Flew, Meyer, Jones, Today
Pootergeek has a harsh word or two to say about Antony Flew on the god question.
It takes a professional philosopher to choose, of all the arguments for the existence of some kind of god, the most exquisitely wrong.
Brian Leiter is also somewhat ungentle.
His understanding of the putative “science” is not, shall we say, robust, and old age, as we know, takes its toll on people in many different ways. This is more an embarrassment for Flew than some triumph for creationism.
And The Secular Web attempts to clear up the confusion about exactly what Flew’s position is right now as opposed to last October or a year ago or August 2001.
At any rate Leiter and some of his correspondents ask an apposite question, the same one I asked with the sarky stuff about Bush and Osama and Billy all changing their minds one of these days:
Gilbert Harman (Philosophy, Princeton) observes: “What’s interesting is that there are no headlines about famous believers who become atheists, or anyway I don’t remember such headlines…” Nor do I…[W]hy is it that an alleged embrace of theism by an atheist is deemed so newsworthy, while the converse (which must surely happen) is not?
Well we know why of course. Because the hurrah-religion position has (for some godunknown reason) become the default position in the ‘mainstream’ media and discourse, therefore atheists who recant are News while theists who recant are dropped down the memory hole. Anthony Cox of Black Triangle makes the connection in a comment at Pootergeek:
The Today programme had one of these intelligent design people vs Steve Jones on this morning. You could sense his annoyance that it is even necessary to counter such rubbish these days. The reporter finished with some throw away line like “I’m sure the controversy will go on”. Controversy? 99.99% of biologists think intelligent design is nuts and the BBC managed to make it into a controversy because they “intelligently design” a 50/50 split on the Today programme?
Too right. And the ID prat (Stephen Meyer) does the vast majority of the talking, too. Why’s that? Why is Today so eager to ask him to talk and so slow to ask Jones? Why does Today keep returning to Meyer after Jones has said about twenty words, and then let Meyer go on and on? Why does Today start and end with Meyer leaving Jones only a few short replies in between? Maddening.
It’s not just the ID argument, I think, but the whole “fine tuning” argument, which Flew mentions in the interview, which to my understanding is basically the same as the anthropic principle: natural laws just happen to work in a way making life possible. I was never impressed with the reasoning: there is no way for us to work out what the chances are of physical laws just turning out that way, it assumes “alternative scenarios” which we really can have no knowledge about.
Exactly! If things hadn’t been the way they are, we wouldn’t be here and the topic wouldn’t arise. It’s so bloody obvious!
Maybe Rose should’ve taken notice of those scientists who simply won’t appear with ID protagonists because they realise it’s a lose/lose situation.
My recommendation? E-mail the ‘Today’ programme and express your annoyance. I’m certainly going to.
“Well we know why of course. Because the hurrah-religion position has (for some godunknown reason) become the default position in the ‘mainstream’ media and discourse, therefore atheists who recant are News while theists who recant are dropped down the memory hole.”
Could it be possible that the extreme irritation you feel at these god-bites-man stories might be giving you a perverse selection bias?
The fact is that ordinary people getting religion is not newsworthy because it’s neither rare nor controversial. But the mainstream media is not theist; it is selecting for attention-grabbing value. The idea of a strong rationalist joining the theists is so plain irrational that it has headline shock value.
I heard the Today programme too… isn’t there also a rather creepy back-story to all this… ? A large number of the public have an almost medieval ambivalence about science at the moment. The Christian fundamentalists have seen public confidence in scientific knowledge – a strategic stronghold of the rational, enlightened ‘west’ – undermined by e.g BSE, or the MRSA superbug, and ethical and health concerns over cloning and GM. People seem to believe suspect endeavour of having an dodgy inate moral/ethical/political element, when it doesn’t (it does have those outcomes, but they don’t drive it). Combine this with an ignorance of what much of what underpins contemporary understanding of the nature of things: the way we understand our world is very abstracted, and people, including educated professionals, have a hard time really knowing what our scienist peers are speculating over what makes the universe tick…
A wealthy baranch of the Hellfire lot can therefore quite readily make up any spseudo-science bunkum sound at least half-convincing, the same as the Wiccas and all the other snakeoilpersons out there trading in the free world. I got the impression that the today interviewer (Naughtie ? Humphries?) was allowing this Godborg plenty of air-time because he was quietly choking on his own incredulity, but maybe I was just half-asleep still…
“it assumes “alternative scenarios” which we really can have no knowledge about.”
There you have it again… “knowledge”. Knowledge is only *one* component of wisdom, if even that.
ID is so intelligent that it is far beyond my capacities to prove or disprove it, even to believe or disbelieve in it. Which leads me to ignore it, like so many other “wonderful ideas”.
And what’s wrong with pseudo-science anyway? Isn’t it a healthy compromise between science and belief?
“Could it be possible that the extreme irritation you feel at these god-bites-man stories might be giving you a perverse selection bias?”
Sure, that’s possible.
However it’s also true that the headline writers did a very bad job – saying atheist now believes in God, and the like. That’s a highly misleading way of stating what Flew thinks.
“And what’s wrong with pseudo-science anyway? Isn’t it a healthy compromise between science and belief?”
Is that irony?
Did you see ‘What we still don’t know’ presented by Martin Rees which presented a very similar situation?
The supposed scientific side of the argument (susskind) came out in support of ID given the required precision of the Cosmological constant. It was described as proof.
I clearly haven’t kept up since I thought that Einstein described it as his greatest mistake.
The cosmological constant is back in vogue these days as a possible solution to the (lack of) flatness problem and new estimates of the vacuum engergy density.
I’m with Chris – with a sample of only one
universe, the strong anthropic principle is meaningless. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here … that’s all we can say!
As it happens, Martin Rees is my old supervisor’s supervisor. I’ve never met him, but he seems like a bit of a pratt to me. Or perhaps gadfly is a kinder term.