This question is the subject of chapter 3 in Steven Pinker’s <i>The Language Instinct.</i> He begins by quoting the appendix on Newspeak from George Orwell’s <i>1984,</i> which explains the plans of Orwell’s fictional totalitarians to create a language in which dissent would be impossible. Pinker goes on to mention a number of other sources for this idea, including a non-fiction piece of Orwell’s: “Inspired by Orewll’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language,’ pundits accuse governments of manipulating our minds with euphemisms like <i>pacification</i> (bombing), <i>revenue enhancement</i> (taxes), and <i>nonretention</i> (firing).” Then, though, Pinker declares this is all wrong, and, once he has his other villains set up, he informs us that Orwell actually agreed with him: Orwell thought euphemisms were a form of lying, not mind control.

Central to Pinker’s essay, though, is an equivocation:<blockquote>The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that congitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts.</blockquote>Notice the little slip? In one sentence, Pinker is talking about thought shaping language, in the next, he is talking about thought being identical with language.

Similarly, there’s an equivocation when Pinker asks, skeptically, “Do people literally think in English, Cherokee, Kivunjo, or, by 2050, Newspeak?” A logician would say there’s a missing quantifier: is this a question about whether people think only in words, or think sometimes in words? Pinker cites evidence of people thinking in pictures, which does show we do not think only in words, but it actually supports the hypothesis that we think sometimes in words, because it would be bizarre if our apparent thinking in words was an illusion while our apparent thinking in pictures was real.

But is there definite evidence that language effects thought? If we define “lying” as saying anything that is in any way deceptive, then euphemisms lie. But if we take “lying” to mean saying something one knows to be false, then euphemism isn’t lying. Euphemisms are alternative, if often vaguer, ways of saying something. Pinker says “Once a euphemism is pointed out, people are not so brainwashed that they have trouble understanding the deception.” He speaks in terms of pointing out euphemisms rather than exposing lies because the meanings of euphemisms are generally common knowledge. When we point out a euphemism, we force people to think about things they already half-knew, we are not really giving them new information.

Take, for example, the word “pacification.” Most people, when hearing the word, do not immediately think “bombing,” but they know it is something the military does, and it means something like “subduing.” Since people also know that militaries rely on guns and bombs and combat knives are the main tools of militaries, they know enough to know that pacification means subduing people with guns and bombs and combat knives. The significance of using the word “pacification” is that it saves people from making these connections, even if they would be glad to have made the connection once someone like Orwell tells them:<blockquote>Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.</blockquote>However, it makes no sense to tell someone, “the U.S. government said it was trying to pacify Vietnam, but this is a lie, it was really bombing Vietnam.”

Turning from euphemism to political invective, consider this wonderful example from Orwell’s <i>Homage to Catalonia:</i> Members of the Soviet-backed party in the Spanish Civil War would attack their opponents as “Trotskyites,” a word which had three different meanings that were muddled together: (1) a member of an organization founded by Trotsky (2) a supporter of global socialist revolution, like Trotsky (3) a fascist. It makes little sense to claim rhetoric about “Trotskyites” was lying in the conventional sense, rather, it used a word to hide a fallacious inference. To a naive ear, Orwell’s example seems incredible, but it’s the stuff that fills the my blog posts on <a href=”http://www.uncrediblehallq.net/category/stupidity/”>stupidity</a> and has a close parallel in <a href=”http://www.uncrediblehallq.net/category/stupidity/”>Ann Coulter’s rhetoric about “liberals.”</a>

In general, failure to pay attention to the meanings of words is one of the main marks of bad philosophy and bad reasoning in general. Jumping between two meanings of words is one of the easiest ways to hide a fallacious inference, and dressing up bizarre claims in academic jargon is one of the easiest ways to make them look like truisms.

Final comment: trying to deny the importance of words to know we think was quite a surprise coming from Pinker. A major point of his book <i>The Stuff of Thought</i> is how language reflects how we think, and how word choice matters even when the meaning is unchanged. One of the best chapters was his chapter on swearing, which contains such gems as:<blockquote>The seven words you can never say on television refer to sexuality and excretion: they are the names for feces, urine, intercourse, breasts, the vagina, person who engages in fellation, and person who acts out an Oedipal desire.</blockquote>Pinker wrote this knowing, and reminding people, that his word choice mattered, that words have power.

Side thought: some people think that if something is a “merely verbal dispute,” no one can be right or wrong. Against this, I would like to propose Hallquist’s Rule for Verbal Disputes: “If a strong majority of people use a word one way most of the time, and a minority insists this is wrong to do for deeply misguided reasons, then the minority is wrong in a verbal dispute.”

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.

Literalism: Ward hits the literalism issue hard, in a way that most writers don’t. Within this topic, there’s a strong emphasis on what anthropology tells us about whether religion was originally taken literally or figuratively. And Ward claims that we can know nothing at all about this.

But wait a minute. If all the earliest records of the world’s literate groups indicate that they all took their beliefs literally, and whenever we encounter isolated non-literate populations, they take their beliefs literally, doesn’t that provide some grounds for thinking that people took their beliefs literally even further back in the past? Can’t we say that the hypothesis that religion had been that way all along is more reasonable than the hypothesis that all these different groups changed in the same direction, for some mysterious reason?

Ward also raises the possibility that religion has become importantly more sophisticated since its origin. There are two troubles with this: first, many people are still literalists (or, if you accept a non-literal Time Immemorial of religion, many people have fallen into literalism). For example, the college atheist group I’m involved with sometimes gets Christians at meetings. At one meeting in particular, I remember we were discussing prayer, and one girl declared her belief that prayer can cure illness, and she told a story about how her family took a relative to the hospital, and prayed for him, and wonder of wonders he got better. Now, it’s tempting to suggest that, despite initial appearances, the fact that he was taken to the hospital in the first place indicated they really knew it was the hospital that was doing the healing. But this girl found that suggestion disturbing. And even if you argue her belief was some mere “unacountable operation of the mind” (a la Hume) or “belief in belief” (a la Dennett), all the evidence I have from interacting with her indicated she did not hold this belief metaphorically.

The other problem with the “religion has advanced” claim is that religion hasn’t advanced in any coherent direction. In the case of science–which Ward uses an analogy–we started out with Aristotle’s mechanics and the mechanics of the ancient atomists and Descartes’ mechanics and Leibniz’ mechanics and Newton’s mechanics, and at first there was a big muddle about which one was right, and then we worked out that Newton was the first major advance in the direction of a correct mechanics, though he needs modification by Einstein and Schrodinger and so on, but far more worth remembering and knowing about than all those other guys. We don’t have that with religion.

As an aside, there’s a somewhat confused dis of Dennett’s anthropology of religion: first, he complains that Dennett claims to be trying to open up scientific study of religion, but his sort of scientific study was already being done in the 19th century. Second, Dennett has failed to see that contemporary anthropologists reject that approach. Isn’t it maybe possible that Dennett’s point was not that we need to start doing the “scientific study of religion” schtick for the first time, but that we need to go back to it? Especially given that Ward admits modern anthropologists aren’t so hot on it? Then we get this:

The trouble with [the original, scientific version of anthropology of religion] is that it sets out with the assumption that all religious beliefs… are false or irrelevant. This is hardly a dispassionate view, and it is not likely to evoke much sympathy for religious beliefs. It amounts to treating all religious believers as deluded or perhaps even as mentally challenged.

Most contemporary anthropologists think that beginning with such a strong prejudice is not the right way to undertake a proper scientific inquiry.

The Ward ties this to the interpreting beliefs problem, which is strange because it seems like the argument, if it works, should work whatever the beliefs are. Next, what does “dispassionate” mean: it could mean “reasonable,” or it could mean “agnostic about X, Y, and Z,” the rhetorical force of the passage seems to rest on muddling these things. Furthermore, Ward ignores the fact that you can avoid _a priori_ rejection of religious beliefs, but still reject them based on the results of other disciplines. For example, an anthropologists who encounters people who believe (as some people have believed) that epilepsy is caused by demons may have no _a priori_ objection to this belief, but nevertheless reject it on the basis of current medical science.

Finally, Ward invokes Aquinas in support of his anti-literalism, specifically regarding whether God is anthropomorphic (human-like). Now, all orthodox theology has held that God is human-like in some respects but not in others. He can act, think, and have moral virtues, but he lacks the limits humans have with regards to these things. Aquinas, based on some metaphysical views taken from Aristotle, took anti-anthropomorphism further than some theologians, and some Christian theologians worry Aquinas unintentionally trapped himself in Spinoza-style, nigh-atheistic views of God. In any case this was _not_ Aquinas’ intent, as unlike Spinoza Aquinas thought God had worked miracles and authored scripture in the fairly literal sense required by mainstream Christian theology. Aquinas provides no support for Ward’s suggestion that maybe it is Paul Tillich’s idea of God as “supreme moral ideal” is the one we should devote our effort to discussing.

Religion and violence: Ward admits that there are parts of the world’s great holy texts that can be used to justify violence. He simply claims, with little argument, that these texts are not very important to the religion. However, I’ve read the Bible twice, and I can say that both the idea of conquering the Holy Land and killing idolaters get a very prominent place in the Torah. Conquest is not so important to the Profits, but they still rage at the evils of idolatry (shorter Ezekiel: “Because of idolatry, Israel is like whore! Except she’s worse than a whore, because she likes it and doesn’t charge money! And her lovers have bigger penises than mine! So let’s kill anyone who doesn’t feel as sexually inad… I mean, who isn’t as shocked by idolatry as I am!”)

The evidence of the New Testament is more mixed; the first three Gospels, and the Epistle of James, tend to support the “religion is about being good to people” line. But John and Romans take the view that all that really matters in this world is believing certain dogmas, and it is very easy to see how this view, combined with the views of the Old Testament, has led to the killing of anyone with the wrong dogmas.

Reason and religion: The very first argument Ward makes in favor of the rationality of religious beliefs is that “Anselm, Aquinas, Kant, Kirkegaard, Hegel, Descartes, and Leibniz” were religious, and these men “define what we call reasonableness.” Later in the book, there is a similar appeal to Newton and Kepler. Strictly speaking, this is false, since it is possible to define the word “reasonableness” without using any of these names. Aside from that, they have little in common except belonging to our vague cultural category of “famous philosophers,” whether they are equally deserving of respect is open to dispute. It’s an appeal to authority, though I wonder if it should be called the “appeal to fame” instead. Descartes and Leibniz, at least, made vital contributions to mathematics and were part of the discussions that eventually led to modern physics, but it is less clear why the name of Hegel should impress us. And there is no contradiction in thinking Descartes was a great mathematician, and that someone as smart as him should have known better than to offer such lousy arguments for the existence of God.

We also get the claim that scientism is self-refuting, which I don’t feel like talking about right now, though I am making a note to myself to do a separate post on it at some point.

Finally, Ward endorses a semi-subjectivist view of rationality:

In applying [criteria of reasonableness] there is an important and ineliminable element of personal judgement involved… [Reason] cannot dictate one agreed result, for that will depend on differing emphases laid on differing data, differing organizing paradigms laid that seem to illuminate the complexity of experience, and differing practical commitments that express basic judgements about what is important in life.

Thus, reasonableness is semi-subjective because these other things are semi-subjective. But why think these things are semi-subjective? As it stands, Ward doesn’t provide much of an argument.

Materialism: There are two rather confused arguments against materialism. First, it is said to be refuted by modern science, because the understanding of matter in 21st century physics is different than that of earlier, cruder attempts at physics. But of course, that doesn’t tell us whether everything could be matter (or “physical,” if you prefer) in the sense understood by 21st century physicists. Second, Ward argues that “consciousness” is a problem, but for him “consciousness” does not mean the specific problem of conscious experience that has so fascinated today’s philosophers and scientists, rather, it means “mathematics, logic, feelings, and intentions.” None of these issues are explored in detail.

There’s a quick move from the rejection of materialism to the acceptance of idealism (the claim that everything is mind). But of course, it could be that there are several types of things in the world–perhaps mater, mind, and abstract objects–and that none is more fundamental than the other. And idealism could be true but theism false.

The Reformation: In a simple contrary-to-fact section of the book, Ward claims that the Reformation should get credit for religious freedom, and that religious freedom “has always been a key Christian principle.” This is in spite of the fact that Luther and Calvin were monsters, that the greatest advocates of religious liberty have been heretics like Spinoza and Jefferson, and that the Catholic Church was explicitly anti-liberal into the 19th century, and did not become explicitly liberal until the 20th. Enough to make me wonder if, when Ward talks about the true nature of religions, he isn’t even trying to say anything recognizable as such by those concerned with the facts.

Your atheist readers make the classic move of pretending to be the referee when in fact they are just another player on the field.

Okay, stop right now, this is a good example of why dying metaphors are so annoying. When I discuss God, I don’t pretend to be a referee, I don’t pretend to be anything other than a guy taking part in an intellectual discussion. But going on…

They are treating it as an intellectual puzzle rather than what it actually is for every last of us: a lived commitment. This is why the term “Atheist” itself is so misleading. You’re an atheist, fine. I’m an A-Vishnuist, and an A-Buddhist, and an A-Teapotist. Telling me what you don’t believe tells me very little, but it’s a really cool way to get into the conversation in such a way that everyone has to defend their positions except you — you get to attack…

…Atheists should be forced to articulate their positive position (say, secular humanism) as price of admission to the conversation… …I simply point out that living your life is a specific, positive claim, and thus everyone has to bear the burden of proof equally.

No, living your life is an action, not a claim, and confusing them is a category error. But seriously, I get the desire to sometimes ask open-ended questions (what is the nature of moral truth?) but why should simple yes-no questions (is there a God? have extraterrestrials visited Earth?) never play a role in intellectual discussion? What does he even think he’s saying when he says we “should” do it his way? That it’s more practical, morally required, somehow necessary for intellectual progress? Or is he just expressing annoyance with people he disagrees with, and can’t think of anything else to say?

Number Two:

I’m an avid reader who’s never written you before, but as a philosophy major and not much else, this is probably the first time I’ve felt (vaguely) qualified. And the sudden phenomenon of assertive atheism has me concerned too.

What the defenders of the Flying Spaghetti Monster thesis’ commensurability with actual theism fail to recognize is that belief in God generally doesn’t have anything so “concrete” as its substance. It’s not the particulars of God — the “invisible man in the sky” imagery and such — that matter. In some sense these particulars aren’t the content of theist belief at all; it’s the “consequences” of God — moral compunction, cultural taboo, social phenomena that amount to a de facto eschatology, etc. — that actually constitute theism. And when measured by adherence to behaviors consistent with this belief, atheism suddenly appears much rarer.

Nietzsche recognized this; it’s the reason why an insistence on overcoming Judeo-Christian ethics comes right alongside his proclamation of the death of God.

The use of “concrete” here is ambiguous, since orthodox theology has some very definite ideas about how God does and does not resemble human beings. He’s not located in physical space, and doesn’t have a physical brain, but can act, make choices, and so on–at least if you believe orthodox theology. And given how much orthodox believers talk about these things, I don’t understand why we should think these things secondary to the main characteristics traditionally attributed to God.

What the final sentence says amounts to is saying that “I’m going to redefine ‘theism’ to mean a certain moral stance, so therefore I get to declare that people I dislike are rejecting a certain moral stance, even though really they aren’t.” The reference to Neitzche is just so much appeal to authority–or perhaps it should be called “appeal to fame,” because the only thing such philosophical authorities seem to have in common is that they’re really famous names.

Number Three–same link as Two–is mainly a reprise of Douthat’s mistake, not understanding what the teapot/Flying Spaghetti Monster analogy is supposed to show.

Oh, and some mostly atheist-friendly four and five if you’re curious.