For quite awhile now, I've been following with interest the conflict that exists within the secular humanist/atheist community--a conflict over how to engage with religious believers. In this debate, there seems to be something of a continuum between "friendly atheists" on one end and "hostile atheists" on the other.
That is, there are atheists who think reasonable, decent people can honestly disagree about the existence of God; and there are atheists who think that anyone who believes in God is a willfully blind, selectively irrational, dangerously misguided threat to all that is good and true. And there are atheists who fall at various places in between.
Those on the "friendly" end generally disapprove of the kind of polarization and animosity generated by those on the hostile end. Those on the "hostile" end, by contrast, are inclined to call their atheist opponents "accomodationists."
The authors of the new atheist bestsellers--most notably Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens--seem to be clustered towards the "hostile" end of the spectrum (although sometimes they are more hostile than at other times). But the epitome of the hostile atheist is, without much doubt, PZ Myers.
And some atheists are fed up with him.
Their objections are sometimes strategic (a minority group won't make much progress in changing hearts and minds by engaging in endless bellicose attacks on the religious majority), sometimes principled (religious believers as a class just don't warrant, at least not uniformly, the kind of assault that Myers directs towards them). Some, I'm sure, are worried that reason and truth aren't served by someone who puts together so-called "take-downs" of his opponents that, as was the case with the one blog post he devoted to attacking me, are almost nothing but fallacy and pseudoreasoning.
But in a recent Secular Perspectives essay, "General Myers and His Endless War on Error," Sarah Hippolitus may offer the most comprehensive expression of these complaints. If the other essay by Hippolitus that I've discussed on this blog is any indication, she isn't at the opposite extreme from Myers on the atheist spectrum. To argue that Christian belief is damaging to phsychological health, as she does, may not be precisely hostile, but it's not exactly friendly either. I'd put her somewhere in the middle.
But this is significant. Atheists in the middle of this spectrum--who are not afraid to make rather stinging critiques of religion--are less than happy with Myers.
I'm curious what readers of this blog think of Hippolitus's arguments.
Showing posts with label PZ Myers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PZ Myers. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Jesus Fibbers, Sophists, and Inner Peace
A friend of mine called my attention to this article from the Huffington Post, in which Karl Giberson confesses not so much to telling lies in his print and online clashes with the new atheists, but to engaging in creative namecalling (he even confesses to spending time trying to come up with clever put-downs).
Given my recent exchange with PZ Myers, I was particularly interested in his brief comments about his own clashes with Myers, and the following remark: "I recommend against verbal swordfights with PZ Myers -- you can't win."
I immediately wondered what he meant by "verbal swordfights." Presumably, given the topic of the piece, he meant exchanges of clever sophistry and put-downs, as opposed, say, to well-thought out arguments that engage fairly with one's opponents' thinking.
And here, as I contemplate Myers, I find myself sorely tempted to do what Giberson confessed to doing and which he recommends against doing in relation to Myers. All sorts of slams against Myers are flying through my head--and, ironically, they are triggered by Myers' own propensity to rely on clever slams and my own philosopher's outrage against the intellectual vices that such reliance on slams epitomizes. In short, my moral outrage against Myers' pseudo-reasoning triggers in me a nearly irresistible desire to engage in it myself.
I should note, I think, that to name what Myers does "sophistry" and "pseudoreasoning" is not itself to engage in the same if one has taken the time to pick through Myers writing to identify instance after instance of argumentative tactics that forego actual fair and sound argumentation in favor of fallacious arguments, misrepresentation, and the like. Since I have done this in a recent sequence of posts (here, here, and here), to say that his writing routinely resorts to pseudoreasoning is to apply a description that has been shown to fit--which is the antithesis of pseudoreasoning.
But what I'm tempted to do goes beyond simply noting that much of Myers writing is sophistry. In fact, the temptation is so strong that I have already written and erased from this post half a dozen colorful and (I dare say) clever slams of Myers. I indulge in them for a moment and then delete them because it would be sinking to Myers' level (I actually had to rewrite that last phrase, since something much more vivid danced off my keyboard than "sinking to Myers' level"). I can't tell you how many low blows I deleted before posting the final versions of my responses to Myers. And I'm sure I didn't keep them all out of the final versions. After all, the whole exercize was motivated by something less noble than a desire to warn readers against the kinds of rhetorical tactics that take the place of argument. I wanted Myers to look bad.
And so, in my own way, I was allowing myself to be drawn into Myers' kind of personal-attack-approach to disagreement. And the fact is that I think I could be pretty good at it. If I let myself go there--if I really indulged the impulses that shape Myers' writing--a part of me almost believes that, contrary to what Giberson says, I could actually win.
But in the process, I would be indulging things in myself that I not only view to be intellectual vices but that would stir me up inside, being a source of ongoing inner unrest rather than the internal peace I seek.
And as I think about what it would take to do what Myers does day in and day out, so effectively that Giberson feels called to warn people against taking Myers on in those terms--as I think about what parts of his character Myers needs to indulge, I actually do feel for him. Because I've flirted on the edge of just that emotional space on many occasions. And while there is a thrill associated with it, there's also a deep personal cost.
Given my recent exchange with PZ Myers, I was particularly interested in his brief comments about his own clashes with Myers, and the following remark: "I recommend against verbal swordfights with PZ Myers -- you can't win."
I immediately wondered what he meant by "verbal swordfights." Presumably, given the topic of the piece, he meant exchanges of clever sophistry and put-downs, as opposed, say, to well-thought out arguments that engage fairly with one's opponents' thinking.
And here, as I contemplate Myers, I find myself sorely tempted to do what Giberson confessed to doing and which he recommends against doing in relation to Myers. All sorts of slams against Myers are flying through my head--and, ironically, they are triggered by Myers' own propensity to rely on clever slams and my own philosopher's outrage against the intellectual vices that such reliance on slams epitomizes. In short, my moral outrage against Myers' pseudo-reasoning triggers in me a nearly irresistible desire to engage in it myself.
I should note, I think, that to name what Myers does "sophistry" and "pseudoreasoning" is not itself to engage in the same if one has taken the time to pick through Myers writing to identify instance after instance of argumentative tactics that forego actual fair and sound argumentation in favor of fallacious arguments, misrepresentation, and the like. Since I have done this in a recent sequence of posts (here, here, and here), to say that his writing routinely resorts to pseudoreasoning is to apply a description that has been shown to fit--which is the antithesis of pseudoreasoning.
But what I'm tempted to do goes beyond simply noting that much of Myers writing is sophistry. In fact, the temptation is so strong that I have already written and erased from this post half a dozen colorful and (I dare say) clever slams of Myers. I indulge in them for a moment and then delete them because it would be sinking to Myers' level (I actually had to rewrite that last phrase, since something much more vivid danced off my keyboard than "sinking to Myers' level"). I can't tell you how many low blows I deleted before posting the final versions of my responses to Myers. And I'm sure I didn't keep them all out of the final versions. After all, the whole exercize was motivated by something less noble than a desire to warn readers against the kinds of rhetorical tactics that take the place of argument. I wanted Myers to look bad.
And so, in my own way, I was allowing myself to be drawn into Myers' kind of personal-attack-approach to disagreement. And the fact is that I think I could be pretty good at it. If I let myself go there--if I really indulged the impulses that shape Myers' writing--a part of me almost believes that, contrary to what Giberson says, I could actually win.
But in the process, I would be indulging things in myself that I not only view to be intellectual vices but that would stir me up inside, being a source of ongoing inner unrest rather than the internal peace I seek.
And as I think about what it would take to do what Myers does day in and day out, so effectively that Giberson feels called to warn people against taking Myers on in those terms--as I think about what parts of his character Myers needs to indulge, I actually do feel for him. Because I've flirted on the edge of just that emotional space on many occasions. And while there is a thrill associated with it, there's also a deep personal cost.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Once More Into the Muck Heap
Just before leaving town for my wife’s triathlon, I had the pleasure of being targeted by PZ Myers, who responded to my most recent Religion Dispatches essay with his usual blend of name-calling, sophistry, fallacious reasoning, ignorance, and arrogance—all put forward (and received by his avid followers) as if he were presenting a brilliant argument.
I responded at first with a brief post pointing out how deeply Myers misrepresents a key point I make, and then a longer post in which I walked through his essay the way I might in a critical thinking class, identifying examples of pseudo-argumentation and intellectually dishonest rhetorical moves. But I ran out for time (since I needed to pack for my trip) before I ran out of sophistry to critique.
I said at the end of that post that I might return to my critique—but in the intervening two weeks I’ve been preoccupied by the end of an intensive three-week intercession course in ethics (and the heap of grading that goes with it)…and, honestly, I’ve just not been all that motivated to continue such a generally unpleasant and wholly negative task.
But I have a cold. I feel lousy. And that puts me in a pugnacious mood.
So, picking up where we left off last time…
Name-Calling
A common failing in novice philosophy papers is that, instead of assessing on the basis of reasons the merits of an idea or argument encountered in an assigned essay, the student resorts to name-calling. That is, the student simply calls the idea absurd or ridiculous and then goes on.
When that happens, I circle it and write the following marginal comment: “Name-calling replaces argument here. Try to charitably reconstruct the author’s thoughts—offer the most defensible interpretation of it that you can—and then pinpoint where you disagree and, most important, why.” Or that’s what I write in response to the first instance of name-calling in their first paper. After that I just write, “Name-calling.”
The persistence of name-calling in student papers is one of the great frustrations of teaching first-time philosophy students. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that undergraduate students with no prior exposure to philosophy mistake name-calling for argument. After all, this mode of pseudo-argument is modeled for them all over the place—in the radio diatribes of people like Rush Limbaugh, for example. And in popular incendiary blogs like Myers' pharyngula.
Take, for example, how Myers addresses the most extended quote he extracts from my Religion Dispatches article. This is a quote which comes in the wake of distinguishing between interpretive worldviews (ways of seeing and unifying the whole of human experience) and empirical hypotheses. I note that interpretive worldviews (of which Myers’ metaphysical naturalism is an example) cannot be evaluated in the way that empirical hypothesis can—but that doesn’t mean there’s no conceivable way to decide among them. I note that one thing we need to do with interpretive worldviews is “try them on” to see how well they work relative to one another in terms of coordinating and making sense of the various elements of human experience.
In the passage he quotes, I define theology as the effort to develop and try out alternative theistic worldviews. And I then specify one very concrete requirement that any acceptable worldview has to meet: it must “fit” with experience—including what science teaches us. In my podcast interview with Luke Muelhauser over at Common Sense Atheism, I explain this idea more fully using the famous “duck-rabbit” image. The image is, in a word, ambiguous—you can see it as a duck or as a rabbit. Both ways of seeing “fit” with the material one is presented with in experience. But there are ways of seeing that don’t. Suggest to me that I try to see the image as an elephant balancing on top of a Starbuck’s coffee cup while eating a banana, and I’ll assume you’re either silly or crazy.
Likewise, some interpretive worldviews can be rejected because they are a bad fit with what we encounter in experience. Here, I mention Young Earth Creationism.
In any event, after quoting this passage Myers makes no attempt to charitably restate it in his own words to make sure he has it right. He makes no attempt to pinpoint a specific claim or premise he disagrees with. What he says, instead, is this: “Stark raving naked bullshit.”
The only difference between Myers and my students is that Myers is a bit cruder in his name-calling. But crudeness should not be confused with sound argument.
Unsubstantiated Criticism
But let’s also consider the comment that immediately rides on the coat-tails of this name-calling: “This is what you get when you try to pretend that reality is a ‘worldview’.”
This comment isn’t exactly name-calling, but it’s not much better. While it has the rough shape of an objection to my ideas, I really have no idea how to flesh out the objection. Presumably he means to say that my thinking is at some point (where?) premised on falsely equating reality with a worldview, and that this leads me to embrace a conclusion (what?) that is false. I certainly don’t accept this strange identification, and so would be quite surprised to discover that in some way my thinking presupposes it. But since Myers makes no effort to show how and why my thinking presupposes it, I’m just left scratching my head.
In fact, there is good reason to suppose, given what I say in my essay, that I don’t equate reality with a worldview. After all, the whole point of the essay is to address how we can go about assessing alternative worldviews. Why would we need to assess alternatives to decide which is better if reality simply were a worldview? The task of assessment supposes that there is a truth “out there” that we are trying to align our beliefs with. The challenge is to figure out what that truth is when you’re dealing, not with testable hypotheses, but with holistic understandings of the basic nature of reality. Is reality exhausted by what scientists can study empirically, or is there more? The main point of my essay is that we shouldn’t blindly assume that one answer or the other is correct—but since we can’t answer the question through scientific or broadly empirical means, we need a different approach…one that, I think, cannot ignore theology.
But all of this is obviously premised on a distinction between worldviews and reality. Myers can get away with accusing me of equating the two only because he has failed to carefully and charitably reconstruct my thinking. He just flippantly throws out the criticism without any clarification or explanation of why one might be justified in thinking it fits. Maybe on some level he knows that it doesn’t fit, and that’s why he fails to explain the charge. Better to offer a free-floating objection and hope that some of your readers will buy it than to explain the objection enough to make clear how erroneous it is.
Ironically, I think Myers actually does falsely identify reality with a ‘worldview.” To be more specific, he confuses his own naturalistic worldview with reality. I say this because it seems like the most plausible explanation for a number of the assertions he makes in his response to me.
For example, he says, “Theologians seem to have decided that truth is optional and irrelevant.” The only evidence he offers in support of this charge, however, is the fact that theologians are wrestling with elusive matters that fall outside the limits of science and its powerful methods of empirical testing. But why does that amount to treating truth as optional and irrelevant? I can understand why he would say this if he equates his naturalist worldview with reality. If you do that, then you will think that what exceeds the scope of scientific study isn’t real. And this seems to be what Myers is doing: he identifies “reality” with what his naturalistic worldview posits, and so treats theologians who aren’t prepared to accept this naturalism as being indifferent to truth.
Likewise, he says of me that “abandonment of the truth is the heart of his argument.” But how can he say this, given that I am advocating a quest for ultimate truth that involves an open-minded consideration of alternative holistic worldviews? Well, the most plausible explanation as far as I can tell is this: when I argue that we need to comparatively examine alternative holistic interpretations of experience, I am clearly saying that we shouldn’t just blindly and dogmatically adopt the naturalistic one. And if you happen to identify this naturalistic one with reality, then you might mistake a resistance to dogmatic acceptance of naturalism for a rejection of reality.
Now this is just suggestive rather than conclusive. That is, I’ve shown that some of the puzzling things he says make sense once one sees him as dogmatically identifying his favored (unfalsifiable) worldview with truth. But there might be another way to understand these statements. For example, he might have just been blathering self-importantly without giving any thought to whether his words actually make sense. But at least here I’ve given some reason to suppose that Myers is guilty of the false identification that he accuses me of making. Myers offers no such reasons—and, in fact, couldn’t do so were he to interpret my argument charitably, since any attempt to do so would reveal that my argument is premised on the opposite of what he accusing me of assuming.
Rhetorical Questions Obscuring Questionable Assertions
When I teach critical thinking, one of the things I point out to my students is how rhetorical questions often conceal weaknesses in an essay or argument. This is not to say there is never a place for rhetorical questions. But when you stumble across them it’s often a good idea to translate them into their corresponding assertions and then ask whether there is good reason to believe that the assertion is true. After all, that’s what a rhetorical question is—an assertion in the form of a question. You are asking a question whose answer you take to be obvious.
But here’s the problem: Sometimes the answer isn’t obvious. Sometimes the question ought to be treated as a legitimate question. And sometimes writers know (sometimes only on an intuitive level) that if they assert something outright in an essay people will pause and wonder, “Is that true?” But a rhetorical question will roll right past them, and the intended assertion will slip in the back door, so to speak, without ever being examined. And this is especially useful if the writer really has no idea whether the assertion is true or not.
Take, for example, the following string of rhetorical assertions made by Myers in his response to me:
So, tell me, Dr Reitan: are theologians working on a grand project to reconcile Christianity and Islam? Even Protestantism vs. Catholicism? Is that too much, should we narrow our goals to resolving smaller sectarian differences, like the Wisconsin vs. Missouri synods of the Lutheran church? Which particular sect has the worldview most consistent with experience?
Here, a string of rhetorical questions are introduced that are clearly intended to be assertions in disguise. So let’s consider these assertions. The first is that no theologians are working on grand projects of inter-religious reconciliation. Is that true? No. The second is that theologians are not working on reconciling differences between Protestantism and Catholicism. Is that true? No. The third is that no theologians are working on more nuanced theological disputes between closely related religious denominations or sects. Is that true? No.
Consider the first of these questions. There has been a rich strain of theology over the last two centuries that takes very seriously how we should approach the fact of rival religious worldviews. This stretches at least back to Schleiermacher, who took the question very seriously. Some theologians since then have sought a synthesis of diverse religious traditions under the rubric of a more comprehensive theology. For an example of a Christian effort along these lines, one might consider R.C. Zaehner’s At Sundry Times.
Others have attempted to build the case that all world religions can be reconciled when they are seen as different culturally and historically located responses to an experience of the transcendent—that they are, in effect, culturally meaningful metaphors aimed at aligning us with ultimate reality, and should be evaluated pragmatically in terms of how well they work at jarring us out of our self-centered existence and into a “reality-centered” one. Of course, anyone who knows anything about theology knows that I’m describing John Hick’s work here—but, of course, Myers knows nothing about theology. He just flings rhetorical questions from his own well of ignorance.
Of course, that theologians are wrestling with these issues doesn't mean that they've successfully resolved them--but this relates to the last of Myers’ rhetorical questions, which is a bit different from the others. He asks, “Which particular sect has the worldview most consistent with experience?” Here, the hidden assertion is not a particular answer to the question, but rather (I'm pretty sure) a claim about the unavailability of an answer. In effect, he’s stating that there is no way to know which worldview is best, because there are no standards for assessing worldviews or methods for going about trying to ascertain which worldviews offer the best “fit” with experience as a whole.
Is that true? If so, then Myers should give up his confidence about naturalism. He should probably become an agnostic and say, "There's no way to know what ultimate reality is like, so let's stop trying to come up with accounts of ultimate reality and instead just answer the questions we can answer." While I think that's a defensible position to take, I’m not convinced that human beings can't make any headway in choosing among worldviews--and I certainly don't think we should just assume in advance that there is no way to make such headway.
The problem, of course, is that even if we can begin to sketch out criteria according to which worldviews might be assessed--such things as pragmatic impact, explanatory power, power to coordinate and unify diverse dimensions of experience, fit with empirical facts, simplicity, etc.--the assessment of worldviews will not be a straightforward thing. It will be hard. As I put it in a comment on my last post about Myers,
…differences in the meaning of an experience under one worldview or another does not rise to the level of either verification or falsification--that is, worldviews are not verified by their capacity to explain a feature of experience, nor are worldviews falsified by the fact that they need to explain AWAY an experience. And so, we might say, that the process of deciding on a holistic interpretive worldview is more art than science.
But to say this is not to say that there can be no headway in deciding among worldviews (or at least narrowing the field of options by excluding some), or that the struggle isn’t necessary and worth it, or that simply assuming the truth of naturalism is an adequate surrogate for engaging in that struggle. And I don’t see how we can engage in that struggle by ignoring those theologians and philosophers who have made it their life’s work to engage in it.
Once again I find myself running out of time and energy before I’ve run out of sophistry to critique. But at this point, it’s probably sufficient to say “And so on.”
I responded at first with a brief post pointing out how deeply Myers misrepresents a key point I make, and then a longer post in which I walked through his essay the way I might in a critical thinking class, identifying examples of pseudo-argumentation and intellectually dishonest rhetorical moves. But I ran out for time (since I needed to pack for my trip) before I ran out of sophistry to critique.
I said at the end of that post that I might return to my critique—but in the intervening two weeks I’ve been preoccupied by the end of an intensive three-week intercession course in ethics (and the heap of grading that goes with it)…and, honestly, I’ve just not been all that motivated to continue such a generally unpleasant and wholly negative task.
But I have a cold. I feel lousy. And that puts me in a pugnacious mood.
So, picking up where we left off last time…
Name-Calling
A common failing in novice philosophy papers is that, instead of assessing on the basis of reasons the merits of an idea or argument encountered in an assigned essay, the student resorts to name-calling. That is, the student simply calls the idea absurd or ridiculous and then goes on.
When that happens, I circle it and write the following marginal comment: “Name-calling replaces argument here. Try to charitably reconstruct the author’s thoughts—offer the most defensible interpretation of it that you can—and then pinpoint where you disagree and, most important, why.” Or that’s what I write in response to the first instance of name-calling in their first paper. After that I just write, “Name-calling.”
The persistence of name-calling in student papers is one of the great frustrations of teaching first-time philosophy students. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that undergraduate students with no prior exposure to philosophy mistake name-calling for argument. After all, this mode of pseudo-argument is modeled for them all over the place—in the radio diatribes of people like Rush Limbaugh, for example. And in popular incendiary blogs like Myers' pharyngula.
Take, for example, how Myers addresses the most extended quote he extracts from my Religion Dispatches article. This is a quote which comes in the wake of distinguishing between interpretive worldviews (ways of seeing and unifying the whole of human experience) and empirical hypotheses. I note that interpretive worldviews (of which Myers’ metaphysical naturalism is an example) cannot be evaluated in the way that empirical hypothesis can—but that doesn’t mean there’s no conceivable way to decide among them. I note that one thing we need to do with interpretive worldviews is “try them on” to see how well they work relative to one another in terms of coordinating and making sense of the various elements of human experience.
In the passage he quotes, I define theology as the effort to develop and try out alternative theistic worldviews. And I then specify one very concrete requirement that any acceptable worldview has to meet: it must “fit” with experience—including what science teaches us. In my podcast interview with Luke Muelhauser over at Common Sense Atheism, I explain this idea more fully using the famous “duck-rabbit” image. The image is, in a word, ambiguous—you can see it as a duck or as a rabbit. Both ways of seeing “fit” with the material one is presented with in experience. But there are ways of seeing that don’t. Suggest to me that I try to see the image as an elephant balancing on top of a Starbuck’s coffee cup while eating a banana, and I’ll assume you’re either silly or crazy.
Likewise, some interpretive worldviews can be rejected because they are a bad fit with what we encounter in experience. Here, I mention Young Earth Creationism.
In any event, after quoting this passage Myers makes no attempt to charitably restate it in his own words to make sure he has it right. He makes no attempt to pinpoint a specific claim or premise he disagrees with. What he says, instead, is this: “Stark raving naked bullshit.”
The only difference between Myers and my students is that Myers is a bit cruder in his name-calling. But crudeness should not be confused with sound argument.
Unsubstantiated Criticism
But let’s also consider the comment that immediately rides on the coat-tails of this name-calling: “This is what you get when you try to pretend that reality is a ‘worldview’.”
This comment isn’t exactly name-calling, but it’s not much better. While it has the rough shape of an objection to my ideas, I really have no idea how to flesh out the objection. Presumably he means to say that my thinking is at some point (where?) premised on falsely equating reality with a worldview, and that this leads me to embrace a conclusion (what?) that is false. I certainly don’t accept this strange identification, and so would be quite surprised to discover that in some way my thinking presupposes it. But since Myers makes no effort to show how and why my thinking presupposes it, I’m just left scratching my head.
In fact, there is good reason to suppose, given what I say in my essay, that I don’t equate reality with a worldview. After all, the whole point of the essay is to address how we can go about assessing alternative worldviews. Why would we need to assess alternatives to decide which is better if reality simply were a worldview? The task of assessment supposes that there is a truth “out there” that we are trying to align our beliefs with. The challenge is to figure out what that truth is when you’re dealing, not with testable hypotheses, but with holistic understandings of the basic nature of reality. Is reality exhausted by what scientists can study empirically, or is there more? The main point of my essay is that we shouldn’t blindly assume that one answer or the other is correct—but since we can’t answer the question through scientific or broadly empirical means, we need a different approach…one that, I think, cannot ignore theology.
But all of this is obviously premised on a distinction between worldviews and reality. Myers can get away with accusing me of equating the two only because he has failed to carefully and charitably reconstruct my thinking. He just flippantly throws out the criticism without any clarification or explanation of why one might be justified in thinking it fits. Maybe on some level he knows that it doesn’t fit, and that’s why he fails to explain the charge. Better to offer a free-floating objection and hope that some of your readers will buy it than to explain the objection enough to make clear how erroneous it is.
Ironically, I think Myers actually does falsely identify reality with a ‘worldview.” To be more specific, he confuses his own naturalistic worldview with reality. I say this because it seems like the most plausible explanation for a number of the assertions he makes in his response to me.
For example, he says, “Theologians seem to have decided that truth is optional and irrelevant.” The only evidence he offers in support of this charge, however, is the fact that theologians are wrestling with elusive matters that fall outside the limits of science and its powerful methods of empirical testing. But why does that amount to treating truth as optional and irrelevant? I can understand why he would say this if he equates his naturalist worldview with reality. If you do that, then you will think that what exceeds the scope of scientific study isn’t real. And this seems to be what Myers is doing: he identifies “reality” with what his naturalistic worldview posits, and so treats theologians who aren’t prepared to accept this naturalism as being indifferent to truth.
Likewise, he says of me that “abandonment of the truth is the heart of his argument.” But how can he say this, given that I am advocating a quest for ultimate truth that involves an open-minded consideration of alternative holistic worldviews? Well, the most plausible explanation as far as I can tell is this: when I argue that we need to comparatively examine alternative holistic interpretations of experience, I am clearly saying that we shouldn’t just blindly and dogmatically adopt the naturalistic one. And if you happen to identify this naturalistic one with reality, then you might mistake a resistance to dogmatic acceptance of naturalism for a rejection of reality.
Now this is just suggestive rather than conclusive. That is, I’ve shown that some of the puzzling things he says make sense once one sees him as dogmatically identifying his favored (unfalsifiable) worldview with truth. But there might be another way to understand these statements. For example, he might have just been blathering self-importantly without giving any thought to whether his words actually make sense. But at least here I’ve given some reason to suppose that Myers is guilty of the false identification that he accuses me of making. Myers offers no such reasons—and, in fact, couldn’t do so were he to interpret my argument charitably, since any attempt to do so would reveal that my argument is premised on the opposite of what he accusing me of assuming.
Rhetorical Questions Obscuring Questionable Assertions
When I teach critical thinking, one of the things I point out to my students is how rhetorical questions often conceal weaknesses in an essay or argument. This is not to say there is never a place for rhetorical questions. But when you stumble across them it’s often a good idea to translate them into their corresponding assertions and then ask whether there is good reason to believe that the assertion is true. After all, that’s what a rhetorical question is—an assertion in the form of a question. You are asking a question whose answer you take to be obvious.
But here’s the problem: Sometimes the answer isn’t obvious. Sometimes the question ought to be treated as a legitimate question. And sometimes writers know (sometimes only on an intuitive level) that if they assert something outright in an essay people will pause and wonder, “Is that true?” But a rhetorical question will roll right past them, and the intended assertion will slip in the back door, so to speak, without ever being examined. And this is especially useful if the writer really has no idea whether the assertion is true or not.
Take, for example, the following string of rhetorical assertions made by Myers in his response to me:
So, tell me, Dr Reitan: are theologians working on a grand project to reconcile Christianity and Islam? Even Protestantism vs. Catholicism? Is that too much, should we narrow our goals to resolving smaller sectarian differences, like the Wisconsin vs. Missouri synods of the Lutheran church? Which particular sect has the worldview most consistent with experience?
Here, a string of rhetorical questions are introduced that are clearly intended to be assertions in disguise. So let’s consider these assertions. The first is that no theologians are working on grand projects of inter-religious reconciliation. Is that true? No. The second is that theologians are not working on reconciling differences between Protestantism and Catholicism. Is that true? No. The third is that no theologians are working on more nuanced theological disputes between closely related religious denominations or sects. Is that true? No.
Consider the first of these questions. There has been a rich strain of theology over the last two centuries that takes very seriously how we should approach the fact of rival religious worldviews. This stretches at least back to Schleiermacher, who took the question very seriously. Some theologians since then have sought a synthesis of diverse religious traditions under the rubric of a more comprehensive theology. For an example of a Christian effort along these lines, one might consider R.C. Zaehner’s At Sundry Times.
Others have attempted to build the case that all world religions can be reconciled when they are seen as different culturally and historically located responses to an experience of the transcendent—that they are, in effect, culturally meaningful metaphors aimed at aligning us with ultimate reality, and should be evaluated pragmatically in terms of how well they work at jarring us out of our self-centered existence and into a “reality-centered” one. Of course, anyone who knows anything about theology knows that I’m describing John Hick’s work here—but, of course, Myers knows nothing about theology. He just flings rhetorical questions from his own well of ignorance.
Of course, that theologians are wrestling with these issues doesn't mean that they've successfully resolved them--but this relates to the last of Myers’ rhetorical questions, which is a bit different from the others. He asks, “Which particular sect has the worldview most consistent with experience?” Here, the hidden assertion is not a particular answer to the question, but rather (I'm pretty sure) a claim about the unavailability of an answer. In effect, he’s stating that there is no way to know which worldview is best, because there are no standards for assessing worldviews or methods for going about trying to ascertain which worldviews offer the best “fit” with experience as a whole.
Is that true? If so, then Myers should give up his confidence about naturalism. He should probably become an agnostic and say, "There's no way to know what ultimate reality is like, so let's stop trying to come up with accounts of ultimate reality and instead just answer the questions we can answer." While I think that's a defensible position to take, I’m not convinced that human beings can't make any headway in choosing among worldviews--and I certainly don't think we should just assume in advance that there is no way to make such headway.
The problem, of course, is that even if we can begin to sketch out criteria according to which worldviews might be assessed--such things as pragmatic impact, explanatory power, power to coordinate and unify diverse dimensions of experience, fit with empirical facts, simplicity, etc.--the assessment of worldviews will not be a straightforward thing. It will be hard. As I put it in a comment on my last post about Myers,
…differences in the meaning of an experience under one worldview or another does not rise to the level of either verification or falsification--that is, worldviews are not verified by their capacity to explain a feature of experience, nor are worldviews falsified by the fact that they need to explain AWAY an experience. And so, we might say, that the process of deciding on a holistic interpretive worldview is more art than science.
But to say this is not to say that there can be no headway in deciding among worldviews (or at least narrowing the field of options by excluding some), or that the struggle isn’t necessary and worth it, or that simply assuming the truth of naturalism is an adequate surrogate for engaging in that struggle. And I don’t see how we can engage in that struggle by ignoring those theologians and philosophers who have made it their life’s work to engage in it.
Once again I find myself running out of time and energy before I’ve run out of sophistry to critique. But at this point, it’s probably sufficient to say “And so on.”
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Contemplating New Atheism's Effects
The other morning I read a brief interview with Bernard Beckett, a New Zealand school teacher and young adult novelist, who shifted from being a self-described atheist to being an agnostic after chairing an event featuring Richard Dawkins. He says he was put off by the kind of true-believer mentality of the fans that crowded in to hear Dawkins speak—and he was reminded of the kind of group-think and demand for orthodoxy that had turned him off of church. Here’s how he puts it:
...it felt more like being in church. Suddenly, there were a whole heap of people who seemed to be responding as one. To me, that reproduced some of the things I disliked about the church I was brought up in, because leaps are made from atheism to other beliefs that you are meant to have as well.
One of those beliefs which Beckett disagreed with was the view that religion is evil, a danger to the world. A bit further on in the interview, Beckett invokes (in his own way) Kant’s distinction between reality itself (the noumenal realm, in Kant’s language) and the world as it appears to us (the phenomenal world). Beckett argues that ultimate reality is unknowable—especially if our cognitive faculties are the result of evolution through random mutation and natural selection. His idea (a contemporary adaptation of Kant) is that our brains evolved for survival, not for piercing the phenomenal veil to get at the ultimate nature of reality. Hence, even if science offers us some incredibly useful models for engaging with our environment successfully, there is no good reason to suppose that these models can provide us with the ultimate truth about the nature of reality.
Given this perspective, Beckett found himself put off by the confidence of those gathered to listen to their atheist hero—the confidence that they and Dawkins were right and everyone who disagreed with them wrong. Apparently, Beckett couldn’t identify with that confidence, and so found himself gravitating towards agnosticism.
This got me wondering about the broader effects of the new atheist movement (presuming that a cluster of bestsellers coordinated with online communities and speaking engagements, along with groups of avid followers, qualifies as a movement).
Dawkins expresses his own hope about these effects in his preface to The God Delusion. “If this book works as I intend,” he says, “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” He quickly concedes that “dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument,” so that he really can’t expect to convert them. But he goes on to express the hope that there are “people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or for other reasons didn’t ‘take,’ or whose native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it. Such free spirits should need only a little encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether.”
In short, Dawkins—arguably the most prominent and influential new atheist leader—sees his aim as a kind of atheist evangelism (although he probably wouldn’t care for that term). But this evangelical fervor was part of what turned Bernard Beckett off, insofar as he was hoping to escape such things when he left religion behind. And I don’t doubt there are plenty of people like Beckett—people who’ve left religion or stayed away from it because so much religion is wedded to this attitude of “we’ve got the truth, those who disagree with us are idiots or victims or villains, and we must spread the truth to all who are able to hear.” Finding this attitude reproduced in the new atheist movement is therefore enough to drive people like Beckett away.
And then, of course, there are people like me. How does new atheism affect us? I wasn’t subjected to any kind of “childhood indoctrination” into religion (my parents were both agnostic preachers’ kids who responded to religion in much the way that Beckett did)—and, if I do say so myself, had I been I a victim of such indoctrination I’d likely be among those whose “native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it” (unless, of course, religious belief isn't as opposed to reasonableness as Dawkins supposes). In my case, theistic religion is something I came to out of a vague agnostic/atheistic youth—as the result of a personal journey that started in a moment of philosophical reflection in the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees library and carried me through several years of flirtation with charismatic Christianity, close to half a year in India fascinated by the diversity of faiths represented there, and then on to an academic career in philosophy.
Of course, my story isn’t typical of religious believers. But there are others like me. And how are we affected by the new atheist movement? It annoys us—sometimes enough to motivate us to write books about it. It annoys us because it entirely ignores us—that is, it argues against religion as if people like us, and religious faith like ours, doesn’t exist. (Not all atheist critics are guilty of this, by the way--but it is pretty characteristic of the new atheist movement.) And then when we defend our faith—when we say that it does exist and that the new atheist arguments don’t account for it—we get accused of “avoiding the new atheist arguments by redefining religion as something no one believes in.” Which, predictably, makes us even more annoyed.
The religious fundamentalists, by and large, are unaffected by the new atheists in much the way that Dawkins predicted—because, as he puts it in The God Delusion, they are protected by “immunological devices” such as the “dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely the work of Satan.”
I don’t doubt that there are some who have been grating under the weight of the kind of religion that the new atheists most directly attack (poised to reject it as my mother rejected her fundamentalist upbringing) for whom a new atheist bestseller or lecture served as the catalyst. But I also suspect that most of these would have rejected religion sooner or later anyway.
All of this leads me to wonder, first, who the real target audience is for the new atheist movement; and second, what is being offered to that target audience.
So who is new atheism’s target audience? It’s not non-religious free thinkers like Beckett, who are bothered by the movement’s group-think mentality. It’s not religious free thinkers like me (I've thought about devoting a post to complaining about the tendency for atheists to reserve for themselves the "free-thinker" label). We find the new atheists to be not only willfully ignoring our brand of religion but also reproducing in atheist clothes the very same in-group/out-group mentality, the very same demands for “correct thinking” and cries of heresy, that we take to be the crud weighing down the gems we find in religious life and thought.
And it'spretty obvious that the target audience is not devoted fundamentalists, who are mostly immune to atheist arguments.
It may be that those poised to shake off religious fundamentalism like a set of chains are among new atheism’s target audience—but if so they are part of a substantially broader group which includes (for example) those who have already rejected their fundamentalist past but harbor an ongoing resentment, and those who have never been fundamentalists but have clashed with them in various ways (over the teaching of evolution in school, or over the separation of church and state, or over homosexuality, etc.).
And what is it that the new atheist movement offers this loose collection of people? Despite Dawkins’ expressed hopes, new atheism is not ultimately about atheist evangelism. The disaffected fundamentalists are most probably heading towards some species of atheism in any event, and the others in the target audience are already there. What the new atheist movement offers them, I think, is precisely what Beckett saw when he chaired a gathering of Dawkins fans—namely, a church...or the atheist equivalent of one.
The new atheism is speaking to those who have rejected organized religion but who still long for its structures, its unity, the sense of belonging and purpose it has to offer. It’s such people who are most likely to be drawn to new atheism’s evangelical mission, its in-group/out-group mentality, and its established visionary leaders. But instead of gathering together every week in a shared building, they gather together online—listening to PZ Myers’ sermons (delivering their amens! and halleluias! in posted comments) or having small group book studies at RichardDawkins.net—and then occasionally attending a big tent revival when Hitchens or Harris or Dawkins comes to town.
And so I conclude that the chief effect of the new atheist movement hasn’t been to substantially increase the number of atheists in the world. Rather, it has been to help build the atheist’s version of an organized religion—somewhat less organized, but complete with its characteristic vices.
And given the evangelical fervor with which this new church on the scene attacks its rivals, I’d be surprised if one of its most telling effects hasn’t been to exacerbate the ideological polarization and entrenchment in the world. If so, we can only hope that more atheists will have a moment like the one Bernard Beckett experienced at the Richard Dawkins event he chaired: looking at the new atheists gathered all around him and thinking, “Good God, this is just like church.”
...it felt more like being in church. Suddenly, there were a whole heap of people who seemed to be responding as one. To me, that reproduced some of the things I disliked about the church I was brought up in, because leaps are made from atheism to other beliefs that you are meant to have as well.
One of those beliefs which Beckett disagreed with was the view that religion is evil, a danger to the world. A bit further on in the interview, Beckett invokes (in his own way) Kant’s distinction between reality itself (the noumenal realm, in Kant’s language) and the world as it appears to us (the phenomenal world). Beckett argues that ultimate reality is unknowable—especially if our cognitive faculties are the result of evolution through random mutation and natural selection. His idea (a contemporary adaptation of Kant) is that our brains evolved for survival, not for piercing the phenomenal veil to get at the ultimate nature of reality. Hence, even if science offers us some incredibly useful models for engaging with our environment successfully, there is no good reason to suppose that these models can provide us with the ultimate truth about the nature of reality.
Given this perspective, Beckett found himself put off by the confidence of those gathered to listen to their atheist hero—the confidence that they and Dawkins were right and everyone who disagreed with them wrong. Apparently, Beckett couldn’t identify with that confidence, and so found himself gravitating towards agnosticism.
This got me wondering about the broader effects of the new atheist movement (presuming that a cluster of bestsellers coordinated with online communities and speaking engagements, along with groups of avid followers, qualifies as a movement).
Dawkins expresses his own hope about these effects in his preface to The God Delusion. “If this book works as I intend,” he says, “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” He quickly concedes that “dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument,” so that he really can’t expect to convert them. But he goes on to express the hope that there are “people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or for other reasons didn’t ‘take,’ or whose native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it. Such free spirits should need only a little encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether.”
In short, Dawkins—arguably the most prominent and influential new atheist leader—sees his aim as a kind of atheist evangelism (although he probably wouldn’t care for that term). But this evangelical fervor was part of what turned Bernard Beckett off, insofar as he was hoping to escape such things when he left religion behind. And I don’t doubt there are plenty of people like Beckett—people who’ve left religion or stayed away from it because so much religion is wedded to this attitude of “we’ve got the truth, those who disagree with us are idiots or victims or villains, and we must spread the truth to all who are able to hear.” Finding this attitude reproduced in the new atheist movement is therefore enough to drive people like Beckett away.
And then, of course, there are people like me. How does new atheism affect us? I wasn’t subjected to any kind of “childhood indoctrination” into religion (my parents were both agnostic preachers’ kids who responded to religion in much the way that Beckett did)—and, if I do say so myself, had I been I a victim of such indoctrination I’d likely be among those whose “native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it” (unless, of course, religious belief isn't as opposed to reasonableness as Dawkins supposes). In my case, theistic religion is something I came to out of a vague agnostic/atheistic youth—as the result of a personal journey that started in a moment of philosophical reflection in the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees library and carried me through several years of flirtation with charismatic Christianity, close to half a year in India fascinated by the diversity of faiths represented there, and then on to an academic career in philosophy.
Of course, my story isn’t typical of religious believers. But there are others like me. And how are we affected by the new atheist movement? It annoys us—sometimes enough to motivate us to write books about it. It annoys us because it entirely ignores us—that is, it argues against religion as if people like us, and religious faith like ours, doesn’t exist. (Not all atheist critics are guilty of this, by the way--but it is pretty characteristic of the new atheist movement.) And then when we defend our faith—when we say that it does exist and that the new atheist arguments don’t account for it—we get accused of “avoiding the new atheist arguments by redefining religion as something no one believes in.” Which, predictably, makes us even more annoyed.
The religious fundamentalists, by and large, are unaffected by the new atheists in much the way that Dawkins predicted—because, as he puts it in The God Delusion, they are protected by “immunological devices” such as the “dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely the work of Satan.”
I don’t doubt that there are some who have been grating under the weight of the kind of religion that the new atheists most directly attack (poised to reject it as my mother rejected her fundamentalist upbringing) for whom a new atheist bestseller or lecture served as the catalyst. But I also suspect that most of these would have rejected religion sooner or later anyway.
All of this leads me to wonder, first, who the real target audience is for the new atheist movement; and second, what is being offered to that target audience.
So who is new atheism’s target audience? It’s not non-religious free thinkers like Beckett, who are bothered by the movement’s group-think mentality. It’s not religious free thinkers like me (I've thought about devoting a post to complaining about the tendency for atheists to reserve for themselves the "free-thinker" label). We find the new atheists to be not only willfully ignoring our brand of religion but also reproducing in atheist clothes the very same in-group/out-group mentality, the very same demands for “correct thinking” and cries of heresy, that we take to be the crud weighing down the gems we find in religious life and thought.
And it'spretty obvious that the target audience is not devoted fundamentalists, who are mostly immune to atheist arguments.
It may be that those poised to shake off religious fundamentalism like a set of chains are among new atheism’s target audience—but if so they are part of a substantially broader group which includes (for example) those who have already rejected their fundamentalist past but harbor an ongoing resentment, and those who have never been fundamentalists but have clashed with them in various ways (over the teaching of evolution in school, or over the separation of church and state, or over homosexuality, etc.).
And what is it that the new atheist movement offers this loose collection of people? Despite Dawkins’ expressed hopes, new atheism is not ultimately about atheist evangelism. The disaffected fundamentalists are most probably heading towards some species of atheism in any event, and the others in the target audience are already there. What the new atheist movement offers them, I think, is precisely what Beckett saw when he chaired a gathering of Dawkins fans—namely, a church...or the atheist equivalent of one.
The new atheism is speaking to those who have rejected organized religion but who still long for its structures, its unity, the sense of belonging and purpose it has to offer. It’s such people who are most likely to be drawn to new atheism’s evangelical mission, its in-group/out-group mentality, and its established visionary leaders. But instead of gathering together every week in a shared building, they gather together online—listening to PZ Myers’ sermons (delivering their amens! and halleluias! in posted comments) or having small group book studies at RichardDawkins.net—and then occasionally attending a big tent revival when Hitchens or Harris or Dawkins comes to town.
And so I conclude that the chief effect of the new atheist movement hasn’t been to substantially increase the number of atheists in the world. Rather, it has been to help build the atheist’s version of an organized religion—somewhat less organized, but complete with its characteristic vices.
And given the evangelical fervor with which this new church on the scene attacks its rivals, I’d be surprised if one of its most telling effects hasn’t been to exacerbate the ideological polarization and entrenchment in the world. If so, we can only hope that more atheists will have a moment like the one Bernard Beckett experienced at the Richard Dawkins event he chaired: looking at the new atheists gathered all around him and thinking, “Good God, this is just like church.”
Sunday, June 6, 2010
A More Reasonable Naturalist...
For a far more reasonable approach to the question of how much atheists need to know about theology than is offered by PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins and the like, check out this brief post by a naturalist philosopher and secular humanist (and a friend and former colleague of mine) John Shook--a far more astute mind than Myers.
I obviously don't agree with everything in the post--I certainly don't think theistic worldviews can be disproved in 10,000 words, let alone that John has done so (but that's an issue for another time). And I think there's something missing from the life of anyone--atheist or theist--who blissfully lives out their worldview, comfortable in how eminently rational it is, without taking some time out once in awhile to seriously wrestle with thoughtful exponents of the opposing views.
While John doesn't directly state otherwise, it is suggested by the following: "If you don't like arguing over God, then you don't need to know anything about theology. Your non-religious worldview is amply justified by common-sense, reason, and science. Relax and let others do any needed arguing." I hear Christian apologists saying the same kind of thing to believers ("Just live out your faith life, which is amply justified, and we'll go out there and defend it against these atheist challengers"), and while there's something to it (not everyone has to be or can be expected to be an expert in theology and philosophy), I'm uneasy with the precise wording of it.
What I'd say, instead, would be something more along the following lines: "If you happen not to believe in God but don't like to spend time studying theology, then it is better just to live out your atheist worldview and admit you haven't done enough to assess its merits than to adopt a false confidence about your own superior rationality or insight into the truth. Not everyone can spend their lives wrestling with these questions, and some people are more suited to designing airplanes or dancing ballet--pursuits which take up so much time if done well that little energy is left to engage in depth with theological and philosophical questions in the way that academics do. But in the spirit of Socrates' famous dictum about the unexamined life, your life would be enriched to the extent that, at some point or another, you seriously wrestle with core elements of the worldview that drives it." I'd say the same basic thing to theists.
But these quibbles aside, I think John offers a far more sensible template for atheists to follow, when considering how much theology they need to know, than does someone like Myers. In general, it shows intellectual integrity to say to others, "Listen to my ideas, but if you care enough to do so then you might also want to listen to those who seriously develop an alternative view," than it does to say to others, "Listen to me and ignore those who disagree with me."
I obviously don't agree with everything in the post--I certainly don't think theistic worldviews can be disproved in 10,000 words, let alone that John has done so (but that's an issue for another time). And I think there's something missing from the life of anyone--atheist or theist--who blissfully lives out their worldview, comfortable in how eminently rational it is, without taking some time out once in awhile to seriously wrestle with thoughtful exponents of the opposing views.
While John doesn't directly state otherwise, it is suggested by the following: "If you don't like arguing over God, then you don't need to know anything about theology. Your non-religious worldview is amply justified by common-sense, reason, and science. Relax and let others do any needed arguing." I hear Christian apologists saying the same kind of thing to believers ("Just live out your faith life, which is amply justified, and we'll go out there and defend it against these atheist challengers"), and while there's something to it (not everyone has to be or can be expected to be an expert in theology and philosophy), I'm uneasy with the precise wording of it.
What I'd say, instead, would be something more along the following lines: "If you happen not to believe in God but don't like to spend time studying theology, then it is better just to live out your atheist worldview and admit you haven't done enough to assess its merits than to adopt a false confidence about your own superior rationality or insight into the truth. Not everyone can spend their lives wrestling with these questions, and some people are more suited to designing airplanes or dancing ballet--pursuits which take up so much time if done well that little energy is left to engage in depth with theological and philosophical questions in the way that academics do. But in the spirit of Socrates' famous dictum about the unexamined life, your life would be enriched to the extent that, at some point or another, you seriously wrestle with core elements of the worldview that drives it." I'd say the same basic thing to theists.
But these quibbles aside, I think John offers a far more sensible template for atheists to follow, when considering how much theology they need to know, than does someone like Myers. In general, it shows intellectual integrity to say to others, "Listen to my ideas, but if you care enough to do so then you might also want to listen to those who seriously develop an alternative view," than it does to say to others, "Listen to me and ignore those who disagree with me."
Friday, May 28, 2010
PZ Myers--Used as a Critical Thinking Case Study
So, I was rereading PZ Myers’ response to my recent Religion Dispatches essay (in which, among other things, I challenge Myers’ infamous “Courtier’s Reply”), and I found it so riddled with problems—informal fallacies, sophistry, seemingly willful misinterpretations, and a kind of deep blindness to my broader point—that I almost started to feel sorry for the guy.
This temptation was quickly dispelled as I skimmed through the hundreds of comments by his legions of yes-men who praised him for his masterful “take-down” of this hapless Reitan character. And then my eye was caught by one comment I’d missed during the last go-around. Here’s what the commenter says:
But I am now tempted to offer something more substantial—the sort of thing I might do in a critical thinking class (a kind of “spot the fallacies and sophistical argument-surrogates” exercise). Unfortunately, the piece is so riddled with problems from this perspective that to treat all of them would take more time than I have. So, this may have to be the first post in a series...if I have the energy to persist in an exercise of this sort.
Warning: This post is a bit more prickly than usual for me. In any event, here we go.
Poor Caricatures:
Let me begin with the very same part of Myers’ essay that I addressed in my last post. Myers, to his credit, quotes here a substantial chunk of my essay—the chunk in which I say the following:
He then immediately follows it up with these words: “Let me clarify that for you, Dr Reitan. You are saying that religion is a nice fairy tale that makes you feel good.”
Since I’ve already pointed out in my previous post just how far off the mark this supposed summary of my meaning happens to be, I won’t repeat that here. What I want to stress here is the sophistical argumentative strategy that is employed. Rather than attempting to restate the author’s actual thinking and critically assess its merits, he immediately offers a caricature.
But not just any caricature. Rather, he jumps to the strangest sort of caricature one can imagine—one in which the substantive content of the caricature has so little to do with what is actually stated in the quote that it doesn’t seem to even be a caricature of the quoted passage at all.
Let me help Myers out a bit. What he says here—“Religion is a nice fairy tale that makes you feel good”—could actually be used as a caricature of some of the things I actually do say in my book and elsewhere. When I characterize the concept of God as that whose existence would fulfill the “ethico-religious hope” (the hope that the universe is not pitilessly indifferent but is in some fundamental way on the side the good), and I then endorse a pragmatic understanding of “faith” as the decision to live as if a hoped for possibility is true, these ideas might be (unfairly) caricatured in the terms Myers uses.
But using this "believe it because it's a feel good fairy tale" notion to caricature the passage he quotes from the RD essay is akin to using a political cartoon of Barack Obama (in which his ears are larger than his head) as a caricature of Hillary Clinton.
Let me put it baldly: Caricaturing what others say is unsound. It replaces careful argument by offering an up oversimplified straw man for mockery, leaving the more nuanced actual view uncritiqued. But using a caricature that doesn’t even resemble what is being mocked is not just unsound, it exemplifies an utter indifference to engaging seriously with what is being said. Myers can get away with this kind of thing only because his target audience is a crowd of followers eager to cheer him on. From the standpoint of an outsider, one is left scratching one’s head in utter bewilderment.
Leaving Important Stuff Out for the Sake of Creating a False Impression:
In the opening of his riposte, Myers says the following:
What I do claim in the RD essay is that Dawkins hasn’t adequately addressed apologetic theology. It is true, of course, that I do not explore that point in the RD essay. But neither do I merely wave it away. Rather, I point out that since I’ve written an entire book in which large portions are devoted to making this point, I will focus on another point here. In other words, I say that there are two points to be made. One point I’ve already addressed at length, but the other still needs addressing. And so I will (start to) address it.
This certainly changes the significance of my exclusive emphasis on substantive theology. Rather than it sounding like I’m "sidestepping" and "waving away" a crucial issue because I don’t know how to address it, it becomes clear that I’m filling in a blank among things that I haven't yet addressed. But the former is more derogatory and more likely to make me sound like the kind of slippery hack Myers likes to caricature theologians and theistic philosophers as being. And so he goes with that.
And since my reasons for not taking up apologetic theology here don't have bearing on the strength of my argument for substantive theology in any event, insinuating (for argumentative effect) an erroneous negative account of those reasons amounts to the ad hominen fallacy.
Of course, it could be that Myers just wants to avoid helping to sell copies of my book--and that's why he left out mention of it. And once it was left out, he noticed that doing so enabled him to make a false impression that would illegitimately serve his rhetorical purposes...and jumped at the opportunity.
Skipping the Hard Stuff and Launching Headlong into Mischaracterization:
A bit further on, Myers attempts to summarize a key part of my argument in the following way:
Notice here that he makes no effort to explicate why I'd say that “theology is just like naturalism”—which isn’t what I say, by the way. What I say is that theistic worldviews, insofar as they offer a holistic interpretation of the facts rather than making factual claims, are in the same category as metaphysical naturalism: both make a claim about reality that can’t be tested empirically. In other words, if you’re presented with two rival claims—one holding that what is empirically observable exhausts what’s real, the other holding that it doesn’t—you can’t decide between them by appeal to empirical evidence. Empirical observation cannot determine whether there is more to reality than what is empirically observable.
Since this point is so obviously true--and since it implies immediately that naturalism is an empirically unfalsifiable worldview, and hence implies immediately that Myers is committed to an empirically unfalsifiable worldview--it's no wonder that Myers makes no attempt to seriously address this point. Rather, he just (mis)states it in a dismissive tone. The use of dismissive tones in lieau of argument is a standard sophistical tactic which critical thinking teachers warn against and Myers uses repeatedly as if it were a virue. It is not. It is an intellectual vice.
And when that vice is committed, it's often the case that it is being used to mask a weakness in someone's position. Given Myers' insistence both that nothing that defies empirical testing should be embraced and that metaphysical naturalism is true, it's no wonder he resorts to mockery when it's pointed out that metaphysical naturalism defies empirical testing.
He then proceeds quickly to mischaracterize my position, by stating that I conceive of alternative worldviews as “equally unjustifiable and ultimately arbitrary,” comprising a kind of “rack of clothes” from which we are all free to choose “which universe is best for us.”
Of course, choosing worldviews isn't the same as choosing universes. The universe is what it is. A worldview is a holistic understanding and interpretation of it--one which either fits with reality or doesn't, but one whose fit can't be tested empirically. Here, Myers entirely misses the crucial point, which is that I am in this essay attempting to sketch out a broad strategy for investigating the relative merits of something—which worldview we should embrace—that cannot be investigated through the empirical methods exemplified by the sciences.
Admittedly, it is not possible to offer in such a short essay a fully developed picture of this alternative method. If Myers were dissatisfied with the account of this method and desired a fuller picture, it would be fair to ask for more information—whereupon I might direct him to Hegel’s work (not that he’d read it).
But in a short essay one has to content oneself with modest points, and the modest point I was making was this: if there is one clearly necessary feature possessed by any strategy that is going to have any hope of helping us decide which worldview best captures the fundamental nature of reality, that necessary feature is this: a willingness to seeing how the world looks, how experience fits together, under the most carefully developed alternative worldviews. And that requires reading substantive theology.
Myers never engages with this central claim. Instead, he attributes to me a kind of crass relativism to which I do not ascribe. Either this is the result of a failure to read carefully and charitably, or it is the result of a willful misrepresentation. Either way, it is a poor example of sound critical engagement with the views of others. But why engage seriously and thoughtfully with the views of others when you just know you’re right and you’ve got legions of fans who will call your most sophistical prose a work of genius?
Unfortunately I’ve run out of time before running out of sophistry to critique (heading out of town for the long weekend). Since there are a few more whoppers in Myers' post, I may take them up when I get back. But this wholly negative exercise is tiring, so I might not.
This temptation was quickly dispelled as I skimmed through the hundreds of comments by his legions of yes-men who praised him for his masterful “take-down” of this hapless Reitan character. And then my eye was caught by one comment I’d missed during the last go-around. Here’s what the commenter says:
Brilliant essay. But what keeps bothering me is... will Reitan ever read this?At first it just made chuckle, that someone could make such a dogmatic (and erroneous) assumption. After all, I’d not only already read Myers’ critique, I’d written a quick response in which I zeroed in on a key instance of Myers’ willful mischaracterization of my point (a mischaracterization that is crucial to his entire “take-down” of my essay).
Does he just post something like this then blissfully wander away in
ignorance? These people never, ever, EVER seem to respond to such high
quality critiques. Oh, sure, they love to respond to some idiots ripost, but
when its good...never.
How do they do that? How do they remain so detached from ever thinking about their position, what they wrote? I cannot understand being so purposefully ignorant.
But I am now tempted to offer something more substantial—the sort of thing I might do in a critical thinking class (a kind of “spot the fallacies and sophistical argument-surrogates” exercise). Unfortunately, the piece is so riddled with problems from this perspective that to treat all of them would take more time than I have. So, this may have to be the first post in a series...if I have the energy to persist in an exercise of this sort.
Warning: This post is a bit more prickly than usual for me. In any event, here we go.
Poor Caricatures:
Let me begin with the very same part of Myers’ essay that I addressed in my last post. Myers, to his credit, quotes here a substantial chunk of my essay—the chunk in which I say the following:
But belief in God isn't primarily a belief about the contents of the empirical
world. It is, rather, a certain holistic interpretation of our experience, one
that offers an account of the meaning and significance of the empirical world
and the lives we lead within it. To believe in God is to understand the world of
ordinary experience in terms of an interpretive worldview that posits the
existence of "something more."
He then immediately follows it up with these words: “Let me clarify that for you, Dr Reitan. You are saying that religion is a nice fairy tale that makes you feel good.”
Since I’ve already pointed out in my previous post just how far off the mark this supposed summary of my meaning happens to be, I won’t repeat that here. What I want to stress here is the sophistical argumentative strategy that is employed. Rather than attempting to restate the author’s actual thinking and critically assess its merits, he immediately offers a caricature.
But not just any caricature. Rather, he jumps to the strangest sort of caricature one can imagine—one in which the substantive content of the caricature has so little to do with what is actually stated in the quote that it doesn’t seem to even be a caricature of the quoted passage at all.
Let me help Myers out a bit. What he says here—“Religion is a nice fairy tale that makes you feel good”—could actually be used as a caricature of some of the things I actually do say in my book and elsewhere. When I characterize the concept of God as that whose existence would fulfill the “ethico-religious hope” (the hope that the universe is not pitilessly indifferent but is in some fundamental way on the side the good), and I then endorse a pragmatic understanding of “faith” as the decision to live as if a hoped for possibility is true, these ideas might be (unfairly) caricatured in the terms Myers uses.
But using this "believe it because it's a feel good fairy tale" notion to caricature the passage he quotes from the RD essay is akin to using a political cartoon of Barack Obama (in which his ears are larger than his head) as a caricature of Hillary Clinton.
Let me put it baldly: Caricaturing what others say is unsound. It replaces careful argument by offering an up oversimplified straw man for mockery, leaving the more nuanced actual view uncritiqued. But using a caricature that doesn’t even resemble what is being mocked is not just unsound, it exemplifies an utter indifference to engaging seriously with what is being said. Myers can get away with this kind of thing only because his target audience is a crowd of followers eager to cheer him on. From the standpoint of an outsider, one is left scratching one’s head in utter bewilderment.
Leaving Important Stuff Out for the Sake of Creating a False Impression:
In the opening of his riposte, Myers says the following:
What Reitan does in his essay is an interesting sidestep. He acknowledges that there are two kinds of theologies — "apologetic theology", which attempts to address the reality of god's existence, and the misleadingly named "substantive theology", which he claims is about the operational consequences once we've assumed god's existence — and he simply waves away apologetic theology for now. He still claims there's good reason to believe, but it's not the topic here — it's exclusively about whether we canFirst of all, I should point out that he doesn’t exactly get me right when he says that I “claim there’s good reason to believe”--that, in effect, apologetic theology succeeds. In a sense, of course, I do claim this—but not in this essay, and almost certainly not in the sense he has in mind (since the sense in which I hold belief to be reasonable includes some observations about the nature of rationality that presuppose the kind of distinction between interpretive worldviews and empirical facts that Myers fails to understand and so simply ridicules).
dismiss "substantive theology", which is what the Courtier's Reply argues.
What I do claim in the RD essay is that Dawkins hasn’t adequately addressed apologetic theology. It is true, of course, that I do not explore that point in the RD essay. But neither do I merely wave it away. Rather, I point out that since I’ve written an entire book in which large portions are devoted to making this point, I will focus on another point here. In other words, I say that there are two points to be made. One point I’ve already addressed at length, but the other still needs addressing. And so I will (start to) address it.
This certainly changes the significance of my exclusive emphasis on substantive theology. Rather than it sounding like I’m "sidestepping" and "waving away" a crucial issue because I don’t know how to address it, it becomes clear that I’m filling in a blank among things that I haven't yet addressed. But the former is more derogatory and more likely to make me sound like the kind of slippery hack Myers likes to caricature theologians and theistic philosophers as being. And so he goes with that.
And since my reasons for not taking up apologetic theology here don't have bearing on the strength of my argument for substantive theology in any event, insinuating (for argumentative effect) an erroneous negative account of those reasons amounts to the ad hominen fallacy.
Of course, it could be that Myers just wants to avoid helping to sell copies of my book--and that's why he left out mention of it. And once it was left out, he noticed that doing so enabled him to make a false impression that would illegitimately serve his rhetorical purposes...and jumped at the opportunity.
Skipping the Hard Stuff and Launching Headlong into Mischaracterization:
A bit further on, Myers attempts to summarize a key part of my argument in the following way:
He tries to claim that theology is just like naturalism, equally unjustifiable
and ultimately arbitrary, and simply a matter of convenience and compatibility
with our personal philosophies. We have to "try on" different philosophies about
the universe in order to determine which one fits, as if the universe is a rack
of clothes with different sizes for different folks, and we have to each pick
and choose to determine which universe is best for us.
Notice here that he makes no effort to explicate why I'd say that “theology is just like naturalism”—which isn’t what I say, by the way. What I say is that theistic worldviews, insofar as they offer a holistic interpretation of the facts rather than making factual claims, are in the same category as metaphysical naturalism: both make a claim about reality that can’t be tested empirically. In other words, if you’re presented with two rival claims—one holding that what is empirically observable exhausts what’s real, the other holding that it doesn’t—you can’t decide between them by appeal to empirical evidence. Empirical observation cannot determine whether there is more to reality than what is empirically observable.
Since this point is so obviously true--and since it implies immediately that naturalism is an empirically unfalsifiable worldview, and hence implies immediately that Myers is committed to an empirically unfalsifiable worldview--it's no wonder that Myers makes no attempt to seriously address this point. Rather, he just (mis)states it in a dismissive tone. The use of dismissive tones in lieau of argument is a standard sophistical tactic which critical thinking teachers warn against and Myers uses repeatedly as if it were a virue. It is not. It is an intellectual vice.
And when that vice is committed, it's often the case that it is being used to mask a weakness in someone's position. Given Myers' insistence both that nothing that defies empirical testing should be embraced and that metaphysical naturalism is true, it's no wonder he resorts to mockery when it's pointed out that metaphysical naturalism defies empirical testing.
He then proceeds quickly to mischaracterize my position, by stating that I conceive of alternative worldviews as “equally unjustifiable and ultimately arbitrary,” comprising a kind of “rack of clothes” from which we are all free to choose “which universe is best for us.”
Of course, choosing worldviews isn't the same as choosing universes. The universe is what it is. A worldview is a holistic understanding and interpretation of it--one which either fits with reality or doesn't, but one whose fit can't be tested empirically. Here, Myers entirely misses the crucial point, which is that I am in this essay attempting to sketch out a broad strategy for investigating the relative merits of something—which worldview we should embrace—that cannot be investigated through the empirical methods exemplified by the sciences.
Admittedly, it is not possible to offer in such a short essay a fully developed picture of this alternative method. If Myers were dissatisfied with the account of this method and desired a fuller picture, it would be fair to ask for more information—whereupon I might direct him to Hegel’s work (not that he’d read it).
But in a short essay one has to content oneself with modest points, and the modest point I was making was this: if there is one clearly necessary feature possessed by any strategy that is going to have any hope of helping us decide which worldview best captures the fundamental nature of reality, that necessary feature is this: a willingness to seeing how the world looks, how experience fits together, under the most carefully developed alternative worldviews. And that requires reading substantive theology.
Myers never engages with this central claim. Instead, he attributes to me a kind of crass relativism to which I do not ascribe. Either this is the result of a failure to read carefully and charitably, or it is the result of a willful misrepresentation. Either way, it is a poor example of sound critical engagement with the views of others. But why engage seriously and thoughtfully with the views of others when you just know you’re right and you’ve got legions of fans who will call your most sophistical prose a work of genius?
Unfortunately I’ve run out of time before running out of sophistry to critique (heading out of town for the long weekend). Since there are a few more whoppers in Myers' post, I may take them up when I get back. But this wholly negative exercise is tiring, so I might not.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Earned myself a post on Pharyngula!
My recent Religion Dispatches essay inspired a direct reply from the infamous PZ Myers himself, on his atheist blog "Pharyngula." Myers is the biologist whose "Courtier's Reply" I discuss in the RD essay. I must profess to being a bit...honored? He does, after all, compare me to the Dalai Lama (although, for him, it's not intended as a compliment).
A key element of his response is his summation of a passage from my essay, in which I point out that theistic belief is not a belief about the empirical world but rather a component of a worldview which interprets the world of immediate experience by positing a transcendent dimension to reality. Here's how he summarizes that claim: "Let me clarify that for you, Dr Reitan. You are saying that religion is a nice fairy tale that makes you feel good."
Um, no.
I'm saying that the question of whether there is more to reality than what we encounter in direct empirical experience is not a question we can answer through empirical means, and that there is a difference between a claim about the empirical world and a "way of seeing" the empirical world (a distinction I make at some length during my recent podcast interview for "Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot," over at Common Sense Atheism).
I am, furthermore, saying that some "ways of seeing," or interpretive worldviews, are made possible by positing realities that transcend the empirical world, and that the way to assess alternative interpretive worldviews (besides looking at their internal consistency and fit with experience) is to provisionally adopt them, see how well they work in practice, revise them accordingly, and continue doing so--in terms of a roughly Hegelian process that I sketched out, among other places, in my talk at the University of Tulsa last fall.
And I am saying everyone has an interpretive worldview--but that some have their interpretive lenses plastered so firmly to their face that they don't realize it. And I'm saying that immersing oneself in the writings of those who consciously attempt to understand and refine their own worldview in the light of lived experience can help those who are blind to their own assumptions realize that they have them and perhaps begin the process of internal critique. And I'm saying that the best theological writings (but not all theological writings) do this.
Among other things.
A key element of his response is his summation of a passage from my essay, in which I point out that theistic belief is not a belief about the empirical world but rather a component of a worldview which interprets the world of immediate experience by positing a transcendent dimension to reality. Here's how he summarizes that claim: "Let me clarify that for you, Dr Reitan. You are saying that religion is a nice fairy tale that makes you feel good."
Um, no.
I'm saying that the question of whether there is more to reality than what we encounter in direct empirical experience is not a question we can answer through empirical means, and that there is a difference between a claim about the empirical world and a "way of seeing" the empirical world (a distinction I make at some length during my recent podcast interview for "Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot," over at Common Sense Atheism).
I am, furthermore, saying that some "ways of seeing," or interpretive worldviews, are made possible by positing realities that transcend the empirical world, and that the way to assess alternative interpretive worldviews (besides looking at their internal consistency and fit with experience) is to provisionally adopt them, see how well they work in practice, revise them accordingly, and continue doing so--in terms of a roughly Hegelian process that I sketched out, among other places, in my talk at the University of Tulsa last fall.
And I am saying everyone has an interpretive worldview--but that some have their interpretive lenses plastered so firmly to their face that they don't realize it. And I'm saying that immersing oneself in the writings of those who consciously attempt to understand and refine their own worldview in the light of lived experience can help those who are blind to their own assumptions realize that they have them and perhaps begin the process of internal critique. And I'm saying that the best theological writings (but not all theological writings) do this.
Among other things.
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