Superstition and scienceMarch 4, 2009 — Deacon Duncan
Understandably enough, Jayman continues to object to my use of the term “superstition.”
Deacon Duncan, it would be more fruitful to point out errors in logic or reasoning and be done with it. No need to mess around with a term that is often merely used by group A to put down group B for having different beliefs.
I quite understand, and am more than a little sympathetic. I am not using the term “superstition” out of a lazy desire to merely put anybody down. Rather, I am compelled to use the term precisely because it does refer to a practice that constitutes erroneous reasoning. I need to be able to say that it is fallacious “to claim to have found the cause of X when all you have really done is to attribute X to Y, via some kind of magical version of cause and effect, without showing any demonstrable or even describable connection between X and Y.” And I need to be able to express that idea—everything between the quote marks—concisely. The term “superstition” simply seems the most appropriate choice. If someone would care to suggest an alternative term that would express this idea more clearly, I’d use that. But I don’t know of any right off hand.
Anyone can continually ask how A caused B and B caused C and so on and eventually stump the person they are questioning. I’m sure you’re well aware of this when it comes to evolution and gaps in the fossil record (we simply don’t know the full tree of life). Whether we are dealing with natural or supernatural causes there will always be gaps where we are uncertain how A caused B. The fact that this happens is not sufficient to disregard A, whether A is natural or supernatural.
He’s referring to our earlier discussion, in which I pointed out that superstition fails to tell us anything about how, say, God would have cured Bernadette’s tethered spinal cord. Jayman’s reply is that we can guess that, say, He might have done it by disconnecting the tissue attachments that were pulling on the spinal cord. But notice, he’s still not describing what God actually did. Yes, disconnecting the attachments would indeed have the natural effect of relieving her symptoms. But what does that have to do with God? What is it that God would have actually done, to produce the disconnection?
The part that’s superstitious is the part that asserts a connection between the effects we observe (the relief of Bernadette’s symptoms) and whatever magic God is supposed to have used to produce those effects. This isn’t a question of endlessly moving the goalposts, as in Michael Behe’s famous demand that evolutionists provide every single individual organism involved in the evolution of the flagellum. This isn’t a case where there’s an ever-increasing body of verifiable, empirical evidence that’s being countered with an ever growing demand for still higher standards. This is a case where there is no evidence connecting God to the effects that are being attributed to Him, and no meaningful, verifiable specification of what that connection would consist of even if it did exist.
In the case of Michael Behe, for instance, you can describe how evolution could produce the flagellum by co-opting the structures of an early version of a Type-III Secretory System, and in fact a lot of work has been done in the decades since Darwin’s Black Box was first published that show how the ordinary, natural operation of evolutionary mechanisms would indeed produce structures that appear to be irreducibly complex, and that also show a number of real-world examples of species with simpler precursors to structures and systems that Behe describes as irreducible. That’s why Behe has to keep moving the goalposts. If he doesn’t, the rising tide of evidence will swamp them.
Conversely, in the case of Bernadette’s healing, the only thing that’s moving is Jayman’s specification of precisely where the miracle would allegedly have taken place. Were the tissue attachments disconnected? (That is, after all, what the surgeons were trying to do via the surgeries.) Or were her symptoms just mysteriously relieved, without actually changing the underlying condition? We don’t know at this point, but regardless of where the miracle allegedly happened, there’s nothing we can say, even theoretically, about how God would have been involved in producing the effects we can observe. It is God’s black box, not Darwin’s, and it’s a consistent blind spot. Whenever you try to describe exactly how God could or would be connected, you lose the ability to describe what this connection would be, beyond a simple, magical poof.
Now, granted, science has a few blind spots of its own. We don’t know exactly what causes gravity, for example. We can observe it. We can measure it. We can predict how it will operate in various circumstances. But we don’t know what really causes it, except that Einstein’s work seems to show some sort of connection with the curvature of spacetime.
The difference between science and superstition, however, is that when we don’t know what causes gravity, we don’t say, “The Flying Spaghetti Monster causes gravity.” That would be superstitious, you see—attributing an observed effect to some magical cause without being able to demonstrate or describe the connection between the two. (But isn’t it easier and just as accurate to say simply, “That would be superstitious”?)
So no, it’s not moving the goal posts to point out that superstitious explanations always fail to demonstrate any actual connection between the cause they propose and the effect they’re trying to explain. Nor is it a Beggar’s Argument, where you keep asking for more until the other person can no longer meet your demands. The same gap, between God and the “miraculous” effect, is always there and always in the same place. You can make the “miracle” jump around by asserting different consequences of the miracle, but the gap between God and the first observable consequence is always there. And the same goes for any other superstitious attribution (lucky rabbits feet, black cats, spilled salt, etc).
And yes, I do understand that it’s rather insulting to hear the term “superstitious” applied to one’s conclusions. It’s insulting, because we know it’s a logical fallacy to do what superstition does. If the shoe fits, however, then the shoe fits. We can either stop attributing things to God unless and until we can actually demonstrate the connection we claim exists between the two, or we can admit that our attributions are indeed superstitious. I’m not using the term arbitrarily; I’m applying it specifically to cases where the situation matches the definition precisely. And as long as people keep on attributing things to God superstitiously, I’m going to keep on calling it what it is.
Nor do I believe that we ought to substitute some more palatable term, some euphemism that implies it’s perfectly ok to indulge yourself in this kind of illogical and self-deceptive reasoning. I once read that the term “moron” was intended as a kinder, gentler alternative to the term “idiot,” but quickly acquired its own negative connotations because stupid really is stupid. It’s the same way with superstition: the problem is not that the term is insulting, the problem is that the practice is worthless and misleading.
Superstitious is what superstitious does. I say we should all call it superstition, and abstain from practicing it. Agreed?