Later this week, I’m going to try to post something on the recent Plantinga-Dennett debate. I’m listening to the audio as I type this, actually. But until I finish the audio, a blog post inspired by one of the comments on the initial report:

I don’t think the ‘Lots of people think God exists; so that’s good evidence that God exists’ argument is a bad one. Neither is it anything like the ‘Lots of people once believed in Zeus; so that’s good evidence that Zeus exists’ argument.

The good argument relies on a principle something like this: when many, many of our best contemporary philosophers who are pretty well acquainted with science, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science continue to believe P, after many, many years of reflection and considering as many contrary considerations as possible, then that’s excellent evidence that there is good evidence for P.

One implicit assertion here is this: many of our best contemporary philosophers are pretty well acquainted with science. I wish this were true, but I don’t think there’s any good reason to think it is.

I say this as a philosophy major who thinks he understands science pretty well. But I consider the fact that I do a matter of luck: I was lucky to have a very strong natural talent for math, and apparently a decent talent for language. I was lucky to have a mother with a Ph.D. in biochemistry who could answer random science questions when I was little. I was really lucky to mistakenly think I was going to be a doctor, which caused me to take most of the 60 credits of science courses I’ve taken in my college career. I was lucky to have gotten talked into taking a neuroscience course even after I had realized I wasn’t going to med school and had no real idea what good a neuroscience course would do me. I can claim a bit of credit for, but am also a bit lucky to, have happened across good popular science writers who could explain many things that weren’t explained well in my formal schooling.

What happens with most people? An ideal high school education will leave them knowing the following: basic Newtonian physics, the idea of atoms and molecules, the idea that chemical bonds are made of electrons, a basic idea of a chemical reaction, the idea of traits inhereted through DNA molecules, the idea of DNA base pairing, the idea of cells having very small devices for getting work done, the idea of enzymes, the basics of evolutionary theory.

The reality is more like this: understanding physics requires being comfortable with algebra, something many students never obtain. And, Newtonian physics is kind of counter-intuitive. So many students never really get physics. Being able to understand chemical reactions also requires some math, so some students don’t quite get it. Even though evolution is supposed to be taught, many teachers avoid because they don’t want the stress of angry phone calls from creationist parents. As for the tiny mechanisms of biology, I suspect many students simply don’t care: going out and collecting bugs occupies more time for many students. And you can get a Ph.D. in philosophy without ever improving on the shaky scientific knowledge you get in high school. You can fulfill your general ed requirements with food science or something like that.

Even if you get a decent amount of scientific knowledge out of high school, and don’t take completely cop-out general ed requirements, there are still many important scientific discoveries you may never find out about:

• You may never find out about quantum chemistry, one of the great achievements of the 20th century. For those not in the know: quantum mechanics isn’t some new-agey idea about how human consciousness can alter reality. It’s a precise mathematical theory which, when applied to atomic nuclei and the electrons surrounding them, can predict many important chemical facts.
• You’ll get the basic idea of molecular biology in DNA and enzymes, but you won’t get any idea of just how much we know about the molecular mechanisms by which our bodies do their stuff, including what we know about how molecular mechanisms of how our body parts are arranged, how our brains are wired, and how our muscles and brains work.
• You’ll have no idea about what we know about how the connections between brain cells allow us to do basic sensory processing: determining where sounds are coming from, detecting the boundaries of objects, and so on.
• You’ll have no idea about what we know about how messing with or damaging specific areas of the brain affect mental functioning in very specific ways. For example, damaging Broca’s area pretty much always causes difficulty producing speech, while leaving other functions intact.
• You’ll have no idea about the key ideas in evolutionary psychology.
• You’ll have no idea about the clear evidence for innate language ability in humans.

If you don’t learn about these things in school, you can find good popularizers of the sexier aspects of psychology (and the biology of psychology). But good popularizations of quantum chemistry, molecular biology, and cellular neuroscience are almost impossible to find. If you don’t get those things in school, you’re unlikely to get them anywhere. From this, I think it can safely be assumed that anyone who did not get a biology in major in college–with a rigorous curriculum–will not understand important bits of modern science.

More embarrassing than any of this, for the philosophical community, is the fact that many intellectuals who purport to talk about science commit embarrassing misrepresentations of scientific ideas that have been popularized very well. There are, for example, a number of supposed intellectuals who have reasoned that, since Richard Dawkins called one of his books “The Selfish Gene,” Dawkins must believe that genes are conscious agents, which is silly misunderstanding of a metaphor. Thus, it is not generally possible to understand that non-experts will understand the things they read about a science.