Friday, October 23, 2009

On Astrology, Ptolemy, and the Four Elements: The Use of Bad Theories

I was finally getting around to reading the last book of the Hitchhiker's Guide pentology, and I find a quote in there on a topic for which I had already written down some notes order to write a blog post:

"I know that astrology isn't a science," said Gail. "Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or - what's that strange thing you British play?" "Er, cricket? Self-loathing?" "Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations."
So, what is the importance of theory, especially in philosophy?

It seems that I can look at theories that seem to be flawed, and still learn from them. I can read the Renaissance Platonist Ficino on astrology, and still make sense of what he is doing. His division of the world into spheres controlled by the different planets, each under the aspect of a god, a muse, and an aspect of Bacchus, can be insightful even when his reasons for the division have been thoroughly discredited. Similarly, personality theories can be helpful for understanding oneself. Myers-Briggs may lack rigorous scientific evidence, especially insofar as it posits specific explanations of how and why people act, and I may never fit completely into the INTP mold, but I still think that it is more useful for my own self-understanding than the scientifically developed Big Five test, which can group personality characteristics accurately but does not give anything underlying explanations.

Similarly, I can look at scientific achievements in the past which were grounded in bad theories. Astronomy was developed by and large within the Ptolemaic framework. And don't think that this was simply because everyone started with the theory: the data was explained rather well at first by the theory (we experience things rotating around the Earth, and most of the stars seem to stay in their places without big changes). People could continue to revise the theory to deal with the data, and even after people like Copernicus and Galileo, it took Newton and Kepler to establish why the Heliocentric model actually did explain the data better. A lot of astronomical data was accumulated in those Ptolemaic times. Would we have been able to understand as much as we did about the sky, without a wrong theory to organize our data and make it manageable?

Also, take medicine. Western medicine was by and large built on a four-element view of the world: things can be hot or cold, and they can be wet and dry, and different pairings give you the different elements. Makes sense, for a rough-and-ready view of the world. And you can read Galen or Avicenna or Maimonides using this theory in understanding medicine. They may not have been completely right, but they weren't completely wrong either; good doctors in any time or place generally leave their patients in better condition for the visit, or they get labeled as quacks. People notice if Doctor A's patients all die. So the empirical observations of these doctors were still a progress in knowledge, even though their theory was wrong: the four elements were not constituents of the world as building blocks for material mixtures. But this theory also let them be able to process complicated accounts of the human body; could there have been medicine without it?

One issue that has been coming up is that we seem able to advance in empirical knowledge in spite of, and even because of, wrong theories. But what about philosophical understanding? I hear it often said that, due to our increased knowledge of neurological processes, there is no place for dualism anymore. Hogwash. People have always known that if you get hit upside the head, your cognitive faculties will be impaired. We just know a bunch more ways to impair them, now. Avicenna had a rather dualistic account of the person, but again, he was a doctor. He knew about material interactions which interrelated with thought, and they were extensive. In general, medieval cognitional theory is pretty sophisticated and saves any sort of non-bodily cognition only for the highest and hardest cases involving pure intelligibles, which even then often still require some sort of material correlate. I fail to see how modern neuroscience changes the basic framework here, even if it can inspire utmost awe at the marvelous workings of our brains. It fills out the description, but leaves the general categories untouched.

So even within wrong theories, good philosophical categories may persist. And in addition, returning the the original quote, self- and humanistic-knowledge seems to arise clearly in some ways independently of theory. Is this part of the reason for Plato's fondness of myths?

Standards of Evidence in Religion

Sorry to bog down the blog with another anti-apologetic posting. But I have been thinking about an issue which I think is serious, and I would like to hear some critical thought on the matter. Let's put down issues of the extent to which someone should doubt or be critical of what has been given them on any absolute scale. Let's have a relative standard of evidence: the evidence we ask from history should be comparable to the evidence we ask from our daily lives.

Ask yourself this: what would it take to convince you that someone was genuinely God incarnate, here and now? What would make you leave your religion, as people left their families and ways of life, and eventually Judaism or paganism to follow Jesus? Take this standard of evidence, and apply it to the historical record. If you had four texts claiming to be eyewitness accounts, and reports about people having seen someone rising from the dead, would you go and follow that person? If not, why do you accept the Biblical account?

Note that you cannot simply imagine yourself as someone who was an eyewitness, or receiving secondhand reports. This is not the relation we have to the historical data. It has been mediated to us; at very best, we may have some books of the NT written by eyewitnesses to a significant portion of Jesus' life, and that even is not indisputable. You can't go ask eyewitnesses yourself, because you cannot go ask ask the eyewitnesses whom Paul references. You would have the same distance from the evidence for the person here and now, as you currently have from the life of Jesus. Would you then believe the claims of the next religious leader?

Also, you must compare like cases with like. You can't say, "Well, the evidence claims that Jesus rose from the dead, but this other person only did significant miracles/got reincarnated/etc.", unless you can give a very strong reason why being resurrected is categorically different from the others. I'm not sure that it's even the oddest miracle out there; being both God and man seems to be infinitely greater, if it even makes sense, and I'm not sure what counts as good evidence for that in any time period. At any rate, miracles need to be judged insofar as they are miracles, religious claims need to be judged insofar as they are religious, and so on. If you can't accept some miracle-worker who claims to be a Boddhisattva, then would you really accept claims that some guy got resurrected, showed up to a few people, and alone was identical with the single, categorically-different-from-creation God? The former would seem to require much less evidence, even though its truth would at least be a significant problem for Christianity.

At this point some people may say, "But Scripture tells us to watch out for miracle workers and such," or "Scripture tells us that Christ was it. There is no new revelation." Or related things; fill them in as you like. But, you can't assume what you want to prove. We are weighing the evidence for Christianity here, and so we cannot assume that the Christian story/Scripture/our pastors are correct before looking at the evidence.

Finally, I have heard one concern a few times (worded almost eerily the same; maybe it's coming from some common source?), and it absolutely puzzles me. It goes along of the lines of this: "We don't have any more evidence to give, what do you expect? Why should non-Christians have paid attention to what was going on at the time of the Resurrection, in order to provide an alternative perspective?" But I don't see how this is relevant. I'm asking about whether the evidence we have is sufficient to establish truth, and that has nothing to do (or very little) with what evidence I can expect. Let's take the Riemann Hypothesis in mathematics. It has not yet been proven. Even if it could not be proven, this does not mean that I then can expect to get anywhere by picking the side that seems to have the most evidence. That evidence does not meet the standards for mathematical argument, and becomes completely null and void (unless, perhaps, I am a practiced mathematician with an excellent grasp on related issues, in which case I may have intuitions which would raise my opinion slightly above random guessing). Although history is more complicated and admits of degrees of evidence (as well as corresponding degrees of assent), even if we can't expect more evidence, this doesn't make the evidence we have any more conducive to a decision. Arguing merely from what we can expect, or from what is available, is simply fideism.

So, if you truly and honestly would go and follow some contemporary religious teacher under the same standards of evidence upon which you base your current faith, then I simply ask that you have that integrity. If not, then stop claiming any evidence for your faith: you are a fideist, or a pragmatist, but you do not have the support of rational argument.

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Blake on Infinite Desire

William Blake's "There is No Natural Religion (b)":
I. Man's perceptions are not bound by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho' ever so acute) can discover.
II. Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.
III. [This proposition is missing.]
IV. The bounded is loathed by its possessor. the same dull round, even of the universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.
V. If the many become the same as the few when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul; less than All cannot satisfy Man.
VI. If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.
VII. The desire of Man being infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite.
Conclusion.
If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.
Application.
He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.

Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.

(For context, in (a), Blake argues that if we can only perceive what we have senses for; if you were to have no sight, you would not be able to even think of visual things. See http://www.newi.ac.uk/rdover/blake/nonatrel.htm.)

So if our desire is to have any chance at being satisfied, there must be a way of encountering the infinite here and now:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
(- "Auguries of Innocence")