There were six (!) speakers in the debate, and Russell was by far the best. Jane Caro was funny and made some good points, though her focus was really too narrow. In the future, I hope Russell does some one-on-one debates.

But Russell isn’t what really stood out. The most notable thing was how awful the arguments on the affirmative side were. Here’s a snippet of the speech given by Anglican archbishop Peter Jensen:

My problem with many contemporary atheists is that they seem like flat-earthers: they look at our world, its origin, character, nature and history, and declare that it can all be explained on simple materialistic principles. They are simplistic. They turn a world charged with grandeur into grey on grey. They forget that William of Ockham and even Galileo are actually ours, not theirs.

They fail to give an adequate account of all reality. How can something come from nothing? How does the personal arise from the impersonal? Where does the moral law come from? What is love? What is the good life? What do we make of the constant, almost universal religious experience of human beings? What are the limits of science?

I know that atheists have their answers, but the answers are commonly stressed out in trying to avoid the obvious.

This amounts to a very un-self-aware version of “it’s just obvious I’m right.” Combined with that are two obvious fallacies: bundling up atheism with a narrow philosophical materialism, and treating “God did it” as the default answer to any questions we have trouble answering (though I’m a little confused by some of his questions: does he think the limits of science are God?).

I’m pointing this out just because some religion critic critics (in particular critics of Dawkins and Dennett) have the idea that nobody makes arguments as terrible as the ones they attack, or at least nobody of any importance. But in fact you get arguments like this not just from Ray Comfort, but also from philosophy professors, theologians, and church higher-ups.

Rosenhouse has a helluva nerve complaining about my aggressive tone. In the post that began this series of exchanges between Coyne, Rosenhouse, and myself, Coyne dismissed theology as “drivel” and said that he was starting to believe that the “obscurantism” of which he accuses theologians is “deliberate.” In his own first post, Rosenhouse characterized theology as “sewage” (!) and then dismissed my response to Coyne as a “temper tantrum.”

But Rosenhouse never complained about Feser’s “tone.” What Rosenhouse actually said was “if you are going to throw around words like ‘sleazy,’ ‘slimy,’ and ‘contemptible’ you had better have the goods to back them up.” Not “don’t say those things because they’re mean” but “don’t say those things unless you can back them up.” Then he went on to actually argue that the justification Feser gave for them was ludicrous.

I’m inclined to see this as a symptom of something bigger, something that worries me a hell of a lot in public debate. We have a fairly strong norm against saying negative things about people. What we need and don’t have is an even stronger norm against saying untrue or unsupported negative things about people. That should be obvious as a matter of honesty, but a lot of people act unaware of it.

This creates a situation where once the first norm has been violated, people think that then anything goes. I don’t think Feser would actually say that in a reflective frame of mind, but it’s what his “you’ve got a helluva nerve complaining about my tone” amounts to–Feser is acting as if “you’re mean” is the only possible thing Rosenhouse could have been saying.

But if you think “mean” vs. “nice” is the only issue, you’ll also wind up thinking that once you stop playing by the “don’t be mean” rule, you can say whatever crap you want about your opponents and not be accountable for it. But that’s not how it works–just because you don’t have to be nice doesn’t mean you don’t have to be honest.

1. “All environmentalists seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly mistaken, predictions of disaster”?
2. “Most environmentalists seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly mistaken, predictions of disaster”?
3. “Many environmentalists seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly mistaken, predictions of disaster”?
4. “A few environmentalists seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly mistaken, predictions of disaster”?
5. “Two environmentalists, somewhere in the world, seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly mistaken, predictions of disaster”?*

Ever single one of these possible clarifications damages the rhetorical impact of the sentence. 1, 2, and 5 are too ridiculous to comment on; 3 invites the question “what’s the evidence that the number of environmentalists who do this is all that significant?”; and 4 invites the retort “I guess a few environmentalists are crazy, so what?”

What’s frustrating about such sentences is that they appear to say something very significant, but the speaker can respond any challenge by retreating to some more modest interpretation of the sentence. What do we do about them, then? I saw we just point and laugh whenever we see them.

*As a philosophy student, I’m tempted to throw in “there exists an environmentalist…” but this is ruled out by the plural.

There’s something about Xtranormal videos that makes almost any situation funnier. It occurred to me that this makes them a great vehicle for mocking the rhetoric of religious apologists.

I want to emphasize that everything the Craig teddy bear says is based on things Craig actually has said. I relied especially on three books, each presenting a debate between Craig and one opponent: Antony Flew, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and Paul Kurtz.

Note that while the Sinnott-Armstrong book is just Craig and Sinnott-Armstrong, the other two books have transcripts of a live debate with comments from many different professional philosophers, with Craig’s final comments at the end. In both of those books, some of the comments on the transcripts are very good, and I stole liberally from them in making this video (always making sure to include the lame responses from Craig’s final comments.)

Oh, and “Craig”‘s final line comes from this article on his website.

First, they say they had good reason for banning Ophelia:

she was sending us emails demanding to have other posters’ comments deleted. We had a better solution.

So the issue wasn’t so much that they thought she was leaving nasty comments, but they thought it would be so funny and ironical if they banned her for telling them (privately) they needed to keep a better leash on their nastier commenters?

Then they tell us that Benson is wrong about what happened, and to “set the record straight,” they tell us:

These claims are meritless…

Indeed, we have checked our logs, and the first appearance of the “bilbo” who also turned out to be “Tom Johnson,” “Milton C,” etc, was in September of 2009. Long after Benson had been banned.

Except Ophelia never said otherwise. She said that she was banned, and a guy who called her a liar wasn’t banned. Actually, she’s pointed out that a lot of people were calling her a liar on the Twins’ blog without getting banned, she’s just highlighting the fact that one of these people was also an incredibly dishonest person himself (and blatantly so, such that the Twins should have figured it out much sooner than they did). The order of events wasn’t part of Ophelia’s point, nor was there any reason it needed to be. There were, however, other people calling her a liar on the Twins’ blog before she was banned.

I almost dashed off an e-mail to Ophelia telling her not to worry so much about the Twins, though looking at her blog post I think she has the right attitude:

These are not honest people. We knew that, but boy does this underline it. These are shockingly dishonest people.

On the other hand, it’s become expected that if you like the health care reform, then you ought to be the sort of person who can at least smile and nod when someone talks about how capitalism is evil. This is a mindset I can sort of understand; I used to sympathize with it. Then I learned about basic economics, and entered high school shortly thereafter. (This does not stop me from regularly telling Ayn Rand’s fans that I find her unreadable).

In the case of PZ’s post, the weirdest part is this paragraph:

The alternative to regulation of basic services by the government is privatizing them and giving more power to corporations — whose goal is to increase profits. Personally, I like to see the Invisible Hand shackled and restricted to doing useful work, rather than picking pockets.

The first bit is gibberish: privatization isn’t a an alternative to regulation, because private enterprise can be regulated. Does PZ want “basic services” to be private but regulated, or does he want them to be government run? I suspect he means the latter but wants to give the impression he’s only talking about the former, hence the incoherence.

Then we get an announcement that corporations are trying to make money, as if this is supposed to surprise us and make us realize that corporations are evil. This is of course nonsense. We all benefit constantly from people trying to make a buck off of us: I got up this morning (in a room in a house I’m renting from a guy who wants my money) and put on clothes (that I bought at capitalist clothing stores that were trying to make a buck) and read a book (bought from the corporation Amazon.com and written by a guy trying to make money) and then went down stairs to eat my lunch (food purchased at a grocery store trying to make a buck) and am now typing this blog post on my laptop (made by the capitalist Toshiba corporation). Tonight I plan on going out to a bar (whose owner is trying to make a buck of people like me) and perhaps meet a girl who will ask me how I keep my hair in such good condition, which will prompt me to say “with the cheapest stuff I can find” (cheapest, because some corporation wants me to give my money to them rather than to the guys with the next-most-expensive brand).

Also contra PZ, I’ve never heard of corporations organizing teams of pickpockets. Or burglars for that matter. Bad behavior by capitalists tends to top out at giving consumers something not as advertised, but I doubt PZ is trying to make an anti-anarchist point about the importance of having government for fraud protection. He pays lip service to Adam Smith, but doesn’t seem to get that in non-fraudulent free market exchanges, what ensures that some good comes out of the exchange is not shackles, but the fact that people can pass on deals that they don’t believe they will benefit from. They can even walk away from deals that would benefit them, if they think they could get a better deal elsewhere (this is much of the reason why Amazon.com, the sale I got my laptop at, and cheap generic hair products all exist).

Sure, it’s possible to get carried away in marketing hype, or impulse buy crap you don’t need. But the number of times that’s happened to me is far smaller than the number of times my life has been made easier because someone was trying to make money providing the most attractive product at the best price. Broader experience shows that this system tends to bring cheap and readily available goods, while command economies suffer from chronic shortages.

The essence of the weirdness of PZ’s post is that he both demonizes private industry while avoiding saying the government should take over even “basic services,” that he both implies profit is evil and goes through the motions of endorsing the “invisible hand.” This is the paradox of the rhetoric about capitalism that’s fashionable in self-identified “liberal” circles: it tends to amount to simultaneous insistence that capitalism is evil and that the speaker understands the merits of capitalism. This is never done Churchhill-esque ironic way.

So, underneath all the rhetoric, how many of the people spouting it really think socialism is a good idea?

I talked about this in an earlier thread. With Islam, you have to take Muhammad’s word for it that he was touched by an angel. Same with Mormonism and Joseph Smith. With Christianity, you have a pre-crucifixion story where Jesus is supposed to have performed miracles in public. Did these miracles happen? The disciples, at least, are convinced by them, and that’s why we find them dropping their nets and following. You also have Jesus making remarkable claims about himself. Trilemma considerations come into play here. Even if there are possible alternatives to liar, lunatic, or Lord, are the plausible ones? Then, you have the death and resurrection events, again, a public execution, and a resurrection claimed to have been seen by lots of people. Hallucination? Theft? Swoon? Wrong tomb? Evil twin? What happened? And then you have such things as the preaching of Peter and the missionary journeys of Paul. With the missionary journeys you have a story of a series of encounters with government officials in those localities, and at least the facts about local government have been verified by archaeology. So what was Paul doing that got him hauled up before government officials on a regular basis? Just preaching peace and love, brother? The Book of Acts says that there were miracles at this stage, too. And then he appeals to Caesar, when failure to do so would have gotten him released?

Ah, things like this make me feel like I’m 19 again and just discovering the dumb things people will say in defense of their religion.

Vic may as well have defended Mormonism by saying that with Islam, you have to take Muhammad’s word for it, but with Mormonism you have to explain where the miraculous golden plates came from. Vic is of course right that with Christianity, you have a story about miracles, but stories aren’t facts. And pace Victor, what we don’t have is any hard evidence of people following Jesus because they were convinced. What we don’t have is any hard evidence regarding anything Jesus said during his lifetime. What we don’t have are “death and resurrection” events. What we don’t have is the original testimony of the “lots of people” who supposedly claimed to have seen Jesus risen from the dead. That Christian apologists still pretend we have these things tells me apologetics hasn’t really progressed since Josh McDowell.

Any informed and honest person has to admit that with Christianity, you just have to take the word of Paul and a small handful of other guys, and the identity of the other guys isn’t certain–to put it in a way that’s actually very generous to Victor’s case. It may be possible and that their stories are based on actual events but the evidence is pretty sketchy. And everything I’ve just said is information that’s readily available to anyone who’s make a small effort to read up on the issues. I’d like to think that with my book I put together a particularly good one-stop guide to these issues, but the basics of Biblical scholarship I lay out there aren’t anything you couldn’t learn by reading Bart Ehrman or Raymond Brown or even some evangelical scholars, even though none of those people set out to rebut Christian apologists.

I understand why people with no knowledge of the issues would find the sorts of arguments Vic makes appealing, but Vic has been interacting with critics of Christianity for years. I also agree with Richard Carrier’s assessment that, unlike say William Lane Craig, he comes off as honest. I can only conclude, then, that he’s repeatedly failed to understand the most basic points of Biblical scholarship and the post basic points made by people he’s arguing with. That he’s fuzzy on the distinction between a fact and a story someone told once.

Unfortunately, all of this is too typical. The only way to present many of the arguments Christian apologists have in their arsenal is to be dishonest, too lazy to check your facts, or incapable of understanding what you do read.

Faith in reason is not only faith in our own reason but also — and even more — in that of others. Thus a rationalist, even if he believes himself to be intellectually superior to others, will reject all claims to authority since he is aware that, if his intelligence is superior to that of others (which is hard for him to judge), it is so only in so far as he is capable of learning from criticism as well as from his own and other people’s mistakes, and that one can learn in this sense only if one takes others and their arguments seriously. Rationalism is therefore bound up with the idea that the other fellow has a right to be heard, and to defend his arguments.

The other, the conclusion of a post by Christian apologist Metacrock attacking someone who left Christianity:

why would anyone go to the atheist camp to look for answers to their problems of faith? That in itself says “I want out of the faith.” that’s like going to the people who beat you up and robbed you for medical help.

A third quote is old, but worth posting to pre-empt any attempt by Metacrock to insist I’m distorting his words and Christians are too allowed to think for themselves:

In Modern Orthodox Judaism I have not heard much emphasis of the virtues of blind faith. You’re allowed to doubt. You’re just not allowed to successfully doubt.

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.

For these sorts of reasons, intelligent discussion of tone is always in order. The problem is likely to be that a lot of discussion of tone is just not very intelligent – how many reviews of The God Delusion have you read that show a tin ear for Dawkins’ control of tone? Many reviews don’t show any sensitivity at all for the varied tones: the humour; the quiet thoughtfulness and introspection; or the comical intoxication with language itself in Dawkins’ famous denunciation of the Old Testament deity. Generally speaking, the reviewers just don’t “get” it. But the cure for that isn’t less discussion of Dawkins’ tone; it’s more intelligent discussion of Dawkins’ tone. A hackneyed adjective such as “strident” doesn’t cut the mustard.

To say that intelligent discussion of tone is always in order is not to accept that the tone of political, scientific, or philosophical discussion should always be calm and respectful. There’s plenty of room for passion, mockery, and outright denunciation. Not all the time, perhaps, but in their place. Some things deserve to be denounced or mocked, and sometimes it’s necessary to use these elements of language to bring home the essential implausibility or even absurdity of a position. Someone who can adjust forever to logical arguments, in the process moving to a wildly implausible but internally consistent position – may well be shaken into seeing how the whole thing looks from the outside.

Complaints about tone can be misguided, as in this link, and they sometimes seem like attempts to evade other matters to do with the cogency of arguments or the correctness (or plausibility) of conclusions. But again, discussions of tone should not written off as automatically illegitimate or intellectually bogus. Rather, the point is to insist that discussions of tone be intelligent and that judgments about tone be relevant to matters at hand.

A lot of this is right. But it misses something important: the matters of “tone” that people tend to care most about are inseparable from issues of content. You can’t always separate what you say from how to say it. For example, I think that many self-styled experts on science and religion are really propagandists who regularly say things that can only be interpreted as outright lies or, at best expressions of inexcusable ignorance. I think that many religious teachings are as morally repugnant as those of Nazism, and these doctrines have very harmful effects on real-world human behavior. I think that much of what is said on religion is just an attempt to stop necessary discussions from happening in public.

These three sentences express content, thoughts I’ve had for a long time, not tones I choose to take on this particular occasion. They’re hard to read as anything but denunciations, though, and Blackford himself lists “denunciation” as a kind of tone. Simply by stating them in simple language, I’ve set myself up to be read as taking a certain tone, and there is very little I could do to change the perceived tone of those statements without changing the content.

A good writer can use euphemism, understatement, and a variety of other devices imply a conclusion without openly stating the impolite truth. I recognize that. It matters. As I pointed out in a previous post on dealing with liars, accusing someone of “egregiously misquoting” rather than “lying” in your book review might get them to link to your review and say what a nice review it was. However, whenever you decide to merely imply something out of politeness, you’ve changed the literal content of your message, so that’s not an example of separating form and tone. Describing the decision to state rather than imply as one of tone obscures the real decisions writers often face.

Better examples of tone of where tone in some purer form matters aren’t hard to find, for example, determining whether or not a statement was a joke, and what the point of the joke was, though that typically isn’t relevant to the science and religion discussions that breed the discussions of tone Blackford is talking about. There’s also the decision to throw in the extra “choice word” or two. It would be interesting to see an honest (i.e. no claiming “PZ called all believers fuckwits”) discussion of when a choice word or two makes sense. That’s more relevant here, but still doesn’t seem to be the main thing people are talking about when they talk about tone. So I’d be curious to hear from readers, what else they think worries of tone, as separated from content, might be about.