Hubris did not begin with the Age of Reason. I see it rather as a combination of an ingrained tendency to see agency at work in all natural and human phenomenon (which I believe is behind the religious impulse) and an overwhelming fear of being duped. Unidentified, amorphous fears are more troubling than known threats. Spinning conspiracy theories is a psychological way to give structure to free floating fear and anxiety.

The religious impulse would rather suppose that men are not in control, no?

Balderdash. Medieval Christianity was prey to as many and as weird conspiracy theories as the Enlightenment. Witchcraft, notably, but there were plenty of others. What is Satan but a conspiracy theory.

My lesser knowledge of other places and times suggests that conspiracy mania is pretty well universal.

I'm with Harry on this. The equivalents of conspiracy theories are easily seen in religion, polytheistic or monotheistic: "God/a spirit/an unseen force made the crops fail."

Where the Age of Reason comes into it was the recognition of the power of human beings to comprehend nature and to control it. Then, the "unseen forces" effecting people could be seen as people, and not just spirits or gods. Hubris and belief in perfectibilty are not required, just a belief in human power.

I've read various conspiracy theories, which can be good exercises in logic, sort of like a murder mystery. Back in the days of BBSs I spent some time arguing with JFK conspiracy types. My point: if he was killed by a vast conspiracy inside the government, why kill him with an assassin in public? Why not just slip something into his morning coffee and claim he had a heart attack? That autopsy would be a lot easier to cover up, after all. The response I got was that the conspiracy wanted to "send a message." Why a secret conspiracy would want or need to send message was never explained....

Papaya:

Unless you're saying God is a conspiracy of one, then the belief that God causes things to happen is the opposite of saying men cause them to happen.

The difference between conspiracies and religion is that the believers in conspiracies are attributing to mere mortals the powers which religion(s) reserves for its god(s).

Never attribute to a conspiracy that which incompetence can explain.

In a contest, the Cock-up Theory of History wins, hands down.

OJ, I don't think that those two things are "opposites"! Sometimes things just happen, not caused by man or God (except in the most general sense).

OJ, the religious impulse would suppose that what man does not control is controlled by a personal entity, which can be supplicated. What men cannot accept is that there are events which are not controlled by any personal agent.

All;

I think it's much simpler. If there's a conspiracy, then if one can just smash that paradise will be ours. It's so much more comforting to think that our problems are the result of the machinations of some cabal, rather than the inevitable result of having a society comprised of human beings. How much more hopeless is the latter!

To be clear, I don't think religion, in itself, is a form of conspiracy (it's an open racket). But it didn't take the Enlightenment to get men to invent conspiracies to explain things they feared.

Moslems today are fertile in inventing conspiracies, and they never went through the Enlightenment.

According to OJ, all of evolution was purposefully instigated by God with the aim of arriving at man.

Yet you acuse atheists of hubris...?

And what's more, all of man's natural impulses, which are inherently destructive, were given to us by God to test whether we had the strength of will to overcome them.

Yet you accuse atheists of conspiracy theories...

Brit:

There you go again, clouding the issue with facts.

Brit:

Can a conspiracy be for good, rather than evil?

i don't know. can it?

Of course not, nor can it be performed by an individual, nor would it tend to be announced by the conspirator(s):

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=conspiracy

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=nitpicker

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=definition

Words have meanings.

granted. this one might be better

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=paranoia

God probably can't be paranoid any more than He can be a conspirator. Who would "get" Him?

i meant that your theory of evolution was perhaps a little paranoid, not that God was.

you're obviously not paranoid enough, OJ...

It's Ernst Mayr who says it was a conscious plot, I just assume its believers are credulous dupes:

""There is indeed one belief that all true original Darwinians held in common, and that was their rejection of creationism, their rejection of special creation. This was the flag around which they assembled and under which they marched. When Hull claimed that "the Darwinians did not totally agree with each other, even over essentials", he overlooked one essential on which all these Darwinians agreed. Nothing was more essential for them than to decide whether evolution is a natural phenomenon or something controlled by God. The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians together in spite of their disagreements on other of Darwin's theories..." (One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought)"

i apologise. you're quite paranoid enough.

OJ:

Nice quote. It took me several weeks of reading this blog before I worked out what the heck "darwinism" was supposed to mean, that apparently being "firm belief that all past events can be explained without resorting to miracles."

(About which I could say more, but that would be an essay, not a comment...)

Mike:

Not just without resort to miracles but explained exclusively through the idea of nature as imagined in the human head.

Brit:

Don't blame me--it's your guy who's saying it's a conspiracy.

well, you're the expert on Mayr and Darwinist theories.

...and i thought you were just some guy who'd read the opening paragraphs of a few populist books and essays and then jumped to sweeping, dismissive conclusions based on instant misinterpretations...

How much further do you need to read than the admission by the world's leading Darwinist that Darwinism is merely a literary/philosophical theory designed to get rid of the need for God? You certainly don't need to waste time wading through the details of the theory.

I can think of good conspiracies. Silician Vespers, for example.

Mayr's paragraph is a long restatement of Occam's Razor. Which doesn't excuse making sweeping generalizations in lieue of bothering to learn the details.

Jeff:

Yes, he says that the simplest explanation for the rise of Darwinism was "conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of natural processes and not the work of God". That has nothing to do with anything but foundational beliefs.

OJ

you misunderstand both the nature of the statement Mayr makes and its relevance to current evolutionary theorists.

Firstly, science is all about eliminating miracles, demystifying the mysterious, refusing to give up and say "we'll never know"...ie. you assume that the world can be understood, and then you attempt to understand how the world works.

If you don't like that, I suggest that you stop dabbling in it. For me, creationism has very little going for it as a theory...but it is at least a coherent theory.

Your sort of semi-acceptance of scientific explanations, of natural selection combined with design and your vague, optimistic talk about the impossibility speciation is an inherently wobbly position.

(This is only my opinion, but it seems to me that once people start dipping their toes into rational, scientific thinking, they very soon find they're up to their necks whether they like it or not....my advice is just to jump straight in!)

Second, even if there was some sort of conspiratorial aim amongst scientific thinkers to 'oust God', you would have to judge the merits of the resultant theories separately to know whether they had succeeded or not.

Since you don't intend to 'wade through the details', you can have no serious comment to make on Darwinism.

Brit:

I have no serious comments to make about Darwinism, any more than about Marxism, Freudianism, or any of the rest of the -isms. None are serious systems of thought, just alternate faiths.

OJ:

I shouldn't have to need to restate Occam's razor here, so I won't.

But--Occam's Razor, as applied to Evolutionary theory, means that if you find sufficient evidence of a deus ex machina embedded in natural history, then Darwinism cannot stand; it is falsified. That is what Mayr means.

Just like with Newtonian Mechanics. It has to be God-free, for if God routinely comes in and messes with things, Newtonian Mechanics is falsified.

The difference between that and "foundational beliefs" is the moment someone comes up with such a falsification, or any one of many others, then the whole thing goes in the dumpster.

So far, though, that hasn't happened. And, so far, no deus ex machina is required to explain the observed changes.

As opposed to a religious faith, where no amount of contrary evidence is sufficient for disproof.

A serious comment about Darwinism would be to master the details, and demonstrate how they can't possibly come together to produce the observed outcomes.

But learning it can be such a bother; far easier to just throw darts.

Jeff:

If you've used Occam's Razor to shave away everything but random natural processes, and only then begin applying it, you've misunderstood it.

As I stated higher up, what the darwinists were not willing to countenance -- because it could not be matched with observation -- was a benevolent creator.

It never occurred to them, as it had to Milton, that the creator might be malevolent.

Orrin has it upside down. They did not start with the idea of overthrowing god and invent observations to justify that.

They started out, with Paley, to show that god's work was as good as everyone said it was. Up till then, nobody had made any serious observations.

When they were made, god went out the window, because they could imagine only one sort of god.

Even then, they did not -- most of them -- throw out god, they just issued him a TRO to keep his hands off.

""There is indeed one belief that all true original Darwinians held in common, and that was their rejection of creationism, their rejection of special creation. This was the flag around which they assembled and under which they marched. When Hull claimed that "the Darwinians did not totally agree with each other, even over essentials", he overlooked one essential on which all these Darwinians agreed. Nothing was more essential for them than to decide whether evolution is a natural phenomenon or something controlled by God. The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians together in spite of their disagreements on other of Darwin's theories..." (One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought)"

I use Occam's Razor to exclude anything not required to explain the observations.

If the observations can be explained without invoking a deus ex machina, be he Hairy Thunderer or Cosmic Muffin, then Occam's Razor suggests leaving him out.

One cannot explain the observations by eliminating one or more of variation, inheritance, competition, or a dynamic environment.

Also, Harry was discussing their starting point--from whence they came to get to Darwinism. Your quote is appropriate only after Darwinism is established.

Ah, so you take a rule that says: "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything" Then you dispose of one entity in favor of four? Not a philosophy major, were you?

With the possible exception of the Chamberses, who were rejected by the Darwinians and proto-Darwinians, I know of no biologist in the 19th century who started out with antitheistic beliefs.

They could not make creation fit observation, but, as Mayr says in your quotation, that tried.

""one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything" Then you dispose of one entity in favor of four? Not a philosophy major, were you?"

Well, I was once a philosophy 'major', or the British equivalent thereof, and if i learnt anything (arguable, some might say...) it was to beware of sophistry.

when it comes to the logical application of occam's razor, "God" is not 'one entity' comparable to each of Jeff's four observable, natural phenomena.

'God' is a million shades of opinion and a million, mostly unanswerable, questions.

Opinions have nothing to do with the singularity of the entity.

("Opinions have nothing to do with the singularity of the entity"...unless, of course, you happen to be a polytheist. like about half the world, for example)

seriously though, i still don't know whether to argue with you or patronise you on these matters, since i'm still not sure whether you're a sophist on a mission, or whether you genuinely have no aptitude for reasoning.

to think that occam's razor should favour the explanation "God" (because there's one of it) to four observable natural phenomena (because there's four of them) is a glaring confusion of concept and semantics.

If instead of "variation, inheritance, competition, or a dynamic environment" Jeff had simply written "evolutionary forces", or even "darwinism", or "Modern Synthesis"...bingo! we've got one entity! so now who does occam favour?

Here's occam's razor:
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem."

which means: "No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary".

applied to evolution, it means that we do not presume anything more than the natural processes for which we have observable, testable evidence. or, to put it another way, we leave our minds open to everything, but only let something in when we see a compelling reason to.

so, for me and others like me, until there is a compelling reason to believe in intelligent design, it can stay out there along with creationism, hinduism, pantheism, aliens and the easter bunny.

which doesn't mean its impossible - it doesn't even mean you're wrong. it just means i'm not going to believe it until i see some evidence that can't be explained by natural processes.

so much for occam's razor.

----

as for your conspiracy theory on evolutionists (that they all sat round a table thinking "how can we get rid of God? How about evolution!") - which you seem to have constructed entirely from a misinterpretation of one paragraph of Mayr...

let me assure that it is just that, a paranoid conspiracy theory, with no basis in fact.

Darwin himself was not an atheist when he began studying the natural world. he gradually lost his faith when he became aware of the horrendous cruelty in nature, or rather, nature's utter indifference to suffering. And he kept this loss of faith secret to avoid upsetting his wife Emma, who was devout.

Here's the famous quote from Darwin:

"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars."

nasty business, the feeding habits of the ichneumonidae...

You mean like the rise of the initial life form?

Brit:

You did stumble into one metatruth there--if you substitute Darwin for God then Occam can cut either way, which the point.

ah. now watch carefully OJ...here's an application of occam's razor...

i have no particular theory about the 'rise of the initial life form', because its not something i've studied in any depth.

therefore i will assume, for now, that it can ultimately be explained by the natural processes that we have observed and verified....(wait for it)...

...BUT i do not insist that it MUST by definition be explained by natural processes. i remain open-minded.

if you can convince me that only some sort of supernatural being could have kick-started the life, i'm willing to listen.

The natural processes we observe being apparently incapable of causing speciation we must not assume that we know anything about the matter.

OJ:

You asserted the natural processes we observe aren't capable of speciation. How do you know? In what precise sense is that capability not present?

The problem with your conception of God with respect to Occam's razor, and Natural History, is that the moment you invoke God, you have completely shut off all inquiry: God explains everything you don't know, so there is no point investigating any further, since there is no way to know, or investigate, God.

Which is the beauty of Occam's Razor excluding God. The only way of knowing whether one must invoke God is to investigate the known and measurable phenomena. At some point, enough knowledge may accumulate to demonstrate the material theory is, in fact, incapable of explaining the observations. Further, the difference between what the material theory can account for, and the observed totality, is where God resides.

Unless you can specifically state where, and by how much, the material explanation of Natural History falls short of accounting for the observed totality, then it isn't time to invoke God.

Jeff:

Yes, Occam's Razor shuts off inquiry.

Boy do you ever have that backwards. Occam's razor acts to show where inquiry should proceed.

Unless you can answer the question above, then you are directing inquiry before having enough information to know if that direction is correct. Which, in this case, stops inquiry dead in its tracks.

"How did X happen?"

"God did it, end of story."

"Oh."

Jeff:

There's no difference between "Occam's razor acts to show where inquiry should proceed." and "Occam's razor shuts off inquiry". If it happens to leave only the correct line of inquiry that's great, but there's nothing that requires that it do so, so more fruitful lines may well be ruled out. Life is more complicated than Occam would have liked, as for instance if Darwinism is true than Occam's razor fails.

OJ:

That is wrong. If it happens to leave the correct line of inquiry, then continued observations will be confirmatory.

However, if something was excluded erroneously, especially an entity immune to direct measurement such as God, then continued observation will produce results forcing God's inclusion.

Do it your way, and you don't have a clue whether God is really responsible.

Do it Occam's way, and if God is responsible for something, the truth will out.

So how is it Darwinism being true means Occam's razor fails?

Because Occam would preclude your ever getting to Darwin.

You are shy a detail or two.

???

of course occam's razor doesn't stop you from investigating in any direction. what a terrible misconception!

it just forbids you from calling something a fact until you absolutely have to.

its really very simple:

if A tells me that the apple fell on my head because of gravity.
and B tells me it fell on my head because of gravity plus a demon sucked it from the underworld
and C tells me it was gravity plus the demon plus God wanted it to fall...

..then occam's razor forbids me from believing B and C until i have futher evidence that A is insufficient, and that B or C are necessary.

which doesn't mean B and C must be wrong. or that occam's razor forbids me from investigating demons or God. i'm just not allowed to call them facts yet.

Right, you accept A and pursue that line of inquiry--thereby shutting off the others.

absolutely not. that's the point i'm trying to make.

you just assume that gravity is the suffient answer.

you can pursue B and C as much as you like. but you don't prefer either in favour of A until, in the course of your investigations, you have proved that they are necessary and that A is insufficient.

"one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything"

Should not.

correct. so, to get me to believe them, you'd have to show that B or C WERE necessary.

nobody has done this yet, and that's why i don't believe B or C to be facts. Occam's razor. Geddit?

come on, OJ, you'll get there in the end...

That was my point precisely--once you serttle on A you ignore B-Z. I'm not saying that A is wrong, just that Occam presents a way of shutting off lines of inquiry in favor of one that is not necessarily right.

oh dear. listen carefully: *occam's razor does not 'shut off' B and C.*

try this:

We observe the descent of the apple to the floor.

Because of what we learnt about Newton in physics class, we put A (gravity) in the box marked 'Known fact'.

B and C are kept in the box marked 'Possible but not proven', along with D-Z. You can pick them up and look at them as much as you like, and try to decide whether they merit being put into the 'Known fact' box.

But here's the rule (Occam's razor): You are not allowed to put them into the 'Known fact' box until you have shown that they are necessary to explain the observation. And you don't take A out of the 'Known fact' box until you have shown that it is wrong or insufficient to explain the observation.

does that help at all?

here's another way of saying "occam's razor": "common sense".

Occam who?

William of Ockham, born in the village of Ockham in Surrey (England) about 1285.

franciscan monk and influential philosopher. he probably never actually said the exact wording mentioned above, but the principle is attributed to him.

No, I know that one. Which one said:

"We observe the descent of the apple to the floor.

Because of what we learnt about Newton in physics class, we put A (gravity) in the box marked 'Known fact'.

B and C are kept in the box marked 'Possible but not proven', along with D-Z. You can pick them up and look at them as much as you like, and try to decide whether they merit being put into the 'Known fact' box.

But here's the rule (Occam's razor): You are not allowed to put them into the 'Known fact' box until you have shown that they are necessary to explain the observation. And you don't take A out of the 'Known fact' box until you have shown that it is wrong or insufficient to explain the observation.

does that help at all?

here's another way of saying "occam's razor": "common sense"."

that was Brit of Ockham

Yes, precisely.

you mean, "thank you, Brit of Ockham, for explaining Occam's razor to me, a humble OJ" ?

no problem.

Yes, thank you for demonstrating the point.

De nada.

I now dub thee 'OJ of Occam.' Go forth and don't multiply.