Ken Miller lies, what to do about it?

Here’s what happened: Like a number of people, including myself, was unhappy with Francis Collins’ NIH appointment, based on Collins’ beliefs about the relationship between science and religion. Then quite a few people began telling lies about what Harris said, including Ken Miller. (HT: Jerry Coyne)

Here’s Miller: “Dr. Collins’s sin, despite credentials Mr. Harris calls “impeccable,” is that he is a Christian.” And here’s Mark Kleinman, who calls his blog “The Reality-Based Community”: “When Sam Harris objects to the nomination of Francis Collins as NIH Director because Collins is an Evangelical Christian who has actual Evangelical Christian beliefs.” And here’s Guardian writer Andrew Brown: “is, unashamedly, a Christian. He’s not a creationist, and he does science without expecting God to interfere. But he believes in God; he prays, and this is for Harris sufficient reason to exclude him from a job directing medical research.”

These are, as PZ put it, disgraceful lies. It was also rather misleading for Alan Jacobs of The American Scene “his only objection to Collins is the man’s religious beliefs.” True insofar as beliefs about the relationship between science and religion are religious beliefs, but the impression is the same as what you get from Ken Miller.

Now the point of this post: it amazes me how predictable people are telling these kinds of lies. It amazes me that they say things like this not just about books, which are long and complicated enough to make the “misunderstanding” defense plausible, but also about short articles that spend 900 words making one point. It amazes me most of all that Ken Miller, who played such a big role in defeating the creationists at Dover, who PZ still describes as one of the good guys would tell a lie like this. If you can’t trust someone like Miller, who can you trust? And if you can’t trust him, how the hell did that come to be?

I’m beginning to wonder if some people don’t even consider honesty an issue in polemical exchanges. If you look at formal attempts to define lying, they tend to be indifferent to context, but sometimes we talk as if the concept of honesty only applies to some domains, and outside those domains lying is impossible. For example, polite untruths are sometimes referred to as “white lies,” but often it doesn’t even occur to us whether to ask whether they might be lies, or whether they might be at odds with the virtue of honesty. In situations governed by politeness, we can think the thought “I said that even though it isn’t true” without thinking “I lied” because the domain of politeness and the domain of honesty are separate domains.

Similarly, while I think it should be impossible for anyone with a drop of reading comprehension–much less someone with Miller’s academic prestige–to so wildly misunderstand Harris’ point in that article, I also have hard time seeing that Miller would be able to consciously tell a lie like that in public. So maybe Miller is capable of thinking “I know Sam Harris didn’t say what I accused him of saying” without thikning “I lied,” because the domain of rhetoric and the domain of honesty are separate domains.

So,as the post-title asks, what do we do about this nonsense? One part of me wants to say that we just need to be agressive about pointing out these lies. If the problem is cultural, if the problem is that people don’t see the domain of rhetoric and the domain of honesty as overlapping, then we need to change the culture, create a culture where truth-in-rhetoric is expected. And these kinds of cultural changes usually require calling out bad behavior.

But… calling people who are sometimes your best friends liars–even if it’s true–puts you in an awkward position. This is something that was recently reinforced for me by reading Jason Rosenhouse’s review of Unscientific America. Rosenhouse makes many of the same negative points other reviewers do, including about how the authors misrepresent “people making death threats are demented fuckwits” as “religious people are demented fuckwits,” but the tone of Rosenhouse’s review is noticably elevated, and he ends by criticizing the tone of a lot of other reviews. And here’s the thing: the authors actually linked to the first third of his review, saying what a nice review it was.

An older example: when I took my review of William Lane Craig’s book and submitted it for publication to Internet Infidels, Keith Augustine asked me to clean up the tone. And my approach to that was pretty much finding more creative ways to say the nasty things I had said about Craig in the original. But as a result, one of the more obnoxious blogosphere denziens I’ve met in my life called the revised version of the review “much more sophisticated.”

In short, if you’re willing to be a little bit euphemistic, tell some very small polite untruths, you tell the world that someone is spreading falsehoods and still have the falsehood-spreader be nice to you afterwards. Is that little benefit really worth it? Or should we see the sort of hysterics that the Unscientific America duo went into over PZ’s review just a tactic used by charlatan’s to lessen the amount they get called out?

In practice, I think this is going to be something I mull over awhile, occasionally take into account when I write, but mostly forget about the problem. The “forget about the problem” approach, after all, is what I made a practical commitment to by calling Ken Miller a liar in the topic of this post.

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3 Comments.

  1. It is not hard to find evidence for Miller’s claim in Harris’s article. For one thing, Harris begins the article by going through slides Collins once presented, with no obvious argumentative connection to the main point. And this is done with an obviously condescending tone, how Harris normally discusses religious beliefs.

    Furthermore, Harris’s main arguments are so sloppy that it really does seem to just bother him when Collins holds standard Christian beliefs – like that the truth of the Gospel answers fundamental human predicament. Harris gets loopy insinuating, if not outright claiming, that this means Collins will undermine research in psychology, for example.

    So you’re half-right – Harris talks as if his problem has to do with things logically distinct from Collins’ religious identity. Yet his presentation begins by histrionic mockery, and ends with melodramatic attempts to show that standard Christian beliefs threaten “the future of biomedical research.”

    And if you’re interested in lies, consider Harris’ claim that Collins thinks “a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible.” This is at best an obvious equivocation on the word “human nature,” deviating from how Collins would use the term. And if indeed a different understanding of “human nature” makes Collins culpable, then Miller is correct that Harris’s arguments will just mean every Christian is guilty by virtue of being a Christian.

  2. Chris Hallquist

    I’m having a little trouble following your argument–the last sentence suggests you think all Christians must have a particular view of human nature. If that’s what you meant to say, I can see where you’re coming from, but it doesn’t vindicate Miller.

    Why I can see where you’re coming from: I tend not to take liberal religious believers seriously. I relish telling them why their ideas about their traditions and scriptures are wrong. And once you have a firm idea of what True Christians believe, it’s easy to turn “we don’t want people who believe that running the NIH” into “no Christians allowed.”

    If that’s what you’re thinking here, it still doesn’t vindicate Miller because that’s not how religious lables normally work. In spite of what I just said, I recognize that “liberal Christian” isn’t a direct contradition in English, and I think most fundamentalists recognize this too. It would be dishonest for a creationist to go around saying, without explanation, that so-and-so wants to bar Christians from running the NIH because so-and-so opposed the nomination of a creationist to the NIH. That would still be a lie, no matter how firmly you believe that all True Christians have to be creationists.

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