Another Scientist Snookered By Supernaturalism? What's The Lowdown On Marcelo Gleiser?

Marcelo Gleiser: Worthy scientist, or pseudo-scientific dupe?

For those unaware, Marcelo Gleiser is  a 60-year-old Brazil-born theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College.  He's also a prolific science popularizer who  has won this year’s Templeton Prize. Valued at just under $1.5 million, the award from the John Templeton Foundation annually recognizes an individual “who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” 

But is that a scientific achievement, or a pseudo-scientific one? Say like being awarded astrology's top prize for casting the most accurate horoscopes in a given year.   One also has to express some dismay at the spectacle of all that money being awarded for a spurious prize, i.e.  for "affirming a dimension" whose existence remains unproven.  To provide some perspective we can turn to physicist Jerry Coyne in his book,  'Faith Vs. Fact: Why Science And Religion Are Incompatible', p. 18:

"The Templeton Foundation distributes $70 million yearly in grants and fellowships. To put that in perspective, that's five times the amount dispensed annually by the U.S. National Science Foundation for evolutionary biology, one of Templeton's  areas of focus.  Given Templeton's deep pockets and  not overly stringent criteria for dispensing money, it's the wonder that - in a time of reduced financial support - scientists line up for Templeton grants."

Well, perhaps it's because they're that desperate for grant money - from any source- to support even marginal research, and thereby gain more name recognition.  Noteworthy also is Prof. Coyne's observation (ibid.) that " this support flows from a constant stream of conferences, books, papers and magazine articles, many arguing for the harmony between faith and  science ."  A trope I've already skewered in a letter appearing in Physics Today, i.e.

Readers' thoughts on science and religion: Physics Today: Vol 71, No 6

What about Gleiser himself? In a recent interview he knocked atheism, as one might expect from a Templeton prize recipient.  He said in response to one question:

"I consider myself an agnostic.I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations."

But the  basis of the Atheist-Materialist worldview is not denial   ('I don't believe even if there's no evidence for or against') but rather the essential redundancy of invoking supernatural artifacts and constructs.  This is important to grasp if one is going to debate or discuss Atheism in any kind of intelligent context.  In other words, the acceptance or belief in such artifacts does not help me make scientific predictions, say the occurrence of the next  auroral substorm or coronal mass ejection, so they end up being superfluous to the scientific process, not part of it.  But again we must not be surprised that Gleiser here parrots the twaddle of so many other supernatural apologists, i.e.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.3831



This bunkum was published in the January, 2018 letters section of PT, and thankfully, Jerry Coyne again delivered a timely response (as I had), e.g.

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2018/02/02/tom-mcleish-continues-his-accommodationism-in-physics-today/

Fortunately, most hard science practitioners are like  Coyne and me, and have no use for this nonsense. See e.g.  cosmologist Sean Carroll's take here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/05/i_won_t_take_money_from_templeton_science_and_religion_can_t_be_reconciled.html

But  another beef I have with Gleiser is his adoption of the generic  "agnostic" brand as if that confers on him some rational, objective, superior position. In fact it doesn't.   The reason is that the basis for agnosticism is epistemological - to do with knowledge- not belief or lack thereof.

To fix ideas here, agnosticism is not a third alternative to theism and atheism because it is concerned with a different aspect of mental affect. Theism and atheism refer to the presence or absence (withholding) of belief in a god; agnosticism refers to the impossibility of knowledge with regard to a god or supernatural being. Since the agnostic posits an impossibility of knowledge he then justifies his recusing himself from any belief based on it.

Further, the term 'agnostic' does not, in itself, indicate whether or not one believes in a god. Agnosticism predicated on the "impossibility of knowledge" can be either theistic or atheistic in manifestation. The agnostic theist believes in the existence of a god but maintains the nature of god is unknowable. The agnostic atheist maintains any supernatural realm is inherently unknowable by the human mind. And further - not only is the nature of any supernatural realm, (e.g. "Hell") unknowable, but the existence of any supernatural being is unknowable as well.

So, we have these initial distinctions:

1) The pure agnostic disdains any belief in a deity based on an absolute impossiblity of knowledge.

2) The agnostic theist BELIEVES in the existence of God, but argues it's useless to attempt to elaborate any divine nature (e.g. all-powerful, all loving, all knowing etc.) because the knowledge basis isn't there to permit such assumptions.

3) The agnostic atheist asserts all transcendents are unknowable and hence their existence is as well, so belief is impossible since it requires a leap of faith not warranted by reason alone.

So one may conclude that Gleiser is likely of agnostic category (2), an agnostic theist - but not a pure agnostic.    One of the other most telling parts of his interview is when he stated:

"I think obviously the Templeton Foundation likes all of this, because this is part of an emerging conversation. It’s not just me; it’s also my colleague the astrophysicist Adam Frank, and a bunch of others, talking more and more about the relation between science and spirituality."

Yes, so he's gratified there are these continuing "emerging conversations" which, of course, fuel more and more yen to spread the science and spirituality  cum supernatural mythology and grafting for the Templeton Foundation grants and prize.  But my take, and Coyne's as well as Carroll's, is that such claptrap fuels the diversion of ever more money to codswallop and pseudo-science.  If astronomers, for example, could net just one half of what Templeton gives away in a year to peddlers of nonsense, it could support the word of dozens of tenure track researchers.  In other words, monetary prizes such as awarded to Gleiser, including the whole  framework for giving them, is funneling support from truly worthy research in genuine science.  I do agree with Gleiser when he avers:  

"Right now what we know is that we have this world, and we are these amazing molecular machines capable of self-awareness, and all that makes us very special indeed. And we know for a fact that there will be no other humans in the universe; there may be some humanoids somewhere out there, but we are unique products of our single, small planet’s long history.

So we have the moral duty to preserve this planet and its life with everything that we’ve got, because we understand how rare this whole game is and that for all practical purposes we are alone. For now, anyways."

A sentiment with which any Atheist-Materialist would certainly concur!

Can We Hope to Educate Fundies on the Different Types of Atheist?

In approaching the fundamentalist brain, one thing one must perpetually keep in mind is its inherent simplicity and the incessant demand for simplicity. Thus, rather than acknowledging the Big Bang as the source for inception of the cosmos the fundie will invent 'young Earth' and 'young Sun' nonsense because it's simpler. After all, you needn't learn about the physics of the Big Bang including the significance of the 2.7 K isotropic microwave radiation  -- you need only invoke the fairy tale of 'Adam & Eve'.

In a similar vein, in approaching evolution the dumb, semi-educated fundie will usually cherry pick one aspect to try to make hay out of (like the 98% chimp-human sharing of DNA) but entirely ignore the more difficult aspects such as that: 1) chimps and humans share the exact same cytochrome-c protein sequence despite 10^93 different possibilities for variation, and 2) the fact that the ape 2p and 2q chromosomes underwent telomeric fusion to become the '2' chromosome in humans. 

But this is what we've come to expect from  a lot that still believes ancient fables such as that a man could survive 3 days in a whale's belly (or 'great fish') despite it being full of hydrochloric acid, or that an 'Ark' could have been constructed to carry pairs of all the critters then on Earth including dinosaurs.

So it's not a surprise to learn that most also lack the intellectual capital or ability to appreciate the distinctions between atheists.  After all, it's simpler just to assume ALL atheists are of one type, e.g. "militant" if they even write something negatively about Xtianity.  Their pea brains fail to understand that writing something negative, say in a blog, is NOT the same thing as demanding the extirpation of religion - even fundy-ism.

Nor do these clowns grasp the distinction between agnostics and atheists. So we are obliged to help them out, and try to express some sympathy too.

Author George Smith[1] notes that the most vernacular usage confuses the meaning of agnostic, usually asserting it is “somewhere between belief and outright unbelief.” The way it is usually framed is that the agnostic “isn’t sure whether or not God exists.”  In fact this is an erroneous interpretation of the term.


What it actually, technically means is someone who asserts there is not yet adequate evidence to make a decision if one were possible. In other words, the issue must remain open-ended and unresolved until such time evidence appears. Thus, true agnosticism is not some dithering or fence-sitting between belief and unbelief, but rather acknowledgement of the impossibility of knowledge as it pertains to any ability to address the question in the first place.

But mayhap this is far too complex for the simplistic gray matter of fundies.

Smith himself (op. cit., p. 9) splits and parses the agnostic position even further, according to whether one is an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist. The first avers that all supernaturalist propositions or claims are inherently unknowable (because they are untestable) by the human mind, and so not worth discussing any more than pink elves, unicorns or fairies. In this sense, unbelief isn’t really even necessary, since who would actually believe in a pink elf or unicorn? Well, then there’d be even less merit to arguing over an invisible Being! Thus, without any capacity for knowledge about it, it’s redundant.


The theist agnostic meanwhile, maintains a firm belief in the existence of God, but asserts the precise nature of this God is unknowable. On this basis, no attributes are assigned to try to define God’s nature.  We cannot say that any divine nature is “eternal”, or “omnipotent” or “omnipresent” because one simply doesn’t know. Thus, it makes no sense to use words to try to describe a deity. Belief is as far as one can go.

Related to definitions of atheists is the ability to distinguish between implicit and explicit atheists. In many ways, the implicit atheist is similar to the agnostic atheist except for the fact the kmowability or otherwise of supernaturalist propositions is not gone into. Thus, the implicit atheist simply avers to be withholding belief in any kind of deity already on offer by the theist. (The explicit atheist, by contrast, rejects it outright.)

As I noted in an article published in the Mensa Bulletin, March 1994:

"Let's be clear about what constitutes Atheism and what doesn't. The Atheist - to put it succinctly, absolutely withholds investing intellectual/emotional resources in any supernatural claim. Indeed the word Atheism itself embodies this definition: a-theos, or without god.”

What is happening here is not active disbelief, i.e. in making a statement “There is no god,” but rather simply passively withholding belief in a statement already made. Hence, the deity believer has made the positive claim. The ontological   (implicit) atheist’s  response is simply an absence of belief in it. No more and no less. It does not and never has implied  active disbelief, aggressive rancor or a vehement and militant opposition to the beliefs.


Let me quickly add here that this withholding of belief is the more natural position, as opposed to advocating belief, which is unnatural. Consider a different context: a neighbor runs over and informs me that aliens have landed in his yard in a spacecraft. Until I actually go over and try to verify his claim I am under no obligation to accept it as a statement of fact. Thus, the default intellectual position is always skepticism, irrespective of the claim made. This again is because the onus is always on the claimant to make good, not the skeptic to “disprove” it.

It isn’t difficult to see from the above context that the more conservative (and reasonable!) position is withholding belief until a claim is validated. One does not, after all, accept a claim then do further research. One ab initio doubts the claim and then sets out to devise tests to ascertain the validity!  And in the case of extraordinary claims (which certainly include “God” and visiting aliens in spaceships), “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence” as the late Carl Sagan used to emphasize.

 

It also isn’t difficult to see that this is exactly analogous to the atheist withholding belief in a deity. After all, If God genuinely exists, why is he/she/it not uniformly perceptible,  at least in basic features, to all peoples? As we saw in previous blog posts (from 2011, mainly), there are nearly as many different versions of deity as there are people. (Or at least, religions!)

Another error made by the wayward fundie is assuming that a negative belief, i.e. that there is no God, is the same as being a positive belief, 'there is a God'.  An example of this would be what Lisa Kennedy spouted on a Bill Maher Real Time show in January, 2012, i.e.  if an atheist simply doesn’t believe in the supernatural or God he is expressing a belief, albeit a negative one. If expressing a negative belief, then it's the same as a positive belief such as invoked in religions, ergo he is professing a religion. This is utter nonsense.


It would be akin to asserting that if I decline belief in ghosts I still have “negative ghost belief” and therefore am a Ghostologist ! The error inheres in asserting that an absence of belief is the same as a belief. This error repeats the canard that the onus is on the non-believer to disprove the believer’s claim, instead of acknowledging it is impossible to prove a negative. Some sophists attempt to get around this by claiming it  "isn’t impossible to prove a negative". They argue that they can prove “there are no black balls” in a box by simply emptying the box out and finding all white balls. But this misrepresents the example, since the possibility of “all white” balls was never in question! The analogy is specious because the existence of God IS in question, and isn’t objectively verifiable, unlike counting real balls. The analogy trivializes the deity existence question while not validating the sophist.

In the end, it may be that because the brains of fundies are unable to perform ACH thinking - or what James Cheyne  has called abstract, categorical and hypothetical thinking (such as integrated into standard I. Q. tests, e.g.  the Raven's and Wechsler Similarities tests) then they cannot also be expected to discriminate between subtle differences in definitions, say for 'atheist'.

Why are believers, fundies especially,  missing this crucial component of thought which also, by the way, is essential for critical thinking? There are a number of reasons. For example, one may be that the honing of such skills was never possible, for example if they came from a home schooling environment. Another, more controversial, is that the very neural pathways that predispose them to belief or faith, are also the ones that inhibit predictive ACH conceptualizing. Lastly, it's feasible they may have suffered head injuries, maybe from a DI - using a pugil stick-- in the Marine Corps at Parris Island, and they never got their senses back together.

Sadly, if any of these is true we can be sure they will always take the simpleton path in their thinking as regards atheists and atheism.

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[1]  George Smith, Atheism - The Case Against God, 1989, Prometheus Books, p. 9.