http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/reviews/ Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:25:12 +0000 43200 Opinion and analysis. http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/reviews/the-grand-design-by-stephen-hawking-r124 David Misialowski (2010)

A Myth for Our Time

In his new book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking has generated the most heat and light for his statement, found on the next-to-last page, that “it is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

But for some people, a more controversial statement is found on Page One, in the second paragraph: “Philosophy is dead.”

If God is unnecessary and philosophy is dead, the field is clear for science to explain the world: to answer all the age-old questions like: “What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator?”

These are the questions Hawking proposes to tackle in his book, armed only with science, because, as he writes: “Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery.”

But then, in the book’s first sixty pages or so, Hawking mainly philosophizes, as he surveys the history of science and the philosophy of science. He concludes emphatically: ”There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality.” The italics are his. What is this if not a philosophical stance? Since we do not have direct access to reality, Hawking explains, we must then employ what he calls “model-dependent realism” to build pictures of the world.

I think Hawking does not really want to suggest that all of philosophy is dead. I think he means that philosophy of a certain sort is dead: philosophy that takes little or no account of scientific findings. And there is such philosophy. Some metaphysicians insist that metaphysics can do just fine without reference to scientific findings or observation of any sort. Other metaphysicians disagree, and so this is a debate within the field of metaphysics itself.

Then, of course, there are scientists who insist that metaphysics itself is just bunk: like theology, these scientists would claim, it is a field without a proper object of study. I don’t think Hawking is among the scientists who would claim this, because otherwise he wouldn’t talk so much about metaphysics in his book.

Hawking writes that under model-dependent realism, there is no single model that can explain the universe. There are, instead, a series of models that overlap. That’s fine, he says, provided that where the models overlap, they make the same predictions. If they don’t, one or more of the models is flawed. Hence Newtonian and General Relativistic models can account for big objects in the world, and quantum mechanical models can account for little things like subatomic particles.

The tricky part, it seems, is where these models overlap. And so far there is no model that accounts for the overlap of quantum mechanics and general relativity, for example. This would seem to be a bit of a sticking point if, as Hawking suggests, we are on the cusp of obtaining the scientific holy grail: the theory of everything.

But the theory of everything that Hawking describes is not the TOE as traditionally conceived, when it was thought that a single equation – a string of numbers that could be written on a T-shirt – would eventually be discovered (invented?) to explain all of physics.

The new Theory of Everything, Hawking writes, is something called M-Theory: As described above, M-Theory is a network of theories, or models, which model different domains of reality, but which will end up making the same predictions where they overlap.

But Hawking also writes of M-theory: “No one seems to know what the ‘M’ stands for, but it may be ‘master,’ ‘miracle’ or ‘mystery.’ It seems to be all three. People are still trying to decipher the nature of M-theory, but that may not be possible.” I suppose many people might feel that if this is the case, it could perhaps be premature to declare either God or philosophy dead, especially when M theory is deemed miraculous (God) and mysterious (philosophy)!

M theory derives from string theory. It describes a world of eleven space time dimensions, in which all but the 3+1 dimensions that we normally experience are curled up into tiny little balls far too small to see or experience.

The mathematics of the theory says that the way these minuscule dimensions are curled up accounts for the “apparent” laws of physics that we experience. So our laws of physics, Hawking explains, are not laws at all, but simply incidental consequences of the way that the extra dimensions are curled up under M theory.

However, M theory requires a successful formulation of models that fall under the domain of quantum field theory. I will skip the details, pointing the reader to book, in which Hawking guides the layperson through this abstruse terrain. Quantum field theory is an effort to make those “overlaps” between classical and quantum theories coincide, as required under Hawking’s model-dependent realism.

The first problem is that this effort is so far incomplete. There still is no quantum description of gravity, for instance. Hawking covers all this. But the second problem is that string theory itself, according to many scientists, is not science. Hawking does not broach this subject, does not meet this objection, and it seems a curious omission.

Why is string theory not science, according to some scientists? Because it makes predictions that can’t be tested. Probably they can’t be tested even in principle; this also makes the theory unfalsifiable. For example, to “see” these other rolled-up dimensions would require energies produced by a supercollider that is about the size of the Milky Way galaxy. We are not going to build any such machine, obviously.

Other scientists like string theory because it provides elegant mathematical descriptions of the world, and all so-far valid theories do seem to have elegant mathematical descriptions. The idea here appears to be that we should take string theory to be true because the math is so elegant!

All of this, of course, raises troubling philosophical problems.

Still, if we grant that string theory can be science, and if the effort to model quantum field theory succeeds and if M theory falls out of all that, what is the upshot?

According to M theory, the way that the dimensions are curled up to instantiate our apparent “laws” can be modeled a number of different ways. That is an understatement. The number of ways that universes can be modeled under this theory turns out to be on the order of 10 to the power of 500. And from this, evidently, we should conclude that all these different universes actually exist, and that each has its own unique physical laws.

But why should we take it that all these universes actually exist, as opposed to being useful fictions? Hawking does not directly address this issue. I take it that one answer would be that there is no reason to expect that our universe alone should exist, if there is nothing special about its particular laws. Why should it be that our own utterly contingent set of laws be the sole universe in which the “blue touch paper” is lit?

It’s a fair question, but the question alone does not establish the actual physical reality of all these other universes. And if no empirical evidence can be found for their existence – if their existence simply falls out of the math – then we have another troubling philosophical problem. It’s funny how a discipline deemed to be dead on Page One of this book keeps kicking throughout its pages, like a lively corpse that never received the telegram informing it of its own demise.

As to other universes, there seem to be at least a couple of different kinds of them in Hawking’s picture of reality. Based on Feynman’s sum-over histories solution to the peculiar behavior of quantum particles in the two-slit experiment, we are invited to believe that the universe takes all possible histories, even as a quantum particle in the experiment takes all possible paths to the detector screen. So every possible universe exists, and each universe takes every possible history that it can.

A new problem arises, though, in that Feynman’s sum-over histories is an interpretation of QM. Hence, it’s philosophical. (There’s that word again.) There are other, different interpretations. As Hawking explains, the Feynman interpretation is perfectly consistent with a different view, that quantum particles have no properties until they are observed. Both interpretations yield the same results, and as Hawking notes, if two different models of reality make the same predictions, then both models are acceptable.

But surely there is an ontological difference between a particle taking all possible paths to a detector and taking no paths to a detector, because it lacks properties when unobserved.

So the problem is that if both models are fine, under model-dependent realism, because they yield the same predictions (and they do), but if each model requires a totally different ontology, one simply can’t say anything about the real world. The idea that there are multiple histories and universes may thus be nothing but a useful fiction. And Hawking clearly understands all this, since he himself is endorsing model-dependent realism. But his own model of QM has a competing model that is inconsistent with the ontology that he is promoting. Hawking does not address this contradiction.

The picture that Hawking paints of reality is a mind-blowing one but, given that it is model-dependent, its presumed ontology might well be fictitious. It consists of the aforementioned multiple universes and multiple histories. There are versions of reality in which electrons are as massive as golf balls, and in which gravity is a stronger force than electro-magnetism rather than the other way around, as in our world. There may be a universe in which the moon is made of Roquefort cheese, Hawking writes.

Hawking says that the picture that science gives us of this New Reality is somehow “top down” and not “bottom up.” Once cannot, because of the indeterministic nature of quantum mechanics, start with initial conditions and calculate future outcomes (expect as probability distributions). Instead, one must start with present conditions, and reconstruct the past from the present. This is a topsy-turvy world in which the delayed-choice two-slit quantum experiment shows that human observations made in the present can actually retroactively make the past be what it was. “We create history by our observation, rather than history creating us,” Hawking writes.

The cosmological argument — the idea that the universe was created by God — is circumvented in this picture of reality. That’s because in the cosmology Hawking describes, the universe did not have a beginning. This does not mean that time extends infinitely into the past. It means rather that like space, time has no edge: it is finite but unbounded. He likens the so-called beginning of the universe to a location on earth like the South Pole, and says to ask “What happened before time began?” is akin to asking “What lies south of the South Pole?” The question has no meaning. Because of this, he writes, the entire universe, and all its different quantum histories, is a self-contained object in which scientific laws alone, deriving from M theory, dictate the nature of the various versions of reality. No supernatural creator and no outside intervention is required to make reality be what it is.

It should be noted that none of this is new, not even for Hawking, who used to use the North Pole rather than the south in explicating his no-boundary proposal for time. What is new is the packaging, bringing all the latest conjectures of science together in one handy-dandy package tied up with a bright ribbon in the form of nice pictures and some funny cartoons.

In the penultimate chapter, Hawking talks about fine-tuning. Our universe is fine-tuned for life, in the sense that if any number of delicate parameters, or physical laws, were tweaked, the conditions for making life as we know it possible would be removed. As Hawking explains, the weak anthropic principle states that we must observe a universe whose properties are consistent with our existence, for otherwise we would not exist to observe anything at all.

Why is the universe fine-tuned? It’s because there are so many of them, Hawking says. With ten to the power of five hundred universes floating about, each with its own different physical laws, it’s unsurprising that at least one of them – our own – would randomly and contingently just happen to take the parameters making life possible.

The fine-tuning of our universe, as Hawking explains, has often been invoked as a theistic argument. The idea is that since it is outlandishly unlikely that all the free parameters would randomly fall in just the right pattern to assure the possibility of life, it is much more parsimonious to assume that a designer, presumably God, endowed the parameters with the values that they have, so that life would arise. The multiverse idea presumably puts paid to this notion. Given enough universes, sooner or later one of them is bound, by chance alone, to take life-permitting values.

There is a thick literature on the fine-tuning issue and various versions of the multiverse. I’ll just mention in passing that some people who have studied these topics contend that the existence of a multiverse does not, in fact, account for the fine-tuning of our universe. The reason for this, I take it, is that the probabilities of each universe having the values that they do are independent of one another, and hence once cannot say that just because a billion universes will not support life, it’s somehow more likely that the next universe in line will support it. If the odds are, say, a billion to one against any particular universe having life-supporting parameters, then those odds remain the same for each universe no matter how many other universes exist.

At the end of the penultimate chapter, Hawking writes: “But is M Theory unique, or demanded by any simple logical principle? Can we answer the question, ‘Why M Theory?’” The question seems to be accompanied by a dramatic drum roll and a flourish of trumpets, for now we are getting down to the nitty gritty, which amounts to: why is there something rather than nothing?

The final chapter is short. Mostly it’s about Conway’s Game of Life, which demonstrates that complex properties can arise from simple rules, with a detour into the question of whether humans have free will. It closes with this thesis: because on a global scale the negative and positive energy of the universe cancels out, it is possible (entailed?) that universes (though not the objects within them) will spontaneously arise out of nothing in accord with M Theory. This idea isn’t new either, by the way. Victor Stenger has written extensively on this subject of universes popping into existence out of “nothing.”

But now, for me, the drum roll and flourish of trumpets is gone, replaced by the sour blat of horns. Unless I have missed a step in Hawking’s reasoning, it certainly does not seem as if he has answered the question “Why M Theory,” or the bigger question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I could be mistaken about this. Perhaps the defect lies with my reading comprehension, and not with his argument. But for me, what we end up with is: “M Theory said, Let there be light, and there was light.”

Hawking spices the text with allusions to ancient human mythology, which put Man at the center of the cosmos as its reason and purpose. Implicitly we are invited to contrast such anthropocentric tales with the disinterested wisdom supposedly underlying the discoveries of modern science. Yet Hawking and other scientists are constructing a modern myth. A myth does not mean a “lie.” It just means a narrative, a conceptual scheme that gives order and purpose to our experience. And even while modern science beginning with Copernicus has been steadily evicting Man from the literal “center of the universe,” man remains at the center even under Hawking’s own schema: model-dependent realism, which of course means that realism depends on us – on the structure of our cognitive faculties, on the architecture (and limitations) of our brains, on the mediation and interpretation of sense data by our mysterious minds. We see through a glass darkly because we are the glass.]]> Sat, 11 Sep 2010 21:37:49 +0000 a1c3ae6c49a89d92aef2d423dadb477f http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/reviews/radical-hope-r123 Kitty Corcoran (2007)

In Radical Hope, Jonathan Lear, John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, looks at how the leader of the Crow Nation, Plenty Coups (born 1848, died 1932), guided his people through the cataclysmic loss of their traditional way of life to a new future.

Lear uses this specific example to demonstrate how people may be able to find ways to survive this type of loss. A statement of Plenty Coups' to his biographer, Frank B. Linderman, was the catalyst for Lear in thinking about this: "But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened." Lear wondered if such a statement as, "after this, nothing happened", could possibly be true and what it could mean if it were. He expresses the idea that Plenty Coups could have meant that after the disappearance of the buffalo the collective life of the Crow as it had been was finished. (Note: Lear is careful throughout to qualify what he says in this way – he does not claim to know what Plenty Coups actually meant but rather what he might have meant.) This way of looking at the past and breaking with it helped Plenty Coups to move toward the future.

Plenty Coups (a more exact translation of his Crow language name "Alaxchiiaahush" is Many Achievements) was born at the beginning of the end of the Crow Nation’s traditional tribal life. The Crow tradition of using dreams to help understand the world played a large part in how Plenty Coups was able to help the Crow people. When he was very young (nine years old), he had two dreams. The first helped him to understand how to go on after the death of his beloved older brother at the hands Sioux warriors. The second dream showed him an apocalyptic vision of the future and also suggested the tools that would help his people to navigate to an as yet unknown future harbor.

Lear's investigation of these dreams, and how they were interpreted by the tribe and by Plenty Coups, provides the focus for his theory about how people can build the hope of a future in the midst of a devastating present. He acknowledges that in the Crow tradition dreams have a religious origin. He intends that this book will allow anyone who reads it, whether from a religious perspective or not, to be able to see how the dreams helped to give Plenty Coups the kind of hope that allowed him to encourage the Crow to believe in a future where it would again be possible to live a good life.

According to Lear, Plenty Coups' response to this cultural devastation was one that positioned the Crow to succeed in any new circumstances that might arise. Plenty Coups worked out an ideal of personal courage that revolved around the Chickadee-person, a Crow icon that appeared in one of his dreams. The key attribute of the Chickadee-person is that s/he listens to others and learns from them. Incorporating this attribute allowed Plenty Coups and the Crow to be flexible in creating new definitions of courage and the good life that would suit any eventuality. While Lear concentrates mostly on Plenty Coups and the Crow, he does contrast their actions with the response of the Sioux Nation under Sitting Bull. The Sioux developed an idea of a messianic savior who would set things right by punishing the white people and allowing the Sioux to return to life as it had always been for them. By adopting this new religion, it is Lear's contention that the Sioux turned away from the future that would come in favor of a dream of the past that could never again be realized.

Lear gives, in Radical Hope, a description of the Crow's specific situation and how they handled it. I think he also wants with this book to give humans as a group the same kind of hope in the face of our inevitable future catastrophes. There are a number of societies that have lost their cultural underpinnings in the past century and the current one. While this particular group was unique in its time, place and response to the tragedy it endured, some of the ideas the Crow and Plenty Coups developed may be useful or apply to other groups, or individuals.]]> Sat, 31 Jul 2010 07:42:19 +0000 037a595e6f4f0576a9efe43154d71c18 http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/reviews/montons-seeking-god-in-science-r92 Paul Newall (2010)

Bradley Monton's new book, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, is an exercise in the principle of charity. Rather than join the chorus of critics dismissing Intelligent Design (henceforth ID) as vacuous, a religious conspiracy or pseudoscience, Monton – himself the atheist of the subtitle – attempts to develop it into the strongest form possible and see if perhaps there is anything to it after all. Although doing so may win him few admirers, he sets to the task with enthusiasm and the result is a superb work of philosophy, engaging for specialists and lay readers alike.

The main complaint at this endeavour is plainly that ID is not a scientific theory of greater or lesser repute but actually an intellectually-upgraded creationism, part of a wider programme that seeks to denigrate science and advance religion. Monton states at the outset that one of the ideas motivating his work is that "for the purposes of evaluating the doctrine of intelligent design, the cultural agenda of intelligent design proponents doesn't matter" (p12). The general principle – "bad people are capable of giving good arguments" (p13) – is obviously sound: it is ad hominem to argue otherwise and the truth or falsity of intelligent design is not logically related to its use in cultural or political debate. The religious persuasions, if any, of its proponents are also irrelevant: it should stand or fall on its own merits.

However, the principle objection to Monton's work and the complaint of ID opponents is that debates do not work in this way. Monton closes his book by saying that he cares only about "getting at the truth" (p156) but so, presumably, do both ID advocates and opponents. Monton does not wish to "change minds with bad argumentation" (p156) but perhaps what needs to be questioned is not his conviction – hopefully the truth and good arguments will ultimately trump poor arguments, employed in support of some short-term goal – but the assumption that matters are actually (or ever) decided by better arguments and approximation to truth?

Ideally, the resources and funding available to research would plentiful and easy to allocate, such that ID advocates and opponents alike would accept Monton's arguments and allow or get involved in some degree of work on ID, alongside evolutionary biology and other areas of science; in reality, programmes and departments already use whatever rhetoric they can muster to try to compete with one another and to convince governments and the public that their work deserves support over and above other possibilities. Such circumstances lead to exactly the situation we see: ID advocates seizing on Monton's work as aiding their own justifications for the validity of ID while ID opponents accuse him (wrongly but understandably) of supporting ID and having a detrimental impact on "real" science, even if both perspectives overstate the influence of a work of philosophy. In fairness to Monton, he explicitly disavows any interest in such issues and wants his book to be read on its own terms, and he is to be admired for doing so and for insisting that some people can and must be allowed to remain outside cultural debates and focus on philosophical arguments.

Although Monton spends several pages looking at arguments against evolution, he quickly concludes that they are "among the weaker arguments that proponents of intelligent design give" (p28). Responding to the charge that he gives too much credit to ID in "counting non-evolution-based arguments for a designer as intelligent design arguments", he simply concedes that readers may think this if they wish; he bounds his investigation by saying that what he is really interested in are "the non-evolution-based arguments" (p29). He reviews some of the objections to ID on the grounds that it is simply a dressed-up version of creationism or else that the posited designer has to be the Christian God, showing (rather too easily, it should be said) that these do not follow from either what the ID proponents say or from the arguments ID opponents provide. For those skeptical of ID supporting anything other than God as the designer, Monton provides directed panspermia as an option, along with the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation (p41). As with many of his arguments involving possibilities, these do not need to be true; he simply requires alternatives that might be true in order to refute the insistence that some other circumstances must obtain. Ultimately, though, none of this matters: it should be possible to consider ID as an atheist, without the accompanying belief in God and without a desire to destroy evolution or science as a whole. Since Monton is an atheist, he can certainly try.

The most interesting aspect of the book, for me, concerns the Dover court case. Monton has been severely critical of the decision of Judge John E. Jones III in his paper Is Intelligent Design Science? Dissecting the Dover Decision. Referencing Larry Laudan's earlier criticisms of attempts to oppose creationism via demarcation criteria, Monton addresses the specific criteria that Jones employed against ID. (Later in the book (p73), Monton agrees with Laudan that demarcation criteria do emotive work for us but little else, meaning that the correct response to "is ID science?" is to reject the demarcation problem altogether.)

The first of Jones's claims is that the arguments against evolution made by ID proponents have been "refuted by the scientific community". Monton responds by noting that even if this is so, it has no impact on the "positive doctrines" (p50) of ID; in other words, the “non-evolution-based arguments” Monton is concerned with. More importantly, even if these arguments were also refuted, it simply does not follow that a refuted doctrine is no longer science (Monton gives the example of Newtonian physics, still taught in schools long after being refuted).

Monton's reply to Jones's second assertion, that Michael Behe's argument for irreducible complexity is flawed, follows largely from the first. That a theory may have errors or have been refuted altogether is no argument that it is unscientific or that the same non-evolution-based arguments for ID are hopelessly flawed. Monton spends little time on these two points because the decision does not warrant anything further.

Monton's third criticism relates to Jones's stipulation that science employs methodological naturalism. Monton provides a story – an implausible scenario, by his own admission, but a possible one nonetheless – according to which God is apparently using Morse code to contact scientists, telling them that if they perform their experiments in a specific way then He will cause a miracle. In this story, the scientists do as they are instructed and the miracles happen. The results do not prove that God exists but, according to Monton, they provide evidence for the hypothesis that He does. Since the hypothesis is clearly testable (the miracles could fail to materialise), it follows that the claim that "Supernaturalism is not allowed" in science (p52, due to Robert Pennock at the trial) is false. (As an aside, Monton says in the notes (n44, p162) that his arguments here are "mostly original with [him]". That this site was independently discussing similar things – for example, here – is therefore nice to know.)

Monton goes on to object to the defense in the trial having not pushed Pennock to clarify his claim that Laudan endorses methodological naturalism (notwithstanding how clearly Laudan has stated his opposition to demarcation criteria like this). Monton says that the defense team "dropped the ball" (p56), an amusing analogy given that Michael Ruse has called Laudan a "Monday morning quarterback" (see here). Although Monton is correct about this, Del Ratzsch's argument about the inherent incompleteness of methodological naturalism might have been better employed here. Ratzsch has argued (see here) – and I have expanded (here) – that adopting naturalism methodologically either means our understanding of the world is inevitably skewed (if it turns out that there are non-natural elements to it, whatever they might be) or else reduces to philosophical naturalism if we assume (or declare) that science can only deal with the natural. Pennock seems to have had something similar in mind (pp64-65) – a "two truths" approach that I referred to in the linked discussion – in which we accept the skew. Monton registers his unease with this resolution of the difficulty and it is interesting that he does not interpret Pennock’s remarks as implying something akin to empirical adequacy or a form of instrumentalism, even though he references Bas van Fraassen on several occasions. Monton might also have used another argument: there simply is no "scientific method" employed in science, as opposed to methods, so invoking methodological naturalism when no one really knows what the methodology is supposed to be (or, for that matter, a coherent definition of what naturalism is) does not seem a very scientific approach.

Another issue with Jones's proclamation is that it is not clear a priori what will come of adopting an hypothesis, even one involving the supernatural. Discussing Pennock's book Tower of Babel, Monton notes that if there is a supernatural cause or influence present, this does not imply stopping at "God did it". He also quotes Ken Miller in chapter 3 (p112), who argues that a theistic science would "cease to explore, because it already knows the answers". The problem is that this assumes that theists consider God a complete answer. Historically, scientists – or natural philosophers, more accurately – who believed in God, His creation and that God's existence could be inferred from the natural world did not cease investigating anything; instead, they sought to discover how God might have constructed the world, believing that in so doing they were granting greater glory to Him. Monton looks in particular at Newton because Pennock tries to suggest that Newton adopted methodological naturalism (p63); Monton provides a quote from Newton’s Opticks in support but really the matter is straightforward for Newton scholars (see my interview with Stephen Snobelen here): "it is now clear that some of Newton’s pre-existing theological and alchemical ideas actually helped inform some aspects of his natural philosophy or science". These kinds of motivations and influences are skimmed over in debate because the history of science fails to support anachronistic claims about the methodological ideas of early scientists and indeed actively undermines them – quite an irony given the criticism of ID advocates that they do not know enough about the subjects they get involved in.

It is in the section entitled "some somewhat plausible intelligent design arguments" that Monton begins offering reasons why ID might be more credible than the evolution-based arguments suggest. The "somewhat plausible" category includes the fine-tuning argument, the kalam cosmological argument, an argument from the very existence of life at all and the simulation argument. Each of these is explained and worked through in detail, setting out what they appear to suggest regarding design but also noting possible shortfalls or areas of concern. Monton's objective here is not to provide a definitive argument for design but to show that these arguments are "somewhat plausible" or at least not easily dismissed.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this treatment occurs with the third argument, looking at how it could be that life came about at all. Monton invokes his own discussion of the probability that life could come about in an infinite universe (see his Life is evidence for an infinite universe and his interview here) and concludes (p104) that "one shouldn't use the development of life from non-life to argue for the existence of a God-like designer". This is because his infinite universe argument suggests that any event with a non-zero probability is (almost) certain to come about, including the jump from non-life to life, however unlikely it might be. For Monton, the matter turns on an assessment of conditional probability: if we assume God exists, how likely is it that life would come about? Alternatively, given that God does not exist, how likely is life? Monton offers his own opinion that life is slightly more likely to happen given that God exists – hence a "somewhat plausible" argument – but that this likelihood is insufficient to stop him being an atheist.

The final chapter ("an extra free bonus", Monton calls it (p133)) looks at whether ID should be taught in schools. Monton considers the shortcomings of school education as it stands; after all, the presupposition behind most criticisms of teaching ID is that science education otherwise functions as it should. Monton quotes Carl Weiman at the University of Colorado, who has argued (along with plenty of other educational reformists) that improving science education "requires abandoning the longstanding and widespread assumption that understanding science means simply learning a requisite body of facts and problem-solving recipes". Monton advocates "non-proselytizing teaching", by which he means not promoting orthodoxy or an unorthodox alternative but instead seeking to develop critical reasoning via "presenting them with the issues that we as a society debate now" (p149).

Monton sets out the specifics of his ideas by considering some objections. The first is that allowing ID to be taught would be teaching religion, to which Monton replies that there is nothing explicitly or inherently religious about ID, even if it turns out that the designer really is God and no matter many ID advocates believe this. He also touches on the complaint that critical thinking – not religion – is what we should be teaching children, responding that if we want to achieve this then comparing and contrasting ID with orthodox theories would help facilitate it. Indeed, if we do not have a "bad" theory to teach in such classes, and if this "bad" theory is not expounded in sufficient detail to at least give students an idea of why it initially appears credible, then it is difficult to see how such critical thinking lessons could come about.

The second complaint is that teaching ID misrepresents the status of ID in science, granting it false credibility. Monton says that some legitimate scientists – legitimate in the sense of their accreditation, at least – support ID, but no doubt ID opponents would retort that an endorsement of ID is enough to undermine their legitimacy. Ultimately, Monton does not need to tackle this complaint: he states that he would not wish to see ID taught if the lessons "pretend that it is widely scientifically respected" or else if it receives "equal time with mainstream scientific theories". The chief requirement remains the "intellectual development of the students" (p151).

Skipping a step, the rejoinder that this would not be teaching genuine critical thinking is the fourth objection Monton looks at; that is, the claim that advocates of ID are opposed to critical thinking because it leads to the questioning of their religion, so they seek to restrict it to evolution and to creating a false impression that biologists actually believe there is something worth debating. Monton's reply here is a little weak: he wants all students – theists and atheists alike – to be challenged in school, even if it means their own beliefs are subjected to uncomfortable scrutiny, but it is unclear how this ideal translates into classroom practice. After all, ID opponents do not deny the value of critical thinking in the science classroom, but they do worry that ID-supporting teachers will skew their presentations or suggest a controversy or debate in biology where neither exist. That said, it is not at all obvious why ID-opposing teachers would not also be unsuitable and if we try to achieve control over the classroom to preclude inaccurate teaching then perhaps no one will want to teach any more?

Returning to the third concern, Monton looks at the insistence that only the current consensus should be taught as science, to which he offers two responses. The first is simple: we already fail to teach the consensus because students learn about Newtonian physics, which was shown to be false and replaced by relativity. We might protest that Newtonian physics is still truthlike in most situations a student would encounter in a science class but the point is clear enough: deciding what is taught involves more than a straightforward invoking of consensus opinion. Monton also returns to Weiman's conception of education and wants to avoid "treating science as a monolithic body of facts" (p152): teaching the consensus view most of the time need not mean doing so always. ID opponents would doubtless reply that there is already insufficient time in the curriculum, which only goes to show that tinkering around the edges of education – and even discussing the inclusion of ID in these terms – is not really enough.

The final objections are that the question of ID's validity is not really a controversy and that teaching it as such is asking too much of both students and teachers. Monton's counterarguments here are unconvincing: it may well be that some ID advocates are presenting science-based arguments for it and that more can be achieved in the classroom than we give credit for, but Monton wants students to know that "science is a dynamic enterprise" and holds that learning about scientific controversies "can give them a better understanding of how science actually happens" (p155). The problem is that ID needs more than a handful of scientists and "somewhat plausible" arguments for it if it is to replace some other potential controversy as a teaching tool. This, after all, is what ID opponents will argue: if we are going to teach how science "actually happens" and show students scientific controversies then there are more than enough options within mainstream science; we do not need to bring in ID. These controversies – such as progress within evolution or the debate over adaptation – exist precisely because science is not monolithic, even if its public rhetoric (usually to combat ID, sadly) may often suggest otherwise. ID would only be preferable (at the moment, anyway) if it has other merits that the other possibilities lack, such as it being a "socio-culturo-political" dispute (p154).

Overall, the book is an easy read and a great success. Even if the reader objects to Monton’s claims, he gives a variety of engaging arguments – involving dartboards and the likes of Dr Evil – and his work is exactly the kind of applied philosophy that might help people appreciate why we study the subject in the first place. Moreover, it is hard not to admire his candour in envisaging an audience of interested observers (the "remnant" of Albert Jay Nock, perhaps?), rather than those "just looking for the latest salvo to defend their side in an ostensible culture war" (p157). It may not work out this way and some ID advocates may be critical of the false legitimacy Monton supposedly provides ID, but if philosophers of science are not both willing and able to engage in this kind of study then who will?]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:53:03 +0000 dbe272bab69f8e13f14b405e038deb64 http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/reviews/cantors-inventing-the-middle-ages-r54 Paul Newall (2006)

The late Norman F. Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages was first published in 1991. He set out to show

Inventing the Middle Ages

... how our current notion of the Middle Ages - with its vivid images of wars, tournaments, plagues, saints and kings, knights and ladies - was born in the twentieth century. The medieval world was not simply excavated through systematic research. It had to be conceptually created: It had to be invented.

Cantor's fundamental claim was that "[a]ll works of history are in a sense autobiographical, particularly if the author is dealing with a historical personality that he finds sympathetic." It should perhaps be added the same holds for those found decidedly unsympathetic, and Cantor studied a host of eminent medievalists who fell into either or both camps. These included Maitland, Schram, Kantorowicz, Bloch, Halphen, Panofsky, Curtius, Haskins, Strayer, Knowles, Gilson and Southern, along with some lesser lights in the form of C.S. Lewis, Tolkein, Huizinga, Postan, Power and Mommsen. The notion at base is quite simple: the historical reality of how it really was - wie es eigentlich gewesen - is underdetermined by the available traces of the past and hence the historian must fill in the gaps. In doing so, however, he or she is liable to project backwards onto the past his or her own preconceptions, ideas and motives.

What Cantor was able to do was illustrate this in a way that seamlessly blended biography, history, politics and philosophy into a carefully reasoned whole. Thus did Erwin Panofsky belong "to that generation of German Jewish humanists who envisioned themselves as connected to a chain of civility and learning that stretched back from Bismarckian and Weimar Germany through the millennia to the classical and biblical worlds that became fused in the Christian patristic culture of the fourth century A.D." Panofsky, like many of the others considered by Cantor, brought to the study of the Middle Ages a conviction of continuity - a thema in Gerald Holton's terminology - that allowed him to read Medieval times as a steady evolution of the classical liberal project.

Many of these medievalists were writing before, during or shortly after the Second World War, and their work took on another dimension as a result. For Curtius, his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages "grew out of a concern for the preservation of Western culture", threatened - as he and most of the others saw it - by Hitler and the Nazis. He attempted "to illuminate the unity of [the Western cultural tradition] in space and time" for in "the intellectual chaos" of the war years it had "become necessary" to do so. That probably no such unity actually existed was not the point: Curtius both believed that it did and wanted it to in order to serve as an antidote to the steady descent into fascism he was witnessing. Schramm's Otto III and Kantorowicz's Frederick II were both written in accordance with their belief that this great culture could be perpetuated only through strong, enlightened leadership, and they looked for a messianic figure in the present to do likewise, replacing the broken Germany of the post-Versailles Treaty years with a new imperialism based on the finest traditions of the Middle Ages. They got Hitler. Schramm thought that an imperfect neo-Medievalism was better than none and took his chances; Kantorowicz was Jewish and had to take his elsewhere.

Tolkein and Lewis, whom Cantor grouped with Powicke as "The Oxford Fantasists", disliked the "modern" world and yearned for a return to (or remodelling on) a better age, one they saw in Medieval times. Bloch, hero of the Resistance, granted too much influence to the peasantry. Strayer and Haskins advocated Medieval law for the present, while Huizinga, Power, Postan, Mommsen and Erdmann saw in the Middle Ages a terror in one form or another (the repression of women for Power, decades ahead of other feminists) that had to be surmounted in order to arrive at a more tolerant, reasonable today. Thus the way we look at Medieval times was born of "learned research, humanistic theory, assumptions about human behaviour, and the ever-present ingredient of the personal experiences of medievalists" Once set, the prestige and power associated with the academic positions occupied by the great Medievalists ensured that their views were perpetuated.

In sum,

Inventing the Middle Ages

... out of this array of constituents, there was solidified a cultural structure that comprised the fundamentals of the Middle Ages that we read in our textbooks, teach and study in our classes, and disseminate in libraries, museums, and the literary and visual arts. Nothing of consequence from the nineteenth century was found worthy of perpetuation in the way of interpreting and imaging of the Middle Ages. Discovering the meaning of the European Middle Ages is a phenomenon of twentieth-century culture.

There are two lessons to draw from Cantor's book. The first is that the role of the individual historian is very much relevant to the overall study of history, which cannot be considered a solely empirical discipline. The historian is working with traces of the past that were recorded (in whatever form) by people with ideas, hopes, goals, ideological positions and influences just as the historian has still others as he or she selects and interprets them - two layers of theory-ladenness, as it were. The question of why a particular historian chose to emphasise some at the expense of others is one that can be addressed (at least in part) by biography - studying the historian instead of supposing that history is all about determining wie es eigentlich gewesen from the available evidence. This is clear in the obvious example of Galileo Studies, wherein some choose to use the Florentine with an apologetic motive and excuse the actions of the Church, even as others start with the notion that a vital conflict between science and religion could be demonstrated. However, that we can never get away from these thematic presuppositions when dealing in history leads to a whole new avenue of investigation: why does Fantoli read the Galileo Affair differently to Finocchiaro, say, and to what extent do the answers lie in their thinking and the circumstances of their lives, rather than (or in addition to) further study of the sources?

The second point is that the so-called postmodern (actually anti-representationalist) critiques of traditional historiography barely (if at all) touch on this sociological dimension enumbrated by Cantor. His methodology does not seem to have significantly influenced either side of the current debate, which is puzzling because it would seem to be devastating for the empiricists and indicative of not going far enough for their opponents. Noting that a Catholic scholar may have approached the events in seventeenth century Rome and Florence with an apologetic motive is unsatisfactory because it only touches the surface: apologists are not identical, after all. What do individual historians bring to their work in sociological terms, beyond basic similarities? How deep does the "ever-present ingredient of the personal experiences" go? This is a question that should provide historiographers with many years of study, as well as indicating - as if it were needed - that history is far, far deeper than a misplaced hope in finding out how it really was way back when.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:58:19 +0000 5e388103a391daabe3de1d76a6739ccd