Louis's Garden

Graph View

Rationally Speaking 4 - The Great Atheist Debate Over the Limits of Science

Sep 15, 20244 min read

Rationally Speaking #4 - The Great Atheist Debate Over the Limits of Science

Cover|200

Episode metadata

Show notes > "Accommodationist" is a word that began to appear in recent months during public debates over science and religion. The derogatory term has been applied to atheists and rationalists like Eugenie Scott, at the National Center for Science Education, and Chris Mooney, science writer at Discover Magazine, who maintain that science and faith are not necessarily incompatible. Although the debate is frequently framed as a practical one, about what the tactics of the secular movement should be, it is also a philosophical one, hinging on the question of the epistemic limits of science. In this episode, we examine the arguments being made by and against the so-called "accommodationists," and ask: Can science disprove religious and supernatural claims?

Episode AI notes

  1. Rejecting a specific religious claim does not signify a rejection of religion in general but challenges a particular version of religion. The concept of Last Thursday’s proposes that God created the world recently to appear old, safeguarding fundamentalist religious claims beyond scientific disproof.
  2. The term qualia refers to the first-person experience of things like colors and sounds, raising questions about the limitations of explanation in consciousness. Understanding physiology and physics cannot fully recreate the subjective experience of seeing a color, highlighting the distinction between explanation and first-person experience.

Snips

[07:24] Rejection of Religious Claims and Last Thursday’s Concept

🎧 Play snip - 1min️ (06:33 - 07:31)

✨ Summary

Rejecting a specific religious claim does not signify a rejection of religion in general but challenges a particular version of religion. The concept of Last Thursday’s proposes that God created the world recently to appear old, challenging the scientific evidence of the Earth’s age. This idea can safeguard fundamentalist religious claims as it is beyond scientific disproof.

📚 Transcript

Click to expand
Speaker 1

But the thing is that contrary to what the purists seem to think, that rejection of that specific religious claim does not amount to a rejection of non-only religion in general, but Even on that particular version of religion. And the reason for that is a nice little concept called last Thursday's. Last Thursday's is this idea that I've actually heard by being proposed by several creationists that, well, you know, the world looks like it's six, you know, four billion years old, And it looks like there is a lot of fossils that have been scattered throughout for a long period of time, but in fact, God created it last Thursday, and he put things in a range of things In a way that makes it look like the Earth is old just to test your faith. Now, that statement completely rescues even fundamentalist religious claims, and there is absolutely nothing that a scientist can say about that claim.

[26:43] Understanding the Limitations of Explanation in Consciousness

🎧 Play snip - 1min️ (25:42 - 26:40)

✨ Summary

The discussion involves the term qualia, which refers to the first-person experience of things like colors and sounds. It raises the question of what constitutes an explanation, highlighting that knowledge about physiology and physics cannot fully recreate the subjective experience of seeing a color. An explanation does not equate to a first-person experience, as the two are distinct concepts.

📚 Transcript

Click to expand
Speaker 1

And there's also another point that is relevant to this whole discussion of consciousness and qualia, which is the qualia is the term that philosophers used for first person experience Of things like colors and sounds and things, that sort. And I think that to some extent that goes back to the very basic question of what do we mean by an explanation? Because, you know, for instance, let's take the case of color. I mean, we understand very well the physiology of color and the physics of color. I mean, we know how human beings perceive another animals perceive color. But if by explanation one means well, but all of that knowledge about physiology and physics and so on and so forth doesn't recreate the first person subjective experience of seeing A color, you know, the color red. Well, of course it doesn't. That's not what an explanation is. An explanation is not a first person experience. A first person experience is an experience, which is not the same thing as an explanation.

Backlinks

Graph View