Physicist Peter Woit on the Sociology of String Theory

The following piece is on Peter Woit’s strong stance against string theory. It focusses on Woit’s sociological analysis of string theory, as found in his blog post ‘20 Years of Not Even Wrong’. This was posted on March the 18th, 2024.

(i) Peter Woit on the Sociology of String Theory

(ii) Sheldon Cooper on the Sociology of String Theory

(iii) Lee Smolin on the Sociology of String Theory

(iv) Woit’s and Smolin’s Non-Sociological Criticisms of String Theory

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Peter Woit is an American theoretical physicist. He’s also a senior lecturer in the Mathematics Department at Columbia University.

An important source of Woit’s criticisms of string theory can be found in his book Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law, which was published in 2006. He runs a blog that’s also called Not Even Wrong. (Woit tells us that the “first entry on this blog was 20 years ago yesterday” — that is, in 2004.)

Peter Woit on the Sociology of String Theory

Peter Woit’s overall position is on the academic and intellectual hegemony (a word he doesn’t actually use) of string theory. He sees this as being bad news for the future of fundamental physics.

Woit argues that string theory’s popularity was at least partly a result of the financial and political nature of academia. More specifically, this hegemony of string theory was also down to the mad academic competition for scarce resources.

The following passage is Woit on string theory:

“In 2004 I was looking at nearly twenty years of domination of fundamental theory by a speculative idea that to me had never looked promising and by then was clearly a failure. 20 years later this story has become highly disturbing. The refusal to admit failure and move on has to a large degree killed off the field as a serious science.”

If we take Woit’s word for things, then it truly is amazing that a “speculative idea” should dominate theoretical physics for such a long time. Indeed, we will see that in certain strong respects, string theory is speculative, and it has dominated theoretical physics for over three decades.

But has string theory also failed?

Well, that depends…

Woit then offers us more on the politics and sociology of string theory:

“My background has been at the elite institutions that are supposed to be providing this kind of training and working environment. Harvard and Princeton gave me this sort of training in 1975–1984 and I think did a good job of it at the time, but from what I can tell things are now quite different. 40 years of training generations of students in a failed research program has taken its toll on the subject.

He continues:

“I remember well what it was like to be an ambitious student at these places, determined to get as quickly as possible to the frontiers of knowledge, which in those times meant learning gauge field theory. These days it unfortunately means putting a lot of effort into reading Polchinski, and becoming expert in the technology of failed ideas.”

All that is strong stuff.

Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose too (in his book The Road to Reality) also had something similar to say on this subject. He wrote:

“The often frantic competitiveness that this ease of communication engenders leads to bandwagon effects, where researchers fear to be left behind if they do not join in.”

According to Woit’s account, string theorists have gained a hegemonic position despite the fact that string theory has no independent (or unique) evidence on its side. Or, in Woit’s own words, despite the fact that string theory is a “failed research program”.

And, like other hegemonies, those in control of this research program (or those who benefit from it) “will never admit what has happened, no matter how bad it gets”.

Another question is the following:

Why has there been “excessive media attention and funding” of string theory?

This hints at a political, and not just a sociological, answer.

Indeed, it surely must be political.

Although string theory is speculative, it’s been heavily funded, and it has sustained countless careers over the last three decades or more. That can’t help but have at least some political implications and explanations.

Of course, Peter Woit is not on his own on all this. Take the following words from the science writer John Horgan:

“[S]cience that is not experimentally testable or resolvable even in principle and therefore is not science in the strict sense at all. Its primary function is to keep us awestruck before the mystery of the cosmos.”

Horgan calls this “ironic science”.

Interestingly enough, all this needn’t be seen as hinting at a negative state of affairs. So now take the words of another science writer, Jim Holt, who put the situation in this way:

“For the first time in its history, theory has caught up with experiment. In the absence of new data, physicists must steer by something other than hard empirical evidence in their quest for a final theory.”

Here we’re being told that string theorists have fully (even happily) accepted this lack of “new data”. Indeed, that’s precisely why “theory has caught up with experiment”. In other words, string theory can hardly have failed to have caught up with experiment if there were no new experiments to catch up with in the first place.

Let’s get back to the sociology of string theory.

The fictional character Sheldon Cooper (of The Big Bang Theory) also experienced the sociology of string theory.

Sheldon Cooper on the Sociology of String Theory

Sheldon Cooper gave his friends the following retrospective account of his youthful conversion to string theory:

“String theory seemed so elegant at the time, but now I realize I was just a simple country boy seduced by a big city theory with variables in all the right places.”

[These words are from ‘The Relationship Diremption’ episode of The Big Bang Theory, in which Sheldon experiences a reverse Damascene conversion.]

The quote above chimes in with what many theoretical physicists have themselves stated over the last couple of decades.

Sociologically, it was indeed the case that in the 1980s (although Sheldon himself wasn’t born until 1980) many talented young physicists were encouraged (by their professors and teachers) to take up string theory.

Relevantly enough, Sheldon’s equally-fictional rival, Barry Kripke, classed himself (in the same episode) as a “stwing pwagmatist”.

What on earth is that?

Barry Kripke explained:

“I say I’m gonna pwove something that cannot be pwoved, I appwy for gwant money, and then I spend it on wiquor and bwoads.”

To which Sheldon responded:

“Do you think he is right? Am I wasting my life on a theory which can never be proven?”

All this happened largely as a result of the monumental claims and grand promises of string theory.

And now those formerly-young physicists are middle-aged (or older) tenured professors who’ve spent their entire professional lives devoted to string theory. (This is unlike Sheldon Cooper himself, who was about 33 — looking about 6 — in this 2014 episode.)

So what else could these professors now do? And if they were to do something else, then would they still be able to pay their mortgages, go on as many holidays, send their kids to good schools, etc?

Lee Smolin on the Sociology of String Theory

Some of these sociological and political issues tackled by Peter Woit can also be found in Lee Smolin’s 2006 book The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. Specifically, this book contains a chapter called ‘How Do You Fight Sociology?’, which is very relevant here.

In a blog post called ‘Response to Criticism’, Smolin also wrote the following words:

“To discuss some sociological issues in contemporary academic science which I argue are slowing the progress of science, and to propose solutions to them.”

In The Problem With Physics itself, Smolin wrote:

“String theory is a powerful, well-motivated idea and deserves much of the work that has been devoted to it. [] The real question is not why we have expended so much energy on string theory but why we haven’t expended nearly enough on alternative approaches.”

It’s worth noting here that Smolin’s (as it were) sociological view of string theory isn’t original: it dates back to at least 1987. In that year, American theoretical physicist and string theorist David Gross made the following controversial comments (as quoted by Peter Woit) about some of the reasons for the popularity of string theory:

“The most important [reason] is that there are no other good ideas around. That’s what gets most people into it. When people started to get interested in string theory they didn’t know anything about it. [] So I think the real reason why people have got attracted by it is because there is no other game in town. All other approaches of constructing grand unified theories, which were more conservative to begin with, and only gradually became more and more radical, have failed, and this game hasn’t failed yet.”

Of course, there have been other games in town. However, David Gross believed that they weren’t worth playing. Either that, or they didn’t offer the same totalist vision that string theory does.

Woit’s and Smolin’s Non-Sociological Criticisms of String Theory

Peter Woit’s comments on Lee Smolin’s book The Trouble With Physics.

To a non-physicist, Peter Woit’s following critique of string theory certainly seems convincing:

“For the last eighteen years particle theory has been dominated by a single approach to the unification of the Standard Model interactions and quantum gravity. This line of thought has hardened into a new orthodoxy that postulates an unknown fundamental supersymmetric theory involving strings and other degrees of freedom with characteristic scale around the Planck length. […]”

Of course, no such supersymmetries have been found. [See here.) Indeed, strings themselves have never actually been found either. And that’s because they’re theoretical posits.

Then we have more criticism from Woit:

“It is a striking fact that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for this complex and unattractive conjectural theory. There is not even a serious proposal for what the dynamics of the fundamental ‘M-theory’ is supposed to be or any reason at all to believe that its dynamics would produce a vacuum state with the desired properties. The sole argument generally given to justify this picture of the world is that perturbative string theories have a massless spin two mode and thus could provide an explanation of gravity, if one ever managed to find an underlying theory for which perturbative string theory is the perturbative expansion.[5]”

I used the words “to a non-physicist” just before I quoted the long passages above. I’m not saying that all readers need to be professional physicists in order to make sense of the scientific parts. However, I certainly don’t feel qualified enough to come down either way on some of Woit’s pronouncements.

[See my next article on testimony as it’s discussed in philosophical literature, and as it directly relates to the (educated) layperson’s relation to science, and to string theory specifically.]

If we return to Lee Smolin .

Smolin (like Woit himself) wouldn’t have offered us his sociological analysis of string theory if it weren’t for his prior scientific and philosophical problems with it.

So now let’s tackle them, if only for a short while.

Smolin (in his book The Trouble With Physics) quotes string theorists talking about the beauty of the theory (or theories) in the following:

“[] ‘How can you not see the beauty of the theory? How could a theory do all this and not be true?’ say the string theorists.”

Here it’s being said (if not explicitly) that to string theorists (mathematical) beauty trumps evidence, experiments, data, observations, etc. In other words, string theory is truly Pythagorean in nature.

Smolin also used the words “postmodern physics” when he wrote the following:

“The feeling was that there could be only one consistent theory that unified all of physics, and since string theory appeared to do that, it had to be right. No more reliance on experiment to check our theories. That was the stuff of Galileo. Mathematics [alone] now sufficed to explore the laws of nature. We had entered the period of postmodern physics.”

Smolin’s description of string theory, and his uses of the words “postmodern physics”, aren’t really (or even at all) references to philosophical postmodernism in the sense practised by philosophers like Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, etc. Smolin simply meant after modern physics by his term “postmodern physics”. (Of course, Smolin must have also been aware of the philosophical associations of this term.) More specifically, Smolin believed that this is how physics — at least as carried out by certain theoretical physicists — came to be done when string theory arrived on the scene.

In conclusion.

Perhaps it was precisely the postmodern nature of string theory that allowed — and enabled — it to establish its hegemony, and then to sustain that hegemony for over three decades. After all, if in string theory there really is (to quote Smolin again) “no more reliance on experiment”, then what on earth could have stopped its almost-total dominance of theoretical physics?

Why Study Philosophy If It’s Already Dead?

The American writer Joyce Carol Oates offers her ‘Followers’ (on X) the words in the screenshot below. They seem to be a variation on Stephen Hawking’s often-quoted “philosophy is dead” mantra.

Why did Stephen Hawking believe that philosophy is dead?

He did so mainly because he believed that “philosophers haven’t kept up with physics”. The following is the passage in full:

“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

For a start. Philosophy isn’t just about “our quest for knowledge”. (If by “knowledge” Hawking meant data, facts, evidence, tests, experiments, “empirical theories”, etc.) Philosophers are just as likely to ask the following question: “What is knowledge?” In other words, philosophers are just as likely to ask questions about knowledge than offer an endless array of (as it were) scraps of knowledge.

Oddly enough, the above also means that in order for physicists — as well as scientists generally — to justifiably claim that “philosophy doesn’t add any knowledge to the world”, then they must do some philosophising themselves:

i) Such scientists need to explain what they mean by “knowledge”.
ii) Such scientists need to tell us why philosophical claims aren’t examples of knowledge.
iii) Such scientists need to tell us why scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge.
iv) And such scientists need to tell us why they give scientific knowledge (or science itself) such a preeminent status.

None of the positive or negative responses to those statements will be scientific in nature.

One would hope, then, that scientists will never argue that such questions shouldn’t even be asked. However, if any scientists did argue (or simply believe) that such questions shouldn’t be so much as asked, then that extreme position itself would need to be philosophically defended. And if such scientists didn’t defend it (or if they believe that they aren’t required to defend it), then that somewhat elitist and arrogant stance will itself — again — need a philosophical defence.

It’s also worth noting here that it’s often been said that “philosophers don’t add any knowledge to the world”.

Indeed, it’s been said since at least the 1920s.

Ironically, it was philosophers themselves (e.g., the logical positivists and Ludwig Wittgenstein — see here) who first made precisely that point!

In any case, Stephen Hawking is actually a bad example of an anti-philosopher. That’s primarily because Hawking himself offered the world his very own philosophical position on physics, which he called model-dependent realism…

Now how perverse is that?

So here’s a taster of Hawking’s own philosophy:

“There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we will adopt a view that we will call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to interpret modern science.”

Sure, it might have been the case that Hawking didn’t see his model-dependent realism as being a philosophical position. He might have seen it as a simple description of the (as it were) facts and methodologies of physics.

However, that too would have been monumentally naïve.

In addition, since Hawking classed himself as “a positivist”, then his rejection of philosophy is even more ridiculous and/or naïve than it may at first seem.

But it wasn’t just Hawking who took a naive and critical philosophical view of philosophy, so too did the well-known biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson.

Wilson once stated almost exactly the same things as Hawking in the following passage:

“It appears to me that professional philosophers have not kept up with the foundational disciplines of neuroscience, behavioural genetics, and evolutionary biology, and as a result they have surrendered their franchise to the scientists. The scientists, not the philosophers, now address most effectively the great questions of existence, the mind, and the meaning of the human condition. This surrender seems to be permanent, and professional philosophers have begun a diaspora into other vital and challenging disciplines that include theoretical neuroscience, evolutionary theory, intellectual history and bioethics.”

Of course, I could be biased in that I read philosophy, and write on philosophy. Then again, I read a lot of scientific stuff too.

Did Hawking and Wilson read a lot of contemporary philosophical stuff?…

Oh!

Why should they have even bothered?

After all, “philosophy is dead”… remember?

In terms of detail. There’s evidence that Hawking never really got passed Karl Popper when it came to 20th century philosophy. He certainly never quoted (or even paraphrased) any contemporary philosophers — at least as far as I’m aware. Indeed, if Hawking had read contemporary philosophers, then he’d have quickly realised that many of them have (to quote his own words) “kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics”.

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates

There’s no shortage of prophetic and sexy statements like this.

The American writer Joyce Carol Oates too could do with studying more contemporary philosophy.

For a start. She doesn’t even bother telling her followers why philosophy has been “rendered irrelevant by more specialized fields of inquiry”. In fact, at face value at least, it’s hard to know what that even means. It’s almost like saying that tennis has been rendered irrelevant by rugby.

Joyce Oates actually seems to be criticising philosophy for not being science. Or, to cite her own examples, she seems to be criticising philosophy for not being “linguistics, neuroscience, etc.”.

What’s more, most philosophers themselves haven’t read Lucretius — at least not in any detail. So that Roman philosopher is an oddly personal choice on Oates’s part…

As for the “pre-Socratics”…

So is Joyce Carol Oates simply attempting to show her followers how widely read she is in philosophy — i.e., in order to lend credence to her categorical and vague pronouncements about philosophy (as it is today?!) being “surpassed”?…

Sure, in Oates’s own favour, it’s only a tweet, not a paper or article.

The thing is, many other tweeters don’t go much further than such slogan-filled posts either.

Naturalism Is a Religion, According to a Christian Apologist (2)

This is a follow-up to my last essay, ‘Naturalism, According to a Christian Apologist (1)’. This was on the article ‘What is Naturalism?’, which was published in the website ‘Compelling Truth: Worldview and Apologetics’.

(i) Science as a Religion?

(ii) A Christian Apologist on Methodological Naturalism

(iii) A Christian Apologist on Materialism and Reductionism

(iv) A Christian Apologist’s False Claims

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Science as a Religion?

This Christian apologist offers his readers a warning against what he deems to be another — rival — religion, which goes as follows:

“Endeavoring to use science to explain and describe our world is a noble undertaking. But when scientists go so far as to deny a basic sense of self or even a sense of pain, it’s an indication their desire for pure science has developed into a religion.”

It’s worth noting here how quickly and smoothly (i.e., without any changes of arguments or terms) this Christian apologist switched from criticising naturalists to criticising scientists themselves.

Elsewhere in the article ‘What is Naturalism?’ it’s also stated that naturalists “turn the assertion that there is no supernatural into a religion” — although nothing much is really said as to why that is the case…

So perhaps classing science (as is also the case with naturalism, materialism, Darwinism and atheism) as a religion is just a cheap, easy and childish gimmick.

In any case, surely naturalism “develop[ing] into a religion” should be a good thing to a religious person.

Put another way.

If science (as well naturalism, materialism, Darwinism, and atheism) can really become genuinely religious in nature, then shouldn’t that be a good thing to this particular Christian apologist?

Yes and no.

Sure, religion is a good thing. But the True Religion — in this case Christianity — is a far, far better thing.

Incidentally, whereas here it’s said that science can “develop[] into a religion”, the usual religious argument is that science, naturalism, evolution, materialism and atheism are religions from the very beginning.

So it can be supposed that when religious people say that science, naturalism, atheism, evolutionary theory, materialism and physicalism are religions, they also mean that the believers in these isms aren’t being honest with themselves. That is, these various ists are criticising religion at the very same time as upholding their own religion…

Except that these accusations are, as already stated, very cheap, easy and childish. In other words, it’s something readers will have come across in school playgrounds.

Let me explain that.

If a scientist, naturalist, materialist, “evolutionist” or atheist accuses a religious person of x, then the latter will accuse the former of being x too. Thus, we have lots of religious people who’ve accused scientists, naturalists, materialists, evolutionists and/or atheists of having “faith” in science/naturalism/materialism/evolution/atheism. Indeed, they’ve also stated that science/evolution/naturalism/atheism/materialism “is a religion”.

This happens at a lot at infant and junior schools. That is, when a little kid accuses another little kid of being x, then that other little kid accuses the accuser of being x too.

The apologists’ bottom line is this.

You accuse us of being x, yet you don’t even realise that you’re x too.

It can be easily argued that very few religious persons genuinely do believe that science, naturalism, materialism, atheism or evolution is a religion, or that people believe in science, naturalism, material, atheism, evolution purely on faith.

Of course, it must be admitted that there will be exceptions to this in that a very small number of people may well use science, naturalism, materialism, atheism and evolutionary theory as a literal substitute for a religion.

That conceded, the comparisons between religion and people’s commitment to science, naturalism, materialism, atheism and/or evolution are often so vague, tangential and rhetorical that, in most cases, I doubt that these claims are even believed by most of the religious people who actually state them.

Still, to claim that scientists, naturalists, materialists, atheists and/or evolutionists have faith in what they believe is extremely useful, and it scores many points.

In any case, many other people have gone into great detail as to why science, naturalism, evolution, materialism and atheism aren’t religions. [See here, here, here, and here.]

A Christian Apologist on Methodological Naturalism

As with other parts of this Christian apologist’s account of naturalism, there are indeed passages from it which I have no problems with.

Take, for example, the following words:

“In addition to naturalism as a philosophical worldview, it can also be a method of learning and exploration.”

The continuing passage is also acceptable:

“Methodological naturalism is a system of scientific study wherein nature is assumed to have a natural basis. Divine intervention (miracles) is not taken into account in the investigation of natural phenomenon.”

Finally, I have no deep problem (apart from wording — see note 1) with this:

“[N]aturalists also believe that everything we think we feel has a corresponding neurological basis that will one day be interpreted — mapped out on an MRI. The phenomenon we call consciousness is merely the complexity of our physical matter.”

However, the concluding passage is a somewhat more controversial account of what scientists believe. It goes as follows:

“As the supernatural is beyond our abilities of description, explanation, and prediction, scientists believe the possibility of the supernatural should not influence the scientific work of description, explanation, and prediction.”

Personally, I would never say that

“the supernatural is beyond our abilities of description, explanation, and prediction”.

That (well) acknowledgment hints at the fact that there are indeed supernatural things: it’s just that they transcend “description, explanation, and prediction”. In other words, the supernatural domain does actually exist (or is real), but it simply isn’t within the remit of science. Instead, it’s in the remit of religion. (This is a hint at the two “non-overlapping magisteria” of Stephen Jay Gould?)

So God, gods, ley lines, pink pixies, holy cows, virgin births, morphic resonance, clairvoyance, precognition, telekinesis, levitation, extrasensory perception, poltergeists, ectoplasm, invisible men, etc. all exist (or are real), it’s just that they’re all beyond our scientific “abilities of description, explanation, and prediction”.

Thus, if you simply state that “x is supernatural”, then, by faith and definition, you automatically place x beyond science.

Yet almost anything can be the value of the variable x!

And that literally includes almost anything — e.g., ley lines, pink fairies, astral travelling, holy cows, virgin births, clairvoyance, precognition, telekinesis, levitation, extrasensory perception, poltergeists, ectoplasm, invisible men, etc.

Thus, the only way to exclude any given x from the domain of the supernatural is to adopt a particular religion which doesn’t include or even allow such a given x within its supernatural domain.

A Christian Apologist on Materialism and Reductionism

Now take the following definition of naturalism from the ‘What is Naturalism’ article:

“Naturalism is the belief that everything in the cosmos is a component or product of the physical stuff of nature.”

Then this sentence is added to the words above:

“There is no such thing as the supernatural, including souls, spirits, and God.”

Much is made of made of what “materialists” (if not always naturalists) take “physical stuff” to be by religious people. They believe they’ve scored some kind of scientific or philosophical (i.e., not religious) point when they tell us that physicists have gone beyond, say, a fixation on “hard particles” and “tangible stuff”, whereas materialists haven’t. Thus, they conclude, materialism should now be a dead-and-buried philosophy.

Of course, this is a caricature of materialism.

It’s certainly a caricature of physicalism. (That’s if we don’t see the words ‘materialism’ and ‘physicalism’ as synonyms.) That’s because this is actually the position of 19th century materialism. Thus, it’s a clear and obvious straw target.

Literally all the naturalists (if not all the materialists) I’ve read accept the existence of forces, fields, spacetime, dark matter, dark energy, etc. and whatever else is in the general consensus in contemporary physics.

That is what makes them naturalists.

To go into more detail.

Some religious people seem to conflate naturalism and materialism with what many naturalists and materialists believed in the 19th century and before — or at least up until (roughly) the 1920s. In other words, they have a view of naturalism and materialism that might have been correct in the early 20th century. Yet even by the 1920s — if not before — this stereotype of naturalism and materialism was no longer the case when it came to naturalists and most materialists.

All this largely boils down to religious apologists claiming that naturalists and materialists believe that all matter — and indeed everything else — is what they call “tangible stuff”. Indeed, the frequent claim used to be — and sometimes still is — that materialists (if not naturalists) believe that everything is made up of “hard particles”.

Yet all that began to change with field physics in the 19th century — which all naturalists almost immediately took on board.

Why was that?

It was largely because such naturalists weren’t mindlessly committed to tangible stuff or to anything else like that — they were committed to the findings of physics and the other sciences. And physicists discovered fields (other than gravity) in the 19th century. [See here.]

In addition, when Einstein showed that matter and energy are interchangeable, naturalists immediately took that on board too. Thus, as an obvious consequence of that, naturalists also came to believe that energy — not matter — is (as it were) prima materia. Or at least they came to believe that matter is a form of energy.

Something similar occurred with the rise of quantum field theory.

Again, naturalists (almost by definition) took quantum field theory on board. That is (as with Einstein’s equation of matter and energy), naturalists came to see that fields — not energy — are prima materia; and therefore that energy is a property of such fields.

Again, the important point here is (even if the technical details of physics are wrong or misinterpreted) that although there were (radical) shifts in parts of physics, most naturalists still took on board these new findings, commitments and theories.

(‘What is Naturalism?’ specifically mentions dark matter and dark energy.)

Reductionism?

It was stated in the first essay that I had no deep problem with some of the accounts of naturalism. However, in the following section, things go askew. Here goes:

“Everything can (eventually) be explained using the hard sciences — biology, chemistry, and especially physics. Softer ‘sciences,’ such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology, can be reduced to the harder sciences.”

The first problematic word above is “everything”.

Does everything include… literally everything?

What about sets, numbers, the past, music, etc.?

Can they be explained by “biology, chemistry, and especially physics”?

No, naturalists don’t believe that everything can be “explained” by “the harder sciences”.

There’s also an assumption here that all naturalists are reductionists.

It certainly isn’t the case that all naturalists believe that the

“softer ‘sciences,’ such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology, can be reduced to the harder sciences”.

This is actually an account of fictitious reductionism, not of naturalism. Indeed, it’s even a caricature of reductionism itself.

Among naturalists and physicalists, for example, there’s been much debate about the precise relation between what many of them call the “special sciences” and physics. Again, it certainly isn’t the case that all naturalists — or even most naturalists — believe that such reductions could be successfully carried out. [See my ‘ Murray Gell-Mann on Scientific Reductionism’.]

So it would have helped if this Christian apologist had actually read some works by contemporary naturalists and physicalists. Perhaps he never quotes — or even paraphrases! — such works because it would complicate matters too much for him.

A Christian Apologist’s False Claims

I’ve said that some of the basic accounts of naturalism in the Christian apologist article ‘What is Naturalism’ are perfectly okay… at least as they stand. However, there are some passage that state things that are just plain false. Yet this isn’t a case of having a rival view on naturalism or on something else (such as emotion, the self, “the meaning of life”, etc.). This is a case of this Christian apologist clearly getting things wrong. And he gets things wrong because he clearly hasn’t read any works by contemporary naturalists or physicalists.

So here are just a couple of false claims to end with.

Take this one:

“[N]aturalists deny that we have an independent, subjective, first-person view of ourselves and our experiences.”

Let’s take the example of Daniel Dennett here.

Dennett actually accepts that “we have an independent, subjective, first-person view of ourselves and our experiences”. He even believes these views should be studied.

He calls such a study heterophenomenology.

Admittedly, I should qualify matters here.

Dennett believes that the “verbal reports” we give about our subjective, first-person views of ourselves and our experiences should be studied…

However!

Not everything we say about such things should be taken as gospel.

Another way of putting that is to say that subjective or first-person experiences aren’t studied: the verbal reports on (or claims about) such things are studied.

So Dennett believes that there is the first-person view of ourselves and our experiences. He just has problems with how these experiences are philosophically interpreted, and he also analyses what we say about them.

There are more claims in ‘What is Naturalism?’ which are blatantly false. I will tackle just one more here.

This Christian apologist states that naturalists believe that “life has no meaning”.

This is a contextless and categorical claim on this apologist’s part.

Naturalists will simply claim that individuals or groups create the meaningS of life. In other words, life’s meanings don’t pre-exist. Therefore, they aren’t (as it were) found in the aether (or in religious texts).

So as with the earlier discussion about this Christian apologist’s claim that naturalists believe that “there is no emotion”, all this amounts to is that naturalists have different (i.e., non-religious) accounts of life’s meaning and emotion, not that they deny such things.

Thus, this Christian apologist is implicitly arguing that if you don’t adhere to his own Christian account of life’s meaning and emotion (to take only two examples), then you simply must believe that these things don’t exist (or aren’t real).

Now is this sheer arrogance, or simple philosophical crudity?

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Note

(1) I used the words “apart form wording” in parenthesis. So take the phrase “consciousness is merely the complexity of our physical matter”. Why merely? Complexity isn’t a mere thing. Sure, it isn’t a supernatural thing either. But there is no (well) mereness about it.

(*) See my ‘Naturalism, According to a Christian Apologist (1)’.