Atheists packing heat
Now it’s Michael Ruse’s turn to do the ‘atheists are evil’ routine using the numbingly familiar ‘atheists are evil’ weapon of shameless exaggeration and misrepresentation. In short, like all his pathetic allies in this tawdry campaign, he paints the people he dislikes as violent and aggressive when all in the world they are is verbally explicit.
In the past few years, we have seen the rise and growth of a group that the public sphere has labeled the “new atheists” – people who are aggressively pro-science, especially pro-Darwinism, and violently anti-religion of all kinds…
‘Violently’ – in the sense of coming right out and saying that they think religion is a bad thing in many ways. That’s a pretty strained sense, if you think about it. That is to say, it’s a cheap trick, and unworthy of someone who says at the outset that he is a philosopher. Philosophers aren’t supposed to use exaggeration to do the work of argument. That’s a no-no in the trade. Ask anyone.
Recently, it has been the newly appointed director of the NIH, Francis Collins, who has been incurring their hatred.
No – their disagreement. Surely a philosopher ought to know the difference.
Then he complains of Dawkins Coyne and Myers (catch them in the Pineapple Lounge tonight at 9:30) saying things about him, then he explains why they do:
This invective is all because, although I am not a believer, I do not think that all believers are evil or stupid, and because I do not think that science and religion have to clash.
No, it’s because you say stupid things like that. They ‘do not think that all believers are evil or stupid,’ and they don’t over-simplify that way, either.
I engage with believers – I don’t accept their beliefs but I respect their right to have them.
But that just describes us – the “New Atheists.” That exactly describes us. We respect people’s right to have beliefs – duh – but we don’t accept the beliefs. So – the implication that we don’t is just yet more misrepresentation.
AGGRESSIVELY PRO-SCIENCE????? What in the world is that supposed to mean?
Gee. I just sat through a graduate student’s thesis defense. . . I hope I wasn’t too aggressively pro-science. I did ask her to clarify a few things, and to specify her evidence.
I hope the public sphere does not label me for this.
We professional philosophers have a word for people who use emotive rhetoric, exaggeration and distortion in place of genuine arguments: ‘bad,’ in all its senses. First, in the impersonal descriptive sense: “That is a bad argument.” Second, in the personal descriptive sense: “Making such a bad argument makes you a bad philosopher, at least in this instance.” Third, in the admonitory sense. “Bad! Bad Michael Ruse! No treat for you!”
AGGRESSIVELY PRO-SCIENCE????? What in the world is that supposed to mean?
Oh, surely you’ve heard of all those science terrorists.
This is the bit that got me…
“If teaching ‘God exists’ is teaching religion – and it is – then why is teaching ‘God does not exist’ not teaching religion? Obviously it is teaching religion.”
Who exactly is advocating this? Is this another part of the insidious New Atheist plan that nobody told me about? Did I miss a meeting?
In what sense is this man a philosopher?
“But if science generally and Darwinism specifically imply that God does not exist, then teaching science generally and Darwinism specifically runs smack up against the First Amendment.”
No – it’s teaching science. Science has many implications – the extreme unlikelihood of there being a God anything like that favoured by the majority of the adherents of the mainstream religions being just one. It implied this long before the New Atheists – even before Darwin.
This is precisely why organisations responsible for promoting science should not adopt ANY position on religion.
“Perhaps indeed teaching Darwinism is implicitly teaching atheism. This is the claim of the new atheists.”
Damn! Did somebody take me off the mailing list or something??
Really – in what sense IS this man a philosopher?
Well that is pretty aggressive, Claire – are you sure you respected her right to have beliefs while you were at it?
Ah thanks for the technical lingo, G.
“in what sense IS this man a philosopher?”
I think he’s kind of jumped the philosophy ship. But in this article he also pretends he still is one, which is cheating.
Another one of Ruse’s bizarre idiosyncrasies is the way he views his relationship with the leaders of the ID movement. He goes really, really far in insisting he’s not on their side. I think that’s because he gives the appearance of really wanting to be on their side, if only all that damn evidence weren’t in the way.
Just look at this:
Gee, the lying con artists you pal around with let one of their buddies publicly stab you in the back in a feature film. How disappointing! And here I thought Dembski and Johnson had integrity.
Clearly, the elaborate Ruse has upped the ante. I’m now obliged to appear at my neighborhood church this Sunday with a loaded Pipetman strapped to my calf and a large placard with that Theodore Dobzhanski quote printed thereon. I love the smell of pro-science aggression in the morning. Hoo-aaah!
Ha!
“I have little time for someone who denies the central dogmas of Christianity and still claims to be a Christian, except in a social sense.”
He must have a dim view of non-literalists, then, Karen Armstrong among them. Which is an unfair caricature of theism, I’m told.
The LA Times print edition had 4 letters in response to M&K’s op ed. One, by Howard Winet (orthopedics prof UCLA and NCSE member) claims Dawkins and the “new atheists” make NCSE’s job damn near impossible…. yet the NCSE website lists books by Dawkins, Dennett and Coyne as valuable resources.
The KoolAid seems to be making the rounds.
Yeh, Ruse jumped the good ship Philosophy some time ago. Deserted in the face of the enemy might be more apt.
I like Windy’s point over at Why Evolution is True:
A crucial and revealing asymmetry.
But to have written this inane piece of self-serving nonsense, and in the course of it to suggest that Dawkins “would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course” (note the disjunction), is almost unbelieveable. Does he really think, despite Plantinga’s contortions, that the ontological argument is more than a trick of logic?
Of course, the ‘article’ is mostly about Ruse. He ‘burnishes his halo’, and complains that people speak ill of him. PZ calls him a ‘clueless gobshite’, Dawkins likens him to Chamberlain – a very apt comparison, given these nonsense syllables – he should remember Jeremiah’s denunciation of crying ‘peace, peace, when there is no peace’ (since he seems to be into trading biblical citations)- and whines that Jerry Coyne characterises him with an Orwellian put-down. Poor dear! Dumbski will no doubt commiserate – has no doubt commiserated?
I was just reading some earlier comments by PZ Myers on this subject, in particular the one where he speaks of ‘clueless gobshites like Ruse’. Not only is he clear and consistent; he’s a much better philosopher than Ruse. That has to hurt!
Ruse’s article was largely nonsense.
But I found his final argument to be troublesome. If science is continuous with philosophy, then what are we supposed to base our “no religion in science classes” stance on? Whatever we come up with, it will have to be a novel philosophical invention, with all the bells and whistles of nuanced argument. And good luck selling this to the American body politic, if there were ever a viable threat to the separation of religion from education.
Sorry Ben, I don’t see the point. First, science is not continuous with philosophy. In what sense is this the case? Philosophy of science tries to understand the structure of scientific reasoning, and may even seek to provide foundations for science, but, in itself, science is not, in any sense, continuous with philosophy. Indeed, many scientists are fairly contemptuous of philosophy of science. Lewis Wolpert, for instance, thinks philosophy of science is completely irrelevant to the scientific project.
Besides, the point that Ruse is making is false. Atheist scientists are not teaching atheism in science courses. The fact that they believe that science is inconsistent with religion is irrelevant to the teaching of science, though most students twig to it pretty quickly. But some, like Jason Lisle, go through the whole PhD programme, and still do not find their religious world view shaken, including young earth creationism and all the rest. Madness? Surely. But not impossible, obviously. Therefore Ruse’s First Amendment argument is a non-starter.
Eric, I think my puzzlement deepens with the way things are going in epistemology today.
On the one hand, philosophy after Quine no longer admits of universal apriorisms, which makes it empirically responsive as it has never been before. On the other hand, science is no longer viewed as a purely inductive process, but instead sometimes has close affinities to abduction: science makes intense use of unobservable inference when observation is impossible, say when the phenomena are remote or inaccessible. They overlap in those senses, which makes them continuous.
Of course, there surely is a distinction between science and philosophy — there has to be, or else we wouldn’t have the two words. But the problem that hits me hard in the gut is this. If the distinction is shallow, then it won’t support a legal separation in any reasoned way. Instead, the law will have to rest on legal tradition without considered foundations, and pedagogy will have to rest on conventions that have no spine. And if it is deep, then the American body politic, in its current supercharged anti-intellectual mood, will reject it for being too nuanced.
I’ll look into Wolpert. But the key question is, does he accept the methdological naturalism/philosophical naturalism divide? If so, then we all know where that leads.
I asked Alex Rosenberg, a philosopher who had recently written “The Structure of Biological Science,” to be a part of my oral examination and this did not impress the biologists who made up the remainder of the committee. One told me afterward to cut out the philosophy bullshit and get back to doing science. I have always found philosophers relevant to my work, but many don’t.
Benjamin. I’m not sure I understand the temper issue. If your steam regulator is out of kilter over this, then you really need to make a few adjustments.
But the argument you refer us to, includes this little gem:
It’s not the continuity of philosophy and science that’s at issue here, but of religion and philosophy, and there’s no plausible basis for making this claim, even though Ruse wants to pack them in the same bag.
Besides, it is not clear that science was ever regarded as purely inductive in a Baconian sense. Nor is it altogether clear what you mean by speaking about black swans and falsification. Certainly, you can ask of your first putative black swan whether it is a swan or not, but presumably you’ve asked the question with a view to answering it. I still don’t see the problem.
Besides, why is this all tied up in contemporary philosophical quandaries? Can you teach evolution without teaching religion? Yes. Can you teach it without teaching atheism? Yes. So, what’s the problem? And don’t go off on a tangent about contemporary epistemology, unless you can show clearly why it involves us in a difficulty over First Amendment rights. I think you’re making too much heavy weather of this.
Now you can slip into fifth gear.
Michael, I’m not surprised. The narrow view of your supervisors is of course why we have the three cultures in academia. On the one hand, inter-disciplinary estrangement is not necessarily a bad thing, since we can’t all be expected to know everything about everything. On the other hand, one sort of expects that good hobbits ought to refrain from flaunting their bold opinions about Mordor unless they’ve been there and back again.
Eric, my bemused comment about my Exasperation Scale was in response to the relevant sections of Wolpert’s books — see the link I cited and the arguments presented. I wrote that post entirely to discuss Wolpert’s opinions, in reply to your reference to him. (My comments in that post will not be intelligible until you read those sections I cited — take a look at them in their context, and if Wolpert fails to make the ideas clear, I’ll try to explain them myself.) In the absence of any commentary on your end that might buttress his arguments, I will continue wallowing in puzzlement at his words. So what I’m going to tell myself for now is that I don’t have to worry about defending the honor of philosophy of science from his bold and seemingly confused opinions, at least until I can be shown just how I’ve failed to do him justice. And if I’m shown to be wrong, I will be quite happy to make the requisite adjustments to my temper-o-meter.
As for the original point: fine, but where does that leave us with respect to Intelligent Design? Surely ID is not religious in many of the ways we talk about religions. i.e., religions often have the explicit concern with recreating certain arbitrary power-structures, they have rituals, they have indoctrination of values and commandments, etc.; ID has none of these things. The only thing I can see that ID has in common with religion is shared content: i.e., the theistic (or deistic) hypothesis, which can be at minimum called a philosophical thesis, owing to a long line of silly arguments for the proof of god(s) which are well known to be philosophy.
The emphasis here is on the phrase “at minimum”: if we accepted the methodological/philosophical naturalism distinction, and denied that science had the latter, then we could also say “at maximum”. Then there’d be no problem. But if Dawkins is right, then the god hypothesis is in principle susceptible to verification, which technically puts it in the realm of science. Which makes deism presentable, albeit as bad science. And this is something that many of us, Myers included, do not want to happen — this is the problem. The practical upshot, as I put it, was that “the law will have to rest on legal tradition without considered foundations, and pedagogy will have to rest on conventions that have no spine.”
I think after the political right made its hay over postmodernism and poststructuralism, we ought to have learned that “going off about contemporary epistemology” is exactly what we ought to be doing. I am not an especially clever man, but I can see the inconsistency in treating the god hypothesis as open to scientific investigation and expecting it to stay out of science class. That means that a clever right-winger will see it, too, and you have to assume they will use it, if they haven’t already begun to do so.
Well, I’m not sure what to say. The reference to Wolpert was a throw-away line. I’m not particularly interested, at the moment, in what he thinmks about philosophy of science. I just don’t see how all this plays into the First Amendment business. You seem to think that ID is really a scientific hypothesis. Well, if it is, then it’s fairly easily dealt with. There’s no evidence that things are intelligently designed, and no indication of what might falsify the claim. So, it’s content is of peculiarly limited scope and value.
As for religion being, in principle, susceptible of scientific verification/falsification, this has, in one sense, always been the case, since the problem of evil has been part and parcel of religion since the beginning. Believers have never been content to accept that evil falsifies the existence of God, but the argument seems pretty decisive to me. But I don’t see how this involves letting God into the science classroom. The claim that there is a God, whether open to verification or not, is still not a part of science. It only becomes a part of science if supposing that there is a God makes a difference to our knowledge of the world. There is no clear evidence that it does, and the question of whether or not it does has belonged traditionally to the province of philosophy/philosophical theology. When ID discovers something that ID tells us about the world that contributes to our understanding of it, then perhaps science will sit up and take notice. I think we’ll wait a long time.
I still don’t see the problem, and the philosophical/methodological naturalism distinction seems like a red herring to me, in this context at least. Clever IDers have been playing the ‘suppose this is science’ game for a long time. It’s all straightforward nonsense, creationism in a party dress. It’s a political football, and creationists will keep trying. They believe this stuff. But it doesn’t come into the realm of science, unless it actually explains something, and it doesn’t. I still don’t see the problem.
Scientific reasoning most certainly is continuous with philosophical reasoning. But nothing earthshattering follows from this for such purposes as US constitutional law.
It may well be that some scientific findings, taken together with other plausible assumptions, have implications for philosophy, including philosophy of religion, and hence for the intellectual plausibility of religious belief. Indeed, I’m convinced that this is the case. In fact, I see an unresolvable tension between well-established elements of the scientific picture of the world and many of the most popular religious beliefs, such as belief in a providential deity.
But then again some commonsense observations, taken together with various plausible assumptions, also have implications for philosophy, including philosophy of religion, and hence for the plausibility of religious belief. Among those commonsense observations is the prevalence of pain and suffering in the world.
But so what? There is no constitutional or legal rule that children can never be exposed to anything at all that might lead them to question religious beliefs. The rule is just that the state cannot teach religious beliefs (or their denial) directly in public schools. That rule is some practical protection against the might of the state to impose or suppress specific viewpoints relating to religion. It is not an attempt to provide children with a perfect inoculation against any facts whatsoever that might ultimately provide premises in their own thinking, one way or another, about religion. No legal rule could ever do that, and any attempt to do so would leave public education paralysed.
Someone please explain this to Ruse. I have a lot of time for some of his earlier philosophical work, but his understanding of legal and constitutional issues is poor.
Eric, yes, I think it is fair to look at ID as a hypothesis that’s open to scientific evaluation. In doing so, I agree with Dawkins when he does just that in his treatment of the “god hypothesis” in his opening chapters of God Delusion. And I’m in agreement with you as far as the problem of evil is concerned. So I take it that the verifiability of god(s) is not in question, at least in the sense that we can come up with evidence that leads to fairly strong conclusions in that direction.
Although you arrive at a plausible conclusion — that there’s no evidence for ID, therefore there’s no reason to discuss it in science class — the problem is that this is just effectively throwing up your hands and saying, “That’s bad science and that’s the end of the story”. Of course it’s true that ID is on all fours with ether, phlogiston, and alchemy. But the problem is that many folks want to say that ID is not just bad science, but rather in addition, that it isn’t science at all, it’s religion. Absent any non-shallow meth/philo naturalism distinction, I don’t see how we can do this in any straightforward way, though I would be delighted to find one.
If I understand you right, your suggestion for getting out of this trap is to appeal to practical considerations, i.e., to say that ID is not just bad science, but also that it makes no difference to how we get along in the world. This is a close cousin to Myers’s views, which are essentially that “Everyone in the science classroom should avoid these topics because it will just create a sectarian debate that will sidetrack our discussion”. This is true, and practical, but it isn’t a very powerful reason to refrain from god-talk in the classroom, since many people do believe that the existence or nonexistence of god makes a difference. And false popular beliefs are perfectly good fodder for a motivated discussion, in the same way that alternative medicine should be fair game in the classroom; it’s scientifically evaluable, but does not stand up to scrutiny.
But if we were to say, instead, that science doesn’t even operate on the same plane as religion, that they’re like incommensurable languages, totally incompatible. Then we have a very powerful reason for saying, “Keep ID out of the science classroom or else it’ll gum up the works”. Do you see what I mean?
It pays to keep in mind the dimensions of the threat that is posed, here. It is not a question of “what scientists do”. We can fully expect them to keep ignoring ID, which is fine and right. But it is a question of what happens in publicly funded science classrooms in Kansas, Missouri, or Mississippi.
Russell,
My worry is that the rejoinder would be that ID doesn’t directly teach religion, since we’re treating it as a scientific hypothesis (albeit a bad one). Solve this in sound byte form, and you will dispatch my worry about some crazy future Republican strategem.
Re: Ruse. Suffice it to say, Ruse is confused about many things, including the role of compatibility in this issue… though he’s not alone on that front. But a stopped clock is still right twice a day (or at least seems more right than wrong, in this case).
The main point that arises in Dover is that ID was introduced into public schools not because it is good science but as a deliberately contrived attempt to protect a certain religious position.
No “New Atheist” is saying that we shouldn’t teach real physics, even though some aspects of it arguably have theistic or deistic implications (I disagree with the argument but don’t deny that it exists). Let the kids learn real science, with no fudging to favour one position or another. We can all work out the implications of the science in philosophical debates outside the classroom.
I don’t take the position that science has no implications at all for religion, and I think that that view is intellectually untenable. But working out just what the implications are is difficult, and it is not the role of the state to do it for us … or to contrive the scientific curriculum to try to push kids in a certain direction. Obviously, the state has to have a fairly broad margin of appreciation in what it puts on the science curriculum, but it had gone far outside of that margin in the Dover case.
That is what the case was all about, when you boil it down. The judge didn’t even need to decide about whether or not ID is genuine science. The state’s actions failed on every limb of the Lemon test, but it only had to fail on one. Clearly the state was being unconstitutionally solicitous to a particular religious viewpoint, and thus tending to establish a religion. No such accusation could be made if it simply taught the established science and let the philosophical implications fall where they may.
All this is well understood within the American judicial system, but Ruse evidently does not understand it. He exaggerates the importance of his own role in defending evolution, much as he made a valuable contribution in his time.
Thanks for the clarification, Russell. My anxieties have been partially quelled, but the worry has not been entirely dispatched. When we take the argument seriously, it can potentially undermine the first prong of the Lemon test. If god is open to scientific investigation, then it becomes an objective secular concern.
Happily, the other two prongs of the Lemon test would require verbal gymnastics on the Republican side in order for them to be successful. And of course, with the decision having been made, complete with precedent language, along with assurances that it won’t proceed onto a higher court, makes it seems unlikely to show up again in the future.
What I find interesting in the Wiki on the case is that the judge argues that ID breaks the “centuries old ground rules” that supernatural entities not be permitted as causes. This sounds actually quite a bit like philosophical naturalism, and well in line with the continuity thesis! If it had been the Supreme Court that made that ruling, then my mutation of Ruse’s worry would have been entirely dispatched.
Surely, though, Ruse’s basic argument is that where you have a very religious group of people and you want to encourage them to accept the theory of evolution, it is not a sound strategy to tell them that in order to accept it they will have to abandon almost everything that defines them and their lives.
Whatever other silliness and pettiness he argues, that argument seems to me to have considerable force. It’s separable from whether ‘new atheists’ or anyone else should self-censor, or what have you; it’s an argument about how advisable a line of argument is.
The thing which first got me interested in all this, which originally led me to Dawkins, etc, was an argument I had with a Muslim I was teaching about evolution. I realised I was shockingly ignorant about the actual arguments for evolution, and went away to find out. Of course on a certain level, the sub-text, so to speak, of the argument was about the entire structure of the guy’s belief system. But I’m quite glad I didn’t insist on that. I *think* I made some progress just by trying to argue my understanding of the science.