Is it not perverse to cling to a redundant deity for whom there is not the slightest evidence?

If the science was complete enough to entirely account for not only the evolution of man and other species from inorganic matter but also the origin and nature of the universe in every last detail, (and we are getting close), - then  would you still insist there must be a divine entity somehow involved?

If so then you could be right. But it seems a little sad and forlorn to cleave to a belief apparently on the sole ground of affection for the old religious philosophers, or that it cannot be positively disproven. It is hard to see how that differs from belief in pure magic.

Here we are witnessing the stripping away by modern science, one by one of all the great Godly feats that were once so otherwise unexplainable. Now the only clearly inexplicable thing left is God. And he is conveniently awarded immunity from the laws of science and rationality. Why?

Is it to delay the time when we must finally face reality?

As shown at http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/26201, I have encountered Signorelli’s views on evolutionary biology before. Last time he misunderstood much of it. Of the many bases on which I object to his latest piece, the first is a return to this issue. It astonishes me how sure he can be of what Darwinism is by quoting one Darwinist. It is especially concerning he chose Ruse, a writer whose comments on the evolution–creation controversy have been so variable it is unclear at times even whose side he’s on. I for one am a Darwinist (if Signorelli insists on naming the modern synthesis for its earliest contributor) who does not include in the term any components beyond the scientific aspects Signorelli is good enough not to find objectionable in his latest piece (in the aforementioned last one of his I read, he was utterly unconvinced of it). Signorelli proves equally confident of summarising theology with one person. The truth which afflicts all discussions of what theology does or doesn’t say is how much it varies between individuals. (Thanks to apophatic theology, even “God exists” being a true statement is not something on which a thorough consensus may be found.) While Aquinas shows us how early it was seen a literal reading of Genesis is wrong, neither he nor any other theologian has ever given a satisfactory reason for thinking its claims were not intended as literal. But even if evolution by being true would be less devastating for Christianity than creationists fear, it must be understood the primary reason creationism gets such detailed refutation at scientists’ hands is not an effort to expunge religion, but a response to the obstacle very high levels of creationism in certain nations represents to good science education. Indeed, I’m convinced in his quotation of Kitcher the latter wished to summarise creationists’ views of evolution’s implications rather than his own.

Quite aside from whether Signorelli is right to think what is typical for a design argument is how it looks with Aquinas, rather than Paley, as its author, he exaggerates the difference between them due to his misunderstanding the language of one Bible verse (not that a single verse can utterly decide the One True way to do Christian theology anyway, given how self–contradictory the Bible proves). Romans 1:20 speaks of inferring details of invisible “things of Him” from analysis of what is “clearly seen” in “things that are made” (i.e. Creation or, as it would be called if not presupposing a deity, the universe). This is very different from what Signorelli imagines to be the basis of the design argument, namely the signs of design themselves being invisible. (It never seems to occur to him no such argument could ever even be formulated, let alone work, as by definition examples could not be brought up.) When we detect the wind, despite the invisibility of air and hence wind too, by its visible effects, it is through empirical data as visible as if the wind itself were too that we make an argument for the wind’s presence. All design arguments ask us to consider some synthetic fact of nature we must know for the argument’s purpose, and which we indeed know through its observability. Misunderstanding “things of Him” as referring to the creations themselves rather than God’s attributes is Signorelli’s entire basis for classifying Paley as a straw man of teleology. (It is worth noting it is only because theology, the philosophy of religion etc. continue to publish Paley as the archetypal teleological argument anyone would think of it as such, Dawkins or otherwise, so we can hardly claim the theologians themselves don’t care for him, and in more than an historical context; as interesting a hypothesis as is phlogiston, most modern chemistry books feel it unworthy of inclusion due to its invalidity.)

Signorelli’s least persuasive effort to characterise the mainstream presentation of teleological arguments is found in his discussion of efficient and final causes. While using “last” and “teleological” as if they were synonyms with the slippery word “final” has long been a basis of arguments for a deity by the fallacy of linguistic ambiguity, it so functions in cosmological rather than teleological arguments, as the former concern why anything exists but teleological arguments focus instead on the existence of those structures requiring the most improbable (in an information–theoretic sense) specification. It is not surprising any more technical term than “argument from design” is absent from Signorelli’s analysis; the difference would then be glaring. The difference between rocks and leopards is quite a different sort of argument can be made for why a leopard mandates postulating a causative intelligence: while both may persuade someone to ask “but why?” until “God did it” is conceded (which seems to be the one answer which shuts up those using the cosmological argument), in the case of the leopard the question is, “how do physical laws permit so much information to form locally without intelligent interference”? An answer is of course in the offing from natural selection. Indeed, we could perhaps best summarise the effect its discovery has on the case for God as making teleological arguments as pathetic as cosmological ones. It is thus no shock Signorelli thinks evolution an irrelevance, if he doesn’t realise how the two arguments differ.

Signorelli is not satisfied, however, only with claiming it just so happens the scientific theory of evolution does not strengthen the refutation of the case for God. During his discussion of final and efficient causes, he claims science cannot investigate the former, because... well, it just can’t. His verbosity excludes this being the whole answer. While he may sound as if he gives a reason, it amounts simply to a claim, not substantiated with any explanation of the meanings of any terms, of what are the limits in principle of science. Critics of science avoid like the plague ever explaining exactly what science is in enough detail both to render such claims clearly true by definition and to offer a description of science liable to be persuasive to anyone who understands it. What would it take for science to provide evidence for the design by God of a leopard? A start would be the tetragrammaton encoded in ASCII in its DNA. It is a purely synthetic matter, not an analytic one, that no evidence whatsoever has ever supported the claims religions make. Does God answer prayers? Did Biblical historical events happen? Does Christian belief drastically improve humans’ behaviour? Science has answered all these questions, with empirical evidence, but in the negative. This is a factually true statement, not a logically necessarily true (or false) one.

Just as Signorelli’s alleged limits on evolutionary biology extend in his mind to science also, his poor understanding of how science works occurs in conjunction with a misunderstanding of how evolution works. In terms of what it’s all about (as opposed to emergent consequences which prove variable), natural selection neither leads to nor intends the survival of organisms; it unintentionally leads to the relative frequency of genes compared with their allelomorphic forms changing (so long as their populations are extant) for reasons born of their differential success in self–replication. This is a mechanism governed by statistics, in which even in the absence of selective pressure genetic lineages are forced to extinction merely by the fixation of genetic drift; the rate at which all but one allelomorphic forms of a locus become extinct in the absence of natural selection is equal to its non–zero mutation rate. So it can’t even be said evolution, which includes both natural selection and genetic drift, does not necessarily require large–scale extinctions of various populations of identical copies of genetic information.

This path from misunderstanding scientific methods to misunderstanding evolution’s nature comes full circle when he also misunderstands in general the lawful properties of reality. We see Signorelli convinced of targeting, and an intention behind it, wherever he sees one thing happening in another’s stead, and wherever one object’s path takes it successively closer to another. Needless to say, there is more reason why this cannot work as an argument for the existence of an intelligence than its open–endedness making the argument a priori valid (if it is to be valid at all), even though no statement of the form “X exists” can ever be a tautology, as nothing existing isn’t self–contradictory. There is the additional problem there is a very big difference between teleology and teleonomy, the designed and the designoid. It is only from vague anthropomorphisms etched into humanity by its evolutionary history we can even feel as innately persuasive the arguments from analogy needed to give teleonomy and “designoid” examples with which to work, let alone to make sense of what similarities to genuine design are really making us feel this way. And there is a great irony in Signorelli accusing biologists of “a cheap gimmick” when they carefully distinguish between teleological and teleonomic terminology by giving the latter scare quotes indicative of a shorthand. Signorelli clearly does not understand that, for example, “The spleen is “designed” for recycling erthrocytic iron” is a compact statement of “Genotypic differences which statistically correlate with differences in the recycling of erthrocytic iron occurring in spleens of organisms whose embryological development is subject to the proteinomic influence of said genotypic differences are such as to thereby correlate also with the mean number of duplicates of said genetic sequences which the next generation of organisms of that deme contain due to said mean duplication numbers correlating also with the differences in erythrocytic iron recycling phenotypes, so that those genotypic differences in this regard which replicate the most are increasingly common relative to the others in subsequent generations, provided their relative order of replicative success is maintained, as indeed it was over the history of the lineage of organisms in which the resultant increase in mean incidence of erythrocytic iron recycling in spleens occurred, the maintenance of said differences in replicative success persisting long enough to entirely cause the resultant increase in mean incidence of erythrocytic iron recycling in spleens up to the present day case”. He also does not understand how radically this differs from “Spleens recycle erythrocytic iron because a designer wished this were so”, or why there is value in an abbreviation as effective as is the use of scare quotes. (By my count, it cuts the word count needed to make a simple statement about spleens from 164 to 8.) Needless to see, similarly verbose better statements exist for why all so–called “directed” phenomena exist in nature. For example, it can be shown the “principle of least action” in classical mechanics, in which nature takes the path which minimises a particular quantity, need not be understood in terms of a selection at all, as it is a statement logically equivalent to a simple differential equation deducible from Newton’s second law. As every physicist knows, it is no exaggeration to say this example and a few mathematical generalisations and corollaries of it account for more or less every single known seeming example of “directed” effects in the entire universe.

Signorelli continues his critique of evolution–based objections to theological propositions by insisting on a great difference between its metaphysical matters and those which science can investigate. This is just another example of his claiming limits for science he makes literally no effort to back up. All this is born of taking terms such as “science”, “metaphysics”, “final and efficient causes” and so on, and keeping them vaguely defined enough it isn’t clear why he should be either right or wrong on purely definitional grounds in claiming, “This stuff isn’t the sort of stuff science deals with, because it’s type A while science deals with type B, and they’re mutually exclusive – they just are.” And however much harm can be done with this technique by using philosophical technical terms such as all quoted ones above bar science, it is often done by lay defenders of religion simply by referring to the more familiar “natural” and “supernatural”, and Signorelli makes use of this trick too in his discussion of superfluity of explanations. In this case there’s an additional problem. He takes as axiomatic assumptions – so–called “implicit definitions”, very different from the “explicit definitions” they need to be for him to need no more than a semantic basis for them (not that he even attempts that) – that all the causes science, history and so on mention  are “natural”, divine phenomena may be “supernatural”, and the latter can never be analysed by recourse to the former. (Notice we could create as tall a hierarchy as we wish in which lower levels could allegedly not refute a claim about higher ones; why stop at two?) But it’s worse than that; he practises a double standard regarding how much the two differ, in that he claims both the possibility of divinity (which he must concede is supernatural, simply by being supernatural in part) acting through natural rather than supernatural causes – see his Washington discussion – and natural causes being so limited an understanding of them can’t be revealing of divine matters. It should be clear why this is an effort to have it both ways; does God interface with the empirical realm or not?

And these are just his original errors in his analysis of what science is doing with theology when it provides alternative explanations. His unoriginal errors are also worthy of mention. Signorelli observes that, if the complete explanation of something were partly supernatural, and if the natural and supernatural are mutually exclusive, a natural explanation wouldn’t be correct and the supernatural component would still be true. It is ironic he accuses the views he tries to rebut with this point the ones relying on circularity. To see why he misses the point of those explanations he dubs naturalistic (I don’t think a natural–supernatural distinction is well–defined), we need only observe we have no need to imagine a supernatural component if the natural is understood well enough for its explanation to be adequate, where by adequate we mean the observed empirical facts are all explicable in the sense of being deducible from premises by virtue of which they could have been predicted and often are. It is precisely the success we have in predicting, and not merely explaining with a narrative, what happens in the world which shows we clearly have no reason to think there is anything to what is going on besides the premises from which the predictions are drawn. Ideas like “Ockham’s razor”, “the principle of parsimony” and “Russell’s teapot” come to mind, & they demand Signorelli take a crasher course on them.

Just as he showed a paltry command of the difference between cosmological and teleological arguments for God, he also clearly does not appreciate the difference between pre– and post–evolution demands of theodicies. It is one thing to claim some aspect or another of what we humans get up to, or what is good for us in the long run, is responsible for all suffering and malfeasance visited upon us and all our biological contemporaries, as was the entire basis of all formulations given for responses to the pre–evolution challenge. What evolutionary facts bring to the situation is the question of our biological predecessors and, perhaps, successors, a matter never previously empirically demonstrated to exist. We now know the vision of the ammonites, who lived for at least 335 million years in the world’s oceans, was born of natural selection in cases where suboptimal visual acuity caused death and suffering on a scale our millennia–old civilisation can scarcely begin to contemplate. And this example is of what it took to achieve just one adaptation in just one lineage which went extinct without us being in the picture. It is no exaggeration to say that literally no theodicy formulated in the aforesaid way can ever even begin to address these facts, or any similar to them in a likely future after humans are extinct. And it is also no exaggeration to say literally no other type of theodicy has ever been offered. And so it is no exaggeration to say literally every theodicy ever given in the entire history of theology and the philosophy of religion is rendered null and void by evolutionary facts.

An entirely separate issue from any topic Signorelli set out to consider in his piece was the ability of evolutionary biology to properly discuss the mind. What has this to do with what it tells us about theology? Certainly not theological aspects of accounts of properties of minds, as this isn’t the point he wishes to make in his discussion of Jim. While it is true we may be able to rewrite a complete explanation of Jim’s behaviour so as to avoid using terminology of a purpose–oriented bent, certain intermediate parts of the explanation may simply be the facts such language describes, and so there is no reason purposes would lack causative power; and, as there is a (very strong!) statistical correlation between our purposes and our actions, it is an indisputable empirical fact such causation exists. To claim the existence of the mind would be doubted under a future understanding of our actions at the level of electrochemistry (the nucleus of which has been growing over the decades) is absurd, as “the mind” would just be recognised as a vague name for a very specific sort of emergent behaviour of an ensemble of many particles. It is through a common problem of his, misunderstanding quotations, that this is unclear to Signorelli. (He seems to misunderstand scientists and theologians in about equal measure.) “Our own authorship” and “conscious will” reference our electing to do things in the very strong sense some philosophers demand of the “free will” concept, namely that we not only do as we choose but choose our choices themselves to the same extinct, and so ad infinitum. (It is a useful primer to the whole free will topic in philosophy to say philosophers view free will as possible depending more or less on whether they define it in this way or as simply doing as we choose.) To make sense of Signorelli’s thinking these quotations support his claims about what Darwinists think, they would have to mean, respectively, “our having a mind formed for us” (presumably by God’s authorship, so “our own authorship” is authorship of us and not by us) and consciousness. (Will and –ness do not append to conscious with the same consequences.) These errors are understandable (and I think I’ve encountered the latter in other authors), provided we’re uncharitable in our estimate of how carefully Signorelli read the text surrounding the parts he quoted.

It is on the basis of a serious mischaracterisation of the claims inherent in modern science – and I will not seek to conform with the borders for “Darwinism” and “metaphysics” by which Signorelli connects the two to these discussions of neurology – that Signorelli disparages the alleged metaphysics (I doubt there even is one) of the Darwinists. Apparently, they think the human mind is a myth, and humans thereby lose all dignity. Quite aside from how early in this argument he was wrong, Signorelli seems unable to resist returning to his previous idea of proving what something is all about with a quotation, in this case quoting Kitcher. Indeed, Signorelli’s discussion at this point of Kitcher is fraught with Signorelli repeating his various mistakes, including his thinking of creationism as a pointless topic and his thinking theodicy is a problem evolution does not worsen, both of which I’ve debunked above. But Signorelli of course has original points to make in his latest discussion of Kitcher. The first is Kitcher’s conceding – if that is the right word – Darwinian evolution is only part of the case against supernaturalism. It is indeed probably the wrong word, since if Signorelli wishes to rebut the idea evolution makes a unique contribution to such a case one would not expect him to think of someone saying something along those lines a target instead of an ally. But the context of the discussion at hand is to consider Kitcher’s, and presumably also any Darwinist’s, case for atheism wanting.

While Signorelli considers the diversity and irreconcilability of religions, textual problems in Biblical scholarship and sociological ideas about religion’s origins to be familiar points made in that case, this is very different from explaining what (if anything) is wrong with them. It is also insufficient to dismiss the scientifically typical honest recognition of when a proposed function of a religious phenotype is a conjecture by calling it “pure speculation”, as if we’ve no reason to take it seriously as an idea. (And, in any case, proposed functions need only demonstrate a Darwinian explanation is in principle possible, so that the observed phenotypes do not empirically falsify the claim adaptive evolution is solely due to natural selection.) And if ever there were an example of asserting something without proof, it would be to say that Kitcher is committing a “screaming” non-sequitur in taking narratives’ ceaseless occurrence in proposed Darwinian bases of religion as indicative of their likely playing a role in religion and therefore being untrustworthy claims about what really happened, due to their spreading for entirely memetic reasons. It might be necessary to see Kitcher’s arguments in much more detail to see how good a case he made, and this would have been a good idea if Signorelli is to claim the reasoning is fallacious.

Most baffling of all, however, is the view we subject ourselves to “intellectual enslavement” if we see our lives mattering as something not requiring interrogation. While it’s true we need very good reasons to consider a belief in a proposition unworthy of continued analysis, this may not be the right way to look on the issue of how if at all our lives matter. It’s not a matter in which only facts are relevant. How important will one think one’s own life; and, in saying “important”, we mean important to whom? If Signorelli is to insist he means only objective importance to the universe, it is clear from astronomy alone we cannot claim this in any case, and so our discussion should have long ago moved beyond this. It is whether one finds any meaning in one’s own life, and not what our existence’s consequences may be for the Hubble zone, that should be the basis of our self–assessment; and, judging by the words of Kitcher Signorelli quotes on the matter, this is probably the point Kitcher sought to make.

If Signorelli wants to understand why theological “alternatives” to Darwinism are given little or no discussion in biologists’ publications, he should firstly note in claiming this he has to dismiss the discussion of creationism and intelligent design as “not counting”, and secondly he needs to appreciate claims that things are the way they are because this was so willed by invisible beings postulated as just competent and ineffable enough to keep their existence at arm’s length (via nothing but ad hoc and therefore rationally unrespectable hypotheses) from a sensible empirical discussion aren’t worthy of any more inclusion in scientists’ writings if the beings in question are deities than if they are anything else (and, if they are anything else, e.g. goblins, Signorelli would no doubt not be calling for their inclusion).

Signorelli’s last paragraph has him go beyond merely disliking claims to refute God, as it shows him upset to hear Dennett claim an ability to succinctly dismiss the arguments for God – an entirely distinct point, as anyone who considers neither God’s existence nor the contrary demonstrable automatically appreciates. It also has him go beyond his previous accusations against scientists when he says, “They are barbarians, and their ascendancy remains the best evidence of what a barbarous age we inhabit” (edited for brevity). The only interpretation for this is Signorelli defines barbarism as preferring explanations which work.

I see that the gentleman who once declared in this forum that “words are self-replicating” has posted another lengthy commentary on my work (at least I hope, for the honor of womanhood, that it is a gentleman writing these things).  I can’t say I’m much more impressed with this endeavor than with the previous one.  But surely common courtesy requires me to acknowledge such extensive attention to my work, even if only to explain why I find it so unimpressive.

It is not true that St. Augustine never explains why we ought not to read Genesis in a strictly literal fashion.  He makes numerous comments on this matter throughout his commentary (and elsewhere), generally to the effect that we should look to the text for spiritual edification, and not merely as a record of natural history.  And he begins by admonishing his readers to recognize the figurative nature of scriptural language.  Why does he not belabor this point?  Because any educated person of his time would have understood that to read any text was to read it with a mind towards its allegorical – ie, its “other” – meaning.  We moderns, having lost the rich rhetorical and hermeneutical traditions of the classical world, are quite behind the ancients in this matter.

The author doubts that the passage from Romans can have the singular importance I ascribe to it.  My answer is, it has; as a matter of scholarly history, this passage has provided the starting point for all Christian speculation on the “possibility of proving God from His works” (see note 8).  He says I misunderstand this passage.  I, for my part, cannot make heads or tails of the point he is trying to make concerning it.  So let me just try to reiterate my original point, which was that arguments of this sort traditionally began from an assertion of the orderliness or beauty of nature, and deduced from this premise the workmanship of God, understood as an entity of supreme beauty and rationality.  Since “beauty” and “order” are clearly not scientific terms, we are obviously not dealing with a scientific argument (and since I indicated this in the article, the author’s claim that I do not explain science’s limitations here is patently false).  No mere data, such as science utilizes, will ever serve as evidence for the initial premise.  No experimentation or quantification will determine for us whether something is beautiful or rationally ordered.  The moment we begin to use concepts of this sort – concepts which bear a reference to mental life - we have left behind the realm of scientific empiricism, and entered the arena of dialectic and conceptual debate. 

What the author (and those of his ilk) cannot understand is that concepts are not like so much flora, objects to be merely plucked out of the natural world.  They must be propounded, qualified, defended.  The methods of science offer us no assistance in this task.  So when the author maintains that science has “proven” that Christianity has not improved man’s behavior, he is just blowing smoke, to be sure, but he is also demonstrating his complete inability to understand the difference between a conceptual and an empirical claim.  Science could never prove such a thing, because the statement necessarily presupposes some conception of the “good” (all improvement is greater approximation towards “the good”), and it is ridiculous to suppose that the accuracy or inaccuracy of any such a conception could be scientifically verified.  The author in one place expresses doubts that the Darwinians possess a metaphysics.  Of course they do; they just smuggle it into their arguments by implication and assumption, just as the author smuggles his conception of “the good” into his statement just quoted.  But anybody who thinks that he has scientific evidence for the adequacy of his conception – anybody who thinks that anyone can have scientific evidence for the adequacy of a conception of “the good” – is seriously confused.  And a similar confusion besets anyone who believes that the accumulation of ever so much data can conclusively “prove” that the world lacks beauty or order.  And this is why I say that the arguments of Augustine and Bonaventure are immune from scientific assessment (thought not assessment per se, which I was at pains to emphasize).  They begin with conceptually-laden (ie, metaphysical) claims.  But since the author does not understand the difference between an assertion about facts and an assertion about concepts, he cannot see why these arguments – why any arguments – should stand outside the province of scientific critique.

Quite clearly then, I did not claim – as the author says I claimed – that “natural causes (are) so limited an understanding of them can’t be revealing of divine matters.”  To the contrary, the arguments I cited from Augustine and Bonaventure suppose that this statement is false.  What I claimed is that traditional “design arguments” do not argue merely from the existence of this or that empirical fact, but rather from a conceptually laden description of natural facts.  Facts all by themselves, absent any conceptual interpretation, do not speak to the presence of God – they do not speak at all.  But the old theologians never reasoned from objects understood in that way, as mere data.  So there can be nothing inconsistent (I am not “having it both ways,” as he says) with this claim and later claims I made about the possibility of perceiving evidence of God’s providence in the world.  Such perception begins with a proper conception of God (a metaphysical task, that), and goes on to discover similarities between created works and God so conceived.  But not everywhere, and not in everything.  The Christian claim has always been that God is both profoundly present in the world and profoundly absent.  We must reason as we would if we were to attend one of those crappy modernized productions of Shakespeare; we would have evidence of the author’s workmanship in the substance of the drama, but we could never suppose that we found evidence of the Bard’s intentions in every last costume or prop to appear on the stage.

The author maintains that “teleological arguments focus instead on the existence of those structures requiring the most improbable specification.”  But anyone who reads the passage which I quoted from Aquinas can see this is false.  He begins his reasoning from a truth about “natural bodies,” and makes no distinction whatsoever between bodies which seem improbable (or complex) and those which don’t.  His point is simply that all natural objects tend to perpetuate their own existence, and that this felicitous directedness compels us to recognize the intentions of a Creator.  And this is why I referred to arguments which move from the world’s existence to God’s existence.  The author says I do not understand the difference between such arguments and teleological arguments; I suppose his evidence is the fact that I myself acknowledged I was probably blurring the two forms of argument.  But Aquinas’ teleological argument – since it emphasizes the fact that natural things are directed towards their perpetuated existence - inevitably leads us to his cosmological argument, and compels us to consider things in their raw being – absent any “specifications” – and that is why scholars have repeatedly insisted that his Fifth Way argument cannot be understood apart from the other arguments for God’s existence.  The simple point to make is that nothing in evolutionary biology could call into question this line of reasoning (although, again, his argument is assailable on other grounds). 

Ah, but we must mind the distinction between “teleology” and “teleonomy,” says the author, between what has “genuine design” and what is a mere “designoid.”  And its clear from what he writes later (“this differs from ‘spleens recycle…because a designer wished this were so”) that the distinction he is making is between conscious teleology (or intentional finality) and brute, unconscious teleology.  But (again, as I made quite clear in my article) the thinkers working in the tradition of Aristotlean metaphysics did not make that distinction; to them, what moved in an end-directed fashion was moved by final causes, whether or not that object was conscious of the fact or not.  The concept of finality that these thinkers were working with extended to conscious and unconscious agents; that is the concept with which they constructed their teleological arguments.   So it obviously will not do to substitute a new concept of finality – one restricted exclusively to conscious agents – and then say that the traditional teleological arguments don’t work anymore.  Of course they don’t work, because they are not the same argument once you redefine finality in such a radical fashion.  If the first premise of the argument is that the “specification” of natural bodies serve as evidence of intentional purposefulness, then yes, evolutionary biology might serve as a challenge to that premise.  But the real first premise of Aquinas’ argument is simply that natural bodies display end-directedness in their motions, and this cannot be challenged by evolutionary biology.

And this is why the Darwinians’ constant use of scare quotes is fraudulent, because scare quotes are always used to suggest doubt towards the validity of the concept so marked.  So “final causes” (as it was written out by the “variable” Michael Ruse) suggests that the concept of a final cause has no real applicability, and this is, as I said, a cheap way to pretend that you have refuted an argument that you have not even engaged.  The author pretends to give a “translation” of the spleen’s operations from teleological to non-teleological language.  But the fact that “spleens operate in order to recycle erthrocytic iron” is left out of the translation; the functionality of organs and other body parts is a necessary part of their description.  Which means their descriptions are inherently teleological.  Which means that suggesting that teleology is a useless concept, through the use of scare quotes, is utterly misleading and fallacious.

 The author clearly does not grasp any of this, because the basic point I have been making about these arguments is that they do not begin with some assertion about a strictly empirical reality, which may be refuted by the discovery of new data.  Yet he writes: “What would it take for science to provide evidence for the design by God of a leopard?  A start would be the tetragrammaton encoded in ASCII in its DNA.”  I suppose this is what passes for humor in the world of Dawkins-Web.  But the fact that he believes the arguments of Bonaventure or Aquinas can be refuted by citing a lack of data demonstrates beyond all question that he does not have the first clue about what those arguments are trying to do.  And needless to say, he cannot refute arguments he doesn’t understand.

Nor clearly does he understand the connection I made between Dennett’s atheism and his materialism.  The point is simply that if a complete mechanical account of a phenomena is sufficient to rule out the necessity for further teleological descriptions (as he claims it is), then obviously, the very full neurological account which we now have of the brain’s functioning is sufficient to rule out of the description of human behavior any forms of teleology, including all forms of the conscious purposefulness with which we all believe ourselves endowed.  The very same form of metaphysical argument (ie, mechanism excludes finality) may serve – indeed, must serve - as support for both his atheism and his materialism.  And that materialism does in fact undermine all conceptions of human dignity, whether the author is comfortable with this fact or not.  But of all the points I made in my article, this is the one I would least expect a Darwinian to accept, as it would occasion a positively excruciating amount of self-reflection on their part.  So let it pass.

The author even supposes he can counter my claims about the possibility of perceiving the effects of providence in the world by referring to “Ockham’s razor” and the “principle of parsimony,” entirely oblivious to the fact that he is just rehearsing the same move which I showed to be illegitimate.  Ockham’s razor obliges us to dispense with all “unnecessary” suppositions, but the point at issue in these arguments just is whether or not the workmanship of God is a “necessary” supposition in explaining natural phenomena.  Almost all appeals to Ockham are question-begging in just this way, as whether or not one takes a premise to be necessary will already be determined by the conclusion one wishes to draw.  So if, like the author, one regards an adequate explanation of a phenomenon one which is “deducible from premises by virtue of which they could have been predicted and often are,” then yes, providence will be an unnecessary supposition.  But to pretend that you are ruling this supposition unnecessary on some objective grounds, devoid of commitment to prior principles, is ludicrous.  You find it unnecessary because you wish to conclude that only scientific explanations are adequate explanations.

Finally, as to Kitcher’s quote, the words speak for themselves, and I invite anyone to read the passage in question to see whether Kitcher qualifies his statement in the way that the author so desperately wants to believe he must have qualified it.  The statement is an unambiguous assertion that we ought not to inquire too much into the basis for our ascriptions of meaningfulness to human life.  That is a disgraceful thing for a philosopher to assert, and if the author agrees with him, then he is being equally disgraceful.  The author obviously has a great regard for Kitcher, and is thus quite willing to afford him a huge interpretative latitude.  But I don’t, so I’m not.

The clear thesis of my article was that all modern attempts to use the facts of evolutionary biology as a refutation of traditional theological positions stem from a widespread ignorance of the philosophical grounding of those positions.  Simply put, Kitcher, Dennett, et. al. do not understand the arguments they are pretending to controvert.  The author of this commentary has attempted to refute my thesis, and in doing so has revealed that he himself does not understand the hermeneutical tradition which informed Augustine’s reading of scripture, he does not understand the concept of teleology employed by traditional theologians, he does not understand the logical structure underpinning their arguments, he does not even understand the difference between a conceptual and an empirical claim.  So I’m afraid that his commentary, for all the labor it must have cost him, only serves to reinforce the validity of my thesis quite powerfully. 

This is a reply to Signorelli’s response to my comment on his latest article. For the record, he may refer to me as the NER’s own website indicted as Jos (or if he prefers surnames he may know mine is Gibbons), whether or not my sex matters to him (I am male as he hoped).

Signorelli is right to say Augustine SAID we shouldn’t interpret Genesis literally, but neither Augustine nor anyone else gave a convincing reason to think Genesis didn’t mean what its surface language suggested. How can anyone suppose extremely detailed genealogies from Adam to later historical figures, sufficient to calculate an approximate age of the Creation, are actually a metaphor for something? The fact is every culture’s origin story, be it Jewish or Aztec, was understood as a literal truth by the society in which it originated, as is clear from how it influenced their behaviour. When a complicated set of claims is shown to be literally false, trying to cling onto it with metaphorical reinterpretation just shows a keenness to have it be somehow, any way we can manage, “right”. Whether or not Signorelli thinks providing the evidence needed to compel such efforts in the first place counts as a challenge to the ways such pieces were originally interpreted, those of us who know not to take more seriously the writings of the Hebrews than those of any other culture realize it does.

Signorelli cannot understand my point about the difference between learning about something from seen effects and not doing any seeing at all, or so he claims. It is clear from his latest description of how certain arguments – he doesn’t really care whether they are teleological or something else – proceed that he recognises certain things are actually observed in the world to make them work. But he claims they are beyond science’s analysis because neither beauty nor order are scientifically definable. As it happens, if any description of what aspects of an entity make us hypothesise as historically accurate the claim deliberate design entered into its production is too vague to be put into scientific – in other words, empirical (based on what we actually know is true by looking at it) – parlance, it is not an argument anyone should take seriously. The turtle must be designed because it is beautiful. What do you mean by that? Oh, I can’t say it in terms you can empirically understand – which means you can’t empirically look down on my argument! Oh, but I can; I can see of which important things it is bereft. It is not that there is a sharp difference between evidential and conceptual matters and science is at a loss to understand the latter; instead concepts are better or less well–explained in terms of that which we can actually test, and if a claim cannot be supported by evidence as of yet we really ought not to have confidence in it, and if concepts are especially divorced from what we are currently up to in empiricism even thinking we know what is meant is a case of being too confident of ourselves.

Signorelli doubts I can empirically analyse whether Christianity improves our behaviour. (For the record, an approximation to the good need not be what I reference; as Sam Harris points out in The Moral Landscape, for every possible state of affairs to be assigned a value and for some to be superior to others does not require any one option to be the best or for others to be better or worse according to how well they approximate it; virtually any geometrical surface has a very different appearance.) In fact, it can; it is statistics which show us that Christianity affords us no decline in crime rates, rise in a society’s equality standards, and so on. It is true the question of ethics is a hard one, and the exact nature of the way empirical analyses can best inform it is still not fully known; but we already know enough of what is good and bad to see how those identifiable things correlate with certain other phenomena. Christianity no more aids morality than homeopathy aids health, and health is an area also bereft of complete clarity on what it is that we mean.

Signorelli is wrong to think Darwinian accounts of biology require concepts of the good to work, or that they refute the existence of beauty or order in the world. On the contrary; all we need to explain why natural selection leads to a state of affairs is data encodable in Markov chains, and insofar as beauty or order can be understood by referencing observable properties of life those facts can be explained, rather than denied, by evolutionary biology. (While the actual terms “beauty” and “order” may or may not be definable in ways Darwinian language can contain, insofar as they can the facts only serve to reaffirm such descriptions, and insofar as they cannot one can no more accuse Darwinism of denying them than of asserting them.) A number of much less vague ideas capture something of what people at times mean when they use the in any case ambiguous terms beauty and order, and most if not all of them have been not only demonstrated by Darwinian biologists but even accounted for by them. Indeed, it is with a Darwinian account we can recognise why we find certain things rather than others appealing.

Signorelli’s discussion of my take on his references to natural causes and my accusing hi, of trying to have it both ways gives the false impression I was in that section of my writing still discussing the way cosmological and teleological arguments work. In fact, I was by that point explaining why setting up a natural–supernatural demarcation and demanding we not dismiss the latter class as empty is an exercise in irrationality, by virtue of it wanting us to entertain the existence of entities we have no actual reason to bring into our discussions. As a result of this topic conflation, Signorelli misses the fact that it is not how if at all empirical facts were used by theologians that led me to accuse him of trying to have it both ways, but rather trying to make a supernatural deity present in natural explanations while at the same time claiming a need to postulate Him due to an alleged paucity of natural explanations.

Signorelli’s confusion of teleological and cosmological arguments seems even more serious now than in his last piece, as he now claims the teleological argument of Aquinas leads into his cosmological one. A cosmological argument is simply an argument from the existence of the universe to the existence of a creator for it; the universe’s properties are not cited. How a completely different point – that there are certain forms of “directedness” – “leads” here is a mystery. I went to great pains to show that all this “directedness” is just convenient shorthand for concepts we now understand in enough detail to also scientifically explain them. To say an empirically successful explanation of something in the form of evolutionary biology does not refute the traditional argument from ignorance – “Amazing thing we don’t understand, therefore God” – can only mean closure to having one’s opinions updated by discovery.

Such closure may well be inherent in every excuse ever given for why not to buy too much into science’s mindset. It is certainly found elsewhere in Signorelli’s efforts to respond to my objections. For one, he thinks the Aristotelians not distinguishing two things should somehow give pause for thought to those of us who know best to distinguish them. For another, his use of the term “a mere “designoid”” implies he cannot have read the term in its original context (Climbing Mount Improbable) to know how it is defined, as he actually believes designoid is a noun, not an adjective! The distinction he hopes should remain as alien to us as it did to the Aristotelians is in fact a distinction even the crudest fundamentalist understands, namely the difference between conscious teleology – i.e. an artificer’s deliberate designing intervention – and “unconscious teleology”, i.e. anything else whose consequences are superficially similar enough to inspire analogies. It is the distinction over whether or not a design hypothesis is historically accurate, and therefore matters to every single person whose belief in God lacks the apophatic character needed to remove his concern over whether this God actually exists or not. And I should stress that if Signorelli is unimpressed with evolutionary biology’s claim to undermine certain ideas because it only gives us reason to doubt the conscious version of those hypotheses, I have to agree with him that that is all that it does; indeed, that is all any evolutionary biologist ever claims, or they wouldn’t go to such great pains to demonstrate the unconscious alternative is an inexorable consequence of how natural selection works. In this way, evolutionary biology is a microcosm for science, which addresses every example of “directedness” so far identified, considers both the conscious and unconscious version of this idea, and dismisses the former while explaining why the latter is, ultimately, true.

Signorelli thinks that my spleen translation is wrong to leave out “spleens operate in order to recycle erthrocytic iron”, but it is not. The extremely long sentence I wrote contains enough claims in it to guarantee how spleens will end up; it’s all about the Price Equation. Indeed, to a biologist “function” simply means “in causal terms WHY natural selection has had those consequences which it has had”. The spleen’s recycling of erythrocytic iron (which Signorelli cannot spell) is a consequence, its causes (to a scientist, that means the true statements from which it is deducible) being natural selection in conjunction with the facts which I listed, and no others; and the spleen–specific details are then the “functions” of the recycling. And so it isn’t necessary to use teleological language at all to make sense of what happens in evolution, but we usually prefer to save ourselves 95 % of the word count, and so either use teleological language without the scare quotes or compromise by adding said scare quotes and thus giving teleonomic language (or, in rare cases, the teleonomic compromise uses neologisms, such as designoid and teleonomy). Now, does any of this mean teleology is a useless concept? To say teleological – really teleological rather than teleonomic – things is useful in proportion to the truth of the things thereby said. Teleology is useful to state logically possible, but factually false, suggestions. But for Signorelli to insist the genuinely teleological arguments cannot be responded to with empirical arguments requires him to seriously claim there is more to our explaining things than deducing observed known facts from falsifiable premises, and this is a claim which cannot be seriously entertained, for reasons I will explain in due course.

A recurrent feature of theologians’ arguments is to argue from analogy, so a recurrent feature of their critics’ responses is to show which differences between things bring down these analogies. The standard example is that organisms’ reproduction with heredity and variation is the reason none of the design arguments based on human artefacts really work in biology. Another example at hand is in Signorelli’s comment: “if a mechanical account is sufficient to rule out the necessity for further teleological descriptions, the neurological account is sufficient to rule out of the description of human behavior any forms of teleology, including all forms of the conscious purposefulness with which we all believe ourselves endowed”. If ever there were an “If ... then” statement which did not follow, this would be it. Knowing why in mechanical terms something happens is enough to know there isn’t a designer behind the scenes. That is very different from saying a mechanical understanding of an entity rules out it being a designer or thinker in its own right. Understanding the mind mechanically is to understanding ecosystems mechanically not as construing the mind as mental is to construing ecosystems as designed (in either the teleological or teleonomic case), but as construing the mind is designed (by another mind!) is to construing ecosystems as designed.

“That materialism does undermine all conceptions of human dignity” – how? We think, and we can now understand how and why we think. We may now understand also the virtues and vices of our thinking by recourse to how the requirements of evolution correspond to those of rational thought. To some extent, we may be able to use this knowledge to improve our minds in the future. Even if we cannot, almost every aspect of us we marvelled at beforehand still is true. (One counterexample is that our “self” is not as centrally organised a phenomenon as we originally imagined before we learned how the brain really works.) If minds are an emergent property of matter, does that make minds less, or does that make matter more?

We now come to Signorelli’s response to my references to Ockham’s razor and the principle of parsimony. He is wrong to accuse my reasoning of circularity. I did not merely assert that supernatural explanations aren’t worth holding onto; I clearly explained why. No doubt it is his assessment that wanting explanations to prove their mettle by getting the right answers in the realm of evidence is somehow an arbitrary commitment of mine. In fact, it is the only way to make sense of any of our commitments. What makes A evidence for B is a matter of how B and its rivals logically stand as propositions in relation to A – which pairs of our propositions are consistent, and when does one imply the other, and when is one unlikely to be true unless the others is? When the evidence in favour of a verdict is strong enough, we are foolish to ignore this; when the evidence in favour of a verdict is not very strong at all, we are foolish to ignore this too. Why? Because if we want beliefs which are actually true, they should be assessed by how well reality hints at this. To say I believe something should be to say I stand in some relation to the world by virtue of which its being true causes me to come by evidence which compels me to take it seriously. Literally any other relationship between me and my beliefs will mean I don’t accept a proposition as plausible in proportion to its true plausibility. And if Signorelli thinks even this is too much of an assumption to admit to any discussion of his favourite philosophical topics, he proves himself beyond open discourse on the matters. It is one thing for him to have found neither of my attempts to refute past essays of his persuasive; it is another for his very standards for changing his mind to be ill–suited to error correction.

There is an irony in Signorelli telling anybody to be more open to the possible metaphorical meanings of Bronze age texts while viewing certain quotations of biologists as unambiguous and as being works which speak for themselves. While Signorelli is keen to calculate just how disgraceful I would be if I agreed with a view he (possibly rightly) ascribes to Kitcher after I clearly explain my own views enough for it to be clear I don’t, the question remains of whether the view I expounded – and which I proposed Kitcher may have meant as well – is in any way objectionable: and it is not. (To remind everyone, I took the view we should not see our lives as meaningless just because their meaning is limited to meaning TO people such as ourselves.) The aforesaid irony extends to another confidence of Signorelli’s: “The author obviously has a great regard for Kitcher, and is thus quite willing to afford him a huge interpretative latitude.” Oh, is it obvious? Well, here’s the thing: I have literally never even heard of Kitcher before and have read none of his works and do not hold him in any special regard. But I understand evolutionary biology – both the observed facts and their theoretical explanations – well enough, and am familiar enough with the comments of other evolutionary biologists, to know how best to interpret the latter’s comments to see which of their possible meanings make the most sense in the context of our knowledge of evolution. It really should be noted that no similar basis exists for entertaining Genesis as meaning anything besides the most obvious reading of its words: there is no body of knowledge in which its author(s) can be expected to have been experts, and we do not even know very much about the author(s) anyway. By contrast, the twin constraints of observed facts and the mathematical structure of population genetics gives us a very good idea what sort of claims evolutionary biology makes about a topic, and hence what nontechnical English intended for the lay is likely to have been intended to convey.

Signorelli’s thesis that “attempts to use biology as a refutation of theological positions stem from a widespread ignorance of the philosophical grounding of those positions” might have been more persuasively defended in his first effort had he shown a better understanding of the theological arguments themselves therein and of what evolution is really about in his memes essay last year, and his response to me here may have been more persuasive had he not made clearer it was a deliberate lack of concern for core distinctions between different classes of argument in theology which motivated his writing now and then. I ask anyone else reading our debate here, who shows any real sign of caring whether an argument is cosmological or teleological, or of which of these evolution concerns (only the second one)? Which one of us has made the best effort to state clearly and precisely the technical issues in both religious and scientific matters? And most pointedly, who here is least keen to rely upon obscurantist techniques to avoid the awkward question, What does evidence really best support and how much does that matter?

And I’m the verbose one!   Well, I should say that it is a foible of mine that I do not refer to people’s pseudonyms, so if good Mr. Ape would be good enough to share his real name, I will be good enough to refer to it.  Otherwise, its “the author.”  This debate is indeed getting lengthy and technical, too lengthy and technical to be of much enlightenment to any readers who may be trying to follow along.  So let me try to focus in here on what are the key points at issue.

First, as to Augustine’s way of reading Genesis, you will notice that I said he did not read in a “strictly” literal fashion.  This is not to say that nothing in scripture is to be taken literally.  Augustine does not say that.  His treatise is entitled “The Literal Meaning of Genesis.”  But he is at great pains to determine what in Genesis is to be taken literally, and what not.  And as I indicated (and as the author refuses to acknowledge), he does indicate what his criteria are for making this distinction (and one of his criteria, as noted in my article, is that nothing empirically verifiable is to be denied in the interpretation).  This is a matter of scandal only to someone who has never spent a moment reflecting on what we do when we read; anybody else will realize that this is what we are always doing,  when we read any text, scriptural or not.  When we read Tolstoy, or Wordsworth, or Virgil, we must – if we are careful readers – constantly ask ourselves in what sense we are to understand the passages we encounter, in what sense are they true.  Did Keats really mean – literally mean – that “beauty is truth, truth beauty?”  Anybody who thinks this is a simple question to answer is a hermeneutical novice. This is an immensely complicated task.  An absolute mountain of critical theory has been amassed, since antiquity, attempting to deal with these problems systematically.  But only someone who lacked all traces of a literary education would regard it as problematic (or worse) that ancient theologians read scripture in exactly the way any sensible person reads any substantive text.  I have written elsewhere on the pages of NER about the grave consequences of the decline in humanist education; now maybe others can see what I mean.

The author still cannot grasp what follows from the truth about Aristotelian teleology, but lets try again (third times a charm, and all that).  He writes, “the Aristotelians not distinguishing two things should somehow give pause for thought to those of us who know best to distinguish them.”  By all means, distinguish.  But in doing so, don’t pretend that you are thereby refuting Aquinas or any other theologian working in that tradition.  If the first premise of an argument is “natural objects display end-directedness,” you cannot refute that argument by responding, “well, evolution proves that no conscious purposefulness is observable in the making of natural objects.”  You are just talking right past your interlocutor, and while you are jumping up and down, gibbon-like (pun intended), for having banished theology from the world for all time, the Christians who you so desperately want to confound are yawning.  You come boasting, “oh look, now we know why giraffes have those long necks, and it has nothing to do with God,” but the Christian theologian couldn’t care less.  His argument doesn’t rest on the conviction that God has intervened directly into the making of every biological contrivance – not at all.  He knows that nature is a realm of secondary causes (ie, causes which do not follow directly from the will of God) and mechanical causes, not only in biology, but in physics, history, economics – everywhere.  He doesn’t see God’s purposes revealed in every natural contingency – certainly not in things like famines or birth defects or wars.  He just thinks (if he is following Aquinas’ form of reasoning) that the tendency of all things to move towards their own perpetuated being suggests that God – who is the totality of Being, perfect Being – is behind their movements, and has in fact created them that way.  This is why I say that Aquinas’ teleological argument points us towards his cosmological argument, because the directedness of natural objects is a directedness towards existence.  It is not “Signorelli” who thus says that his Fifth Way argument needs to be read in the context of his other arguments for God’s existence; it is every legitimate scholar which I’ve read on the matter, and maybe if the author spent some time reading the same scholarship – instead of the parodies of theology that he has imbibed from Dawkins and Hitchens – he would understand why they make this claim. Now, the argument as it stands in Aquinas is problematic, to be sure, but it is not controvertible by science.  And the author even admits as much: “if Signorelli is unimpressed with evolutionary biology’s claim to undermine certain ideas because it only gives us reason to doubt the conscious version of those hypotheses, I have to agree that that is all it does.”  But that’s tantamount to agreeing that evolutionary biology does not undermine the traditional version of the teleological argument, because the traditional version of the teleological argument does not depend on the hypothesis of conscious purposefulness in the making of natural objects.  And the fact that evolutionary biology does not undermine traditional teleological arguments for God’s existence was, of course, the whole point of my article!

Still, the author insists, with painful tediousness, that there is not sufficient “evidence” for God, in any case, to make these arguments work, and moreover, Signorelli is “beyond open discourse” because he too is indifferent to “evidence”.  Now, anyone who will observe the arguments I have quoted in the article will note that their authors depended on reasons, not on evidence (understood as scientific data).  No one should expect to pick up a rock, or a rose, or a leopard (carefully, of course), and conclude, “ah, now I see that there is a God, because here is evidence.”  But according to the old theologians, if you pick up one of those objects and reason properly about it, you will inaugurate a train of deductions which ends with a recognition of God’s authorship.  So how in the world could a reliance on reasons be unreasonable?  It is unreasonable to the author simply because he regards scientific verification as the lone form of verification.  And I regard that conviction as a form of mental illness.  One could not get through the morning thinking that way, and of course, one cannot verify that conviction through the methods of science, a truth which the Logical Positivists learned (to their everlasting shame).

Science is not defined by its insistence on “evidence,” as its propagandists relentlessly insist.  It is defined by its unique criterion of “evidence,” namely, whatever is  quantifiable, that which is subject to mathematical expression, that which is described only under “primary qualities.”  So the only “evidence” which will count for the scientist (and the scientisitic) is evidence of that form, which means that what emerges from qualitative experience cannot ever serve as “evidence” to people like the author.  But literally no one prior to the 17^th century ever thought that way.  So when a Bonaventure or Augustine pointed at nature and said, “look how beautiful,” they certainly regarded the natural world as an important place to begin reasoning, but they weren’t pointing to “evidence,” not in the sense of that word that the author means.  They were describing the world as it appears to us in our phenomenological encounter with it, not as it appears to science once it is stripped of all its secondary qualities.  Unlike the scientist, they did not regard our impressions of nature as an obstacle to understanding, but rather as a doorway.

So to claim that “concepts are better or less well-explained in terms of that which we can actually test” is equivalent to saying that concepts are only valuable insofar as they cover only primary qualities, which itself is equivalent to saying that concepts which have any reference to mental life are illegitimate.  And that’s nuts.  Liberty, justice, sublimity, grace, jealousy, deceit – probably nine-tenths of all abstract nouns would have to be shorn out of common usage.  We would find ourselves perfectly incapable of describing to ourselves even the most basic of our experiences.  And all on account of the perfectly arbitrary decision to take mathematics, rather than our own experience, as the final reference point for conceptual content.

Of course, then, saying that a turtle (for instance) is “beautiful” is not an empirical claim, because one is trying to assert something about the turtle besides its mass or velocity, something which is not translatable into talk of material causes.  This does not make the concept of beauty empty or “ambiguous” as the author states.  As a matter of fact, tidal waves of ink have been spilled trying to say exactly what beauty is, not because it is a concept with no determinate meaning, but because it is a concept with an ineffable extent of meaning.  And that depth of meaning stems from the fact that it refers to human qualitative experience, and human experience is a thing that is endlessly variable and complex.  Again, this sounds outrageous only to someone who has not spent five minutes reflecting on his everyday life.  Suppose you were walking through the Uffizi and, upon seeing a Raphael, remarked, “look how beautiful;” if someone next to you should pipe up and say, “but what is your evidence that it is beautiful,” you would think he’s a royal screwball.  And just so you should regard the person who tries to dismiss Augustine or Bonaventure’s arguments by going on about the lack of empirical evidence for their premises. 

Since concepts like beauty, or order, or goodness – even causality – bear some reference to the way that we encounter the world as conscious creatures, they refer to something other than the “testable.”  So it’s the height of naivety to suppose that we can ever have tidy, neutral, and uncontroversial concepts with which to make sense of the world.  Getting our concepts will always be a task replete with dialectical sloppiness.  There is just no way around it.  The author refuses to acknowledge this uncomfortable fact.  He says that “improvement” need not refer to the “good.”  Why not?  What concept of “improvement” is he working with?  And why is it superior to concepts of “improvement” which refer to the good?  If he thinks he has experimental evidence to answer this question, he is sorely mistaken.  He says that “statistics…show us that Christianity affords no decline in crime rates,” thereby proving that Christianity doesn’t improve people.  But why does he take a decline in crime rates to be the standard of a people’s moral improvement?  Its actually a remarkably dubious standard (I suspect the crime rates in North Korea are quite low, and that owing not at all to the virtue of her citizens).  The author thinks he is deriving his concepts from the data, but in fact he has arbitrarily adopted the meaning of his concepts, and then read the data in light of them.  And so too do all the Darwinians who write on ethics, aesthetics, religion, etc – they all perform the same trick of pretending that they are writing in an “objective” fashion, while employing concepts in a way that commits them to a thousand arbitrary presuppositions. 

This is a long (unduly long, to be sure) way of restating one of the central points of my article, which is that the traditional forms of the “design argument” are immune to scientific assessment.  Because those arguments are replete with conceptual content, and because that content is drawn from conscious experience, no scientific (ie, quantitative) evidence is going to have any relevant bearing on their truth or falsity; there is no experiment to perform to determine whether Augustine was right when he said we see beauty in the world.  The only way around this is to insist, like the author, that all concepts be “testable,” ie, that none of our concepts refer to our experience.  But in that case, you do not need further arguments.  You need help.

So yes, let us now submit this debate to the arbitration of any poor persons who have been following along.  I suspect that everyone will go away with just the same convictions as they came.  Those persons will side with the author who already believe that science and its methods constitute the one legitimate form of inquiry, and the one path to truth.  On the other hand, those who believe that such a dogma constitutes one of the fashionable forms of modern dementia – those who believe that commonplace words like beauty or virtue have a real significance, those who think that poetry and philosophy and religion can state the truth, those who do not require experimental evidence to verify that they love their children or that they appreciate Bach – perhaps such persons will side with me.

For Signorelli’s benefit, my real name IS Jos Gibbons. I know he frequently assumes things about me which aren’t true, so he may not believe it, but if he insists on calling me anything else I’ll have to make do.

That Augustine stated which propositions in Genesis he took as literally true is not enough; there must be a good reason for it. To say “I’ll believe the verifiable bits” misses the point of Holy Scripture, as it makes it immune to error. “Oh, so that bit’s wrong after all? Well then, it wasn’t literal.” I already knew that was what Augustine did; Signorelli needn’t have repeated it or pretended it was a good principle. While it is true literature contains comments which vary in whether they are literal, we can’t claim certain beliefs are justified by the Bible saying they are so – such as thinking we’re the species most important to the creator of the universe, or Original Sin is the cause of our suffering – if nonetheless we grant the literal truth of parts is not guaranteed.

As for injecting supernatural ideas into areas the natural already illuminates, it interests me how Signorelli both thinks certain natural phenomena like birth defects do not involve divine intrusion, while at the same time insisting we shouldn’t ignore the possibility of intrusion in certain other natural phenomena. It is worth noting one either bothers with an extra layer or one does not. Why is it the good bits that God secretly did, and not the bad ones? Because theology isn’t just about believing in an unnecessary deity, but a desirable unnecessary one at that – and that is why we even have a problem of theodicy at all, since a sufficiently weak or ignorant or capricious or indifferent deity would not be challenged by the evil or suffering of our world at all. The simple truth is we should choose whether to add a supernatural layer in our hypotheses about what is going on not on the basis of how that would lead us to morally evaluate that supernatural layer, but on the basis of whether there’s any evidence for it. And while “supernatural” and “divine” are often left vague enough it’s not possible to state what that evidence might be, this is a failing of the hypothesis and not of empirical demands. For, as I said before, only by making evidence the basis for our conclusions can we expect there to be any correlation between reality and what we are thinking of it.

Signorelli makes another effort to somehow link, rather than demarcate, cosmological and teleological arguments, and does so by claiming the directedness of natural objects is towards existence. Quite apart from whether they exhibit such directedness (they do typically stop existing, and to claim they’re directed to it so long as they manage to sustain it leads one to wonder whether they are also directed to all of their predicates so long as they are respectively sustained, only to remind us both predicates and existence may not be down to a direction (which eventually fails) and the whole thing may be a post hoc fallacy), we must point out the cosmological argument is about things ever at all existing, and not whether they keep it up; and yet directedness towards existence in the teleological sense refers to persistence, be it of an individual or of a lineage. So the distinction between teleological and cosmological arguments matters in much the same way as does that between evolution and abiogenesis. For the record, I have indeed read Aquinas and Augustine and Plantinga and Swinburne and all those other people who, whatever else may be said of them, use fallacious rather than valid arguments. And I have also read Signorelli. To claim the entire point of his article was evolution being irrelevant to teleological arguments in the unconscious sense is a lie for two reasons: he never said he limited himself to teleological arguments, instead saying theology as a whole was unaffected, and it has to be conscious (i.e. ACTUAL) teleology one is concerned with in theology, because “unconscious theology” is not a deity’s work at all, but a natural process a crummy argument from analogy inspires us to describe in similar terms. Put simply, anyone who claims no God actually exists in the literal sense and instead all “directedness” is of the unconscious variety is an atheist, not a theologian. Or if Signorelli wants to tell me THAT is the sort of theology he means evolution does not refute, just as nothing can refute so–called “apophatic theology” because in giving up on the importance of propositions it has stopped making any claims for one to refute in the first place, I ask him if he really cannot understand why people have viewed evolution as challenging “theology”. It is because to THEM, it means an actual God being there. It meant that to Augustine and to Aquinas as well, if Signorelli will be honest, and it has at every era in the history of religion meant that to the overwhelming majority of people claiming to profess a faith. That there are people calling themselves theologians while they ultimately take the same view on deities as Richard Dawkins in no way obliges us to claim it is whether their “theology” which is refuted or not that matters in this context, because it doesn’t. So stop trying to shift the goalposts.

Signorelli insists thinking is reasonable provided people give reasons for their thoughts. I am afraid there are such things as bad reasons, and saying “this leopard “is beautiful”, so I reason it is designed and refusing to say what “beautiful” means in enough detail to show evidence bears out the very premise of the argument is no better than simply jumping straight to the equally unevidenced conclusion of the argument. How dare Signorelli claim doing theology (or any activity involving the drawing of propositional conclusions) divorced of evidence is justifiable, or that the failure of Logical Positivism – which requires empirical verification as a basis of meaningfulness, not the issue at hand hear – is relevant here. I have explained very clearly why evidence is vital. And if Signorelli wants that argument to itself be couched in references to evidence for its conclusion (and if he does, I can already foresee him accusing it of circularity and then retreating into his confidence in the legitimacy of conclusions backed up by no sensible line of thinking at all), I need only direct him to how inaccurate people’s ideas get once evidence stops being the basis of their inference. We’ve innumerable examples of this where evidence exists to refute their claims. Why expect the situation where the evidence is not so unambiguously against them, or even mute, to be any different?

Signorelli creates a straw man of science when claiming it refuses to acknowledge any kind of evidence not expressed in numbers. If he wants an example of science accepting a claim without ever once considering numbers to make the point, may I suggest he ask himself why we believe in gravitational lensing? Eddington took two photographs and anyone could see a gap in their stars’ positions. That the gap’s size fit with the quantitative prediction of general relativity, thus supporting that model, was of course interesting too. But the brute question of whether it exists is not something requiring more sophistication than looking. One could say the same of vast swathes of the simplest facts of astronomy. Even if we one day have better descriptions of nature than general relativity affords us, the brute fact of gravitational lensing will be firm. Examples exist in biology too. The evolution by artificial selection of doglike behaviour in foxes in one experiment even led to doglike behaviour. Again, one could put all manners of numbers to it, but so what? We now in fact understand human senses well enough literally any aspect of our phenomenological experiment can be found to have numbers in it if we wish to move from “have you noticed that ...” to a chi squared test. But to claim science is simply not interested in what our senses tell us is ridiculous.

Abstract nouns would never need to leave common usage – we can show what people think of these things and what happens in brains when they think of them, and when they apply the terms. This is an exercise in various aspects of sociology, neurology and linguistics, but all analysable with evidence, and frankly whether philosophers classify them as primary or as secondary or as something else entirely isn’t an important matter. What evidence of ANY kind can be offered for the claim God exists? The “evidence” is always “This stuff is so cool it’d make more sense to think a god did that.” This is simply not good enough: it shows not a hint of interest in avoiding ad hoc moves or saying anything we can ever check or using these suggested ideas as a basis for further investigations.

All this talk of how hard beauty is to define due to its ineffability or any other ways in which it deviates from being as precisely defined as heterochromacy is not the real issue. If you say a flower is beautiful, I could ask you what you mean by that, and I wouldn’t need you to tell me enough to know of anything at all whether it was beautiful or not; I would simply need to know enough about the flower to know what led you to say that, and I may not even need an answer I felt agreed with my own linguistic conventions. It would not necessarily be a point on which we would reach, or would need to reach, semantic consensus. At any rate, I would endeavour to make sure I understood what you thought was true of the flower, if only to see whether it matched what I thought, and if it didn’t that’d open up the conversation further. It is in saying its beauty is reason for postulating any particular claim I would definitely need to know in more detail what the beauty you were referencing was. The point is not how little is common between technical and artistic language. The point is there is literally not a single fact about flowers, be it one you can state plainly or more circuitously, which gives us any reason to think a deity made it, especially given our understanding of evolution’s role. And a difficulty in testing a claim (due to a concept befuddling us or otherwise) is here cited not as a reason to dislike the use of concepts occurring in it, but as a reason to dislike that particular claim being thought true. In saying I do not think the beauty of a flower suggests it had some designer, I am not even commenting on whether the flower is beautiful, let alone whether beauty is a meaningful concept or one which has examples in reality.

It is for these reasons that, in his concluding paragraph, Signorelli’s summary of the position opposing him is full of straw men. That common sense words have some significance is not in dispute; as I said before, testability is asked not as a hallmark of conceptual validity, as the Logical Positivists erroneously thought, but simply as one of the factual accuracy of claims. Nor do I claim some discipline is incapable of speaking the truth – I just point out we need to have empirical standards when it comes to deciding which specific claims we will believe. It is worth bearing in mind one’s love of one’s children is a fact, so needs supporting evidence, but the evidence is there; one’s behaviour towards one’s children is suggestive. As for Bach, there is a big difference between one’s appreciation of him and claiming he deserves it, as can be understood by any philosopher who knows to see an expression of the form as that which emotivism references and the latter as either prescriptivism of a factual claim in action depending on how it is intended. The issue at hand is this: no case for a God actually existing – that is, in a factual sense – based on the nature of living things is even a case at all (instead of word salad) until it takes as its premises facts about life that are directly observable enough for us to know we grant those premises in the first place, and such facts about life are so well explained by evolution the God conclusion is unnecessary, hence unjustified. If Signorelli is to continue insisting arguments based on less well explained, and hence uncorroborated, premises are not touched by this, I need only point out they are already too bad and are not in need of further refutation.

A side note (not strictly relevant to the discussion of what Darwinism means for theology, but it is something Signorelli has twice insisted on discussing at length because of one of three examples I gave of religious claims failing empirically, the other two being such he hasn’t even tried to refute them):

Signorelli asks what I mean by improvement if not approximating the good, and why a different definition should be preferable. This misses the point that those changes we consider improvements may or may not be such that there exists some thing better approximated by the new than the old. It depends on both the nature of the world and which things we deem improvements, and I was only observing the contingency of the “approximating the good” option, not rejecting it. As I already explained, if things vary in how good they are, it is possible the relation between quality and other properties is not such that some one thing is the best and others are better when approximating its properties closely. He also asks me why I take low crime rates to be good, or whether I would apply this criterion to North Korea. In doing so, he is missing the point, which is that every example ever cited of how Christians may be better is simply not true after correcting for other factors. (Whether one lives in a despotic dictatorship seems worthy of consideration. Why he wants science to fail to include proper controls so it can fail to work as he says it must fail I’ve no idea.) The simple truth is we have a fair and improving idea in our moral Zeitgeist of what is good and what is bad, and I should stress it is an idea born not of knowing more about out Darwinian origins, but of our appreciating the consequences of our decisions. To continue to seriously entertain religious claims of moral supremacy when all our ideas about morality and the facts relevant to them suggest otherwise therefore requires us to reject much of that Zeitgeist, and for what? So a still unsubstantiated claim need not be considered refuted. The problem is Signorelli cannot cite a single way Christians and non–Christians statistically differ which any decent person takes seriously as an example of Christians being more moral (being more likely to insist that science is wrong about the age of Earth, for example, won’t do), and so instead he resorts to hoping for a deficiency in our assessment of what is moral rather than in the claim of moral supremacy itself.

An apology is in order for seeming to mock Mr. Gibbons’ name; it really did seem like a screen-name to me.  But since he has gone ahead and called me a liar several times in his latest post, I’m not too sure that such a conciliatory tone is all that necessary on my part.  At any rate, I really feel like I am repeating myself at this point in the debate, so I’m not sure if it makes much sense even to go on.  But here I go.

I recall that Mr. Gibbons had a difficult time remembering the thesis of my earlier work, going on rather hysterically and solecistically about my criticism of memes, when obviously the thesis of that earlier article was about genetic theories of cultural evolution.  And that inability to focus on the point at issue is evident once more.  So for instance, he asks, “Why is it the good bits that God secretly did, and not the bad ones?”  A fine question, that, and one which is very difficult to answer.  Its one which theologians have spent infinite pains trying to get right.   But its obviously not a question that is answerable scientifically.  I doubt that even Mr. Gibbons would suggest that it is.  And to remind, the irrelevance of science to theological questions was the thesis of my article.  So again, when he writes that he questions the deduction of a divine designer from the beauty of nature, and not the attribution of beauty itself, that is a fine and intelligent criticism.  But it is a logical and not a scientific question; its a critique aimed at a deductive conclusion, and not a lack of empirical data.  I have noted more than once that the theological arguments I cited are certainly debatable; what I have strenuously maintained is that evolutionary biology is irrelevant to that debate.  Augustine’s deduction from the beauty of nature, if it is a false one, would have been ever as false if Darwin never breathed air.  And clearly, when Mr. Gibbons wants to really wrangle with those theories, he leaves behind all pretence of arguing scientifically.  Very well.  But then please stop pretending that you disbelieve those old arguments because somehow Darwin proved them wrong.  And if Mr. Gibbons denies that in fact almost all modern atheists do dismiss theological arguments because they think something in Darwin refutes them, then I must smack the accusation of “liar” right back into his own court.

When one reads Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and encounters the line, “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is,” does one conclude that the poet wished to be transformed into a harp?  If not, why not?  Is it not because we realize that the invocation would be nonsensical as a literal request?  Do we therefore conclude that the passage is entirely false, deceitful, the record of a Bronze Age primitive who was mentally enslaved by superstitious beliefs about string instruments?  Or rather, do we not conclude that since the passage is not sensible in any straightforward or literal manner, we must read it figuratively?  Similarly, when we read in Genesis that God rested on the seventh day, why do we read that passage figuratively?  Isn’t it because understood literally, with the implication that God fatigues, this passage too would be nonsensical?  This is allowing scripture to be “immune from error” in precisely the same way we allow any text that privilege, which is to say, we assume that the text means something, and if it doesn’t mean in a straightforward literal fashion, then we go about looking for other ways in which it might mean.  Again, none of this is controversial to someone who knows how to read properly.

And it is quite evident that Mr. Gibbons is someone who does not know how to read properly at all.  He declares that he has read “Aquinas and Augustine and Plantinga and Swinburne,” and then later, when summing up the case against all these theologians, he writes, “the ‘evidence’ is always ‘this stuff is so cool it’d make more sense to think a god did that.’”  So he has read arduously through Aquinas and Augustine, and he still comes away thinking that they have nothing more substantive to say than what is in this snotty little parody?  Well, he may have read them, in the sense of physically running his eyes over their pages, but it is only too clear that he has not comprehended them.  He simply turns around and uses his incomprehension as proof that their arguments are vacuous.  And this is why he can airily dismiss those arguments which even he concedes don’t come in for scientific evaluation as “too bad and…not in need of further refutation.”  I’m sure the arguments of Plantinga and Aquinas appear positively awful to someone who reads in this fashion.  But to ape Mr. Gibbons, his ignorance does not suffice as adequate “evidence” in this case.

And as further “evidence” of his inability to read properly, please note that I have explained the Aristotelian conception of teleology fully three times already, and yet Mr. Gibbons still has the gall to refer to “conscious (ie ACTUAL) teleology.”  For the last time, to Aquinas and other theologians working in the Aristotelian tradition, non-conscious teleology was ACTUAL teleology!  A heart pumping in order to circulate the blood is an object that requires a description in terms of final causes (not “final causes”).  But this does not mean that the heart consciously pumps, or that an angel is physically pumping the heart, or that once upon a time God tinkered with the proper shape of the aorta in his workshop, or that any conscious intentionality can be directly observed in the evolution or the operation of the heart.  This conception of teleology does not entail the claim that God has directly willed every last contingency of nature, so no, Augustine and Aquinas would never have claimed that God is “present” everywhere in that sense.  Mr. Gibbons calls me a liar for denying this.  And I call him a hopeless fool for thinking that they actually believed such a thing. 

This does not mean that God is not conceived as a conscious intentional being, willing certain things of the world.  It just means that that intentional will is outside of this world (hence, not observable, not provable by empirical evidence).  Aquinas reasoned that the non-conscious teleology of objects in the world testified to an ordering intellect outside of the world, and as I have repeated ad nauseam, this is a highly contestable deduction.  But its not contestable by evolutionary biology, because all that can do (all any science can do) is call into question the way things are in the world.  And evolutionary biology does not call into question the fact that nature is replete with finality defined as Aquinas defined it; to the contrary, evolutionary biology packs the world with such finality by its constant resort to “adapted for” explanations.  I’m not moving the goalposts.  I’m telling you that the Christians are playing football, you are playing checkers, and yet you still think you’re winning the game. 

This leaves open the question of how we know which natural contingencies reflect God’s will, and which do not.  I think this is really the primary question for theology – where can we find God in the world.  And this is a staggeringly difficult question, obviously irresolvable in any neat or conclusive fashion.  But Christian theologians do not believe that every natural contingency testifies directly to God’s will.  As Newman wrote, the world is “out of joint with the purposes of its Creator.”  For instance, it is said that God wants us to be honest persons, and yet the world is absolutely bursting with deceit and fraud, and so clearly God’s will is not discovered in a great deal of social interaction.  There is no reason to think the matter is any different in the case of the natural world.  To find God in the world is a daunting intellectual task; it is no surprise then that so many authors (and not just theologians) have compared nature to a book, to be read and interpreted with all the painstaking and inconclusive labor that we apply to a text.  And it is no surprise that Mr. Gibbons is unwilling to undertake such a task, averse as he obviously is to the discipline of reading carefully.  He wants the final truth of life to be stated with the clarity and finality of Maxwell’s equations.  But that’s puerile.  Life’s last truths will always hang alluringly beyond our linguistic limitations, like the harmony of a Bach aria – beautiful, profound, and absolutely inexpressible in words.

The line which most convinced me that Mr. Gibbons’ literacy lags rather behind his loquacity was this: “How dare Signorelli claim doing theology (or any activity involving the drawing of propositional conclusions) divorced from evidence is justifiable.”  Are you serious?  You read my last post, and that’s what you took it to mean?  How could anybody have missed the point I was making, which was that science has its own unique evidentiary criteria, and that the application of those criteria across the board, to the whole of life, makes no sense at all?  Science has its standards of evidence, jurisprudence has its standards, history has its standards, and there is no philosophically justifiable way to affirm the supremacy of the scientific standard over the others.  That was the relevance of the Logical Positivists; they did try to establish the exclusive validity of scientific standards of evidence, and they failed miserably.  But Mr. Gibbons takes for granted that they succeeded, that the scientific standard of evidence is a universally applicable standard.  And that’s why he goes on – and on and on and on – in this last post about the lack of evidence for this or that, for what has to be three-quarters of the post, incurably obtuse to the fact that his standards of evidence have no place in the topics he is dealing with. 

It is not a straw-man or a figment of Signorelli’s imagination – it is a documented fact of intellectual history – that when the scientific method was first expounded in the 17^th century, it relied on a distinction between primary and secondary qualities for its success.  That precision of scientific conclusion, of which Mr. Gibbons is so enamored, derived – as Galileo and Newton knew perfectly well – from the ability of scientists to state truths about the world in mathematical form, and that in turn required the scientist to restrict his data to whatever in nature was quantifiable – namely, mass, location, extension.  Whatever features of natural objects could not be subsumed under mathematical formulations were thus ruled out prima facie as scientific evidence.  This is not to claim that “science is not interested in what our senses tell us;” it is to claim that science is only interested in some of what our senses tell us.

Of course, modern science, and even modern philosophy to a great extent, no longer acknowledges this intrinsic limitation of scientific methodology (for heaven’s sake, whole pseudo-disciplines like psychology and sociology depend on a systematic refusal to acknowledge it).  And that’s why we have such broad-scale materialism and scientism in our times.  That’s why we have things like Dawkins-Web.  But to anybody who cares about philosophical consistency, this limitation of science is very real, and places very strict criteria upon whatever we may wish to call “scientific evidence.”

Look then at what Mr. Gibbons cites as scientific evidence: “Eddington took two photographs and anyone could see a gap in their stars’ position.”  He doesn’t even realize that this is data concerning primary qualities; “position” refers to location, and location is a primary quality.  But imagine that someone looked at those photos and remarked, “I feel a sense of awe when I see these stars.”  That statement could never serve as real scientific evidence, and yet it is perfectly good evidence in literary criticism, aesthetics, or theology.  Of course, Mr. Gibbons does not deny that these disciplines have their own content; to do so explicitly would make him resemble only too obviously his nihilistic idol, Richard Dawkins.  But it doesn’t matter what he asserts; what matters is what follows from his first principles, and if his first principles are that the evidentiary criteria of science are universally applicable, then those disciplines cannot have any verifiable content, because they don’t work with the criteria of science.  Similarly, he can protest as much as he likes that his commitment to scientific standards of verification does not rob most of our familiar concepts of usefulness, but if our concepts are only legitimized by how well they serve our scientific theories (as he claimed in a previous post), then it is clear that all of our concepts which refer to other than primary qualities – again, roughly nine-tenths of all of our concepts – must be judged superfluous.

There is no hope of this point ever sinking into Mr. Gibbons.  He still thinks that you can judge Christians good or bad (or getting better or worse) without a concept of the “good,” or (I cannot tell which) he thinks that science provides such a concept uncontroversialy.  Of course, that is because “we have a fair and improving idea in our moral Zeitgeist of what is good and what is bad.”  I suppose that is the sort of profound moral insight one picks up from the pages of Sam Harris.  Now, I don’t care one way or another whether somebody thinks Christians are better on average than other people (I know quite a lot myself, and I am not nearly as impressed with their general character as Mr. Gibbons seems to think I am).  I simply want to point out, what a child could understand, which is that you cannot say that someone is good or bad (or getting better or worse) without some concept of the “good” and the “bad.”  And science cannot provide us with those concepts.  Mr. Gibbons desperately wants to do two eternally impossible things: admit nothing as true which is not scientifically verifiable and make moral judgments (in this case, condescending judgments concerning the moral character of about 1 billion people).  “But that way madness lies.”  Hence, all the crap about the Zeitgeist, etc.

And that Mr. Gibbons has passed into a form of madness (though, to be fair to him, it is a form of madness that is wonderfully widespread these days) is beyond question when we arrive towards the end of his post and find this: “It is worth bearing in mind one’s love of one’s children is a fact, so needs supporting evidence, but the evidence is there; one’s behavior towards one’s child is suggestive.”  Of course, our behavior is best observed and described by others, not by ourselves, so this statement amounts to nothing less than the claim that if we want to know if we love our children, we should ask somebody else to tell us.  That’s not nuts?  Of course it is, but I only wish to insist – one last time – that this nuttiness follows directly from the author’s uncompromisingly scientistic principles.  Its like the old philosopher’s joke about the two behaviorists in bed, and one turns to the other and asks, “so how did I enjoy it?”  Except for Mr. Gibbons, its not a joke; its the ruling ideology of his life.  To the rest of us though, its all still a joke, and by now, it’s a stale, tired joke.

That’s enough for me.  I’m sure Mr. Gibbons will want to respond to what I have written here, and I will certainly take the time to read what he has to say, but I’ve said all I want.  Like I said, I feel like I am just repeating myself now.  But I wanted to make an effort to clarify my ideas as well as I could, in the hopes of bringing some clarity on these important issues to the one or two people who may be following along with this conversation.

Since Signorelli has said all he wishes to say and I haven’t, it falls to me to have the last word of the two of us (and other posters are positively welcome to join in). This does not in itself confer an advantage on me in my effort to defend my positions should I fail to be persuasive. Let’s find out.

“the thesis of that earlier article was about genetic theories of cultural evolution.” Not so; it was an article which denied the very existence of memes, denied our understanding of population genetics was sufficient to give evolutionary accounts, and accused Dawkins of nihilism, a point on which I corrected him but to which he returns in his latest post here.

“A fine question, that, and one which is very difficult to answer.  Its one which theologians have spent infinite pains trying to get right.” The right answer is that there IS no excuse for the double standard. Good things are no more evidence for benevolent design than bad things are for malevolent design. The competition in nature is evidence for neither; nature is indifferent.

“not a question that is answerable scientifically” It certainly is; science can observe both cases are equally bad. I shall explain HOW science shows a case is bad. An argument consists of premises and conclusions, and conjunctions can express this as a single premise and a single conclusion. When does A imply B? “Imply” is an ambiguous word. Material implication is the least demanding criterion; it interprets “if A then B” as “A is false and/or B is true”. This material implication statement only needs to be true for us to say A materially implies B. It must be logically necessarily true for us to say A logically implies B. Before science illuminates an issue all we have is logicians to guide our way, with their observation more premises must be added to achieve logical validity. We can always conjure up such premises, but does evidence support them? Science judges each argument in a way that better incorporates our knowledge. It will accept the move from A to B, albeit tentatively since the criteria on which said acceptance occurs are based on tentative positions, provided that (1) evidence supports A and (2) evidence supports the material “A is false and/or B is true”. And evidence supports a statement if that statement could have been very easily falsified by the evidence but was not, or if the statement is logically deducible from such statements. And the scientific case is against any argument for which these are not so; science doesn’t just undermine that which it empirically disproves. And the scientific case is against a conclusion for which no argument exists such that the scientific case isn’t against said argument. This is why science attacks the idea the inference of benevolent design from good things is better than the inference of malevolent design from bad things; because there is no empirical evidence for any principle like that. And if it be suggested this is because the terms “good” and “bad” must first be understood, that is not the point; science undermines anything it doesn’t support, and it doesn’t support anything not explained properly.

A note: the tentative acceptance as outlined above is overturned when B is falsified. While this is often characterised as all there is to science, it only happens after the early stage above. As I discuss later, one shouldn’t mistakenly think that which is not attacked with falsification is not attacked scientifically.

“when he writes that he questions the deduction of a divine designer from the beauty of nature, and not the attribution of beauty itself, that is a fine and intelligent criticism.  But it is a logical and not a scientific question; its a critique aimed at a deductive conclusion, and not a lack of empirical data.” Not necessarily so. As explained above, where the link from A to B is inadmissible on logical grounds, that alone doesn’t tell us as much as does the more sophisticated analysis I described above.

“if Mr. Gibbons denies almost all modern atheists do dismiss theological arguments because they think something in Darwin refutes them, then I must smack the accusation of “liar” right back into his own court.” As I explain above, science can give us a much more informed perspective on the strength of the case for a position than can logic alone. What percentage of modern atheists dismiss the teleological argument (unlike Signorelli I am at pains to care which theological arguments we are discussing; consider how askew the discussion would have become had one or both of us brought the ONTOlogical argument into all this) at least in part because of natural selection (I think most modern atheists have several different concordant reasons for atheism, just as in general scientists have several different concordant reasons for their logic–wouldn’t–get–here conclusions) is an interesting question. I haven’t any position on this because I’ve not seen the one and only thing such an issue demands, and that is the statistics. If anyone has them I would love to see them. But it is not how often a position is supported by a particular method which matters to me, only whether that support is scientifically valid (which, as I explained above, is a more inclusive notion than logical validity, and it is also a more relevant one; if we limit ourselves to what is logically deducible from what we see rather than being made a lot more plausible by what we see, that’s almost all of our a posteriori knowledge gone). It is not as if either I or Signorelli talked atheist demographics previously.

“When one encounters, “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is,” does one conclude that the poet wished to be transformed into a harp?  If not, why not?  Is it not because we realize that the invocation would be nonsensical as a literal request?  Do we therefore conclude that the passage is entirely false, deceitful, the record of a Bronze Age primitive who was mentally enslaved by superstitious beliefs about string instruments?  Or rather, do we not conclude that since the passage is not sensible in any straightforward or literal manner, we must read it figuratively?” There’s a real difference between knowing up front the literal falsity of something would be known to the author in his/her time and culture and only discovering later it is literally false. Genesis is literally ridiculous not because God’s ever stopping is at odds with some unproven belief in his omnipotence, but because we have since learned from very hard work its claims about where the world comes from are not true. Those living in the Bronze age had no idea how things really happened, or that anyone ever would know enough about how things really happened as to refute their fanciful wishes. There is a very good reason Signorelli doesn’t use these methods of his to defend Aztec beliefs about deities from attack; he hasn’t arbitrarily chosen to make that his religion. And I am sick and tired of theologians pretending the fact that metaphor exists at all in human language is some sort of retroactive get out of jail free card for reclassifying any previously thought literally true statement as a statement with some other sort of truth rather than simply as mistaken. This is wrong because (1) if scientists tried that we could hang on to all sorts of rubbish, (2) once you concede literal truths aren’t present in particular places (whatever else may be present) you lose the ability to say you believe that something is literally true because the book says so, & (3) theologians and mainstream theists alike have accepted these as literal truths, whereas only immediate dismissal as in the Shelley case is justifiable. Aquinas really did believe in Adam, and all those genealogies, and a global flood, and Hell, and Jesus rising on the third day.

“he read through Aquinas and Augustine, and still comes away thinking they have nothing more to say than this parody?  It is clear he has not comprehended them.  He turns around and uses his incomprehension as proof that their arguments are vacuous.” (Edited for brevity.) If I have misunderstood what they argued, show exactly how. I’ve heard this accusation time and time again, I’ve even heard a request made to prove it, and never has any theologian even tried, when asked or otherwise. How dare Signorelli simply state, with no case, that I am wrong about what form teleological arguments actually take?

“arguments which he concedes don’t come in for scientific evaluation as “too bad and…not in need of further refutation.”” Signorelli is twisting my words here. I didn’t mean they lack scientific evaluation, only that they do not need to be scientifically refuted. I have explained in detail above how science can evaluate them much faster than that. So many ideas are dead at that stage before we even get to bothering to try to falsify them. It’s all science.

“as further “evidence” of his inability to read properly” Why the scare quotes? Does Signorelli hold evidence (as he understands the term, perhaps by the definition used by those he thinks shouldn’t be asking for it as they define it) in derision?

“I explained the Aristotelian conception of teleology, and Gibbons has the gall to refer to “conscious (ie ACTUAL) teleology.”  To theologians working in the Aristotelian tradition, non-conscious teleology was ACTUAL teleology!” (Edited for brevity.) Don’t act as if Aristotle personally choosing to give true teleology and teleonomy the same name amounts to any Christian theologians being satisfied only to claim one or both applies in our world. Every single one of those Christian theologians believed in real teleology; any claim there is literally no teleology in nature and only teleonomy would have upset them, not met with their approval. They believed in a deity who made certain things consciously, such that certain aspects of them hint at his doing that. This is not to say they cited as examples of evidence for design things they thought were designed; one could argue an analysis of life is indicative of a universe suited to its formation and maintained existence, and indeed some theologians concluded only that the universe was designed. But this is still a case of saying there are certain properties of our world, be they of the cosmos at large or ducks, which it is best to think were someone’s designs. This is the view all those theologians took. And it may be true they didn’t sound like they made a fuss over the difference between teleonomy and true teleology. But that is only because as soon as one notes the difference, one sees the case for true teleology – which they wished to make – relies on a fallacy of linguistic ambiguity, by which first teleonomy is defended and then it is pretended this amounts to defending true teleology. Signorelli literally thinks I am the one who is at fault for picking up on this, rather than them being at fault for making the mistake. To repeat, this is a criticism with a scientific dimension, because we could have found in our analysis of designed things that they tend to have the sorts of properties theologians’ arguments are reliant upon. But evidence didn’t go that way, and that is why science is against any pretence for these arguments to be any more valid materially than they are logically. It could have turned out things with certain properties turn out to be designed even when (as with organisms) they reproduce with heritability and variation, and then we could say science is kinder to theology in this one respect than is logic alone, which has far fewer friends. But this did not happen. That is of significance.

“A heart pumping in order to circulate the blood” I already explained, in my response to Signorelli’s take on my spleen example, why we have no reason to conclude the heart pumps in order to circulate the blood. What is true instead is that natural selection led to modern hearts by much the same route as spleens (see my very long explanation of that before) due to causal factors which include so–called “functions”, the strictly unintentional meaning of which I explained clearly in my last post.

“this does not mean that the heart consciously pumps, or an angel is physically pumping, or God tinkered with the aorta, or conscious intentionality can be directly observed in the evolution or the operation of the heart.  This conception of teleology does not entail the claim God directly willed every contingency of nature, so Augustine and Aquinas never claimed God is “present” everywhere in that sense.  Gibbons calls me a liar for denying this.” (Edited for brevity.) The teleological argument is simply that the properties of the heart or some properties of the world in which it has the properties known as its functions (see the above and a previous post for what that means and why it lacks intentionality) make the most sense if designed. I am perfectly aware which of the two options one picks can vary according to the theologian. I never said they thought God willed all properties of nature, though I did ask a challenging question of how you decide which ones are which, and Signorelli blames me for the fact there is no adequate response to this. I also never claimed anyone thought God present everywhere in that sense. And the only reason I ever called Signorelli a liar was for pretending his article was about unconscious teleology and not theology as a whole.

“that intentional will is outside of this world (hence, not observable, not provable by empirical evidence)” You see the wind by its effects, not the wind itself. The wind is in our world, but that is not the point. Either there is evidence to support a hypothesis or there isn’t. I am not asking to see God the way I cannot see the wind. I ask for differences in the empirical predictions of theism and strong atheism (ordinary atheism is not a claim but a lack of belief) such that, when we test those predictions, theism comes out ahead. It is the fault of theism, not of me, that this has not happened.

“not contestable by evolutionary biology, because all that can do (all any science can do) is call into question the way things are in the world.” Even if a god is not in our bubble of space–time, said bubble will look very different if that god intervenes in it than if not. That is why science can still test the idea. But to repeat, science has a case against anything the evidence does not support, even if the evidence also does not oppose it, or even can’t do either in principle.

“evolutionary biology does not call into question the fact that nature is replete with finality defined as Aquinas defined it” As I’ve already explained, Aquinas defining finality as teleonomy rather than teleology was an exercise in the fallacy of linguistic ambiguity, since he actually believed in real teleology, which is what the science challenges.

“Christians are playing football, you are playing checkers, and yet you still think you’re winning the game.” I am playing a game called intellectual honesty. Christians are not. Signorelli certainly isn’t.

“many authors (and not just theologians) have compared nature to a book, to be read and interpreted with all the painstaking and inconclusive labor that we apply to a text.  And it is no surprise that Mr. Gibbons is unwilling to undertake such a task, averse as he obviously is to the discipline of reading carefully.  He wants the final truth of life to be stated with the clarity and finality of Maxwell’s equations.  But that’s puerile.  Life’s last truths will always hang alluringly beyond our linguistic limitations, like the harmony of a Bach aria – beautiful, profound, and absolutely inexpressible in words.” Science is painstaking and laborious in all it does, including Maxwell’s equations, which are by the way wrong whenever particle–antiparticle annihilation or creation occurs in which the particle is charged. That Signorelli cites them as an example of finality goes to show that his reason for being untrustworthy of science is his thinking it achieves finality in certain areas and demands everyone else follow suit. Instead mathematics finds finality and science does not. Indeed, maybe one day evidence supporting theism really will come to light. He also has certainty, on the basis of no evidence, that what it means for a Bach aria to be beautiful and profound and why this is so will never, ever be answerable with recourse to scientific knowledge. Why should we find this more convincing than Augustus Comte’s claim in the nineteenth century scientists will never know the composition of stars? Comte knew nothing of elements’ line spectra, and Signorelli may know less than others do today (and certainly less than the neurologists of the distant future; none of us today know what they will) about what goes on in our brains when we hear music, how that correlates with what goes on in our brain at other times we are approving, why some people amazingly don’t like Bach, why evolution favoured the brain phenotypes I just mentioned, and so on. For now, it suffices to say we don’t love Bach because it’s beautiful; it’s beautiful because we love it, which in turn is so for other reasons. The same could be said of the sweetness of sugar. The problem is not that there is a dimension to our lives science cannot touch; the problem is that science reveals we have misunderstood that dimension, and it may in time illuminate this matter even further. Oh, and one more thing – none of this in any way is a reason to take theism more seriously!

““How dare Signorelli claim doing theology (or any activity involving the drawing of propositional conclusions) divorced from evidence is justifiable.”  Are you serious?  You read my last post, and that’s what you took it to mean?  How could anybody have missed the point I was making, which was that science has its own unique evidentiary criteria, and that the application of those criteria across the board, to the whole of life, makes no sense at all?” So Signorelli seriously contends there is evidence for the conclusions of theologians, just not the same sort of evidence scientists use to draw their conclusions? What nonsense. The entire case for theological positions is always fallacious arguments whose premises confound the matter further by not standing up to scrutiny – sometimes being refutable, but always lacking empirical merit. And science’s notion of evidence is wide enough to accept the cases made in jurisprudence and history, and “science” as understood by those who think otherwise – with the lab coats and the Bunsen burners – has in fact improved the practices of jurisprudence and history, with such things as DNA tests and carbon dating. Science doesn’t object to the nature of the evidence they use, though in some cases it has a few critical points to make; we know, for example, our traditional views on the extent to which eyewitness testimony is reliable are a little too generous, and that lawyers in using DNA evidence often don’t understand there is a (possibly very large) difference between the probability of a client’s innocence given DNA evidence and the probability of that DNA evidence given a client’s innocence; and sometimes we prove historians have misdated something. But for the most part history and jurisprudence know what they’re talking about and science recognises this. The problem is theology has no merits at all to the case that it makes.

“Gibbons takes for granted that they [the Logical Positivists] succeeded, that the scientific standard of evidence is a universally applicable standard.” Signorelli knows so little of what the scientific standard of evidence is – namely, let’s just have any evidence at all! – he may misunderstand what I demand of all disciplines in asking it be met. But he cannot claim to know I think the positivists succeeded; in fact, I am as ready to critique them as anyone is, for I understand what they actually said, and it was a notion of which propositions are meaningful that doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny. Signorelli shouldn’t pretend I favour those philosophers, as I already said I don’t.

“that’s why he goes on in this last post about the lack of evidence for this or that, obtuse to the fact his standards of evidence have no place in the topics he is dealing with.” (Edited for brevity.) How dare Signorelli say this when I explicitly granted certain things he imagined I did not think pass as evidence in fact do. We’re not talking about jurisprudence or history here or which types of evidence are most useful in investigating different questions about the world; we’re talking   about the fact that on no notion of evidence whatsoever does theology work.

“documented fact of intellectual history that when the scientific method was first expounded in the 17^th century, it relied on a distinction between primary and secondary qualities” Never mind what Francis Bacon or René Descartes or John Locke said about the scientific method, or what the actual scientists themselves didn’t. (You won’t find a discussion like that in Newton, for example.) Never mind which qualities are primary and which secondary and who cares. It is a fact, here and now, that science is very different from what it was in the 17^th century, and now it has grown up and knows how to understand any form of evidence.

“Whatever features of natural objects could not be subsumed under mathematical formulations were thus ruled out prima facie as scientific evidence.” No–one who ever said that added that they thought scientific evidence was the only kind to be valid in any context. After all, Galileo was a theist. I do not define this type of evidence or that as scientific; I define science in terms of what it does with evidence, all evidence. It is as a result of this way of defining science I have good reason to say its standards are universal.

“whole pseudo-disciplines like psychology and sociology depend on a systematic refusal to acknowledge it [by it, Signorelli means an insistence on mathematical methods and relying on the 17^th century distinction between primary and secondary qualities]” Psychology and sociology, like any subject, produce numerous claims of which many are not justified by the evidence. Michael Blume’s recent work on the sociology of religion comes to mind. On the other hand, there are some successes in these areas. It is unfair to dismiss either as pseudo–disciplines. What is really bizarre is that a systematic refusal to acknowledge the very same standards Signorelli systematically refuses to acknowledge for theology is the only point he cites in favour of calling these things pseudo–disciplines, a title he would not give to theology. And the reason theology is not a true discipline whereas psychology and sociology at their best are is because theology goes further by also refusing to acknowledge any of the more inclusive standards of evidence I have been discussing.

““Eddington took two photographs and anyone could see a gap in their stars’ position.”  He doesn’t even realize that this is data concerning primary qualities; “position” refers to location, and location is a primary quality.” I realized it, but I didn’t care. Science now isn’t the same as science in the 17^th century.

“imagine that someone looked at those photos and remarked, “I feel a sense of awe when I see these stars.”  That statement could never serve as real scientific evidence, and yet it is perfectly good evidence in literary criticism, aesthetics, or theology.” But evidence of what? Is it evidence those stars, or their universe, or its laws, or its constants, are down to a designing agent? No, and nor is any other thing one can say about the stars, be it encodable in discussions of primary qualities, secondary ones, or something else altogether.

“his nihilistic idol, Richard Dawkins.” Why think Dawkins is my idol, and why think – as Signorelli did in his memes article last year, only to be corrected by me and ignore said correction completely – Dawkins is a nihilist? He has stated many times what he values and why, and has thereby shown he is no nihilist, whatever else may be said about the quality of his values or his case for them.

“what matters is what follows from his first principles, and if his first principles are that the evidentiary criteria of science are universally applicable, then those disciplines cannot have any verifiable content, because they don’t work with the criteria of science.” My first principles are that our beliefs, because they are beliefs about what is true, ought to be formed and revised by methods which take the most care we can manage to make the truth of claims and the consequences this has in our world and for our senses the basis for what we end up believing. And there is no sense in which theology has yet passed muster on this.

“if our concepts are only legitimized by how well they serve our scientific theories” No; claims are only legitimized by how well they succeed empirically. Concepts are a wholly other matter.

“He still thinks that you can judge Christians good or bad (or getting better or worse) without a concept of the “good,” or (I cannot tell which) he thinks that science provides such a concept uncontroversialy.” For the record, we can judge goodness much the same way as we judge health. Health is not as tightly defined a concept as electromagnetism. Dying at the age of 60 is now nowhere near as tolerable as was dying at the age of 40 only a century ago. There may come a time when an inability to run a marathon aged 200 is as much a sign of decrepitude as today is the inability to run up the stairs at age 20 without sweating or getting out of breath. None of this means there isn’t a profound difference between being alive and healthy, alive and unhealthy, and dead; and similarly we cannot pretend limitations of our knowledge about ethics amount to us not knowing anything about it well enough to use facts about it as premises in analyses. We know it is wrong to murder people. We know also Christians aren’t less likely to do it.

“I am not nearly as impressed with their general character as Mr. Gibbons seems to think I am” I never said Signorelli thought of Christians as moral superiors to non–Christians, only that their being so is a common (though not universal) belief in Christianity which science has refuted.

“you cannot say that someone is good or bad (or getting better or worse) without some concept of the “good” and the “bad.”  And science cannot provide us with those concepts.” It is not science’s job to provide us with concepts. It is science’s job to notice when a claim has failed to meet every last one of the following criteria, and then moan about it:

(1) We know what the claim means well enough to infer its empirical implications;

(2) It passes the tests I outlined earlier;

(3) It has resisted falsification despite prudent efforts which could have falsified it.

“Gibbons desperately wants to do two eternally impossible things: admit nothing as true which is not scientifically verifiable and make moral judgments (in this case, condescending judgments concerning the moral character of about 1 billion people).” There is nothing condescending about calling Christians and non–Christians moral equals. (It is true some statistics paint Christians in a worse light than this, but we don’t yet know if this is due to Christianity or something correlating with it such as poverty or low education.) As for the idea one cannot make scientifically testable (NOT verifiable; unlike positivists, I do not discuss verifiability, and know when to settle for ideas not being falsified) claims about ethics, I need only point out that (1) science tells us when we cannot have it both ways, e.g. by showing As and Bs overlap and therefore cannot attract incompatible exceptionless moral qualities, and (2) as we learn more about the consequences of our decisions, ethics becomes in the Zeitgeist much more consequentialist than deontological, and (3) consequentialism has an immediate connection with science.

““It is worth bearing in mind one’s love of one’s children is a fact, so needs supporting evidence, but the evidence is there; one’s behavior towards one’s child is suggestive.”  Of course, our behavior is best observed and described by others, not by ourselves, so this statement amounts to nothing less than the claim that if we want to know if we love our children, we should ask somebody else to tell us.” Signorelli’s conclusion is fallacious. I never said this was the only way we know we love our children. I deliberately chose to discuss the most public evidence. However, there is plenty of evidence only known to the person who feels the love. To show why this counts as evidence in an empirical sense, I’ll need to talk in a bit more detail about how our senses work. While most philosophers are happy to talk about our vision of the world around us, they seldom talk about our sense of the carbon dioxide level in our bloodstream, from which we know when we must breathe heavily. This is a sense in the same way as is vision. Admittedly we do not think in terms of carbon dioxide, but we don’t think in terms of photons either. What makes this sense different from vision is how much of an effort one has to experimentally go to if one wishes to access the same data about another person’s body as they themselves can. Our internal senses are still empirical; they can even still be made a matter of public evidence, but it’s nowhere near as easy as everyone staring at the same corner of the room. We have quite a lot of these internal senses. These include our detecting various neurotransmitters. It is only because we detect them we feel certain things. (Whether or not a brain is operating normally, when such detection occurs those mental states do too, whereas otherwise they don’t.) How do I know I love someone? The same way I know if my blood has too much carbon dioxide.

Good God, you people do go on.  Between Gibbons's endless snooty positivism and Signorelli's tortuous mental contortions, there's enough hot air in this thread to make the Hindenburg explode three times over.

(And incidentally, Signorelli, you're quite the heartbreaker.   Here I've been, article after article, trying to goad you into a response, and instead you ignore me for some chump from the "noted nihilist Richard Dawkins" thread.   I'm going to cry go myself to sleep now.)

I'll only add two nuggets of food-for-thought to this conversation, as I don't think I have a novel in me like you two do:

1.) When you say that a materialistic worldview informed by Darwinism "begs the question," you write:

A naturalistic account of events, evolutionary or otherwise, is complete only if there is in fact no supernatural dimension to those events, a possibility which, as we have seen, cannot be precluded by stating the “brute, mechanistic” facts with ever so much accuracy. And if there is such a dimension – if natural events are unfolding in a manner consistent with the purposes of a transcendent mind – then this is quite clearly the most interesting thing about those events. So an account that omits this dimension is anything but complete.

Signorelli, in my view, is only right if the burden of proof is with the scientists -- that is, that they must prove the nonexistence of a metaphysical or ideal realm.   If that's the case, then I suppose Signorelli is right and it's circular logic to say that nature operating on its own precludes a transcendent mind directing it.   This is because an observable natural order only proves the existence of a natural order.  But, then again, if the burden of proof lies with the idealist rather than the materialist (which to me sounds more reasonable), then what you're left with is support for the existence of a natural order...and nothing more.  Certainly not that there's a guiding hand directing it toward its teleological end -- unless you already come into the argument believing in that guiding hand for other reasons.

Also, the "natural order" is, I suspect, in large part an illusion caused by the action and decay of many, many tiny mechanical forces that have always been in motion and always will be -- that they interact with one another and move all at once gives the illusion of order, but really it's all chance and entropy.   This is not an original take, and Signorelli pre-empts it with this:

[I]f there is no directing intelligence behind nature, the teleology which we discover there is illusory, but since it is impossible that it is illusory (since, for instance, we find it impossible to speak about nature without drawing upon teleological language), then there must be an intelligence behind nature 

See, your argument hinges upon the fact that natural order cannot be illusory and is in fact real, beyond reasonable doubt (to co-opt another lawyerly phrase).   But your argument toward that, if I'm reading your parenthetical statement right, is that it cannot be an illusion because we talk about it as having some "end."   Firstly, I'm no scientist, but I'd dispute the claim that no one familiar with fundamental natural sciences such as quantum physics has ever seriously stated that the universe operates on processes that have no intrinsic purpose and just are.   I'm pretty sure they have, because I've read them.   The other thing is that, even if humans can't for whatever reason talk about nature without talking about its "end," that doesn't say anything about nature -- it says something about us, and our need for purpose in life.   And just because we want something to exist doesn't mean that it does.

2.) In the comments thread, you make an eloquent point against Mr. Gibbons about how attempts to "prove" this or that about the Bible are flawed because they deny the inherently "literary" (or, to use your word, "pre-critical") nature of the Bible's text.   In other words, the Bible uses myth, metaphor, allegory, and other devices to say something fundamental about God and humanity through its stories, and that the literal truth of the stories is not the important part of Biblical analysis.  As a fellow literary man, I cannot help but agree enthusiastically with your point -- but, just as scientific positivism provides an insufficient method for reading and understanding the Bible, a "literary" reading of the Bible proves nothing except that the Bible is a remarkable piece of literature.  

No one needs to tell me that literature can be a transformative, life-affirming thing -- but that doesn't mean that it gives me any reason to believe the content of that literature is real, much less worthy of worship.  You still would need to make a leap of faith to really believe that the God of the Bible is, then, wouldn't you?   And that's a leap many nonreligious people, including myself, are hesitant to make; in my opinion, it brings you no closer to certainty or happiness except for the promise (which is more a hope than a belief, in my experience) of eternal life and universal order to stymie our fears of death and meaninglessness, respectively.

Alexander, I am not a positivist; as I have repeatedly explained, if I were a positivist I'd think the empirically untestable was meaningless, which I don't. So kindly stop misrepresenting me. And the simplest reason why the burden of proof is on him, not me, is Russell's teapot. And don't ignore in the teleology issue my example of how to remove teleological language; it's definitely possible. Lastly, if you agree with Signorelli that the existence of literary non-literal aspects of human language somehow gets the Bible off the hook for every error in it, you must remember you only have the right to assume a literally wrong comment wasn't intended literally if authors in that culture at that time could know it was literally wrong. Those in the Bronze age Middle East couldn't know the Earth's life took aeons to form rather than a week.