Comments by Dianelos Georgoudis
551. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #68192 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 6, 2007 at 10:20 am
Irate_atheist (post 2133, or #67905):
DG - How can you possibly claim to know what God wants and how he does anything, if neither you or anybody else can even prove he exists in the first place?You mean one must first discover that something exists and then what its properties are. So, for example, Columbus first had to discover the American continent and then he (and others) discover the details about America's shoreline, mountains, rivers, and so on.
Well, it turns out that that's not how discovery works. First of all we must distinguish between necessary and contingent properties of something. The former are defining properties, i.e. form part of the thing itself. In the case of America its defining properties would be something like "a large mass of land lying somewhere to the east of Spain". Contingent properties would be America's shoreline etc. Now, Columbus did famously hypothesize the existence of America as defined by its necessary properties, and then proceeded to discover both America and its contingent properties.
That's how discovery works in virtually all cases, and especially in science. For example scientists studying the phenomenon of the exact orbit of Uranus found some anomalies that did not make any sense unless one hypothesized the existence of another planet even further away with such and such mass (these then were the defining properties of their hypothesis), and lo and behold they proceeded to discover Neptune. Now at least Neptune is visible to the telescope, but there are many scientific objects (which concept, by the way, does not entail that these objects are objectively real :-) that are entirely invisible but whose existence is accepted in order to make sense of other phenomena that are. That's how scientists have hypothesized the existence of several elementary particles. They first detect anomalies in phenomena (i.e. find phenomena that cannot be explained based on the known particles) and then hypothesize the existence of a particle having such and such defining properties that can explain the same. (For example that's how it was the case with the neutrino.) Now a possible confusion derives from the fact that scientists sometimes speak of the "discovery" of a new particle not when it was first hypothesized as the best explanation, but when previously unobserved phenomena that the existence of this particles implies are actually experimentally confirmed. (The existence of the neutrino first hypothesized by Pauli in 1930 was only experimentally confirmed or discovered 25 years later – but this is not to say that scientists for 25 years really doubted the existence of the neutrino.) A famous example of such an experimental confirmation was when the bending of light was experimentally demonstrated and thus a basic prediction of Einstein's general relativity was confirmed.
Now the fact that experimental confirmation of a prediction counts as the golden standard in science does not mean that such an experimental confirmation is necessary. For example the hypothesis that matter is composed of atoms was resisted by many scientist but was finally accepted, not because some prediction was confirmed, but because the hypothesis of the atomic nature of matter explained very well the previously well-known but mysterious phenomenon of the so-called "Brownian motion" (i.e. that small particles of dirt sustained in water are seen under the microscope to tremble in a random fashion). Another example is string theory, which can hardly be experimentally confirmed but which many scientists believe will be ultimately accepted as the best description of phenomena we have based solely on its explanatory power. So, in conclusion, what justifies existence is explanatory power. If moreover some prediction is confirmed then so much the better.
Now I think the above is a valid standard for all existents and not just for physical existents. So, in our context, the claim that God exists can be justified by its explanatory power too, and if some predictions are confirmed then so much the better. And that's exactly the case, at least when compared to the explanatory power of naturalism, as I have been arguing in this thread.
Just in order to avoid a misunderstanding: the fact that the existence of God can be justified both on its superior explanatory power as well as on the confirmation of predictions does not imply that this is the only way to reasonably believe in God. You see, there are some beliefs, called "basic beliefs", that are implicitly justified without any evidence or argument in favor. A good example of such a belief is to believe in the truth of objective evidence. So beliefs such as "I see the moon in the moon in the night sky", or "I observe that water freezes into ice" are examples of basic beliefs that do not require any further justification. Therefore philosophers say that beliefs "evident to the senses" are basic beliefs. Another class of basic beliefs that do not require any further justification are so-called "incorrigible beliefs", namely beliefs that can't possibly be wrong, such as "I exist", or "all large birds are birds". Another class of basic beliefs that one can reasonably believe without any further justification are the "self-evident" (or "intuitive") beliefs, i.e. beliefs we believe in by personal fiat as it were, as we cannot conceive of them being false. At first this looks arbitrary and unreasonable, but in fact it's impossible to reason without believing in such self-evident beliefs. Examples of such self-evident beliefs in my case are: "Objective reality exists" (which incidentally solipsists deny), "other minds exist" (ditto), "the inductive method is reasonable", "the world did not start 5 minutes ago", "my name is Dianelos" (or in general "my memory is trustworthy in some basic issues"), "gratuitous torture is wrong", etc. Now observe that it's possible that each one of the beliefs that strike us as self-evident is wrong. Notwithstanding that these are basic beliefs one may reasonably hold because a) one finds it personally impossible to doubt them, and b) one doesn't experience any problems using them as basis for one's thoughts. I mentioned the last example about gratuitous torture being wrong knowing fully well that some here may disagree. That's a good example then of the fact that some basic beliefs one person adopts need not necessarily be adopted by everybody else. So I personally find it impossible to doubt that gratuitous torture is wrong, but others may disagree. Another example of disagreement about self-evident beliefs is this: Many, probably most, people find it impossible to doubt in the belief "the physical universe is objectively real" and so consider it self-evidently true and hence a basic belief that does not require any further justification or evidence - but this is a belief that I happen to disagree with. This last example demonstrates that self-evident beliefs may be falsified in reason and hence may be challenged by others as I have been doing here. Of course, if such a basic belief is falsified a reasonable person must be prepared to abandon it and re-evaluate all their beliefs that are contingent on it.
Arguably the philosopher who has more rigorously analyzed how beliefs are justified in reason turns out to be a theist, namely Plantinga in his 1993 book "Warrant and Proper Function" as well as in his previous "Reason and Belief in God". Plantinga explains that for him belief in God is a self-evidently true and therefore a basic belief that requires no further justification, or in other words that theistic worldviews are reasonable even at the absence of a justification for that particular basic belief. So Plantinga's stance is that it is possible to build a logically coherent, consistent with all evidence, and pragmatically useful (and because of all these reasons reasonable) worldview based on a set of basic beliefs that includes belief in God. To my knowledge Plantinga's argument has not been refuted by non-theist philosophers, who simply respond by pointing out that by the same measure a worldview build on the basic belief that God does not exist is entirely reasonable too (See for example "God, and the Burden of Proof" by Keith Parsons.) A corollary of my argument in this thread is that the latter claim is in fact questionable, as the ontological understanding of the vast majority of non-theists may be incompatible with some evidence to the senses (i.e. may contradict some objective evidence).
So, in conclusion, belief in God can be justified both on evidence the way any other existential belief is justified, or implicitly as a basic belief. (Plantinga would say a "properly basic belief', but never mind.)
(Walks away, shaking his head, wondering if the faithheads will ever wake up and face reality.)Yes, well, I on the contrary find that the kind of populist naturalism that Dawkins epitomizes and which you apparently follow is based on two main cognitive failures:
1. To conflate all theism with biblical literalism, which implies a contradiction between all of theism and science.
2. To fail to appreciate how shaky naturalism really is, including that naturalism's typical worldview of scientific realism may be contrary to objective evidence.
Both these fallacies are really failures of education. Especially the idea that all theism entails biblical literalism, or that all theism contradicts science, are trivially wrong beliefs. After all theist philosophers have been discussing the existence of God with absolutely no dependence on the Bible since ancient times (see Plato, for example). And some great scientists, including some Nobel price winning physicists, are theists, thus evidencing that not all theism is incompatible with science. So cognitive failure #1 above is a massive case of a strawman. As for cognitive failure #2 it's especially reprehensible in the case of a naturalist of the intellectual stature of a scientist like Dawkins; I mean it's bad enough that Dawkins refuses to study serious theology, but it seems he also did not educate himself about the ontology of naturalism and about the ontological implications of science itself, beyond his own particular field. But what I find a dramatic case of cognitive failure is Sam Harris, who apart from being highly intelligent and highly honest, has been trained in both philosophy and science at some of the best educational institutions of the US. As for the third musketeer, Hitchens, I find him an embarrassment for atheism, and I console myself with the idea that maybe he is just out to make some money out of the current fad, and therefore figured he had to do Harris and Dawkins one better.
I wonder what happened to the sophisticated and thoughtful Mackie or Martin kind of atheologians? I can tell you what happened: Martin's "Atheism: A Philosophical Justification" is #370,000 in Amazon's sales rank, and Mackie's "The Miracle of theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God" is #209,000. Which is not as bad as Drange's meticulous "Nobelief & Evil: Two Argumetns for the Nonexistence of God" which stands at #1,106,000. In comparison Harris's, Dawkins's, and Hitchens's "religious belief is the greatest danger facing civilization and the survival of humanity" kind of nonsense are bestsellers standing at #672, #96, and #36 respectively. Which I am afraid only evidences the intellectual diminishing of atheism: atheism as a cheap fast-food service for the masses - the McDonalds approach to ontology. How could a serious intellectual position fall so low? Well, I suppose Dawkins's meme theory once again offers an explanation: The reproductive success of the respective nonsense theistic memes opened up evolutionary niches for comparably superficial atheistic memes. Great.
552. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #68058 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 5, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Steve99 (post 2130, or #67844):
This is what I don't get... and why I find your debating so frustrating. You have experienced here a debate about the supposed Trinitarian nature of reality. You put forward reasons for it, in terms of both 'mind structure' and 'information processing'. I put forward what I believed was a clear argument that your reasoning was wrong. For example, you believed that humans could exist without instinct (which is clearly nonsense), that processing could proceed without software.I never said that humans could not exist without instinct. What I wrote (post 2064 or #67184) is: " I cannot conceive of a person (i.e. conscious subject) who misses either awareness, thought or will – these three are necessary. But I can conceive of a person without instinct." and in several posts (the most recent one is 2091 or #67403) I have clarified that not only people are persons as not only people are conscious subjects (God, intelligent computers, aliens, angels, Santa Claus etc are all persons too). And indeed one can easily conceive of a person (i.e. a conscious subject) without instinct, in the same way that one can conceive of a conscious subject without eyesight, or without a human brain, or without feelings of anger, and so on. But one can't conceive of a conscious subject without awareness, thought, and will. These three really strike me as necessary and also as interdependent properties of personhood.
So I am sorry you find our debate frustrating, but I think you are just too quick to react and do not read carefully what the other person is trying to say, or check whether the other person's factual claims are in fact true.
A case in point: It's factually true that information processing can proceed without software. A thermostat processes information but does not use any software. Maybe you are thinking of digital computers that do use software but these are a very special kind of information processing machines, namely so-called "von Neumann architecture" machines. The vast majority of kinds of information processing goes on without any software. For example it's an easy matter to build an arithmetic calculator using basic logic gates (things like ANDs and ORs, and NOTs) and without any software whatsoever. A wildflower does information processing (it turns its face towards the sun) and it does not use any software to achieve that. As do viruses. As do both individual ants and ant colonies. I could give you many other examples. But, again, no information processing can exist without some interdependent input, processing, and output – and if interdependent input, processing and output are present then you always have some information processing. If you disagree then please produce a counterexample, i.e. some example in nature where input/processing/output does take place but no information processing, or conversely that some information processing takes place that lacks input or processing or output. I think that's a trivial point, and I am sure you'd have recognized that if you'd taken just a little time to think about it.
I think the whole matter is nonsense - to me it is like arguing about the fine structure of fairy wingsWell, that's maybe part of the problem. To meaningfully debate you must be able to at least entertain the possibility that the other party is right. If not then instead of debating you are apt to keep begging the question and/or refusing to seriously consider the other party's arguments. Which wastes much of yours and the other party's time. (In this context, can you see how incoherent Dawkins's position is to on the one hand ask for debate and on the other hand ridicule all religious belief as equivalent to belief in fairies?) Incidentally, an example of how you beg the question is your premise in post 2081 that anything that threatens the naturalistic understanding of reality threatens objective reality itself (when of course objective reality may not be like naturalism has it – that's the whole point in our debate). Or in post 2083 where you use as premise that numbers and morality only exist "in the abstract" and therefore, presumably, don't exist in reality. Or in post 2134 where you use as premise a property of the universe to contest a claim of mine when part of what I claim is that the physical universe doesn't exist in reality.
Actually, Steve, I sympathize. I do understand that the physical universe around us is so obviously there in all its glorious stability and order and massiveness that it is easy to believe that it must be real; the physical universe appears to be the very paragon of what reality means. I understand it's difficult, but in the context of a debate where the other person claims that the physical universe is not real you can't use as premise in a counterargument that the physical universe is real, for that's begging the question. If it's so obviously true that the physical universe is real then it should be easy to demonstrate that without using as a premise that it is. But as it turns out it's not at all easy to demonstrate that. On the contrary and rather surprisingly, there is a good argument to be made that some observational facts and a little math imply that the physical universe is not real (see our recent discussion about Bell's inequality). Which I freely concede is an amazing result, and I am still having some trouble fully accepting it. (Incidentally by "real" I always mean "objectively real", as we all agree that reality is objective.)
This kind of ignoring of counter-arguments and proceeding on blissfully as if no-one had said anything is no way to behave.I have not ignored your arguments Steve, as evidenced by the fact that of all the posters here you have been the one I have most often responded to. And I have invested quite some work trying to respond well. On the other hand I can't respond to each one of your posts, simply because I lack the time, so I try to pick those that strike me as more substantial or interesting. If that's not good enough for you then there's nothing more I can do.
553. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #68001 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 5, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Steve99 (post 2081, or #67223)
Make up your mind... are you willing to believe in QM and accept the general views of physicists in this matter, or are you going to dismiss QM as wild and crazy?Of course I accept Quantum Mechanics; I wonder where I gave the impression I was doubting the truth of QM, or any other of the current scientific theories for that matter. I find it remarkable that after months of debating with me you still can't believe that I fully agree with science. Take my word for it: one can be a theist and at the same time have no problem at all with the project of science. (And, incidentally, I am not sure why you stress the issue of the "general" views of physicists; there are hardly any physicists today that doubt QM as far as I know.)
The situation changes in the case of those physicists who actually care about the issue of what QM implies for our understanding of reality. And here indeed there is hardly any general agreement. But what some of the finest physicists thought is rather surprising: They thought either that objective physical reality does not exist or else that consciousness creates physical reality. It goes without saying that the first view is identical to idealism's and the second is only one hair removed from it, as it clearly makes consciousness the ultimate reality. Let me mention some names:
Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientists of all time thought that QM implies that the moon is not there when nobody is looking, and therefore worked hard and long trying to demonstrate that what quantum theory implied about reality couldn't be right. Bell's test results proved him wrong.
Niehls Bohr, one of the founders of QM and one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century made it clear that it is wrong to think of an objective world producing quantum phenomena: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is."
Werner Heisenberg, another of the founders of QM and a giant of science wrote: "One cannot go back to the idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively." and "It is of course tempting to say that the electron must have been somewhere between two observations and that therefore the electron must have described some kind of path or orbit even if it may be impossible to know which path. This would be a reasonable argument in classical physics. But in quantum theory it would be a misuse of language which … cannot be justified".
Pascual Jordan, another of the founders of QM wrote: "Observations not only disturb what has to be measured, they produce it. […] We ourselves produce the results of measurement."
Eugene Wigner who some compare to Einstein in intellectual greatness wrote: "It is not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness […] It will remain remarkable in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of consciousness is an ultimate reality."
John Wheeler made clear the preeminence of the conscious observer writing: "No elementary phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon."
Arthur Eddington: "To put the conclusion crudely – the stuff of the world is 'mind stuff' "
Von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and the first to formalize the mathematics of quantum mechanics wrote as early as 1932 a proof that quantum mechanics was not compatible with the belief that particles possessed objective albeit hidden variable properties before being measured – which later led to the even stronger Bell's theorem.
The following are maybe less famous but still A-level physicists (by which I mean physicists who have made important contributions to science):
Bernard d'Espagnat: "The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment."
David Mermin commenting on Einstein's question: "We now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks."
There are other well-known physicists who believed that QM implies that consciousness creates physical reality including David Bohm, Walter Heitler, Fritz London, Henry Pierce Stapp – but I could not find any actual quotes by them (I'd be thankful if the reader can find some).
Now is the above a minority understanding? Hard to say. The majority of quantum physicists do not care about what quantum mechanics implies for reality one way or the other, as this is not a scientific but a philosophical issue that belongs to metaphysics, and there are no research grants nor honors to be won doing metaphysical research (as Feynman famously responded to students who wondered about how reality is: "Shut up and calculate"). But the conclusions of some of the very best who were above all that or who were just too curious is pretty unanimous. And now that we have Bell's test results even the non-specialist can understand why that should be so (Bell's theorem is inspired by but is not dependent on Quantum Mechanics, so can be understood without knowledge of Quantum Mechanics and will remain true even if Quantum Mechanics is one day proven wrong.)
Here is how Nick Herbert puts it in his "Quantum Reality: An excursion into metaphysics and the meaning of reality": "One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality. News of the reality crisis hardly exists outside the physics community." That's an excellent book by the way that I am now reading for the second time; highly recommended to anybody interested of learning more about what quantum phenomena imply about how reality is not. A very recent (2006) book that exhaustively explains why the only possible implication of quantum mechanics is that consciousness creates reality is "Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness" written by two physics professors of the University of California at Santa Cruz.
554. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #67866 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 5, 2007 at 3:31 am
PaulEmecz (post 2111, or #67702):
I am making a claim about the world around us. I am saying it was designed by God.I agree, but would like to point out that "design" is not only a loaded concept (see the nonsense of the so-called "intelligent design"), but also, more importantly, a confusing concept. Take for example the very relevant issue of natural evolution. It's undoubtedly true: natural evolution does explain the complexity of species beyond any reasonable doubt. And natural evolution is a strictly mechanical process based on random mutations and natural selection for which absolutely no designer is required. On the other hand you and I believe that God designed the world around us, including the species in it, which incidentally includes our bodies and our intelligence. How can such a state of affairs be possible? How can something be both the result of a strictly mechanical process and of personal design?
I would like to illustrate how by giving an example out of my own personal experience as a designer. It turns out I design software systems. Once, as part of such an application, I had to design a large number of hash functions (I think it was 16). What a hash function exactly is, is irrelevant here; suffice to say that a hash function is a mathematical function that inputs a number, processes it, and outputs another number trying to optimize a particular relationship between those two numbers. Now there are good and bad hash functions, and it's not easy to design a good one. In fact to design a really good hash function is extremely difficult and a very specialized kind of work. In my application I only needed fairly good hash functions, but also a large number of them. How to proceed? Well, I thought, instead of breaking my own head trying to design so many different hash functions, why not use the brute force of the computer to produce them? So I wrote an automatic process that randomly produced hash functions (to the tune of billions) and then simply checked to see how good they were, and continued to search until it found the 16 fairly good ones I needed. After maybe of few days of a single PC sweating away I got the 16 functions I needed.
Now the question is: "Were these 16 functions designed by me, or were they the result of a mechanical process?" It's hardly reasonable to say that they were not designed by me, after all I set up the whole thing. On the other hand they were indisputably the result of a purely mechanical process, indeed one not dissimilar to natural evolution, as it was also based on random production and selection. So we see that it is entirely possible for complexity to be the result of both a purely mechanical process and of personal design.
Now a possible question in this context is this: "In the case of a human software designer it makes sense to put a mechanical computer to work hard instead of breaking one's own personal head. But God is supposed to be a person of (at least practically) infinite powers, so why would God use such a round-about way instead of directly designing the required species to His/Her specifications?" I think that's a fair question which admits of a good answer once we realize that in order to understand a person's actions we must first understand that person's motivation. According to Irenaean theodicy God's motivation for creation is to give us an experiential environment optimized for the personal attainment of virtue. As John Hick put it, the world is a place for soul-making. But if that is God's motivation then God does not need design a world including its species to any particular specification of individual perfection; quite the contrary. Which brings us to kind of a paradox: If God had directly designed the species then each would have to be perfect in itself. But a world perfectly designed in each particular, including it containing perfect species and perfect humans, would actually contradict God's motivation for creating the world, as such a world would be far from optimal for the personal attainment of virtue (in fact I think would make it impossible).
But, still one may ask: "Why hasn't then God directly and on purpose design the imperfect species we see around us? Why use the roundabout way of a mechanism (namely natural selection) that produces the complex but imperfect species required by God's prime motivation for creation? After all if God were a software designer needing 16 hash functions it's true that S/He would naturally and easily design the 16 maximally best hash functions there are, but also could, if S/He so wanted, also produce 16 only fairly good hash functions." Well, suppose God had directly designed imperfect species (and in general an imperfect world) without using the round-about way of mechanisms, and imagine we were experiencing such a world. How would we think about God in such a world? At first it might seem that such a world would be advantageous as it would make it easier for us to find out that God exists. After all the so-called argument from design (or teleological argument) would be watertight. No Darwin would have come along destroying the argument that the complexity of the species evidences the existence of designer. But in fact such a state of affairs would not be advantageous from God's point of view. "But why not? Doesn't God want us to believe in Him/Her?" Well, the short answer to this question is "no". God's primary motivation for creation, what God really wishes, is for us to attain personal virtue (according to Ireneaus's, John Hick's and my worldview, but also according to Jesus's new commandment as recorded in the gospel of John), and a world where God is in our face as it were, is not the best world for that. But there is a second reason for God to avoid direct design: The world that is best for us to attain personal virtue is not one where God is not trivially easy to discern, but on the other hand is also not a world were we are mislead about how God is, once we do the effort to discern Him/Her. I think that a world full of obviously imperfect direct designs by God would powerfully mislead us into believing in an imperfect God, some kind of evil Demiurge as Gnostics had it. Imagine a state of affairs where it were obviously true that the Bible, with all its imperfections, were the direct and literal word of God; surely such a state of affairs would greatly confuse and mislead us about how God really is. There is a third reason I could mention here, and which I have analyzed some time back (including in post 1764 or #61594): In order to grow in personal virtue we need a physical environment, i.e. an environment that follows mechanical laws and is therefore basically predictable, otherwise we wouldn't be able to perform the simulations that, as Donald argues in post 2090, are necessary for ethical thinking. That's a complex issue, but I think it's clear that if we lived in a non-mechanical medium then doing good would hardly be meaningful.
So in conclusion I think there are sufficient grounds to justify the claim that the premise of the perfectly good God not only fails to contradict but actually implies or explains the fact that the origin of the species is a mechanical process. Which means that those theists who struggle against the theory of natural evolution are doing exactly the wrong thing. After all if God exists then everything, including natural evolution, evidences God. As I hope to have shown here :-)
555. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #67825 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 5, 2007 at 12:41 am
Lauregon (post 2093, or #67477):
"God" can't be both not interventionist and at the same time "directly affecting" the qualitative parts of our life.Why not? Let's think about this from the most fundamental point of view there is, namely from the point of view of our condition. Our experience of life is such that it is both objective and subjective: we objectively see the moon but our experience of seeing the moon has also the qualitative part of how it is like to see the moon. The objective/quantitative aspect of our experience is public, but the subjective/qualitative aspect is strictly private. So, for example, if you were speaking with an intelligent computer you could both easily discuss the objective experience of seeing the moon and what that implies, but one would have to wonder how the intelligent computer experiences seeing the moon. I think reality is such that we all basically share the same objective experience of life, but I think how we experience life, the subjective part of it, can and often is quite different. How could I know that if each person's qualitative experience of life is so private? Well, I know that from observing how my own qualitative experience of life is so changeable. I think that the fact that one's qualitative (or subjective) experience of life is so changeable and the rules that govern that change is one of the most important facts of our condition that have not been studied by philosophers. Some of these rules are quite clear. Just to mention one example, learning strongly affects the quality of our experiencing something. One very notable case is how the quality of one's listening to a foreign language changes if one learns that foreign language.
So far so good, but what does all that have to do with our relationship to God (as I see it)? Well, by now we see rather clearly (thanks to science) that the objective part of our conscious experience is structured mechanically: Mechanisms explain the movement of the planets and the falling of apples and the complexity of the species and the fact that we can't walk through walls. There is no reason to suspect that there are exceptions to this rule, so I think it's by now unreasonable to believe that God interferes (or at least systematically interferes) with the mechanisms that structure our objective experiences. My own view is that for all practical purposes God never interferes, so I understand God as non-interventionist. To make this clear, I believe that if we were about to destroy life on Earth God would not interfere to stop us. On the other hand I think the qualitative part of our life is one where we are directly in touch with God in a free and dynamic way. Our intuitions about goodness are rooted here. Our experience of beauty is a direct experience of God (my own religious experiences feel exactly like my experience of music – but at the absence of sounds). How it is like to do the right thing and all that it entails is our coming closer to God, of building a more intimate relationship with Him/Her – and significantly that experience is equally open and equally satisfying to all persons no matter their ontological views. (That's how I explain the fact that non-theists can be as good people as theists.) In short all of the qualitative part of our condition is directly contingent on God and represents our dynamic and interactive relationship to God. And I think it's indisputable that the qualitative part of our experience is far more valuable and relevant to us than the objective part of our experience.
It is in this sense then that I claim that God is both non-interventionist and non-absent.
Well, I think that's an issue easily settled: Just take a few seconds to look around you, and you'll realize that you exist in a space of conscious experience. The material world is something you infer from your conscious experience. That's a basic fact of our condition.Further I object to you calling the reality of human beings "material". I think it's indisputable that the reality of human beings is experiential rather than material. Matter, material objects, and their properties are all things we find out about based on our experience. - DianelosIs that merely a semantic disagreement? It seems to me that our experience is derived from observation and perception of and interaction with the material world. In that sense, IMO, human reality is a material one.
Experience based upon unverifiable subjective perception of the non-verifiable and non-material is, as I see it, fantasy.I am not sure how you mean that :-) but let's take an example. You experience the color blue, yes? That's a completely subjective as well as atomic experience, something that philosophers of the mind call "a quale". In what sense is that experience "a fantasy"? On the contrary it seems to me that direct experiences are the only knowledge that is absolutely certain and cannot possibly be a fantasy. Experience is all the data we have (and I mean experience as it is, namely comprising both the objective and the subjective aspects of it - both the object of our experience and how it is to experience it.) Where we can err is in what we infer from that data. So, for example, I claim that it is an error to infer from the data we have (the objective data in this case) that the physical universe is real.
556. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #67808 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 4, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Downunder (post 2094, or #67579):
Dr Benways' 2084. I know what you mean but can't resist to note that IMHO, objectively, 3 legs on the ground provide perfect stability. In our imperfect world, 4 legged tables are likely to have one leg shorter than the gradient set by the other 3. Subsequently, wobbly 4 legged tables are less perfect and could spill your amber liquid.LOL. Good point. I think I shall use it when arguing about the Trinitarian nature of reality.
Incidentally, Downunder, I have always wondered if by LIFE you mean what I call consciousness. Do you see any cases where LIFE is present but consciousness isn't, or consciousness is present but LIFE isn't? Because if you don't then the two concepts are pretty much equivalent.
557. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #67682 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 4, 2007 at 10:40 am
Donald (post 2092 or #67468):
No, I did not include them amongst those worth considering but amongst those that are possible (not to mention that idealistic theism, the worldview of Plato, Leibniz, Kant, and Berkeley, is certainly worth considering). I think we can all safely agree that knowledge about reality is not easy to come by, and that one's intuitions about how reality must be can easily be wrong and that we therefore should not "rule out" anything. (See for example Einstein's wrong intuitions about entangled articles, or Kelvin's wrong intuitions about the luminiferous ether – or see Kant's argument about the noumena, or Plantinga's argument that if natural evolution is true then we should not expect to possess good cognitive abilities to discern which ontological propositions are true). So to be on the safe side I think the best methodology to use is not to ponder which ontological view appears reasonable or not at first sight, but rather to first consider the set of any possible realities that would account for the data we have, and then carefully examine which is the most reasonable of them by consistently applying the same set of criteria to each of them. Now if I am right about the implications of Bell's theorem then scientific realism, i.e. the view that the physical objects that science studies (and that we see around us) form part of reality, does not even belong in the set of possible realities.So, in the case that Newtonian mechanics happened to be an exact description of all physical phenomena, one could still hypothesize that reality is physical but that each physical particle in it is moved around not by the physical laws described by Newton but by small hidden demons who just make fun of us playing along with Newton's "laws" for a while. Or, one could still hypothesize idealistic theism according to which physical reality does not exist and that God's will causes the Newtonian order present in the physical phenomena we observe.Taking that as an example, I would rule those out as unreasonable, whereas you seem to be including them amongst those worth considering. (BTW, as this is the internet, perhaps I should just clarify that I was using "reasonable" to mean "likely enough to be a practical contender", not to mean "arrived at through reason".)
However, we want theories to preserve causality, i.e. that the set of objects and events has the same story about which events caused other events, no matter which observer we ask.Right.
However, the shared variable interpretation does not require the common story to specify which of A or B altered the shared variable.Why not? If that shared property was altered I want to know what caused that change to take place. Surely it did not just magically happen.
So observer 1 sees the following 6 events regarding a shared variable:Yes. And as observer 1 sees (or rather assumes) S become 1 just after particle A interacts this observer concludes that A's interaction caused S to become 1. Similarly observer 2 concludes that B's interaction caused S to become 1. They can't be both right, and something must have caused S to change into 1. That's the problem.
creation of variable S, initial value = 0 { 0 means open }
particle A interacts
S becomes 1
particle B interacts
S remains 1
removal of variable S { both particles have interacted }
And observer 2 sees:
creation of variable S, initial value = 0 { 0 means open }
particle B interacts
S becomes 1
particle A interacts
S remains 1
removal of variable S { both particles have interacted }
It is perfectly possible to dispense with an explicit shared variable and simply say that the entangled particles are the shared variable, and that is effectively what most physicists do, but I thought talking about it as an explicit shared variable could help.I agree. Actually "variable" is a misnomer: Variables are parts of equations, not of reality. What in reality exist are things and their properties. So when we speak here of "variables" we actually mean "variable properties". Moreover these are necessary properties, and hence do not represent something that may or may not be there, but rather something that defines what a particle is, and therefore forms part of what a particle is. (In this context I did not quite understand why above you inserted the "removal of S", and indeed it servers no purpose I can see.)
Well, yes and no. I agree that a particle's properties, including a particle's variable properties, form an integral part of it. But after one measures a photon's polarization at a particular angle the values of its polarization at all other angles before that measurement becomes fundamentally unknowable, and therefore these values are properly called "hidden". So a photon's polarization is hidden (i.e. invisible) at all angles until it is measured in one. And the thesis that nevertheless the photon's polarization has existed at all angles before being measured at one is an unnecessary assumption as far as Quantum Mechanics is concerned. So I stand by my claim that the objective existence of the variable property of polarization is both invisible and not required by science.But the existence of non-local/hidden/shared variables is just that: completely invisible and not required by any scientific theory.The hidden shared variable is not really hidden or invisible. I described it that way as temporary conceptual scaffolding, because our mental models do not normally include that particles have links to shared variables. In fact the properties of the particles (polarization of photons in actual experiments) are the variables being discussed, so the "variables" are in fact visible and precisely measurable.
In other words: The assumption that the photon has objective existence (i.e. forms part of reality) entails that its properties have objective existence also, and do not come into existence only when we look. But the assumption that a photon's properties are real is falsified by Bell's test results, unless one also assumes that two entangled photons keep sharing a common variable property even though they are far apart (which is wild hypothesis but possibly true). But (I claim) that that latter assumption is falsified by the fact that two different observers will claim, with equal justification, that two different events caused that shared property to vary, which can't be the case unless one is willing to entertain the idea that reality is not only non-local but also non-coherent.
I post the following paragraph for the benefit of any readers who may not know what the property of "polarization" exactly means and what its place is in our discussion.
The following explanation of the concept of polarization is given under the assumption that photons and their properties are real things. Polarization is a binary property of a photon which is defined for all angles between 0 and 180 degrees (between 180 and 360 degrees the values are symmetrical, i.e. the polarization at angle 180+x is identical to the polarization at x). By "binary" we mean that at each angle that property can only have two values (say "1" or "0"), and hence we say that a photon is either polarized or not polarized at a particular angle. We can measure whether a photon is polarized at a particular angle (or in other words whether its polarization property at that angle has a "1" value) by placing a polarization filter at the same angle in front of it. If the photon passes the filter it shows that it was polarized in that angle, if not that it wasn't. The problem is that the measuring the photon's polarization at that angle causes its polarization at other angles to change, so it's not possible to make a series of measurements and map the values of the polarization of the photon at different angles (and hence these values are unknowable or "hidden"). Here is how we know that to measure a photon's polarization at one angle changes its polarization values at other angles: Let's say a photon passes a polarization filter at angle alpha (and hence was polarized at angle alpha before hitting that filter) and then passes a polarization filter at angle beta (and hence was polarized at angle beta before hitting that second filter). Now let's suppose that the second filter did not change the photon's polarization at angle alpha, i.e. that the photon is still polarized at angle alpha when it leaves the second filter. If we now put a third filter at angle alpha in front of it we'd expect it to always pass it because it's still polarized at that angle. But in fact – as Quantum Mechanics predicts and experiment confirms – it only passes that third filter with probability cos^2(beta-alpha), so the second filter that measured the photon's polarization at angle beta sometimes removes the polarization of the photon at angle alpha (and does so with a probability of 1-cos^2(beta-alpha) ). Now so far there isn't any problem with the idea that photons and their properties are real. The problem that Donald and I are discussing is this: There are processes that produce two photons with the same initial polarization at all angles, and which then proceed to behave exactly as if they were one photon. So if the left photon's polarization is measured at angle alpha and then the right photon's polarization is measured at angle beta we observe exactly the same kind of behavior as if one photon where first measured at angle alpha (a measurement that changes its polarization) and then is measured at angle beta (which evidences that change). It's difficult to understand how two photons could produce such coordinated observations, except by assuming that they instantly act on each other at a distance (either by sending each other instantaneous signals, or by sharing their variable polarization property even though they are far apart). This ontological assumption is called "non-local" because it posits a reality in which the concept of distance disappears, as it posits that these two particles keep in touch even when they are far apart. (By the way, the problem is much more general than the case of that pair of entangled photons. According to Quantum Mechanics all material particles get quickly entangled with each other, so the hypothesis of a non-local physical universe implies that physical space as we normally mean the term does not exist: all physical objects are in touch with each other. That's why the idea of a non-local universe reminds some people of the mystical view that all reality is one and undivided.)
That's not what physicists are looking for. They are looking for a reality with simple rules (they love Occam's razor), so a vast computer simulation wouldn't really suit.Well, I find that the standard of Occam's razor is not applied consistently. For example the many worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (which is arguably the most popular description of reality among physicists today) is much more complex than any vast computer capable of producing our experience of physical phenomena.
And, of course, if you do like the idea that our universe is simulated in a (big) computer, you don't need to wait for more theory.I don't like that idea; in fact I think it's wrong. I only point out that naturalism implies that material systems can become conscious and that therefore the hypothesis that a big computer produces all our experiences of physical phenomena is a) possible, b) less complex than the various interpretations of Quantum Mechanics that physicists put forward, and c) free of several of the paradoxes related to Quantum Mechanics that plague its interpretation, including the paradoxes related to Bell's theorem. So, it seems to me, that if one is a naturalist then reason requires that one abandons scientific realism in favor of the computer simulation hypothesis. Which hypothesis, by the way, has much going for it when compared to scientific realism. For example it explains why the universe is so quiet instead of swarming with signs of intelligent life, it explains the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants, it explains why all physical quantities appear to be quantized, it explains why the problem of consciousness is so hard (after all our brain does not really produce our consciousness so we are looking in the wrong place, not to mention the physical reality we experience may well lack consciousness producing properties), and others.
I don't wish to belong to any tribe, my friend. I would rather stand alone as I think any freethinker must. This allows me to freely cherry pick any tribe's best ideas without owing allegiance to any one tribe's core ideas. For example Dawkins's "The Selfish Gene" has been a seminal book early in my life, so I carry part of his mind in mine. On the other hand I find his idea that all religious worldviews are dangerous (never mind the greatest threat to civilization and to the very survival of humankind) to be - hmm - stupid. By not belonging in any tribe that Dawkins belongs to I keep myself completely free to pick his good ideas and reject his bad ones (as I see them). Incidentally, Dawkins's own meme theory nicely explains why tribalizing memeplexes are good for their member memes reproduction success; which is one more reason for keeping one's own mind free of such memeplexes.That's the ontological understanding of the vast majority of naturalists, including of Dawkins.I agree - why not join us? Membership is free, and you'd be very welcome.
The reason I reject Idealism is that it is too wide, too general, too open.Yes, and maybe too powerful to boot. Corylus's observation in post 1951 (or #65143) that my way with reality reminds him (or her) of how Alexander the Great dealt with the Gordian Knot still reverberates in my mind and puts me at some unease. On the other hand, if reality does consist of a perfect person then one should expect the existence of such a perfectly smooth way that cuts through all difficulties and paradoxes like a hot knife through butter.
Anything is possible, and it makes no predictions.No, that's not true. The hypothesis that reality follows personal will is more flexible than the hypothesis that reality follows mechanical laws, but does not imply that everything goes. We know what a person (or conscious subject) means and we have a pretty good idea of what perfect person means. This knowledge has implications which must not only be compatible but must also explain the data we have (i.e. our experience of life). So idealistic theism is falsifiable by experiences that are incompatible with it, and can be weakened by its failure to explain our experiences. In fact the best argument against God's existence, the so-called argument from evil, tries to do exactly that: argue from our experience of moral and natural evils that God does not exist, or probably does not exist.
Thinking about this, I wonder if my concession above that idealistic theism is a more flexible hypothesis than naturalism is actually warranted. You see, any person, and particularly a perfectly good person, has a psychological make-up that is coherent and also limiting in many ways. What's more we, being persons ourselves, have kind of a privileged insight of what claims do or do not make sense in the context of personhood. In comparison naturalism is fairly unfettered as long as it posits a mechanical reality. I mean just see with what freedom the various ontological interpretations of Quantum Mechanics are conceived, not to mention the freedom entailed in the computer simulation hypothesis. So the hypothesis of a personal reality may be more restrictive than the hypothesis of a mechanical reality after all.
The whole point of current science is that the theories it keeps are restrictive.Right, and I think that a meaningful proposition in any context, including in the contexts of science and of ontology, must share that quality. On the other hand, notwithstanding our intuitions to the contrary, science could (or should) not care less about what kind of objective reality gives rise to the phenomena it studies. Science is in the business of investigating phenomena - not reality - and however reality turns out to be does not make any difference to science as it produces all the right phenomena. The distinction between appearance and reality is known to philosophers since ancient times, and now quantum phenomena simply forces us all to deal with this fact; after all Quantum Mechanics is doing just splendidly well while no scientist can really say what kind of reality gives rise to quantum phenomena. On the other hand science can and does sometimes tell us how reality is not, because reality cannot contradict the phenomena that science finds out about. And some of the phenomena that Quantum Mechanics predicted and which realist Einstein found so unreasonable have now been experimentally confirmed, and they appear to falsify scientific realism – even, it seems to me, if one posits that physical reality is non-local. It seems the only escape route for scientific realism is to posit a non-causal reality where the very objectivity of our objective observations is lost. I think that's close to the definition of a maximally magical reality, not to mention the very antithesis of the scientific mindset, and therefore I think that any reasonable person who checks the evidence will have to conclude that scientific realism (i.e. the worldview of almost all naturalists) is untenable.
But I may be wrong, and non-locality is possible. But I still don't see how.
558. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #67403 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 3, 2007 at 10:09 am
Donald (post 2058, or #67172):
Sorry for the delayNot at all. I much prefer a well thought out answer than a quick answer. What I hate is the absence of an answer when I find the subject matter to be interesting.
Although I agree that our conscious brains operate with "second hand" or "derived" data that is not physical reality itself, and therefore could be just disembodied thoughts, delivered through spiritual means, my judgment of all the evidence I have accumulated, is that the physical world is real.OK. On the other hand it should be clear that I don't agree that conscious brains exist because I don't agree that brains themselves exist as part of objective reality. In this thread I have argued that even if one does believe that the physical universe is real and hence that our brains are real too it's unreasonable to believe that they produce our consciousness – but for the moment at least I'd rather keep our discussion focused on the implications of Bell's theorem.
I also take it that we agree on a judgment that we are not brains in vats, and that other people existI agree that we are not brains in vats because I don't believe that brains form part of objective reality. The brain in a vat thought experiment is relevant only in the context of a naturalistic understanding of reality. Further, to be precise, I agree that other persons (i.e. conscious subjects) exist, which covers humans and God, as well as, possibly, intelligent computers and aliens. As for people, brains, etc. they all exist as patterns present in our conscious experience, which entails that they do not exist objectively (they are not there when nobody is looking).
From what you say, I conclude that if experiments throughout the last century had confirmed Newtonian mechanics as an exact description of the physical world, you would believe the physical world was real.No, that's not my epistemological position. If Newtonian mechanics happened to be an exact description of the physical phenomena we observe and science studies then I would not necessarily believe that the physical world was real either. That's a basic point and it would be useful to make it quite clear: It seems that our condition is such that one can always conceptualize more than one reality that would give rise to the physical phenomena we observe (or to be more precise, would give rise to the whole of our experience including the physical phenomena we observe). So, in the case that Newtonian mechanics happened to be an exact description of all physical phenomena, one could still hypothesize that reality is physical but that each physical particle in it is moved around not by the physical laws described by Newton but by small hidden demons who just make fun of us playing along with Newton's "laws" for a while. Or, one could still hypothesize idealistic theism according to which physical reality does not exist and that God's will causes the Newtonian order present in the physical phenomena we observe. So the relevant question is: That being so, how far can reason bring us in our understanding of reality? We agree that phenomenal evidence can falsify one or the other ontological view. It is possible that reality and our experience of it is such that there is sufficient evidence to falsify all but one ontological view, but I find that very unlikely. In any case as long as several ontological worldviews are viable reason demands that we compare them one to one according to a series of criteria and adopt the one ontological worldview that fares best. That has been my project in this thread, and I think the methodology proposed is entirely fair and can be agreed upon no matter where one's own ontological beliefs lie. I wonder if you would agree with this.
But since experiments throughout the last century have produced overwhelming evidence of mind-boggling quantum weirdness, you have switched to thinking that the physical world is not real, and that our shared phenomenology must be some kind of non-physical activity which you call spiritual.Right, even though that's not the only reason. But let's here concentrate on the claim that the experimental confirmation of Bell's theorem is a sufficient reason for rejecting the ontological view that the physical universe is real.
If I am right so far, it follows that if there was a credible explanation of quantum weirdness that was based on a mechanical physical reality (with probabilistic outcomes allowed), you would probably switch back to accepting physical reality, and agree that there is no need for assuming anything spiritual. Is that right?No, sorry. If Bell's results have the far-reaching implications I think they have then my argument becomes stronger. But if I am mistaken about these implications then my basic argument, namely that belief in idealistic theism is more reasonable than belief in naturalism (or to be more precise, in scientific realism), has still much going for it. In fact in post 333 (and in a shorter form in post 470) where I first described my basic argument, as well as in many dozens of posts after that, I did not make any use of Bell's theorem. In other words my argument does not depend on the implications of Bell's theorem.
The error is in assuming that the non-local relationship must be enforced by a signal that arises at the moment of the first interaction and is conveyed to the other interaction. The relationship could be instead be enforced by a common cause. That is to say, the entangled entities could be real, in the sense of being identifiable entities independent of observers, and the entanglement could also be real, in the same observer-independent sense, but the behaviour of the entangled entity could be governed by a shared hidden variable (a common cause) which is implicit in the creation of an entangled entity, is non-local (as are the entangled entities), and does not disappear (or become irrelevant) until all elements of the entangled entity have undergone interactions.This view could be summarised as "assuming non-local hidden, and shared, variables".I see. So the idea is that what happens in reality is not that the entangled particles send instantaneous signals one to another but rather that the entangled particles always share a common (as well as hidden) variable property even when they are far apart, and it's through that variable that they instantly coordinate their reactions to measurement. So, the first particle to interact with a measuring device changes the value of that variable depending of the kind of measurement that took place, and the second particle has access to that changed value and hence can produce the appropriate result when it gets measured. Spooky actions at a distance are not necessary anymore.
I have two objections to this idea:
First, I don't see how it invalidates Mermin's argument. No actions at a distance take place but the new hypothesis still implies an asymmetry, namely that one of the two entangled particles first affects the value of the shared/hidden variable. So Mermin's argument still works, because two different observers would make contradictory conclusions about events that took place in reality based on their observation of the same experiment (namely one would conclude that it was particle A that modified the value of the shared/hidden variable, and the other that it was particle B that did it).
My second objection goes beyond Mermin's argument. Suppose that that argument is wrong, and does not in fact show the logical impossibility of actions at a distance or of non-local/hidden/shared variables. I would like to argue that even then to hypothesize the existence of non-local/hidden/shared variables is unreasonable - not because such a hypothesis violates our intuitions of how physical reality should be, but because it violates naturalism's own standards about reasonableness. Naturalists have long argued that it is not reasonable to hypothesize invisible and scientifically completely unnecessary things only in order to shore up one's ontological views. But the existence of non-local/hidden/shared variables is just that: completely invisible and not required by any scientific theory. Their existence is only required to maintain naturalism as a viable description of reality.
I think there is no need for such [non-causal ontological] theories, but I was trying to be thorough.Let's first agree on whether non-local physical realities are viable. If they are not then we can discuss the even more exotic non-causal physical realities.
How about "process physics"? This is a theory in which reality is a layer underneath the quantum world, with totally different properties, but which can create patterns that behave like the quantum particles we observe. I don't think Cahill has a fully workable theory yet, but the principle that underneath the quantum world is another layer of totally different stuff is a view held by many physicists.Well, I don't want to underrate such ideas, but I notice they don't work yet, i.e. they do not yet describe a physical reality that could account for the physical phenomena that science has discovered. Here we are discussing possible ontological theories, not theories that may one day become possible. In any case, if you are willing to posit an unseen layer of reality underneath quantum phenomena then it's easy to posit a naturalistic description of reality that is compatible with Bell's results, for example the idea that we all live within a computer simulation (which is very different from the brain in a vat idea). As I mentioned before (post 2068 or #67196), here I am arguing that Bell's results do not strictly speaking falsify absolutely all naturalistic worldviews, but falsify those naturalistic worldviews that posit the objective reality of the physical universe, or in other words scientific realism. According to scientific realism, electrons, apples, the bending of spacetime, and the natural evolution of the species are not just appearances but are integral parts of objective reality. That's the ontological understanding of the vast majority of naturalists, including of Dawkins. And it's that understanding that I think Bell's results falsify.
By any measure Bell's theorem is a powerful idea. What's more it does not depend on the truth of Quantum Mechanics but only on some observed facts and a little math. So even if Quantum Mechanics itself were to be proven wrong in the future (by discovering some phenomena that contradict it) what Bell's theorem implies about how reality is not would still be true.
559. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #67218 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 2, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Donald (post 2072 or #67204):
I don't want to interfere with Paul's argument about morality which I find very interesting, but I have a question about your post: How do you get a "should" from an "is" by running a simulation of actions and by predicting their implications? Say I find a wallet full of money and I predict that if I keep the money I will enjoy far more advantages than if I return it – and also that if I keep it the person that lost that money will suffer a lot of disadvantages. How does this predictive power by itself help me decide whether I ought to return the money or not?
By the way I would value your comments on my post 1992. I find that the implications of Bell's test results to be very far-reaching, and I wonder about your views.
560. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #67210 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 2, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Corylus (post 2011 or #65968):
Just look at the contortions, evasions, circumlocutions, and convolutions required to defend and support the idea of an ordering and interventionist supernatural supreme being from an unknown realm whose alleged "personal will" and perfect actions defy the common material reality of human beings on this earthly plane!Well I have never claimed that God is interventionist, in the sense that God first creates natural order we observe in the universe and then constantly interferes with it. I would agree with you that this makes little sense. On the other hand according to my worldview it's not like God is an absent landlord either: God sustains the whole of our experiential life and directly affects the qualitative parts of it. Further I object to you calling the reality of human beings "material". I think it's indisputable that the reality of human beings is experiential rather than material. Matter, material objects, and their properties are all things we find out about based on our experience.
supernatural (a definition): actions and logic-defying earthly events attributed to the actions and will, perfect or permissive, of an alleged all-powerful deity who allegedly exists, orders, commands, and occasionally "miraculously" intervenes in earthly matters from a far-away realm.I don't think that's a good definition, because according to it a fairy godmother should not be considered supernatural. The dictionary definition (Websters) is: "not subject to explanation according to natural laws" which is a fairly good definition but I think can be improved as "not subject to explanation according to mechanical laws".
561. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #67208 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 2, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Corylus (post 2005 or #65935):
I notice that Dianelos never uses [the concept of "physicalism" which is more subtle than simple "materialism"] - wonder why??Well, there is a range of naturalistic views, some of them ill-defined. For example the claim in Wikipedia's article on physicalism that "there are no kinds of things other than physical things" is most often associated with so-called "naive materialism" which is considered untenable (for example it has trouble accounting for the existence of numbers which certainly exist and which certainly are not physical things). In this thread, as I could not investigate each of the myriad non-religious views of reality I grouped them all together under their common feature which is the belief that reality is basically constituted of physical things and is governed by mechanical laws, or, alternatively, that everything that exists can be explained on physical/mechanical principles. (This general naturalistic view has no trouble accounting for the existence of numbers: numbers represent properties present when countable physical things exist.)
562. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #67203 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 2, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Steve99 (post 2004 or #65929):
Dianelos - imagine those future minds, and imagine how they might understand reality. It will be nothing like we do, I am sure.I understand what you are saying, but I agree only in part. I too expect future minds to reach a much deeper understanding of reality than we can. On the other hand I don't think that that understanding will be nothing like we do. For example future minds will agree either on some naturalistic or else on some religious (or if you prefer supernatural) understanding of reality. This is an either-or question so the truth must lie one way or the other.
I am troubled that you think you understand not just how the universe is structured, with this 'God person' at the centre, but you also feel that you are in any position to declare what is sensible and what is absurd about interpretations of physics. Such arrogance and hubris in one whose species is so young! The only honourable and honest approach is to say "We don't know".Again, I share your sentiment but only in part. First, I don't see Dawkins et al saying "We don't know whether God exist or not"; they are rather positive that God doesn't exist, aren't they? Secondly and more importantly, we do have some knowledge on which to base our beliefs about reality. And my point here has always been that (in my view) what we do know makes it today more reasonable to believe in some sort of theism than in some sort of naturalism.
563. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #67201 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 2, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Dr Benway (post 2001 or #65905):
Let's not confuse the tunneling effect in which material particles instantly (i.e. at infinite speeds) move to another point in space with the "spooky actions at a distance" that Einstein was speaking about. The former are phenomena predicted by Quantum Mechanics (according to which any material particle exists everywhere in space before its position is measured). Further these are phenomena observed in experiment, and have been put to practical use, for example in such marvelous measuring devices such as the Scanning Tunneling Microscope, which uses the tunneling of electrons to resolve down to the size of individual atoms. The latter are an ontological (i.e. metaphysical) hypothesis that is completely invisible and unnecessary to science and that is posited only to save naturalism's pretension of being a viable description of reality.
There is one more fundamental difference. Tunneling effects are probabilistic and the probability of a physical object much greater than an electron to instantly travel to a point in space a few centimeters away quickly approaches zero, and for all practical purposes becomes zero. Contrasted to that the spooky actions at a distance that naturalism requires are supposed to always happen when an entangled particle is observed, and are supposed to affect the other particle no matter how far it is. By the way the experiments that confirmed Bell's theorem have already used distances of more than 10 meters, and for naturalism to remain possible it wouldn't make a difference if the distance were 10 light years.
564. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #67196 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 2, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Dr Benway (post 1973, or #65604):
I'm trying to save you from pages of equivocation between metaphysical naturalism and methodological naturalism.If there is any equivocation between these concepts it stems from naturalists' unfortunate inclination to coin nice sounding concepts, such as "methodological naturalism", designed to give naturalism the aura of association with science. So the traditional, well understood and perfectly adequate concept of "scientific method" is often substituted with "methodological naturalism" in order to imply that science's methodology has something to do with or implies naturalism. The confusion is worsened by some naturalists' custom to speak of "naturalism" when they in fact mean the "scientific method".
I think it is best to keep our concepts in order:
There is the scientific method, i.e. the method that science uses to model phenomena. This method is independent of a scientist's ontological views, and indeed many theistic and non-theistic scientists have in the past and are today using it.
And there are several ontological views about what kind of reality gives rise to these phenomena. Many of these views can be categorized into two broad sets called theism and naturalism (by which I always mean metaphysical naturalism). Of course when discussing which ontological view is the most reasonable we must first pick the strongest theistic view and the strongest naturalistic view. In this discussion I have been comparing what I consider the strongest theistic view, namely idealistic theism with the naturalistic view of Dawkins at al of scientific realism, namely the view that reality is composed by the instantiation of the concepts used in scientific models (i.e. that the scientific concepts such as "electron" or "bending of spacetime" or "natural evolution" are not just abstractions that form part of a model of phenomena but are concrete parts of reality that give rise to the phenomena being modeled). It's fair to say that most atheologians, including most scientists, believe in scientific realism. I think it's also fair to say that most atheologian philosophers arguing against theism hold this naturalistic view of reality also. Scientific realism then covers virtually all naturalistic worldviews, and in this thread I have argued that idealistic theism is superior to it under any criterion I could think of, including the criterion of internal coherency.
At this juncture what bothers me is that scientific realism may not be the strongest naturalistic view of reality, and maybe it was unfair of me to compare idealistic theism with this particular version of naturalism, notwithstanding the fact that it is the view held by most naturalists. The view that we live within a computer simulation that runs in some naturalistic world beyond our access may well be a stronger naturalistic view. Or there may be other naturalistic views that are stronger still. Perhaps Steve is right when he makes the point in post 2004 that it may be too early for our species to gain knowledge about how reality is. On the other hand as long as nobody comes forward with a better idea than idealistic theism I stand by my claim that idealistic theism is the most reasonable description of reality.
What Dianelos fails to appreciate: he's no closer to establishing Jesus et al if he presumes idealism rather than materialism.I am afraid what you fail to appreciate is that I am not here to "establish Jesus et al". I am here to establish that it is more reasonable to believe that reality is constituted by conscious experience and change is caused by personal will rather than that reality is constituted by matter and change is caused by mechanical laws. (And of course I am talking about the same one objective reality we all agree is out there causing all our experiences including the phenomena that science studies.) Or, simpler, that it is more reasonable to believe that the overarching explanatory principle for the whole of our experience is a person (we call God) rather than physical laws. Only once we agree that reality is theistic does it make any sense to discuss whether Jesus of Nazareth was a human like any other or else enjoyed some special status. The latter question is especially relevant in the context of Christianity of course, but is not especially relevant in the context of ontology. The truth about reality is there for all to find out, whether they have ever heard of Jesus of Nazareth or not.
565. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #67184 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 2, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Steve99 (post 1971 or #65600):
No, because instinct is not necessary. I cannot conceive of a person (i.e. conscious subject) who misses either awareness, thought or will – these three are necessary. But I can conceive of a person without instinct.But all normal persons know of awareness, thought, and will. No conscious being, whether human or not, can exist without that knowledge.That is an entirely arbitrary division. I can just as easily make up my own division: awareness, thought, will and instinct.
What you have to stop doing is working backwards from what you want to believe (Jesus, the resurrection, the Trinity) and retro-fitting unfalsifiable models of reality on that.You may think that my idea that these three represent the high-level structure of any conscious being is ad-hoc and designed to fit Christian dogma, but in fact any information processing organism displays the same high-level structure, namely input, processing, and output. (Incidentally if one wants to be precise "structure" is not the correct word, because it implies that the various elements of the structure can stand by themselves. In the case of persons though, awareness, thought and will are interdependent and cannot exist individually. So the original word used "hypostasis", or "what stands underneath", is the most appropriate in this context.)
Strictly speaking theistic idealism is falsifiable, because it makes various falsifiable predictions about our future experiences, such as that we shall survive death and that we shall always experience an ethically challenging environment. But this point is moot anyway in the context of our discussion: I don't have to show that idealistic theism is falsifiable because I am not claiming that idealistic theism is true. Rather my claim is that it is more reasonable to believe that idealistic theism is true than to believe that naturalism is true. And that latter claim, the claim I have been making in this thread since post 333, is eminently falsifiable: suffice to show under which reasonable criteria naturalism works better than idealistic theism.
You need to take a deeper look at quantum mechanics. You have a profound misunderstanding. The arguments about the Bell Inequality are not founded on any physical forms. They are about the nature of reality of *any* form. If you assume any reality, then that is what our observations of QM are probing.Oh I agree. The experimentally confirmed Bell test results are observational facts, and reality, whichever form it has, must be compatible with these facts. The problem for naturalism is that these results are incompatible with the premise that material objects are objectively real, and that's a very big problem for virtually all naturalistic views about reality. The same implication is not a problem for idealism, because according to idealism material objects and the laws they follow are not supposed to be objectively real in the first place, but are understood as stable patterns present in our experience of physical phenomena.
You may ask: If it's true that these observations falsify the view that material objects are real then why hasn't that momentous insight become common knowledge? Well I suppose there are many reasons: The experimental results are quite recent. Some diehards insist that the experimental results are not conclusive, or that spooky actions at a distance do exist. Most scientists today are specialists and do not really care about ontology – after all you don't get a lot of research money for doing what is properly called metaphysics. Most theist philosophers, who one might think would use these results, are not idealists but follow orthodox dogma according to which physical reality does exist. Which means that both naturalists and most theists who take part in the public discourse have reason to be unhappy with these experimental results and have no motivation to make a big deal of them.
Also, your dislike of interpretations is your personal problem, and not a problem with QM.I think all interpretations of QM that posit the existence of an objectively real physical world are wrong, so it's not really a case of liking or disliking. What's more, I like the fact that there is a growing number of mutually contradictory descriptions of physical reality that naturalists propose, because this state of affairs makes it easier for people to understand how problematic naturalism is. And I like the fact that these descriptions of reality strain credulity. (For example surely you don't find it very credible that each time you switch on a light you cause the entire universe is split into a huge number of copies, do you? Or that you will live for ever in some these physical universes?)
Unlike your worldview, QM has actual practical use.QM has lots of practical use of course, and is moreover the very linchpin of all physics, which makes it all the more remarkable that it is not compatible with naturalism and its view that the physical universe is real – unless you introduce really ad-hoc and magical mechanisms of "spooky actions at a distance". Today some sugarcoat this implication by saying that Bell's test results only show that reality is non-local, but that's exactly the same as saying that invisible and scientifically superfluous spooky actions at a distance do exist.
As for my worldview it does have practical uses as I have often argued here, especially in comparison to naturalism. For example it eliminates the need for physicists to worry about all the paradoxes of QM or to try to device descriptions of the physical reality that are compatible with quantum phenomena. It is ethically empowering. It is experientially fulfilling. It is intellectually satisfying. It's true that you can't use idealistic theism to build a better airplane, but then you can't use naturalism to build a better airplane either.
So, back to my question: Either you can have randomness, or you can have total determinism, with no free will. Which is it?I am sorry, I am not sure I understand what you mean by this question. What we know is that quantum phenomena are at face value not deterministic. So, reasonably enough, most interpretations of QM (i.e. naturalistic descriptions of reality that are compatible with QM phenomena) are not deterministic too, but there are at least two that are. (As I have argued before even if reality is not deterministic and produces non-deterministic phenomena one can always defend the claim that it is all deterministic.) In any case, as they are several mutually contradictory interpretations, a naturalist must choose one or the other, and therefore must decide whether to pick a non-deterministic or a deterministic description of reality. But I, not being a naturalist, don't have to pick one naturalistic description of reality of course, so, again, I am not sure what you are asking me. And, frankly, I don't envy naturalists who must choose one or the other description of physical reality proposed by those who device the various QM interpretations because I don't know based on what grounds a naturalist is to make that choice. I suppose most natuarlists are blissfully unaware of the problem, but the problem is there: there are many wildly different descriptions of reality that naturalists have proposed.
Ah, but maybe you are asking whether reality is deterministic or not according to my worldview of idealistic theism. If so, the answer should be obvious: it's not. According to idealistic theism all change is ultimately caused by personal will and personal will is not deterministic.
566. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #65961 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 27, 2007 at 3:19 pm
I am off to a small Greek island to spend a few days relaxing :-) I don't think I will have the access or the disposition to read Internet there, so take care.
P.S. And should you see Donald please tell him that I am expecting his comments on my post 1992.
567. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #65956 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 27, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Lauregon (post 2002, or #65913):
We use names in many other contexts and should follow the same spelling rules in all. The fact that we or many people do not agree about the properties or even the existence of what is referred by a name is not good reason for writing this name in lower case. Children may believe that Santa Claus exists but disagree about whether he brings presents to all children or only to good children and you and I may believe that Santa Claus doesn't even exist – but we all write Santa Claus's name in upper case, don't we? Similarly the fact that Jews, Christians and Muslims disagree about many of God's properties and that atheologians and Buddhists believe that God does not even exist is not sufficient reason to write God's name in lower case. Now, there are some contexts where I think it's reasonable to write god or gods in lower case, namely when one is not speaking about God but rather about "god concepts" or about "divinities", for example when saying something like: "people throughout history have believed in the existence of many different gods"(And, incidentally, "Bible" is a name and should be written in upper-case, as is "God" when used in the context of the three great monotheistic religions.) - DianelosThis is a confusion that really doesn't have to occur. As has been mentioned before, when you use the term "God," the term you've helpfully pointed out must be capitalized when it refers to the "God" of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, quite naturally you invite direct associations to the "God" of Jews, Christians and Muslims, all of which derive from the Bible.
Either you are talking about the capricious, bloodthirsty, narcissistic, interventionist, monotheistic "God" described in the Bible, or you're not. If you're not, why don't you avoid the very natural confusion and invent another word for the unique, not-Biblical, supernatural deity you believe exists? Why not give it its own name and make clear which deity you're talking about?You have a point there, and I have thought about this. One reason I decided to stick with "God" is that I don't see why I should let the ugly/stupid bits in the Bible affect my use of the perfectly appropriate name I myself use when thinking. And, secondly, the god concept described in some parts of the Bible and in much of Christian tradition is very close to the my own. So it would be hypocritical for me to use a different name. I am really talking about God, even though I disagree not only with the description of God in much of the Old Testament but also with some basic tenets of Christian orthodoxy, including the dogma of the fall and of atonement, the dogma of hell, and the belief in miracles.
568. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #65953 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 27, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Dr Benway (post 2001 or #65905):
materialism limits reality to matter and energy; naturalism leaves the door open for other factors yet to be detected or defined, but rejects alleged supernatural realities.I think you are basically right, but let's be practical here: Except for some special cases naturalism and materialism is the same thing. First note that all materialists are also naturalists because matter is by definition not supernatural. The contrary is not necessarily true: one can be a naturalist without being a materialist, because, as you say, a naturalist is (at least in theory) open to the idea of other things beyond matter existing, as long as these are not considered to be supernatural. (Chalmers, for example, might argue that he remains a naturalist even though he posits that non-material consciousness is a fundamental principle of reality at par with matter.) The problem with naturalism's definition is of course that nobody is really defining what "supernatural" means. After reading the ideas of many naturalists I think the common denominator is that reality (whether only material or material + other factors) is ultimately governed by mechanical laws, or, conversely, that the supernatural is any power that affects reality that does not obey mechanical laws. (By "mechanical laws" I mean the kind of laws that science discovers in its study of physical phenomena, namely laws that can be modeled by a mathematical formula.) Theism then is clearly a supernatural understanding of reality because it posits that the fundamental law that governs all things is not mechanical but personal will (which entails freedom and creativity).
But this all amounts to hair splitting. When I speak of naturalism I mean the kind of naturalism that virtually all naturalists believe in, namely that objective reality consists of the physical universe we observe around us (or maybe an agglomeration of physical universes beyond ours too) that contains matter and energy the behavior of which is governed by the mechanical laws that science discovers. There may be stronger versions of naturalism than that, but if so I wish to know which.
569. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #65952 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 27, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Steve99 (post 2000 or #65891):
Quantum mechanics DOES NOT contradict a naturalistic understanding of reality.But it does. As I tried to explain in post 1999 it turns out that if photons had objective existence then we should observe the same color flashing with probability 1/3, but Quantum Mechanics predicts (and experiment confirms) a probability of 1/4.
If you are going to use QM to (falsely) dismiss naturalism because it says there is no objective reality, then you are claiming.... that there is no objective reality of any kind.No. QM and experiment only falsify a particular class of objective realities, namely those that contain material particles following mechanical laws. Theistic idealism does not posit any such kind of reality and therefore is not contradicted by QM. So, to be precise, QM does not falsify all naturalistic realities, but does certainly falsify those naturalistic realities according to which the objects that science studies are objectively real – which is probably the belief of more than 99% of naturalists – certainly the belief of Dawkins. What kind of naturalistic realities may survive the QM conundrum? Well, the ontological claim that we all exist within a computer simulation would survive, because in such a reality the objects that science studies are not objective but only simulated by the computer.
(post 2004, or #65929):
My definition of naturalism is that there is no magic, and that there is some objective reality.We all agree that there is an objective reality (only solipsists disagree with that); the question is what kind of objective reality. Naturalism represents a particular view of how objective reality is. You say that reality has no magic in it, but then I wonder what you mean by "magic". After all, some people might call very advanced technology "magic", and some others might call quantum phenomena "magic", and so on. You must have something else in mind. The standard definition of naturalism is that everything goes except the supernatural, but then nobody defines "supernatural".
570. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #65881 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 27, 2007 at 8:39 am
Recently I have argued about the implications that Bell's inequality has on our understanding of reality. Here I would like to explain what Bell's inequality is, based on several articles of David Mermin's "Boojums all the Way Through". The longest article about Bell in this book is a reprint of the first article to appear in Encyclopedia Britannica's 1988 "The Great Ideas Today" which one can find in any library. (If the reader finds something bellow difficult to understand, or maybe something that is wrong, please let me know.)
The story begins with the birth of quantum mechanics and the so-called double slit experiment. Here a photon is shot against a screen that has two narrow slits in it. The experimental results are as follows: When a photon detector is placed directly behind one or the other slit it detects the passage of an photon in 50% of the cases. So it seems that photons behave like small ping-pong balls that sometimes pass through one and sometimes through the other slit. But if a photon detector is placed at the wall far behind the screen then it detects a photon at a probability that only makes sense if one assumes that a photon is not like a ping-pong ball but rather like a wave that passes through both slits at once. Therefore the mathematical model that physicists developed to capture these phenomena (the so-called Schroedinger equation) describes the photon not as an objective thing in a concrete state but as something that exists everywhere in space as superposition of possible states, and predicts the probability where a single photon will be detected depending on the position (and time) in which one makes an observation say by using a photon detector (e.g. if you put the photon detector behind one of the slots the probability is 0.5, if you put it in this position here on the wall the probability is (say) 0.07, if it's there the probability might fall close to zero, and so on. Further that equation governs not only the behavior of photons but of all material particles and systems, be they electrons, bullets, or galaxies. It turns out that for some 80 years now the correctness of the Schroendinger equation has been confirmed to an incredible precision in countless experiments, and indeed most of our technological gadgets, from digital watches to airplanes, make use and depend on the fundamental soundness of that equation. So there is really lots of evidence that quantum mechanics is true.
So far so good. Now what bugged Einstein (himself a contributor to the birth of quantum mechanics) was the ontological claim that the founders of Quantum Mechanics expounded in the sense that material systems did not have some objective existence until they were observed. Einstein would have nothing of that. Such a view might not contradict the phenomena that Quantum Mechanics studies and models so well, but reality could not be like that. Einstein was a "scientific realist", i.e. somebody who believed that science describes not only phenomena but also the objective reality that gives rise to these phenomena, so for him the idea that material particles had not concrete properties (such as position, speed, etc) before a conscious being observed them was anathema, because that idea is tantamount to the idea that these particles, from which all material things are built, are not objectively real but have a kind of existence that depends on us observing them. He was certain that material particles and systems in general are really there having concrete positions and speeds whether people were observing them or not. To him, the ontological claim by the founders of Quantum Mechanics could only mean that QM, even though correct in its predictions, must be an incomplete theory of matter, leaving out some important insights about what is really happening. To argue his case he proposed a thought experiment (known as the EPR paradox, for "Einstein Podolsky and Rosen") which goes like this:
There are quantum processes that produce a pair of electrons that are shot in different directions, say to the left and to the right. According to QM the states of these electrons are "entangled" which is a fancy way of saying that if a measuring device is placed to the left to measure some property of the left electron and an identical device is placed to the right to measure the same property of the right electron then both devices will measure the same property. The property Einstein proposed should be measured was the orientation of the electron's "spin". What exactly the electron's spin is is irrelevant here; suffice to say that when its orientation is measured in an experimental configuration proposed it can give two possible results, let's call them, say, "up" and "down". So QM predicted and experiment verified that the two measuring devices would always detect the same spin orientation, say both would detect an "up". So far so good. Now here is Einstein's thought experiment: Suppose QM is a complete theory that describes everything about material particles. According to QM the left electron just before hitting the measuring device is on a superposed state of "up" and "down" spin, and only when its spin orientation is measured a particular spin orientation "materializes": "up" or "down" each with 0.5 probability. Let's call the left and right measuring devices A and B respectively, and let's assume that A detects an "up" spin orientation. Now consider what happens at B when at the same time (A and B are equidistant to the source of the electrons) the right electron enters B while being in a superposition state of "up" and "down". We know that only one of these spins orientations will be materialized and that what we shall observe B measure is an "up" reading (because it must be the same measurement we got at A). But how does B "know" that it must produce an "up" reading? After all B has no way of knowing what A is doing, and the electron it received is in a superposition of both "up" and "down" orientations. So the only way for B to display the correct result that QM predicts is for A to secretly and instantaneously "act" on B telling it to produce an "up" measurement. But such "spooky actions at a distance" cannot possibly exist. As Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen put in the 1935 paper where they describe their thought experiment "No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this." So the only reasonable conception of reality is one where electrons, contrary to the ontological claims of the founders of QM, do have concrete properties even while they are not being observed. And if QM did not describe these properties it follows that QM is an incomplete theory.
Now, for several decades nothing much changed concerning this ontological (and therefore philosophical) disagreement between Einstein and the founders of QM. Nobody was able to find a more complete theory that Einstein thought must exist. On the other hand nobody could find the slightest flaw with QM itself. On the contrary QM continued to grow in modeling power, and in the form of Quantum Electrodynamics now exactly describes all phenomena we know of except for gravity and some nuclear phenomena. But then, in 1964, John S. Bell suggested an experiment that could actually be performed to falsify Einstein's beliefs about reality. Finally in 1982 Alain Aspect in Paris did perform the experiment described by Bell and, lo and behold, it did falsify Einstein's ontological beliefs about reality. Since then other researchers have repeated the experiment and have confirmed the results. Bellow, following the methodology of Mermin's article, I will first describe the experiment as we would observe it and explain why its implications for our understanding of reality are so far-reaching. Only after that will I describe how the experiment is set-up.
So consider an experiment that consists of a source that shoots two particles in opposite directions towards measuring devices A and B. The devices measure a particular property of the particle they receive and flash a Green light (G) every time they detect that property and a Red light (R) every time they don't. Further, each measuring device has a switch that can be placed in one of three different positions (1, 2, or 3) and which affects the measuring process. We run the same experiment many times. In each run we shoot a pair of particles from the source towards A and B, place the switches of A and B at some random position, and observe and write down the color that these devices flash. So, suppose in the first run of the experiment the switch at A was placed in the "2" position and of B in the "1" position, and that A flashed the Red light and that B flashed the Green light. We write down this result as "21RG" representing the position of the switches and the experimental results. We do a great number of runs and observe that, exactly as Quantum Mechanics predicts, we get the following patterns:
1) When the switches at A and B are set in the same position both detectors always flash the same color. (So we only get "11RR" or "11GG" or "22RR", or "22GG", or "33RR" or "33GG" but never, say, "22GR".)
2) In the remaining cases, i.e. when the switches at A and B are set differently, both detectors flash the same color only a quarter of the time. (So we get RR and GG occurring with equal frequency in 25% of the runs, and RG and GR occurring with equal frequency in the remaining 75% of the runs).
That's all there is to it. These experimental results look innocuous enough but it turns out that the kind of objective reality that could produce them cannot be physical unless one is prepared to entertain the idea of a physical reality full of magical effects. (An additional argument by Mermin shows that the later fig leaf is not possible anyway.) How can the above results be so far-reaching? Here is how:
Pattern 1 above demonstrates that there is a correlation between then results of A and B. As A and B are not in any way connected but only individually perform some measurement on the particle they receive, this correlation must be the result of some kind of objective property that the particles has (that's the basic premise of both scientific realism and naturalism: that matter is objectively real and has concrete properties no matter whether somebody is looking or not). So each particle must contain some kind of property that serves as an instruction which tells the measuring device which color to flash when its switch is set at a particular position. For example, a particle may carry the instruction set "RGG" meaning that the measuring device must flash Red if its switch position is set at "1", Green if its switch is set at "2" and Green if its switch is set at "3". It's easy to see that if the two particles generated at the source in an entangled state carry the same instruction set then the pattern 1) works nicely. So, in the case of particles that have the "RGG" property, if the two switches are at the same position they will always flash the same color; for example if they are at position "2" or "3" both A and B will flash Green, but if both switches are set at position "1" then both A and B will flash Red. But if the particles generated at the source were of the "GRG" kind, then both A and B would flash red if their switches were at the "2" position. And so on. In short the idea that particles carry concrete properties has no trouble accounting for the pattern 1) we observe. So far so good.
Now let's consider what happens in the remaining cases where the switches of A and B are set at different positions. They still receive particles with instructions of what color they should flash depending on their individual switch positions, and indeed that color can well be different. For example if a pair of "RGG" particles are shot and the A switch is set at "1" and the B switch is set at "2" then we will get A to flash Red and B to flash Green, i.e. we will get a "12RG" result. Now there are only 6 combinations of different switches that are possible, namely 12, 13, 21, 23, 31, 32. Let's write them down and note the colors that A and B would flash in the case the particles generated are of the "RGG" kind: 12RG, 13RG, 21GR, 23GG, 31GR, 32GG (the reader should be able to compute this latter sequence by hand). So if the particle generated at the source is of the "RGR" kind then we get the same color to flash in 2 out of the 6 cases, i.e. the probability of the same color flashing is 1/3. If we repeat the same calculation with all possible types of particle (they are only 8 such cases, namely RRR, RRG, RGR, RGG, GRR, GRG, GGR, GGG) we will find that in each case we would get the same color to flash in 1/3 of the runs. But what Quantum Mechanics predicts and the experiment confirms is that in fact the same color flashes only in 1/4 of the runs. So, the assumption that the two particles that are produced at the source have objective properties contradicts the experimental result and is therefore wrong. If reality were so that these particles had objective properties then we would have gotten a 1/3 probability of A and B flashing the same color, but the experimental result is 1/4. But the objective existence of matter is a fundamental premise of both scientific realism and naturalism, and hence they are both falsified by the experimental results.
One way out of this conundrum is for the naturalist to claim, contrary to what Einstein considered reasonable, that spooky actions as a distance do exist. So, for example when A having its switch at the "1" position receives an RGG particle (and therefore flashes Red) it sends at infinite speed a secret message to B telling it: "look, if your switch is at positions 2 or 3 be careful to flash Red only with 1/4 probability". (One could argue that as A and B are exactly equidistant to the source not even actions at infinite speeds would make it possible for A and B to coordinate their behavior, but in reality exact equidistance does not exist, so we shall assume that A is slightly closer to the source than B and therefore is the first to receive the particle and read its properties and can therefore infer how B should behave.)
Now, as I have explained before, the only reason to hypothesize the existence of such magical effects is to save naturalism's pretensions of being a valid description of reality. But, as Mermin notes, even if A is a little closer to the source a naturalist observer walking towards B will see B flash before A does, and will therefore insist that it was B that sent the secret signal to A in order for them to coordinate their flashing, and not the other way around as another naturalist observer insists. The fact then that two naturalists based on the same logic and the same experimental evidence make contradictory claims about reality implies that the premise both used, namely that actions at infinite speeds exist, must be wrong. So, it seems, not even spooky actions at a distance can save naturalism.
Now it's not relevant to know any