Great Christian thinkers

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 27, 2011 3 comments

I’ve previously written, in reference to Ed Feser:

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.

What is objective morality anyway?

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 23, 2011 8 comments

I’m not a huge Michael Ruse fan. Scratch that, I’m not any kind of Michael Ruse fan. However, after seeing a friend criticize this for supposedly being consistent about moral realism/anti-realism, I’m starting to wonder if Ruse has a point about morality. This is because there are several different questions we could be talking about when we talk about “moral realism” or “objective morality.” Here are two of them:

(1) Is morality reducible to what somebody (or bodies) says or thinks is moral?
(2) Is morality reducible to something contingent and local to planet Earth?

There’s an obvious way to say “no” to both questions: if moral truths are written in some Platonic realm. There’s also an obvious way to say “yes” to both questions: if morality is reducible to what humans say or think is moral. But there’s a famous moral view that says “yes” to (1) and “no” to (2), namely the sort of divine command theory endorsed by William Lane Craig, which makes morality reducible to what God says.

Now here’s Ruse:

How does a non-realist like me proceed? One could be some kind of social contract theorist and think that a group of wise old people sat down one day and made up the rules of morality. This seems to me to be unsatisfactory both as history and philosophy. I go rather with the late John Rawls in his Theory of Justice, thinking that natural selection put morality into place. Those proto-humans who thought and behaved morally survived and reproduced at a better rate than those that did not. (There are all sorts of good biological reasons why cooperation can be a much better strategy than just fighting all of the time.)

So what does this make of morality? Sure, it is something that is part of our psychology. Frankly, who would ever doubt that? If you like, the controversial part is that it is only part of our psychology. I think that is the world into which David Hume pushed us. But because it may be the case that we can do what we like, it doesn’t follow that we should do what we like. As evolved human beings, the rules of morality are as binding on us as if we were the children of God and He had made up the rules.

So that is why what Jerry Sandusky allegedly did was wrong – really and truly wrong. That is not a matter of opinion.

This sounds puzzling, but maybe Ruse wants to say “no” to (1) and “yes” to (2), by making morality rooted in human psychology (though not, apparently, in a way that’s open to straightforward scientific study). And it’s not really obvious saying “yes” to (2) in this way requires you to say “yes” to (1). Just because a fact is psychological doesn’t mean it can be changed by getting people to agree to say something different about it. If that’s right, it’s wrong for Craig to insinuate that on Ruse’s view, morality would be changed “if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them.”

My gut inclination is to want to say “no” to both (1) and (2), to follow G. E. Moore and Russ Shafer-Landau if not Plato. But maybe Ruse (if I understand him correctly) has the right approach, “no” to (1) and “yes” to (2). That could be right even if Ruse doesn’t have the most plausible view of this sort. Russell Blackford has complained that “too many people assume that the only alternatives are a very crude moral relativism or a naive moral realism.” And I’ve been thinking of picking up Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project, which I’m told treats morality as a kind of technology (and facts about technology aren’t automatically changed by what people say or think).

I’ll take Alvin Plantinga over John Haught any day

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 22, 2011 4 comments

Jerry Coyne, last week:

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.

Plantinga’s inexcusable faults (review of Where The Conflict Really Lies)

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 21, 2011 15 comments

I don’t expect Plantinga’s fans to ever totally agree with my negative assessment of Plantinga. My disagreements with them are too big. For one thing, I assume most of Plantinga’s fans think that what academic philosophers do is generally worthwhile, where as I don’t think that. But I hope that even fans of academic philosophy will agree that it is possible for a philosopher to screw up badly when writing about topics outside of his expertise, and this is what Plantinga does when writing about evolution.

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.

Speaking ill of the dead

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 17, 2011 0 comments

I strongly recommend Glenn Greenwald on Hitchens’ death, both for what it says about Hitchens specifically and an important general point:

We are all taught that it is impolite to speak ill of the dead, particularly in the immediate aftermath of someone’s death. For a private person, in a private setting, that makes perfect sense. Most human beings are complex and shaped by conflicting drives, defined by both good and bad acts. That’s more or less what it means to be human. And — when it comes to private individuals — it’s entirely appropriate to emphasize the positives of someone’s life and avoid criticisms upon their death: it comforts their grieving loved ones and honors their memory. In that context, there’s just no reason, no benefit, to highlight their flaws.

But that is completely inapplicable to the death of a public person, especially one who is political. When someone dies who is a public figure by virtue of their political acts — like Ronald Reagan — discussions of them upon death will be inherently politicized. How they are remembered is not strictly a matter of the sensitivities of their loved ones, but has substantial impact on the culture which discusses their lives. To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a matter of politeness; it’s deceitful and propagandistic. To exploit the sentiments of sympathy produced by death to enshrine a political figure as Great and Noble is to sanction, or at best minimize, their sins. Misapplying private death etiquette to public figures creates false history and glorifies the ignoble.

Though I’m proud to say that I haven’t seen evidence of what Greenwald is complaining about in the atheist blogosphere. (My guess is that what he says about the mainstream media is true, but I really have no idea). For example, Greta:

A fair amount of what he wrote irritated and angered me. And that’s one of the things I like best about the atheist movement. We don’t have to idolize our leaders and our heroes. We can disagree with them. We can recognize that they’re human. We can say to them one day, “Damn, that was brilliant”… and the next day say, “You’re being a fucking asshole, this is beneath you”… and the next day say yet again, “Okay, that was brilliant.”

Sometimes, Christopher Hitchens was a fucking asshole, and said and wrote things that were beneath him. Most of the time, he was brilliant. I’m deeply sorry that I never met him.

And PZ, after an initial post where he said only nice things about Hitchens, but followed up with a post titled, “The dark side of Hitchens” (though see my own post on the FFRF convention). Both Greta and PZ are basically saying what they were saying about Hitchens before his death. For much more in this vein, see Daniel Fincke’s roundup.

As Greenwald points out, one of Hitchens’ virtues was that he did not buy into the nonsense that we should stop criticizing public figures when they die. So when I look at all this criticism, I don’t think Hitchens would have it any other way. Well, he might call us bad names for disagreeing with him, but he wouldn’t expect us to shut up just because he’s dead.