At Beliefnet: atheist and neuroscientist-in-training Sam Harris takes on Andrew Sullivan in a fight to the bloody death over that whole God business. It saddens me that Sullivan is still able to find work. The man's always been a sloppy, shallow, dishonest thinker, from his pimping of racist pseudoscience as editor of The New Republic to his frothing hysteria over the War on Terra to his bitchy and stylistically limp blogging. It seems nothing has changed, as in this exchange he routinely mischaracterises Harris's points, refuses to engage with the substance of Harris's arguments, and demonstrates that he knows nothing about the practice of history or mathematics while trying to use them to bolster his case.
As a mathematician, I take this personally.
The practice of mathematics can essentially be reduced to the following archetypical question: "Assuming that X, Y, and Z are true, what can we logically deduce?" There's another side to it too, though, which most people probably aren't familiar with: "If X, Y, and Z are true, we can prove some lovely things. But are X, Y, and Z in fact true for anything interesting?" Mathematics is not at its heart just a lot of empty sophistry in which Mr Cleverdick can come waltzing in and make any old assumptions he wants. That's not sporting. Mathematicians demand consistency. Mathematicians demand rigorous, detailed, very explicit chains of logical reasoning. Mathematicians, oftentimes, demand constructability: if you intend to prove a beautiful and elegant result about all things with properties X, Y, and Z, you'd better show people how to get their hands on things that really do have properties X, Y, and Z as well. Mathematics is not divorced from empiricism. Huge numbers of the most significant and brilliant insights in math have come about by seeking ways to mathematically model physical systems, and really interesting mathematical results very often give us deeper insights into phenomena in the physical world. Mathematics is the image of science in Alice's mirror.
The key, fundamental, vital spark shared by all forms of rational investigation--science, history, mathematics, anything worth taking seriously--is this: you have to back your shit up, man. You have to document your assumptions and the chain of reasoning that led you from them to your conclusion. You have to make a convincing case for the reasonableness of your assumptions and open them up to criticism and further investigation. You do not pull things out of your ass. History may not involve control groups or experimentation, but it is still a rational discipline: it hinges on extrapolation, by chains of logic which are open to inspection and criticism, from a pool of data open to all comers. Likewise mathematics, building logically off of propositions which are known, explicit, and transparent.
Religious faith, you will observe, does not share this spark at all. Religious experiences are not transparent, cannot be shared, are not open to inspection and criticism. They are not like historical data. They are not like scientific data. They are nothing at all like mathematical axioms. All religious propositions have at their core this statement: "I know these things to be true, although you'll just have to take a bunch of dead people's words for it."
So when Sullivan says...
My point here is to say that once you have conceded the possibility of a truth that is not reducible to empirical proof [as in history and mathematics], you have allowed for the validity of religious faith as a form of legitimate truth-seeking in a different mode.
...he exposes himself as an ignorant fraud.
Quelle surprise.
Posted by aloysius at April 05, 2007 02:47 PM |