>>>I post this because it represents a formative experience in terms of how I think philosophy classes should be run. Oh, it might be worth mentioning that this was the professor who convinced me to be a philosophy major. First published 31 October 2005.<<<

This is a post I delayed for a very long time, it is a continuation of my previous posts on God in philosophy class. I first waited to see how my professor would wrap up the unit, then to talk to him in office hours about it. Here it goes.

The section on the design argument started with Paley’s famous version, then sloppily transitioned into talking about philosophy of science and the Intelligent Design issue. The main argument about both the 19th-century argument and its modern ghost was the design flaws in living things. He considered that God might have created organisms with design flaws, then said this requires knowing whether God would want to give things design flaws. Such an inquiry could not be scientific, he said, because such claims about God couldn’t be independently tested. Modern Intelligent Design arugments like irreducible complexity were ignored. I think if I had been teaching the course, I would have put the philosophy of science material in the epistemology unit and examined ID more thoroughly or not at all. However, I could also imagine worse, and am quite glad no Republican legislators were interfering with his teaching.

Then came the problem of evil. He assigned two articles on it, the first arguing there is not a good solution, the second arguing there is. He discussed the first article on a Monday, shooting down every defense offered by a questioning student. Wednesday, people wanted to review for Friday’s test, so he said “Okay, I’ll summarize the other article in two sentences” and then, after a pause, said “never mind, I won’t sumarize it, it doesn’t matter.”

As I said in previous posts (see above), he had introduced the topic saying things like, “I don’t want to cause any personal crises,” and there he was trying to put forth a strong case that God did not exist. I decided to go in and ask him about that in office hours. He said he was indeed an atheist, and shot down all refutations of the problem of evil because there are no good refutations. He also explained that he was worried the article he had assigned as a rebuttal was so weak that discussing it would only get some people more upset. He said he introduced the topic the way he did because he didn’t want anyone to think they had to agree with him to get a good grade.

Some teachers are very good at hiding their opinions. My senior year in high school, I took a class called “contemporary issues” where the teacher refused to reveal her political leanings, boaster about her a bility to play devil’s advocate, and made a game out of having us try to figure them out. The strongest piece of evidence I got one way or another was that she said if we took economics from her, we’d become convinced she’s uber-conservative. I reasoned she would only say this if she was actually liberal, but I never got solid confirmation.

She, of course, is the exception. Most people have difficulty discussing controversial issues without giving their opinions on them. My philosophy prof would have been better off starting by telling everyone what he told me in office hours, that he was an atheist but didn’t want anyone to feel they had to agree with him to get a good grade. I think this story shows why its a bad idea made professors scared to state their opinions on a class’ subject matter. A botched attempt at concealing one’s opions is likely to be more intimidating than an open argument.