Tired debates

Comments (57)

1. A great, much-needed post — I’ve been thinking similar things too. That schoolyard-level exchange of insults and idiocy was getting out of hand. It’d be nice if some science bloggers actually blogged about, you know, science, rather than arguing over it to death…

2. Points 2 and 3 on accommodationism make an essential distinction so clearly that most of the cases that people argue about will simply disappear, leaving time to discuss something interesting or useful.

   Oh, and Santa Claus is your uncle.

   Good job, though.

   Now I must pick a nit about U and non-U. Must you blame everything on Americans? As the Wikipedia article makes clear, it was about British, or maybe just English, usage and class. (I must refresh my memory on the point by re-reading Nancy Mitford’s book soon. It’s well worth it. (I also like The Duke of Bedford’s Book of Snobs and not only for the unbeatable title.)

   The only important American connection was that Ogden Nash read the book and was inspired to write one of his rambling irregular poems about his imaginary cousin who suggested at dinner that everyone should stop talking about money (the only subject Americans talked about) and talk about the English upper classes instead. Which they do. It was rather a grand sendup of the class system, and Mitford just simply adored it.

   Oh, and the points about who should educate the public about science should also end that debate. And will, just before my derivatives contracts in the pig-wing futures market pay off.

   1. I apologise for the implication that this was an American invention, but American upper classishness is as bad as the English in all but monarchism. And I read it in Nash as a kid, which is why I made that connection.

      1. Ah, you saw it in Nash’s poem! OK, that excuses everything.

3. 1. So long as one is realistic about what it is to be “rational”, rational people may be both religious and scientific.

   2. An association that represents science may not make a meta-scientific claim about the compatibility of religion and science.

   3. An association that represents the place of science in education and society, like the NCSE, is entitled to.

   4. I think science makes religion highly unlikely to be true – any religion. But that’s not part of the accommodationism debate; rather, it’s part of a wider and more interesting issue, the nature of religion, that I will continue to discuss.

   I agree with much of what you have to say, and at the same time disagree with about as much which I won’t comment on, but I do have to take issue with this list, because there are different ways to be realistic about what it means to be rational. Describing a philosophical position as “rational” and describing a person as “rational” are two completely different things.

   Yes, a rational person might believe both science and religion. So any realistic definition of a rational person would include that. However, a rational person will still hold many irrational beliefs (this is a psychological and sociological necessity). From what I can tell, a rational person is just a person who tries most of the time to be rational, but no one can be rational all the time.

   As your point (4) makes clear, believing both science and religion is not a rational philosophical position to hold. Science renders traditional religious claims highly unlikely. So by a reasonable definition of rational in terms of what ideas can be reasonably accommodated with each other (regardless of the quality of the person doing the accommodating), science and religion are incompatible and to accept both is irrational. Even an otherwise irrational person could rationally decide on some one particular issue. Whether science is compatible with religion shouldn’t revolve around how good some certain people are–it should be an issue of whether the ideas are compatible with each other.

   I do think that’s relevant to the “accommodation” debate, because usually it is the latter meaning of “rational” that “anti-accommodationists” (I use the scare quotes because I dislike the us-vs-them attitudes that such terms engender) have in mind, while the “accommodationists” usually have the former. In fact, the whole reason there’s a debate over this at all has a lot to do with the fact that people spend a lot of time talking past each other.

   I see no contradiction in saying that Francis Collins is a rational person, but he is being irrational when he claims that both science and traditional Christianity are true. I guess that puts me in a weird position in these debates, but that’s how I see it. “The Language of God” contains some truly pathetic arguments attempting to harmonize the two, and the only thing I could conclude after reading it was that he already believed both–regardless of rationality–and desperately sought out any cheesy rationalizations he could to make excuses for what he believed.

   That doesn’t necessarily make him an irrational person. But the special pleading and question begging in his arguments certainly make his accommodation of science to religion completely and utterly irrational.

   1. Oh, and as for the particular incident which kicked off this whole kerfuffle, I made my opinions on that known at the other John’s blog:

      http://blog.jmlynch.org/2010/04/15/pigliucci-on-the-new-atheism/#comment-9396

      1. “Oh, and as for the particular incident which kicked off this whole kerfuffle, I made my opinions on that known at the other John’s blog”

         I saw that and replied. I think you are confused as to what DeDora’s actual stance is, since you called his supposed position B.S., only to espouse DeDora’s actual position yourself. I’m afraid that you’ve been distracted by PZ’s theatrical invective and neglected to notice that PZ built up a straw man.

   2. Wes, I’ve made points about what rationality of persons is before on this blog. In particular I appeal to bounded rationality as a realistic account (one can only choose based on the information and the time available, and one uses heuristics to make decisions about what to believe). So overall I agree, but I would disagree with your blanket claim that one cannot be rationally scientific and religious – traditional religious claims are a moveable feast. I know many who think, for example, that the virgin birth and the various miracles are allegories not to be taken literally (these Christians exempt the resurrection, mostly, although I’ve known a few who do not), and I’ve known unitarians who take it all to be allegory and theological parables. I’ve known Muslims who take the rational side of their religion as the core and reject the folk tales. So I think one has to always qualify what one is denoting by the procrustean and plastic term “religion”.

      1. Hi John.

         Sorry I neglected your post in my back and forth with JJ.

         I think you and I are 99% in agreement here. Religion isn’t just about beliefs. It’s a form of social organization, and (from my point of view) the beliefs are a byproduct of the social organization (and other things, such as cognitive evolution).

         So religion, broadly construed, can mean all sorts of things. Those things which don’t involve supernatural beliefs would be compatible with science.

         However, sociologically speaking, most religious adherents really do believe a number of supernatural claims which are wholly incompatible with science (the resurrection included). For better or worse, it is the compatibility of these beliefs that is usually meant when “religion vs. science” debates arise.

         I don’t think that science leaves any room at all for traditional theism. The notion that a personal entity controls the universe simply doesn’t square with the universe that science is describing. Most religion (at least in the West) has traditional theism as its cornerstone, and this form of religion is not rationally compatible with science.

         I’ve read numerous attempts to reconcile the two, and all the attempts I’ve read have been either special pleading (e.g. “reformed” epistemology), argument from ignorance (e.g. “fine tuning”) and/or wishful thinking (e.g. “the will to believe”). Since all the arguments for reconciliation that I am familiar with rely on rather obvious fallacies, I can only conclude that they are not rationally grounded. (This fits your definition of bounded rationality on my part, I hope.)

         1. De nada.

            When arguing against a position, you are required, by the Principle of Charity, to argue against the best construal of that position, not, say, the folk or popular version. So one might, for example, argue against a Hans Küng or a Paul Tillich or a Rudolph Bultmann, depending on what you take the position to be. [I’m not up on the latest “liberal” theologians.] And this is far from trivial. So, for example, if you think that Thomism is at least an intellectually respectable position to defend, as I do, even though I think it is false, you had better engage with the best of those arguments and not, say, those of some ignorant church political hack with a bishop’s mitre (like the present Archbishop of Sydney).

            On this basis, I think that opponents of theism, which I am not, tend to overestimate the extent to which science resolves these ultimately philosophical questions. When I am trying to explain to (usually science) undergraduates what the difference between science and philosophy is, I tell them: science is what you do when the facts resolve the matter; philosophy is what you do when they don’t. And in the case of a (suitably empirically innoculated) religious dispute, facts do not resolve the questions like “Is there a god?”, “does god make something right or wrong?” and so on.

            It happens that popular Christianity, Islam, Hassidic Judaism, and so on are all contrary-to-fact, and so it is a scientific matter whether they are true or not, at least when you take them as a whole. But atomise them into claims of various kinds, with degrees of core value, and you can make out a case that what gets falsified by science are not necessarily core claims, and Bultmann, for example, treats all the miracles as allegorical and hence immune to falsification (why one might remain Christian under such a construal is another issue). So yes, the populist versions are false, but, and this is crucial, we knew that already. This doesn’t need a new movement to tell us this. What matters, what is at issue, is whether all religions are falsified because some or some part of all, are. Scope matters here, and it seems to me that the “new”, or affirmative, atheists are often blind to matters of quantification here. Some ? all.

         2. John, I find the following a bit problematic:

            When arguing against a position, you are required, by the Principle of Charity, to argue against the best construal of that position, not, say, the folk or popular version.

            The reason I find it problematic, is that the people who adhere to that position often don’t agree with “the best construal of that position”. An easy example is Christianity, where there are many somewhat more rational interpretations by theologists than what e.g. the fundamentalists presents. Yet the fundamentalists would reject those more rational interpretations.

            So, if you argue against the best version, you are arguing against something which many people who hold the position rejects.

         3. Damn blockquotes. Was only the first paragraph which was supposed to be quoted.

         4. Fixed.

         5. That’s as may be. But when you argue against a position, it is independent of the views of the worst thinkers who are associated with it. Otherwise we open ourselves to the same approach – most atheists and agnostics really do have views that are objectionable in one way or another. But we do not want our own views to be judged on that basis.

         6. When arguing against a position, you are required, by the Principle of Charity, to argue against the best construal of that position, not, say, the folk or popular version.

            But when you argue against a position, it is independent of the views of the worst thinkers who are associated with it.

            This is interesting. I’m with you on this as a philosophical exercise for a professional academic philosopher, or one that merely loves philosophy and is attracted to the intellectual fruits that the philosophical endeavor yields. That’s what happens when one is in the position of choosing one’s battles.

            However, when the battle is foisted upon us (as those irrational religious thinkers and laymen alike have done to evolutionary thinkers), is it not presumptuous for you to define the rules of engagement such that the majority of your potential interlocutors would be defined into defeat before the battle even begins?

            If those liberal theologians are the only thinkers that the principle of charity allows you to address, are you not simply wielding the principle of charity as a cudgel to summarily dismiss their position? After all, for those holding the “inferior position” being backed into the “liberal theological” position is nearly as undesirable as being pushed to the non-accommodationist position. Does wielding the principle of charity not require a justification as to why those other positions are not the best that theology has to offer? If so, does this justification itself not simply collapse back into questioning those “less worthy” more fundamentalist theological alternatives in the first place?

            In other words, who gets to decide how to apply the charity?

         7. If that’s word salad, I apologize. Does it make sense or do I need to figure out a better way to write it?

         8. Ah well, I really did think that the Principle of Charity really did get to the crux of the matter, and was curious as to anyone’s thoughts on it. I guess I should learn to write more crisply or maybe this is just a boring topic? Here’s one more go:

            Let there be 4 parties in a debate: Ae (extreme atheists), Am (moderate atheists), Tl (liberal theists) and Tf (fundamentalist theists). If the Principle of Charity is being invoked by an Am philosopher like John such that he only addresses the arguments of Tl philosophers like Plantinga (or whoever), does that not automatically exclude the arguments of Tf proponents?

            I understand that (and agree) that Tf arguments are weaker, but I know that a plurality of theists (at least in many regions in the U.S.) are Tf proponents.

            So, while I’d be happy (as an Ae) if all Tf’s become Tl’s, that isn’t the case. And I see that, at a bare minimum, it would be desirable to move theists into the more liberal category if not into the atheist categories. This would help in all sorts of things. It seems that applying the Principle of Charity is at odds with moving Tf’s at all.

            And if one applies the Principle of Charity, does it not then become necessary to justify why a position held by large vocal plurality is dismissed outright? And does that justification not then become an argument against their position?

            This is why I never really quite “got” why people make the arguments that you and Alan Orr have made that we ought to focus on the “good” arguments. Don’t get me wrong, I do understand why in a professional context you would want to do that. After all, academic philosophy has moved on to more interesting discussions, and it profits nobody to address those tired arguments. The field has arrived at a consensus: Tf arguments are vapid. This is the same for research in evolution: nobody needs to belabor common ancestry in academic research. Creationist arguments are vapid.

            But as a social conversation, we certainly need people writing books about the facts of evolution and advocating an understanding of it. Along the same vein, we need to be challenging the more honest echelon of thinkers among the Tf’s to consider moderating their beliefs. If PZ only had Tm’s and their moderate antics to rail against, his blog and the constituency it represents would wither and die for lack of material. The accommodationist vs. guerilla-militant-fascio-atheist debate would be moot. That’s why I asked.

         9. I’m busy right now, but I will respond when I can.

         10. “In other words, who gets to decide how to apply the charity?”

             It’s entirely up to you!

             You decide when you decide how widely to cast your net. If you state without qualification that science and, say, Christianity, are incompatible, then you’ve chosen to take on the task of dealing with the tougher targets as well as the easy ones. If you want to make a statement that the YEC’s version of Christianity is incompatible with science then you don’t need to address other more rational/less irrational forms of Christianity.

             What’s not kosher is to do the latter and claim (or write as if) you’ve done the former.

   3. “However, sociologically speaking, most religious adherents really do believe a number of supernatural claims which are wholly incompatible with science (the resurrection included).”

      What do you mean by “incompatible with science” exactly? Would it be “incompatible with science” for colleagues of Edwin Abbott’s Square to entertain the possibility that Square might be right about the existence of Spheres, even if their instruments haven’t recorded any sightings of circles lately?

      Further, would it impugn a Flatland scientist’s integrity to hold that Square’s testimony is true without empirical evidence to back it up, if said scientist took care not to allow this unverified faith to affect his interpretation of the more mundane and reproducible happenings in the measurable realm of Flatland?

      1. “Would it be “incompatible with science” for colleagues of Edwin Abbott’s Square to entertain the possibility that Square might be right about the existence of Spheres, even if their instruments haven’t recorded any sightings of circles lately?”

         If square couldn’t replicate the observation, yes. The scientific method relies heavily on replication.

         “Further, would it impugn a Flatland scientist’s integrity to hold that Square’s testimony is true without empirical evidence to back it up, if said scientist took care not to allow this unverified faith to affect his interpretation of the more mundane and reproducible happenings in the measurable realm of Flatland?”

         No. Nor would it impugn his “integrity” to hold that square’s visions are true while square was on peyote. But a singular observations made under unreplicable circumstances are legion and haven’t proven particularly useful in describing the world. What would impugn the Flatland scientist’s integrity would be to:

         1) give more weight to the reports of Sphere than he gives to the reports of the great sages Cube or Cone;
         2) claim that the visions of Sphere are useful in explaining Flatland.

   4. “If square couldn’t replicate the observation, yes. The scientific method relies heavily on replication.”

      It certainly does, which is its strength in dealing with objective measurement, but its weakness when dealing with things for which subjective evidence plays a critical role: e.g. witness testimony in law and the historical record. So regardless of religion, it’s clear that imposing the hypothetico-deductive model as some benchmark for rational thinking is a bit heavy handed and impractical.

      As it is, the Flatland analogy demonstrates the limitations of the Teh Method anyway. If we assume that Sphere exists in the analogy, then if he never dips his bulk into Flatland’s plane again, Square’s colleagues would have been duped into committing a Type I error.

      Now, my personal response to this would be the Apathetic Agnostic position of, “So what? If we can’t detect Sphere’s influence, then to our subjective viewpoint it’s irrelevant whether Sphere exists or otherwise.”

      But this is purely an expression of philosophical preference on the matter, and has no bearing on my ability to conduct science. Similarly, I see no reason to think that a scientist’s appeal to Pink Unicorns on the big “Why?” questions of life should necessarily hinder his ability to approach thoroughly and meticulously the material evidence regarding the “How?” questions of the observable world and its various machinations.

      1. its weakness when dealing with things for which subjective evidence plays a critical role: e.g. witness testimony in law and the historical record

         Things that are difficult to establish are difficult to establish. Or more succinctly, hard things are hard. Notably absent from your comment is an alternative, superior method for establishing “facts of the matter” when even science has failed. Apart from establishing a conservative null hypothesis and raising the bar for rejecting it, do you actually propose anything to move things forward? All I can perceive is a comment to the effect: “Some things are hard to answer, even in the real world! If you make up sh!t with the goal of evading scrutiny, it can even be impossible in principle ‘know’ certain ‘issues’.”*

         The rest of your post indicates a wanton disregard for Wes’ statement (the part you block-quoted) and my perspective, which I’ve elaborated in this thread at least twice. You’re entitled to that perspective and I don’t necessarily feel it is profitable to seek to disagree, but given the context, your comments seem like a non sequitur. Sure, if we engage in intellectual masturbation and insist on dealing with invisible pink unicorns or garage dragons that breath heatless fire, we can arrive at a disingenuous truce with people who love to Russell’s teapots. As many have demonstrated before, this is pretty insipid at best and just plain wrong at worst. But, for the moment, allow me to give that approach the benefit of the doubt and charitably accept that it is a useful way of thinking just to humor you*.

         As much as I’d prefer that fantasy land of harmless, insipid flights of fancy that have nothing to do with the material world to what we currently have, it is still a fantasy land. In reality, where I have to raise children and educate undergrads, it isn’t the islamo-fascio-neo-stalin-atheists against the peace-loving paragons of reasonable theism. The “enemies” are retrograde fundamentalist theists who are well-funded, vocal, dishonest, and/or stupid. They are the Ken Hams, Kent Hovinds, Don McLeroys, the DI flaks, etc. And they are having a detrimental and growing impact on our culture. The problem is so bad that even my grandmother, who set me straight when, as a 5 year old, I loudly exclaimed “Bull!!!” to a planetarium narration that proclaimed the age of the universe to be > 13 By, now says that kids should be learning about ID. And it is because her conservative Christianity makes her receptive such fool notions. At a crucial moment in my life she steered me away from wild-eyed crazy fundamentalism, and now decades later, she herself is being swallowed by its stealth cousin.

         This is the target you set for yourself:

         However, sociologically speaking, most religious adherents really do believe a number of supernatural claims which are wholly incompatible with science (the resurrection included).

         If you’re going to choose to quarrel such a difficult target, you need to come better armed. And when pressed on the matter, you aren’t allowed to pretend that you’ve addressed that issue while instead retreating the save haven of Russell’s teapot and other “unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge”. The resurrection of a three day dead corpse who is the son of a human woman and a godly father is no more or less reasonable than 6 day creation and a 6,000 yo world or Last Thursdayism. And since when has “evidence” of a singular event reported by 4 or fewer eye-witnesses with conflicts of interest decades after the fact with no subsequent corroborating evidence served as the basis for any useful knowledge?

         * In any event, it would probably be more profitable to read the exchange between William Samuel Lilly and Thomas Henry Huxley with regard to some of these issues. A memorable quote from Huxely was: “the foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.”

      2. As it happens, while I still hold to the tenor of Wilkins original comments, I just read Louis’ post and found his arguments highly persuasive, even with regard to his objection to the absolute claim that “science is compatible with religion”, which is a step further than stating that science is not necessarily incompatible with religion.

         “If you’re going to choose to quarrel such a difficult target,”

         I didn’t necessarily intend to quarrel with it, I was looking for clarification first (which I think Louis might have laid out about as well as it can be).

         As for fighting the material woes inflicted by appeals to unverifiable dogma, I’m completely with you, although I would sooner open up the front on all such ideologies. You say “the enemies” are the creationists &c, but I think these folk are small potatoes compared to some of the far more influential and deleterious political groups that are operating at a much higher political level than school boards. Besides, when you cut underneath the veneer of religiosity, you often find that the underlying motive of many of the more influential religious conservative groups is the pursuit of some extreme secular political agenda; whether traditionalist/progressive, nationalist/regionalist, libertarian/socialist or whatever. That’s why I think Hitchens rather missed the mark with his inference that “religion poisons everything”; it is only in very rare cases ever a cause, and more often merely a foil for it’s putative “crusaders”, who usually have their eye on more mundane things, like political clout and the spoils that comes with it.

4. Excellent, John, as almost always. (Sometimes you’re just good.)

5. Interesting post. Can you clarify a few things for me?

   1. So long as one is realistic about what it is to be “rational”, rational people may be both religious and scientific.

   Do you believe that rational people can be both scientific and believers in astrology? Do you believe that a rational person can be a scientist and believe in UFO abductions? Do you believe that a rational person can be scientific and opposed to childhood vaccinations?

   2. An association that represents science may not make a meta-scientific claim about the compatibility of religion and science.

   I agree, except that I would say “should not.”

   3. An association that represents the place of science in education and society, like the NCSE, is entitled to.

   I agree. NCSE can do whatever it wants. However, don’t you think they have to declare that it’s their personal OPINON that science and religion are compatible? Are they under any obligation to point out that many scientists and philosophers disagree with them?

   4. I think science makes religion highly unlikely to be true – any religion. But that’s not part of the accommodationism debate; rather, it’s part of a wider and more interesting issue, the nature of religion, that I will continue to discuss.

   Hmmm … I’m looking forward to learning about this distinction. It looks to me like you’re agreeing that science and religion are in conflict. The accommodationists don’t agree with you.

   1. Yes, I know rational people who believe in astrology. Their belief in astrology is not rational, but they are, usually.

      But there’s a hidden petitio in your implied critique here (and explicitly in other comments you have made). Suppose we put it this way:

      “Do you believe that rational people can be both scientific and conservatives?” If the speaker is a radical, this may seem like a knockdown argument against conservatism and accommodationism of tory views with science. But that presumes that only the radical view is consistent with science, which is the point at issue.

      You, PZ and the rest all presume that religion, all religion and not merely the folk religion that Dawkins explicitly targets in TGD, is incompatible with science. Moreover, you presume that if any part of a religious view is incompatible with science, then all of it is, as if religion were a single coherent worldview that is, so to speak, irreducibly complex. But this is precisely what is at issue.

      Yes, most of what passes as religion is incompatible with science, but there are, as I never tire of saying, religious positions that are not, and moreover, people have views they haven’t properly ramified so that they contain multitudes. If it is true of Whitman, it is also true of you and every other human being who happens not to be a Laplacean Demon.

      1. John Wilkins said,

         Yes, I know rational people who believe in astrology. Their belief in astrology is not rational, but they are, usually.

         Thank-you. I rather suspected that’s what you meant. So, according to your definition of rational behavior, it’s OK to be completely irrational on some very important topics (e.g., UFO abductions, astrology) and still be considered a rational person.

         I guess that’s how philosophers think. It explains a lot ….. 🙂

         But there’s a hidden petitio in your implied critique here (and explicitly in other comments you have made). Suppose we put it this way:

         “Do you believe that rational people can be both scientific and conservatives?” If the speaker is a radical, this may seem like a knockdown argument against conservatism and accommodationism of tory views with science. But that presumes that only the radical view is consistent with science, which is the point at issue.

         Exactly. But that’s not the point I’m discussing. The point you seemed to be making is that even if conservativism is proven to be irrational you would still claim that a person can be rational and a conservative. Right?

         You, PZ and the rest all presume that religion, all religion and not merely the folk religion that Dawkins explicitly targets in TGD, is incompatible with science.

         John, that’s an untrue statement and after all these years you should know better. I have said on many occasions that there is at least one form of religion that seems compatible – strict Deism. I’ve also said there are “religions” that don’t require Gods and these are OK (e.g., some forms of Buddhism).

         Let’s get beyond these exceptions. Please don’t mischaracterize my position.

         (P.S. Dawkins, PZ, I, and many others have tried hard to address the “sophisticated” arguments for the existence of God whenever we encounter them. None of them have stood up to rational examination.)

         Moreover, you presume that if any part of a religious view is incompatible with science, then all of it is, as if religion were a single coherent worldview that is, so to speak, irreducibly complex. But this is precisely what is at issue.

         It’s not an issues with me. Take it up with someone else. What I say is that the vast majority of religious claims are incompatible with science. Therefore it’s perfectly acceptable to say that science and religion are in conflict (with a few minor exceptions).

         Yes, most of what passes as religion is incompatible with science, but there are, as I never tire of saying, religious positions that are not, and moreover, people have views they haven’t properly ramified so that they contain multitudes.

         We agree. Where we differ is that you focus on the exceptions and I focus on the generality. From my perspective you are granting religion a special privilege that you wouldn’t grant to any other belief that conflicts with science.

         I suspect I could conjure up a form of astrology that was so wishy-washy it didn’t directly conflict with science. If I did that, would you immediately become an accommodationist in the war between science and astrology?

         I doubt it. But religion is different, right?

6. I’m afraid that you’ve been distracted by PZ’s theatrical invective and neglected to notice that PZ built up a straw man.

   Maybe. I’m sure you have a good point to make in regard to how PZ’s actions influence mine.

   An alternative possibility is that you’re still bitter about being banned from PZ’s site for insulting his teenage daughter. Since I know as much about you as you know about me, I figure my statement about your motivations is about as well founded as yours about mine.

   1. I didn’t speculate on your emotional motivations, but rather claimed that you were fooled by fallacious argument.

      No, you did not claim that I was fooled by a fallacious argument. You claimed that I missed the fallacious argument because I was distracted by theatrics:

      I’m afraid that you’ve been distracted by PZ’s theatrical invective and neglected to notice that PZ built up a straw man.

      And you’re wrong. I don’t care about PZ’s theatrics. But I do care about De Dora’s interpretation of the constitution and constitutional law, because I think he’s wrong.

      1. Wes: “No, you did not claim that I was fooled by a fallacious argument. You claimed that I missed the fallacious argument because I was distracted by theatrics”

         Wes, the theatrics are part of the fallacious argument. Using invective to obscure the fallacies in other parts of one’s argument (like a straw man) is itself fallacious.

   2. Oops! The above was supposed to be posted down below. I clicked the wrong button. My bad…

7. Wes: “An alternative possibility is that you’re still bitter about being banned from PZ’s site for insulting his teenage daughter.”

   Do you really want to bring that up?

   First, what I has said about his daughter amounted to pointing out that she had acted like the sort of “strident” atheist that PZ said didn’t exist, with “strident” being his word choice. She had referred to other theists as retards–her choice of words, not mine–and I had said those words were “immature.” If showing that she was disturbingly mirroring her father’s less-than savory attitudes is an insult, then that was an insult. From here, PZ Myers lost whatever moral high ground he had.

   First, he embellished what happened and claimed that I had badgered him about his daughter on his own blog, which is false.

   Second, a couple years later, when someone pointed out that what he had said was untrue, he tried to cover for the lack of evidence in his favor by making up the claim that I had “made extremely inappropriate comments about my under-age daughter’s sex life” and then saying that the comments were deleted. There are a couple red flags here, one, that he hadn’t mentioned it before, and two, that according to his story, the banning would have had to coincide with a sudden change in my M.O., from making lewd comments about Skatje to pointing out that she had insulted others. Rather lucky timing, that.

   Third, only a year after that, PZ changed his story again, forgetting all about his previous explanation for the lack of evidence for his embellished claims and then saying “he made the one post about it here, but then I found him complaining about Skatje on other sites, too.” Trouble is, what two complaints exist aren’t insults at all, with one being a straight answer to someone’s question, “Do we also hear of young kids raised under atheist parents spouting off disrespectful words in the same way,” and the other a criticism where I write that she has “sometimes been part of the problem as well as the solution” and that she “almost gets it when she writes about militant atheism.” (The word choice of “militant” was mainly because previous commenters had used it.) This is not exactly a rabid heaping of abuse. Oddly enough, even though Myers’ latest story is substantially different from the one on his Dungeon page, with the claims of badgering now gone, the Dungeon page still has his original story.

   Am I bitter? Of course. Who wouldn’t be bitter about being repeatedly slandered with little recourse to set the record straight? And what I see now is Myers slandering someone else. DeDora at least has a better forum than I do.

   1. By the way, sorry for further discussing the mess between myself and PZ into our host’s “living room,” but if Wes is going to try to bring up that mess, he should at least expect me to defend myself. I would rather retire this digression now and go back to our irregularly scheduled bits on DeDora, accommodationism, etc.

      1. Well, you entirely missed the point of me bringing it up. I was pointing out how absurd it is to speculate about people’s motivations when you have very little information.

         How do you know that my objections to De Dora’s constitutional reasoning have anything to do with PZ? How do you know that PZ’s rants have any influence on me at all?

      2. Wes: “How do you know that PZ’s rants have any influence on me at all?”

         Well, there is the matter that you echo one of PZ’s misrepresentations of DeDora, namely that DeDora had flat-out claimed that religious claims, such as the Earth being 6,000 rather than 4.5 billion years old, cannot be contradicted in science classes. There is also the matter that ridicule is so often used as a way to razzle-dazzle an audience into believing false ideas. I suppose, though, that I could be horribly uncharitable and conclude that you had misread DeDora all on your own.

         Wes: “Well, you entirely missed the point of me bringing it up. I was pointing out how absurd it is to speculate about people’s motivations when you have very little information.”

         If you wanted to do that, you could have picked an example that (a) could not be construed as an attempt to poison the well, and (b) wasn’t a propagation of someone else’s slander. PZ probably means well, but when he goes off the rails, he really goes off, and you shouldn’t take PZ’s words at face value.

      3. Any attempt to speculate on people’s emotional motivations when you know very little about them is an attempt to poison the well. If you begin a debate with something like, “Well, I’m afraid that you’ve been emotionally influenced by so-and-so, you person I know nothing about,” then you are poisoning the well from the outset.

         As for De Dora’s claims, I discussed those over at the other John’s blog. There’s no need to cross-post them here.

      4. Wes: “Any attempt to speculate on people’s emotional motivations when you know very little about them is an attempt to poison the well.”

         I didn’t speculate on your emotional motivations, but rather claimed that you were fooled by fallacious argument. I don’t have to know you or PZ that well to see that (1) PZ’s rhetoric was misleading, and (2) that you accepted false claims made by PZ. If Glenn Beck had presented a screed, and I noticed that someone had echoed the sentiments of that screed, would it really be much of a leap to conclude that someone had been led astray by Beck’s excesses?

   2. Do not rehearse this here. Family is right out of bounds.

      1. Understood.

      2. And it wasn’t OK for Wes to bring it up in the first place, right?

      3. Any attack on anyone’s family by anyone is out of bounds and will result in the person making the attack being banned from ET.

      4. Agreed, and I respect your rules. But that doesn’t quite answer my question.

         1. I was being critical of anyone who raises that issue. I do not intend to engage in that debate.

         2. Understood. Please disregard my follow up question – we posted at the same time.

      5. To be clear, I’m not questioning your authority. I’m honestly wondering how JJ can take part in discusions here if commenters can bring up this specific incident from his past as a debating technique but he is unable to reply without breaking your rule.
         The commentors are technically not breaking your rule, but at least in this case I thought it was at least an attempt to change the subject.

      6. TD,

         You misunderstood to. I honestly don’t know JJ and PZ’s background, and I don’t care about it. All I know is that he’s in PZ’s dungeon.

         I have no idea if bitterness towards PZ influenced him at all. Which is to say, I know as much about how PZ motivates him as he does about how PZ motivates me. The point is that it’s poisoning the well to impute motives to people when you have no evidence at all that those are their motives.

      7. Wes, I did not indicate that you had said anything about PZ’s family. I am merely insisting that nobody does.

      8. Wes, I read your post at the link and I read what you wrote here, and I’m not misunderstanding anything.
         John set specific boundaries and I merely sought to clarify them, which he did: “I was being critical of anyone who raises that issue.”
         As to the main issue Ramsey has with your post, he has a valid point – one echoed elsewhere by people who don’t share either of your motivations, notably dododreams.blogspot.com
         Sorry, no direct link as I’m smart/dumb phoning this in.

      9. TB: “Sorry, no direct link as I’m smart/dumb phoning this in.”

         I think you mean this link: http://dododreams.blogspot.com/2010/04/of-cats-and-dogs.html

      10. That’s the link

8. Wherever religion makes claims about the natural world which can be investigated by science there is the potential for conflict. Even the most Chamberlainite accommodationist will have difficulty reconciling the claim of a 6,000 year-old world with the geological and radiometric evidence for one that is 4.5 billion years old.

   On questions of morality, however, religion
   is entitled to be heard. Otherwise, how would you decide scientifically whether a fertilized egg is entitled to the right to life or whether stem cells should be harvested from embryos that are surplus to requirements at IVF facilities?

9. Philosophers certainly should be in the business of identifying and arguing against the strongest arguments for the positions they oppose. But that doesn’t entail that we should only argue against the most intellectually plausible positions that are in the vicinity. Sometimes, it’s important to argue against important but less plausible positions, if these are the ones that have worrying implications and actual public influence. As philosophers, we do have to consider the strongest arguments for those positions, but not those for some other position that may be more intrinsically plausible but may also not have the implications that worry us.

   I think this distinction is important. By all means, engage with Alvin Plantinga or William Lane Craig or Richard Swinburne, or whoever is putting the strongest arguments for orthodox Abrahamic theism and a version of traditional Christianity. But there’s not necessarily any reason (unless you want to) to engage with Tillich or Kung or Spong, who may be putting arguments for something rather different.

   Some of the criticisms of the New Atheists seem to miss this point.

   OTOH, the New Atheists sometimes seem to miss the sort of points I’m discussing over here:

   http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2010/04/if-i-could-lead-cat-herd.html

   Or so it could be argued.

   1. I think you may misunderestimate the number of intelligent religious believers who read and agree with Spong, Küng and even Tillich (although I will admit there is no church of Tillichism, for a very good reason, the same reason why there is no faculty of Heideggerianism). I have encountered them without even trying, in the sciences and academe, and even in the occasional suburban parish.

10. John S. Wilkins: “That’s as may be.”

    And that’s a wishy-washy reply to a solid objection to your reasoning. There simply is no best construal of Christian doctrine, as you yourself admit, so the Principle of Charity does not apply generally.

    Wilkins: “Bultmann, for example, treats all the miracles as allegorical and hence immune to falsification…”

    And I’m sure many Christians would consider Bultmann’s theology a complete joke if not an abomination; so why are they wrong? I may have missed it, but have you provided a metric for determining what constitutes “worst thinkers?”

11. Hi John,

    Here’s my rough thoughts on the matter:

    1) It seems that “debate” is vastly confused by different arguments at different levels.
    Firstly, there are “matters of fact” (for want of a better term). There exists a subset of religious claims that are claims about the universe. These are ostensibly empirical claims, or at least claims open to empirical or reasoned analysis. Right from the outset I want to make a key distinction between rational in a personal sense and rational in an epistemological sense, I’ll call these rational(p) and rational(e). The vast majority of these claims can be, and have been, analysed by empirical/scientific/rational(e) means and found wanting. I.e. they were, however derived, attempts at explanatory hypotheses/frameworks for a series of observed phenomena (at least in part).

    These empirically verifiable claims have been shown to be inconsistent with observation and experiment, shown to be irrational(e) or in some manner scientifically falsified. I think it’s is perfectly legitimate to describe these claims as “irrational” as long as one makes it clear that one is using an epistemological/philosophical sense of the word “irrational”. When considering individual people or groups of people who hold beliefs in the veracity of claims of this nature I think there is a confusion/equivocation about which sense of the word(s) “(ir)rational” is being used. Is it irrational(p) to hold to the veracity of claims that are irrational(e)? Not necessarily, although it certainly can be.

    To be honest, I don’t see any genuinely controversial arguments at this level of the “debate”. Creationism in its various guises is false, demonstrably so. Likewise homeopathy etc. There are various formulations of religious ideas, like strict deism, which can in principle be made so that they don’t intersect with science. Whether or not they are rational(e) or based on reason as a mechanism of acquiring knowledge (more on that in a bit) is a different kettle of fish. For the other type of claims, there appears to be no reason to not describe those claims that are falsified as irrational(e), apart from a lingering personal attachment to maintaining religious privilege (or privileging religious explanations simply because they are in some manner religious).

    Secondly, there “matters of socio-political strategy”. There are political, psychological and sociological claims being thrown into the mix and insufficiently defined, clarified or even separated from the “matters of fact”. Here, I think, there exists genuine controversy. I think the “best” strategy is, as you mention, to take account of the context and act accordingly. The perfect is the enemy of the good here, and a pluralist approach seems the best option as you say. There really is no one “best” strategy to rule them all, and failure to take account of the context prevents one from even developing a good one. From what I’ve read across the main players’ places/blogs in this “debate” there really seems to be a lot of nonsense in this specific area, for example people claiming that simply because a claim is irrational(e) that a person holding it is irrational(p). Ironically, I see this coming distressingly often from the “accommodationist” side of things as a straw man of the “new atheist” view. I think this is because of the confusion over the issue of religious people being scientists. Which brings me to…

    2) Can religious people be scientists? Or even good scientists (whatever that might mean)? Yes of course they can. It’s irrelevant to the issue of the actual compatibility of science and religion. Should there be political, social and personal antipathy between science and scientists on one side and religion and religious people on the other? Does the fact of an epistemological conflict (if it exists, and I think it does) necessitate that there should be a conflict in other arenas? I think the answer is no to both questions, and I think, again, that these questions are irrelevant to the actual issue of compatibility.

    Whether or not science and religion are actually compatible is not a question of totting up believers and non believers in science and publishing the results, or a matter of political strategy. This, again, is an instance of confusing the personal/social and the epistemological. As you and others have noted, it also falls foul of the nebulous definitions of “religion”. This all essentially boils down to an epistemological claim about mechanisms of acquiring knowledge. I don’t think the conflict is at the “science and religion” level, I think it’s at the “faith and reason” level (i.e. religion is a manifestation of fideist claims of faith as a means of acquiring knowledge, and science is the most reasoned of the reason based methods of acquiring knowledge, there are of course other reason based methods). Does faith actually produce knowledge (where knowledge = justified true belief, for a provisional value of “true” given the usual philosophical niceties and caveats)? I would argue that it doesn’t for a variety of reasons (too long to mention at the moment, maybe this will come out later), not least of which is because faith can be used to claim anything and explicitly requires no external test of the claim to demonstrate its veracity. I think we have to make distinctions between what we believe to be true and what we claim to be factually true, and that this process requires a good deal of honesty and philosophical insight. Is “religion” all derived from faith? No, of course not. Within religion there are a variety of reason based arguments and reason derived claims, hence why I don’t think the conflict, such as it is, exists at the level of science and religion. And also why the Tillichs et al of this world are not totally irrelevant.

    This is why I think things like the NCSE’s bold statement about the compatibility of science and religion is in error. There are three reasons: a) it is aimed at the wrong level of the “debate” (e.g. it uses the religiosity of some scientists as if this demonstrates epistemological compatibility), b) it presents features as bugs, and c) that it is false in the crucial, epistemological sense. I think it equivocates on the terms involved and as such is more of an own goal than an accommodationist strategy to cool the social and political situation.

    Reason b) needs a little expansion. On the “accomodationism” side of the “debate” there seems to me to be a desperate struggle to cover up the challenging, “universal acid to ideas” aspect of science. It seems that some people think that if this aspect of science is too openly revealed that this will discourage religious people from engaging with science and thus further the culture war etc. I find this to be a spectacularly patronising view of religious people as a group. Now, again, my impressions may be incorrect, but I’m far from the only one to notice this. I also think this is a major component of the own goal because, as I said, it presents a feature as a bug. The challenging aspect of science is part of what’s good about it, it’s part of the process, without it science wouldn’t be science.

    Here is where I think it is relevant to mention religious scientists, to come at the “problem” from a different angle. If the NCSE had come out and said that they couldn’t comment on the philosophical compatibility of science and religion, that they have no stance on this technical issue, then the objection goes away. If also the NCSE made no overt attempt to pander specifically to religious people as a special interest group but instead presented this as if it were not a problem at all (which from an individual point of view it isn’t), then I think that would have been a better strategy, one which achieved the same goals whilst not bowdlerising science to do so. Show people that on a personal level science does not necessarily lead to abandonment of religious beliefs and acknowledge that whist this is the case, science will challenge them personally which is a good thing. This can all be done without making a very dubious philosophical claim which at best muddies the waters.

    Sorry this is a bit long, but I hope it makes some kind of sense.

    Louis

    1. I have to commend this comment! Very well articulated. I’m impressed. This is what I like about it:

       1) it articulates many of my feelings (this is somewhat self-serving praise);
       2) it convinces me to change some of my ideas and re-evaluate others;
       3) perhaps most importantly, it changes the perspective of how I approach the topic, and in the process obviates many niggling issues;
       4) it is communicated better than I could even if I came to the table with the same ideas.

       Anyway, thanks for posting. I’ll be returning from time to time to review your words.

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