A Common Form of Erroneous Thinking about the Universe

post by rohern · 2011-02-26T09:42:42.697Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 4 comments

         This essay may be something of a non sequitur compared to usual LW topics.  I wrote it some time ago and have long been sitting on it, waiting to discover a place to share it.  I have just spent some time stripping it down to bones for this forum.  I wrote it because I kept hearing while listening to or reading debates about religion, often involving Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens (the Mighty Hitch), objections from religious types that contained some form of the argument:        

         “Some aspect of the universe or of an object present in the universe exhibits such a high level of complexity that it can be concluded that it is not a natural product of the universe.  It indicates the existence of X [usually God].”

         I think that my response to this argument is relevant to this community because scientists and philosophers also make judgments about the complexity and the orderedness of the universe, indeed so have I, and I think that my objections to the above – patently silly – argument can be generalized to critique the statements of these latter two groups as well.  To it, then: 

         It is difficult to find sympathy for any opinion about the qualities of the universe predicated on the notion that a particular quality is beyond the capabilities of nature to produce unaided.  Such opinions can be as extreme as those of the religious who find the complexities of life as grounds for inferring the existence of a Creator or a mild as the casual observation that a natural occurrence is unusually or unexpectedly beautiful or orderly.  I recently found myself holding an opinion of the latter type concerning the human brain and the immense chemical and electrical complexities that effect its qualities.  There is some bizarre intuition that suggests the question, “How can nature alone do something so great/complex/impressive?”  I intend to here demonstrate that this intuition is specious and silly, and should be avoided by those who would make rational judgments.

         All of our opinions about what is naturally possible must be based, by definition, on observations of nature.  Ultimately, some observation of nature grounds your reasoning about nature.  I take it that a moment of thought will confirm this in the reader.  Nature, by plain logic, cannot defy these opinions except when these opinions are themselves spurious.  To formalize: if all of your judgments about X come from observations of X, X cannot have properties that contradict these judgments unless these judgments are incorrect themselves.

         You may argue that our opinions of nature need not be based on observations of nature and that we can come to judgments about a thing without reference to that thing.  You and I hold two contradictory opinions about knowledge and how to come to it, at least as concerns objects in nature and nature itself.  I will not spend time arguing for a materialist and scientific approach in this essay, as others have done it better and have works readily available. 

The strangeness of claims that defy the dependence of judgment on observation is obvious when dealing with claims about the unnaturalness of objects:       

         “Such a thing is unnatural.”

         “How do you know?”

         “By observing nature.”

         “But the unnatural thing is as much a part of nature as the things you think are natural.”

         “Yes.  Wait, what?”

         The same sort of objection applies to claims that nature is too “well-tuned” to be strictly natural.  Again, from where have you derived your opinion of what is the natural level of “tunedness”?  If you think that nature seems well-tuned, then it must be the case that one of the qualities of nature is its well-tunedness in this particular case.  

       There is, I think, in judgments of the above form, an implicit comparison taking place, and it is from this unacknowledged comparison that the error arises.  When you say that nature is surprisingly or especially one way, to what are you comparing it?  What is this thing that has given you your ideas about what is unsurprising or normal in nature if it is not nature itself.  The inability to answer this question reveals the problem.

         This world is the realm within which we have formed all of our opinions about greatness, order, impressiveness, etc.  How then can a piece of the world defy these opinions except if the opinions are based on incomplete data or on bad reasoning or lousy observations.  Obviously these opinions of the world are wrong, not the world.  The natural world cannot fail to live-up to its own nature.

         

 

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