Special Pleading

And since it is Sunday . . .

I was reading a retrospective on the life and work of Freeman Dyson, the mathematician, scientist, and visionary, and the author dropped this beauty:

“He saw religion as a way of grappling with questions beyond the scope of science, such as the meaning and purpose of life, ethics, and human consciousness.”

There is so much to unpack here! First, religions do not “grapple with questions.” They create ad hoc answers off the tops of their heads. If they can find any support for their answers in scripture, they will quote that, but that is not the same as a scientific citation.

As for being “beyond the scope of science” the meaning and purpose of life is beyond the scope of science because they are entirely made up and therefore lacking in any reality to study scientifically. When people use the phrase “the meaning of life” they really mean “the meaning of human life” because nobody would give a damn if it were the meaning of the lives of amoebae we were talking about. And, this is a form of special pleading as it is a claim that human life is just so damned special, it must have a meaning. And any such meaning would have to come from outside us, otherwise it would just be a social construct (sneer, sneer). And, if it came from outside us, it would have to come from some source, say . . . a god! The exact same can be said about our “purpose,” something else coming from outside (Is that you, God?).

Does anyone claim that ethics are anything but social constructed? (There is even the subtopic of “legal ethics!” Just ask Rudy Giuliani about that.)

And I can’t find any traction for the concept that we will never answer the riddle of consciousness scientifically. We have been only studying it scientifically for a few decades and it is a difficult issue. Philosophers have been considering it for much longer but they got nowhere as they had almost no real data to discuss. If we think science will not help us understand consciousness, why on Earth would we expect religion to figure it out? Religions were not created to answer questions.

So, this statement, if anchored in Dyson’s writings, is another indication that our religious cultures have a real grip on our thinking.

Dyson himself wasn’t above writing nonsense, for example consider the quote from one of his books “Science has as many competing styles as painting or poetry. The diversity of science also finds a parallel in the diversity of religion.” The first sentence seems true, the second seems bizarre. The diversity of science is created by the diversity of knowledge that stems from it. If the quantity of knowledge were miniscule then we would only have a few “scientists.” But because the knowledge acquired is so vast, we have biologists, chemists, physicists, cosmologists, botanists, etc. Even experts in these fields cannot handle all of the knowledge contained, so there are specialties within those specialties: in physics there are particle physicists, nuclear physicists, quantum physicists, medical physicists, molecular physicists, cosmological physicists, etc. And none of them knows what the others do.

Religious diversity stems from what? Clearly geographical isolation is part of the cause. In western religion, it seems that schism is a hobby practiced by theologians in great quantity.

Some religions seem to have been created as way to become rich (Scientology), others based upon nebulous beliefs that are hard, if not impossible, to substantiate.

Stating that religion and science are both diverse is not a common attribute based upon the same bases. Baseball sabermetrics are incredibly diverse but no one is comparing them to science or religion. The science-religion axis is a hot bed of special pleading, both ways it seems.