Other minds
After some further conversation yesterday, I actually ended up better understanding what the latest spate of anti-gnu atheism was getting at. After yet another look, I still think Berlinerblau’s piece is terrible. It annoys me five paragraphs in, and that’s with having skipped the first two paragraphs. I’m not saying I think the piece is not so bad, but I am saying I can see why he might be riled. I always thought Hoffmann’s piece was a much better read, and now that I also see why he might be riled, well there you go.
They’re both academics, you see; they teach; they teach undergraduates. Need I say more? You know how young people are. (For any readers who are young: you know how you are.) Young people in the US, at any rate, which is the relevant category here.
Once you isolate that variable, it all becomes clear. They teach undergraduates, so they get smart-ass ducklings who think they know everything already and refuse to read anything denser than a Facebook update.
They get “new atheist” undergraduates like that. They get “new atheist” undergraduates like that who grew up on self-esteem classes. Ohhhhhhhh – now I get it.
Is that the fault of “new” atheism? Hmmm. I would say mostly no, but I wouldn’t say that none of it is. In fact I would agree that some of it probably is. On the other hand, I would add, if it weren’t gnu atheism it would be something else.
Yes but if you teach history of religion, for instance, callow lazy undergraduate gnu atheism interferes directly with what you teach. The same is probably true if you’re the Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization.
You can see it, right? You can see how it might go? Gnu atheist students age 20 or so, who think they already know whatever they need to know on the subject and express lofty contempt for things they can’t even spell. Why do they think this? They picked it up from PZ Myers, or Richard Dawkins – that’s the thinking. Actually it’s a lot more likely that they picked it up from commenters at Pharyngula or the RDF site, but still – that’s “new” atheism in some sense (though it’s always better to make it clear which sense is in play).
I can sort of see how gnu atheism could seem like just another version of anti-intellectualism, and I can pretty easily see that it’s at least compatible with anti-intellectualism for followers. I say “for followers” because it’s absurd to think of any of the Name “new” atheists as anti-intellectual, much less incurious, which was Berlinerblau’s wild charge.
I said on Facebook yesterday that I was tempted to work up a little statement to append to every post I write –
Nothing here is to be construed as permission to refuse to read any history or philosophy of religion. There is no merit to ignorance.
Your last words say it all, i.e. “There is no merit to ignorance.”
And I never thought there was. On the other hand, I also don’t think there should be entrance requirements for atheism.
It may be that that thought gets confused with the thought that there is merit to ignorance.
If Hoffman thinks 17th Century European atheist history is important, he should make a case why it’s important. Not engage in a childish rant against ‘gnu atheists’ and their ‘smart-ass comments’ while dragging in (and thus tarring through allusion) Shylock and Pol Pot.
I don’t know how to design and build a car; therefore I shouldn’t be allowed to drive one.
Thing is, no matter how much certain forums resemble mosh-pits rather than an intellectual debating arena – and I suspect the reputation is not entirely fair; nowhere on any atheist website anywhere has ignorance or lack of knowledge been praised, encouraged or advocated.
There may be individuals who aren’t much into research or reading, but they are just as many who have multiple degrees (not that a degree is the essential element in pursuing knowledge).
But all that aside, I am still curious why atheists get singled out for being told that they must become experts on the history & philosophies of atheism past & present. Oh, and also become experts on theology & theodicy while we’re at it. Somehow that requirement isn’t necessary for theists – god knows it isn’t.
It’s just a variation on the “if you don’t agree with me, then shut up” theme.
I don’t think there has ever been a rule that teaching at a university was supposed to be easy. But anyway, it occurred to me during the beginning of the TJ (Wally Smith) affair that these “Hard” Old Atheists do often lash out for what appears to be a miffed feeling that PZ and Dawkins et al have robbed them of their elite intellectual status. The history of fashion behind the Emperor’s New Clothes is no more interesting than a detailed investigation of the precise hue of green on leprechauns’ tailcoats or what kind of wacky tobacky they smoke in their pipes or why there are no females. If adults want knowledge worth having, then that kind of stuff is likely not going to interest most of them.
Another point – which I meant to include but forgot about (so I might do a follow-up later) – is that most of the Name gnus also teach undergraduates and that’s also why they are riled. People who teach biology get smug ducklings who think they know better because of what their pastor has been telling them for years.
And the fact that atheists really are a despised minority for no good reason (so they’re not like the despised minority of serial killers), so people who write jeremiads about them really are feeding into an existing prejudice. I still think they ought to be much more careful about that, however irritating their students are.
I understand that atheism covers a broad set of people, from those who have no real interest in anything intellectual but still have strong opinions, to high-brow academics and professors. I put myself somewhat in the middle between the two. Sometimes it gets a little frustrating that I’m not cultured or educated enough to keep up with the high brows, while it is also frustrating to read comments from atheists who don’t make very thoughtful comments and are largely ignorant. That’s why I read Hoffmann several times, to see if he’s actually saying anything of merit. And each time I got angrier and angrier as it actually read like a comment from one of those thoughtless atheists, albeit with a greater vocabulary and knowledge base.
The thing is, if atheism is going to be a broad popular movement, then it won’t be entirely made up of professors, scientists, artists and historians. We’re going to have people who will look toward professors and artists for inspiration and guidance. And that broad base of people are always open to being mislead and exploited. I mean, can you imagine Ruse or Mooney with millions of followers? No, that goes to people like Professor Dawkins, whose integrity matters, a great deal.
You know, I was wondering about that. So many of the gnu-critics seemed to have someone specifically in mind — but none of the writers or speakers they cited seemed to fit their dramatic accusations. For a while I wondered if there wasn’t some persistent and particular Angry Old Coot writing a bunch of letters to favored philosophers — but students might trigger the same sense of exasperation.
Everybody thinks they’re a moderate. Gnu atheists usually have their own tales of encountering other atheists who were too abrasive, annoying, or ignorant. We don’t tend to think of them as spearheading a Movement, though.
So, basically, all of Hoffman’s article could be summed up as “My students are ignorant, and I wish they would study before making their inane arguments”? I teach high school and I see the same thing. I don’t blame their religion (unless, as would be relevant to Hoffman, their ignorance deals directly with their religion), nor do I blame all religious people everywhere for the ignorance of this subpopulation.
If Hoffman had written it as talking about his students, then it probably wouldn’t have caused a flicker, and many of us would probably have said “Yeah, I see what you mean.” But he took the (probably legally best route) of being non-specific to his students and shot himself in the foot.
Ophelia, I find your analysis very compelling. This may indeed be the source of these rather shallow responses to the new atheism, but it doesn’t justify them. It could also be the reason why Berlinerblau and Hoffmann don’t provide any evidence for the kind of empty invective they are dealing in. To read the so-called ‘four horsemen’ and simply dismiss them in the way that both B and H do is absurd. If they really want to claim, as Hoffmann does, that they are carelessly wordspinning and then sitting back for the money to roll in is simple calumny, and even if it has some justification in the kind of response they get from their undergraduate students is no excuse for responding like one — and that’s just what Hoffmann adn Berlinerblau are doing. Shame on them!
It makes sense. There is a lot of silly anti-philosophy talk around at the moment – just look at RichardDawkins.net.
Yeah but silly anti-philosophy talk shows up at practically all levels of education. I am dismissive of alot of philosophy too, but thats because I think it’s wrong, and the way I know this is because I’ve looked at the arguments for and against it. I stopped reading the comments on the Julian Baggini’s article on the self at RD.net they were so bad. What made it worse was that I study cognitive science and I thought the view expressed in the article was pretty much right and had slowly become the status quo in the field. It seems everyone thinks they are experts in psychology and philosophy of mind, and can dismiss anything in it without even looking at the evidence.
ps. Its not just undergrads, even PhD students can be Wallys, just ask Polly-O who I agree with (that meme never caugth on did it)
<blockquote>If they really want to claim, as Hoffmann does, that they are carelessly wordspinning and then sitting back for the money to roll in is simple calumny, and even if it has some justification in the kind of response they get from their undergraduate students is no excuse for responding like one — and that’s just what Hoffmann adn Berlinerblau are doing.</blockquote>
The Humpty Dumpty argument from <i>Through the Looking Glass:</i>
<blockquote>’And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’
‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’ </blockquote>
Ouch, complete html fail…. sigh
The fact that they teach should hold them to a higher standard.
I can see you being criticized for some things – as well as Gnu Inc. – but ignorance isn’t one of them. That’s below the belt.
I have to say I think you’re far too kind to Hoffman. I read the piece and he’s pretty clearly directing criticisms at “EZs” and “News,” though he helps himself to plenty of sloppy elisions and equivocations such that basically any dumb thing any atheist — or heck, any person commenting on questions of metaphysics — has said or done anywhere for the last 40 years is caught in his net, e.g., this bit of rot:
The amorphous blob of gnu he has in mind is, he wants to say, worryingly indistinguishable from Charles Manson and Pol Pot — this in a piece that gripes about, among other things, the unoriginality of others’ arguments.
He never once limits this to undergraduates or anything of the kind. He’s just piling on the accusations Berlinblau and Ruse made before him, and those aren’t improved by the repeating.
I reached atheism by my own path prior to 1970. I was not raised in any religion, so I had no need to break away. I feel kinship to New Atheism, but I’m probably not really one of them.
In this ongoing criticism of Gnu Atheism I feel like I’m being told that my answer to 2+2 is wrong because I reached it the wrong way. I got 4 by, you know, ADDING a quantity of TWO to a quantity of TWO. I’m told that I cannot take that stance because I did not study the Indian origin of zero, the process used by Newton to derive calculus, Riemann’s transformations, and string theory.
They are not allowed to tell me that I must go through everything they went through to find their answer their way. I am not allowed to expect that of them either.
I reached my answer by a process that I can demonstrate and defend as true. They have two choices to change my mind: show me that my answer (or process) is wrong or show me how they got their answer. They refuse to do either.
Its not quite that simple of course. We’re not talking about something as clear cut as a sum of integers or a process as clearly defined as arithmetic. It’s more akin to them saying that indigo-purple-ultraviolet clashes with all other colors in the spectrum and is therefore not allowed to be seen in public. They insist that they can tell what clashes and what does not and they will tell us when we are wrong and when we are wearing an acceptable shade.
I didn’t start out looking for a metaphor that fits so well with the burqa, but I’m not unhappy it turned out that way
I meant to add ‘you have not read [this huge stack of books] and therefore your argument is invalid’ has to be a logical fallacy. Isn’t it just a slightly veiled appeal to authority?
If it’s not connected to any particular argument — as it is not in Hoffman’s piece — it doesn’t even rise to the level of logically fallacious. It’s just hand-waving.
He would do better to state what, precisely, the “EZs” and the “News” got wrong as a result of the alleged failure to read Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Camus, and the others. This would do well to begin with particular citations of the people he has in mind.
Plus, how would Berlinerblau rate Roberto De Mattei’s latest rumblings on “practical Catholic atheism,” a man whose faith informs him that the Japanese are being punished by God? Or Cardinal Martini’s declaration today that these are the birth pangs of Apocalypse (in Corriere della Sera)? It hard to see how one is supposed to engage these people in serious discussion.
Ophelia, I think you might feel less charitable towards rjh after seeing his latest piece…
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/scipio-and-the-new-atheism/
Oh, and comments are closed, by the way. Remind you of anyone?
Josh Rosenau seems to agree with Ruse
from http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2011/03/point_coyne-terpoint.php
That captures it well. I’m not sure that Berlinerbau’s and Hoffman’s anger can be attributed to having to deal with atheist students’ willful ignorance. History of religion isn’t part of anybody’s core curriculum, so the students are likely to be interested in the subject. Perhaps the students are frustrated to learn that history of religion is really limited to history of religious thought. Atheist students are not likely to find that particularly relevant.
It is inquisitive students who reject sclerotic thinking, no matter how deep and rich, who move scholarship forward. Painfully, at times.
Stephen @ 22 – WTF? Can he pile the strawmen any higher in that allegory? If that is how he teaches his students, then I feel sorry for them.
Ken @ 25 – I think it was Hoffman who said that argued against students refusing to read Aquinas because he was religious (just one of the strawman arguments, I hope, although it is possible some people feel that way) – I haven’t read Aquinas, but unless it was needed for some reason, I have much better things to do with my time. If Aquinas presented evidence for the existence of his deity, then it isn’t really relevant to any arguments today – arguments that are baed on reason, science, and evidence. I think this dismissal of philosophy that really irks them – in a sense, we are saying that they wasted their time. For me, I’m not saying that, just that their particular discipline has nothing to say regarding the particular arguments I am thinking about. If I wanted to engage in some philosophical debates, then sure, it behooves me to become acquainted with the relevant works – but not the entire corpus of knowledge!
Ophelia, I have an alternative hypothesis: Berlinerblau and Hoffmann write out of pure jealousy for the success and publicity that have accrued to the New Atheists. Neither of them, nor Ruse, have had any great success in influencing public opinion, or writing popular books or articles In fact, there’s evidence for my theory, since both of them, like Ruse, repeatedly mention and denigate the Gnu’s success.
As far as I can see, there is no evidence for your hypothesis. I’m not going to go back and read their screeds, but I don’t remember them dwelling on the presence of obnoxious and cocksure undergraduates.
I am a bit saddened, in fact, to see you trying to excuse their invective. I have met, in my years of teaching, many young students who are either atheists or on the verge of becoming so. And almost none of them have been arrogant. They are tentative, questioning, deferential, and thoroughly likeable–much more so than their contemporaries who are secure in religion. I don’t see any merit in your hypothesis, at least based on my own experience.
I do not know Mr Coyne. But I did not know his field was psychology. I know what a screed is and my blog wasn’t one. If he is a scientist then he will know that “success” is not any indication of truth or correctness, anymore in 2011 than it was in 325 (he can do the looking up). But there is no evidence that except for book sales the new atheism is successful, and much evidence that serious atheists don’t like it.
To impute jealousy as the reason we (Ruse, Berlinerbalu, others) don’t like it is merely emotive. Worse, he is completely unaware of the many times I have come on board in favor of atheism and against repressive religiosity. Also, he bears a certain responsibility for the way in which he has replied to the critique of Mr Berlinerblau and others. The fact that virtually no one beyond his fan club weighed in is…interesting:
He might start here http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/five-good-things-about-atheism-2/
And btw, my field is history of religion, and my reputation in that area confers at least as much right to be taken seriously as Mr Coyne’s. The ferocity and insecurity of the responses I have received strongly indicates that there was something worth…mentioning. If this means my license to be a non-believer has to be revoked–well, there ya go. That’s why the second post on the topic was all about moving to atheist orthodoxy.
Having not to long ago been a callow undergraduate catalyzed to Gnu Atheism by the Gnu Atheists, I can testify that there is a certain willingness to confront religious people that sometimes ignores circumstances such that the bounds of civility are stretched to the breaking point. The worst real-life offender I’ve seen–while not nearly as bad as Ruse et al. would suggest–nevertheless induced a fairly cringeworthy social situation over the matter in my social group. This person was also the guy who lent me a copy of Letter to a Christian Nation back when it was still new, so I can see how the connection between rude undergraduates and the Gnu Atheists might be drawn, just based on my own experience. The analogy to the Tea Party is way out of line, though, and fails at multiple points (like when Berlinerblau talks about “originalism.” Seriously?). I think what we are seeing in these complaints is the response of academics used to dry, conciliatory discussion to the infusion into the discussion of people who don’t know and don’t care about the borders they’ve carefully drawn with the help of other academics isolated from the concerns of the larger culture (like actually taking one’s religion literally).
Just out of curiosity, who are these serious atheists?
rjh@28: So I read your “Five Good Things About Atheism”
I could cite dozens of examples (sound familiar?) of strawmen but I’ll settle for one:
You might want to read “Unweaving the Rainbow”…
“Poor, poor, pitiful me. Oh, these gnus keep picking on me.”
What you actually have been suggesting is that non-believers should, in effect, be licensed to talk about it the right way. If they don’t include a deep knowledge of everything, then they are dangerous, right?
” I think it was Hoffman who said that argued against students refusing to read Aquinas because he was religious (just one of the strawman arguments, I hope, although it is possible some people feel that way) – I haven’t read Aquinas, but unless it was needed for some reason,”
Hoffmann who argued for starters: it was entirely argumentative. Did you get that part? Would there be a good reason to read Aquinas? Only if you wanted to know where the philosophical proofs for God’s existence come from–otherwise, No. Do you know what a straw man argument actually is? It keeps popping up and I challenge you to underline where it is in my posts.
RJH:
Or that many of us find your attempts to pathologize and silence open challenges to bigoted majority privilege to be severely distasteful.
Your posts on this issue have been consistently snide, dishonest, and empty, and they repeatedly smear a minority that is already widely despised in American society. Small wonder that the pushback from atheists who have found a voice has been “ferocious.” Attacks like yours deserve a strong response.
I recognize that you have called yourself an atheist. As you are learning, however, the Uncle Tom role carries both rewards and hazards. Coddling the hatred that this society directs at us is unconscionable regardless of what you believe about deities.
Screed: “a long speech or piece of writing, typically one regarded as tedious.”
Seems pretty accurate to me. And, as Eric says, it’s calumny as well.
Success is an indicator of success–that is, a lot of people reading and discussing the Gnu Atheist books. And a lot of converts, too–that’s more than anecdotal by now. As for “truth,” well, what is untrue about the absence of God, since Dr. Hoffmann apparently agrees with it?
I took Hoffmann’s article as seriously as it deserved to be taken–as a piece of ill-tempered and extremely arrogant slander. And as for the Mooney-an claim:
That’s the last defense of somebody who has been pwned. The ferocity of the responses has another explanation, which is that the piece was inflammatory, poorly argued, and an insult to those atheists who know a lot more than Hoffman thinks they do.
Ah well. It seemed like a good idea at the time (as we used to say in my family after someone had screwed something up royally).
RJH:
No, actually, it’s a direct inference from specific material you’ve written, such as the following:
You are the one who, for reasons which remain mysterious, brought “royalty checks and speaking fees” into this. That says some thing not insignificant about you and the substance of your “emotive” notions, hard as it appears to be for you to admit.
Jerry and his fans are probably right. There is no use arguing when they have stopped reading. MacDonald & Coyne are obviously exemplary of the position Berlinerblau characterizes as hper-empiricism. Their view of religion is their under-assessed and totally scientistic caricature of religion, de-historicized and dragged without context into their private psychology. From that vantage point, everyone else is a polemicist.
I think this highlights the problem. Here in the UK we had a visitor last year. We was invited as a head of state for the first time. He was lauded by our new Prime Minister. He had an audience with the Queen, as happens. But something rather odd happened. He was allowed to preach. That’s distinctly unusual. Heads of state usually don’t preach. It’s typically thought rather rude. But that didn’t stop this visitor, and indeed, his preaching expected and was reported throughout the media. That was odd too, as he was hardly praising the UK. He spoke of the dangers of secularism and the historical lessons we should learn from the rejection of faith. And there is the clue. This respected head of state was religious. That allows him to bypass normal protocols and give the UK a good spanking. It was, of course, the Pope. This Pope is, we hear, respected in religious circles. He’s particularly respected as an academic. He is an expert theologian we hear.
So, I ask my philosophical friends (I have a few) what they think of theology. Their views are clear: unfounded rubbish. The introduction of modal logic is interesting, but as exercises in truth-finding theology is hopelessly outdated. I hear from these philosopher and historian friends about how the reputation of theology didn’t survive the rise of science, about how the meaning of supernaturalism has changed. Of course, these are just my philosopher friends, and it’s just their views, but there we go.
So, we have a religious head of state who comes to a country, slags off a large proportion of its population, tells them that their new laws on equality are dangerous, and makes a feeble non-apology for his Church’s horrific treatment of some children, but because he is religious, he is treated with affection and respect.
There is a huge amount for atheists to do. I would suggest that getting uppity about them because some aren’t enlightened in theology and the reasons for their non-belief is utterly missing the point.
I’m gay. It’s like telling me I should not get annoyed at the Church and campaign noisily for my rights because it’s terribly rude and I’m not able to discuss in detail the theological basis the Church’s considering homosexuality sinful.
I don’t think I’m going to get anywhere by discussing theology with the Pope, sorry.
Hahahaha! Sorry, I found that completely funny. Jealous much?
And the award for most pretentious blog comment of the decade goes to….
rjosephhoffmann!!! (he can do the looking up)
I don’t know, Egbert: but my name is not Egbert.
Ophelia, can I respect your humanity for your self-reflection, if your OP here means that every action has unintended consequences, and you’re taking a moment to consider the unintended consequences of New Atheism as a movement. The example that comes to my mind is that here in the United States, an unintended consequence of the civil rights movement was that racial desegregation led to upper-middle class blacks leaving the cities because they could, and that left the cities with a higher concentration of lower economic class, and that led to urban decay. But by making this observation, I’m not advocating segregation (!!). I’m saying desegregation was right, and by analogy, good gnu arguments are right. And at the same time, I will watch for unintended consequences of these right actions. But about Hoffmann, maybe you see this in terms of reading his two posts chronologically: A) You read his first New-bashing piece, then B) Now you understand (from his follow-up post) that he’s “really” annoyed by his undergrads, and you feel now that we understand each other, we have a resolution of a conflict. Well, I can respect your humanity for wanting to be understanding, but note the real chronology (according to Hoffmann) is this: #1 – Hoffmann felt frustrated by his undergrads, #2 – So he wrote the first post bashing News (a.k.a. EZs), where he said Berlinerblau hit the nail on the head with charges of “hyper-materialism” and “hyper-empiricism” (lol wut?). And when you pressed him on who thinks this way, Hoffmann said (in the comments to his first post) it’s anyone who would call himself or herself a New or Gnu. Scapegoat much? Your tenacity got him to say his real story was #1 and #2 together. Now reflect on that, because it shows how he’ll treat you in the future. I also share Jerry Coyne’s skepticism of Hoffmann’s “real” story #1 about his undergrads (which was not in his original post, but in his follow-up post to “explain”). Since Hoffmann presented #1 and #2 (scapegoating gnus) to “explain” he was being reasonable (!!), that also gives me reason to believe his characterization of his undergrads in #1 is biased.
it’s calumny as well. Go on: that is an interesting word.
One clarification – I wasn’t trying to excuse their invective. (Look again at what I said about Berlinerblau’s post!) I was just saying I thought I understood better (than before) what was motivating them. I’d mentioned puzzlement about what motivates the anti-gnu rage – I’ve been puzzled by that for ages, and I only get more puzzled as more rage appears. I thought I had some understanding of this particular academic branch of it. (That branch doesn’t include Ruse. He’s in a category by himself. Besides, he’s said himself what motivates him – he likes a good dust-up. He says that before and after he complains about all the dust he’s stirred up. “The new atheists are mad at me. I like a good dust-up. The new atheists are mad at me.” Like that.)
Just understanding. Not “therefore the invective is just fine.” The invective isn’t just fine, especially since it’s directed at a whole large group of people as opposed to individuals or even types. It’s as fine as would have been invective directed at “those civil rights people” or “those feminists” or “those gay rights activists.”
I hope we’ve got that straight!
Joe,
Are you interested in being understood? Or just slagging?
Seriously. Why don’t you actually explain for us undereducated hypermaterialist hyperempiricists approximately where the line is between materialism and hypermaterialism, and whether the former is bad, and why the latter is bad—as you evidently think it is. Likewise for empiricism vs. hyperempiricism.
If you’re not going to bother with that, don’t expect us to think that the terms you use are anything but convenient, made-up hifalutin’ derogatory terms that mean “too much” of some unspecified thing for your particular tastes.
And if that’s all you care to convey, I have a few choice words for you, too.
Dave, I posted before I saw your comment. Yes that’s the fella: unintended consequences. I was thinking about those.
I don’t think it was comments on Joe’s posts that suggested the issue with teaching though…although now I don’t remember what it was. I don’t remember the comments on the posts very well; I found them frustrating so I bailed.
It’s all rather frustrating; lots of talking past. Ah well.
(Feminism had unintended consequences, too. One is that intelligent women can do things other than teach, and by god they do, so there are a lot fewer brilliant teachers. You would not believe the teachers I had in school – they’d all be at universities now.)
rjosephhoffman #38 wrote:
Could you give a specific quote where Jerry does this? It seems like you were responding to his criticism in his post above yours, but that didn’t deal with religion as such. If he was mischaracterizing anything, it was you.
“As you are learning, however, the Uncle Tom role carries both rewards and hazards. Coddling the hatred that this society directs at us is unconscionable regardless of what you believe about deities.” Huh? Are you actually receiving death threats? Or are you suggesting that my commentary which stretches back a few decades is Uncle Tomism? How fucking stupid. Excuse the profanity, but the comment expresses the very lack of information that most worries me about the News. There is a history of opposition to religious hegemony in this country that stretches back before 2005.
I don’t think one needs to stereotype undergraduates and the young in general so that one can say kind words about someone who has none for you. If people are stupid enough to generalize from a few smug undergraduates (I’m sure there are some, although “smug” is not a word that pops to my mind when I think of undergraduates as a group) to a whole school of thought, then they shouldn’t be teaching.
For goodness sake. Being told that you are immoral, a threat to society, “not even fully human”, not entitled to equal rights and so on is sufficient to suggest a certain degree of hatred, don’t you think?
Is this the standard of discussion you are trying to encourage?
Oh dear, if I can’t stereotype undergraduates and the young, what’s left?
The post with the complaint about his undergrads is at
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/the-orthodoxy-of-just-not-believing-in-god/
Dave – having taught history to undergraduates, I’ve had the ‘why do we need to know this’, and initially was revising my opinion of rjh. (But not Ruse or Berlinblau). Then I read the post I linked to in #22 and realised he’s exactly like Ruse and Berlinblau. What was really funny, going back to it, is that the character we assume is rjh… is called Cleanthes. Seriously? rjh sees himself as Zeno’s successor. rotflmfao
I think if there is one thing we can all agree on, and no hugs are necessary, it is that this sort of discussion indicates that atheists have lots of spirit. It is difficult to be labeled an Uncle Tom and a bad teacher (I don’t think I’m either and neither do [most] of my students) or an elitist or someone who simply wants 17th century atheism taught or wants there to be an entry exam for atheists–none of which I have ever suggested–and then be told that what I write is mere diatribe. before anyone adds to the list of my “calumnies” that I am now being self-defensive, I am. Part of that has to do with (as I suggested) a record that goes back long before most Americans had heard of Richard Dawkins. Some of us older and old atheists remember what a lonely battle that was. Many who came to the movement since 2000 will not. And that is precisely the pojnt. Without saying jealousy is involved, there are many (not just me) who know that the Dawkins revolution could not have taken place without th almost invisible work of many of my associates in and out of the academy over many many years. On the one hand, we need to be grateful that the New Atheists have been successful in garnering support; on the other hand, and I know this from experience, nothing ensured the death of a book in this country before 1995 like putting the word atheism or humanism in the title. So, there were laborers in the trenches. I suppose what grieves me the most about the tenor of this discussion is that it’s being fought among cousins. It is being fought among people who have bought into the old/new divide, which is absurd, and I am guilty of it too. Let’s get rid of it. over it. But also over the idea that atheism is just a CNN poll, up or down, based on how we feel about the God idea. That has been my issue. If we really felt that the question is that simple, it would be reflected in a social context, and th social context tells us something different. this is my last post here–but I have to say, this has been interesting, chastening and compelling. See you maybe at The New Oxonian.
You could always take up sock puppetry :)
Well Joe – if you would talk about it in that style, it would be a different matter. The style of your recent posts wasn’t very…cousinly, to adapt a Mitfordism.
I’m older than time, myself, but I wasn’t a noisy atheist until sometime in the mid-90s. I owe the laborers in the trenches. But…well I don’t see what I’m doing as somehow not paying back the laborers in the trenches. I’m trying to join them in the trenches. I should have started decades ago; I didn’t; I was doing other things. I’m here now. I do my best with what I have.
I’m reminded of the song “I was country when country wasn’t cool.” I think we should take Hoffmann at his word that that is the real issue spurring the criticisms; i.e., that many people who have long been atheists feel left out of the recent “cooler” version. That is (or at least could be) a valid point, and I bet there are actually a lot of people around who would like to learn about what came before, minus the contempt for the more celebrated voices. Shouldn’t the reaction to the successes of the new class have been “good for them”? Even “good for them, but lets acknowledge some of those who helped get us here” would have been very well received, I think.
rjosephhoffman #55 wrote:
But of course. I’m surprised that you think the so-called gnu atheists think otherwise. The term “gnu” was only adopted because we couldn’t stand the implication that anyone was saying anything really new.
Hoffman – Rereading your passage – “A worshipper of Richard Dawkins who can’t deal with Aquinas because he is “religious” is not better than an evangelical Christian who won’t read it because he was “Catholic.” That is where we are.” – this isn’t a strawman since you’re not making any argument. You just seem to think this is common or you could be saying that it happens a lot to you. Since it hasn’t been my experience, nor do I see this anywhere where I read or visit, I can only assume we know two completely different groups of people. So, it would seem that these EZs are not any of the Gnus, so we’re back to you just lamenting the incurious and ignorant students you have, even if you framed it as a polemic against the Gnu Atheists.
Moi:
RJH:
Yes, in fact I have received death threats. As have several of the targets of your slime.
But who said anything about death threats? I mentioned hatred. And your recent work makes it clear that you are utterly ignorant about, or indifferent to, the broad-based hatred that numerous large groups of people bear and express toward atheists. Your sneers on this topic are severely ugly; the Shylock bit was especially disgusting. Whether you deign to survey the provinces from your tower or not, atheists are by several measures the most hated minority in the United States. We are baited and insulted by public figures, to say nothing of by the currency in our pockets or the Pledge of Allegiance our children recite in school, on a daily basis. Despite legislation that allegedly protects us, untold numbers of us have been subjected to employment and housing discrimination, and (as Eugene Volokh has documented) we are routinely denied custody of our children, in open court, on the grounds that we are not religious. How dare you trivialize the antipathy that millions of Americans bear toward us by comparing mild and respectful attempts to counteract it—”We who are nonreligious lead meaningful lives without reliance on the supernatural”—to Shylock? And then, as a kicker:
Yes, you blind, arrogant asshole, there is. And you are doing a swell job of supporting it.
I wasn’t aware that your attack on outspoken atheism “stretche[d] back a few decades”; but if so, then sure, it certainly appears to be. It’s hard to miss the message that you, unlike the ugly uppity
Negroesatheists you oppose, represent no threat to the hegemon’s privilege.Hey, I agree. I can’t imagine why you’re so hot and bothered to insult and misrepresent atheists for the heinous crime of failing to genuflect at the altar of religious privilege. With repeated (and still mysterious) references to all of the money certain Gnus are making—how “emotive” of you.
In light of the blithering ignorance your post reveals you’re laboring under (“is there really a general movement afoot to tar atheists as emotional defectives” indeed), that’s a bit ironic. Oddly enough, a fair number of people think that the damage that religious power wreaks on humanity in the here-and-now is a bit more relevant and worthy of attention than are the minutiae of the work of (to pick three figures you whined about) Thomas Aquinas, Paul Kurtz, and Albert Camus. Even when we know quite a bit, thanks, about Aquinas, Kurtz, and Camus.
Yes, I’m more than six years old, too. That rather fails to substantiate your repeated misrepresentations about what Gnu Atheists know and argue.
Or rather, to say what I’m sure Sastra meant to say, we couldn’t stand the implication that we thought anyone was saying anything really new. No we never thought we’d invented atheism or improved it or done anything other then be around at a particular moment.
And Richard himself was one of those laborers in the trenches, after all; so was Hitchens. Both wrote a column for Free Inquiry. I thought of Free Inquiry as a kind of candle in the dark type of thing.
As an atheist with a record (within organized atheism and otherwise) that goes back long before most Americans had heard of Richard Dawkins and long before 2000, it seems to me that your behavior in this episode has been dishonest and awful.
To my mind, what fundamentally characterizes Gnu Atheism from other approaches to religious discussion is its open and dogged refusal to accept or obey the unjust privilege that religions and religious people have arrogated to themselves. It is, obviously, entirely possible to lack a belief in gods while simultaneously arguing strenuously that said religious privilege ought to be stringently enforced.
Which is to say: if you don’t like being called an Uncle Tom, it might behoove you to stop acting like one.
Hoffman; you keep saying “Jerry and his fans”. With all fanboy excitement toward Mr Coyne aside, some of us consider ourselves Benson fans first and foremost.
Respect.
When the new atheist movement started, one thing they did not do was demonize other atheists and say they were “hurting the cause.” That’s something anti-gnu atheist atheists started doing. So if a fight betwixt cousins has been picked here, it hasn’t been picked by gnus. See, we’ve been “over it.” It was never our modus operandi to trash other atheists.
Glendon. Hear, hear!
When the new atheist movement started, one thing they did not do was demonize other atheists and say they were “hurting the cause.”
Well, to be fair, some did. I remember a Pat Condell video from a few years back in which, amongst other things, he berated those atheists who engaged with theists in debate. But I don’t see that kind of view as common.
I now see that Jerry is clearly right – there is envy here. Which is a shame. I wish those who feel upset or left out of the movement in some way would be more honest about what they feel. Why not just admit that there are those who have helped atheism over the decades who should be recognised? That’s a fair point to make, as against ranting against the supposed low intellectual quality of others.
Yes, that is a fair point to make, and also a rather difficult point to make. None of us cares to acknowledge our own vanity. Perhaps we would do well to, quietly, acknowledge one another’s.
I say “for followers” because it’s absurd to think of any of the Name “new” atheists as anti-intellectual, much less incurious, which was Berlinerblau’s wild charge.
It’s not intellectuals I have a problem with, it’s faux intellectuals. There are many of these at universities (and elsewhere), we’ve all suffered through one or more of their classes, and Berlinerblau is one of them. I don’t think many are in the Physics department however!
Perhaps I should admit my own vanity and get it over with then. It’s hard to cure, but it’s undignified not to admit when you have been caught out.
RE: rjosephhoffman #54
It could also be that this “revolution” has nothing to do with you or is incidental to you and your associates and all your hard work in academy. How is it that you think you had much of anything to do with Gnu Atheism? Why do you think Dawkins’ and Harris’s and Hitchens’ and Dennett’s and Stenger’s and Ali’s etc. books did so well and how did their success relate to you and your associates if at all?
This overlooks the obvious possibility that the selection of books with one of those words in their title were not very good prior to 1995 and also the possibility that a poorly received book with one of those words in its title may have been pro-theism and so not reached the same audience that a pro-atheism book might have.
I find this whole issue baffling as if we are being told that we aren’t respectful enough of our predecessors. Well, if you know so much about all they have done, why not write about their accomplishments instead of being unreasonably condescending towards Gnu Atheists?
As a person who was involved with organized atheism (and even Free Inquiry) long before the publication of The End of Faith, I’m kinda sorta sympathetic to the complaint that Gnu Atheists big and small aren’t as cognizant of Twentieth Century atheism as they could be.
But my goodness, is that an irrelevant issue when addressing the actual arguments and presentations—indeed, the public face in general—of Gnu Atheism. Studying the history of nonbelief can be a rewarding pursuit, and anyway there’s nothing ennobling about ignorance; but the matters that many Gnus tend to focus on instead happen to be rather significant ones.
As for history, though, and one of the figures Hoffman concentrates on: some of us are aware that Paul Kurtz’s first major role in organized nonbelief was as the editor of The Humanist, the house organ of the American Humanist Association. In 1979-80, Kurtz resigned as Humanist editor, noisily left the AHA, and founded the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (CODESH—subsequently renamed the Council for Secular Humanism), which directly competed with the AHA for membership dollars. Free Inquiry was founded as (and still is) the Council’s counterpart to The Humanist.
The reason for Kurtz’s schism, during which he dragged a sizeable chunk of the AHA’s membership away with him? He thought the AHA was too sympathetic to religion. He wanted a humanist organization that was proudly and overtly secular.
That idea seems to me to be a heavily Gnuish one; indeed, Kurtz was (and to the extent they remember the incident, he still is) bashed severely by his opponents within the AHA as a know-nothing antireligious zealot.
It seems to me that the current Gnu tide is different from Kurtz’s schism only in the sense that the current movement is less about humanism as such and more about cultural discourse more broadly. But what goes around comes around: now Free Inquiry, or at least one of its writers, is the author rather than the target of allegations of mindless antipathy toward religion. And then there are the shots Kurtz himself has taken at Gnus.
Guh.
If the objection is that Gnus are too scientistic – what an odd postmodernist term to be using at this late date – then surely the problem isn’t that they’re just relying on reporting their feelings loudly. I can’t think of an example from any published Gnu atheist where the argument boils down to I Just Feel Like This Is True. The epistemology is a bit more complex.
I take this to be the tone critique – that what Gnus are doing is empirically poor applied social epistemology, not designed to sway minds – and isn’t the reply from Gnus that *they don’t want to do marketing, but to say true things?*
Of course some of us are receiving death threats – aimed at us and our loved ones. What an odd thing to ask.
However, if Professor Hoffman really does feel chastened, as he says, then I suppose the point is made and he won’t be attacking fellow atheists in future. I hope he was sincere about that.
As for the “old atheists”, I owe a huge debt to Bertrand Russell, Antony Flew (in his atheist days), Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, John Mackie, Paul Edwards, and others, including Paul Kurtz. Going back, I have a debt to Epicurus, David Hume, Diderot, and others. We’d be much poorer without all these people having contributed. But that hardly takes away from the achievement of Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett … and later Hitchens … in breaking into the mass market when there was a window of opportunity. Surely that made things easier for everyone on our “side” and ought to be grateful to them. If the price is a few know-all undergrads who won’t take Aquinas seriously, it’s a price I’m prepared to pay.
Alright then..My legs are too skinny and my belly is too fat.
I wonder if some of this ill-feeling is partly as a result of Dawkins’ approach. I thoroughly enjoy reading his scientific writings for many reasons but one of them is that he is a straight talker, and is quite amusingly direct when dealing with the flaws in the ideas of others. This is not uncommon in science: there can be some challenges to ideas with don’t mince words, but this does not necessarily mean there is personal animosity (although that can get involved). When I read “The God Delusion” I immediately recognised Dawkins’ direct style. I suspect that many who read it didn’t get this style for what it was, and assumed that Dawkins was being extremely rude and personal. It’s only applying scientific standards of criticism to religion. Get used to it.
Steve:
Aw, c’mon, Steve: gimme a “P”! Gimme an “R”! Gimme an “I”-“V”-“I”-“L”-“E”-“G”-“E”! What’s that spell?
All together now!
– Rieux, one-man Gnu Atheists Should Talk Lots More About Religious Privilege (’cause it’s one of the main things we’re against and the main reason Gnu-bashers don’t like us) Squad
Hypocrisy much? You did after all claim that the Gnus were basing their arguments on profit motive.
We’re doing it wrong, Hoffman tells us:
Give the man credit: he admits that it didn’t work. Why, though, if he shares our goals, does he complain about our popularity? Hey, for once, some of the fools are on our side! Otherwise it’s is rather like the common Catholic complaint that atheists ought to be sad about the loss of God. Perhaps there ought also to be some nostalgia for phlogiston or the lumeniferous ether; I’m sure there are people who’d enjoy reenactments in period costumes. It also completely misses the point. Atheism isn’t about good and evil. It’s about true and false.
rjosephhoffmann @ #54
This is quite a helpful comment, I think, to give a bit more beef to Hoffmann’s motivations. And, as Ophelia too admits, it’s the motivation for these attacks that puzzles.
And gratitude for the success of the New Atheists would be appropriate. It’s quite the human response that, instead of rejoicing in the fruit of the ‘many many years’ of invisible labour, some older atheists look at the fruit, see a small bruise, and throw it away in disgust!
The mea culpa is noted, but as Andy above wrote, this division is not made by the gnus. Those who are unhappy with the modern movement are distinguishing themselves from those nasty gnus, and don’t want to be identified with that movement. There are things to be said about the tone and the arguments, but the way to address them is not to add to the sum of false opprobrium heaped on this despised minority. Because, shameful attacks like these (Berlinerblau’s, Ruse’s and now Hoffmann’s) give theists succour, and they can then ignore arguments against their privilege put by the gnus, because accommodationists also buy into their anti-gnu propaganda. It’s worth restating here what Berlinerblau wrote, by illustration:
It is, simply, a wicked thing to write, because it looks to brand a community of thinkers with a facile world-view, when trolls are simply a symptom of any movement, particularly on the internet.
would seem to have some bearing on
were it not for the fact that it is indeed the bleat of pwnage.
Bedtime in my time zone was just as Jerry had waded in, in response to what I understood to be Ophelia bending over backwards to bring some unity to people who ought not to forget that they have a common enemy who breaks out the champagne at every inter-atheist disagreement.
I don’t know if RJH is still monitoring this thread. I always considered him one of our allies and was saddened to see what appears to be a switch in direction. I’m pretty sure he would have gotten a lot less heat had he taken the time to exclude the following from his praise for Berlinerblau:
Whichever way you look at that, it’s simply not true. If it’s intended as hyberbole, then it’s an admitted exaggeration (not helped by two “all”s and an “every” being italicised in the original). If not, it’s just plain false. Never mind someone like me, who does identify as a Gnu Atheist, completely rejecting such a definition. What about Jerry visiting that congregation a couple of months ago? If you italicise “all” and “every,” you’re not admitting to exceptions and if you don’t want to be be taken literally then don’t go on as if what you wrote is true.
I think RJH wasn’t helping (please pardon that phrase) in his Scipio pieces by painting religion as all singing and help to the needy, leaving the only references to religion’s negative aspects in the mouth of a character he clearly meant to be seen as misguided and fanatical.
RJH describes his field as “history of religion,” which inevitably links to the history of movements opposed to religion. Nobody’s saying that disqualifies him from wanting to influence what his field will chronicle in the future, but surely the Zeitgeist is at work here. If the time hadn’t been ripe for this development, it wouldn’t have happened, with or without 9/11, Dawkins and all the rest. You don’t have to like de-baptisms, blasphemy challenges, atheist posters and bus ads, but can you deny that there was a grassroots element to them that made them take off?
It is not for me to delegitimise anger that may be felt by anyone. Many people were pre-Dawkins atheists and some may see their methods as obsolete now. When I was a child I did not know one single person who agreed with my atheism. Not being alone in my unbelief might have spared me a lot of agony. It is not my wont to carelessly throw invective around, so my mood is seldom improved when I read that all members of the group with whom I identify are insufferably rude and insulting. If a few of them sometimes sacrifice tact for bluntness and directness (in the face of an assault from religion that never abates) and it helps even one child in the situation I used to be in realise that there are others out there, it will have been well worth it. I have no doubt that, historically speaking, it is true that there were atheists during my childhood, but they were not anywhere I could find them when I so wished I could find even one. What we have now is an improvement, warts and all, and the freeing of young minds is not something that I can agree ought to take second place to the preservation of what seems to be regarded as atheism’s academic respectability.
[…] but also completely ignorant about the history of atheism. Over at Butterflies and Wheels, a post by Ophelia Benson has inspired a lively discussion, with Hoffmann defending his accusations and everybody else piling on. I’ve contributed a […]
Via bad Jim:
In a way, I really resent that attempt to rob us of our emotion. I will make up my own mind about how evil religion is (and it is!), thank you.
Deep rifts… If Hoffman were to keep up with PZ (who am I kidding, that is almost impossible), he would know that PZ advocates the eclectic approach of bring-whatever-you-can-to-the-table. However, the movement of atheism of the gnu kind seems to be primarily concerned with questioning the belief that fake things are real with the idea that such beliefs are inappropriate with our current scientific understanding, immature with respect to our critical faculties, and often times damaging (thus evil) to humanity and to life on Earth in general; and that we can and should be out and proud about being atheists and for resisting or overcoming religious faith and dogma.
I also think it is high time we did turn the tables on evangelism in the South (the backwaters of Slicklizard, AL). Hoffman may not realize it, but all it takes to be an atheist missionary is to sit at home and wait for the Lord’s sheeple to knock on the door of your home which they do quite frequently, and you can then fill your annual conversion quota by preaching the Good Gnus to them in return for having to sit through copious amounts of randomly chosen reactionary Bible verses.
I wonder how many of the social effects (good and bad) we’re “debating” are due to the quick response and mass audiences that Internet faciliates. Alternatively, the “moving of the overton window” idea suggests that previous nonreligious, nontheist, etc. folks also encountered (to a lesser degree – because of the first point) a similar situation. Think of how many people were accused of being Cartesians, where that meant “almost-materialist Deist” or were labelled Spinozists. An interesting study is Catherine Wilson’s recent book on Epicurus and early modernity – many folks wanted to adopt Epicurean views but were concerned and attacked with the “we’ve seen this all before!” viewpoints. I think one metaphorical aspect of the “overton window” applies here too – a window is not a line like slit – it is has an area, so each time it shifts some of the same scene is visible. So of course there’s some historical overlap – nothing completely escapes the past. Which leads me to the single biggest complaint against the “anti-News” I have – the failure to actually *say* what these supposed insights that have gotten lost are. Or, for the ones put in sociological rather than historical terms, what social features are being missed? I do think that a better analysis of society is needed in general terms – the social sciences are very primitive for the most part, and rife with pseudoscience (e.g. much of economics). But this leads finally to my other complaint. It is true that some people treat this as a movement with leaders and followers and a sort of top-down structure: but that’s a bad picture for any social system, both normatively, and importantly, descriptively. Some of us may learn from everyone from Epicurus to Dawkins but that doesn’t entail that these recent authors or their ancient counterparts are somehow thereby the leaders – my approach to citation is that I (at the best of times – it is an ideal) digest carefully and then a positive citation is an *endorsement* of the argument in question, not a “this book is the bees knees” in every respect – even when I say to read the whole thing. (As I did on _Why Evolution is True_ the other day when asked about scientific metaphysics.)
When I’m listening to someone speak about medicine and I hear the term “big Pharma”, used in earnest, as if it actually represents something in the real world, I stop listening. That person may be right about this fact or that (as a broken clock twice daily is), but overall credibility is gone, and it’s not worth my time to verify everything such a person says. That defeats entirely the purpose of having experts.
I can now likewise say that when I see someone writing about atheism and spot the terms “scientism” or “hyper-empiricism”, depicted as coherent concepts, I can stop reading.
On the topic of history of religion and attacking scientistic gnus here’s a rather less than successful attempt!
The really funny part is that it is Nick Matzke (not usually a friend of the gnus) who does the pwnage!
And I’m not even sure that it was intentional!
http://evolvingthoughts.net/2011/03/turtles-all-the-way-down/
[…] at Butterflies and Wheels Ophelia has started a very fruitful discussion on the reasons for the hyper-criticism of people like Berlinerblau and Joseph Hoffmann. And Jerry […]
philosopher-animal,
“An interesting study is Catherine Wilson’s recent book on Epicurus and early modernity – many folks wanted to adopt Epicurean views but were concerned and attacked with the “we’ve seen this all before!” viewpoints.”
But I think this is the issue, actually. Most times when that “attack” is made it’s basically a challenge of “Look, we’ve seen and heard all this before, we’ve raised the issues, we’ve said — and written a lot — about why it’s unconvincing. If all you’re going to do is simply restate it, then why bother? At least come up with a new twist that can overcome the objections to it and the comments made against it, demonstrating that you know the actual history of the debate and where that is. We don’t have much interest in starting at the beginning again.”
Some of the rejections of “sophisticated theology” and studying it — made by the intellectual gnus — smack of simply dismissing that work and that progress made in getting to the heart of the issues — at least in the minds of the people reading and reflecting on those histories — as if that’s all irrelevant. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. And maybe people who say that they don’t care really should. But no one will ever discover that if they don’t look at those things.
Another part of Hoffman’s piece that is really shocking is this:
Where Hoffman sees “worthily opposed”, I see Alister McGrath craftily maneuvering around Dawkins’ points and relying on effete praise to soften the blow. McGrath brings up C.S. Lewis’s argument that faith is like sunlight and that without it you can’t see the supernatural–god goggles, for Spam’s sake!
Verbose Stoic
The issue is one that I think is best described from a computer gamer’s point of view.
A lot of computer games have communities which attach to them, and these communities have a lot of people who are sort of old hands on their forums. They got the game early, or were even part of the beta to the game and are often sources of wisdom on how to handle some challenges or on just what the game has to offer.
These old hands contrast with the community known as newbies. Newbies, according to one faction of old hands, are irritating. They ask the questions that have been answered a million times before, make points that stopped being clever months ago and really why can’t these idiots read the goddamn FAQ that has been stickied at the top of the goddamn board already?
A second faction however recognises that the newby is their best friend – why? Because the more newbies you have the more the community grows, and the more interest there is in making another game like the one that brought the community together in the first place. This faction recognises that for a lot of people those really are new questions, or interesting points, and they will quite tolerantly point out the answers.
Now my take on this is that as a community – with new, as in just converted recently, atheists you are going to get obnoxious ones or ones that ask obvious questions, but we were all newbies once.
Thinking about this Hoffman assertion (from #28 above) overnight:
Re “no evidence,” how about this?
Insofar as Ophelia, in the original post, is correct about Hoffman’s motivations, the above might not in fact strike him as good news. (The drip.) But regardless, it is evidence unrelated to book sales that “the new atheism is successful.”
FWIW, I happen to think the SSA is the most exciting atheist organization on offer these days.
I see the problem as being with this new Internet thing. In the early 90s it was a time of great hope and optimism. The Internet would be a tool for collaboration, for co-operation. Also, we could pretend it was all virtual reality like TRON.
But then America Online joined the Internet, and we realised that the Internet didn’t educate everyone as we hoped, but would allow new forms of ignorance to spread ever faster. Instead of one nutter sitting in a bedroom ranting alone, there could be mailing lists and news groups where a hundred nutters could all rant together.
Then came trolling. That was huge fun, and everyone had to use smileys to indicate that they were actually being fluffy and not rude.
And finally we got the trawlers. They would troll to stir up the mud, then spread their net wide to see what fanged beasts their trolling had woken up. They could then point at the fanged beast and say “look – horrid!”, which would shut up every argument.
If you go out troll-fishing, of course you will get responses which are slimy and poisonous. But to say that’s the only fish in the atheist sea is a bit lying.
Yeah, Steve, I agree that the ‘Net is a huge and under-examined element of what has made all of this—both the Gnu trend and the backlash against it—possible.
Well put. I believe many of the criticisms of today’s young “gnu” atheists is mainly due to the fact that they do not read as much as before. Or are “apparently” less informed than the youth of 50 years ago. Frontline did a very good documentary “Digital Nation” which explains how being wired 24/7 is not always as good as people think it is.
Many today decide to read a good book summary instead of reading the whole book and they base their opinions on the summary, which is often opinionated. I agree with you, Ophelia, that many of the ideas of the young 20-something gnus are probably taken from the comments of others, as today, people prefer to read what ever takes them less time. If they can summarize a view in 140 characters, even better.
What bothers me though about people criticizing the “gnu” atheists is that we atheists/non-believers/non-religious/secular humanists and the like have found common ground on the internet. We have now, more than ever, gotten our voices heard at a rate faster than we could have imagined. But some people (those who criticize us) still have this need to “respect” those ancient traditions that have been held sacred by past generations and get angry at whoever has an insulting, rough, or hard criticizing voice for them.
I believe the fronts have to be fought in different ways, those who can dialogue, will dialogue… and those who want to shout, let them shout. Until those hypocritical religious bastards start condemning publicly the wrongs they cause, I say give ’em hell Gnu Atheists.
If HIstory has taught us anything, it’s that religion likes to get on it’s toes whenever it is threatened. It’s been beaten to a pulp by Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, and all of science’s branches… Religion is near a cliff, about to fall, and the only thing it can do is flail its arms trying to get hold of anything.
Verbose Stoic:
I’m going to ask you a question we generally ask people who say things like this.
What do you mean by “sophisticated theology”? Give some examples.
In particular, don’t just give links or references to books, but say what sophisticated theology, as you see it, consists of, and why it’s interesting.
Many of us here have read varied theology, and been unable to find the actually sophisticated, actually good kind.
Are you talking about supernaturalist theology, with souls that are maybe immortal? Is God supposed to be a person, with thinks like knowledge and preferences?
A big problem with the claim that there’s “sophisticated” theology is that there’s a lot of theology out there, and it’s largely contradictory. Most of us consider that a bad sign.
I’d really like all the people who criticize Gnus to get together and vote on recommended readings in sophisticated theology—what are the top 5 works of sophicated theology that it would do us the most good to read.
Many of us have read folks like Haught and Amstrong, and found them wanting, to say the least. Some of us have read people like Tillich, Buber, and Kung, and/or various stuff by Popes, e.g., Theology of the Body. Not to mention some Luther and Calvin.
What are you talking about when you talk about sophisticated theology?
What are the key points that you think we’ve missed?
Don’t just suggest that we go read a lot of that wonderful stuff. Give us specifics.
One of the things that’s most frustrating about the gnu-bashing about sophisticated theology is that there doesn’t seem to be an agreement among the critics about what counts. Many of us have come to the conclusion that “sophisticated” theology is a myth—and that even the people who think there is such a thing think each others’ ideas of “sophisticated” theology are bogus.
(Theodicy is a great example. Theologians can’t resolve what counts as a good solution to the Problem of Evil, and think each others’ solutions are mostly atrocious.)
So please, put up or shut up, and be very specific.
@Verbose Stoic:
Of course, it would also be fair to accuse the apologetics of not responding to existing arguments. Then again, apologetics may not be in the business of converting skeptics anyway. They seem to be more in the business of making religion sound reasonable to believers.
But the problem that New Atheists have with “sophisticated theology” is exactly that it refuses to defend its foundations. It refuses to acknowledge that it hasn’t made the case for even its basic premises. Until they do, why should we discuss the architecture of the skycastles that were built on top of this non-existing base?
@rjosephhoffmann
I posted this a few years ago on Chris Mooney’s blog when wrote about Richard Dawkins and his “followers”, which I think applies quite well to this conversation.
It’s not a popularity contest, respect is earned, not bestowed, and you appear to be running up quite the deficit in that department.
The failure of the anti-gnus to specify just exactly who they are talking about makes it very difficult for me to tell if I agree with them. I said as much after Phil Plait’s DBAD speech: http://nojesusnopeas.blogspot.com/2010/08/rules-for-not-being-dick-too-much.html Namely, that because he failed to actually say what he was talking about, I wasn’t sure if I vociferously disagreed with him, or if he was making a valid point. I’m still not sure. heh…
Thanks to Philosopher-Animal for the reference to Catherine Wilson’s book on Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity, which should, by the look of it, offer a needed corrective to religiously biased historians who think of science as the natural outworking of medieval theology. Hadn’t heard of it before, and now have it on my Kindle, to the distress of my banker, no doubt.
@Steve Oberski: sometimes I wonder if the differences between the gnus and their critics mostly come down to a difference in authoritarian attitudes. A lot of the criticism seems to suggest that somehow Dawkins speaks for us all, or that somehow what Dawkins says is gospel, and that his readers are automatically his followers (or similar criticisms aimed at PZ, Coyne or Ophelia – but Dawkins appears to be a favorite target)*. Such criticism smells of projection to me.
On the other hand, you could probably say that one of the distinguishing features of Gnu Atheism is a lack of respect for the authority of the church and of theology. Or a refusal to take Very Serious People seriously**. To me, this seems to be where their critics have the biggest problems with the gnus.
* Never mind the shitstorm Dawkins got from even his biggest supporters when he defended Bill Maher’s award, or the criticism Dawkins regularly gets from feminist atheists.
** I like to think the tongue-in-cheek name the gnus chose for themselves – rather than just adopting the “New Atheist” label – also shows some healthy sense of not taking ourselves too seriously.
Well when I went offline yesterday evening I was at least half sorry I’d written this post at all, but now I’m not – it has elicited some compelling comments. Many of them, in fact.
Eric, another excellent book on that subject is The Epicurean Tradition, by Howard Jones (Routledge).
I think the matter of critics trawling for offensive comments is quite an interesting one. Offensive comments are what you inevitably get on relatively open and unmoderated fora, which tends to be the situation with the Gnus, but that gives ammunition to those who consider unrepresentative posts ammunition. There was an awful ‘Flea’ of Dawkins – David Robertson – who basically made something of a career of this: come onto the forum, be a total wazzock, pick up a snarky response, then go and post “oooh! Look at how nasty nasty atheists are!” on his own forums and in books.
@rjosephhoffmann
That’s “Dr” Coyne. I’m quite sure he’s earned it.
Thank you for the recommendation, Ophelia. I looked it up on Amazon. A new hardback copy costs — now get this! — $520.96! Paperback much more reasonable but still pretty dear. However, I shall look around.
Aratina Cage has already cited the following comments made by Mr. Hoffman in comment 70 above, but if I may, I’d like to cite them again to add one or two bits that may be of interest. And then Jane Austen. But first the bits…
“…on the other hand, and I know this from experience, nothing ensured the death of a book in this country before 1995 like putting the word atheist or humanism in the title.”
He’s right about that, of course. Jennifer Michael Hecht’s 2003 book (note–published before any of the big four books) Doubt–A History was originally titled ‘A History of Atheism’. Her editor, I believe, suggested the change, and for exactly the reason Mr. Hoffman notes. There’s something ironic here, I’m sure, which someone with more insight than I will surely elucidate.
The second bit:
“…a record that goes back long before most Americans had heard of Richard Dawkins. Some of us older and old atheists remember what a lonely battle that was. Many who came to the movement since 2000 will not.”
I know Mr. Hoffman doesn’t take Greta Christina quite seriously, but there really is a piece of hers that is extremely relevant here. If you’ve time, sir, here is the link:
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/03/on-the-amazingn.html
She is comparing what she sees as happening now in the atheist movement with very similar changes in the LBGT movement as it grew, took hold, and was carried forward by younger members who hadn’t really ever eperienced the–as you say–lonliness that old timers had.
And finally, with respect to the motivations for Mr. Ruse’s piece and others like it–Mr. Zara above thinks
“…I see now that Jerry is right–there is envy here. Which is a shame.”
…possibly true. Or possibly this:
“And yet I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to one’s genius, such an opening for wit to have a dislike of that kind. One may be continually abusive without saying anything just….”
(Eliza Bennett with regard to her unreasoned dislike of Mr. Darcy. P&P, Ch. 40)
Dear Jane…why use one’s own words, when hers are always so much better;-)
before anyone adds to the list of my “calumnies” that I am now being self-defensive, I am. Part of that has to do with (as I suggested) a record that goes back long before most Americans had heard of Richard Dawkins. Some of us older and old atheists remember what a lonely battle that was. … what grieves me the most about the tenor of this discussion is that it’s being fought among cousins. It is being fought among people who have bought into the old/new divide, which is absurd, and I am guilty of it too. Let’s get … over it. But also over the idea that atheism is just a CNN poll, up or down, based on how we feel about the God idea. That has been my issue.
Okay, so Ophelia and Jerry are both rong—this is a simple case of “THEM DAMN KIDZ PLAY THEIR GNU MUSIC TOO LOUD AND HAVE IT TOO EZ!1!”
Your mea culpa is a good start, and deflated any interest I had in doling out the rich ironies inherent in your praise of Berlinerblau’s imbecilic rodomontade.
But the motivation you give fails to explain why you would make over-the-top comparisons of gnus to money-grubbing Shylocks, or suggest a connection between their arguments and Khmer Rouge atrocities, tossing in a photo of a pile of skulls from the Killing Fields for good measure. A—dare I say it?—blood libel given the implied comparisons to Shylock. For this alone, you need to walk on your knees many miles further before achieving redemption in my eyes. Another full post is required, not an obscure comment here.
You plainly exhibit two déformations professionnelle consistent with my theory for the recent academically-based anti-gnu articles: a childishly petty academic turf battle fought against the lowest combatant in such, encroaching outsiders. The evidence: (1) you demand that respect be automatically granted not for the quality of arguments but for one’s specific academic discipline (“I did not know his field was psychology”, “my field is history of religion, and my reputation in that area confers at least as much right to be taken seriously as Mr Coyne’s”); (2) you insist that the debate be placed its proper historical and philosophical context (“the new atheist regime … has been disrespectful if not downright dumb about its history and origins and rude to its conversation partners”). The first one is actually a severe flaw, but the second can be a virtue in the right context. Your problems are that you’re provably wrong about the history, and worse, that you’ve failed to identify the appropriate tactic for the gnu battlefield. No one cares about your history or academic reputation on tv or the bestseller lists. The fact is that aside from attacks on religion from genuinely new scientific knowledge, there is nothing that the gnus are doing that is new; it is simply using popular media and the internet to amplify Tom Jefferson’s admonition,
“In the middle ages of Christianity opposition to the State opinions was hushed. The consequence was, Christianity became loaded with all the Romish follies. Nothing but free argument, raillery & even ridicule will preserve the purity of religion.” (Notes on Religion,1776)
Applying a little history should demonstrate how wrongheaded you’ve been, even your own field. I hope that I won’t be disappointed by your follow-up post, or failure to produce one.
Rieux:
Sociologists have been arguing for decades now—up until recently—as to why most first-world democracies (especially in Western European and Japan) have been secularizing for generations, but the U.S. hasn’t. Now they’re arguing about whether the uptick in U.S. irreligiosity is for real, and is the beginning of a similar long-term trend.
One thing I’ve wondered about is whether the difference is partly due to the different kinds of democracies in most places vs. the US. Most non-US democracies are parlaimentary democracies, unlike ours, and don’t have such a strict two-party system in practice.
As I understand it, their politicians and operatives often have to be nicer to minorities, who have a voice in minority parties that they made need to form coalitions with. The parties that are moderately “liberal” (in the US sense) can’t afford to alienate the socialists and Communists, so it’s uncool on one whole end of the political spectrum to go around gratuitiously bashing irreligious people, even if most people in the center don’t like them. You can play to the center, but only up to a point, because you also have to keep the people more “extreme” than you happy enough to form coalitions with you.
In the US, by contrast, the Democratic party has been comparatively free to praise religion and dis irreligion, by invidious comparison, because irreligious have had noplace to go—they’ll generally vote for the less wackily religious party, because it’s the lesser of the evils. In a two party system, both parties usually play to the center, and political discourse is dominated by those parties, with the “fringe” groups having little effective voice.
Up to a few of decades ago, that had a big narrowing effect on what views were expressed in the media, especially television. There were three big and very similar major networks, all of which were fairly centrist and upheld certain values with their Standards Departments, which were basically there to keep things acceptable to the center—e.g., no shows about gay people, because a lot of people in the center thought it was Bad for the Kids to see that sort of thing, and would raise political hell and get the FCC involved.
Cable television changed that considerably. The government couldn’t regulate Showtime and HBO and other new cable networks the way it regulated the Big Three. They could have more characters which conservatives and many centrists found “morally objectionable”—particularly gays and people not respectful of religion, or overtly irreligious—and if Mrs. Grundy didn’t like it, she didn’t have to pay for HBO or Showtime. It was much easier to say “if you don’t like it, don’t pay to subscribe,” than to say “if you don’t like it, don’t watch it” when there were only three networks to choose from, using free airwaves under government control.
That, in turn, put pressure on the Big Three networks to put on programming that the very many people who did like that stuff wanted to watch; they didn’t want to lose the less-uptight half of the viewing audience to the upstarts. It became impractical to keep the Big Three on such a tight leash; It’s one thing to say they can’t be corrupting our children for no good reason, and it’s another to say that they must go out of business hewing to standards that nobody else has to hew to, and which cost them real money.
It seems to me that when the internet exploded, we were already in the process of broading our public discourse to include some cool things—especially acceptance of homosexuals and sexuality in general, and irreligiosity—and the internet tremendously accelerated that.
Of course, we also got Fox News, and a lot of bad stuff. But at least Fox was going to give the audience things like The Simpsons, as well as foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing kooks in their “News”, because there was money in both.
Even before the Internet got big, the Overton Window of what people could say in public was widening, due to fragmentation of the major media.
Teenagers, in particular, could watch stuff that they previously couldn’t watch—shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with perfectly fine gay characters and fucked-up homophobes who don’t get it. A lot of those kids could watch stuff they wouldn’t have been able to watch before, even if their relatively liberal parents hadn’t minded, because it just wouldn’t have been on TV because of protests from other kids’ less liberal parents.
And with the Internet, even kids whose parents don’t subscribe to cable, and program their V-chips to block non-G-rated network shows can watch the same shows on the Internet, on YouTube or Hulu or whatever. They’ll watch what the other kids are watching, and the center has shifted.
(Few parents ever cared quite enough to actually program a V-chip anyway—committedly censorious types had an effect through government pressure and network Standards departments all out of proportion to their numbers. Similarly, relatively few parents now are committed enough to keeping their kids from watching that stuff that they go to much trouble to effectively block internet access to it. Good.)
The bottom line, it seems to me, is that the fragmentation of media in the US has recently achieved what parlaimentary democracies had all along—a broader Overton Window of publically acceptable views about many things, including sexuality and religion.
If that’s right, then it seems likely that the US will likely follow the same sort of secularization pattern over the next few generations that most first-world countries have followed over the last few—we still have a two-party system with an inherent tendency to marginalize us, but cable networks and the internet naturally route around it.
yokohamamama: Yes, Greta Christina’s “On The Amazingness of Atheists… And Why It’s Doomed” piece occurred to me as well (though vaguely; couldn’t remember the title) as a relevant cite for this thread. But I couldn’t find it to link to it. Thanks.
Brilliant use of Austen, Amy! That line always makes me laugh guiltily (I read Austen repeatedly, hence the “always”) – oh yes, I recognize that, as of course did Austen herself.
By strict convention of American etiquette, the title Doctor is not applied to holders of research degrees (e.g., Ph.D.) So Hoffman was just being formal.
@yokohamamama
That bit about the renaming of Hecht’s book is troubling and, yes, ironic given the date and the assertion from Hoffman of a much earlier date for that sort of business (but to be fair, Hoffman might have drawn out 1995 as a safe bet). Now that I think of it, I wonder if Dawkins had to do a little wrangling to get his book titled so antagonistically that way, and perhaps Hitchens had to fight for his book’s title, too, not to mention Harris. Has this been asked of them?
As for the P&P quote, Oooh Snap! Nothing like considering yourself the nemesis of a famous thinker to obtain a little self esteem boost, or to become renowned for using the same person as the butt of all your jokes (I’m thinking of David Letterman’s Oprah jokes, for instance).
(I read Austen repeatedly, too–which is why her words always spring readily to mind, rendering me somewhat less original than I might otherwise like to be…)
By the way, the aforementioned thoughts about secularization and forms of government and media fragmentation and Overton Windows are one reason why I think Mooney and Nesbit are a terrible bullshitting poseurs.
They don’t talk about that stuff. If there’s anything he should be talking about, as a politically savvy “communications expert” who’s so all fired interested in science and religion, that’s it.
I’m no expert, and I might be wildly wrong, but I don’t see them offering any insight into what’s basically going on right now, or putting it in context of what’s happened in similar-but-different countries like, say, Britain and Sweden, over the last fifty years. They demonstrate no understanding whatsoever of broad patterns of history and politics.
They continually write as though this is a very religious country, and will necessarily remain so for the foreseeable future, without explaining why it’s such a religious country, or whether that’s changing, right now, as has been happening in most comparable places in our own lifetimes.
That’s especially ironic given how they bemoan the effects of the fragmentation of media, and the terrible visibility of non-elite non-centrist opinion, and “echo chambers” that amplify fringe views.
What do they think has been happening in Europe and Japan in the last fifty years? Do they think that similar things haven’t been happening all along in those places, e.g., with minor parties having their own social networks and their own partisan media outlets, where axes are ground and “inflammatory” views are expressed? Do they think that the discourse there has all been been terribly civil by their standards? Or do they think that the terrible polarizing incivility that comes from a broader Overton Window about religion has rent those societies asunder, with disastrous consequences for science acceptance?
One thing I guarantee you: if they ever think about these things in any depth, they’ll never tell you about them in any depth. If they mention it at all, they’ll just very selectively tell you the parts that seem favor their preferred strategies, and tell you what to do. Trust them. They know all about it, so you don’t have to.
And we’re the ones who are ahistorical and “incurious.”
If that’s true, the leading anti-gnus have a whole lot of explaining to do. They are the least historically inclined and the least curious of all, and when we talk about such things, their main messages are don’t worry whether it’s true, trust us, don’t rock the boat, and shut the fuck up.
Ah! So Kissinger has been trampling on American etiquette all this time. Good to know. (I think it was Hitch – naturally – who acidly said that the academic “Dr” had never had such a workout as it got from Kissinger.)
But not Madeleine Albright nor Condoleezza Rice.
Why is it that gnu-bashers think only what happens in America counts ? It really is becoming quite tiresome to read.
To be honest I am not sure the atheist movement in the US has been that influential on Dawkins in the development of his atheism, especially in his teens when he first embraced atheism. He is now 70, so we are talking of events 55 or so years ago. I am not aware of any specific mention he has made of US atheism being an influence on him, other than those categorised as new atheists; Dennett, Harris, Myers etc. He has mentioned both Russell and Flew as being influences. Russell being an influence on his early atheism for sure.
Bruce Gorton,
In your analogy, though, I think I’d see at least some of the complaints of theological and philosophical naivete as reflecting more a progression of the newbies being told that the answers are in the FAQ and the newbies replying “I don’t need to read the FAQ! Just answer my questions!”. That always does tick people off.
The analogy does start to break down at this point, though, because the case we’re talking about here isn’t as clear-cut as that one.
Fascinating stuff (@ 108; I’m still reading subsequent comments), Paul—though I’m not quite convinced that the fragmentation you’re talking about has had quite the effect on public attitudes toward atheism that it plausibly has on attitudes toward GLBTs. Where’s the atheist “Ellen” (or “Buffy,” “Will and Grace,” or “The L Word”)? You have an interesting hypothesis about the effect of broadening media choices on public attitudes toward minorities; still, I’m not aware of TV shows, whether on Showtime, HBO, Fox, or CBS, that have portrayed religious doubt-as-such in a positive light.
Or is it just the idea that, on “Buffy” (and for that matter “The Simpsons”) and company, religion has been frequently portrayed as hidebound, clueless, and therefore unworthy of esteem or privilege? It’s an interesting notion.
Anyway, regarding the effect of the internet on atheism, somewhat unrelated to your hypothesis is the ability of people (especially young ones) who would never before have had access to critical analyses of religion to find them, in spades, on the ’Net. There are millions of nonbelievers traipsing around on the Internet leaving the fruits of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge around for innocent religious-raised Adams and Eves to find. Lots of them (cough) Fall for it.
Moreover, religious skeptics aren’t actually that rare; we’re just somewhat thinly spread, and religious privilege ensures that it’s socially difficult for us to organize even in places where we’re numerous. Enter the ability of the ’Net to facilitate social networking, and the power of our numbers can start to tell.
And thus here we are: a bunch of nonbelievers who would otherwise be isolated as lone dismissable “village atheists” are able to convene here and help reassure one another, not to mention the lurkers who visit, that we’re not alone. It’s a powerful thing, and I wonder if it’s not a game-changing one.
I grew up in a mainline Protestant church, was confirmed at age 16 despite mounting (though amorphous) doubts, and only realized upon reflection a year later that I did not actually believe in God. If, at 15 (or much younger!), I had had access to P.Z. Myers and Greta Christina and Thunderf00t and NonStampCollector and Ebonmuse and Julia Sweeney and Austin Cline and Jerry Coyne and Russell Blackford and Eric MacDonald and Hemant Mehta and our esteemed hostess, I seriously doubt that I would have made it to confirmation. The world of ideas is unavoidably far different in the internet age than it was before.
I will spend today celebrating the fact that Common Atheists feel safe enough to state their opinions openly.
Rieux, haven’t there been atheist characters on Glee?
Deen,
“Of course, it would also be fair to accuse the apologetics of not responding to existing arguments.”
Well, some of them, absolutely. Note that my statement wasn’t meant to apply to all atheists or even all “gnus”.
“But the problem that New Atheists have with “sophisticated theology” is exactly that it refuses to defend its foundations. It refuses to acknowledge that it hasn’t made the case for even its basic premises. Until they do, why should we discuss the architecture of the skycastles that were built on top of this non-existing base?”
I’m not sure exactly what you’re referring to, but it is looking suspiciously close to comments that I’ve heard before and that irritate me: two people are debating the existience of God, say the Problem of Evil. For the purpose of the argument, they are assuming that God exists and has the qualities purported, and are debating if that is consistent with suffering. And someone wanders in and declares that this is all pointless because the one person hasn’t proven that God even exists. Well, yes, but that’s the whole point; we’re examining issues around the concept to see if it exists or not and how. Sometimes to do that you grant the position for the sake of argument and tease out the consequences.
Retreating from such an argument to “Well you haven’t proven that God exists, which is the important part” is also annoying because it seems to be a case of side-stepping the fact that the argument was lost, and so the debate shifts to a new argument that the person being argued with never really tried to defend to that level. And I have seen that move in some cases.
Matt @117:
I’d say that goes for a whole lot of us Americans, including gnus. Sorry; that blind spot of ours can indeed be very stupid.
“…perhaps Hitchens had to fight for his book’s title, too, not to mention Harris. Has this been asked of them?”
I don’t know–but it would be extremely interesting to know, wouldn’t it? (To be honest, I don’t know of my own knowledge that Hecht’s book was renamed– I was told it was in a comment to a review I wrote of it at Blessed Atheist, and I assumed the comment was highly likely to be correct).
(OT–I adore Jane. She is so full of snaps;-)
@Rieux–glad to help out. Nothing more irritating than not being able to find a link to something that was just…right… well, it was there somewhere! (Mommy Alzheimer’s–I forget where I’ve read stuff *constantly*).
Well that is true, and it can become tiresome, but my experience, for what it is worth is that gnu-bashers are worse offenders than the gnus. I also find that the gnus are less likely to think atheist tactics should have as a priority the issue of creationism being taught in US schools, or similar concerns.
I know my experience does not constitute much in the way of evidence, but I know others outside the US have noticed this tendency in the gnu-bashers.
I would also add I have never really noticed a US-centric attitude in the gnu blogs I read. Most are written by Americans, and so it is reasonable to expect a good amount of coverage of US issues, but they all realise there is world beyond the US borders and cover that as well. And almost without exception (the exceptions being trollers and idiots) the commentators realise the same.
Aratina:
I’ve never seen it, so I can’t say firsthand; but my understanding is yes.
According to (wonderfully loudmouthed atheist feminist blogger) Amanda Marcotte, though, the episode dealing with a main character’s atheism didn’t go well:
…And so on.
My wife is actually a big fan of the show, and she plays the soundtrack album from the first season on our living-room stereo with some frequency. My decision not to watch it is founded much more on distaste for their saccharine-corporate mangling of some very good music; I guess it’s my inner Hoffman (I have a degree in music) speaking. But then I read Marcotte’s review and decided boycotting Glee made sense on entirely different grounds.
Paul W.,
Note that when I say “interesting”, I’m taking a philosophical perspective, which doesn’t mean “right”, but just means interesting. I also consider interesting arguments ones that do not necessarily prove the argument or criticism wrong but introduce problems and issues that need to be considered.
I also don’t generally give book recommendations, which you seem to want in addition to arguments. I’m more about arguments, personally, but I’ll try.
Starting from “The God Delusion”:
Dawkins demonstrated that he didn’t understand the ontological argument, as he skipped over the best argument against it (in at least my opinion) giving it only a brief mention, which is Kant’s argument that existence is not a property in the right way to make the argument work. He also misunderstood the point of “perfect island” arguments when he introduces his “I used the same logic to prove that pigs fly” and says that at the end the people he was arguing with had to resort to modal logic to prove that wrong. Which sounds right, until you realize that the point of using the same logic to demonstrate something unacceptable is that if they manage to refute you, they’ve refuted the ontological argument at the same time.
Dawkins also gets dualism completely wrong, likening it to believing the trees and animals have minds. This is not true of dualism in general, and is more true of animism or idealism. Suffice it to say, no theist dualistic view holds this since whether or not animals have souls is a major discussion point; few extend it to trees. Well, maybe druidism would, but I think that’s them thinking the whole world as one soul.
Dawkins also needs to look at epistemology, since he classifies “know” as meaning “absolute certainty”, which hasn’t been required for ages (that’s his position 7, which is what he calls “know”). This is an issue for many, actually.
I’ll give him credit for getting Kant’s moral view right. Unfortunately, that’s something that Sam Harris fails to get. Sam Harris is also a bit weak on some of the actual moral positions he criticizes. There’s a lot more to say about “is/ought” for example than he says. He also seems to think that the is/ought distinction primarily supports a relativist position, even though it’s most commonly used — except, I guess, by Hume — to defend objectivist positions.
The distinction between belief and knowledge and what justifies belief when you don’t know is something that most of the people in the debate really need to look at. We believe things with little evidence fairly frequently.
Whether testimony ever counts as knowledge is critical, and books have been written about it philosophically.
And if you’re going to talk about the incompatibility of faith and science, you really need to read Kuhn on how science seems to actually work.
The contingency argument is actually a useful reply to simple rebuttals of the ontological argument, and is ignored or dismissed without thought too much of the time.
Addressing you specifically, Chalmers or Nagel or McGinn might be good references to show that phenomenal experience, at least, seems difficult to explain materially. Heck, even Descartes is still relevant. Alternatively, one of Searle’s latest books sums it up fairly well and fairly fairly. I can look that up if you care.
Platinga’s stuff on naturalism is actually quite interesting in raising the problem and issues with naturalism and evolution — why would we evolve truth if falsehood would be useful? — as are his arguments about ways to buttress some of the traditional arguments. I think he does the cosmological, but I’ll admit I haven’t read it much myself.
Ultimately, my biggest advice is to pick up very good introductory texts on Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology and Ethics. Not ones written in favour of a position — so no “Atheist Readings” or “Theist Readings” — but ones just written as introductory texts without taking a side. These should get the basic issues, and then move on from there.
I don’t find Armstrong’s view all that interesting, personally, but I haven’t really read it and so can’t really honestly judge it.
Note that my comments here are biased to philosophy, and not so much to theology. That being said, I don’t see much difference between the two, as they seem to use similar methods.
And ultimately, my biggest pet peeve? Defining science and faith as being incompatible in such a way that philosophy and science would also be incompatible. Finding out how philosophy and science work should actually help with that.
Ken,
Um… was that tongue-in-cheek?
Either way, please explain.
My understanding is that in academia, it’s certainly not at all bad etiquette to refer to Ph.D.’s as “doctor”; rather the reverse, under some circumstances. If you’re referring to anybody as doctor, you’re supposed to refer to everybody with an earned (not honorary) doctorate that way. It’s my impression that it’s a minor faux pas to refer to such a Dr. as a (mere) Mr. or Ms. in a context where other people are being called “Dr.”, especially if it’s a good guess that the person is a Dr.
Some academics, like me, think it’s pretty rude to refer to medical doctors as “doctor”, but not refer to Ph.D.’s as “doctor.” (Outside of a medical context where it clearly means medical doctor, e.g., “I went to the doctor.” or “The doctor will see you now.”)
I mean, it’s not like most medical doctors are real doctors—most of them didn’t write a dissertation and defend it before a panel of experts in their field, so they hardly count as academic “doctors.” :-/ (Mostly kidding.)
Given that Hoffman is an academic, and pontificating about academic qualifications, I’d expect he’d use “doctor” the academic way, and Coyne is clearly Dr. Coyne, or just Coyne if he doesn’t know or doesn’t care, but not (explicitly merely) Mr. Coyne, which suggests that maybe Hoffman does know and does care, and that Coyne either doesn’t have an academic doctorate or nonetheless somehow doesn’t deserve the obvious honorific.
(Hoffman does know that Coyne’s an evolutionary biologist, and therefore extremely likely to be a Dr., right?)
For future reference, you can all call me “Paul,” or “Dr. W.,” or just “W.,” or just “Doc,” or “hey you, asshole,” but “Mr. W.” is right out; that sort of impertinence lays eggs under my delicate skin.
BTW, an advantage of the plain Coyne or Dr. Coyne thing is that you don’t have to bring sex into it. I personally find “Mr.” and “Ms.” distracting, making me sorta visualize a stereotypical man or woman, and then making me wonder what the person in question actually looks like, and in a sex-stereotype-specific way—which should be utterly irrelevant. (But you can call me Miss W. if you’re gnasty.)
The “Dr.” thing is often distracting, too. In normal academic discussions of peoples ideas, it’s usual to just use last names unless that introduces ambiguity. (E.g., Coyne argues P, but Hoffman insists Not P.) If somebody’s ideas are worth taking seriously, it doesn’t matter if they don’t have a doctorate—and if they’re not worth taking seriously, it doesn’t help if they do. So by default, just leave it out.
On the subject of who to call doctor, in the UK medical doctors should be called doctor unless they are surgeon, in which case they should be called Mr, Mrs, Miss or Ms depending on their preference. It is considered rather rude to call a qualified surgeon Dr. It all goes back to when medical doctors did not do surgery, and looked down on people who did. It is a form of inverse snobbery.
And I have to add in an anecdote I got from the letters page of The Times involving a discussion on what title should be given to a person with two doctorates. My favourite suggestion was “Dr Two”.
I am puzzled (to put it kindly) by the following two quotations from Hoffmann:
First, this: “At the beginning, having seen Dawkins worthily opposed in debates at Oxford in the 1980s . . . ” The link is to a video of a discussion between me and Alister McGrath which took place, not in the 1980s but in 2006. Others may judge whether McGrath ‘worthily’ opposed me. My own assessment of his performance is ‘utterly pathetic’, but in any case it certainly was not 1980s.
Second mysterious quotation from Hoffman: “But, as it soon became clear, the only people who the News wanted to debate, or wanted to debate them, were preposterous self-promoters like William Lane Craig, John Lennox and John Maynard Smith . . .”
Craig and Lennox are indeed preposterous self-promoters, but John Maynard Smith? The great John Maynard Smith? Brilliant evolutionary biologist and as staunch an atheist as you could wish for?
With these two howlers behind him, it ill becomes Hoffmann to criticise anybody else for poor scholarship.
@ Verbose Stoic. Recapping this thread:
Verbose Stoic: the rejections of “sophisticated theology” and studying it — made by the intellectual gnus — smack of simply dismissing that work and that progress made in getting to the heart of the issues
Paul W.: What do you mean by “sophisticated theology”? Give some examples.
Verbose Stoic: <no examples>
I’ll repeat the question. What do you mean by “sophisticated theology”? Give some examples.
A-hem—that’s Dr. William Lane Craig.
:)
@Rieux,
I didn’t watch it either but remembered seeing it discussed on LGBT blogs. Yeah, that ending really isn’t in the spirit of Gnu Atheism, but it sure is better than watching the character convert to some form of theism. Also, it really perturbed the Christians (that and the young guys in love + kissing storyline) and the show’s producers did cave in and do (or are planning to do?) a Christiany episode I have read. Anyway, that’s the only atheist on a major network TV show I can think of at this time.
It should also be noted that, just as the Gnu Atheists are not really “new,” the conflict between atheists and accommodationists isn’t really new either–Baron D’Holbach and Denis Diderot, two of the greatest atheists of the modern age, had to endure the bitching and sniping of Volatire and Rousseau (as detailed in Philip Blom’s excellent book A Wicked Company: Freethinkers and Friendship in Pre-revolutionary Paris). Though the latter achieved more fame since their work was softer-edged, it’s obvious that the tide has turned, and the popularity of our modern-day D’Holbachs suggests that this time the outcome will favor the harder-edge.
@ Richard Dawkins, “the only people who the News wanted to debate, or wanted to debate them, were preposterous self-promoters like William Lane Craig, John Lennox and John Maynard Smith”. John Maynard Smith? The great John Maynard Smith? Brilliant evolutionary biologist and as staunch an atheist as you could wish for?
It’s worse than that. Hoffmann is conflating John Maynard Smith, with whom you debated alongside against the creationists A. E. Wilder-Smith (“Professor of Pharmacology”) and Edgar Andrews in 1986.
But Hoffmann is right about one thing! You were pwned by those creationists, even though we didn’t even have pwning in the 80s.
Oh shit! It’s an Oxford Union debate, so we can actually check who won. Whut?! It was you and John Maynard Smith by 150 for creationism, 198 against. That makes three howlers from Hoffmann on this one subject alone.
@ Richard Dawkins, “the only people who the News wanted to debate, or wanted to debate them, were preposterous self-promoters like William Lane Craig, John Lennox and John Maynard Smith”. John Maynard Smith? The great John Maynard Smith? Brilliant evolutionary biologist and as staunch an atheist as you could wish for?
It’s worse than that. Hoffmann is conflating John Maynard Smith, with whom you debated alongside against the creationists A. E. Wilder-Smith (“Professor of Pharmacology”) and Edgar Andrews in 1986.
But Hoffmann is right about one thing! You were pwned by those creationists, even though we didn’t even have pwning in the 80s.
Oh shit! It’s an Oxford Union debate, so we can actually check who won. Whut?! It was you and John Maynard Smith by 150 for creationism, 198 against. That makes three howlers from Hoffmann on this one subject alone.
I am a lifelong atheist. And although I’m an educated person, I’ve never studied the history of religion or the history of atheism. I am unfamiliar with many of the arguments alluded to here and many of the historical figures mentioned. But this kind of quote from Hoffman (whom I had likewise never heard of) really gets under my skin:
“But there is no evidence that except for book sales the new atheism is successful, and much evidence that serious atheists don’t like it.”
Serious atheists. I think that says it all. This Hoffman fellow is upset that people are jumping his turnstile. He’s a gatekeeper, and fewer and fewer people are giving him the authority he has worked for. The authority to decide the right ways to know, to conclude, to believe. The authority to decide whose understanding or insight takes priority. The authority to decide who is legitimate. Who is “serious.”
I’ll never understand why atheists have an obligation to be scholars of religious history or religious belief. (Not devoting your academic life to studying these fields is hardly the same as embracing ignorance.)
I’m already here. It’s too late for the gatekeepers to keep me out.
Richard Dawkins @ 131
In advance of watching the video, I will say that I have read his (and Joanna McGrath’s) The Dawkins Delusion, and that was certainly utterly pathetic. It was toe-curling.
stvs,
“I’ll repeat the question. What do you mean by “sophisticated theology”? Give some examples.”
I gave examples of relevant philosophical and theological positions, and suggested some people to read. I can give specific books if you’d like, but other than that I’m afraid that I’m not sure what you mean by “examples”. Especially considering that I already stated that you wouldn’t get outright refutations or proofs because that’s not what I, at least, mean by interesting.
For a specific example, then, I liked this even though it was dismissed by many people:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/04/believe-it-or-not
Ophelia,
“In advance of watching the video, I will say that I have read his (and Joanna McGrath’s) The Dawkins Delusion, and that was certainly utterly pathetic. It was toe-curling.”
You know, now I probably actually have to read that book, just to see if it’s that bad …
I expect, from this, that I’ll find some parts better than you do, but likely some parts worse …
That’s The Dawkins Delusion, not to be confused with The Devil’s Delusion by David Berlinski. Well, actually, you can go ahead and confuse them. The books are essentially the same drivel, different typeface.
Aratina, one of the main characters on NBC’s “Community” is an atheist, and the central character is an agnostic. To some degree this is just a reflection of the way they’ve structured the cast: the seven main characters are an agnostic, an atheist, a Jehovah’s Witness, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew, and a theologically conservative Protestant. Of the seven, only the Protestant seems particularly invested, or at least openly so, in religious (non-)belief—and her demands on this front are not terribly well received by the others. (The Muslim and JW rarely mention religion at all, I haven’t seen any sign that the Jewish character is religiously observant, and the self-described Buddhist evidently belongs to some bizarre Internet cult that calls itself Buddhist, though it’s fairly clear to all and sundry that it has nothing to do with actual Buddhism at all.) The strongest voice in the show belongs to the agnostic, who has (largely successfully) advocated that everyone shut up and ignore religious identity entirely. That fervent apatheist approach doubtless suits the show’s writers and producers well.
Anyway, I suppose “Community”‘s treatment of religion is a net positive for atheists. The atheist’s and (especially) the agnostic’s perspectives are not generally held up for contempt or ridicule, and that’s certainly a plus.
Rieux:
I’m sure it hasn’t had as much effect on attitudes toward irreligiosity as toward homosexuality, but the latter gives me hope about the former, and I think there is a similar but weaker phenomenon going on with regard to irreligiosity.
You can now have shows where major characters are explicitly irreligious, and they’re important good guys, e.g., House (the explicitly atheist and overtly religion-bashing lead on House, MD), Bones (the explicitly “atheist” and overtly religion-bashing main character on Bones), the main male lead on Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60, who’s also explicitly an “atheist” or the father on Kyle X Y, who “rejected religion” long ago and isn’t going back to it. (The latter two shows ended, but I don’t keep up with broadcast TV, so I don’t have a good current sample. I don’t know what’s out there right now, but I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have seen those things twenty or thirty years ago, and we have seen such things recently.)
I wish I had good statistics, or a representative sample, but my impression is that there’s been a significant rise in the incidence of explicit irreligiosity on TV, and a decrease in the extent to which such characters are portrayed as bad guys, or confused, or acting out of childish orneriness.
We don’t have an Ellen, but we do have Bill Maher, who himself went from being an “agnostic” who bashes those doctrinaire “atheists” to acknowledging that yeah, he’s actually an atheist too—and he often offers moral critique of religious people, as though atheists were in a position to do that, because they’re not crazy or deluded. (And there’s Jon Stewart and Colbert, who rarely criticize religion across the board, but seem to make it clear that being religious isn’t particularly important, and being too religious is often foolish if not outright evil.)
More subversive forms of irreligion are more common. E.g., Buffy and Angel were basically atheistic shows—written by atheists, and it shows. They live in a universe where supernaturalism is true, but they’re basically atheistic—they don’t go around worshipping anybody, and the truth of supernaturalism in that fictional universe is mainly a practical problem that isn’t relevant to any moral problems. The few people who do believe that God has something to do with morality are wrong—e.g., the homophobic parents of a lesbian character. And you gotta love a show where the kickass, righteous protagonist says “We don’t bow down to gods any more,” right to a god‘s face. Some people may not get it that that applies to God, not just some annoying pagan god, but a lot of people do get the key idea that something’s being supernatural and bigger or more powerful than you just doesn’t make it worthy of worship. And such a worship-worthy God is conspicuous by his absence in Buffy and Angel. When people make moral decisions—and they come up all the time—asking what Jesus would do just doesn’t occur to anybody except the occasional obvious religious kook.
I watched some episodes of Kyle X Y recently mostly because I was interested in these kinds of issues. (Not so much because it’s a particularly good show.) I was pretty stunned to see what had been shown for three years on the ABC Family cable network, and rerun for a year on regular ABC. This is not your father’s ABC, and it’s not your father’s Family values. (Unless your father’s pretty cool.)
The show is largely about the importance of family, and actual family values, and religion just doesn’t come into it. Dad’s an atheist of some sort, we can’t tell what Mom is, and the family apparently doesn’t go to church. One of the important recurring characters has two mommies, and organizes an alternative prom to protest the homophobic no-same-sex-couples policy imposed by asshole administrators. Not only that, but it’s just dead obvious to all the main characters that that’s the right thing to do, and all those mostly straight characters pitch in to make it happen. The girl with two mommies, who’s straight, invites a bunch of flamingly gay boys from some other school(s) to liven up the party, and the few characters who think they’re odd in a bad way learn that they’re being stupidly knee-jerk judgmental.
That’s mostly about homosexuality, but it’s interesting to me how it’s a morality play all about family values where the family values are never, ever cast in terms of religion. What it says in Leviticus is not relevant, and it’s apparently not even relevant what Jesus Would Do. What’s relevant is not being a stupid asshole.
It’s really a pretty amazing show, with teenagers deciding when (not if) to start having premarital sex, and the only real issue is do they really want to, and are they ready to do it responsibly, and is somebody going to get hurt. The parents are in favor of taking it slow and delaying the onset of sex, but even they recognize that the kids have a right to decide, and when they see that their kids are in healthy relationships, and reasonably think they’re ready for sex, that’s what really matters. Their kids have absorbed the right basic ideas and values, and have to make their own decisions.
Likewise, issues of underage drinking are treated in a way that would have been inconceivable on TV when I was a kid. It’s not just something bad kids do. It’s something that most good kids do, too, to some extent, and the moral issue is not overdoing something that’s likely to harm you if you do it too much, or which makes you do something stupid and dangerous.
There’s even an episode where one of the kids gets into the dad’s pot stash, and smokes his dope, and asks his outraged dad whether he’s outraged that he’s smoking dope, or that he’s smoking his dope. I think they sorta wimped out on the resolution of that one. (Dad doesn’t regularly smoke dope, but had some around, and promises not to smoke dope at all if his son won’t, so he won’t be a hypocrite.)
It’s a very liberal family values show. People have sex. Teenagers masturbate, and everybody knows it and nobody really cares, even if it’s “funny”—it’s not a sin, and not at all unusual. Some people have gay sex. People drink. People smoke dope. And nothing’s a sin that makes somebody a bad boy or bad girl, and religion doesn’t enter into it. It’s all just stuff people have to deal with, and be careful not to hurt and get hurt. The bad characters are the ones that don’t have a sufficient concern for others’ well-being, and that’s about all.
It’s not perfect, but wow. It’s really different from what I grew up with. It’s exactly the kind of subversive liberal stuff that the Christian “Family Values” people have worked so hard to keep off of TV, and failed.
There’s still a significant amount of atheist-but stuff involved in some shows. House and Bones, for example, are basically admirable good people, but House is a bit of a fucked-up cynic, and Bones appears to be a bit autistic—so people desperate not to like atheists could attribute their atheism to their mental problems or character flaws if they want. They could guess that House’s machiavellian and sometimes assholish behavior is because he hasn’t found Jesus and become a well-rounded person; they can guess that Bones is only an atheist because she’s too clueless about spiritual things to see that she’s missing something.
Still, I think this is some pretty serious progress in how atheists can be portrayed on TV, and how discussions of values issues can be conspicuously free of religious crap.
There have been fairly sympathetic irreligious, humanist characters on TV before—e.g., Archie’s son-in-law on All in the Familiy, Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H—but I *think* there’s something more going on. I’d really like to see some good stats on this, showing what people are airing and especially who’s really watching, but I doubt there are any out there.
(I’d guess there are bogus statistics from conservative family values types, who want to make it look like the sky is falling, and that others generally don’t want to make it clear how right those people are that the “liberal media” are “corrupting” our children with crazy ideas like irreligion and acceptance of gays.)
If anybody does know of any good more-than-anecdotal evidence about this stuff, I’m interested.
@ Verbose Stoic, “I gave examples of relevant philosophical and theological positions, and suggested some people to read. I can give specific books if you’d like, but other than that I’m afraid that I’m not sure what you mean by “examples”.”
We’re just asking for one citation of a work that represents what you consider to be what you call “sophisticated theology”. Just one. Format: <Book or Article Title> by <Author Name>, <Year Published>.
The people you mentioned—David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Colin McGinn, Alvin Plantinga, and René Descartes—are all philosophers, though of course Descartes also contributed banned theological writing. Is Descartes your one example of “sophisticated theology”? And the First Things article you link to suffers from the identical deficiency:
I’ll repeat the question. What do you mean by “sophisticated theology”? Give just one example.
If Hart’s screed is supposed to be an example, that speaks volumes.
There’s this idea floating around that we are in some sense disqualified from holding theological or philosophical opinions unless we really know theology or philosophy. In the natural sciences this attitude can hold some water (think of Ray Comfort saying one of the problems with evolution is that even if you got a new species to evolve against incredible odds, you’d need to beat the same incredible odds a second time in order to get a female with which it could mate…).
It does appear that there is a growing number of growingly vocal atheists who want religion confined to the private sphere. These people, naturally enough, range from the awe-inspiringly erudite and well-read to loutish types who really did get their knowledge of the subject from a bumper sticker (certainly no worse than the other side). I suppose most of us would agree that the more of us have a broad knowledge of what it is we oppose, the better. What I don’t think one can say is that atheism must be “earned,” as some would imply. For a start, wouldn’t that mean that the religious would also have to “earn” their right to belief? Suppose the more academic atheists simply did not have all the texts available to them from the last couple of thousand years with which so many of us are insufficiently familiar? Would they not have the right to their non-belief? Would they not try to back up their ideas using the best means at their disposal, whatever they were? I think it may be necessary to resort to exaggeration to really make the point here. If a woman came to a voting booth with no knowledge of the Suffragette movement, would she be turned away? If an African-American turned out to be ignorant of the Abolition movement, would it be ok to sell him back to a plantation? In those places in the world where some freedom from religion is guaranteed, it has been hard-won. We can’t be told that we haven’t earned it just because we don’t know exactly how we got to where we are.
stvs,
“We’re just asking for one citation of a work that represents what you consider to be what you call “sophisticated theology”. Just one. Format: <Book or Article Title> by <Author Name>, <Year Published>.”
That is explicitly what Paul W., said he didn’t want — or at least not all that he wanted — and is also not what I refer to when I use those terms or ask people to understand theology. I really do mean introductory texts much of the time, and refer to the field, not a specific author. To be blunt, I don’t care for specific authors but for the overall arguments in the field, so demanding that I provide specific authors is demanding things that I never, ever even referred to as something missing there.
That may be what other people mean, but never was what I meant. If that isn’t what you’re looking for, then feel free to ignore me. But my not being able to provide that in no way means that you can ignore the whole fields of theology and philosophy, and that is the attitude I’m opposing here.
It’s a defensible move, because it can be based on a realisation that use of theology is a trick, even if that is not realised by the user. It’s attempting to get to conclusions based on absurd premises. It’s very much the equivalent of a missed division by zero in a long mathematical proof.
Theological arguments have a certain interest in the history of ideas, but to see them brought out today is not a sign of the sophistication of believers, it’s a sign of their ignorance.
The claims of Hoffman get curiouser and curiouser. I just went to Amazon.com (USA) and looked up books published before 1995 using the keyword “atheism” and came up with 961 hits including one titled, get this, The New Atheism and the Erosion of Freedom by Robert Morey from 1994! I guess we can ratchet that term back a decade then. Of course, it is a refudiation of atheism by a blinkered theist (gnats before gnus and all).
And while many of the books are by theists, there are some highly recommended atheist books in there too, including two by Michael Martin, one of which (published in 1992) has the word “atheism” in its title.
Ken Pidcock,
“If Hart’s screed is supposed to be an example, that speaks volumes.”
Care to expand on what you don’t like about it? Especially noting that I explicitly said that to me interesting != correct?
I’ll start you off by conceding that the cultural argument is weak. However, I like the reference to contingent beings since that is important for arguments like “If everything complex had to be designed, then so would God” which is not something you can necessarily say about non-contingent beings (they would have to start with all relevant properties, which may make them complex. I also think he’s right that many of the New Atheists try to engage with the metaphysical arguments without really understanding them or the various replies.
There’s quite a bit of snark there, too, which is less interesting. That being said, that would put him in good company with, say, A.C. Grayling.
Sure, you can get better examples of the basic issues, but I didn’t have them handy.
@ Verbose Stoic. Recapping this thread:
The you’re evading this extremely simple question makes me suspect that you are not aware of even one work that offers a “sophisticated theology”, or that none such exists. And certainly I’ve never suggested that one can ignore any field of study. In fact, I’m asking for just one sophisticated example from theology that you said the gnus neglect. Well, what is it? Give us just one example of the “sophisticated theology”, please.
I’ll repeat the question. What do you mean by “sophisticated theology”? Give just one example.
Steve Zara,
“It’s a defensible move, because it can be based on a realisation that use of theology is a trick, even if that is not realised by the user. It’s attempting to get to conclusions based on absurd premises. It’s very much the equivalent of a missed division by zero in a long mathematical proof.”
It might be defensible if the theist raises the argument and the atheist immediately uses it to not engage it (although just immediately stating a lack of interest might be preferable). It is somewhat less defensible if the atheist raised the argument and only retreats to that in response to the theist’s counter-arguments.
Now, this wasn’t one of the Gnu atheists, but I was once told in a reply that I couldn’t use omniscience in an argument trying to show that the Problem of Evil wasn’t a problem. This was by a respected poster on the group and wasn’t challenged by anyone but me. The reasoning was that I hadn’t proved that God has omniscience. I think everyone here can see the problem with that reasoning.
Stewart,
My position is that if you are going to engage with any field, you really should know something about it. We all, of course, get things wrong, even me in fields where I have studied. So, in those cases, if someone says “Look, you’re getting that wrong” I think that I should at least try to learn about that, even if it’s just from them. For me, I don’t tell people to read books. I tell them what the terms really mean, at least in what I learned.
But it is a bit insulting to dismiss a field outright, and that is certainly done for theology and often for philosophy.
stvs,
I already pointed out the errors in Dawkins’ view of the ontological argument, at least as stated in “The God Delusion”. To get the “more sophisticated view”, you can pretty much read any introductory text in Philosophy of Religion. The same thing can be said about questions about the soul and dualism; the introductory texts do a good job of actually outlining what the positions really are, all the way back to Plato.
Specifically, in Hart’s piece here is the extra notions of contingency and the like:
“Thus, the New Atheists’ favorite argument turns out to be just a version of the old argument from infinite regress: If you try to explain the existence of the universe by asserting God created it, you have solved nothing because then you are obliged to say where God came from, and so on ad infinitum, one turtle after another, all the way down. This is a line of attack with a long pedigree, admittedly. John Stuart Mill learned it at his father’s knee. Bertrand Russell thought it more than sufficient to put paid to the whole God issue once and for all. Dennett thinks it as unanswerable today as when Hume first advanced it—although, as a professed admirer of Hume, he might have noticed that Hume quite explicitly treats it as a formidable objection only to the God of Deism, not to the God of “traditional metaphysics.” In truth, though, there could hardly be a weaker argument. To use a feeble analogy, it is rather like asserting that it is inadequate to say that light is the cause of illumination because one is then obliged to say what it is that illuminates the light, and so on ad infinitum.The most venerable metaphysical claims about God do not simply shift priority from one kind of thing (say, a teacup or the universe) to another thing that just happens to be much bigger and come much earlier (some discrete, very large gentleman who preexists teacups and universes alike). These claims start, rather, from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself. Thus, abstracting from the universal conditions of contingency, one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: not a “supreme being,” not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates.It is immaterial whether one is wholly convinced by such reasoning. Even its most ardent proponents would have to acknowledge that it is an almost entirely negative deduction, obedient only to something like Sherlock Holmes’ maxim that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” It certainly says nearly nothing about who or what God is.But such reasoning is also certainly not subject to the objection from infinite regress. It is not logically requisite for anyone, on observing that contingent reality must depend on absolute reality, to say then what the absolute depends on or, on asserting the participation of finite beings in infinite being, further to explain what it is that makes being to be. Other arguments are called for, as Hume knew. And only a complete failure to grasp the most basic philosophical terms of the conversation could prompt this strange inversion of logic, by which the argument from infinite regress—traditionally and correctly regarded as the most powerful objection to pure materialism—is now treated as an irrefutable argument against belief in God.”
Re-reading it, others have put it better, but again I don’t have them handy.
Need I raise the standard examples of fairyology and leprechaunology? (Or, for that matter, astrology, or the sophisticated theology of Scientology?)
Just because a lot of people believe something, and provide complex reasons as to why, does not mean that those reasons are coherent, nor does it mean that one has to examine the detailed reasons to show why the overall beliefs are not coherent.
Look, let me clear something up here: “sophisticated theology” doesn’t actually have to be all that “sophisticated”. It just has to be more advanced than the arguments that are normally posited. I think what Hart said about contingency does, at least, demonstrate that for at least some of the Gnu Atheists that does, indeed, seem to be true; there are deeper arguments and concerns than they are addressing when they try to address some arguments.
To return to Paul W., I feel the same way when he talk about dualism being disproven. The issues science has settled are not ones that most dualists — even back to Descartes — are not concerned about.
And I do not apologize for mixing “theologically naive” and “philosophically naive”. I care more about the latter, so that’s what I have more examples of.
That’s because it deserves to be dismissed. Just like astrology, phrenology, and alchemy deserve to be dismissed outright.
I and many other people disagree. Care to provide evidence of that?
Ultimately, I think that theology could be rolled into Philosophy of Religion without losing much, but that seems to be just me. They seem to pretty much argue the same things in the same ways.
Tulse,
Those fields don’t exist, but if they did I’d say that you shouldn’t reject them without knowing what they’re talking about.
As for astrology, for the most part a lot of it has been tested and found lacking. That being said, if you were criticizing it based on concepts that they had long abandoned, I criticize you for that as well.
And you do need to address what concepts they actually hold. As long as you are doing that, you’re fine. The problem for theology is that a lot of people are appealing only to folk theology, and dismissing the field entirely based on that. There are more issues in theology that are interesting and more “sophisticated” than a lot of people allow for. Like contingency and first causes. Like when it’s okay to believe something. Like how strongly untestability should count against a proposition. Like if there are any limits to scientific examination. Like if the supernatural exists or can be proven such, and even what it means. Like what faith really means.
Yes, a lot of these are philosophical, but most fields have a lot of the philosophical in them, incluiding science, so that doesn’t disqualify these as being interesting theological issues.
Verbose Stoic:
I think you’re seriously mistaken here, and missing a basic point. (Admittedly, Dawkins could have made the point more clearly.)
The real issue of “dualism” is non-monism or supernaturalism. You should really, really read Pascal Boyer and Richard Carrier on supernaturalism—they make some things clearer than Dawkins does.
The idea is that supernaturalism in general is a belief that there are things besides plain old brute nonteleological matter and energy, which have some kind of irreducibly mental (Carrier’s phrase) or irreducibly teleological properties.
Take Aristotle’s idea of “souls.” Aristotle was not a “dualist” in the obvious sense, but at least triplist or quadruplist, as is cross-culturally quite common.
Aristotle, like many people in many cultures around the world, saw different levels of seemingly purposive behavior in different kinds of living things, and inferred that there were underlying teleological (goal-seeking) essences. He thought there was some special goal-seeking essence of plants—a “vegetable soul”—that enabled them to develop and heal and so on, because it was a different kind of stuff than normal brute matter, and had magical mind-like property to direct the plant toward certain developmental “goals.” Likewise, animals have an “animal soul,” over and above the kind of “soul” plants have, which allows them to actually locomote, recognize dangers, fight or flee, and so on; their souls let them do fancier mind-like things, with different goals, and taking different aspects of circumstances into account. Human beings have yet another kind of “soul,” a rational soul, that allows them to consciously think and plan and communicate with language and so on.
Each of these kinds of souls is assumed to be irreducibly different from normal matter and what normal matter can do—mental or teleological properties are assumed to be a property of a different kind of stuff, rather than what they now appear scientifically to be: emergent properties of the organization of matter, and in particular, the processing of information by plain old brute (nonmental, nonteleological) matter.
Most religious people still think that way—they think there’s not only a magical soul which irreducibly can do mind-things in a way that a meat computer can’t.
Worse, I suspect that most religious people are still vitalists to some extent—they believe in a life force, or vital essence, or some kind of energy or vibration that is essential for something to really be alive, even if they also understand that a lot of biology is mechanistic. (E.g., that the heart is a kind of pump.) They do not understand that living organisms are made entirely out of brute matter, and are exactly fancy evolved machines. They still believe in something like Aristotle’s vegetable or animal soul, which is intrinsically and irreducibly teleological, rather than being an information processing system made of brute matter, embedded in a kind of naturally occurring robot.
This kind general kind of nonmonism is often called “dualism,” in either of two ways.
You can talk about it as Carrier does, distingishing between plain old brute matter, which does not seek goals, and all the higher-level stuff, which does. That’s what Carrier is doing when he talks about supernatural things having irreducibly mental properties—he’s distinguishing between plain matter as scientists understand it and anything that’s sensitive to higher-level properties of interest to humans. (Goals, plans, values, etc.) His term “irreducibly mental” is confusing, because by “mental” he include any kind of teleology—e.g., Aristotle’s “final causation.”
The other common version of dualism fits into the same multileveled framework by distinguishing between the highest level and all the ones below—it’s commonly assumed by modern educated dualists that humans have a soul that’s roughly like Aristotle’s “rational soul,” but that everything below that is all just machinery.
Most scientifically sophisticated dualists no longer believe that, e.g., bacteria or individual human cells need souls to be alive, or that a heart needs some kind of soul to tell it when to beat faster, or that “dumb” animals need souls to pursue prey. All that can be done by biological machinery.
You are wrong, though, if you think that people these days generally don’t think that trees have souls. Many do think, like Aristotle, that all living things have some kind of irreducibly teleological essence that makes them alive, and makes them able to do the kinds of things that living things do. They do not recognize that trees are precisely machines made entirely of non-purposive matter, and that their apparently purposive activiies (development and healing and so on) are entirely a matter of complex adaptive machinery in action.
People these days don’t generally call that a “soul,” but it’s recognizably the kind of thing that has been called a soul, e.g., by Aristotle and in early Christian theology that took him too seriously. (And I think there are vestiges of it in modern Catholic theology, and I’m sure there’s a bit of it in a lot of fundamentalist theology.
Many people do still believe in a magical (irreducibly teleological) life force, and in a special human (irreducibly mental) soul, and I’m pretty sure many are pretty vague on the relationship between the two, so they are at least triplists in the more general scheme, and dualists in both senses of “dualism,” which draw lines in different places.
Given that overall framework, I think it should be clear how popular dualism—and the dualism of much modern theology—-is like thinking that trees have souls, from a materialist point of view.
In both cases, the idea is that there is some special, irreducibly teleological extra thing that allows brute matter to be a functioning plant or animal or person.
We scientific materialists think that there’s no extra teleological thing, and that all purposive processes supervene on brute nonteleological matter, which is not sensitive to high-level things like goals or thoughts or values or preferences. (Supervenience is basically the made-out-of relation.)
To us, thinking that there’s an extra “mind thing” that makes a mind really a mind is like thinking there’s an extra “life thing” that makes a “lower” organism alive. It’s the same kind of category mistake, assuming that different “purposive” properties at a high level reduce to being a different kind of intrinsically purposive thing at a lower level, rather than being the same kind of boring low-level stuff, organized differently and functioning accordingly.
You really should read Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained, which explains why people are prone to thinking in this mistaken kind of way, in terms of cognitive psychology and social evolution. (He bills it as “evolutionary psychology,” but it’s mostly not—it’s mostly straight cognitive anthropology.) For my money, it’s the best New Atheist book, and the one that’s most “New”—it’s not just putting old wine in new bottles.
You should also read Carrier’s blog post series (3 parts, I think) on what “supernaturalism” means. He’s basically talking about the same thing, and what he says is compatible with what Boyer says; you just have to remember that when he talks about irreducibly “mental” properties, he means “mental” in a very general way, to include the kinds of simple teleology Aristotle was talking about—things behaving as if they had simple minds, whether or not its’ assumed they do because they actually have minds—-not just fancy stuff like the human mind.
@ Verbose Stoic. Recapping this thread:
Your opinion about ontology or dualism do not count as one example of “sophisticated theology”. Your recommendation to read “any introductory text in Philosophy of Religion” might count. Are you really saying that all introductory texts to the philosophy of religion count as “sophisticated theology”? Please be explicit.
And I can’t let this ignorant sentence from Hart pass without comment:
Message from the 20th century to David B. Hart: photons are the cause of light. This has fucking nothing whatsoever to do with the unsolvable problem of infinite regress of who created God. At best, it’s yet another god-of-the-gaps argument because we don’t yet know where quantum mechanics comes from. Almost every sentence in Hart’s article displays such dreadful ignorance and misunderstanding, but at least it is an article that can be enjoyed ironically, like so many others that are published in First Things.
I’ll repeat the question. What do you mean by “sophisticated theology”? Give just one example.
stvs,
“Your opinion about ontology or dualism do not count as one example of “sophisticated theology”. Your recommendation to read “any introductory text in Philosophy of Religion” might count. Are you really saying that all introductory texts to the philosophy of religion count as “sophisticated theology”? Please be explicit.”
I think that most good introductory texts provide more sophisticated theology than at least some of the gnu atheists who are charged with not reading sophisticated theology present when they criticize it, yes. The ontological argument and Dawkins’ take is my big example, and my consistently repeating seems to be getting to the point of baiting him to take me on, so I won’t mention that again; I’ve said it enough, even to you.
You’ve got the directions inverted.
Step 1: Provide evidence for God’s existence.
Step 2: Start investigating the properties of that God.
Step 2 is what gets dismissed outright if Step 1 is not met. Where’s the “sophisticated” theology that handles Step 2 above? Note, you cannot use Step 2 to support Step 1, no matter how “sophisticated” the work is in Step 2.
Note that these are not dismissed outright: archeology, biblical scholarship, anthropology, history, philosophy of religion etc.
I can see your point. The problem I have with theology is that it is a subject where the premises are based on antiquated views. I believe it can be dismissed outright because of that. I guess the problem isn’t when it is dismissed, but attempts are made to engage with it without understanding exactly what the flaws are. Best to stay clear, perhaps.
The ontological argument is ‘sophisticated theology’?
Regarding the David Hart article, this is quite the analogy fail (and Hart even admits it):
Verbose Stoic,
It really is incumbent on you to show that we’re not justified in dismissing theology in the way we dismiss other fields full of messed-up ideas, even if those fields made some lasting contributions that we do build on today.
Consider alchemy. Alchemists actually did come up with some practical knowledge that was exploited—with considerable reinterpretation—by later chemists. They did in fact explore the actual properties of many elements and compounds, even if they didn’t understand which ones were elements, which ones were compounds, and so on. Modern chemistry evolved partly by building on alchemical knowledge—e.g., that gold will dissolve in aqua regia, and not much else.
Once we got a clue about atoms of elements and molecules of compounds, and Mendeleyev figured out the periodic table, we stopped referring to alchemy so much. These days, it’s hardly ever mentioned except by history geeks, even though modern science really does owe a considerable debt to the small minority of alchemical work that wasn’t a total, misguided waste of human effort based on fundamentally wrong assumptions.
Your task, if you want to convince us to take theology more seriously, is to show us that it’s of more lasting value than alchemy.
We’re not denying that some theologians figured out some stuff, at some points, that wasn’t wrong.
We’re not denying that we use some of those ideas to this day.
What we don’t understand is what theology has to teach us that we don’t already know and accept, such that we still need to refer to theology in a way that we don’t generally need to refer to alchemy.
I’ll grant you that theology, like alchemy, managed to make some positive contributions to modern knowledge.
Consider the puzzles about “existence” as a logical predicate—problems with things like the ontological argument clarified the need for “exists” as a basic quantifier rather than a predicate in first-order predicate logic, and clarified how it can’t mean quite what “exists” usually means in natural language.
That’s interesting to me as a historical note, but not of any clear practical use to me, or near as I can tell, to anyone now. It’s no more interesting than a discussion of the similarities and differences in Newton’s and Leibniz’s inventions of the calculus of infinitesimals.
The former is not something I’d necessarily expect somebody learning logic to learn, and even if I found out a professional logician didn’t know about it, I might be disappointed, but I wouldn’t think it disqualified them as a logician.
Similarly, if a physicist or mathematician understands calculus, and is good at it, that’s far more important to me than whether they know what to be grateful to Leibniz for, as opposed to Newton. It’s ancient history.
So what has theology done for us lately?
I’m waiting for even one specific piece of theological wisdom or knowledge that you claim we’re missing.
If you can’t come up with that, please do go away.
Yes, but only if it’s brought up by someone with sophistication.
Sigmund,
“The ontological argument is ‘sophisticated theology’?”
Do I need to say again that when I say “sophisticated”, I just mean “more sophisticated than some of the attempts at it present it”? I mean that in the sense of someone, say, taking Darwin’s work literally and attacking it instead of noting the years of work that’s gone into proving and refining the Theory of Evolution.
But let me add something here:
For the longest time, I was basically in agreement with atheists that the Ontological Argument was a bad argument because it just wasn’t the right sort of argument to establish that something existed. But then, suddenly, it occurred to me that if you’re dealing with a necessary/non-contingent/absolute reality, how ELSE would you prove that but with a purely logical, a priori argument? You can’t settle it a posteriori or empirically because neither of those can get something that is necessarily the case, but can only get what IS the case. You can’t scour the universe and find the thing that has to exist, because there’s no empirical way to prove that it actually HAS to exist.
So, my thinking has changed. That being said, I still don’t think it works, mostly because of Kant’s argument about existence as a property. At least, I think that was Kant’s argument [grin].
Paul @144, that’s an impressive survey. A few of those shows I’ve seen (I was/am a loyal fan of M*A*S*H), but thanks for the insight.
But it is precisely folk theology that is used by 99.99% of believers. The frustration many Gnus feel is that academics are busy building elaborate defences of arguments that no one in the real world actually holds.
designsoda,
“You’ve got the directions inverted.
Step 1: Provide evidence for God’s existence.
Step 2: Start investigating the properties of that God.”
Actually, YOU have it backwards … kinda.
Step 1: Define the properties of the CONCEPT that you are trying to determine the existence of.
Step 2: Use appropriate methods to determine if that thing exists, given the concept you’re studying.
Step 3: Derive other properties that are not essential to the concept from the proofs and evidence you’ve accumulated.
In practice, though, things are never this smooth, since sometimes you need to look at things before getting the concept to start looking at and need to refine the concept later based on investigations (“Okay, maybe it is not an essential property of swans that they be white, so we should change the concept ‘swan’ to accomodate that.”)
“Step 2 is what gets dismissed outright if Step 1 is not met. Where’s the “sophisticated” theology that handles Step 2 above? Note, you cannot use Step 2 to support Step 1, no matter how “sophisticated” the work is in Step 2.”
In your example, I see 1) and 2) as interrelated: you can’t provide evidence for something until you have some idea what you’re looking for.
“Note that these are not dismissed outright: archeology, biblical scholarship, anthropology, history, philosophy of religion etc.”
Good to hear, especially the last one [grin].
I’d like to add that the “Big Bang Theory” has at least one obvious atheist (Sheldon) likely more, among its characters. however, he’s a social imbecile, which is a character flaw that lets theists off the hook as Paul mentioned earlier.
Verbose Stoic, what it would lose would be a gain. You could argue the same things without presuming the truth of nonsense.
Actually I think the argument against the infinite regress argument isn’t a justification for belief in god. It says there is a condition of radical noncontingency, which is supposed to enable belief in what that is without regard to whether it describes anything, which it doesn’t, since beyond it’s somethingness it isn’t a description. You can’t believe a particular thing exists because any thing might exist. Theology is full of crap like this. Historians can explain its provenance without telling people they have to try to believe it.
Steve Zara,
“I can see your point. The problem I have with theology is that it is a subject where the premises are based on antiquated views. I believe it can be dismissed outright because of that.”
But updating theology would be the job of theologians and, of course, philosophers. I’d love to update some of the concepts, and many theologians are trying to do that, not always successfully. As an example, Karen Armstrong’s view does strike me as an attempt to update theology, but not a very successful one.
” I guess the problem isn’t when it is dismissed, but attempts are made to engage with it without understanding exactly what the flaws are. Best to stay clear, perhaps.”
I’m not sure that that applies to theologians and philosophers of religion, though, who often do seem to understand and engage the flaws. I personally think that I understand the flaws, but we may not agree on what they are. But to discuss that is at least philosophy of religion, if not theology.
Tulse:
…And then pitching a fit when Gnus don’t address said elaborate defenses in profuse detail.
In other news: man, is Paul W. ever good at this stuff. Start a blog, Paul.
@Ken Browning
Indeed, these days a strident atheist is one that can no longer be burned at the stake.
Paul W.,
Before I answer you on theology, I need to ask this: what do you think “The God Delusion” is, as a work:
Theology? Philosophy of Religion? Something else?
@Verbose Stoic.
Hart makes no effort to justify claims to knowledge of supernatural agents. It’s as simple as that. He may be right that NAs mangle philosophical arguments for the existence of God, but he won’t bother to state them more clearly. In fact, and predictably, Hart dismisses the idea of God’s exisence as laughable.
Oh, wow, man, I think I get it now. This is not knowledge. The writer is not justifying anything.
Yet, in the end, Hart demands, not only that we acknowledge this ground of all being stuff, but that we believe (and he does mean believe) the Incarnation and Ressurection, at the risk of human civilization descending into… well, we can’t even comprehend.
Sez who? Seriously.
Hart writes only to convince less erudite First Things readers that the new atheists have had their asses well and truly kicked.
ernie keller,
“Verbose Stoic, what it would lose would be a gain. You could argue the same things without presuming the truth of nonsense.”
I think that you can indeed do theology without presuming that any particular god exists, or at least only doing so for the sake of argument/investigation. But if you think that more the province of philosophy of religion I won’t disagree,
“You can’t believe a particular thing exists because any thing might exist. Theology is full of crap like this.”
Interestingly, though, many who do theology — myself and Hart specifically for this thread — agree that you can’t actually do that, and raise it as an objection to the line of argumentation. So theology figured that out. That some still spout it doesn’t count against the field.
Just read that the “It’s all turtles! :: It’s all illumination!” analogy bothered stvs, too.
Tulse,
“But it is precisely folk theology that is used by 99.99% of believers. The frustration many Gnus feel is that academics are busy building elaborate defences of arguments that no one in the real world actually holds.”
Folk physics is also used by 99.99% of people, but that doesn’t count against physics. I also think the link is oftentimes — but not always, which is a weakness of philosophy in general — closer to what people really would believe if they thought about it than you might think.
Paul W.,
Running short of time and it’s a bit of an aside, so I just want to touch on a couple of points:
First, I have come across Carrier’s view, but I dispute it because a lot of things that were considerd supernatural don’t seem to have a mental component, like time travel or most forms of magic. Generally, supernatural meant “violates the laws of nature”, and that’s far better than that reinterpretation.
Second, your definition of dualism doesn’t fit Cartesian Dualism, which is the dominant one in Western philosophy and seems to best fit the theistic idea of the soul. Thus, you would be reading a lot in to say that that view of the soul fits your definition so that, say, Christians think that animals and trees have souls, since they explicitly denied the latter and questioned the former.
Third, I may look at reading one of those books, if I remember the names.
The problem is that, at least from what I come across, what they are talking about usually bears no relation to the God of believers.
It is extremely frustrating to have to deal with any or all of the following situations:
1. A standard believer who goes for all the business of miracles, resurrection etc, but then says that we should understand Aquinas etc. in order to attack their position.
2. Nonsense from, say, Lane Craig or Plantinga that are trivially dismissible because of premises and yet seems to have some mysterious intellectual weight. We are supposed to engage with such nonsense based on the logic of the arguments as against their flawed premises, and if we don’t we are considered ‘uneducated atheists’.
3. God as some sort of abstract beyond-evidence essence theologists who are brought up by true theists as some kind of defense of their position.
4. Assertions that the pope is a world-renowned theologian which apparently puts him in a position to comment on contraceptive use and to tell people that condoms don’t work.
If theology was some intellectual game of historical interest, then it might be worth seriously engaging in but it seems to be used as a decoy to fend off justified attacks on religious privilege and politics.
But physics explains how the world actually is, regardless of people’s beliefs. It has an objective topic of study. Theology is used to justify people’s beliefs — as others have already pointed out, there is no agreement that the subject of the discipline actually exists. If theology no longer makes contact with the actual beliefs of the religious (as I would argue that, for example, Armstrong is guilty of), then there is little justification for its practice.
What an extremely good point – I had never thought of this. Theology is about nothing but the thoughts of theologians, and that’s it!
Ken Pidcock,
I already addressed the cultural argument — I find it lacking — but you seem to concede that he is asking for belief, not knowledge. Does he even claim to know that God exists? I, for example, absolutely deny that I know that God exists and, in fact, think that it is indeed unknowable. However, I don’t think that you have to be able to know something to believe it, even as I use a weaker definition of believe — the epistemic one — than many religious believers use. So if he doesn’t claim to know that God exists, it would be unfair to demand that he demonstrate knowledge, right?
Note that this isn’t the same as claiming knowledge of the details of the CONCEPT of the proposed God, since that can be done by stipulation and definition, which means that we can know it.
Verbose Stoic has mentioned how it would be useful to understand why science and philosophy are compatible. I agree with that, but to me it is almost a trivial problem, viz. I cannot distinguish the two if the philosophy is sufficiently science informed. I’ve mentioned Bunge, Armstrong, etc. in that light – this is exactly the point they tend to make (Bunge much more so). This is also the way to see where religion and science really are incompatible – the epistemology and metaphysics (and these two interact strongly in both cases) needed for religion are just massively incompatible with those of science (and technology, for that matter – which makes for of a problem in a place that officially tries to have engineers without the “dangers” of science – Iran comes to mind). As for the specific considerations, they are contentious, to say the least – as is, of course, what I have just said. And so it goes, but then again philosophers don’t even agree on whether their field should exist!
IA: Also, it was much easier to be squishy (and “accomodationist”) when there was less evidence available. Our metaphysics ought to change with science – which is what Dawkins can mean in more general terms when he mentions Darwin’s work as allowing one to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Holbach was a materialist in spite of the tradition – even somebody like Hume is debatably a dualist, though of the phenomenalist sort [warning! contentious scholarship!] – despite not being a theist.
Ben: Those who violate gatekeeping in less advanced fields of study always seem to have more trouble than in advanced ones. Chomsky tells a story about how when he presents in politics people always complain that he’s not trained in the area, etc. but when he presents, again outside his training, in mathematics (think Chomsky hierarchy, etc.) none of the mathematicians bat an eyelid – they only care about the arguments and evidence, not whether or not the guy has the appropriate degrees, etc. Since religious studies (and theology, which is maximally squishy) is sometimes really squishy, this is not at all surprising. Of course, there’s a whole swath of pretty hard nosed “science of religion” which a lot of these mad people allude to, but I wonder how much of it is read (really – I have no idea). I did a course in the sociology of religion (at a Canadian university, hence the focus of the topic) and most of the class groaned when they had to read *figures and statistics*. The professor noted that this is, in part, how to explore the “secularization thesis” we’ve discussed in the context of other places here and elsewhere. This isn’t even social modelling, people, this is just descriptive stuff in precise terms! Yeesh.
Paul W. mentions supernaturalist fiction as one source of antireligion. Admittedly (from what I know) Buffy etc. are pretty blatant. But there was a seed of that even in the original Star Trek’s “Who Mourns for Adonais?” if one listens and reads between the lines carefully. Yes, the crew (some of them) profess monotheism (Kirk, notably) after literally (in some ways) meeting Apollo. But if one thinks through how some stuff is portrayed, the episode does seem to work as a general theism-counter argument. One crucial part is that at least in this episode, there’s absolutely no suggestion that Kirk is a Christian. To be fair, though, it is difficult trying to reconcile this story *story-wise* with the Christianity stuff in “Bread and Circuses”. (Of course, real world, it is likely different writers, etc.)
stvs: “Verbose Stoic”‘s name might be an answer – i.e., maybe Stoicism is what he or she has in mind. Of course, according to the stoics, God is just as material as everything else (except propositions, or whatever you think “lekta” should be translated as), so I have a hard time believing that would help much with 99%+ of all believers.
Verbose Stoic brings up the supposed failure of the “atheistic regress argument”. What I understood all versions of this argument to show is that simply asserting that matter (for example) is not self-sustaining gets one nowhere, because one has to ad-hocly postulate the solution to avoid the regress. Moreover, it is an ad hominem reply (in the good sense) since very few believers will buy that there can be an infinite regress of gods, etc. “There is no god but god”, etc. Of course, as everyone should have thought about more carefully was whether or not Democritus was right – that matter is self existent and self-sustaining. We now know about conservation laws – the germs of which were known to Descartes, to the point that this was *pointed out to him* – so IMO the regress argument move is not necessary since there is a clearer route to the same conclusion. But that doesn’t change its merits really.
Paul W. uses “matter and energy”. If we are debating “tone trolling” I do wish we could stop using that phrase. Energy is not a stuff, and Maxwell (150 years ago) showed us why – do dimensional analysis – it is a *property*. What most people seem to mean is “matter and electromagnetic radiation” or something. But radiation is just matter with no mass – which traditionally, admittedly, is oxymoronic. But since one can “make” radiation from massive matter, and conversely, it suggests the Bunge hypothesis: what is real is what possesses energy, which is, so to speak, the “degree of changability” of some system. Social systems, for example, are real, since it takes energy to rip apart a family or a school group – or to keep them together. So there’s a social analogue to binding energy, for example. (Sorry, this really is a pet peeve of mine! Ignore it if you wish.)
– * –
Kant’s argument about existence not being a predicate fails in modern terms, though. There are logics where existence IS a predicate (and the backwards E thing is called the “particularizer” or other such things). The crucial point is that the “ontology”, rather than the logic, determines what is hypothesized to exist, which is as it should be as far as I am concerned. (See, e.g., Bunge, _Treatise on Basic Philosophy_, vol. 3 and the more recent entire field – some of which I do not endorse – of “free logics”.) None of it (least of all Bunge’s work) should be confort to a theist, of course, since theist would have to postulate a field of study where god was either a fiction (and hence had formal existence, like the number 2 and the rings of ring theory, or fictional proper – like Spock, Superman and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra) – or factual. But in the latter case, then what support is there for god’s existence? We’re back to other arguments.
– * –
Can someone explain to me what “updated theology” means, when nothing has changed in the field under study? Has there been new evidence for god/gods/God we’re all unaware of? If ideas have been updated, on what basis have they been updated? Is it updating in the same sense that hairstyles get updated?
How is theology different from “opinion” or “sophisticated opinion”?
I understand that these questions brand me as an unserious atheist, but I’m asking them sincerely.
philosopher-animal,
First, it is a matter of massive debate in philosophy how scientiifically informed it should. For example, there are normativity issues in both morality and epistemology that may not be amenable to a scientific explanation. And it is these sorts of debates that would make philosophy as incompatible with science as faith, at least using some gnu atheist definitions (I think Larry Moran’s and Jerry Coyne’s are vulnerable to this). Philosophy really does use a method that is different from science, and their base principles do not at least limit themselves to the scientific method.
Second, I’ve always considered the Stoics atheists, since the Logos is nothing like a god, and others taught me that. But I’m open to correction. At any rate, they weren’t what I was referring to, but they may be another good example.
Third, I don’t see any reason to accept that those logics really are valid ways to go about describing this world, and one can still take from the initial argument that existence is just not the right sort of property to make the sort of argument the Ontological Argument is making. Additionally, if those logics shake out that might be a defense of the Ontological Argument.
Fourth, if people like Dawkins had made the argument “Why can’t the thing with necessary existence be the universe or something like that?” I’d have more respect for their claim. But he, at least, didn’t; he relied on “If complex things have to evolve, then so does the first thing”. To which the reply, quite reasonably, is that something that has necessary existence may well be complex without having to evolve, or as Hart puts it that you can’t directly map properties about the absolute from the properties of the non-absolute.
Ben,
As in philosophy, new ideas about the concept are considered updating and progress in theology even if they don’t provide proof that any god exists. In things that use the philosophical method, clarification of concepts is as important if not more important than proofs of existence.
I’m not likely to reply anymore tonight and am away from the computer all day tomorrow, so I may not be able to keep up and reply to anything else in this comment thread. So if I don’t, I enjoyed the discussion and hope you found something interesting in my replies.
I don’t believe that is Dawkins’ argument. To me, it’s about the meaning of “explanation”. Also, it’s not reasonable to say that something that has necessary existence may well be complex without having to evolve. That complexity has never been part of the necessity, indeed the necessity originated from a time when it might have been reasonable to assume that minds were simple. Complexity is not an attribute of one thing. It’s about relationships. This is another reason why such arguments fail – you have to have necessity for a vast number of things to have a god with the required complexity to be a person. This is an example of why the premises of theological arguments fail – because what the arguments are supposedly dealing with can turn out to be not suitable for such logical treatments.
To some extent this was the case with Germany under the NAZIs with their metaphysical rejection of “Jewish physics”. Religious absolutism isn’t the only kind of absolutism we know about, though it’s the most common. Then you might consider the parallel with the Soviets and the Lysenko case. We have many examples in history of incompatibility between philosophical absolutes and the “open architecture” of modern empiricism/pragmatism, which were designed to conform to what science says is true without being limited to the cases science has reached. The difference between philosophy and theology on this point would be that there’s greater recognition in philosophy that absolutist conceptions can’t say what’s true in the world, whereas in theology such a recognition would leave the field entirely in the hands of crypto-atheists, which probably isn’t the case (yet).
Verbose Stoic: “As in philosophy, new ideas about the concept are considered updating and progress in theology even if they don’t provide proof that any god exists. In things that use the philosophical method, clarification of concepts is as important if not more important than proofs of existence.” (Sorry, don’t know the right html for quoting.)
I have just learned that I don’t understand what theology is. Or why, if it isn’t (necessarily) concerned with proofs of existence, anyone cares about it. Just sounds like academic one-up-manship and logrolling.
@ Paul W. #128
“For future reference, you can all call me “Paul,” or “Dr. W.,” or just “W.,” or just “Doc,” or “hey you, asshole,” but “Mr. W.” is right out; that sort of impertinence lays eggs under my delicate skin.”
You seem to have tickets on yourself. I would enjoy calling you Mr W precisely because it annoys you.
@Verbose Stoic.
I do. To me, it makes no sense to say that I believe an assertion that cannot be justified. And this does not limit my experience. I do not believe that The Firebird is a magnificent work of art. Nor do I know it.
Verbose Stoic:
I think you’re mistaken. Thought experiments generally show that when people claim something is supernatural, they do not mean that it violates the laws of nature, broadly construed, but that it follows a different kind of law than mere (plain) “natural” phenomena—one with irreducibly mental or teleological principles.
Consider time travel. Suppose, on the one hand, that we convince somebody time travel has happened by traveling through a wormhole, and that’s possible in the usual, physically understandable sense because space is warped in higher dimensions, and we developed a machine that can tweak the fabric of spacetime and slide you through a wormhole. That’s not supernatural.
If, on the other hand, a supernatural being did it by sheer mind-force—because mind over matter works for him because irreducible force of will is able to directly control mere matter, because he’s irreducibly the kind of being whose essence allows him to do that—that would still seem like magic to most people.
The basic materialist view is that mind supervenes on matter. The basic supernaturalist view is that it doesn’t—that certain mental or teleological entities and attributes are just different, and able to influence material phenomena without being themselves reducible to material phenomena. Once you start reducing supernatural events to nonteleological, nonmental mechanisms—e.g., machinery, fancy information processing, etc—the sense of supernaturalism is lost.
The supernaturalist mindset projects mental properties onto the universe as though they were basic irreducible facts about how things are.
Consider something like Luck, such that you can be a lucky person or an unlucky person, beyond random chance.
How would that work? How would Luck, whatever it is, know what would count as being good for your, or bad for you, and arrange the kinds of things you’d like, or the kinds of things you wouldn’t? How would it know so much about your psychology and your circumstances as to be able to intervene in a complicated world in ways that work out to your having good or bad things happen to you, in human terms?
It would have to be pretty darned knowledgeable, pretty darned smart—something resembling omnisicient, and very sensitive to your very human concerns to even know what would count as good or bad for you and ensure that happened.
If it turned out luck worked without irreducible teleology, because some alien kept running simulations on a superpowerful quantum computer to figure out what would turn out well or badly for you, and did the occasional thing the simulation said to do in order to tweak the patterns of events… well, that wouldn’t be supernatural anymore. It’d just be a neat trick.
For luck to seem supernatural, it has to be something that’s not reducible in that way to the normal operation of nonteleological stuff—e.g., a free-floating principle of helping or harming, which just attracts helpful or harmful things, without having to process astonishing amounts of information to figure out what would count as helping or harming—it just “knows” or even if it’s not a overtly a mind-like thing, it behaves as if it knows what would count as good or bad for you.
Supernatural entities are like that because we couldn’t understand them if they weren’t. They have to obey some rules to be a recognizable category, even for fictional purposes, and what we do is graft psychological properties onto nonpscyhological things, and give them the ability to just have certain effects with certain kinds of psychological significance.
E.g., a love potion just makes you fall in love, because it has some magical essence that fairly directly creates the phenomenon of love. It doesn’t do it in a way that reduces to nonteleological mechanisms—e.g., by inhibiting a certain class of synapses so that your critical faculties are impaired, and stimulating the production of oxytocin to potentiate bonding, and so on. It also doesn’t do it by processing a lot of information about you and subtly rewiring your synapses in a way that encodes particular beliefs and attitudes, which count as being in love, at a higher level. It’s not beer goggles or a date rape drug, or a brain-programming; it’s magic. It operates fairly directly on high-level things, with high-level effects, on the assumption that there are such irreducibly mental things and essences, which can interact at that level.
Similarly, a love goddess like Eros isn’t just an alien who understands how your brain works, analyzes it in detail, and rewires it. She has an irreducibly special essence, closely related to the irreducible essence of love, which allows her to create love, because that’s irreducibly the kind of thing she is.
That sense of supernaturalism doesn’t come from violating the laws of nature, in the broad sense. Eros is assumed to have a particular kind of nature, and so is Love, and her nature allows her to do that sort of thing “naturally” (for her)—things that we can’t do, or can’t do that fairly direct way; we can only do them with machinery and trickery. (Unless perhaps our purported souls have such latent abiilities, and we can learn to use them.)
There’s nothing particularly unpredictable about it—Eros is like a human, with beliefs and desires, understandable in a general way as you’d understand a human. The things she does are understandable in human terms, because they deal with human interests—things like love—regarded as irreducible things in themselves, which she can manipulate in much the same way we can “just manipulate” physical objects. (Or so it seems, because we’re not generally aware of the how just doing things actually works—we don’t understand the tremendous amount of information processing we do unconsciously to “just do” things.)
To prescientific people, this makes a lot of sense. They can use their instinctive patterns of reasoning to reason about the purportedly supernatural because it’s fundamentally similar to their understanding of human minds and normal “natural” stuff, at a certain intuitive level.
Intuitively, we seem to be able to just do things in an irreducibly mental and teleological way—we can just look at things and see them, we can just will our bodies to move, and just move, etc. Given that prescientific people no idea how complex and many-leveled those phenomena are, or that the high levels reduce to utterly nonmental and nonteleological material processes, it’s not surprising that people believe in mind-over-matter, or that somewhat different beings could just do interestingly different things, with different interesting things, according to their somewhat different nature.
You make an interesting point. (I am also wondering how young is “young” to figure out if I qualify.) If this is so, they’re unfairly taking out their frustration with students on fellow professors, which doesn’t make sense. So perhaps this can be a point of agreement between “New Atheists” professor and Hoffmann, Berlinerblau, etc. Their annoyance with students who refuse to learn and don’t appreciate the importance of education can be a foundation for further agreement.
Amen.
That reminds me, I never replied to Paul. Check the practice of Chronicle of Higher Education. When they’re writing about academics, it’s a good bet that the person referred to holds the Ph.D., yet they are never referred to as Dr. Nor does Chronicle just refer to scholars by their last name, which Science seems to do to get around the convention. Yet, if the author is a medical doctor, the title is used.
Here’s a recent story with which you may be familiar:
I look at supernaturalism like this. If it is reducible to anything like mechanism or a different kind of law, it has ceased to be super. Supernaturalism is therefore best described not as something not understood, but something imagined as systematically not understandable. Can something systematically unreachable also be posited as existing? Only in the sense that a series of words arranged as a question can take that form. If you design a question so that nothing could possibly answer it, the question can be safely left to specialists in questions, or knowledge, or logic. But we don’t need to wait for their deliberations to complete to decide that supernatural beings aren’t real.
Ken,
OK. That strikes me as weird, and the latter bit as just gross. (The Chronicle of Higher Education calls medicos doctors, and not professors? Bleah!)
Is this a more common practice than I realize, in academically-oriented publications? Maybe I’ve just been oblivious all these years.
Or is it that CHE is using a “newspaper” convention, and newspapers generally assume the hoi polloi will interpret “doctor” to mean “physician”? (It doesn’t surprise me in a random newspaper.)
Frak ’em all, I say.
Harrumph!
/huffysnit
One of the oddest things about reading the debates on this blog is the presence of a ton of unacknowledged epistemologists quietly teaching, without reference to the fact that they’re actually professional philosophers – and then someone at maybe the advanced undergrad level as a philosopher piles in to gatekeep.
I expect that happens because philosophers don’t actually tend to argue from authority.
You lot have an incredible amount of patience. Kudos.
Meh. As I understand it, a doctor is someone who (1) had to pay for their terminal degree, and (2) can’t be trusted to possess the intellectual curiosity required to remain current in their field, hence continuing education requirements.
Me, I’m self-directed.
Tulse wrote:
I’ve always found this frustrating, mostly because it implies that you’re allowed to call yourself a believer no matter how little you actually know about the history or philosophy of the faith you adhere to; unbelievers, however, are scorned and belittled as ‘ignorant’ and ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘lacking nuance’ if they aren’t experts on all and any theological position the theists (or anti-gnu atheists) care to name.
Hypocrisy, pure and simple. If atheists are required to be experts before being taken seriously, membership in a church should be contingent on achieving the same level of knowledge and understanding.
If it weren’t for the Gnu Atheists I’d just be an atheist, not an atheist who now happens to have read Lucretius, Spinoza and modern humanists and atheists.
I realize this is sort of an out of the blue and out of sequence reply but I find the whole idea that gnu atheists somehow don’t know any history of religion, theology or atheism when I hear or read Hitchens or Harris in particular but any “gnu atheist” I’m familiar with, not only the four horsemen.
@Wowbagger (comment 205):
Yes, exactly. That’s just what I’d been thinking about recently. Though, I wonder how many religious leaders would actually make studying the religion a requirement a person has to complete before joining. They may feel it would deter converts.
I see everybody piled on before I had a chance to reply to Verbose Stoic; astrology went through my head, too.
Christianity is pretty easy, isn’t it? Though I think Islam is even easier (leaving it is another story, right?). By comparison, Judaism is pretty draconian. But again, studying just the rules of the one religion you’re going to join is a lot simpler than knowing a reasonable amount about the history of religion. So, can Hitchens be paraphrased here? What can be professed without study can be rejected without study. They can get away with it, because the difference between us is not merely a difference of opinion; it’s a difference in attitudes to authority.
I don’t call that an out of the blue reply, Robert, I think it’s very apt.
Raised LCA Lutheran, I learned Christianity in three years of weekly instruction leading to membership. I learned Islam from a book (which I call the grey book) intended for youth and converts, loaned to me by a student. I learned Judaism from the textbook from a course our daughter took at her private high school. The course was very popular, both because the Jewish parents wanted their progeny to have greater exposure to the heritage, and because the students considered it kind of gut. (On the off chance that you’re reading this, Rabbi Kaplan, I never believed a word of it.) The textbook, though, was quite the treatise, 700+ pages, for which I was grateful.
I think all religious traditions have an interest in promoting learning (such as it is), because it has the effect of investing adherents in the tradition. The more you’re led to think that you “understand” the tradition, the more it becomes part of how you perceive the world. At the extreme, think of all of these theologians. You read this shit, and you think, “How could they possibly…?” Hey, they’ve been at it for decades. They can think their way around any challenge you can present. In fact, they probably have boilerplate at hand.
Stewart:
Makes sense to me.
My attitude toward sophisticated theology is merely this: Let’s hear it. If there’s some blockbuster argument that I am not aware of, then let’s hear it. Don’t make vague reference to the annals high-brow theology of which I’m supposedly ignorant; don’t gesture toward a bookshelf full of theological masturbation; and definitely don’t tell me that the sophisticated arguments are “too complex” to summarize. Just present the arguments, and let’s see what’s what.
Hope there was no misunderstanding; I meant joining, not learning. Sometimes you can do the former without the latter.
I took a correspondence course in Catholicism when I was nine. My father’s condition for letting me do this was that I didn’t tell anybody he’d permitted it.
I think that Verbose Stoic has a small point. It’s probably best to make our position clear from the start: theology is bunk. Getting involved in theological discussions may give the impression that we think that they have credibility, perhaps, and it does not look good if we can’t defend our position if we enter the fray.
On the other hand, he/she doesn’t have that much of a point. There is little hope of changing anyone’s mind via rebuttal of theology, so it’s not a failure is doing any harm. Might as well have some fun arguing! Although, I have twice managed to change a believer’s mind about the validity of a theological argument, but twice in 5 years isn’t that great.
I guess it doesn’t really matter much what we do. Theologists will still believe theology. We will be called ignorant atheists no matter how much we do or don’t come up with elegant rebuttals, because accommodationists and believers want to think we are ignorant, and they aren’t that fond of the truth.
(It’s quite ironic that someone like Jerry could be called ignorant because he’s a world-class expert on How We Got Here, which sounds quite theological to me)
Might just as well do what you like and have fun, I say.
Thanks Ophelia for publishing my comment #150, and sorry everyone for pushing the numbers up by one after that.
I know Verbose Stoic isn’t here right now but this paragraph is giving me a problem. For one thing, Dawkins rightly doesn’t make rules for any first thing before the first thing. He is stating the rule for the first thing we know about. And it evolved, didn’t it? For another thing, why is a hypothetical previous thing necessary? Why isn’t it contingent, too, in a way consistent with our subsequent arrival? Making such unfounded assumptions about “necessary beings” doesn’t make them “necessary” assumptions.
And last, certainly not least, you can’t map the properties of the absolute, full stop.
Verbose Stoic
First: On the ontological argument.
I think there is an important flaw here that is being missed: You might disagree with what flaws we find in the argument – but we have all dealt with it. The basic argument is at its heart horse shit, from particularly stupid horses.
So it is outright wrong to argue that we do not consider sophisticated theology, if that is to be your example of such. It would be more accurate to say that you do not agree with our particular analysis, and instead favour a different one.
Second on gaming boards: I honestly don’t see that much of a difference. The psychology is pretty much exactly the same, except of course in this case the old guard tends to have either written a faq that is only really accessible to people who are already quite advanced or not written a faq at all and proclaimed those that are popular because they are readable to be “New Atheist” tracts.
There is generally no springboard being made available except via the so-called “New Atheists”, because all too often providing such a springboard is the main defining feature of being “New Atheists.”
Just to clarify
The basic ontological argument is at its heart horse shit, from particularly stupid horses.
No he didn’t. Read the book again – he said it was more likely for a simple something (Such as a non-living universe with no opinions about anything) to come from nothing, as opposed to a highly complex something (Such as a living god that is a bit squicked by shellfish).
Here’s some sophisticated unicornology.
We define a unicorn as a horselike animal with a single horn in the middle of its forehead.
I will now use proof by contradiction to demonstrate the existence of unicorns.
Let us propose that unicorns do not exist.
If unicorns do not exist, unicorn horns do not exist.
Therefore there are no unicorn horns.
If there are no unicorn horns, unicorns do not have horns.
But unicorns are defined as having horns, and we have a contradiction.
Therefore, unicorns exist.
This little argument, which i cooked up on my way to work this morning, is at least as sophisticated as the ontological proof. Does anyone think I’ve made a major contribution to the history of thought? Or that there’s anything here of substance?
Demanding that atheists immerse themselves in sophisticated theology is like demanding that everyone learn Elvish and the Black Speech of Mordor before we’re allowed to say that elves and orcs are fictional.
Let make two quick comments as I get ready to leave:
1) I did screw up Dawkins’ argument. I saw the argument that I think I was referring to, and it was an answer to irreducible complexity arguments, and he says that God would be irreducibly complex as well — and so not simple — and the implication is that if other things need a designer, so would God. The reply I was making was that you can’t imply a need for a designer for a necessary being. I thought he had said what I said he said, but I can’t find it so it might just be something someone else said he’d said.
2) I’m making no claim that you have to be an expert to be an atheist, or even to participate. My complaint is that if you deal with theology — such as dealing with theological arguments — and someone says that you’ve gotten it wrong or that the field has moved on from that simple statement of the argument, you can’t just say “Well, I don’t care; theology’s garbage anyway” but you either have to listen to their explanation or stop talking about theology. And if they won’t explain it, that’s a problem, too.
One thing this thread does illustrate is how great the ontological argument is as a teaching tool in philosophy. Pretty much every student can see immediately that there is something wrong with it, but putting your finger on precisely what takes a little longer. It is a bit like the opposite of the Monty Hall problem, where most people think there must be something wrong with it and there isn’t.
As an atheist who reads Aquinas for fun I of course do not exist. I find the demonology parts most entertaining.
For some reason you tend to get less apothatic stuff with demons so there is plenty of scope there for a sophisticated modern theologian to move the field on.
RE: rjosephhoffman #54
And here it is… People have upset your smug little coffee klatch. You can no longer go to coffee houses (perverted from exclusive little clubs into behemoths Starbucks) and sit there with your three friends, smoking clove-scented French cigarettes and look down on the unwashed and unenlightened because they haven’t read a thousand volumes of niche history and philosophy to arrive at your very-same conclusion.
Also, you didn’t do anything. You’re stealing credit in a fit of hubris and plagiarism. It’s quite rather like the bar scene in Goodwill Hunting:
Chuckie: All right, are we gonna have a problem?Clark: There’s no problem. I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the early colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War the economic modalities, especially of the southern colonies could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capitalist and…Will: [interrupting] Of course that’s your contention. You’re a first year grad student. You just got finished some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison prob’ly, you’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon, then you’re gonna be talkin’ about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist back in 1740. That’s gonna last until next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.Clark: [taken aback] Well, as a matter of fact, I won’t, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of–Will: …”Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth…” You got that from Vickers. “Work in Essex County,” Page 98, right? Yeah I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us- you have any thoughts of- of your own on this matter? Or do- is that your thing, you come into a bar, you read some obscure passage and then you pretend- you pawn it off as your own- your own idea just to impress some girls? Embarrass my friend?[Clark is stunned]Will: See the sad thing about a guy like you, is in about 50 years you’re gonna start doin’ some thinkin’ on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don’t do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda’ got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.Clark: Yeah, but I will have a degree, and you’ll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.Will: [smiles] Yeah, maybe. But at least I won’t be unoriginal.
You Mr. Hoffman are the essential Clark.
Ah frak! More HTML Fail. This is getting annoying.
Verbose Stoic:
I think seems like a really nice example of supposedly sophisticated theology or philosophy of religion that really, really isn’t.
Most philosophers don’t think that Ontological Arguments work. They’re mostly interesting in the sense of showing how tricky it is to do modal proofs, and in clarifying the very weird and ambiguous ideas of “necessity” and “possibility.” Even among the minority of philosophers who are religious, most don’t think Ontological Arguments work. Even among the minority of that minority who do think some Ontological Argument or other works, there’s no consensus—most think most Ontological Arguments don’t actually work, and disagree on which one actually does.
(I once showed a couple of logician colleagues a recent stab at a modal logic proof of God, and they were just aghast. One of them was a Catholic logician, who was especially appalled that somebody’d abase their beloved modal logic in disgustingly sneaky ways when talking about something as serious and important as God. It’s just not cool to lie about God, and using modal logic to dress it up just made it sneakier and sleazier.)
So if you think Ontological Arguments are something more that a cottage industry of evasive apologetic bullshit trying to sneak the conclusion into the premises in a novel way and not get caught—or just interesting brain teasers that may help us clarify ideas about “necessity” and “possibility”—then by all means, tell us which Ontological Argument you’re talking about, and show us that you understand it.
I think that ontological arguments are fundamentally goofy, and don’t prove anything interesting, and that taking them seriously as anything but puzzles suggests that you wouldn’t know sophisticated theology if it bit you on the ass, unless “sophisticated” means “sophistical.”
I agree with Skippy-O!
umm… Scipio.
Verbose Stoic:
Since we’re talking about things (“gods”) that may exist — not, say, numbers — we have nothing but non-absolutes from which to map properties, and we can do this mapping either within or beyond the boundaries of the reasonable, logical, and evidence-supported. Since Hart is saying we can’t even hope to complete the exercise because the regularities of the observable universe don’t obtain in the sky-realm he has in mind, then let’s go with that and not begin the exercise. The world has plenty of empty word-castles as it is.
Since Hoffman and others get a tummy ache when such statements come from somewhere other than a venerated stack of books, I would suggest that D’Holbach’s Good Sense covers this ground pretty thoroughly, and Hume’s Dialogues put variations of it in the mouth of Demea in order to shoot it down. Both Hume and D’Holbach were dead long before any gnu atheist cooties could soil them, so he can click the hyperlinks without fear.
Verbose Stoic,
I think you’ve missed something very basic about the Ontological and similar Arguments.
1. There’s really good reason to doubt that there’s any such thing as an absolutely necessary being. The idea seems to be incoherent. (Likewise an absolutely perfect being.) Necessity that we understand is always implicitly relativenothing to some principles we accept and take as unquestionable for the purposes of the argument. Something that is “necessitated” by nothing doesn’t fit the schema, and nobody knows what it could mean. It seems that to talk about an absolutely necessary being is a category mistake. It may be that nothing is absolutely necessary.
Maybe the entire cosmos—and God, if there is one—is contingent, i.e., something that could have not been, but is anyhow. That’s a difficult idea to accept, and seems wacky, but it’s no weirder and wackier than the alternative, that it was impossible that there be nothing.
2. The plausibility of these arguments always rests on certain intuitions people have about words, and ambiguities in concepts e.g., they think they know what it means for something to be possible, but they don’t. They don’t realize how many senses of “possible” there are, and that they switch between them without thinking. They don’t even understand that what “possible” means is always relative to other things taken as givens, and that those givens change, depending on what concept of “possibility” seems useful.
3. Another word that people conveniently misinterpret is “being.” In the context of formal proofs of God, it only means actual thing—something that bes, ie., is—not person.
The upshot of that is that even if one of these proofs “works,” it’s not at all clear what it actually proves, and it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t prove what people want to think and claim it proves.
E.g., maybe there is an “absolutely necessary being.” All that means is that in some unfathomable sense, there’s some thing that unconditionally could not have failed to exist. And maybe that’s just quantum mechanics or something, which just had to be in a way that’s indisinguishable from just being, and just being that way, because by hypothesis it is for no good reason that we can fathom.
All of these “proofs” work by taking common and conflicting intuitions and pushing them beyond the realm in which we’re clear on what they mean, selectively forcing one intuition to break while conveniently preserving another which would similarly break if we pushed it that hard.
That is why most philosophers think this is all bullshit—the basic technique is a kind of sleight of hand, where you take a seemingly reasonable assumption, hide the fact that the assumption is very dubious in the context you’re talking about, rig the outcome in favor of your pet hypothesis, and pretend to have made a rigorous argument.
Even most religious philosophers of religion now accept that thats largely what’s going on, and no longer refer to these things as “proofs,” but as mere “arguments.”
Seriously, some religious philosophers and “sophisticated theologians” (if I understand the term) acknowledge that these aren’t even close to convincing arguments, much less proofs, but like them anyway. They think they’re interesting puzzles for people’s spiritual development, sort of like Zen Koans, and that if you think long and hard about them, you don’t get anywhere logically, but thinking around the problems helps put you in a frame of mind to use your spiritual intuition and realize but it’s true anyhow!
Is that your idea of sophisticated theology?
Verbose Stoic:
Well, yeah, its usually a category mistake to map the properties of real things onto the properties of category mistakes, like religious ideas about the Absolute.
It sounds like Hart is disclaiming any responsibility to make anything remotely like sense at all, because he can use The Absolute as a mystical placeholder for any fucking thing he wants to tell you and not have to defend.
The problem with this kind of quasi-apologetic goo is that the quasi-apologists constantly appeal to people’s intuitions, grounded in the real-world, when it suits them, to make points they like, then conveniently change the rules and say “your intuitions just don’t apply” to forestall criticisms of their positions.
This is a classic example.
We’re expected to use our normal intuitions about contingency or perfection or causality or supervenience to infer that there must be something much less contingent, or much more perfect, or much earlier or more fundamental, than what we acually see.
Not only that, we’ll make it seem really special by asserting that there’s something that’s absolutely necessary, or absolutely perfect, or absolutely the first cause, or absolutely the fundamental ground of all being, based on simplistic intuitions that if some thing is more X than something else, there must be some particular thing that is the Xest.
Then when people bring other intuitions and a little bit of smarts to bear, which reveal that those things are probably intrinsically relative, or that it’s just as inuitively bizarre to accept one thing as another, all the sudden we change the rules. Merely human intuitions don’t matter, and it’s intrinsically beyond human comprehension, and by the way it has exactly the properties P, Q, R, and V, but not S and T, which we always said it did, take our word for it.
Seriously, Verbose Stoic, do you really believe this stuff? Do you think it has any intellectual integrity?
Do you really think it’s reasonable to infer that an absolutely necessary being—meaning only a thing that unfathomably couldn’t not exist—just happens to be a magical person with beliefs and desires who looks out for you, and who you can be with after your brain stops doing all the things that seem to make you you?
How likely do you really think that is?
Or is it more likely that some mysterious thing that mysteriously couldn’t not exist is nothing like a person a all, and is just profoundly weird, like quantum mechanics, in a way that has no fundamental relationship to human interests, and doesn’t operate according to the intuitions that we have, which were evolved to be useful, at a certain level, for doing things right around here?
Doesn’t interpreting a mysteriously existing thing as God seem a little bit like an exercise in wishful, anthropomorphic and anthropocentric projection?
Do you really think this vast, ancient, weird, and apparently utterly indifferent universe was created by somebody fundamentally like you, for things very much like you, and that the underlying weirdness of it means that lo and behold, it’s exactly what we thought—its so inconceivably strange that it must really be very familiar in just the crucial ways we always naively assumed or hoped for?
I really, really don’t get it.
It seems to me that everything we learn about the universe conflicts with what we prescientifically thought about how the universe really works—-in our tiny little, extremly nonrepresentative corner of it that we’re so adapted to, that we only understand intuitively at a certain shallow level anyhow.
And yet, no matter how bizarre and inhuman and unfathomable the reality is, in terms of our our evolved, crude, prescientific schemas, theists always manage to use that very counterintutive inhuman bizarreness to turn around and say See, we were right!
The same very shocking wrongness of their intuitive concepts, as revealed by scientists and philosophers, ends up being use to argue that it’s all so darned mysterious that the scientists and philosophers can’t be right, and their intuitive concepts win, and people like bronze age goatherds and medieval monks knew better after all.
They were so shockingly, inconceivably consistently wrong that they’re obviously right!
There’s a word for that ability to consistently twist disconfirming evidence around and interpret it as somehow confirming your fixed ideas: delusion.
I know this seems “arrogant,” but it’s relevant to the issue of “sophisticated theology.”
The mainstream philosophy view of sophisticated theology—of the sort where people actually believe this farfetched stuff—is exactly that it’s worse than merely wrong: it’s deluded.
It’s one thing for normal people to be religious; they’re surrounded by other people who confirm their prejudices, and they’ve never been very informed or thought very deeply about these things.
It’s quite another thing for somebody to be a philosopher of religion or a sophisticated theologian, who’s actually studied these things in depth, and still believe in God, especially the God of orthodox Western Theism.
Thats just way beyond wrong; it’s disturbing frightening. These people are literally seriously deluded kooks, as many other philosophers—even a lot of religious ones—will tell you off the record.
Few people wants to say that out loud in public, and cause a useless firestorm of academic and political controversy, but I’m pretty sure that’s what many if not most philosophers think of the real believers in philosophy of religion.
I know that when discussing certain “sophisticated” pro-god journal papers with philosophers, it’s become apparent that everybody present realized that the person who wrote it was not just wrong but seriously mentally ill.
Philosophers in general accord a certain minimal respect to those people. They don’t generally go around calling them deluded kooks or seriously mentally ill.
But if you’re going to take “sophisticated theology” seriously, do consider that. It’s not something that gets real intellectual respect among mainstream philosophers. Many of them think that many of those religion guys are not doing real philosophy, but mired in patent delusions.
Many would like to get rid of them—they don’t think those people belong in philosophy, because they’ve gone entirely off the rails—but they don’t see how you can get rid of them. Religion is too entrenched and too powerful, and you can’t expect deans and chancellors and the general public to understand that you’re not getting rid of them because they’re religious, but because they’re kooks who are incompetent to do real philosophy.
So instead, for the most part, there’s a convenient truce—we don’t publish in your journals, and you don’t publish in ours, and the poor suckers doing actual philosophy of religion non-crazily get stuck in the ghetto with the religious kooks.
You want people to not be “arrogant,” and to treat your theistic views and “sophistiated theology” with suitable deference.
You just don’t understand how much unearned deference your side is already getting, from our point of view.
From our point of view, there’s already plenty of affirmative action for theism, including within academic philosophy, with deluded kooks being treated with the kind of respect that philosophers give other philosophers they simply disagree with.
That’s why I reacted negatively to your idea that theology could be rolled into philosophy of religion.
NO NO NO NO.
That would be too many kooks for philosophy departments to absorb. It’s not their job to be a dumping ground for kooks who you can’t fire without huge political repercussions.
I used to hang out with philosophers from a certain top 10 philosophy department, and something roughly similar happened.
The administration decided it would be a coup to hire a certain esteemed theistic philosopher, who had written fairly popular books and was a very big name among theistic philosophers and theologians—and among political conservatives, some of whom wanted to donate big money to establish an endowed Chair for the guy, so the university could get him, and pay him well, with money left over for staff, for free.
But the philosophers already on the faculty didn’t think he did real philosophy. They thought he was a kind of crummy but popular philosopher, and a deluded kook.
Almost all the philosophers in that outstanding philosophy department signed a letter basically saying “you can have him or us”—if the administration put him in their department, they would all leave.
So the administration backed down, and created a whole new academic “program” for the eminent deluded kook, so that he would come to the university, have his endowed chair, but not be in philosophy, where his deluded kookery would not be tolerated.
Take that very seriously when you talk about how respectable theistic philosophy of religion and “sophisticated theology” are. Rightly or wrongly, many very serious philosophers very seriously don’t think so, and think that “sophisticated theology” is largely a crock that gets a free ride because its appealing to people who don’t know any better, and usually beyond criticism of the sort that any similarly bad philosophy would get.
This! This to an arbitrarily high order of magnitude!
I think the problem may actually be the reverse. New Atheists undergrads actually tend to be better informed about relgion than more waffly atheists and vague theists, precisely because they love debate and they like to compete. The agressive hardasses here actually tend to be the most knowledgable. The assumption that a strong anti-theist stance is incompatable with a strong knowledge of history and philosophy is asinine. Shoot, take a look at an actual philosophy department. They are positively packed with atheists. The assumption that knowing these topics in depth will lead to theism or waffly atheism assumes there is something valuable to be found there in defense of religion and religious ideas when there isn’t.
To give an example. My art history professor wanted to know our general familiarity with historical Christianity for understanding the subject matter of certain paintings. What question did she ask? “Is everyone here Christian?” My response “I am not.” Her reply “Are you Jewish?” (my undergrad had many Jewish students). My response “No.” Her response “What religion are you then?” “None, I am an atheist.” “But you were raised Christian right? You are culturally Christian?” (at this point, she seems rather confused as to how to deal with me). “No. The traditional cultural practices of Christianity are in general the complete opposite of my views and how I live my life.” Then she tried the tired old line where they pretend that universal human values like sharing are “Christian values”. A heap of glares, an argument, and a few Marx quotes later, she announced we were moving on. At which point she asked who knew the story of the saint featured in the painting. I was the only one. I think her eyes were about ready to pop out of her head at that point. If she had just asked that question to begin with, rather than making assumptions about people’s religious beliefs, backgrounds, and knowledge, the problem would have gone away.
@cat
Great anecdote!
The anecdote is also consistent with that recent Pew study that showed nonbelievers to be more religiously literate than believers.
If college new atheists are any different from “mainline” new atheists, it’s probably mainly a difference of youthful energy and, perhaps, the occasional naivete. I think we could safely say the same difference exists between Democrats and College Democrats, between environmental groups and college environmental groups.
Beautiful.
Verbose Stoic says: “I don’t think that you have to be able to know something to believe it.”
So if I ask “do you believe in xyz?” you will be able to answer without knowing what “xyz” is? How does that work?
BTW, I’ve got a bridge for sale if you’re interested. :-)
My favourite bit:
Utter bliss to read such clear thinking expressed so well. Your forum is a mine of insightful gems.
Yes, what Paul W said!
His comment reminds me of this podcast, with Luke Muehlhauser and Tyler Wunder, in which Alvin Plantinga’s double standards are pointed out by Wunder. Plantinga dismisses materialist theories based on criteria that he then jettisons when talking about his properly basic beliefs.
It’s my most common complaint against theists; they treat their religious beliefs differently to their other beliefs.
Verbose, I see your point but it occurs to me that if you can’t do something it doesn’t mean you can do it differently. Some things can’t be done, and the saying “if it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well” applies. Logical validity isn’t a substitute for truth.
Part of the problem may be the view of empiricism as a doctrinal choice among others, so that there is empirically derived truth and then other kinds. I don’t think that is the case. It might be the case if Plato was right that there are things out there and the truth about things out there and the truth about the truth….but it looks like there are just things out there and the truth is part of our conceptual toolkit for dealing with it. In that case empirical methods are just what works. Logic, then, is just another aspect of the toolkit, which usually plays a supportive role when there’s grist for the mill in the form of observations.
A lot of votes there; Paul’s @ 229 is a winner of a comment.
I do not think, therefore I am not.
My head hurts … again!
And please allow me to add my vote. That was a truly magnificent reading of the riot act. Pure hellfire.
I too agree with Doctor W!
My understanding of logic, limited as it may be by my youthful acquisition of a math degree, is that it is a reliable means of teasing out the implications of a set of assumptions, so that if a train of reasoning concludes that God exists, either God was lurking in the assumptions or there was a flaw in the argument.
The reality of course is that most believers, which is to say most Americans, see God’s hand in everything that happens. “Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication.” Half of our fellow citizens believe their personalities reside in their hearts. I’ve never seen any statistics, but I have the impression that the idea that consciousness is somewhat supernatural is generally held; we do generally believe that it survives death.
If I have a point, it’s that the conviction that (something generally felt to be obviously true) must also be (demonstrably true) is pretty powerful, at least on the order of attraction of a too-short skirt, and may lead philosophers into dark corners where they prefer not to think about what they’re doing.
Paul W.,
I do want to address your long and popular comment — especially since it seems to do a very good job of arguing against things I never said — but I do want to focus here on my question to you that, as far as I know, you never answered: What field would you say “The God Delusion” is in?
I’ll answer that for me, at least: I think it theology. Addressing the arguments for the existence of God and making new arguments against the existence of God does seem to me to be theological. I see little reason to not consider, for example, The Problem of Evil a theological argument. So, I think that Dawkins is doing theology. This can be contrased with Dennet’s “Breaking the Spell” which to me seems more clearly philosophy of religion, as it is primarily examining how religion worksas opposed to arguing really for or against it.
The line is not all that clear, however, as I already said. But I do think that “The Problem of Evil” is theology, and discussions over whether science and faith are compatible are philosophy that has to bridge philosophy of religion and philosophy of science, at the very least.
If you don’t agree that “The God Delusion” is primarily theology, and that making and addressing arguments for or against the existence of God is theology, then I need you to tell me what “The God Delusion” is and why, and what you think theology is and why.
Ben,
“I have just learned that I don’t understand what theology is. Or why, if it isn’t (necessarily) concerned with proofs of existence, anyone cares about it. Just sounds like academic one-up-manship and logrolling.”
I was talking about progress, primarily, and pointed out that progress is not just measured by having an answer that works. Advances in understanding the concept and what’s involved in it and what issues or hurdles there are is considered progress. Ultimately, the goal is indeed to either definitively prove that God exists or doesn’t exist, but the fact that that goal has not been achieved does not mean that it hasn’t progressed, which is also the case for philosophy. And probably science, too, although it does tend to get to answers faster than philosophy or theology.
Ken,
“I do. To me, it makes no sense to say that I believe an assertion that cannot be justified. And this does not limit my experience. I do not believe that The Firebird is a magnificent work of art. Nor do I know it.”
I think we’re using different definitions of “believe” here, because by my definition if you don’t believe it and don’t know it — or, more accurately, if you don’t believe it since if you know something you also believe it by definition — then you don’t think it true. Thus, translating your sentence I’d say that you don’t think that “The Firebird” is a magnificent work of art, which is clearly not what you mean.
Additionally, “justified” in “justified true belief” is quite a bit stronger than the normal, every day notion of justified. I think I’m justified in the normal notion of justified in believing that crows used to get into my garbage bags — despite there being other possibilities and my not having seen them or tested it — while I don’t think I actually know that, since I don’t have the more stringent justification required for knowledge. And I’m sure there are better examples but I can’t think of any off the top of my head.
Stewart,
“What can be professed without study can be rejected without study.”
However theology — which is what I’m talking about here — does not profess anything without study, and so this wouldn’t be a reason to dismiss theology. It might be a reason to say that you can be an atheist without knowing everything — or even much at all — about religion, but as the main front man for this debate here I can say with absolute conviction that I am not in any way arguing against that.
or the equivalent in case you want to nitpick — despite the fact that it’s been discussed with many papers in theology and philosophy of religion for quite a long time and that as preeminent an atheist philosopher as Betrand Russell said that it isn’t obvious why it’s wrong.
This is something I admit I just don’t get. It is obvious to a scientist why ontological arguments are wrong – because we pick logic to deal with reality, we don’t get reality from logic. There are an infinite number of logics, and we select one like picking from a toolbox. We don’t say that because we picked a hammer, everything is a nail. There are other clear reasons why ontological arguments are wrong, but that’s the main one, and I’m very surprised why it isn’t clear to a philosopher.
I see other theological arguments discussed by philosophers that are trivially wrong – such as Plantiga’s evolutionary argument. It’s deeply silly, and wrong, and obviously so to a biologist, and with good reason. And yet it’s held up by some as interesting. I’m afraid I am at a loss as to see why.
Friends who are naturalist philosophers also can’t see why.
SinSeeker,
“So if I ask “do you believe in xyz?” you will be able to answer without knowing what “xyz” is? How does that work?”
You are conflating two different propositions here. One is: X exists. The other is: The concept X is defined by these properties. I’d almost always have to know the latter, but none of that would necessarily get me the former. And the former is what I use when I say “I believe in X” or, to expand it “I believe in the existence of X.”
I’m not a philosopher and, so, I sometimes need hand-holding through the language. Simple question, for anyone:
Nature must account for its existence.
Is that what y’all call an intuition?
Of course it does, namely, the existence of its topic of investigation, god(s). I suppose one could claim that theology does not a priori postulate the actual existence of such an entity or entities, but can proceed even if such entities are fictive. But that then reduces theology to something akin to the deep discussions one sees on Harry Potter fan boards or at Star Trek conventions.
One can do sociology of religion and anthropology of religion without assuming the existence of god(s). One can potentially even do philosophy of religion without such assumption. But one can’t do theology without presupposing the existence supernatural entitites, any more than one could do leprechaunology without presupposing the existence of Irish fey folk. In the end, theology is just apologetics.
Hey, I have an idea – rather than having Verbose Stoic take over my site, let’s move Verbose Stoic’s branch of the discussion to Verbose Stoic’s site. Verbose Stoic has a blog, so let’s use it.
[…] http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/other-minds/#comments GA_googleAddAttr("AdOpt", "1"); GA_googleAddAttr("Origin", "other"); GA_googleAddAttr("LangId", "1"); GA_googleFillSlot("wpcom_below_post"); […]
A post for that is here:
http://verbosestoic.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/theology-philosophy-of-religion-and-everyone/
I saw this coming, and do apologize for many comments here, but do want to point out that this was a special case of catching up with well over a day of posts in a short period of time, and wanting to try to address everyone.
Ok, and I know, but 16 comments all at once…overkill.
Feels a bit anticlimactic to backtrack here, but I had to say something.
It’s really bizarre how often critics of the New Atheists seem to sort of assume that our reactions don’t come out of actual informed interaction with believers.
I mean, I was raised in an unexceptional, unaffiliated Baptist church. It stayed away from political hot topics, but most people there were nonvocal creationists (I understood evolution but didn’t get in arguments). I was taught that nonbelievers went to hell, not as a fire-and-brimstone scare tactic or polemical attack, but in a very straightforward, “compassionate” way. I remember being told that if we converted Hindus, we must be sure to convince them to give up all their false gods, as well as accepting Jesus. They were all nice to me at the time, and I never had a bad experience with them. Many young people who I met outside of church shared these beliefs, and several (mistakenly) thought that most people in the area did as well.
So my idea of religion is not this intolerant clueless mockery of it. Nor is that the case with most former theists I know.
Yet, all those people now, if they met me, would believe me to be going to hell (and to be dreadfully sexually sinful to boot, I suppose). So do my mom’s family. I’ve been told that I’m evil and luring people to hell. My mom, with whom I actually have a very good relationship, still says that she liked me better before I was an atheist. Not because I’m obnoxious; she’s the one that brings it up every time. But because she has such a low opinion of atheists and doesn’t like to think of me as being in that group. “Those people” don’t understand love, or beauty. “Those people” have no purpose in their lives. And of course, I keep going to the state legislature to watch our elected “good Christian” representatives argue against my civil rights as both an atheist and a bisexual person.
So when Hoffmann asks, “But is there really a general movement afoot to tar atheists as emotional defectives?” that is strange to me. What circles does Hoffmann run in? I thought it was common knowledge that a ton of people already believe that. Since it’s such a common belief, I didn’t think there had to be a movement about it. Although I’ve heard plenty about how atheism motivated the Columbine shootings, and there was that Answers in Genesis billboard about it I guess. It was not much better when Hoffmann wrote that dialogue with the “New Atheist” who really didn’t understand what church is or why some people like it. Does he really think that we’re, generally, that uninformed? Maybe he is basing it all off of cocky undergrads, after all.
I was also troubled by this:
“But unlike the groups which had legitimate claims to exclusion on the basis of unalterable conditions or status, atheists were asking to be judged by what they did not believe, not who or what they were. The whole pretext was absurd. And unlike the marginalized, their undeclinable position was such that they could not claim simple equality to the religious majority.”
I wonder, for instance, whether Hoffmann actually believes that the immutability of these traits is really what grants legitimacy to such claims. If gay people could become straight, would that really nullify their claims to being marginalized? For that matter, does he really believe that being an atheist is readily alterable (admittedly that can change, but that it can do so purely through conscious effort is dubious)? And it’s not that atheists were asking to be judged by their unbelief, but instead to not be judged as strongly.
And all this glosses over the rhetoric surrounding freedom of religion. Atheists are asking to be equal in the same way as Catholics or Hindus or Muslims ask to be equal. Catholicism is not utterly unalterable. Hindus request equality based on what they believe, (as well as on what they don’t believe, such as not believing that Jesus is the only way to heaven). Muslims do not claim simple equality to the majority in a moral or epistemic sense, yet they do so in a political and sometimes a social sense. In what way is it absurd for atheists to ask for the same sorts of equality?
I didn’t catch that earlier. That really is uncannily like the way conservative politicians have spoken against gay rights. (Not who they are, but what they do. Ridiculous.)
I, too, had an uneventful – nay, enjoyable – Christian upbringing. Being forced to let go of God was a drag to me. After about twenty years, I consciously sought association with a Christian congregation, which I held for a further twenty years. A classic believer in belief. Like any b-in-b, I guessed I assumed that society would descend into chaos without religion, but I don’t remember resenting frank atheists. Maybe I thought they were nihilist for not appreciating the importance of religion. I was, though, grateful to be a nonbeliever, and enjoyed finding other nonbelievers among my fellow worshippers. (There were lots!)
What was new, to me, about new atheism was the ferocity of the reaction to it, which left me with a guilty conscience. (I’m supposed to be with these people?) So I declared my apostasy and left. And felt more honest than I had for years.
But I didn’t have skin in the game. Hoffman kind of makes his living, in part, off of the persistence of religion. As such, he’s maybe more inclined to regard new atheists as interlopers, and uninformed ones at that.
I posted this comment on Hoffman’s blog, & now I seem to not be able to comment there again, so I will repost ot here in hopes of getting a response….
Ruse & Berlinerblau & apperently you, Mr. Hoffman, seem to miss the entire point behind the ‘new atheism’. Would you judge books by Josh McDowell & Lee Strobel by the same criteria as Richard Swinburne & Alvin Plantinga? You all seem to be missing that this ‘movement’ is more about popularizing than presenting a philosophically sophisticated defense of atheism. The new atheist authors are aimed to the popular level crowd, to denegrate them for lack of academic rigor is entirely missing the point.
For someone that calls himself a philosopher to frame the issue & poison the well with phrases like ‘hyper-emiricism’ also seems dishonest. What exactly is ‘hyper-empiricism’, where in the philosophical literature can I read about it? Since Berlinerblau made absolutely NO argument as to what is wrong with this invented position, can you elaborate the flaws in it? What makes it ‘hyper’ instead of regular old empiricism? What exactly is wrong with just plain old empiricism, do you guys have a bone to pick with Hume? Are you saying that rationalism is better? If so, then, where are the arguments?
It seems that while Ruse, Berlinerblau & the like want to charge new atheists for not reading enough about atheism, but they appear just as ignorant of advancements in the field. There has been quite a lot of work done recently from the atheist position in philosophy of relgion, things have moved on since the gloomy existentialists of the late 19th/ early 20th century. And even past early to mid 20th century guys like Flew & J.L. Mackie. In the past 20 years or so, there have been powerful atheistic argumentsput forth by guys like Paul Draper, Ted Drange, J.L. Schellenberg, Andrea Weisberger, and Nicholas Trakakis, William Rowe. Graham Oppy, Jordan Howard Sobel, Nicholas Everitt, Michael Martin, Robin Le Poidevin and Richard Gale have put forth extremely sophisticated works that devastate theistic arguments in their modern & classical forms. Gregroy Dawes’ ‘Theism & Explanation’ gives strong arguments for the impotency of theistic explanations. Erik Wielenberg has done great work on why ethics does not need god, Steven Maitzen has written some great papers on how theism cannot ground morality. Erik Baldwin & Evan Fales have put forth powerful objections to reformed epistemolgy. There have been great defenses of naturalistic ethics, reliabilist epistemology, I could go on & on. The new atheist views are completely in line with comtemporary philosophy, as shown by the recent philpapers survey on what most philosophers believe.
For you to endorse the straw-man fest by Berlinerlrau is just absurd, if it’s really a more intellectual atheism you want to see, why not try to help out, ya know, embrace the principle of charity? Saying that new atheists ‘mock every thinker & text’ is surely not being charitable. Even in your own comments, I see you advise someone to learn epistemology & ‘start from Descartes & go from there’, is that really how one should approach the issue? Shoudn’t one dive right into Aquinas when enquiring about the issue? Wouldn’t it be better to point people to contemporary introductions to the subject instead of pointing to a bunch of different authors? It seems like you & the others are more interesting in appearing knowledgeable than helping people understand the issues.
Oops, & I also forgot to correct my typos again!
*apparently*
*empiricism*
*arguments put forth*
As you can imagine, I don’t understand most of the questions, but I was kind of surprised by the responses on free will. I remember reading an American Scientist article where the authors mocked the high support for free will among evolutionary biologists, implying that philosophers were pretty much agreed on no free will.
Harumph.
There are two forms of free will, libertarian & compatiblist. The former is what is rejected, as there are contradictions that arise once the implications of the view are analyzed logically. Most philosophers are compatibilists, which states that there is no formal contradiction with determinism & a carefully defined version of free will. And libertarian free will is what most religious believers talk about when refering to god giving man free will.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
The best evidence that there is no contra-causal free will comes from neuroscience, an fMRI scan shows pre-cognitive brain activity before conscious thought arises.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6S9OidmNZM
Ken, I think you’re (understandably) misunderstanding the results about “free will.”
The large majority of philosophers don’t believe in “libertarian” free will of the sort most people believe in. They think you and your behavior are the product of your environment and heredity and quantum randomness and whatnot, NOT some magical “free will” that gets god off the hook for the Problem of Evil.
The most relevant statistic is what percentage believe in libertarian free will, and that’s 13.7 percent, a small minority.
Almost three fifths of philosophers are “compatibilists” like Dennett, which means they DON’T believe in free will of that sort, but that the term “free will” does refer to something that is still a useful concept on reflection—e.g., we can make sense of the legal distinction of doing something of your own “free will,” i.e., because you want to in a way that recognizably reflects something about who you actually are, as opposed to being coerced into it, laboring under patent delusion, being patently mentally defective, etc.
72 percent of the philosophers surveyed disbelieve in the kind of free will most people believe in, and of the rest, slightly more said “other” (14.9 percent) than “libertarianism” (13.7 percent).
It’s also noteworthy that there are strong correlation between belief in libertarian free will and belief that there’s a God, and that minds aren’t physical, and being a philosopher of religion. Those ininorities are largely the same people.
Of all the correlations between areas of specialization and particular answers to other questions, the highest is between being a philosopher of religion and believing in God, consistent with my view of it as a ghetto for theistic kooks. (But also consistent with the rest of philosophy being a ghetto for atheist kooks, and other less loaded interpretations.)
I think I’m getting through to Hoffman in the comments…
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/the-orthodoxy-of-just-not-believing-in-god/#comment-2286
I don’t necessarily agree. The meaning of that brain activity before conscious thought is not always easy to figure out. I believe that contra-causal free will is a non-starter because it is counter to physics. There is no need for any biological evidence to back up that view. Indeed, it’s hard to see what kind of evidence there could be for the alternative – contra-causal free will.
An a priori belief is never a substitute for hard empirical evidence. You may not need to be convinced of the failure of libertarian free will, but plenty others do. And, I wonder if you actually watched the video I provided, as it explained exactly how they set up the experiment in order to determine what the brain activity meant.
And even ignoring all that & taking you claim of the irrelevance of evidence, the claim that it is a “counter to physics” must be defended by arguments. Merely claiming it is a counter to physics without demonstrating why is just begging the question.
Not at all. It breaks conservation of energy. Contra-causal free will would introduce information into the physical universe, by some unknown mechanism, into the brain (the decisions made by the will).
That would be an argument, then it wouldn’t be begging the question. But merely asserting that is countered by physics witrhout explaining why is fallacious.
> But merely asserting that is countered by physics witrhout explaining why is fallacious.
I guess. I assumed that the physical principles broken by dualistic ideas such as counter-causal free will were sort of obvious, but my mistake :)
Just a minor point re # 269 – Nick Trakakis is not an atheist. He thinks that the Problem of Evil defies resolution, but as I understand him he also thinks that there is some sort of argument from cumulative considerations for the existence of some version of God.
(Hope I haven’t misrepresented you, Nick, if you’re reading this.)
No,, Trakakis isn’t an atheist, but he has published papers defending Rowe’s verions of the evidential problem of evil. He may think the logicak form is not resovable, but he agrees that the EPOE provides strong evidence against gods existence. He’s like Wes Morriston, while beimg theists, both publiah work that is critical of theism.
rjosephhoffman #38 wrote:
Is this, and much of the following justification for theology in this thread, simply a courtiers reply?
God does not exist, so why are the particular characteristics of his non-existence of interest to anyone other than historians?
@Wade, Paul W
Well, one response is that people obviously decide before they can indicate such. That is sort of a “duh”. Even the fastest reflexes will result in a lag between decision to act and action. And deliberation is a cognitive activity in and of itself that should show up prior to the decision being finalized. You have to start thinking about something before deliberating and before acting on deliberation.
Another issue with said MRI studies is that the task does not represent deliberation. On example is where the subject was told to press a button whenever they chose. This means that first of all, there is little motivation to deliberate and a great deal of motivation to act on mere whim. It also means that the subject has already decided to act and are only deciding when.
“It’s also noteworthy that there are strong correlation between belief in libertarian free will and belief that there’s a God, and that minds aren’t physical, and being a philosopher of religion. Those ininorities are largely the same people.”
Some theists are attracted to the idea of free will because they think it gives them an out on the problem of evil (it really does not), which means you do find few theists amoung hard determinists (or the even rarer group who believes in indeterminism and no free will). However, compatibilism actually works rather well with a lot of western theology (it lets them maintain free will and makes divine foreknowledge more feasible). There are a fair share of atheist “libertarians” (again, using the word as it is used in context of philosophy, not politically) and no real reason why the two should be mutually exclusive (the science data from modern physics, for example, leans heavily in favor of indeterminism). I wonder if the slightly higher numbers of theists are not mere coincidence resulting from the fact that Van Inwagen, one of the big names in anti-compatibilism, happens to also be heavy on dualism and religion. Some of Van Inwagen’s religious arguments depend on his metaphysical positions, so theists who encounter him first in the area of religion may be rather pre-disposed to adopt his metaphysics in order to hold onto them.
@Cat,
“Even the fastest reflexes will result in a lag between decision to act and action. And deliberation is a cognitive activity in and of itself that should show up prior to the decision being finalized. You have to start thinking about something before deliberating and before acting on deliberation. ”
Yes, of course, but the point was that there is unconscious brain activity several seconds before thought even began. And I don’t think the point was about deliberation as in a long drawn out process of weighing the pros & cons of some issue. Of course that may involve more cognitive activity than a decision made ‘on a whim’ as you say, but even a decision on a whim involves a weighing of 2 options, however quickly it may happen. This is actually the main point, that our normal decision making process is influenced by factors that are not always at the forefront of cognitive thought.
“and no real reason why the two should be mutually exclusive ”
Acknowledging where the preponderance of opinion lies is not a claim to their mutual exclusivity, of course there are going to be exceptions & counter-examples. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth noting that there is a correlation between libertarian free will, belief in god, some form of dualism & such. Of correlation is not always causation, but the ‘not always’ part is what’s important.
Sure, there are many theists who are also compatibilists, even hard determinists, but they have an awful lot of explaining to do when it comes to the POE, & most attempts to resovle the issues inevitably must redefine some of god’s properties in order to avoid contradiction. If viewed as an actual hypothesis to explain phenomena, the constant need for redefinition of the hypothesis at some point just becomes ad hoc.
“There are a fair share of atheist “libertarians” (again, using the word as it is used in context of philosophy, not politically)”
Yes, there are, & ther are also quite a few atheists whom are political libertarians as well, which is puzzling. The current meaning of the word (how it is used in the U.S. anyway) is, as Chomsky says “a wholesale endorsement of tyranny by the majority”. There is a deification of the market & capitalism, an immunity to counter-arguments, & a complete ignorance of history & economics that rivals creationist misunderstandings of science.
“(the science data from modern physics, for example, leans heavily in favor of indeterminism)”
Does it, though? What data, exactly? The supposed ‘observer effect’ or ‘wave-particle duality’? Before I jump to conclusions, I’ll ask, what exact data leans heavily in favor of determinism? And is this really a question of data itself, or our philosophical interpretation of said data?
“I wonder if the slightly higher numbers of theists are not mere coincidence resulting from the fact that Van Inwagen, one of the big names in anti-compatibilism, happens to also be heavy on dualism and religion.”
You may be on to something there. It’s be interesting to look what actual arguments they find most persuasive & see if those are arguments made by Van Inwagen himself.
I think most philosophers are agreed that the indeterminacy in quantum physics doesn’t give you anything close to libertarian free will in an interesting sense. It’s just being at the mercy of determinism plus randomness, which isn’t any better than being at the mercy of straight determinism, given that we can’t predict the future in practice anyhow. (Because of all the subjectively random stuff—stuff that’s “really random” is not interestingly different for our purposes than stuff that’s effectively random due to unknowns.) And of course, if he’s really omniscient, it is determinist—he knows which way each random event is going to go—and if he’s timeless, he sees it all, all the time.
If God keeps playing Russian roulette with the universe, knowing that inevitably the gun will go off pretty often, he’s still the same kind of asshole. He knows the odds, knows full well how things will go in the long run, and gambles away our fortunes.
Maybe they can blame it on his drinking.
I’m not doing ao hot with typing, it seems, I meant to say *minority*, not majority.
A few notes on QM:
First off, it’s irrelevant if cognition is not much influenced by quantum indeterminacy. Neurons are big (compared with quantum scales). Synapses are big. It has yet to be demonstrated that quantum effects play a significant effect. Or that the effect that they have is in any meaningful way different from pseudorandom but deterministic effects, such as electrical or thermal noise in the brain (admittedly thermal noise itself has some quantum component).
Secondly, I don’t think the issue of indeterminism is settled. The two leading interpretations (or classes of interpretations) of quantum mechanics are the Copenhagen (measurement-induced collapse) interpretation and the Everett (many worlds) interpretation. The data do not yet exist to distinguish them (worse, some interpretations are in principle empirically indistinguishable from each other), and different fields within QM have a different balance between acceptance of Copenhagen, Everett, and alternative explanations. Many experimenters seem to assume Copenhagen <em>de facto</em> in interpreting their results (at least, in the papers I’ve read), whereas, for example, Stephen Hawking once remarked that many worlds were a trivial prediction of quantum mechanics as we understand it (I actually agree that this appears to be the case). Then there are minority interpretations such as non-local hidden variable theories.
I think that it’s possible that the issue could be (partially) settled empirically (I could go on far too long about exactly how). I think Everett stands as the best (most parsimonious) null hypothesis, but it would be better if we had a better idea of what precisely probability means within it (there are some troublesome mathematical and philosophical questions about whether Everett generates no predictions beyond those of QM, or generates some additional, counterfactual predictions).
Anyway, if Everett, non-local hidden variable, or most other no-collapse interpretations are true, the world is actually deterministic, and the apparent indeterminism is due to limitations on human knowledge.
If Copenhagen or objective collapse theories are true, there’s a mechanism within our universe for producing apparent randomness. This would argue strongly for indeterminism (but could not quite prove it, in that there could always be a yet-to-be-discovered, deterministic process-of-the-gaps in there).
But, thirdly, as noted above, indeterminism is not enough to produce libertarian free will. Random actions are not equivalent to choice, but rather to insanity. Libertarian free will seems to require, not mere indeterminism, but a whole new category of events (choices) which are fully generated by psychological causes (such as reasons, personality, and the inner observer), but not actually fully predictable or derivable from an arbitrarily detailed understanding of those causes. I think that this is really an absurdity, so I don’t have any truck with that sort of thing, but there you have it.
I suspect that a lot of supernatural stuff (God, spirits, the soul, whatever) is driven by people thinking that conscious thought is simpler than it is. That makes it easy to postulate consciousness as a cause independent of the material components that generate it (and to do so without explicitly disregarding Occam’s razor). It feels like this indivisible thing not made up of complex parts because we don’t internally have access to every event that builds up cognition. But I suspect (pending further neuroscience) that this is quite illusory.
Same for qualia, really. The sensation of redness may not appear to be composed of a functional process or to be informational in nature, but that only means that, if redness is functional/computational (as implemented in our brains), we don’t have internal access to those processes, not that they are not the actual basis for what we sense.
Well, I guess I didn’t have to say a thing…good explanation,Shawn. There is no reason why quantum indeterminancy would support libertarian free will, let alone reality creation or any of the other insane things said by the Deepaks & other new age woo woo.
Verbose Stoic,
I’m not actually referring to you. :)
I have never seen this supposed parsimoniousness of Everett’s idea. It does absolutely no better than any other interpretation in answering the question “why do I see what I do?”. The answer “because a trillion copies of you see something else” is not a satisfactory answer. Looking back at my personal history, there are still a series of “collapses” of wave functions, no matter what interpretation is chosen. I see the Many Worlds interpretation as being flawed in the way that multiverse theories often are: invoking invisible, causally unconnected alternative realties isn’t really any answer to anything, because the idea of explanatory alternatives only makes sense within a causally connected spacetime.
Yes, I agree. The idea of contra-causal free will seems a contradiction. If something is unpredictable by an arbitrary level of detail of understanding, then it’s also unpredictable for me, so I have no idea why I am making certain choices. How is that free will? So, libertarian free will is a non-starter.
I don’t really think that’s the idea behind parsimoniousness. I mean, it’s not supposed to explain anything better, in the predictive sense, but to explain the same things with fewer assumptions.
Objective collapse invokes a fundamental and so-far unexplained physical difference between the classical and quantum worlds, such that they require different rules. Non-local hidden variables invoke, well, unobservable variables. The Everett interpretation invokes nothing exterior to quantum mechanics, but simply takes the fundamental laws of the quantum world to be the only fundamental laws, with nothing additional.
The many worlds are not an assumption in the Everett interpretation, but in fact necessarily and logically follow from this basic idea, combined with the basic view of a measuring device as something that responds to the object being measured. It’s somewhat like how we assume that photons are emitted by a laser, even if it’s pointed into space and we’ll never detect most of those photons directly; we infer their existence from the presumed constancy of the laws of physics.
Nor is it technically the case that the many worlds are causally disconnected. They are difficult, but in principle possible to interact with (in practice, this is like a un-breaking a coffee mug; entropic considerations make it, for the foreseeable technological future, impossible). The different “worlds” stand in the same relation to each other as the different states do in a superposition.
Anyway, perhaps I should have put it differently; if you accept that the null hypothesis should be that the known fundamental laws in quantum mechanics are the only laws you need, with no hidden variables or additional phenomena necessary, then (some form of) Everett is identical with that hypothesis. The many worlds (or many minds, or many observers, or whatever) are a non-negotiable logical consequence, not a fundamental assumption.
Sean –
Sorry, I probably wasn’t clear. I have been studying the philosophy of different interpretations of quantum mechanics for many years. I’m familiar with the reasons why Many Worlds is considered parsimonious. If the different worlds could interact in a clear way, that would be a way of demonstrating the reality of the interpretation, but that isn’t the case.
The different worlds are a necessity of the interpretation, but that does not make them real. There is a sense in which they aren’t. No matter what interpretation of QM we use, we are still after a probability for what we will actually see, and what we see is a single outcome.
There is the same ontological problem with the Many Worlds of Everett’s interpretation as with non-causally connected multiverses.
There is also the problem of assuming that interpretations of quantum mechanics are anything more than artifacts of our ignorance. It’s a map/territory confusion – problems of the nature of wavefunction collapse could, in a century or two, look at absurd as claims that singularities have physical existence (that were common in the 70s) do now.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. There is no observable difference, of course, in believing in them or not. However, there is no sharp line between such worlds and other types of superposition (in fact the size of detectable superposition is purely a practical matter, so far as we know). To state that they do not exist implies, to me, that you expect that some new phenomenon to intercede to prevent their existence. Collapse would do so, in that it would introduce an irreversible, discontinuous event that would set the probability of observing certain “worlds” to zero. Without postulating such an event, I don’t know what would make them unreal.
I’m confused. Are you asserting anti-realism then? That’s your prerogative, although I have strong reservations about such a view. But the measurement problem is a real and serious question about quantum mechanics. It may go away because we find the answer, or because we replace the theory under which it arises (read: replace quantum mechanics with something better, not a trivial or obviously imminent event). But it will not go away because we decide it just wasn’t ever an important question. I would not say that claims about the physical existence of singularities were ever absurd either; they were implied by the physics of the time, and in some cases still are (although we now have higher hopes and stronger reasons for getting rid of them through various tricks).
I would also say that there are unobservable entities, and then there are unobservable entities. Hidden variables are one type of unobservable entity. Planets which are satellites of stars in another galaxy are of a very different type. The first has to be asserted separately from observation. The latter necessarily exists unless the universe works in a completely different way everywhere but near us. Parsimony argues against the former and for the latter.
If you believe that many worlds generates actual predictions that are clearly wrong, that would be a different sort of argument (I’ve seen it reasonably asserted, and you seem to flirt with it). But I don’t know if that’s actually your position.
When you look back over your history, that is what happened. You only see certain worlds. What you see is precisely the same whether or not many worlds actually existed.
Absolutely not.
Of course it is. But while it is a question, we aren’t really in a position to make statements about the true strangeness of reality.
Those claims always were absurd. But that’s not the point. Making claims of the reality of things that can’t have their existence verified by experiment, that are not causally connected to us, is a strange thing to do. The alternative worlds of Many Worlds are in that state. The question will remain – what makes one of the worlds “real” in the sense that we observe it? Why THIS world?
Let us say that we emit a photon heading away from the Earth, in such a direction that it escapes our galaxy cluster before being absorbed. Let us say, further, that it lasts long enough that the accelerating expansion of the universe separates our future light cone from that of this photon.
It is now impossible, in principle, for us to ever detect the continued existence of this photon after that point. Is it reasonable to believe that the photon continues exist?
For that matter, due to inflation, there can be more of the universe than we can see, since light has a limited time in which to reach us. Is it unreasonable to believe in this universe?
I am asserting that the “invisible” worlds of the many worlds theory are of this type.
As for this:
I believe that I understand what you mean, and I also believe that it is a nonsensical question, or at the very least, a radically different type of question than you think you are asking.
Say I ask “Why was I born myself, and not some other person? Why wasn’t I born a Chinese woman, or an Australian Aborigine in the year 1000 B.C.E., or an alien from another planet?”
Firstly, all that science (or any objective, empirical study) has to say about this question is that I exist and am asking this question here and now. And further, that Chinese women exist, and Australian Aborigines from the year 1000 B.C.E. exist, and aliens may or may not exist, and some of them may have had similar thoughts, but none of them are me or exact copies of me.
Secondly, this question implicitly assumes that I have some unique essence intrinsic to and identifying myself, and that that essence could just as easily have been put into some other person. But of course that is not true. There is no other person I could have been. When I use the (loaded) word “I”, I am referring specifically to this personality of mine which is bound to a specific physical instantiation. Every time I use the word “I”, I am referring to this body and mind of mine, which was born once and is not, and never could be, born anyone else. Asking why I was born into this life is to ask why I am me, which is to say, to ask someone to explain a tautology, which can’t actually be justified further.
Let’s say that many worlds are real, and that they have a split, where in one world an electron is measured to be spin up, and in the other it is measured to be spin down. In one world the scientist asks “What makes this spin-up world ‘real’? Why THIS world?” and in the other the (nearly identical) scientist asks “What makes this spin-down world ‘real’? Why THIS world?”
We can only answer that both worlds are real, and that, for each person, the answer is “When you say that ‘this world’, you are referring to the one you are in, and the word ‘you’ refers to a person who was born with the spin-X world just a moment ago. To say that you see the spin-X world as real is a tautology, and cannot be explained any more obviously.”
Or in more detail, “When the electron alone was in a superposition, the two worlds were very close, and could interact and re-merge. But when you measured it, the mechanism became part of the superposition, and the surrounding environment soon after that. By the time you saw the measurement, the superposition had already hit your brain, and your original self was split into two yous. The only reason you ask this question is because there’s no intuitive way to understand how such a process can split a person in half, without feeling the conceit that ‘you’ are somehow the original. You aren’t, in the banal sense that you are that person a few moments later. You also are that person, in the sense that you have continuity with your previous self, but so are all your other current selves, even though none of them are ‘you’ in the same sense.”
This is all the answer that many worlds gives. While it may not be a pleasing answer, I see no philosophical flaw in it.
They aren’t. It’s not like some material or particle was once causally connected to us, but then vanished. Nothing leaves our reality when other worlds are generated.
It’s not a matter of it being pleasing or not, it is that assigning reality to the other worlds adds no explanatory power: the same situation arises, which is that for any given observer, what will be seen in the future is a matter of probability – it is not determined.
Many Worlds gives no predictive power. It adds nothing to the reality we see around us. Our history is that of a series of collapses of potential, each predicted probabilistically. Many Worlds is, to me, rather like saying that I should not be unhappy about bad news because endless other copies of me had good news (some of them while living on Mars). “So what?” I am entitled to say, and that is my reaction to those other worlds. Showing me the equations doesn’t make those worlds real.
Steve,
I’m no expert, but my impression is that the fairly obvious basic interpretation of QM is that there are other universe-like things interacting with this one, whether you think they’re full-blown universes or little temporary superposed partial universes. We can see the effects of interference between these universish things, and physicists generally agree that it “looks like” there are multiple universish things, and that they really do matter in our universe.
The lack of parsimony in e.g., Copenhagenish interpretations is that you have two kinds of universish things—the full-blown universe that we observe, post-collapse or whatever, and those superposed eigenstate things, which may not be real in the same sense, but seem to behave as though they were real. They have observable effects.
The basic parsimony claim for Many Worlds is that you don’t need to posit two basic kinds of universe-like things. One will do, and the apparent difference between this universe and those superposed thingamajigs is a matter of perspective—if we were inside one of them, it’d look a lot like this one.
That’s analogous to the idea that stars are distant suns—inconceivable numbers of enormous objects like the Sun, very far away. The apparent obvious differences between the sun and a star are just due to being here, not there.
When it was first proposed that the sun is just one of zillions of stars, it struck many people as unparsimonious, because they were counting concrete objects. The idea that all those zillions of tiny points of light were enormous sun-like things seemed ridiculous, and it seemed simpler to think that things are really the way they look—there’s one real sun, and a lot of much, much smaller things called stars.
In general, the history of physics has taught us that reality is not parsimonious about concrete things, and even very very big concrete things. It’s perfectly happy to have inconceivably large numbers of inconceivably large things, in defiance of our anthropocentric assumptions. We’ve learned from repeated bitter experience that that sort of parsimony doesn’t work. Nature is not parsimonious about the number or size of concrete things, just the number of kinds of things.
The theory that the sun is a star was parsimonious, because it reduced the number of kinds of luminous celestial objects from two to one, even if it implied inconceivably vast numbers of vast objects.
Likewise, the story goes, Many Worlds reduces the number of universe-like kinds of things from two to one; if it implies inconceivably vast numbers of inconceivably vast universes, so be it.
> The lack of parsimony in e.g., Copenhagenish interpretations is that you have two kinds of universish things—the full-blown universe that we observe, post-collapse or whatever, and those superposed eigenstate things, which may not be real in the same sense, but seem to behave as though they were real. They have observable effects.
I am familiar with the nature and history of Quantum Mechanics interpretations – it has been an interest of mine for decades. Yeah, I know that’s what anyone says when being argued against, but what I’m saying is that you don’t need to write out long explanations if you don’t want to :)
The “post collapse” aspects of reality don’t have observable effects – if they did then we could distinguish between interpretations, and we can’t.
But that does not provide any more explanatory or predictive power, as I explained.
That’s quite different, because it was about unifying what we see. We don’t see alternative quantum realities.
I find this area fascinating, as I think it is an area where physics and philosophy need to work together more. There is a map/territory grey area here, and we have a long way to go before any claims about what reality is actually like can be made. There are also questions about what “real” means, in any model of reality that involve multiverses. It’s a question which, in my view, is often neglected.
Philosophers would split into realist and instrumentalist categories here. There are books and books and books and books and books about it.
Richard Healey at UofArizona is one philosopher of science currently working at this intersection: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rhealey/
But I would start with David Albert’s _Quantum Mechanics and Experience_: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Experience-David-Albert/dp/0674741137/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301765257&sr=8-1
perhaps followed by Jeffrey Barrett’s _The Quantum Mechanics of Minds and Worlds_: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Minds-Worlds/dp/0199247439/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1301765304&sr=1-1
“But that does not provide any more explanatory or predictive power, as I explained.”
We cannot rely solely on this criterion! ALL scientific theories are underdetermined from the data. For this reason parsimony is necessary.
“They aren’t. It’s not like some material or particle was once causally connected to us, but then vanished. Nothing leaves our reality when other worlds are generated.”
Huh? That’s precisely what happens. A component of the particle’s state that was previously observable disappears. There’s even an apparent violation of conservation laws.
“That’s quite different, because it was about unifying what we see. We don’t see alternative quantum realities.”
What’s unified is the macroscopic and microscopic views of reality. We see both.
Steve,
I think I agree with Sean. You seem to be thinking that parsimony isn’t parsimony if it the more parsimonious theory doesn’t make different predictions than the less parsimonious one. That makes no sense—parsimony isn’t itself about making different predictions, but making the same predictions with lower “theoretical costs.”
Usually, the theories do make different predictions, and that’s very helpful in finding out whether the more parsimonious theory is in fact true, but its not a requirement of parsimony itself.
By the way, my understanding is that multiple worldsish interpretations are particuarly popular among cosmologists (like David Deutsch) who not only think they’re more parsimonious in ways that matter in explaining the very very very early universe, but that they may turn out to have observable consequences once you sort out enough other very weird shit, in which case you’d have real scientific theories, not just “interpretations.”
Or maybe I listen to David Deutsch too much.
Replying to two posts:
If there is a violation, then it would be observable and a way of distinguishing between interpretations, but we can’t.
No, what I’m saying is that parsimony is no indication of either truth or usefulness. One of the most parsimonious ideas in physics is Tegmark’s mathematical multiverse, in which all mathematical objects have reality. But it’s ontological status is extremely dodgy, and it’s hard to see what it explains. I see the same with the claim that all quantum possibilities are real, but perhaps that’s just me :) I think that what is important about physical theories is what they can explain and predict.
Naah :) Deutch’s ideas are pretty weird. His suggestion, for example, that a sufficiently large quantum computer would have to work using other universes has little philosophical foundation. It’s just a fun idea, IMHO.
[…] not just guessing about this : Hoffman says it explicitly in a comment at Butterflies and Wheels: Before anyone adds to the list of my “calumnies” that […]
That’s a great sentiment. Unfortunately, Gnus like Dawkins, and many of their followers, basically say that theology is a discipline without a subject and therefore completely worthless. Centuries of philosophy of religion are thereby allegedly just wrapped up with a few derisive remarks. They show similar disdain for historical complexity when it comes to talking about religion — i.e., every time moderates and extremists are lumped together, every time the common, peaceful moderates are scapegoated to be scapegoats for rare, crazed, extremists, etc.
peaceful moderates are scapegoated to be scapegoats for rare, crazed, extremists, etc. –> peaceful moderates are scapegoated to be rare, crazed, extremists, etc.
Nick – theology is not the same thing as philosophy of religion. Really not.
And this business of complexity cuts both ways. It’s too simple to lump “moderates” and “extremists” together in all ways at all times with no exceptions and let it go at that – but by the same token it’s too simple to separate them in all ways at all times with no exceptions and let it go at that. It’s not the case that they are identical but it’s also not the case that they have nothing whatever in common, or that what they have in common doesn’t matter while what separates them does.