Suppose materialism were true: then, as we’ve seen, my belief will be a neural structure that has both NP [neuro-physiological--Hallquist] properties and also a propositional content. It is by virtue of the NP properties, however, not the content, that the belief causes what it does cause. It is by virtue of those properties that the belief causes neural impulses to travel down the relevant efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, causing them to contract, and thus causing behavior. It isn’t by virtue of the content of this belief; the content of the belief is irrelevant to the causal power of the belief with respect to behavior (p. 336).

Plantinga argues that therefore, if materialism is true, then there’s no reason for evolution to produce reliable belief-forming mechanisms, and therefore it’s unlikely that evolution would produce reliable belief-forming mechanisms. This strikes me as utterly bizarre. As far as I can tell, it makes no more sense than saying that if materialism were true, it is by virtue of the arrangement of subatomic particles that our digestive system digests food, and therefore whether or not those particles are arranged into a stomach, intestines, etc. is irrelevant with respect to digestion, and therefore evolution is unlikely to produce those organs.

My guess is that that is what most non-eliminative materialists would say in response to Plantinga. In fact, hardcore non-reductive materialists like Hilary Putnam would say that the higher level explanation is crucial, and the lower level explanations aren’t even really explanations. Plantinga shows no curiosity about any of this; there’s not the slightest mention of how materialist philosophers might respond to his central claim. And that looks like a bigger problem than ignoring evolutionary biologists.

But… I recently (more recently than I read Plantinga’s book) re-read Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works, which talks about the cognitive revolution in psychology, which happened decades ago, and which in the mind of many psychologists has demystified things like beliefs and their relationship to the brain.

Because of this, I don’t think there’s any reason to see the relationship between the brain and beliefs as any less a scientific issue than the relationship between atoms and macroscopic objects. And it means that by ignoring what materialists might say about his argument, Plantinga isn’t just ignoring other philosophers, he’s also ignoring scientists. As I explained in my previous post, that really shouldn’t be acceptable anymore.

One thing Greta Christina did in criticizing DJ Grothe was refer back to a previous post she had written, Why “Yes, But” Is the Wrong Response to Misogyny. When I saw this post, I thought it was pretty obviously problematic, for reasons that don’t require any preamble to explain, so I want to talk about that now. Here’s the core of the post:

When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it trivializes misogyny.

When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it conveys the message that whatever men want to talk about is more important than misogyny.

When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject to something that’s about them, it conveys the message that men are the ones who really matter, and that any harm done to men is always more important than misogyny.

And when the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it comes across as excusing misogyny. It doesn’t matter how many times you say, “Yes, of course, misogyny is terrible.” When you follow that with a “Yes, but…”, it comes across as an excuse. In many cases, it is an excuse. And it contributes to a culture that makes excuses for misogyny.

Whether this is right or not depends on what kinds of situations Greta is talking about. Situation 1 is where someone says, “this is an example of horrid misogyny” full stop, and someone else changes the subject. In that situation, the second person definitely seems like they’re trivializing misogyny. But then there’s situation 2, where someone says “this is an example of horrid misogyny, and also X” and someone takes exception to the “and also X.” It’s hard to see how a rule against taking exception to the “and also X”s in situation 2 could be justified.

For one thing, if such a rule ever truly came to be accepted in a particular community, it would invite abuse. People could cite instances of misogyny to push any crazy agenda and then invoke the rule to block criticism. But even without active abuse of the rule, there’s still the possibility of cases where the “and also X” is problematic in important ways, and it doesn’t necessarily trivialize misogyny to discuss that.

Now, Greta’s initial “yes, but” post was made in a context that made what she said sound pretty plausible. A 15 year old girl had made a short post on Reddit’s atheism community (known as r/atheism) with a picture of herself holding up a copy of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World with a message saying, basically, “look what my mom got me for Christmas!” The post got a lot of nice comments, but it also got quite a few nasty, sexual, harassing comments. Obviously that was horrible.

But even then, the “yes buts” weren’t directed only at people saying “that’s horrible.” Rebecca Waston’s post on the incident was titled, “Reddit Makes Me Hate Atheists,” and ended with “Fuck you, r/atheism.” It’s not surprising to see pushback against this, especially from r/atheism users who didn’t contribute to the horribleness.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to say in Rebecca’s defense here (such as “it should be obvious from context that she didn’t mean all atheists,” “r/atheism really is especially bad,” that r/atheism’s moderators need to delete those kind of comments, etc.) The point is that it’s not reasonable to expect people to refrain from pushback as a matter of general principle, and the defensibility of Rebecca’s post doesn’t make “no yes buts” a good general principle.

The dustup with DJ is a pretty good example of why “no yes buts” is a problematic general principle. For starters, Greta doesn’t seem to be sticking to a strict “no yes buts” position. Instead, she says:

My problem is that — when weighing on the one hand, “Greta did something that in my opinion was unfair by quoting someone out of context,” and on the other hand, “Ryan publicly stated that he wanted to ‘slap the bitch’ and ‘kick her readers in the cunt’” — you seem to think that the former is of greater concern than the latter. You have certainly devoted significantly more space to discussing it. In the discussion on Stephanie’s blog, you devoted one sentence to saying that “there is never any defense for real or pretend threats of violence”… and 2,371 words discussing other matters, including 602 words (by a conservative count) justifying Ryan’s behavior, defending it, explaining the context for it, expressed a wish that people have sympathy for it, defending your own reaction to it, and blaming me for having instigated it.

Those priorities are, in my opinion, exactly backwards. If you’d spent one sentence saying, “Yes, I think Greta’s behavior was unfair,” and then spent the rest of your comments on the topic saying that obviously the important issue here was threats of violence, specifically gender-based, sexualized threats of violence against a female writer and her readers… we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Though it’s a little unclear, this makes it sound like her position is that it’s okay to say “yes but” as long as you don’t dedicate too many sentences to the “but.” The underlying idea is that how much attention you devote to different issues reflects how important you think those different issues are. However, while importance is one factor people use to decide how much attention to pay to different things, it’s only one of many. This makes the whole idea of criticizing someone based on how many sentences they devoted to different points a little strange.

For one thing: when you agree, all you have to say is “I agree.” You can elaborate, but it isn’t always necessary, and it would be a waste of time to rehash absolutely everything the person you’re agreeing with said. But when you say “I think you’re being unfair,” it’s natural for people to expect a somewhat detailed explanation of why you think they’re being unfair. In fact, I think if anything DJ could be faulted for not explaining himself enough.

Furthermore, part of DJ “defending his own reaction” here was DJ responding to some not very nice comments about himself, in particular “DJ Grothe has a problem, an ongoing problem with a pattern, and that problem is him” (from Stephanie Zvan). Had DJ followed Greta’s suggestion in the second paragraph quoted above, he wouldn’t have been able to respond, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people to not defend themselves against such remarks. (Maybe Greta didn’t mean to suggest that, and she was just giving one example of one thing DJ could have done instead, but if so, it’s not a very helpful example.)

But maybe Greta didn’t mean to say that “we wouldn’t be having this conversation” if only DJ had distributed his sentences differently. She certainly does make other criticisms of DJ, and I’ll talk about them in later posts.

Part of the problem with the DJ/Greta dustup is that it was spawned by something that happened on Greta’s Facebook page. Facebook does not make it easy to permalink to old threads, so basically nobody has the context for this unless you’re both (1) friends with Greta on Facebook (2) patient enough to scroll through all the stuff on her page to find something that happened more than a month ago. So I’ve decided to go ahead and make screen caps of the thing. Not whole threads, but I’ve tried to get everything relevant and then some (especially in the case of the second thread).

You can discuss this now or ignore it; I’ll be giving my own commentary later.

So I was actually kind of happy to see that Steve Hayes of Triablogue had responded to my review of Craig Keener’s book Miracles. But then I read it, and… it’s totally full o’ fail. Yet I feel like commenting on a few parts anyways:

(1) Hayes quotes me as calling Keener’s thesis “weasly,” and then calls this a “conspiratorial interpretation” while ignoring my more detailed explanation of what’s wrong with Keener’s thesis. To recap: the “primary thesis” is poorly-chosen because it’s too trivial to be worth devoting a two-volume set to, and his “secondary thesis” is problematic because it’s vague, and seems to provide Keener with an excuse for spending a lot of time accusing people of being closed-minded, instead of doing what he should be doing, which is arguing that miracles actually occur.

I suppose I could have spent a little more time on this last problem, for the sake of making things clear. In particular, I neglected to quote some of the more blatant ad hominems, such as, “skeptics ‘have laid out the rules of the game in such a way that they cannot possibly lose’” (p. 703). This quote, along with much of Keener’s discussion of such important issues medical documentation, misdiagnosis, and scientific study of prayer (quoted in my original review), is located in a chapter titled “Biased Standards?” which implies that the key issue with respect to these things is not the quality (or weakness) of the evidence, but whether skeptics are closed-minded.

(2) Hayes quotes me as saying

The fact that the only prayers God “answers” are prayers for things that have a chance of happening anyway is powerful evidence that God never actually answers prayers… Deep down, most of them have to know that prayer doesn’t really ever work, which is why they only pray for things that have a chance of happening anyway.

Then he complains a lot about it, but never answers two key questions: why do believers rarely pray for limbs to regenerate, and why are the prayers for limb regeneration that people do make so rarely answered? And while I’m on the subject: Hayes complains that I’m “leaving myself an out” by pointing out that a leg regrowth story might be a lie. But does he seriously think it’s unreasonable to be skeptical of the story from Pat Robertson’s book?

(3) Hayes writes, “In the nature of the case, most odds-beating recoveries will also happen after medical treatment. Is it just coincidental that the cure follows the treatment?” My answer: In some cases, yes. In other cases, no. But the reason we know that some medical treatments really work is not because of Keener-style collections of stories of people who received medical treatment and then recovered. We know this because we’ve done scientific studies of the effectiveness of many medical treatments, and in many cases the results came back positive.

(4) Another thing Hayes says is, “If Hallquist rejects methodological naturalism, then he has no right to tilt the board against miracles. In that event there’s no antecedent presumption to the contrary which the evidence must overcome.” This is just bizarre. If I reject one rationale for being skeptical of miracles, then I can’t be skeptical of miracles?

Here’s a simple explanation of why I’m skeptical of miracles: If someone tells me they took a ride on an airplane, under normal circumstances I’ll believe them, because I have lots of reason to think airplanes are real. (Among other things, I have memories of riding in them.) However, if someone tells me they took a ride on an extraterrestrial spacecraft, I’m going to be skeptical unless they can give me some very good evidence, because I’ve never seen any good evidence that any human has ever ridden in an extraterrestrial spacecraft. This has nothing to do with “naturalism,” since extraterrestrial spacecraft aren’t supernatural.

Similarly, if a friend tells me they got sick, took some penicillin, and got better, I’ll figure the penicillin probably contributed to their getting better, because I know there’s good evidence that penicillin helps fight infections. However, if a friend tells me they got sick, prayed, and got better, I’ll think it’s extraordinarily unlikely that the prayer helped except maybe in a psychosomatic way, because there’s no good evidence for the efficacy of prayer. In other words, it’s totally normal to use what you know about the world in general to evaluate reports about specific occasions. This should not be hard to understand.

(5) There’s all kinds of other things I can talk about, but I don’t care, because everything else in the post is even sillier than what I’ve talked about so far.

However, while there’s a whole lot I have to say about this, I don’t want this to consume my life for any length of time, even on the scale of days. So I’m going to say what I have to say a little bit at a time, starting with just quoting the stuff DJ said that I think is especially important:

I do believe that much atheist and skeptic blogging engages in far too much in-group/out-group categorizing, us vs. them thinking. If the consequence of sharing these opinions means that you or others do not want to attend TAM under my leadership, I’d be baffled. People of good will should be able to disagree about things without such a reaction.

[snip]

I have to say I find this whole discussion of how horrible it is to some that I commented in disagreement on blog posts or liked FB statuses (of CFI Michigan regarding their defense of a speaker on their program, etc.) to be unsettling. I debate ideas professionally, and often they concern central beliefs that are controversial. Unfortunately, nothing in this blog post approaches debating an idea, nor is there much actual criticism of ideas. Instead, there is deceptive and dishonest tarring-and-feathering. I reserve the right to express my opinions, even if I am the ceo and president of a nonprofit foundation, and I hope that others can disagree with them in emotionally and intellectually mature ways. You may think I’m wrong in my view that Christina behaved unfairly. But that is a far cry from saying that I am a misogynist or that women should boycott TAM or that “D.J. Grothe has a problem and that problem is him.” Such overwrought rhetoric isn’t how the good guys debate issues honestly.

[snip]

I think as skeptics, it behooves us to be a bit more generous with others in disagreement, to be slower to vilify, and to engage in less scorched-earthing. I know it may be good for blog hits, but it is bad for skepticism and in my view, is antithetical to our values.

Having quoted this, a whole bunch of caveats. First, there is one thing I’ve just quoted that I don’t agree with. I think DJ correctly identifies a problem with in-group/out-group categorizing, us vs. them thinking, and vilification. However, I don’t think this is the result of people trying to generate “blog hits.” The problems he identifies also exist on internet forums where no one is worrying about generating traffic.

Second, I haven’t given any context for things I’ve just quoted, and I want to be up-front about that. My goal is not to have people read those quotes and think Greta must be wrong because what DJ said was so obviously reasonable. If you want to get into this fiasco without waiting for my other posts, go have a look at the two discussion threads I’ve linked to, both the criticisms that have been made of DJ and his responses.

Third, part of the reason I care about this is because Greta is a strong candidate for my favorite writer on the planet. Seriously, she’s the only person where I’ll automatically read just about anything she writes, just based on the byline. In future posts I’ll be talking about things Greta has said that are, in my opinion, extremely foolish, but I’m suppressing the tiny, childish part of me that wants to react to this by saying, “nooo now I can’t like Greta any more.” The current draft of the book I’m working on quotes and recommends some extremely awesome things she’s written, and it’s not like I’ll be cutting any of that out.

Fourth, I recognize that so far I’m just saying what I think in very vague terms, and not explaining exactly what I think or why. I’m posting anyway because I have too much to say for one blog post, even a very long blog post, and I have to start somewhere. But if you want to flame me over this, I won’t think less of you, because hey, you don’t yet know why I’m writing this crap.

Modern miracle stories

For a while now I’ve been quite aware that there are a lot of Christians who like to tell miracle stories about things that allegedly happened very recently. These are not all friend-of-a-friend type stories. Sometimes it’s things people claim to have seen themselves, or that someone they know very well has seen. So for example, a year or two ago I was listing to an interview with Evangelical biblical scholar Mike Licona, and about a third of the way through the interview Licona trots out this story that supposedly happened to an unnamed Yale-educated friend of his that involves an encounter with a demon while he was in China.

Now Mike Licona is one of those evangelicals who claims that the resurrection of Jesus can be shown to have happened with historical evidence (in fact, the resurrection of Jesus was the main topic of the interview). But my reaction to hearing that in the interview was to think that these modern reports of the supernatural are way, way more interesting than the alleged evidence for Jesus’s resurrection, because with these modern stories there is, at least in principle, the possibility that you could go track down the witnesses, do a real investigation, and potentially—if the thing really happened—get together quite a bit of documentation (and if it didn’t happen, uncover reasons not to take the story at face value).

Now based on what I know about the history of paranormal investigation and some of the adventures of the Society for Psychical Research, I’d quite confidently predict that if Christians ever did that kind of investigation, they’d eventually realize that they’re not going to find good evidence for supernatural phenomenon with those kinds of stories. Still, you could do an interesting investigation.

Enter Craig Keener. The main thing he does in Miracles is collect lots and lots of stories of seemingly miraculous happenings, most of them healings. He doesn’t really try to do any in-depth investigation of the stories he reports, but he’s up-front about that. He talks about his limitations, like a lack of funding for investigation, lack of time off from his teaching duties, and his own lack of medical knowledge, and suggests that maybe in the future other people will be able to build on his work and do an investigation that doesn’t suffer from those limitations. I think that if Keener’s book inspires other evangelical Christians to spend some real time and effort scrutinizing these kinds of stories, then the book will have done some good.

But now the bad. The problems with Keener’s book begin on the very first page when he states the book’s thesis:

The book’s primary thesis is simply that eyewitnesses do offer miracle claims, a thesis simple enough but one sometimes neglected when some scholars approach accounts in the Gospels. The secondary thesis is that supernatural explanations, while not suitable in every case, should be welcome on the scholarly table along with other explanations often discussed (p. 1)

This is what I call a weaselly thesis statement because it clearly says much less than what Keener wants to say. It lets him that hint at some very controversial claims, but because he’s officially only defending these seemingly banal claims, it gets him off the hook from really having to defend his views. So the primary thesis is something that I agree with and I agreed with before I even began reading the book, and it’s really the kind of thing you would defend the an article, not a two-volume set.

And the role of the secondary thesis, in practice, ends up being to allow Keener to spend a lot of time making ad hominem attacks against those big nasty skeptics who want supernatural explanations off the table and then Keener can fight the good fight to have the explanations on the table. (Whatever that means—part of the problem here is that “on the table” is vague, so it’s not even clear with thesis is.)

Regrown limbs

Now when I accused Keener of making ad hominem attacks, what do I mean that? Ad hominem is a phrase that I think is that horridly overused for any time someone is mean to someone else. But I mean it in the strict sense of substituting attacks on a person’s character for arguments in a situation where the person’s character is irrelevant.

So for example, let’s look at the issue of claims of regrown limbs. There’s a website called WhyWon’tGodHealAmputees.com, (formerly known as WhyDoesGodHateAmputees.com) that makes an argument:

For this experiment, we need to find a deserving person who has had both of his legs amputated. For example, find a sincere, devout veteran of the Iraqi war, or a person who was involved in a tragic automobile accident…

If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a single miracle for this one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch.

What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He does not say it once — he says it many times in many ways in the Bible.

And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen…

What are we seeing here? It is not that God sometimes answers the prayers of amputees, and sometimes does not. Instead, in this situation there is a very clear line. God never answers the prayers of amputees. It would appear, to an unbiased observer, that God is singling out amputees and purposefully ignoring them.(LINK)

What’s the point of this thought experiment?

How do we know, for sure, that God does not answer prayers?… we simply pray and watch what happens. What we find is that nothing happens. No matter how many people pray, no matter how often they pray, no matter how sincerely they pray, no matter how worthy the prayer, nothing ever happens. If we pray for anything that is impossible — for example, regenerating an amputated limb or moving Mt. Everest to Newark, NJ — it never happens. We all know that. If we pray for anything that is possible, the results of the prayer will unfold in exact accord with the normal laws of probability. In every situation where we statistically analyze the effects of prayers, looking at both the success AND the failure of prayer, we find that prayer has zero effect. Prayers for amputees never work. Medical prayers never work. Prayers for “good people” never work. Battlefield prayers never work. That happens, always, because God is imaginary. Every time a Christian says, “The Lord answered my prayer,” what we are seeing instead is a simple coincidence or the natural effects of self-talk.(LINK)

Now I have to admit that my gut reaction to this argument is that this is a horribly unsophisticated argument. But I think the truth is that this is an argument that any idiot can see is correct, and the part of me that instinctively dislikes this argument is the part of me that’s terrified of being mistaken for any idiot. The fact that the only prayers God “answers” are prayers for things that have a chance of happening anyway is powerful evidence that God never actually answers prayers

If you wanted to be a little more charitable towards the “this argument is so unsophisticated” line, you might say that religious people must have good responses to obvious arguments like this one, or else there wouldn’t be any religious people, but I don’t think that’s true. I think most religious people are just good at not thinking too hard about problems for their religious beliefs like this one. Deep down, most of them have to know that prayer doesn’t really ever work, which is why they only pray for things that have a chance of happening anyway. This is a good example of how religious people compartmentalize.

Now, here’s what Keener says about regrown limbs, and this is where the ad hominems come in:

Some skeptics about healing argue (beyond the evidence) that almost anything can be psychosomatic, whereas clearly organic restorations of limbs are never reported. Certainly there are not many such reports (including the Bible), but they do appear occasionally; in one extraordinary report, for example, a leg severed beneath the knee grew back. [A footnote cites a book by televangelist Pat Robertson--Hallquist] Elsewhere, useless or shriveled limbs have become functional and filled out miraculously quickly. Those committed to disbelief that such miracles can happen will, of course, dismiss such claims; but while the rareness of such claims (hence limited possible analogies) does invite caution, one might also get the impression that some skeptics’ demands for particular kinds of evidence become stricter whenever evidence of the demanded sort appears. (p. 747)

Now Keener is completely missing the point here. The significance of the regrown limb issue is that if regrown limbs happened, they’d avoid a lot of problems you get with other kinds of healing claims. You eliminate the possibility that it could be a coincidence you, elliminate the possibility that maybe the doctors made a mistake. If someone’s leg really regrew it’d be pretty easy to document conclusively, if it happened under the right circumstances. If the limb regrows almost instantaneously, it’s going be hard to be mistaken about witnessing that.

So we shouldn’t expect false reports of regrowing limbs to happen very often. It’s going be hard to get away with making up a story like that, and we should expect that to deter people from making up stories about regrowing limbs. However, people do sometimes tell outrageous lies. So the fact that there is a story of a regrowing limb in a book by Pat Robertson doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t change the fact that the lack of evidence of regrowing limbs is suspicious, and the fact that skeptics aren’t impressed by such stories isn’t evidence of closed-mindedness.

Science!

Now that I’ve talked about an example of a claim that people rarely make, let’s look at a claim that’s more typical of claims people do make:

Even solid medical documentation is not adequate by itself to surmount strongly held presuppositions, because one may insist in every case (even if there are thousands of them) that another explanation is possible. My colleague in Hebrew Bible, Emmanuel Itapson, was told that his third child had “the death chromosome” and would likely die before birth if not aborted. The family prayed, and the boy is now nine years old. Because 1 percent of those with this chromosome are known to live beyond infancy, one cannot prove beyond any doubt that prayer is the factor that helped him to live so long; yet I am prepared to grant that likelihood in view of the significant number of extraordinary answers to prayer in Emmanuel’s circle, including one mentioned in chapter 9 and another in chapter 12 (p. 666–I did not notice this page number until after choosing the quote).

The first thing to notice about this is that this story is evidently being filtered through people who don’t have a lot of medical knowledge. The “death chromosome” presumably refers to a lethal chromosomal abnormality, but since there are many lethal chromosomal abnormalities, there’s no such thing as “the” death chromosome. Either someone misunderstood the doctor, or the doctor was dumbing down the diagnosis for the benefit of the parents. But whatever the case, it makes this story a little harder to evaluate.

More importantly, the way Keener introduces this case suggests he thinks it illustrates how unreasonable skeptics are. That’s frankly ridiculous. In fact, setting aside for a moment the other “extraordinary answers to prayer,” this case doesn’t provide any evidence at all for the efficacy of prayer. By definition, for every 100 times someone is faced with 100 to 1 odds, one person will beat the odds. In more religious parts of the world, including the United States, I’m sure that most people, maybe an overwhelming majority of people, pray when they or their children are faced with a serious illness. In that case, most odds-beating recoveries will happen after prayer. Because stories like this aren’t surprising even if you don’t think miracles happen, these stories aren’t evidence of anything miraculous.

This is why science is neat. At the most basic level, when we’re talking about the scientific study of prayer, we’re talking about checking to see if prayer leads to beating the odds more often than not praying. We’re also checking for things like bias among people recording the data and the placebo effect. (The placebo effect is when something that wouldn’t normally do anything, like a sugar pill, leads to people doing better merely because they think they’re getting treated.)

What about the fact that this guy’s circle of friends supposedly has had a whole bunch of remarkable recoveries? Is that evidence of something supernatural? Again, no. The problem with saying “Oh it looks like we’ve got this really improbable cluster of cases,” without doing rigorous statistical analysis, is that humans are really bad at eyeballing probability. We have a tendency to see patterns in randomness, and we even sometimes judge rigged events as more random than really random ones. To give just one of many examples, psychologist Steven Pinker describes one experiment which found that “people think that genuine sequences of coin flips (like TTHHTHTTTT) are fixed, because they have more long runs of heads or tails than their intuitions allow, and they think that sequences that were jiggered to avoid long runs (like HTHTTHTHHT) are fair” (Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature, p. 204).

This is something that’s actually not all that surprising, once you think about what randomness means. Random doesn’t mean being distributed evenly. There’s nothing about randomness that prevents events of a certain kind from clumping together just by chance, so it’s going to happen some of the time. Yes in some cases it’s going to be tempting to say “this clump is just too improbable to have happened by chance,” but except in the very most extreme of cases it’s just not something you can say without careful statistical analysis.

Furthermore, even in cases that seem extreme, what might be happening is that inaccurate reporting is taking events that were only somewhat improbable and blowing them up into something extremely improbable. There are a number of reasons that could happen. One of them is lack of medical knowledge, which I’ve already pointed out in the death chromosome story. And the point of taking a rigorous scientific approach is to avoid those kinds of problems.

Keener does discuss scientific studies of the efficacy of prayer briefly. He mentions studies with positive results, but does so only very briefly, vaguely saying in one case that “many have questioned the study” without discussing the criticisms or trying to determine whether the criticisms are valid. This reflects a general problem with the book: Keener’s approach to important questions is often to say, “some people say X, some people say otherwise, moving on…”

He does devote a paragraph to discussing the results of a 2006 prayer study funded by the John Templeton Foundation, a foundation that funds academic research related to religion. The study was the largest such study to date, and according to the authors it tried to make up for shortcomings in previous studies. It found no evidence of any benefit from prayer. Keener says a number of things to try to minimize this result, including asking, “Would God favor someone or not because they belonged to a control group?” (pp. 708-709).

Well maybe not. But you could also ask similar questions about prayer in general—why an omnipotent, omniscient God would need our input on how to run the universe. And whatever you think of those theological questions, they don’t negate the value of science, nor do they negate the problems with using collections of stories as proof of the supernatural.

Keener does at one point given very brief argument for why we can’t study the supernatural scientifically:

Since science depends on observation and experimentation, and since a “miracle is by definition an irreproducible” experience, even documented miracle cures by definition cannot fit precisely the expectations of science as it has been most narrowly defined. While affirming miracles, one scholar warns that “miracles cannot be investigated by the usual scientific methods since we cannot control the variables and perform experiments” (p. 608).

This is pretty clearly wrong. If God gave one man the power to work a certain limited kind of miracles at will, that would be reproducible, and subject to scientific experimentation. In particular, he could submit to a test under conditions designed to rule out fraud and delusion, and then we could see if he could still produce the apparent effects under those conditions. There are many people who would be happy to arrange such a test, including the James Randi Educational Foundation, which offers a $1,000,000 prize to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal abilities under controlled test conditions.

You might want to argue that God would never grant miracle-working power in that manner, but consider this famous passage from the book of Exodus (Exodus 4:1-9):

1 Moses answered, “What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say, ‘The LORD did not appear to you’?”

2 Then the LORD said to him, “What is that in your hand?”

“A staff,” he replied.

3 The LORD said, “Throw it on the ground.”

Moses threw it on the ground and it became a snake, and he ran from it. 4 Then the LORD said to him, “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail.” So Moses reached out and took hold of the snake and it turned back into a staff in his hand. 5 “This,” said the LORD, “is so that they may believe that the LORD, the God of their fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has appeared to you.”

6 Then the LORD said, “Put your hand inside your cloak.” So Moses put his hand into his cloak, and when he took it out, the skin was leprous—it had become as white as snow.

7 “Now put it back into your cloak,” he said. So Moses put his hand back into his cloak, and when he took it out, it was restored, like the rest of his flesh.

8 Then the LORD said, “If they do not believe you or pay attention to the first sign, they may believe the second. 9 But if they do not believe these two signs or listen to you, take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground. The water you take from the river will become blood on the ground.”

If you’re an orthodox Christian who thinks this story from Exodus really happened, as far as I can tell the only thing you can say here is that the reason God doesn’t empower prophets in this manner today is that he doesn’t want to make the evidence for miracles too clear.

I’ve actually heard Christians say something like this. What they’ll say is that God has given us clear enough evidence, but he’s avoided giving us too much so that closed-minded skeptics can continue being closed-minded (because we all know that skeptics are wicked and need to be set up to be punished for their wickedness). There are two problems with this. First of all I don’t think the premise that skeptics are typically closed-minded and wicked is really true. But perhaps more importantly, I just don’t think explanations that suppose that the universe is in some way conspiring to avoid giving us very good evidence are generally the best explanations.

For example, you can say that the reason people who claim to be psychic are never able to demonstrate under controlled test conditions that are designed to rule out cheating is that the presence of skeptics somehow disrupts psychic powers, but I think the more plausible explanation is that nobody really has psychic powers and precautions against cheating are doing exactly what they’re supposed. Or, a UFO organization once claimed that 2% of Americans have been abducted by aliens. In response, Carl Sagan quipped, “It’s surprising that more of the neighbors haven’t noticed” You could suppose that the aliens have various kinds of super-technology that allows them to hide almost all of the evidence, but a better explanation is that people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are suffering from hallucinations, false memories and so on (see The Demon Haunted World, pp. 64, 181). Likewise, I think the best explanation for the lack of evidence for miracles is that there aren’t any.

So it can’t be disputed that the evidence for miracles is less than perfect. That’s enough to disprove Keener’s insinuation that skeptics of miracles wouldn’t be persuaded by any evidence. The vast majority of skeptics would have no trouble believing in the power of prayer if there were as much evidence for it as there is for the power of penicillin. But there isn’t.

Misdiagnosis

Another problem with stories of miraculous healings is the problem with doctors making mistakes. Consider this story:

In 2006, I interviewed Dr. Douglass Norwood; during the time of most of the testimonies he recounted, he was a Moravian pastor. He mentioned several dramatic healings but explained two in the greatest detail. The first case, which took place in Suriname, I have recounted earlier. The other case, more relevant for this chapter, involved his wife, Sarah. Her neck was broken and her spinal cord severed in a car crash on December 14, 1982; she remained paralyzed at the Rusk Institute for six months. Despite the medical impossibility of her walking with a severed spinal cord, she began walking within twenty-four hours of being “anointed with oil,” leading to a number of conversions among the hospital staff. Doug notes that the healing is only 90 percent complete, though it is a medical miracle; she walks with considerable effort and requires medicines, but that she walks at all still astonishes those who examine her (p. 438-439).

I picked up this story because it’s listed on a table at the end of the book as one where Keener had personally talked to the guy who supposedly witnessed this, and it was also listed as a case that Keener was especially confident was really miraculous. Personally, I just don’t see it. Given that the woman in this story could only walk “with considerable effort,” I don’t understand the mindset of someone who would look at this and say “this is an amazing miracle.” My guess is that what happened is that this woman really was badly injured and she just wasn’t quite as badly injured as the doctors initially thought. There’s nothing difficult to explain here.

Now Keener, once again has something to say about the issue of doctors making mistakes and once again it involves an ad hominem:

Those who question supernatural healings often attribute the more convincing cases to an initial misdiagnosis. Although genuine misdiagnosis does occur at times, this approach sometimes has been used as a means to explain away extranormal healings retroactively, and sometimes the initial evidence is too firm to aver a misdiagnosis… To simply dismiss every cure as a case of prior misdiagnosis is to allow one’s presuppositions to determine the outcome, especially when it involves many cases and the prior diagnoses involve multiple physicians. One healing evangelist reasonably complains that if critics really believe that so many hundreds of healing cases result from initial misdiagnosis, they should be raising an outcry against such widespread misdiagnosis instead of divine healing.

And once again this is all beside the point. The issue is not whether skeptics are closed-minded, the issue is that if the case is going to be touted as powerful evidence of miraculous healing, it needs to be possible to show with some degree of certainty that the doctors didn’t make a mistake. Keener claims that misdiagnosis can sometimes be ruled out, but he supports this claim with just a footnote. As happens all too often in the book, there’s no discussion of an absolutely central claim.

On top of that, there’s other silly rhetoric here. The thing about dismissing every cure as a case of misdiagnosis misses the point because a possible explanation doesn’t need to explain every case to be a serious concern. This is just like how there’s no single cause of UFO sightings that turn out not to be extraterrestrial spacecraft. Also, the complaint about hundreds of misdiagnoses is silly because in a world where millions upon millions of people seek medical care every year, a few hundred mistakes isn’t all that much. Doctors aren’t perfect.

A final point

I don’t know if you’re getting sick of this post by now, but I am, so one last point: Keener tries to explain the lack of medical documentation for alleged miraculous healings by proposing that God has seen fit to mainly work healing miracles in the context of missionary efforts in the Third World, and that makes them difficult to document (see i.e. p. 662-704-705). Again, while this is a possible explanation, I don’t think it’s the best explanation. Alleged miracles not happening under circumstances where they can be well documented is just what we would expect if no miracles were happening all.

Basically the book starts off with three chapters of preliminaries talking about the sort of silly knee-jerk reactions that people have to criticism of religion, talking about why it’s okay to criticize religion, talking about the differences between what most religious people believe and what left-wing theologians believe, stuff like that. And then I have five chapters talking about the truth of religion, arguments for the existence of God, arguments against the existence of God, stuff like that.

Essentially that’s what I that written so far and the plan was to make the last chapter to chapter about the moral side of religion and the harm that religion does. But I’ve sort of got writer’s block on this chapter because I’m not sure how to make it interesting. Because I’m not sure there’s anything interesting that can be said in defense of the moral side of religion.

So, for example, I think Plantinga’s ontological argument isn’t it all a good argument in the sense that I don’t think it does anything for the credibility of theism. But it’s an interesting argument insofar as there’s an interesting explanation of why it’s a bad argument, and I can write 2500 words about it and not feel like I’m wasting my reader’s time. But I’m not sure there are any comparably interesting defenses of moral side of religion.

Perhaps a better way to explain it is that William Lane Craig’s arguments for the existence of God are terrible arguments, but when you put him up on stage against an opponent he can use all his rhetorical prowess and high school debate team skills to impress the audience. But Craig rarely does debates on things like the morality of hell, and he probably would never agree to a debate on a topic like, say, “resolved, that the Bible is full of immoral teachings” because any halfway competent opponent would win in spite of Craig’s debating skills. That’s an indicator that the question of the morality of many religious teachings is one-sided, in a way that the argument over the existence of God is not one-sided.

So when Dawkins says that the God of the Old Testament is a homophobic, misogynistic, genocidal, bully and so on and so forth, that’s something that’s just obvious anyone who’s actually read the Old Testament. That’s a paragraph that all of Dawkins’ critics cite as evidence of what a terrible person Dawkins is, but their attempts to explain what is wrong with that statement are just absolutely pathetic. For example, Alastair McGrath says well, that’s not the God I believe in or anyone I know believes in, which may be true but it’s still the God described in the Old Testament.

Or you have Alvin Plantinga who makes the really insulting claim that the fact that Dawkins would dare say such a thing about God (or the God of the Old Testament, rather) indicates that Dawkins’ book contains no “evenhanded than thoughtful commentary,” even though Plantinga ought to know the basis for Dawkins statement. And instead of actually trying to rebut it he just dismisses it, which I think is a much more serious indicator of a lack of thoughtful commentary.

When Christians aren’t talking about what a big meanie Richard Dawkins is, the usual approach to talking about the Old Testament seems to be to go on and on about context. (I won’t get into what Jews say, they have somewhat different strategies.) Both conservative Christians and liberal Christians do this, and it’s just an evasion. The Old Testament, remember, contain commandments to kill men for having gay sex, commandments to kill people for blasphemy or for trying to get you to worship other gods. It even contains a part where Moses has a man killed for picking up sticks on the Sabbath of all things. It contains commandments to exterminate entire tribes.

Lots of awful stuff. Stuff that is on the face of it horrendously immoral. And when Christians talk about the context of the Old Testament, they never actually get around to explaining why that should stop us from thinking that these things in the Old Testament are horrendously immoral.

Similarly, there are verses in the New Testament, which taken together seem to suggest that anyone who does not believe in Christianity will be punished forever in hell. I called the Old Testament horrendously immoral; this goes beyond horrendously immoral. In fact I don’t even think there are words in the English language to express how evil this doctrine is, except perhaps, for “hellish.”

Some Evangelical Christians address this problem by saying, no, this misinterpretation of the Bible and try to interpret the Bible in a way that allows some non-Christians to go to heaven or even allows everybody to go to heaven. There are a serious Evangelical Christians who seriously argue that the Bible teaches that, and part of me says fair enough, because I think the Bible contradicts itself on what you have to do to get salvation.

However, a lot of Evangelical leaders think the all non-Christians go to hell thing is nonnegotiable. How they deal with the problem of hell is first of all, the avoid talking about it. Second of all if they do have to talk about it, they downplay it. One thing they’ll say is that hell isn’t literal flames hell is just separation from God.

Of course this doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, it might even be a blessing in disguise since a lot of times the God of Evangelical Christianity he sounds like a bit of a weirdo, who I might want to stay far, far away from, if, for example, he’s really that obsessed with getting people to believe things for which there is very little evidence.

On the other hand, if you ask the “hell is separation from God” folks, “how bad is hell?” they’ll tell you that hell is the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. So if the belief is also that all non-Christians go to hell, that’s still saying that all non-Christians (if they die without coming to the truth and accepting Jesus as their Savior) will meet the worst fate imaginable. It’s saying that all of Hitler’s victims, with the exception of minority of converts to Christianity, all of them once they were killed in the Holocaust then went on to a fate even worse than Holocaust, ordained for them by the Evangelical Christian God. Good news indeed.

So there’s just no good defense of these doctrines. The other defensive strategy is that oh well we should ignore these doctrines because of the overriding message of love that is the true core of Christianity. This is very popular among liberal Christians, but surprisingly you also hear it sometimes from Christians who claim to be Evangelicals, claim to believe everything in the Bible.

My response to that is that, well, it’s true the Bible talks about love, but in so far as a particular biblical author combines talk about love with these horrible teachings and that’s evidence that that particular author did not really understand love. If a modern cult leader who advocated both stoning gays to death and also said some nice things about love, we wouldn’t think that the nice things about love overrode the horrible things about stoning gays to death.

Maybe the reason some Christians are so impressed the idea of a message of love and the Bible is they are under the impression that without the Bible, people wouldn’t know to love each other, which is maybe understandable if your moral education has been totally limited to the Bible. But once you know even a tiny little bit about ethical traditions outside of religion it becomes totally obvious that that’s false. For example, just look at Stoic teachings about the brotherhood of all men which, predate Jesus.

So that’s my stream of consciousness thoughts about the moral side of religion. I could go on, I’ve got more to say, but I’m not sure I have a book chapter worth of things to say. I think it’s a very important point and I don’t want to sell it short in the book, so give me advice on this one. When I talk about the moral side of religion, what should I be talking about? Yes, I can talk about the lie that Hitler was an atheist, and I can talk about communism, and I can talk about the Inquisition, and I can talk about the horrible treatment of women in Muslim countries today, but I think those issues are as straightforward and can probably be dealt with just as briefly as the things I’ve been talking about this post.

So what do I do to fill this chapter I’m trying to write?

I agree that Leprechaunology is not a great analogy for the work of Aquinas or Leibniz. But it’s easy to suggest better analogies: how about Spinozism or Hegelianism? I’d be surprised if Feser took either of those doctrines terribly seriously.

The dirty little secret of philosophy is that just because a philosopher is held up as “great” to the public and considered required reading in undergraduate courses does not mean professional philosophers think his work is very good, or that they’re obliged to study him carefully before thinking his work is not very good.

Feser bemoans this when his colleagues do it to Aquinas, but he himself does it with plenty of modern and contemporary philosophers. The brand of rhetoric that Feser has made his name on strikes many professional philosophers as utterly bizarre, and with good reason.

Let me expand a little. Feser seems to rely on the assumption that people like Augustine and Aquinas were great thinkers, and there’s no need to argue this, because everyone knows who history’s great thinkers are. And if what you mean by a “great” thinker is an influential one, then there’s no question that Augustine, Aquinas, etc. were “great” thinkers. The problem is that there’s little reason to think believing nonsense is a barrier to becoming influential, so the “greatness” of Augustine and Aquinas in this sense is no evidence that they didn’t believe a lot of nonsense.

On the other hand, if what you mean by “great” is the quality of a thinker’s insights, the quality of his contributions to the intellectual tradition, then there’s no agreement as to who the “great” thinkers are. For example: Georg Hegel (1770-1831): greatest philosopher whoever lived? Or was his work, as Schopenauer (1788-1860) said, “a colossal piece of mystification” featuring “the most outrageous misuse of language”? Informed people disagree. Then there’s the fact–as mentioned above–that Feser himself has little regard for most of the philosophers in the standard list of greats from Descartes onwards.

A third thing people might mean when they talk about “great” philosophers is that when we read Augustine or Aquinas, it’s just obvious that these were very smart men, and any idea had by a very smart man must be at least somewhat good. Now, I don’t think it really is so obvious that Augustine and Aquinas were that smart (Augustine’s The City of God is on the face of it a rambling piece of hack polemic), but let that pass.

The bigger problem here is that intelligence isn’t much of a barrier to believing nonsense. Indeed, it isn’t even always a barrier to supporting downright evil causes–as we learned from Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and the other German intellectuals who supported the Nazis. Part of the problem, as Michael Shermer said, is that “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” But the problem is even worse than that: there are some kinds of nonsense that only smart people are capable of producing.

This is related to the points I’ve made previously, but let me give an especially clear example: physicist Alan Sokal’s paper Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Here is a sample:

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity”. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz’s analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross’ discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray’s and Hayles’ exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding’s comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.

Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, existence itself — become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.

There’s no question that this is nonsense. When the journal Social Text published the article in 1996, Sokal immediately revealed that the article was “a parody,” which he had submitted to the journal to test the question “would a leading North American journal of cultural studies… publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?”

However, while Sokal’s article was “liberally salted with nonsense,” it was not nonsense that just anyone could have written. To write an article like that you’d need, at minimum, some knowledge of physics, some knowledge of postmodern literary theory, and a certain knack for imitating other people’s writing style. In other words, it’s something Sokal might have published even if he hadn’t had a point to make and just wanted to show off. And if he had just wanted to show off, he might have been better off not revealing the hoax.

This is not to say that any famous philosophers have consciously perpetrated Sokal-style hoaxes and just not told anybody. I suspect that the worst nonsense producers do want to impress people but also manage to convince themselves they’re talking sense. But whatever is going on inside the heads of certain people, the Sokal hoax shows that a piece of writing can display intelligence and learning and still be arrant nonsense.

Now, while there are lots of important differences between science and philosophy, most of what I’ve said here applies to scientists as much as philosophers. Newton’s work in physics is held in high regard not because Newton was obviously such a great guy, but because Newton did an impressive job of drawing inferences from the evidence (even though we now know some of his ideas about physics were wrong). Newton also put a lot of effort into occultism and finding hidden messages in the Bible, but scientists don’t feel obligated to respect that part of Newton’s work simply because he was a “great thinker.”

What I’ve written so far has been about philosophers and “thinkers” in general, but there’s an additional problem with defending Christianity with appeals to great Christian thinkers: for much of the history of Christianity, it wasn’t safe to be anything other than a Christian in Christian lands. Augustine argued that heretics should be corrected with torture and imprisonment, and there is a place in The City of God where he gloats about the fact that some people had written rebuttals to his work, and then refrained from publishing them out of fear for their own safety. Aquinas went a step further and argued that heretics should be executed.

Things improved only gradually after the scientific revolution. Hobbes was tried for heresy and could have been executed if found guilty, but escaped with only a ban on future writings. Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise (which argued for “freedom to philosophize”) had to be circulated clandestinely, and Spinoza was unable to publish his Ethics during his lifetime.

Hume lived after the last execution for blasphemy in Britain, but lost out on a teaching position at the University of Edinburgh in part because his Treatise of Human Nature was perceived as threatening the traditional arguments for the existence of God. Hume later discussed the arguments for the existence of God in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and though he concealed his own views behind the characters in the dialogue his friends persuaded him not to publish the book during his lifetime. Only in the 19th century did it become truly safe to openly reject all religion, and at that point you got prominent thinkers openly rejecting all religion.

One reason this last point is important is that it’s tempting to say, “The arguments for the existence of God given by people like Thomas Aquinas and Samuel Clarke were convincing to people back then because people back then accepted the arguments’ assumptions, but today we reject those assumptions.” But I wonder if people found the arguments all that convincing even back then. Maybe they were just afraid to disagree.

Alvin Plantinga, like John Haught, is regarded as a sophisticated and serious theologian. (Although he’s formally a Christian philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, he’s published lots of books defending God, engaging in apologetics, and so on, so there’s little doubt he qualifies as a theologian.)

This made me wince. I’ve been being pretty mean to Plantinga over the past couple of weeks, but my opinion always improves whenever I try to read a “theologian” in the sense of a theology professor like Haught (or one of the writers who tend to be popular among professors of theology.) In my experience, there are huge cultural differences between academic philosophy of religion and academic theology. Because of this, there may be a sense in which Plantinga is a theologian, but it’s somewhat misleading to call him that.

Theologians at major universities, places like Harvard Divinity and Princeton Theological Seminary, can be pretty left-wing. As a grad student at Notre Dame, my impression was that this was true even there, in spite of it being a Catholic institution. One of my fellow grad students grumbled about the theology there being “not Vatican approved;” there were rumors of a theology course that had gotten the nickname “lesbian theology.” Yes, there are Evangelical seminaries that force professors to sign orthodox statements of faith, but it’s liberal theology still dominates the academic world.

If academic theology were merely liberal, I’d be happy about that, but it also tends to be highly obfuscatory–which is to say theologians frequently do not even try to write clearly. My typical experience when picking up their books is to first notice they are using words in ways I am not used to. Then I start skimming to try to find the section where they explain what they mean by their words (sometimes there are legitimate reasons for using words in unusual ways). Then I end up closing the book when I fail to find such a section.

Why do theologians write this way? Some suspect they are trying to hide the fact that they do not have anything worthwhile to say. But another reason, I think, it is that they are heretics but lack the courage of yesterday’s heretics, and want to hide how heretical their views are. Thus, in the words of (philosopher of religion) Peter van Inwagen, they have developed a way of talking “that enables atheists who occupy chairs of theology to talk as if they were theists.”

With John Haught, I got through his entire book God and the New Atheism without ever learning what his theological views are. As a result I was surprised, but only moderately surprised, when I read the following in an interview with Haught:

What do you make of the miracles in the Bible — most importantly, the Resurrection? Do you think that happened in the literal sense?

I don’t think theology is being responsible if it ever takes anything with completely literal understanding. What we have in the New Testament is a story that’s trying to awaken us to trust that our lives make sense, that in the end, everything works out for the best. In a pre-scientific age, this is done in a way in which unlettered and scientifically illiterate people can be challenged by this Resurrection. But if you ask me whether a scientific experiment could verify the Resurrection, I would say such an event is entirely too important to be subjected to a method which is devoid of all religious meaning.

So if a camera was at the Resurrection, it would have recorded nothing?

If you had a camera in the upper room when the disciples came together after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we would not see it. I’m not the only one to say this. Even conservative Catholic theologians say that. Faith means taking the risk of being vulnerable and opening your heart to that which is most important. We trivialize the whole meaning of the Resurrection when we start asking, Is it scientifically verifiable? Science is simply not equipped to deal with the dimensions of purposefulness, love, compassion, forgiveness — all the feelings and experiences that accompanied the early community’s belief that Jesus is still alive. Science is simply not equipped to deal with that. We have to learn to read the universe at different levels. That means we have to overcome literalism not just in the Christian or Jewish or Islamic interpretations of scripture but also in the scientific exploration of the universe. There are levels of depth in the cosmos that science simply cannot reach by itself.

Notice how unclear Haught’s initial response is; the interviewer had to ask a follow-up to make sure Haught was saying what he really seemed to be saying. And even Haught’s response to the follow up isn’t totally clear. But it sure sounds like he’s saying “the resurrection didn’t really happen” (cf. Alexander Pruss’ musings).

Plantinga isn’t the clearest writer. He sometimes uses more jargon and logical notation than is healthy. And his latest book is surprisingly silent on what he thinks of evolution. But he at least tries clearly, he usually isn’t afraid to state his views, and I’ve never once heard him give the sort of non-answer Haught gave in the above interview. Similarly, while Plantinga’s arguments may not be good, he at least gives them (or gives arguments for why he doesn’t have to give arguments for his beliefs). That’s more than I can say of the academic theologians I’ve encountered.

This doesn’t mean the theologians are wrong in their views. Indeed, if Haught really denies the resurrection happened, then in my view he’s being sensible! The problem, rather, is analogous to a situation where (as in the real world) scientists’ understanding of the world has improved a lot since the middle ages, but for some reason (unlike the real world) scientists have put a lot of energy into finding ways of talking as if the medieval alchemical theories were true. If scientists were doing that, that’s not an enterprise we’d be under any obligation to take seriously. The same goes for left-wing theology.

Many specialists in philosophy of science have actual degrees in the area of science they write about, even if it’s just a bachelor’s. Of course, it’s possible to know quite a bit of science without formal training, but I think it’s safe to say that if you’re going to do serious academic writing on science without such formal training, you’ll need to put in a fair amount of effort educating yourself.

How much? Well, enough that you don’t make any mistakes that would be obvious to an undergraduate studying the field you’re writing about. Enough that you call tell the difference between something one scientist said once, and something most scientists in the relevant field consider a well-established finding. Popularizations can be useful, but you’d be wise not to rely too much on them. Certainly, if you find a particular popularization’s description of the evidence for a scientific claim lacking, you should do more research, rather than assume it is the science and not just the popularization that is flawed.

In fact, the safest policy is probably is to assume the experts are right when they can agree that something is certain (or nearly certain). But if you must disagree, or come to the defense of views generally regarded as fringe, at least be careful. Don’t rush in as you might rush in to a debate in your area of expertise. First make a real effort to understand why the experts think what they do. Be ready for the possibility that their reasons will be stronger than you thought at first. And if you do that and still aren’t convinced, be willing to clearly explain why you aren’t convinced.

Things not to do include: hand waving dismissals of the evidence for widely-accepted findings, jumping to the conclusion that the opinion of the experts is merely the product of bias, and declaring that none of the scientists who’ve criticized the fringe view you favor are worth responding to.

These rules should be common sense, and I think most philosophers who write about science follow them. Plantinga, however, has a long history of breaking them when writing about evolution. An early example is Plantinga’s paper, “When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible.” It opens with a tidy statement of how religion and science at least seem to conflict:

Taken at face value, the Bible seems to teach that God created the world relatively recently, that he created life by way of several separate acts of creation, that in another separate act of creation, he created an original human pair, Adam and Eve, and that these our original parents disobeyed God, thereby bringing ruinous calamity on themselves, their posterity and the rest of creation.

According to contemporary science, on the other hand, the universe is exceedingly old-some 15 or 16 billion years or so, give or take a billion or two. The earth is much younger, maybe 4 1/2 billion years old, but still hardly a spring chicken. Primitive life arose on earth perhaps 3 1/2 billion years ago, by virtue of processes that are completely natural if so far not well understood; and subsequent forms of life developed from these aboriginal forms by way of natural processes, the most popular candidates being perhaps random genetic mutation and natural selection.

He then discusses a number of ways of handling this apparent conflict. He notes that some Christians think they should always be willing to reinterpret the Bible to accommodate science, but says this view is “deplorable.” In fact, though Plantinga says he accepts that the Earth is old, he also says that “One need not be a fanatic, or a Flat Earther, or an ignorant Fundamentalist” to be a young-Earth creationist.

Then Plantinga says he thinks the theory of evolution is probably false, and tries to argue that the evidence for it is weak. This section of the paper is by Plantinga’s own admission “hand waving,” and includes at least one howler: Plantinga complains of “the nearly complete absence, in the fossil record, of intermediates between such major divisions as, say, reptiles and birds, or fish and reptiles, or reptiles and mammals.”

This is an idea creationists seem to have gotten from a misunderstanding of Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibria, and Gould has put a lot of energy into correcting this misunderstanding. One place he corrects it is his essay “Evolution as Fact and Theory,” which happens to be the one piece of Gould’s writing that appears in Plantinga’s bibliography. Gould explains that “Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.” Plantinga’s mistake is so big, and so avoidable, that it suggests he wasn’t really even trying to get his science right.

After making a mess of discussing the evidence for evolution, Plantinga decides that the confidence scientists have in evolution must be due to philosophical prejudice and confusion. This, of course, is not something you can actually infer from a “hand waving” discussion of the evidence, but it may explain the sloppiness of that discussion. Why read Gould carefully, or take him seriously when he tells you you’re suffering from a serious misconception, if you can dismiss him as philosophically prejudiced?

In more recent years, Plantinga has backed off from his stronger anti-evolution comments, but is still uncomfortable with evolution, just in denial about his discomfort. In 2010, Michael Ruse wrote an article describing Plantinga as having “long harbored a distrust, even an ardent dislike, of evolutionary theorizing in general and of Darwinian thinking in particular.” Plantinga replied that this was a “misrepresentation” showing Ruse’s “distressing inability to make relevant distinctions,” because Plantinga’s view wasn’t that the theory of evolution is false, just that it’s a “modern idol of the tribe” and a “shibboleth.”

This reply makes no sense. It’s possible dislike an idea without being confident enough to say it’s false. Also, Plantinga’s rationale for calling evolution an “idol of the tribe” seems to have been that some people have said you are ignorant if you doubt evolution. But if people say you are ignorant if you doubt that the Earth is roughly spherical, that doesn’t make round-Earthism an “idol.” That Plantinga would give such a lame excuse for calling evolution an “idol” does suggest a dislike of the theory.

Plantinga’s latest book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism is surprisingly unforthcoming about what he now thinks about evolution. A New York Times article on the book says that “Mr. Plantinga says he accepts the scientific theory of evolution, as all Christians should.” But I can’t find anything to that effect in the book, so presumably the NYT’s claim is based on an interview.

Also, in the book (marked as pp. 8-9 in the Kindle edition), Plantinga makes a point of defining “evolution” to include common ancestry but exclude Darwin’s theory of natural selection. This, combined with various negative remarks about Darwin’s theory, makes me think that Plantinga now accepts common ancestry but still rejects natural selection (or at least thinks natural selection can’t explain very much). But Plantinga isn’t forthcoming about any of that. This is significant, partly because it avoids the question of whether he was too careless in his previous writing on evolution.

Now I don’t know how to talk about the handling of science in Where the Conflict Really Lies without talking about Plantinga’s really appalling hypocrisy about matters of “tone.” Russell Blackford has complained about this with respect to John Haught and Alister McGrath, but Plantinga is even worse here. He complains about “invective, mockery, ridicule, and name-calling” used by his opponents, but indulges in plenty of it himself.

For example, Plantinga describes Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins as “dancing on the lunatic fringe” and describes Dawkins’ argument in The Blind Watchmaker as taking the form “p is not astronomically improbable therefore p.” Daniel Dennett is described as wanting to keep Baptists in “something like zoos,” apparently a reference to this paragraph in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea:

I love the King James Version of the Bible. My own spirit recoils from a God Who is He or She in the same way my heart sinks when I see a lion pacing neurotically back and forth in a small zoo cage. I know, I know, the lion is beautiful but dangerous; if you let the lion roam free, it would kill me; safety demands that it be put in a cage. Safety demands that religions be put in cages, too—when absolutely necessary. We just can’t have forced female circumcision, and the second-class status of women in Roman Catholicism and Mormonism, to say nothing of their status in Islam. The recent Supreme Court ruling declaring unconstitutional the Florida law prohibiting the sac-rificing of animals in the rituals of the Santeria sect (an Afro-Caribbean religion incorporating elements of Yoruba traditions and Roman Catholi-cism) is a borderline case, at least for many of us. Such rituals are offensive to many, but the protective mantle of religious tradition secures our toler-ance. We are wise to respect these traditions. It is, after all, just part of respect for the biosphere.

There’s a big differences between saying “religions should be put in cages” and saying “religious believers should be put in cages”–you can’t literally cage a religion, which makes it obvious that Dennett was speaking metaphorically. Maybe Plantinga knew what Dennett meant, wasn’t trying to deceive anyone, and just thought it would be funny to twist Dennett’s words. Even granting that, though, Plantinga’s antics strike me as bizarre. (In mentioning this bit involving Dennett, I worry that such nonsense isn’t worth anybody’s time, but I want to give a taste of just how strange this book sometimes is.)

Plantinga frequently complains about anti-evolutionists being called ignorant. And I’ve called Plantinga ignorant in the past. But now I think the problem isn’t ignorance–it’s something much worse. He’s clearly done a lot of reading on evolution. Maybe he doesn’t know the topic as well as one really should to write about it academically–his reading list is weighted towards popular works and works written by philosophers–but he’s doing pretty well for a layman.

The problem, rather, is that he seems to have been reading less for understanding, and more to find things to snark about. Not that snark is always bad! Sometimes it’s deserved, and it can be fun to snark! But being eager to snark about a topic you don’t understand very well is setting yourself up to look like a fool, and that’s what Plantinga has done.

There’s much to criticize in Where the Conflict Really Lies, but I’ll limit myself to one more especially clear illustration of my main point. Plantinga devotes an entire chapter to the work of Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe. His final assessment ends up being cautions but positive: Behe’s work doesn’t provide “irrefragable arguments for theism” but does “support theism.” But in reaching this conclusion, Plantinga barely bothers to discuss what other scientists have had to say about Behe’s claims.

Here is how Plantinga describes the response to Behe’s first book, Darwin’s Black Box, which argues that certain biochemical structures couldn’t possibly have evolved through random mutation and natural selection:

Not everyone is pleased. We are in the neighborhood of cultural conflicts (“culture war”) where feelings run high; the level of vitriol, vituperation and contempt heaped on Behe’s unsuspecting head is really quite remarkable. There are screams of hysterical anguish, frenzied denunciations, accusations of treason (how could an actual scientist say things like this?), charges of deceit, duplicity, deviousness, tergiversation, pusillanimity, and other indications of less than total agreement. One is reminded of the medieval philosopher Peter Damian, who said that those who held a certain position (oddly enough, one different from his own) are contemptible, not worthy of a reply, and should instead be branded. Many of those who comment on Behe seem to think along similar lines. These screeds are not of course the sort of thing to which one can give an argumentative reply: they aren’t so much arguments as brickbats.

Again, notice the hypocrisy: describing criticisms of Behe as “screams of hysterical anguish” is pointlessly insulting. No one is literally screaming in anguish. (Contrast Dawkins’ infamous description of the God of the Old Testament: the Old Testament really does contain commands to kill gay men, exterminate entire tribes, etc.) Similarly, I’ve never heard anyone dismiss Darwin’s Black Box as unworthy of reply or suggest Behe be branded.

Well, maybe Plantinga knows of attacks on Darwin’s Black Box that are as bad as he says. It’s hard to tell, since the footnotes only cite a single example, an online article written by physical chemist Peter Atkins. Atkins doesn’t discuss Behe’s arguments in any detail, explaining “Specialists far more competent than me,” have already done so and providing a couple hyperlinks.

Atkins does, however, make one serious and strictly scientific criticism of Behe: Behe falsely claimed that the scientific literature is largely silent on molecular evolution. This is a criticism Plantinga could have given an “argumentative reply” to (except maybe in the sense that there is no good defense of Behe on this point). Thus, Plantinga’s description of the scientific response to Darwin’s Black Box turns out to be untrue even of the one example he gives.

Plantinga does decide one critic of Darwin’s Black Box is worth replying to, philosopher Paul Draper. That suggests he could not find a single scientist worth replying to, but that can’t possibly be right. The instant I began reading Plantinga’s discussion of Draper, I recognized Draper’s criticism of Behe as one that’s also been made by many scientists (H. Allen Orr, for example). And Plantinga ends up admitting that Draper’s criticisms of Behe are correct, but tries to minimize the damage:

It’s important to note that the possibilities Draper suggests are merely abstract possibilities. Draper doesn’t argue or even venture the opinion that in fact there are routes of these kinds that are not prohibitively improbable; he simply points out that Behe has not eliminated them…

As far as I can make out, Draper is right: Behe’s argument, taken as Draper takes it, is by no means airtight. Behe has not demonstrated that there are irreducibly complex systems such that it is impossible or even monumentally improbable that they have evolved in a Darwinian fashion—although he has certainly provided Darwinians with a highly significant challenge.

Unfortunately, scientific critics of Darwin’s Black Box have argued that there are worse problems with the book than mere lack of logical airtightness. These are criticisms Plantinga could have given an “argumentative reply” to, but he chose not to. Whatever you think of Behe or his critics, this is no way to do serious academic writing on a scientific subject.

I’ve addressed only a fraction of Where the Conflict Really Lies, but I’ve made my point: Plantinga is an embarrassment to philosophy. Not for giving bad philosophical arguments–I’m not arguing that here, and anyways plenty of influential philosophers have occasionally been guilty of bad arguments. No, what’s embarrassing is that Planting has persistently screwed up something that academic philosophers nowadays mostly get right: understanding the science before you try to philosophize about it.