The Campaign to Get People Vaccinated: Manipulation vs. Reasoned Persuasion

I've seen the following meme recently on social media, and given the timing of its spread it presumably relates to current efforts to convince Americans to become fully vaccinated against COVID. Here's the meme:

(In the event of any difficulty reading the image, it says the following:

How Manipulation Works

1. FEAR--Do this or something bad will happen.

2. FLATTERY--Do this and you're a good person.

3. BRIBERY--Do this and I will do something for you.

4. VIOLENCE--Do this or else...

By the way...We're at step 3.)

Looking at the meme as a philosopher, there are numerous problems with it. One problem relates to "steps" 1 & 2, and involves the failure to distinguish between what Plato called "mere persuasion" and persuasion that proceeds via "instruction"--or what I'm inclined to call the distinction between manipulative persuasion and reasoned persuasion.

The point is that we can persuade people through a kind of trickery in which we bypass people's rationality and responsiveness to evidence and arguments, instead appealing directly to irrelevant feelings and emotions to shift a person's view in the desired direction.

Or we can persuade people by give reasons and evidence that support the truth of the view we are asking them to accept. 

The former is a kind of manipulation. The latter is not.

So, consider the so-called "step 1" of manipulation in the meme above, labeled "Fear": 

Do this or something bad will happen. 

Consider this step in relation to what the meme was surely intended to be a commentary about: the ongoing COVID vaccination campaign. Suppose that I point out that while COVID infection often has only mild health repercussions, in a significant number of people (much higher than for viruses like, say, the flu), it can lead to serious long-term health problems and even death. We've been able to isolate some of the risk factors for serious illness, but not all--and many apparently healthy people have died from the disease. 

Suppose, furthermore, that I point out that the vaccines for COVID have been shown to be very safe and effective--and especially effective at prevent serious illness.

And suppose, furthermore, that I note that with widespread vaccination, we will be able to return to our normal lives without either seeing a surge of COVID-related deaths or whole classes of vulnerable people being forced to isolate themselves to avoid infection. But without widespread vaccination, we'll continue to face the tough choices we faced before vaccines were available: either we radically altar our collective way of life to protect the vulnerable (with the economic, social, and personal costs that this brings), or we don't, in which case vulnerable people will either be dying in frightening numbers or forced into seclusion.

And suppose I conclude on the basis of all of this that if we don't collectively make a commitment to vaccinate as widely as we can--which at a minimum means vaccinating ourselves and may also mean urging friends and family to do likewise--then the circumstances in our country will be far worse for many people than would be the case were we to make that collective commitment to vaccinate.

Suppose I lay out that argument. What I've effectively done here is given reason to think that it is true that "bad things will happen" if we don't collectively commit to vaccinating--bad things that won't happen if we do. But the argument above is based on sound evidence, and it logically supports the conclusion. In other words, it is a good argument for reaching the conclusion that if we don't do this, bad things will happen (or keep happening); and if we do this, those bad things will be avoided.

An argument like that is not manipulation. If you are about to drive without a seatbelt and I point out the differential accident survival rates of those who do and don't wear seatbelts, I'm engaged in reasoned persuasion, not the manipulative kind. Likewise with the vaccine argument above.

Of course, reasoned persuasion is open to criticism and response. It evolves through dialogue, through considering objections  and responding. Reasoned persuasion, because it is oriented towards uncovering the truth, is open to being tested in the light of critical questions and the like. The point here, however, is that reasoned persuasion, which is not manipulative, can have the form of saying "Do this or something bad will happen." What distinguishes it from manipulation is that it is backed up by reasons and has an orientation towards speaking the truth.

The same can be said about "step 2." What are the characteristics of a good person? There is no universal consensus, of course, but there are still things we can and do agree about: virtues, or good character traits, that are typical of the people we call "good." 

They care about others. They care about the public welfare. They are willing to mildly inconvenience themselves for the sake of helping others avoid major sacrifices, and they are willing to take small personal risks to help others avoid dire ones. 

Given all the facts laid out in my argument above, you can see that it is easy to construct an argument for the conclusion that, on this broad portrait of a good person, someone who gets vaccinated against COVID is acting as a good person would. (Of course, there are cases of individuals who face a greater-than-typical risk from vaccination, and so might be very good people but choose nevertheless not to vaccinate; but generally, for the vast majority of us, the risk of vaccination is very low.)

In short, everything I said about step 1 applies to step 2: there are non-manipulative arguments for the conclusion that getting a vaccine is the sort of thing a good person as described above would do. Or, put another way, there are moral arguments for getting vaccinated that are good arguments for most ordinary, healthy people. Of course, these arguments are again open to critical examination, questions and objections. People with good motives may be misinformed about salient facts, and so they are unconvinced that they should get vaccinated absent a deeper investigation of those facts. But it is also the case that good people are open to being persuaded by an honest investigation of the evidence.

The point is that there can be good reasons to think that getting vaccinated is the sort of thing a good person, fully and properly informed, would do.

Of course there is manipulative persuasion that appeals to fear, and manipulative persuasion that appeals to flattery. What distinguishes these manipulative forms of persuasion is that they do not invoke evidence and reasons to support their conclusion. Instead, they paint a scary picture without offering clear, sound evidence for the view that the desired behavior contributes to preventing the scary picture from becoming reality. Or they pander to the egos of their audience, making the audience feel good about themselves, and then just trust that those good feelings will spill over onto the desired behavior without offering any solid moral arguments in support of the behavior.

Manipulation is about creating associations between feelings and views through building subconscious connections. You hold up an idea you want someone to believe, and you stoke certain emotions (fear or pride, etc.)--and you hope that those emotions will latch onto the idea in the right way. Fear will be associated with not doing X because of the vivid association created, even though you have done nothing to support the conclusion that failure to do X will have the fearful results. Or that gushy feeling of being a great person is associated with doing X, even though no reasoned moral argument is offered in support of the view that doing X is the kind of thing someone motivated by virtuous character traits would do.

When it comes to steps 3 & 4 in the meme, things are a bit different. 3 & 4 are not forms of persuasion in the sense of convincing you that something is true--either manipulatively or instructively. 3 & 4 are about behavior modification through rewards and penalties. But in labeling 4 "VIOLENCE," the meme ignores the fact that there are a wide array of penalties that are imposed to modify behavior that don't typically fall under the heading of violence--at least not violence in the typical overt form that we usually have in mind when we use the term (there are some less conventional understandings of violence that see all coercive pressures as violent, but I'm not going to dig into those understandings here).

Behavior modification through rewards and penalties is a widespread human practice. Parents do it when they reward and punish their kids. Teachers do it with gold stars and time in the thinking spot, or with A's and F's. Governments do it when they offer tax breaks and tax penalties. Laws are built on negative consequences for disobedience.

It is hard to imagine a functioning society that does not use rewards and penalties when the behavior at issue is important for the sake of social health and success. Of course, there are always pressing questions that we need to wrestle with when we are considering the imposition of rewards and penalties: is the matter important enough to try to shift people's default behavior by adding incentives and disincentives? And if so, what is the best approach: incentive-based, or penalty-based? 

3 is often employed when reasoned persuasion of types 1 & 2 are insufficient. Milder (not-overtly-violent) forms of 4 are sometimes employed when 3 fails, without an overtly violent form of 4 ever being deployed. Many times we stop at 3 because we conclude that the most effective way to proceed is to push on with a combination 1-3. Sometimes the matter is so serious (murder), that we implement a violent (forcible arrest and incarceration) form of 4 immediately without waiting to see whether 1-3 alone, or a milder form of 4, will work. In terms of social tools for getting people to behave civilly and beneficially with one another, we use a mix of 1-4 in ways that don't follow some clear, inevitable pattern.

What is troubling about this meme is that it does not present 3 & (milder forms of) 4 as inevitable features of civil society, where 3 & 4 are employed variously in various situations, in various combinations with 1 & 2, based on assessments of social needs, individual rights, and pragmatic questions about what works. And it does not recognize that the "penalty" side of behavior modification comes in a range of forms, most of it not overtly violent. Instead, the meme represents 4 as violence, and 1-4 as this inevitable progression of increasing severity, with violence the final frightening stage in government population control. And then it ends with saying that we are just about to enter that final stage.

The meme offers no evidence, no reasoned argument, for the view that this is how our nation's campaign to get people vaccinated is evolving. It simply lays out this ominous set of stages, with VIOLENCE (in all caps) about to come hammering down.

So, based on the distinction made above between manipulative and reasoned persuasion, this meme appears to be a case of manipulative persuasion. In that respect, it is distinct from prevailing arguments about the troubling outcomes of large-scale failure to vaccinate, and moral arguments in favor of vaccination, since these arguments (at least the ones I've seen) most often take the form of reasoned persuasion. 

Guns and Islam: A Philosophical Public Service Announcement

The mass shooting by a pair of radicalized Muslims in San Bernardino fueled two ongoing conversations in this country: one about guns, the other about Islam. And I've noticed that a few of the arguments tossed about in the gun conversation have some logical parallels in the conversation about Islam (and vice versa).

I think these parallels are worth pointing out in the service of our collective effort to be more consistent thinkers--a kind of quick Public Service Announcement of the sort philosophers are especially suited to offer. If you don't care about logical consistency, feel free to ignore what follows (and be ignored in turn by those who do care). But if you care about consistency, then here are some things you might want to think about.

PARALLEL 1

Suppose you think along the following lines, as many advocates of gun rights do:

"Most gun owners are law abiding citizens who don't kill innocent people. Therefore, when it comes to the problem of innocent people getting killed, guns aren't the problem."

If you think that, then as a matter of logic you should accept the following reasoning:

"Most Muslims are law-abiding citizens who don't kill innocent people. Therefore, when it comes to the problem of innocent people getting killed, Islam isn't the problem."

PARALLEL 2

Suppose you think along the following lines, as many advocates of gun rights do:

"Even if we were to grant that taking away all guns would make our society safer, you can't justify such a policy on those grounds alone because people have rights. We have to protect the rights of law-abiding gun owners even as we aim to keep ourselves safe from the criminal ones."

Setting aside the fact that no political leader is talking about taking away all guns, if you accept this reasoning, then as a matter of logic you should accept the following reasoning (which, unfortunately, refers to something that a current candidate for President is seriously talking about):

"Even if we were to grant that closing our borders to/deporting/tracking all Muslims would make our society safer, you can't justify such a policy on those grounds alone because people have rights. We have to protect the rights of law-abiding Muslims even as we aim to keep ourselves safe from the criminal ones."

PARALLEL 3

Suppose you think along the following lines, as many advocates of gun rights do:

"Even though some gun owners occasionally kill innocent people, it doesn't follow that gun owners are the enemy. Most gun owners would never do such things, and so we should treat them with respect, focusing our outrage at the individuals who actually commit these crimes."

If you think along these lines, then as a matter of logic you should accept the following reasoning:

"Even though some Muslims occasionally kill innocent people, it doesn't follow that Muslims are the enemy. Most Muslims would never do such things, and so we should treat them with respect, focusing our outrage at the individuals who actually commit these crimes."

(I'm sure I've only scratched the surface of the parallel arguments here. Feel free to share any that occur to you in the comments section.)

CLARIFYING REMARK: INADEQUATE RESPONSES

In each of these cases, you may be tempted to respond along the following lines: "But wait! There's more to the story! While most (gun-owners/Muslims) aren't violent or dangerous, there's something about (guns/Islam) that contributes to the problem even so, something that is present in the one case that doesn't apply in the other."

But if you say that, you have conceded that the reasoning in both of the parallel arguments is unsound, because there is more that you need to know in order to draw the inference made in either argument. If you think Islam is a problem even though most Muslims are peaceful and law abiding, then you can't logically hold that guns aren't a problem just because most gun-owners are peaceful and law abiding (and vice versa).

In general, if you think the reasoning in one case is incomplete and unpersuasive, you should think the reasoning in the other case is likewise incomplete and unpersuasive. And so you should reject the argument in favor of something more nuanced.

"Delinking" Marriage from Procreation: Some Thoughts on Weasel Words

I had a professor in graduate school who had a problem with "weasel words." By this, he meant words that are so imprecise that they interfere with clear thinking. They lend themselves to equivocal reasoning: they shift meaning in a way that obscures the unsoundness of an argument.

Yesterday, as I listened to the NPR report on Supreme Court arguments on same-sex marriage, I found myself thinking about weasel words--because the lawyer defending discriminatory marriage laws, John Bursch, used a doozy of a weasel word in his arguments: "Delinking."

What Bursch argued is this: If we extend marriage to same-sex couples, we are "delinking" marriage from procreation. And if we delink marriage from procreation, then it's only "common sense" that we will see an increase in out-of-wedlock childbirth.

Got that? If not, here's the argument in a bit more detail: If our society recognizes same-sex marriage, we thereby indicate that procreative potential is not necessary for marriage. Thus, we "delink" marriage from procreation. But people who have babies out of wedlock are also "delinking" marriage from procreation--not in the same sense, but ignore that in favor of the fact that the word "delinking" is imprecise enough that it can be used in both cases. Isn't it perfectly reasonable to assume that if our society officially stands by delinking in the former sense, we should expect to see more delinking in the latter?

John Bursch seems to think so, which just goes to show that lawyers sometimes need refresher courses in basic critical thinking. In fact, I'm tempted to use this argument when I teach critical thinking in my classes.

Here's the thing. One thing, P, can be "linked" to another, Q, in all sorts of ways. For example, P might be a sufficient condition for Q, the way that being born in Oklahoma is a sufficient condition for being born in the US. Then again, P might be a necessary condition for Q, the way that being born on planet Earth is necessary for being born in the US.

Notice that things can be linked in one way but not linked in another. While being born in Oklahoma is a sufficient condition for being born in the US, it isn't a necessary condition. You could, like me, have been born in California. Or Texas. Or Rhode Island. (You get the idea). That being born in Oklahoma isn't necessary for being born in the US tells us nothing about whether it's sufficient.

Being born in one of the 50 states is a necessary and sufficient condition for being born in the US. But suppose we were to make Puerto Rico the 51st state of the union. Then, we would be "delinking" being born in the current 50 states from being born in the US--by making the former no longer necessary for the latter. But the two would remain linked in another way: being born in one of the current 50 states would still be sufficient for being born in the US. The one kind of "delinking" does not lead to the other.

Of course, whatever link there is between marriage and procreation is going to be different from what we find in the examples above. Infertile couples have been allowed to marry in this country for a long time. For even longer, unmarried people have been making babies. So if there is a link between the two, it isn't that one is necessary for the other. So what is it?

Maybe it's this: We think that a stable, long-term intimate partnership supported by society and the law provides the best environment for child-rearing (all else being equal). Hence, it is best if fertile heterosexual partners restrict sex to marriage, because this would ensure that children are consistently born into the best environment for child-rearing (all else being equal).

If this is the link, we might express it as follows: If you're going to make babies, it's best that you do it within a marriage. Let's call this a normative link: If P, then it's best that Q.

This is, for example, the sort of link many see between being a gun collector and having a gun safe in your home: If you're going to collect guns, then it's best to have an appropriately-sized safe in which you can store them.

But notice that if we allow people who don't collect guns to own large safes suitable for putting guns into, we have in no way severed this normative link. Letting a non-gun-collector own a gun safe--because, say, it's good for storing the person's priceless collection of ancient scepters--does not threaten in any way at all the link described above. It remains true that gun collectors would be well advised to have a gun safe even if we make gun safes available to people who don't collect guns.

Put simply, if you think that all gun collectors should own safes, you'd be pretty silly to believe that letting non-gun-collectors own safes too will threaten this principle and lead to fewer gun-collectors buying safes. It isn't remotely "common sense" that by "delinking" safe-ownership from gun-collecting in this way, you will end up with more gun collectors lacking safes in which to store their guns.

Likewise, it isn't remotely common sense that if you extend marriage to a new class of non-procreative pairs (we already extend it to non-procreative heterosexual pairs), you will have more out-of-wedlock childbirth. "Procreation should be restricted to within marriage" articulates a different kind of link between procreation and marriage than "Marriage should be restricted to couples who can procreate." If we reject the latter, that has no direct implications for the former.

The only way to make it seem as if it does is to use a weasel word like "delink." Reference two different kinds of connections with the same word, and you can proceed as if they were the same. By this reasoning, I hope to convince you to bury all your money by the edge of Stillwater Creek. I'll tell you where. Trust me, it'll be safe.

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.”

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:

Brilliant essay. But what keeps bothering me is... will Reitan ever read this?
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.

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).

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 can
dismiss "substantive theology", which is what the Courtier's Reply argues.

First 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).

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.