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.

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.

Anything on the psychology of religion. Lately I’m more interested in knowing more about why people believe irrational things than in dissecting plainly bad arguments.

Which was followed by Andy Scicluna saying:

Gotta go with Ellis. A lot of Theists nowadays seem to be argueing that, since Religion and Religious experiences have no complete natural explaination, they seem to imply the existence of God. Also, I’d like to see what you’ve got on dualism (chalmerian vs theistic).

Psychology of religion is something I don’t have a lot to say about. I recently re-read a bit of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and remembered how great it was. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it, and I may blog about some of the cooler parts at some point.

In this post, though, I want to focus on Andy Scicluna’s comment, because it makes me realize that while I tend to think it’s obvious what the main issues with religious experience are, what’s obvious to me isn’t always obvious to everyone. So first: it’s a mistake to think that the best response to the appeal to religious experience is to try to “explain away” religious experience. Really, there isn’t anything about the brain we understand 100%, so we’re not going to have a 100% explanation of anything brain-related.

Some atheists, I think, have the idea that the reliability of religious experience is somehow undermined by discoveries in neuroscience. It’s hard to see how this could be so, though. Neuroscience now gives us strong reason to think that whenever something happens in the mind, there’s corresponding stuff happening in the brain. So when we make the specific discovery that there are specific kinds of events in the brain associated with religious experience, that’s just what we’d expect on general principles. It neither confirms nor disconfirms religious experiences.

This is an important general point. Waaay too much popular neuroscience boils down to, “OMG! When X happens, something happens IN YOUR BRAIN!” We’re past the point where that should be surprising. Like when someone says “pornography is bad because pornography CHANGES YOUR BRAIN!” Yeah, memory involves changes in your brain, so if you can remember watching porn, porn has changed your brain. This is just a scientifically confused way of saying “You watched it, you can’t unwatch it!”

Similarly, the fact that messing with people’s brains can induce religious experiences doesn’t prove people don’t ever genuinely experience God. Messing with people’s brains can also make them hallucinate spiders, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t ever see real spiders. If someone knows of a neuroscience-based argument against religious experience that I’m not aware of, please fill me in, but from what I know now I doubt there are any good arguments of that sort.

The real problem with religious experiences is that religious experiences are wildly inconsistent with each other. Not just sometimes inconsistent, the way visual experiences are, but pretty much all the time: Mormons routinely have religious experiences that seem to them to validate Mormonism, Catholics routinely have… well, you get the idea. Adherents of some Eastern religions even have what could be considered “atheist religious experiences”; here’s Richard Carrier on an experience he had back when he was a Taoist:

The most fantastic experience I had was like that times ten. It happened at sea, well past midnight on the flight deck of a cutter, in international waters two hundred miles from the nearest land. I had not slept for over 36 hours, thanks to a common misfortune of overlapping duty schedules and emergency rescue operations. For hours we had been practicing helicopter landing and refuelling drills and at long last the chopper was away and everything was calm. The ship was rocking slowly in a gentle, dark sea, and I was alone beneath the starriest of skies that most people have never seen. I fell so deeply into the clear, total immersion in the real that I left my body and my soul expanded to the size of the universe, so that I could at one thought perceive, almost ‘feel’, everything that existed in perfect and total clarity. It was like undergoing a Vulcan Mind Meld with God. Naturally, words cannot do justice to something like this. It cannot really be described, only experienced, or hinted at. What did I see? A beautiful, vast, harmonious and wonderful universe all at peace with the Tao. There was plenty of life scattered like tiny seeds everywhere, but no supernatural beings, no gods or demons or souls floating about, no heaven or hell. Just a perfect, complete universe, with no need for anything more. The experience was absolutely real to me. There was nothing about it that would suggest it was a dream or a mere flight of imagination. And it was magnificent.

I’ll do another post on dualism at some point, but the issue of why some kinds of dualism are ruled out is a neurosciency one, so I’ll toss in a link to Sam Harris here, who said it better than I could. I should mention that Chalmersian dualism isn’t the only kind of dualism that tries to avoid these issues. Richard Swinburne wants the soul to be responsible for personal identity through time, but I think he accepts that memory, personality, intelligence, etc. is dependent on the brain. I reject Swinburne’s view, but more because I don’t see the point than for a definite scientific reason.

Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires. We act of our own free will to the extent that we have the opportunity to exercise these capacities, without unreasonable external or internal pressure. We are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities and we have opportunities to exercise them.

[snip]

This conception of free will represents a longstanding and dominant view in philosophy, though it is typically ignored by scientists who conclude that free will is an illusion. It also turns out that most non-philosophers have intuitions about free and responsible action that track this conception of free will. Researchers in the new field of experimental philosophy study what “the folk” think about philosophical issues and why. For instance, my collaborators and I have found that most people think that free will and responsibility are compatible with determinism, the thesis that all events are part of a law-like chain of events such that earlier events necessitate later events. That is, most people judge that you can have free will and be responsible for your actions even if all of your decisions and actions are entirely caused by earlier events in accord with natural laws. [This view is known as compatibilism - Hallq]

Our studies suggest that people sometimes misunderstand determinism to mean that we are somehow cut out of this causal chain leading to our actions. People are threatened by a possibility I call “bypassing” — the idea that our actions are caused in ways that bypass our conscious deliberations and decisions. So, if people mistakenly take causal determinism to mean that everything that happens is inevitable no matter what you think or try to do, then they conclude that we have no free will. Or if determinism is presented in a way that suggests all our decisions are just chemical reactions, they take that to mean that our conscious thinking is bypassed in such a way that we lack free will.

And here’s Coyne’s reply:

How do people conceive of free will, though? My own definition, which I think corresponds to most people’s take, is that if you could rerun the tape of life back to the moment a decision is made, with all the concatenations of molecules at that moment, and the circumstances leading up to it, remaining the same, you could have chosen differently. If you couldn’t, then determinism reigns and we’re not free agents, at least as most people think of them.

Philosophers don’t like that notion—the idea that we’re all puppets on the strings of physics. So they do what theologians do when a Biblical claim is disproven: they simply redefine free will in a way that allows us to retain it. Like the story of Adam and Eve, it becomes a metaphor, with a meaning very different from how it was once used.

I’m sympathetic to much of what Coyne says about philosophy and theology, but here he’s completely missing the point. The problem with a lot of liberal theology is that there’s no motivation for it, aside from a desire to somehow save tradition from scientific and moral advances. And in the worst cases, left-wing theologians end up saying things about “God” that make “God” unrecognizable to the vast majority of religious believers. We know this because surveys show that in the US, at least, a larger percentage of the population still adheres to a relatively conservative brand of Christianity.

However, while Coyne asserts that his view of free will is the one most people have, he presents no evidence for this, whereas Nahmias has done actual research on what ordinary people (or at least undergraduates untutored in philosophy) think about free will. Nahmias doesn’t say as much as he could about his research, but anyone who’s curious about it can find free PDFs of some of his papers online (Google Scholar will do better than ordinary Google here).

Nahmias’ research is part of a movement known as “experimental philosophy,” and takes a totally different approach to understanding concepts like “free will” than the one taken by most philosophers and theologians. This means that he shouldn’t be lumped in with them–and I should mention that when I’ve talked negatively about philosophy on this blog, I’m not mainly talking about Nahmias and his fellow experimental philosophers. (Unfortunately, they haven’t solved the problem of philosophers being unable to agree on anything, though.)

I could go over some of the examples Nahmias gives subjects in his research, but instead let me repurpose one of Alvin Plantinga’s examples to make my point. Suppose Curley Smith, mayor of Boston, is offered a $35,000 bribe, and given his venality (and various other conditions, including his financial situation and estimate of the odds of getting caught), it’s a forgone conclusion that he’ll accept the bribe. Maybe if he were less venial, or he felt certain he’d be caught, he’d reject the bribe, but given how things actually are, there’s no way he’s going to reject it.

Now, given this, once Curley accepts the bribe, can we say he chose to accept it? Can we say he could have rejected it? I think the answer to both questions is “yes.” And I think the answer to these questions is still “yes,” even if what guaranteed Curley would accept the bribe was a matter of the laws of psychology. But being people’s actions being determined by initial conditions and laws is just what determinism is. So it seems determinism is compatible with choice, even compatible with being able to do otherwise in a sense.

I say “in a sense” because there’s a sense in which determinism means being unable to do otherwise. It means being unable to do otherwise holding relevant all initial conditions and laws exactly fixed. But in these contexts, I think it’s natural to say “he could have done otherwise” if what we mean is, “he might have rejected the bribe if he were less venal, etc.” And the majority of Nahmias’ subjects seem to agree.

Of course, I’ve described this example at the level of psychology, in terms of personality traits and so on. So you might think bringing in neuroscientific explanations of behavior changes things. But what Nahmias is reporting is that people are mainly bothered by the idea of their actions being the product of chemistry because they think that means the psychological stuff doesn’t matter. And what neuroscience actually does is explain the psychology in terms of chemistry and cell biology. It doesn’t make the psychology irrelevant.

I’ve decided to start off with something simple though: the scientific ignorance of some philosophers, and the philosophical ignorance of some scientists, and why I think the former is much worse than the latter. I’ll focus on two famous cases: Alvin Plantinga and Richard Dawkins.

I’ve written about the allegations of ignorance against Dawkins here. To put it briefly, while Dawkins certainly isn’t an expert in philosophy or theology, the attempts to dismiss him on these grounds are simply absurd. It’s silly to complain that he doesn’t cover everything, and as far as I can tell, the allegations that he’s misrepresenting the people he’s attacking themselves depend on misrepresenting Dawkins.

Also, as Dawkins puts, theology isn’t a subject. It has failed to produce a body of results in the way that, say, chemistry and physics have. It makes sense to criticize someone for being ignorant of scientific facts; it makes no sense to criticize someone for being ignorant of theological facts. It makes sense to criticize someone for ignoring the best evidence for a scientific theory; it makes less sense to criticize someone for ignoring the best evidence for the existence of God, because the experts can’t even agree on whether there is any good evidence, much less on which evidence is the best.

Now if you want an example of someone who really does deserve to be criticized for the things they’ve said
on a subject they’re ignorant of, it’s hard to think of a better example than Alvin Plantinga writing on evolution. Well, just about any anti-evolutionist would do, but Plantinga is an interesting case because he is aware of his own ignorance, but uses superficially humble declarations of ignorance as a cloak for philosophical self-importance:

If the question is simple, the answer is enormously difficult. To think about it properly, one must obviously know a great deal of science. On the other hand, the question crucially involves both philosophy and theology: one must have a serious and penetrating grasp of the relevant theological and philosophical issues. And who among us can fill a bill like that? Certainly I can’t. (And that, as my colleague Ralph McInerny once said in another connection, is no idle boast.) The scientists among us don’t ordinarily have a sufficient grasp of the relevant philosophy and theology; the philosophers and theologians don’t know enough science; consequently, hardly anyone is qualified to speak here with real authority.

The implied assumption of this paragraph is that while it may be problematic for non-scientists to spout off about science, but its just as bad for non-philosophers to talk about topics philosophers have declared to be theirs. So really, it isn’t actually that bad for philosophers to spout off about science.

But a quick read Plantinga’s discussion of science brings up howlers beyond anything Dawkins has been accused of. Plantinga complains, for example, about “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” (wrong) and implies that the evolution of the eye is absurdly improbable (also wrong).

It’s hard not to see Plantinga’s essay as a bit dishonest: He quotes Gould on the lack of transitional forms, but ignores Gould’s complaints about how his words on the subject had been twisted (in spite of quoting a different section of the Gould’s “Evolution as Fact and Theory,” where Gould lodges that complaint.) He also uses the infamous Darwin quote on the apparent absurdity of the evolution of the eye, while ignoring Darwin’s proposal for how the eye evolved.

However, I still think that on the whole, Plantinga’s statements on evolution are probably the result of ignorance. I suppose some creationist tract told him that bird-reptile transitions were lacking, and therefore he assumed that Gould’s complaints about having his words twisted must have been hairsplitting. Here, ignorance isn’t really much of an excuse–the mistake could have been avoided if Plantinga had bothered to go ask a qualified paleontologist, “is this right?” Still, I think Plantinga is a fine example of the consequences of scientific ignorance. And they’re far worse, far less excusable, than the consequences of philosophical ignorance or theological ignorance as seen in someone like Dawkins.

Now it may be that there are worse examples of philosophical ignorance to be found than Dawkins. (Any suggestions?) However, it’s not clear what such an example would even look like. True, it’s possible to be clearly wrong about what some philosopher has said, but such mistakes rarely (if ever) put one at risk of mistakenly rejecting a well-established philosophical finding, because philosophy doesn’t have much in the way of findings.

Another point: When I’ve talked with friends about Plantinga’s (and some other philosophers’) statements about evolution, they’re always surprised. They expect being a philosopher to make people generally reasonable. I’ve never been surprised in this way, though I guess I should be. In the past I’ve bought in to the idea that studying philosophy brings with it a kind of general-purpose rationality. Now I think that was a mistake. Philosophy at best makes people more rational in some ways, while being useless in many other ways. It may even make people more likely to say foolish things on certain subjects, if they mistake their ignorance for philosophical insight.

This way of framing things, if you’ll excuse the term, is unfavorable to the accommodationists insofar as Chris Mooney and Josh Rosenau wouldn’t want to admit to lacking principles or having narrow priorities. However, it’s very favorable to them in that it implicitly concedes their central claim–that if all you care about is teaching evolution, trying to accommodate religious believers is the smart tactic.

I’m convinced, though, that critics of accomodationists shouldn’t concede this. This is because of the obvious and too-rarely-stated risks in the accomodationist strategy. In particular, accomodationism risks letting science be held hostage to religious dogma.

Remember why the debate over accomodationism is happening. Mostly, its happening because huge numbers of people in the U.S. think that the Bible is inerrant, and the plain meaning of the text is that life on Earth was made by God in a few days, rather than evolving over millions of years.

Some believers buy into non-literal interpretations of that part of the Bible, but lots don’t, and they reject evolution because of it. Then they cause headaches for everyone else when they attack the teaching of evolution in schools.

Yes, some believers oppose evolution because they’re trying to salvage the design argument, and some feel uncomfortable with evolution even though they hesitate to say it’s incompatible with the Bible. Biblical inerrancy, though, is the original source of the evolution-creationism conflict.

This is what the accomodationism debate is about. It’s a debate about what to do about that problem, the problem of science being attacked by people who insist the authority of the Bible trumps everything.

Now suppose you aren’t real sure about Biblical interpretation, have defending evolution as your top priority, and don’t mind saying things you don’t believe if it will help your policy goals. Should you be an accomodationist? That is, should you avoid criticizing people’s religous beliefs, and tell them that in fact science is compatible with their religious beliefs–in this case, that evolution is compatible with the Bible?

Once the real question has been put clearly, I think it’s obvious that the accomodationist strategy could go badly wrong in at least two ways:

1. You might just fail to convince people that evolution really is compatible with the Bible, so that those who started out rejecting evolution because it conflicts with the Bible will continue doing so.
2. You might convince them on the one point of Biblical interpretation, but be unable to win the Bible interpretation argument on the next science vs. religion issue, or on moral issues like gay rights.

In both bad outcomes, the problem is that you got into an argument Biblical interpretation while not challenging the assumption that Biblical interpretation should matter. Yet the idea that it might be right to settle scientific or moral issues by arguing over Biblical interpretation is not only wrong, it’s one that has obvious potential to cause huge problems on a broad range of issues.

This makes it an idea that would be insane not to challenge, unless the prospects for challenging this idea were utterly hopeless. And they’re not hopeless. Biblical inerrancy is a doctrine that even many hard-core Evangelicals now shy away from defending in public. They look for small scraps of scientific evidence for their beliefs, rather than say (openly) that they will side with the Bible come what may

I’m also convinced that the number of people who accept Biblical inerrancy deep down is far smaller than the number who claim to. Few Evangelicals really think, for example, that the question of whether we should round up and execute gay men should be decided through careful Biblical interpretation.

Given those facts, people who care about science education should not be afraid to point out places where science contradicts the Bible. If you can convince someone that the Bible wrong is about just one thing, you’ve opened their mind to thinking the it could be wrong about a lot of other things.

To refuse to do that is to fight with one hand behind your back. It’s to let not just science, but also ethics, be held hostage to religious dogma.

And we must let nothing be held hostage to religious dogma.

Shouldn’t that be the big story here? Take out Catholics, and you realize that two-thirds of non-Catholic believers belong to groups run by creationists. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed the U.S. evolution/creation controversy closely: it’s well-known that the Catholic church hasn’t officially opposed evolution, but anyone who’s followed the issue also has plenty of reason to suspect that anti-evolutionism is mainstream among U.S. protestants. Now we have data to confirm that suspicion–and the confirmation is even stronger than it appears at first, given that megachurches weren’t counted in the data.

In fact, this data makes the Clergy Letters Project and similar efforts to convince people evolution and religion are compatible look pretty ridiculous. The main reason the Clergy Letters Project looks like a good idea to most people is that a lot of people still think of “churches” in terms of the liberal denominations that used to have a rationale for calling themselves “mainline.” This data, though, brings into focus just how much trouble these denominations are having.

Actual issue at question was the attempt by Tennessee father to ban a biology textbook with the following statement:

In the 1970s and 1980s, antievolutionists in Arkansas, Tennessee and Louisiana passed identical bills calling for ‘equal time’ for teaching evolution and creationism, the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian god in six days. But a court ruled that the ‘equal-time’ bill was unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the separation of church and state.

The father, you see, didn’t like creationism being called a myth. But PZ’s accusation of witless wanking and pablum peddling wasn’t directed at the father, it was directed at Center for Inquiry blogger Michael De Dora basically agreeing with the father. A month ago I mounted a partial defense of De Dora, suggesting he might just be a bad writer and not motivated by anything pernicious. In this case, though, the shock is hard to convey. CFI is one of the most important organizations in the world for defending secularism and debunking pseudoscience. To find a CFI blogger saying biology texts shouldn’t say anything negative about pseudoscience feels like stepping into a Star Trek-style mirror universe.

De Dora’s argument is that because creationism is a religious idea, science can’t disprove it. He seems to be taking his cues from Pigliucci, whose ideas about this I’ve criticized here, but he takes Pigliucci’s merely misguided nitpicking and draws the seriously absurd conclusion that we can’t say creationism is wrong in science class. Scientists can’t do that unless they “put on the philosopher’s cap,” which you’re not supposed to do in a biology classroom. The silliness of De Dora’s position becomes acute in this paragraph:

Some have argued that teaching the Earth is 4.5 billion years old is the same as denying the Earth is 6,000 years old. But one clearly imparts scientific knowledge; the other clearly denies a religious idea. One is constitutional; the other is not. Scientific knowledge makes many ideas seem crazy, but there is no reason for a high school biology teacher to actually go into denying all of them, specifically the religious ones.

Logically, though, the Earth’s being 4.5 billion years old entails its not being 6,000 years old. This means that by “philosopher’s cap,” what De Dora means is basic logic. Oh, there’s a small philosophical issue there insofar as a few oddballs in the history of philosophy have denied that the logical law of non-contradiction holds, but science would be crippled if scientists had to constantly kowtow to philosophical worries about logic. Is there a single mathematically informed paper that’s ever been written that could still have worked if we took exotic skepticism about logic (and related mathematical principles like “4.5 billion is not 6,000″) seriously?

Also, there’s nothing inherently religious about the idea that the Earth is 6,000 years old. The only sense it in which it is a religious idea and the idea that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old is not is this: The latter is thoroughly supported by all our scientific evidence, while all our scientific evidence points us towards rejecting the latter and as a matter of sociological fact hardly anyone believes the former except because they are in the grip of religious dogma.

The practical absurdity is that you can’t make the evolution-creation issue go away simply by not talking about it. Every high school teacher whose curriculum comes anywhere near a controversial issue knows that they run the risk of getting angry phone calls from parents even if they do their best to avoid the controversy. Thus, in middle school and high school, I never had a teacher who could talk about evolution without a little disclaimer along the lines of “we’re not saying anything’s wrong with creationism, we just want you to understand evolution.” (This problem wasn’t restricted to science class–even our English class’s unit on Greek mythology came with a disclaimer.)

The question is not whether to let creationism be an issue in biology classrooms, but how to address it. I actually think creationism is a wonderful teaching opportunity, given that the creationist literature is so full of false scientific claims and correcting those falsehoods is an excellent way to explain current evolutionary theory and the evidence for it. A great deal of what I know about evolution I owe to popular-level debunkings of the claims of the antievolution movement. What’s De Dora’s objection to that approach to teaching evolution? That instead we should vaguely tell students about the falsehoods “some people” have promoted in an attempt to defend unspecified “non-scientific ideas”?

I won’t say De Dora’s view, if taken seriously, would damage science education in the U.S., because U.S. science education is already in such bad shape. Taking De Dora seriously certainly would impair efforts to improve science education, though, and that’s why I worry about it much more than Pigliucci’s nitpicking.

As for Pigliucci: scroll to his second to last paragraph, and you’ll see him apparently claiming that people who disagree with his philosophical claim are guilty of taking a “cavalier attitude toward the substance, rationality and coherence of one’s arguments.” As fun as it would be to complain about the hypocrisy of throwing insults like this, the real issue is why anyone would make such absurd statements. Why are people who are basically on the same side as Dawkins, Myers, et al. so eager to write firey denunciations of them based on minor disagreements?

I’m not saying the issues shouldn’t be aired, I find them fascinating (much as I find the discussion over Sam Harris’ TED talk, which I largely disagreed with, fascinating). But why try to turn these disagreements into proof that the New (read: Bad) Atheists are screwing everything up? This is very disappointing to see coming from Pigliucci given that, on the one hand, he’s done real good in the fight against creationism, but on the other it’s hard to come up with an interpretation of his behavior here that makes him come out looking good.

EDIT: After a bit of reflection, what bothers me about Massimo’s post is the level of eagerness to trash the people who happen to be some of the most currently successful communicators on science and religion issues. That eagerness is weird and wrong. I could speculate on the causes, but the main thing to notice is how widespread it is. Also, those who are interested can read PZ’s responses to De Dora and Pigliucci here and here.

A criticism of evolutionary psychology that literally centers on insulting the opposition’s mating fitness and social status?

Now that’s irony.

–A comment on BoingBoing

Also: the people in the comments who say feminism isn’t monolithic are absolutely right. Some definitions make you as “they have a word for that?” while in other contexts feminism seems to be the view that that girl Jenny is, like, such. a. total. slut.

What I mean by that is this: mostly, I think of Hitchens as a polemicist, someone who’s very good at penning take downs of whomever he wants to target, a category that over the years has included Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa, anti-war protesters and Sara Palin. He’s also good with rapid fire comebacks, the kind of person you want appearing across from Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity on Fox. There’s another side to Hitchens though: the literary critic who takes the humanities very seriously while not taking post-modern nonsense too seriously. This is something I’ve noticed before. Though my review of god is not Great was mostly negative, I noted that Hitches has a “recognition, often lacking elsewhere, of the fact that religions tend to be more about ancient traditions than the modern reasonings often conscripted in their defense.”

That was the side Hitchens presented in the debate. He spoke first, and his opening speech sounded like what I imagine a early 20th-century Oxford literature professor would sound like, getting up to give a speech on religion, focusing largely on the place of religion in human cultural history. Hitchens said that religion was our first attempt to do a lot of things, but it would be odd to think that we should settle for that first attempt, it would be odd to think that, if there is a creator of the universe, he would have given his ultimate revelation to humanity to a few people at one point in history on a small stretch of desert. Religion, Hitchens said and went on to say repeatedly throughout the debate, looks like something manmade. He also talked about science a little, but it was obvious he was talking about it as a non-expert who very often could just refer you to what the experts were saying, and talked about science mainly for the sake of thinking about humanity’s place in the universe.

D’Souza treated the event much more as a traditional debate, which could have worked very well for him if he were a skilled debater, but D’Souza sounded a bit clownish, trying to hard to to be funny and smart without having much in either department. On the “trying to be funny side,” D’Souza started out with a quote from Winston Churchill about the Boer War, which was supposed to describe how he felt about Hitchens’ speech, to the effect of “it was so exciting to be shot at without any effect.” This got some laughs accompanied by a certain uncertainty at how to respond, then Hitchens gave a bit thumbs down, which got laughs and applause. That set the tone for most of the visible audience reaction to the debate: D’Souza said things obviously intended to get laughs, but Hitchens knew how to get more with less. Also, D’Souza didn’t really follow the Churchill quote up with much, I guess the point was he didn’t think Hitchens’ arguments were any good, but it wasn’t really clear.

On the smarts side, the most obvious annoyance coming from D’Souza is that he used lots of jargon that he seems to have made up himself, for example, claiming that science rests on presuppositional arguments, whatever that is.* After the Churchill joke, D’Souza’s opening speech ended up being dominated by a fairly standard list of things which atheists, allegedly, can’t explain. It could have been effective in the hands of a better debater, but it was easy to get the sense that D’Souza not only didn’t know much about what he was talking about, he also didn’t understand how out of his depth he was.

These opening speeches were fifteen minutes each, after that, Hitchens and D’Souza were supposed to get five minutes each to respond to each other. They both ran significantly over their allotted time, which was good, since five minutes is a ridiculously small amount of time to respond to a fifteen minute speech. Even so, they didn’t work as hard as they could have to seriously interact. The rebuttals made clear that Hitchens mainly wanted to talk about actual religions like Christianity and Islam, while D’Souza wanted to debate to be just whether there is some sort of God. I’m sympathetic to Hitchens here: I think he correctly perceives that the truth of particular alleged revelations is what most really serious believers really care about, and given that, it’s odd how unenthusiastic believers are about talking about those things in public. Still, it made for a less interesting event.

After the rebuttals was Q&A, which started off with the moderator, Mike Rea (who’s a philosophy professor), asking them one question each, and neither of them seemed to understand the questions. Oh well.

I was also disappointed that Hitchens never contradicted D’Souza’s claim that we must either believe that God created life, or a modern cell sprang into existence all at once by chance. This is scientifically ignorant, and someone who’s done as many debates on religion as Hitchens should be able to explain what’s wrong with common misconceptions like that.

On the other hand, there was one very good interaction in the Q&A when D’Souza claimed that Hitler was a secularist, Hitchens responded by quoting a place in Mein Kampf where Hitler claimed to be doing “the Lord’s work,” and D’Souza responded that Hitler faked belief in Christianity and really wanted to revive Teutonic paganism, and therefore was an example of secularism. Rather than belabor the silliness of blaming atheists for the actions of an apparent pagan, Hitchens thanked D’Souza for retracting his previous claim about Hitler, which was probably the right response.

That kind of interaction was rare, though. I suspect the quality of the interaction could have been improved considerably just by having three mircophones at the central table, rather than giving one mircophone to Rea and making Hitchens and D’Souza have to be at a podium in order to say anything. It probably made them feel like they had to make a speech in response to every question, instead of being able to have a conversation with each other.

Once it came time to end the debate, Rea suddenly declared that their response to the last question would double as their closing remarks. The question was about the meaning of life, and directed at D’Souza, which meant the last thing the would hear would be Hitchens talking about the meaning of life, and Hitchens made pretty good use of that fact. He said that the reason he does things like give blood and try to help Iranian dissidents is that he enjoys it, he enjoys knowing that he’s helping others, and enjoys meeting the people he meets pursing political causes. He rambled on a bit in these comments, and there was some awkward laughter when he used the word “pleasurable” to describe giving blood, but on the whole I think Hitchens managed to make a very good impression.

I know Hitchens leaves a lot of things to be desired, but I think he also does a lot of things well that few people who make a career writing and speaking about religion bother with. I think the video of the debate is scheduled to go up on the website for the Center for Philosophy of Religion, once it does and I find the time, I actually plan to study it to try to learn as much as I can from Hitchens’ performance.

*It pretty clearly wasn’t Calvinist presuppositionalist apologetics, even though I thought D’Souza might go there for a second.