories of star formation said there should be thousands of planetary systems, but we had no proof. Now we've catalogued hundreds of planets. Unfortunately small rocky planets are still a bit elusive. NASA plans on launching an interferometric telescope to allow us to see them around stars, and we have several candidates. So when we actually directly observe a rocky planet, it will be quite a scientific feat.

The rub is that unless life on Earth and life on Mars is related by some early asteroid incident, it would seem to me to be virtually impossible to detect whether life ever existed on Mars.

Why would it be impossible? Off the cuff I would look for the presence of amino acids in the soil or water samples. If there is a balance between the two, odds are there was never any life on the planet. We know this because when amino acids form spontaneously both branches of amino acids occur in the same relative concentrations. Life on earth however selected one branch of amino acids over another. An imbalance in the concentration one amino acid branch over another would therefore be an excellent indication that there was once life on the planet. It is possible that life in another system doesn't select one branch over another. In that case the worse you'd have is a false negative.

40

Mr. Moderate writes

"It is possible that life in another system doesn't select one branch over another."

Or use even amino acids as the building blocks for its structural and enzymatic molecules.

Amino acids are obviously useful building blocks but surely they aren't the only kind of molecular building blocks that can be assembled into a vast and diverse assortment of functional polymers.

I don't know how to begin calculating the probability that amino acids will independently evolve as the preferred building blocks for structurally and/or catalytically diverse biomolecules under any imaginable abiogenic scheme. But my guts tell me that it's not likely. What do your guts tell you, Mr. Mod?

41

Joe, I keep telling you to put David G. Myers in your Know Your Evangelicals series.

42

Macht,

I'll bump him to the head of the list.

43

Mr. Moderate-
"Actually until the mid-1990's we had never seen a single planet outside the solar system." We still haven't "seen" a planet ouside the solar system. They've been detected spectroscopically.
"Unfortunately small rocky planets are still a bit elusive"
We're down to finding neptunes these days. Part of the problem with finding smaller worlds is a noise issue. Current techniques allow determing a star's radial velocity to within a few tens of meters per second. Finding an earth sized world means determining radial velocity of the parent star down to one or two meters/second, or even less. Inteferometry with a pair of large telescopes may achieve the required resolution of spectral lines but it is very difficult engineering problem to solve.
Marcy & Butler are the planet-finding kings. Their webpage is at http://exoplanets.org/

44

Woo-hoo!

45

Interesting stuff, in its way. Of course, "prove" is such a strong word . . . I can't "prove" continuity of consciousness, without which pretty much everything else is up for grabs.

But I can be sure that some things *must* be true if *anything* I experience is significant, or can be communicated coherently (including in my own reflections).

BTW, I think we can deal with the example of Helen Keller without abandoning the idea that real human language is a necessary component of real human personality. Walker Percy actually begins from the example of Helen Keller in his very, very interesting The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has To Do With The Other. Percy was pretty unconventional, but his boundary beliefs were Christian (Roman Catholic) and his epistemological commitments included a healthy dose of the scientific: he was a physician-cum-novelist who speculated on language. Slightly dated, but worth a read.

46

Mark Sides:

In Buddhism, the "three poisons" are greed, hatred, and ignorance.

Now these can pretty much encompass the rest of the whole enchilada of character defects, faults, and "sins" that are noted in other traditions.

Take laziness: it's a form of greed and ignorance. It's greed for wanting to attach too much to not doing what needs to be done, whereas it's a form of ignorance because it deliberately excludes the experience of doing something that needs to be done to see what can or should be done next.

47

Dear, dear Mumon. Hoist on your own petard.

“I believe nothing to be true (clearly real) if it cannot be proved.” -- MARIA SPIROPULU, Physicist

"And my point is she need not prove them, because they're axiomatic." -- MUMON

Precisely.

We need to get you and Ms. Spiropulu in the same room.

48

Ken, really. Ms. Spiropulu says she requires proof for her beliefs, not proof for her proofs.

49

Joe:
'Really? So would you tell Helen Keller that she wasn't “conscious” until she learned a "human language?"'

Keller had a human language. I think dennet is saying that one needs to communicate in order to be fully conscious.