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.”

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.”

Racing for a Cure

I want to take time out from my usual philosophy of religion blogging to talk about something else.

Just over a week ago my wife, Ty, raced in her first triathlon—the CapTex Tri in Austin, Texas. It was a wonderful experience for the family, since we all stayed in a hotel adjacent to the course, in a room with a view of the river where the triathletes would be swimming. The day before the race we went canoing on the river with one of my wife's old friends from high school and her family. We stood under the Congress Avenue Bridge at dusk, waiting for bats to pour out of their hidey-holes. We swam and ate and watched dogs cavorting on the nearby trail (this, I think, was my daughter's favorite part).

And then, before dawn on the morning of Memorial day, Ty slipped out of bed, bundled up her wetsuit, bike helmet, various racing shoes and energy "goos," and slipped down to the starting area. The rest of us woke up in time to watch the swimmers from the hotel window--although they were too far away to discern which tiny little bobbing head belonged to my wife. That didn't stop my four-year-old daughter from confidently pointing at one of them and announcing, "There's mommy!"

A little later we positioned ourselves at the finish area for the bicycling portion of the race, and were able to cheer Ty on as she swept down the hill and clambered off the bike in preparation for the final run. Then we hied up the road to a good spot to watch the runners, and cheered again as Ty came running up a blazing street that magnified the Texas heat.

About an hour later, I found myself standing next to an exultant triathlete.

For my wife, the experience (far less stressful on her body than the marathons she’s done before) was so exhilarating that she’s planning to do it again, and again, and again (with visions of moving up from the Olympic distance to the “half Iron Man”—which combines a half marathon with something over 50 miles of biking and some ungodly length of swimming).

But she didn’t train for months and run (and swim, and bike) in this triathlon purely for her own health or enjoyment--although these were part of the motivation. Like the marathons she’s done before, my wife trained and raced with Team in Training, which uses these and other sporting events to raise awareness of blood cancers and raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS). LLS funds blood cancer research as well as providing financial and other forms of support for families struggling with leukemia or lymphoma, and Team in Training is the most significant work-horse for LLS in terms of fundraising.

Each Team in Training athlete has an honored hero. Ty’s hero was a young man named Steven, recently turned 18, who fought desperately against lymphoma until the week before the triathlon, when his struggle finally came to an end. My wife had been hoping to run in his honor but found herself, instead, running in his memory.

Coincidentally, just a few days before we left town for the event the wife of a colleague from another department came up to me just as I was finishing lunch at Panera Bread. She told me that her husband, Stephen, had just recently been diagnosed with Leukemia and was now at MD Anderson in Texas, awaiting a bone marrow transplant. Apparently he’d successfully fought off Lymphoma a decade before, but the treatment which had saved him then was responsible for his current blood cancer.

While I’d been friendly with Stephen for years (he worked closely with one of my philosophy colleagues on a couple of projects) I’d gotten to know him better just a year ago when I led a Wednesday night book study series of my book, Is God a Delusion?, at a church here in town—where Stephen and his family are members. He, his wife, and son all participated in a lively and thought-provoking series of conversations about the nature of religious faith, the relationship between science and religion, spiritual experience, and the like. I’ve also come to serve as the outside member of a dissertation committee that Stephen chairs, so I’ve seen him and come to know him in that capacity as well.

And so, as my wife ran the CapTex Tri on Memorial Day in memory of her honored hero, she was also running it in honor of my colleague and friend. And as I stood near the finish line with the kids, waiting for Ty to cross while the Texas sun blazed down on us, I thought about my friend Stephen, whose wife and children faced the fear of loss tempered by the hope of a cure. I thought about the family of Ty’s honored hero, Steven, who were now in the depths of grief. And I thought about the father who’d spoken at the Team in Training dinner the night before, whose son had been diagnosed with leukemia when he was not much older than my own—the boy whose last words, before he died, were “Keep fighting.”

And I knew that boy could have been one of our children--an awareness made all the more vivid by an experience we had a little over a year ago. My son had an unexplained pain in his leg—possibly a sprain, but we didn’t know. When Ty took him to the pediatrician's office, the doctor noticed all the bruises on my son’s legs (he’s so exuberantly active he’s constantly battering his shins against things) and decided to run some blood tests. The doctor didn’t say what the tests were for, but my wife had by then run her first marathon with Team in Training, and she’d heard all the stories—most of which had started just like this. And so she sat in the doctor’s office, waiting in terror for the results, getting support through her Blackberry from facebook friends (since I was out of town, visiting my father who’d just had bypass surgery).

The results were negative. My son was just a kid with a sprain who happens to bruise easily. But every day mothers like Ty and fathers like me go to the doctor with their child, suspecting a minor playground injury and receiving a far different diagnosis. And so, as Ty swam and biked and ran, she was running also for all those other families who received a less encouraging diagnosis than we did.

My wife has finished her race, but she’s not finished fighting against these diseases. And she’s not finished with her efforts to raise money for LLS. She has a number of fundraising events planned for the coming weeks, and her Team in Training/LLS fundraising page remains active, for anyone who feels moved to make a donation.

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."

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.

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.

Responding to theology's critics

For those interested, I have a new feature article in today's Religion Dispatches. In brief, it's a defense of the discipline of theology and its relevance to the question of whether a transcendent reality or God exists.

Let me say a few words about this. For as long as there've been theologians trying to develop and refine theistic pictures of reality in the light of human experience, I'm sure there have been critics of particular theological ideas or theologians. But there is a growing trend these days towards a much broader criticism, one which thinks theology as such is worthless. An example appears in an essay in yesterday's Guardian, in which Terry Sanderson, the president of the UK's National Secular Society, dismissed the entire field of theology as so much drivel.

These critics aren't just saying that theology isn't for them, or that they don't understand it. What they're saying is that the field itself is valueless, nothing but a waste of time.

I think the best way to refute such criticisms is to have the critic read several major works in theology with the guidance of a reputable theologian who can help to introduce the novice to the technical language and the historic and intellectual contexts in which theological arguments evolved, and who can help navigate the way through the nuances of abstract arguments and ideas. In other words, real exposure to and understanding of theology, of the sort one gets by taking a couple of theology courses from good theology professors, offers the best answer to those who dismiss theology out of hand. The problem, of course, is that those who are already convinced that theology is nonsense aren't going to do that.

Another strategy is to attempt to briefly explain what theology is and then try to sketch out why one cannot legitimately ignore its work, even if one doesn't happen to believe in a God. A substantive and detailed account, one that walks through specific theological works and highlights their main themes and then shows why they matter, would end up being a work of theology and so would be the kind of thing the critics in question refuse to waste their time on. So one can try for something a bit more general, something with just enough substance to challenge the critic and, perhaps, inspire them to investigate the matter a bit further.

That is what Nick Spencer does in a contrasting article to Sanderson's in today's Guardian, and what I do in today's Religion Dispatches. But, looking at the dismissive comments that follow both articles (comments that systematically ignore the principle of charity), it's not clear that this strategy has any more hope of being effective.

So--for those who refuse to crack any of the great works of theology but think they are competent to make definitive pronouncements about the value of the field (as well as definitive pronouncements about the kinds of questions theologians wrestle with), is there any approach that is likely to shake their attitude of prejudicial dismissiveness? And if so, what would it be?

My Spiritual Autobiography: The Beginning

I remember quite vividly the moment I came to believe in God. It was during the first semester of my freshman year in college, and it happened in the library. I was sitting at a wooden desk in “the stacks,” a quiet place by a high window, surrounded by books. Since I’d chosen to sit near the engineering texts, the only distraction was the graffiti scrawled on the desk.

But this was no ordinary graffiti. What dominated this particular wooden desk was a conversation about the meaning of life. Given how worn and faded the inaugural message was, it had obviously started long ago, perhaps decades. I wondered how many years separated each entry, how many generations of college students had carved their own thoughts into the wood with a ballpoint pen.

I can no longer recall their words, but I do remember that none of the additions were flippant or glib. This was graffiti-turned-serious, and those who chose to add their thoughts seemed to respect that. And I remember thinking I should add a message of my own.

The problem was that I didn’t have one. I had no idea what life was all about, or even if there was an “all about.” At some point during my high school years a species of atheism had crept over me—nothing militant or doctrinaire, just this vague sense that the material world was all there was and that religion was a comforting illusion created to help us cope with the inevitability of death.

I’d grown up the son of two preachers’ kids—and, like many preachers’ kids, my parents had rejected the religion of their upbringing. At some point in his young adulthood my father had realized that the Lutheran liturgies he recited on Sunday mornings were nothing more than rote words, habits without meaning. And so he left them behind without ceremony, becoming an agnostic scientist who spent his time thinking about what rock formations can tell us of the Earth’s history.

My mother’s break with her religious upbringing was more impassioned, a repudiation of the fundamentalist Baptist world she’d come to find increasingly claustrophobic. When her family immigrated to the United States in the 1950’s, they went from insular Baptist enclaves in small-town Scandinavia to the burgeoning cosmopolitanism of the Bay area. And so my mother found herself encountering a rich tapestry of ideas and perspectives, cultures and experiences that she wanted to explore. But to do so she had to cast off the worldview which insisted that all of these things were a threat, temptations put in her path to lead her away from God.

For my mother, the outcome of rejecting this worldview was a lingering, pluralistic spirituality too vague to have any practical bearing on the routines of daily life.

And so I grew up with parents for whom religion and religious life lay at the periphery of their concerns. We went to church inconsistently—a pleasant, milk-toast Methodist congregation—but only because my parents thought my sister and I should have some exposure to it “so that you’ll know what it is and can make your own decisions about it.”

And by the end of high school I’d pretty much reached the conclusion that it wasn’t for me. Over the course of my childhood I’d gone from an uncritical acceptance of theism as “just the way things are” (largely through the influence of my grandparents) to an indifferent agnosticism that tended towards atheism. I thought of church attendance as a nice way to make some friends, but I took the teachings of the church to be, most likely, nothing but old myths—harmless but probably false. Since there was no pressure from my family to be anything but such an indifferent agnostic, the stance was a comfortable one. Nothing defiant about it or daring. I was secular in the truest sense of the word: I lived in a world where God and religion just really didn’t matter.

And then I found myself in the stacks of the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library, dividing my time between my history textbook and this odd, cross-generational conversation about life’s meaning written on an old wooden desk.

It so happened that what I was reading in the textbook had to do with the meaning of life as well, at least in a broad sense. It was a section on the history of ideas in early modern Europe. While I can’t say for sure which specific philosophers I was reading about at the time, I’d guess that Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz were among them. What I remember clearly is finding myself, quite to my own surprise, abruptly engaged in deep metaphysical reflection for the first time in my life. All alone in the stacks, the sunlight streaming onto a desk cluttered with old graffiti, I began to think in earnest about the meaning of life and the nature of reality.

I must have spent a good hour in silent contemplation, the textbook—with its oversimplified summaries of philosophical ideas—all but forgotten. What I thought about during that hour was wide-ranging, but two things stand out in my memory. The first was a vivid image of something terrifying; the second a line of argument that assured me, with a degree of certainty I now know philosophical arguments can never wholly justify, that the terrifying image was just an illusion.

The image that terrified me was, to put it bluntly, nothing. That is, it was nothingness, nonexistence. As I thought about the meaning of life, I inevitably thought about the end of life, about death, and about what death was from the standpoint of the vague materialism I’d stumbled into during high school.

I’d never really thought about that before, about what death was. And as I confronted it I saw before me an endless expanse of nonexistence, of not being. In the face of that infinite sea of nothing, my finite life seemed a flimsy reed. The nothingness swamped me by its sheer vastness. What did it matter whether I lived for a day or a year or a hundred years? Against an eternity of nonexistence, it all seemed pointless—especially since it wasn’t just me who faced this fate. Every living creature would die, all consciousness would be extinguished. The nothingness began to appear to me like an all-consuming maw, as if it were the ultimate reality, as if existence and life and light were just an ephemeral moment in what was otherwise an endless night of nonbeing.

What I was encountering, tucked away in a sunny corner of the library, was the thing that Karl Barth takes to be the root of evil, the wellspring of human depravity and despair: Das Nichtige. The nothingness. When, years later, I read Barth’s account of it, there was a strong resonance, a deep familiarity. This was something I knew, something I’d seen.

But at the time, being an eighteen-year old kid, I recoiled from it almost as soon as it occurred to me. I quickly reconstructed for myself the pleasant little reality in which I existed: young and healthy with my whole life ahead of me, going to a prestigious private university with a National Merit Scholarship to help cover the costs, lots of chances to have fun, to party, to learn, to pursue romance with one or another of the pretty girls I saw wandering around the campus.

But even as I rebuilt this comfortable little self-understanding, a part of me sensed that it was little more than a tissue curtain hiding the nothingness from view. I retained the lingering sense that if this material existence was all there was, then all of it, everything I cared about, all my ambitions and dreams—all of it was vanity and illusion, and the best I could do was immerse myself in the business of life and try not to think about the deeper truths. Eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow you die.

And that’s what might have happened, except for the fact that my philosophical reverie wasn’t over. Although I couldn’t face the precipice I’d stumbled upon as I thought about materialism from my existential standpoint, my mind continued to gnaw at this same materialist worldview in another way.

Specifically, I began to think about how science explains the world around us. The things we see are made up of smaller things, and the patterns we observe are the macro-level consequences of more basic rules. Everything is explained mechanistically. If we want to know why things have the properties and powers that they have, we do so by understanding how the parts fit together and by learning the rules which govern their interaction.

Human beings have the powers and properties that they possess as an outcome of more basic building blocks organized in a certain way and interacting in accord with certain laws. But the building blocks themselves have powers and properties. So how do we explain them? We explain them by looking at more basic components organized in a certain way and interacting according to more general laws.

In my mind I was zooming in on myself, as if looking at what I was through the most powerful microscope imaginable. I zoomed in from organs to cells, from cells to molecules, from molecules to atoms, from atoms to subatomic particles. At each level, I was chopping up what I found and zooming in on the parts that made it up.

This is how you explain it, I thought—by taking it apart and looking at the pieces. But does it ever stop? It seemed to me in that moment, and I still believe it today, that an infinite regress of that sort of explanation explains nothing—it just keeps pushing the need for an explanation back one more level.

At this point my eighteen-year-old mind was swimming furiously to keep afloat in the conceptual depths I’d suddenly found myself in. I was excited, full of a sense of anticipation, as if I were on the verge of discovering some incredible secret. I thought: Material reality has to be infinitely divisible. Any component of a physical object occupies space, and space is mathematically divisible. Even if we get to a basic particle out of which all physical reality is constructed, doesn’t it have to either have extension or not? And if it has extension, then it’s divisible and so has parts. And if it has parts then how can it be the basic particle? But if it doesn’t have extension, than how can it be a physical thing at all?

Maybe it’s energy, I thought—but what the hell is energy? What is it other than some mysterious capacity to affect other things? Is the most basic thing just an unextended point of “capacity to affect other things”? If so, then it can’t be explained the way that science explains everything else. It will have to have the properties and powers that it has in its own right, rather than as a by-product of how more basic building blocks are organized and the rules which they follow.

And suddenly I found myself confronting this basic idea, that the most fundamental building block of reality would have to be nothing like the physical world studied by science, in which things can be understood mechanistically as the effects of constituent parts operating in accord with natural laws. Instead, there’d be this extensionless constituent that just is what it is, able to do things, to affect other things, for no reason other than its own nature—a nature defined in terms of something other than these reductionistic terms.

But then I had another thought: Since the basic building block of matter couldn’t have extension or structure (or it wouldn’t be the basic building block), the only thing making it different from nothing at all would have to be its power to affect and be affected by other things. And the other things affecting and being affected by it would have to be precisely in the same boat: they’d be nothing but the power to affect and be affected by other things.

But then what was it that was affecting and being affected? We’ve gotten rid of everything but the power to affect and be affected, without there being anything that is doing the affecting or experiencing the effects. Bits of nothing affecting and being affected by other bits of nothing.

It made no sense. I had the sudden, jarring certainty that materialism was conceptually incoherent, at least if it wasn’t grounded in something else more fundamental. And then, like a bright window opening up in my mind, I thought, “The something else is mind. The most fundamental reality is mind.” What else could it be? There was mind and matter, and when my mind plumbed far enough into the depths of matter, there was nothing material that could explain the material world.

And I suddenly had a vision of the universe, a vision in which everything that science studies is a vast outflow of a root consciousness, a unifying mind that acts in and through the physical universe, manifesting itself and expressing itself in all the things we see, in the physical laws that we discover, in the objects we touch and discern with our senses.

And I thought, there in the library: God.

And the nothingness that had been so terrifying to me, that had seemed to strip away all meaning from my life, was suddenly full of mind—the mind of God.

Let me be clear about a few things here. First, what I experienced at that desk in the library was not what I would classify as a mystical experience. While I came to have a sense of the unity of all things bound together by an ultimate mind, it was the outcome of speculative metaphysical thinking rather than of immediate numinous experience. It was the frantic philosophical speculations of a young intellect prodded by its first encounter with academic philosophy, along with a sense of solidarity with generations of college students pursuing a quest for meaning—in ballpoint pen, on a wooden library desk.

The second thing I want to be clear about is that the reasoning I went through at that library desk was hardly incontestable. Especially at the end, I made an intuitive leap that many will question—from the apparent untenability of materialism to the idea of mind at the root of all reality. The thinking I did that day (which, I am discovering, bears some striking resemblance to the much more careful and powerful thinking of the great 19th Century German philosopher, Hermann Lotze) was not the end of my spiritual and intellectual journey. It was the beginning.

What is significant for me is the kind of beginning it was. My religious life did not begin in my home, based on the teachings of my parents. It did not begin in church. It didn’t start with some profound mystical experience of the transcendent, as it does with some. The starting point was a line of philosophical speculation.

But the conclusion of that hour of philosophy was a sense that religious belief needed to be taken seriously, that religious practitioners might be on to something after all. I went, in the space of an hour, from a vague atheism to a strong intuitive sense that some species of theism was most likely true.

On the basis of that conviction, I went in search of religion—seriously in search of it—for the first time in my life. And by a set of coincidences the first thing I stumbled into on my search was a small community of charismatic evangelical Christians, a rather cult-like group that met every Friday night at the top floor of Wilson Commons (the University of Rochester’s amazing student union).

The group was called BASIC (Brothers and Sisters in Christ); but my closest friends in college liked to call them BASIS (Brothers and Sisters in Space). They were, quite literally, Jesus freaks. But my conflicted relationship with that group—my fascination and flirtation with their fundamentalism and their faith—is a story for another day.

Sam Harris on Objectivity in Ethics

Earlier today my teaching assistant called my attention to a TED talk by Sam Harris (author of the atheist bestsellers The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation) in which Harris supports objectivity in ethics--by arguing that science can (eventually, with the help of neuroscience) answer ethical questions. You can find a video of the talk here. Since what follows is my reaction to the talk, you may want to read what I say after having viewed the talk itself.


First, let me say that there is much in the talk that I agree with, especially when Harris talks about what objectivity in ethics implies and what it doesn't. Many of the points he makes are similar to ones I routinely make in my classes. For example, I often point out to my students that to say that a moral claim is objectively true is not the same as saying that moral principles don't admit of exceptions. And I often note that even if there are objective standards of human welfare, it doesn't follow that there is only one way for an individual or community to flourish. I've even used the example of physical health that Harris himself invokes to clarify this point.


And when Harris contrasted the conservative Muslim practice of requiring that women's bodies be covered with America's commercial exploitation of women's bodies, I found myself recalling a paper I recently received from a Muslim student in my business ethics class, in which the student carefully exposed the problems associated with the exploitation of women in advertising and the use of unrealistic ideals of female beauty to sell beauty products, and then made an argument for a cultural practice of modestly covering women's bodies as a solution to these problems--as, in effect, a way for women to be taken seriously as persons rather than being judged by how they look. While my extensive marginal comments raised a range of objections and challenges to his argument, I saw both of us groping towards the same kind of middle ground that Harris was pursuing, albeit each of us laden with our respective cultural backgrounds and so coming from opposite sides of the spectrum that Harris vividly depicted with his extreme images.


But despite a number of points of agreement, I have two broad worries about Harris's line of thinking as developed in this talk. First, while he makes the (to my mind rather obvious) point that we can learn much about the conditions of human flourishing and prospects for flourishing through scientific study of human beings, he leaps without argument from this observation to the conclusion that science can answer moral questions about what we ought to do and what ends or goals are worth pursuing.


He clearly makes this move because he is operating on the (unstated) assumption that what is right is what maximizes human flourishing (a species of utilitarianism). But utilitarianism is hardly an uncontested moral theory. And we can rightly ask with some skepticism whether he really thinks science can demonstrate that the utilitarian principle is correct—as opposed to, say, a deontological alternative which posits the intrinsic moral rightness of certain acts apart from their impact on human flourishing, or an egoistic alternative which holds with Ayn Rand that there is no non-indexical good, that the only good is my good or your good, and that only my good can be a reason for me to act (leading to the view that the right act for me is whatever makes me the happiest, regardless of how it affects others).

In short, while scientific study of the conditions of human flourishing is clearly relevant to answering moral questions, what one does with those scientific discoveries will be a function of moral precepts that do not themselves seem to be amenable to the same sort of scientific investigation. As such, to say that science can answer moral questions is problematic at best. Harris certainly hasn't offered any powerful reasons to think so in this talk.

My second problem goes beyond what is most obviously on display in this talk, having to do with worries about the ideological agenda into whose service Harris's claims about objective moral truth are being put. Harris rightly points out that religious demagogues typically embrace the same kind of moral objectivism he endorses, but they put it in the service of their own ideological agendas (and he expressed discomfort with being in the same camp as these demagogues).

The way I’d describe this is as follows: these demagogues adopt the view that there are objective truths in ethics in part for the sake of identifying an “out-group” of individuals and/or communities who are agents of objective evil, thus seeking to justify an in-group/out-group ideology which renders permissible the suspension of norms of moral decency with respect to members of the out-group. In effect, the good is threatened by the out-group, thereby justifying radical action on the part of the in-group in defense of the good. The out-group must be defeated, or it will be the victory of evil.


While Harris does not emphasize in this particular talk his own ideological opposition to religion, it remains as an obvious subtext—and in other writings that ideology becomes explicit and deeply unsettling, insofar as it precisely resembles in FORM the kind of ideology he rightly denounces when it is wedded to religious zealots. That is to say, Harris is not merely an atheist. He doesn't just think that religious believers are mistaken, nor is he apt to say that religion's moral track record is "mixed." For him, religion is evil and a source of evil, and those who are religious are, in his language, "on the wrong side of an escalating war of ideas," one in which he thinks the very survival of humanity depends on the defeat of the religious side by the secular atheist one. Replace "atheism" and "religion" in this ideology with "Christianity" and "Islam," or with "Catholic" and "Protestant," and you can pretty quickly see that it is the same ideology of religious intolerance that has caused so much horror in history, only with all of religion now cast in the camp of the infidel or heretic, and atheism wearing the shining raimant of orthodoxy.

To put it simply, this kind of in-group/out-group ideology depends upon the premise that there is an objective moral truth, because it distinguishes the chosen group from the other group in terms of who has this truth and who poses a threat to it. That certainly doesn't mean that objectivitism in ethics inevitably entails in-group/out-group ideology (how could one say that such ideological thinking is objectively bad if one denied objective moral truth?). But if, like me, you think that such ideologies really are bad, then the defense of ethical objectivism for the sake of vindicating such an ideology will be a cause of deep distress. And I worry that this is exactly what is going on in Harris's case.

On the basis of years working in the field of nonviolence theory and cooperation and conflict studies--both in my academic work and in more practical terms as a facilitator for Alternatives to Violence Project workshops in prisons and other settings--I have become convinced that the deepest moral truths have to do with how we should resolve conflicts with those whose hopes, aims, and values conflict with our own. And I have become especially convinced that one of these deep moral truths is that we should address such conflicts on the basis of a recognition of shared humanity and a with a commitment to bridging the gap of difference so as to make possible mutual understanding and empathy in the face of profound disagreement and conflict--as opposed to, say, anathematizing those who disagree with us, or calling for their deaths or for their exclusion from full participation in the community.


In other words, I think one of the deepest (objective) moral truths is that when we are convinced we have the moral truth and we come into conflict with someone who we are convinced lacks it, and our conflict turns precisely on this difference, we have an obligation to value and affirm the humanity and integrity of the one we think is dead wrong. And part of that obligation is to listen as charitably as we can to their lived experience--including those elements of their experience which lead them to hold the view we find so misguided. Another part of that obligation is to honestly share who we are and what we stand for in a way that has the possibility of inspiring empathetic understanding rather than defensiveness.


And as I see it, one of the greatest impediments to this kind of engagement is the kind of in-group/out-group ideology that is so easy for most human beings to fall into, and which Harris himself is constantly lapsing into with respect to (western) religious communities. That he does so is not, I think, a matter of serious debate (I point out various ways in which it happens in Is God a Delusion?, as well as in a Religion Dispatches essay a while back in which I respond to his strident opposition to Francis Collins' appointment to head the NIH). The real question is how one is to respond to it.

I must confess to an ironic tendency to respond to it by lapsing into an in-group/out-group ideology with respect to those who resist or succumb to in-group/out-group ideologies. But I see this tendency as an objective moral evil. And seeing it at such is one of the things that helps me in the struggle to resist it.

Falling into Wells

This morning, my pastor sent me an e-mail calling my attention to the inaugural essay in a new forum in the New York Times, "The Stone," which aims to offer a series of readable philosophical pieces by "contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless." The opening sally is Simon Critchley's amusing and erudite take on what it means to be a philosopher.

Critchley takes his cue from Plato, who shares in The Theaetetus a story about Thales (taken by some to be the first philosopher). Thales was said to have fallen into a well while looking at the stars, prompting a servant girl to quip that he was so focused on trying to understand the heavens above that he failed to notice what was right at his feet. This anecdote is, in effect, offered as a metaphor for what it means to be a philosopher.

For this blog, I'd like to focus on one remark from Critchley's essay that I think may help to make a distinction I've been thinking about quite a bit recently--namely, the difference between being a Christian philosopher and an apologist. Here's Critchley's remark:

"Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect social convention (sic), rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous."

Certainly, this has been my own experience as a philosopher. In business ethics classes, I refuse to honor the old American gods of capitalism and consumerism, leading the business majors and more economically conservative students in class to view me with suspicion. In my introductory philosophy classes, I make a special effort to introduce my students to arguments that call into question the dominant assumptions of the local culture. There has rarely been a church I've attended in which I haven't at some point challenged the pervasive views of the congregation (this is even true of the liberal UCC congregation I attended for several years).

But since writing Is God a Delusion?, I've found myself on more than one occasion referred to not as a philosopher writing about religion but as "an apologist" or "a Christian apologist." And this is a label that does not sit comfortably with me. I think of myself as a philosopher, and I think that being a philosopher is in a profound way incompatible with being an apologist.

Interestingly, at the same time that I've been called an apologist, I've been repeatedly accused of doing apologetics in a slippery way, by "redefining religion" so as to make it immune to new atheist challenges while at the same time making it unlike "actual" religion (if you look at the reviews of my work on Amazon, you'll see that this is a recurring theme among the more negative ones).

I suspect this accusation may not be uncommon for philosophers of religion whose views are in some broad sense sympathetic to religion. More precisely, I think they become the targets of this accusation when they're taken to be apologists. And as I said, I think there's crucial differences between being a philosopher and being an apologist.

This is not to say that a philosopher might not end up invoking many of the same arguments that an apologist invokes, or endorsing many of the same conclusions. But the apologist (at least as I understand "apologist" in its contemporary use) begins with a commitment to the sanctity of certain "gods"--by which, of course, both Critchley and I mean the normative presuppositions and commitments that define a practice or way of life, allegiance to which is necessary in order to engage in that practice or participate in that way of life. The apologist is one who guards these gods against various challenges, especially those coming from the outside (that is, from those who cleave to different gods).

And so we can have not only religious apologists but apologists for figure skating as a competitive sport, or apologists for associative advertising, or apologists for science or philosophy or even (one might suppose) for apologetics itself. In each of these cases, what characterizes the apologist is a commitment to guarding and protecting the practice and its "gods" from various challenges, especially ones that come from the outside, that is, from those who cleave to opposing gods. And a favored apologetic strategy is to attack the rival gods without mercy, as if the defeat of those rivals would amount to the victory of one's own.

The philosopher, however, begins from a different place and is pursuing different ends. To understand the difference, it's worth asking why philosophers fall into wells. The reason is because--at least to the extent that they are being philosophers (and no one is a philosopher about everything all the time)--they're not engaging in a practice or way of life but are instead critically assessing the normative assumptions which underlie it. They've paused from the task of actually living their life in order to evaluate its foundations. The more comprehensive this evaluation becomes, the less you will be capable of engaging in any practical task (because every practical task depends on taking certain things for granted). And so you may start falling into wells.

Or, perhaps, getting tackled. As anyone who's ever been on an American football field will tell you, it's hard to play football if you're actively re-evaluating the rules and objectives of the game or its value as a sport. If you're busy trying to decide whether the game might be improved by tweaking its rules (or whether a different game altogether might be somehow intrinsically more worthwhile), not only won't you help your team but you're likely to get smacked into the turf.

The star football player, in order to play the game well, has to honor the football gods--something which is achieved by taking them for granted so that the player can focus on engaging in the practice defined by these "gods." In the face of challenges that become too vocal to ignore, the player has several choices. One is to seek out the kind of reassurance that will enable him to return to the game unimpeded by doubts about its very viability.

This is what the football apologist provides. The apologist defends the game against its critics, in effect reassuring the players of their right to play the game just as it is.

The philosopher of football provides something else, something that only the rare player will actively seek out. The philosopher of the game will critically explore it and its rules, asking questions that do not take for granted the legitimacy of football as a human pursuit. Of course, such philosophical interrogation of the football gods can be pursued by someone whose stance is presumptively sympathetic--and it can be pursued by someone who is presumptively unsympathetic. It can be done by a lover of the game or by someone who experiences a visceral suspicion of any enterprise in which knocking people to the ground in pursuit of a zero-sum victory is an accepted practice.

So, consider a somewaht fleshed-out example. A lover of football hears the accusation that football reinforces stereotypical gender traits which in turn perpetuate oppressive patriarchy. Suppose the football lover responds by falling into a fiercely defensive posture, never asking whether the charge is justified but marshalling every available resource to vindicate the game in its current form. Much of that defense, we might suppose, takes the form of attacking feminism in order to show that its "gods" are unworthy of allegiance.

Such a person is a football apologist. But suppose someone hears the same challenge and is inspired by it to reflect critically on the football "gods." In that case one has a philosopher of football--even if, as may be the case, the process of reflection leads to the conclusion that the challenge misses the mark or (as is usually more likely) has some merit but calls only for revisions in the way the game is currently played as opposed to its abandonment.

It should be obvious that someone could be both a football player and a philosopher of football--but probably not at the very same moment. One might suppose that a football player would, by virtue of being personally invested in the game, suffer from potential biases that would interfere with a sound philosophical assessment of the game. But at the same time, a player would also enjoy certain insights that would add to the philosophical analysis. I know that I wouldn't want to do philosophy of sport without including players of the sport in the philosophical conversation. And while I'd probably generally prefer the perspectives of those players who are attempting to be philosophers rather than mere apologists, apologetic arguments are often worth listening to and may express the kinds of insights that only a passionate defender of the game would see. Philosophers can and do make use of apologetic arguments while doing philosophy.

In any event, if a Christian is also a philosopher about Christianity, we'd expect the philosophical analysis to be sympathetic, potentially influenced by biases but also by unique and helpful insights. And while there's no a priori guarantee that the outcome of a genuine philosophical analysis wouldn't be a total vindication of inherited Christian doctrine (of the sort apologists strive for), the fact is that the philosopher does not take this outcome as a given and then tailor arguments to that end. And so it is possible for the outcome of a Christian's philosophical engagement with Christianity to be the rejection of its "gods" (in the metaphorical sense being used here). But the more likely outcome is somewhat more modest--namely, a revised or modified version of the faith.

I say that this is the more likely outcome largely because I do not think it is possible for human beings, no matter how philosophical, to critically reflect on our "gods" in an utterly impartial domain occupied by nothing but uninterpreted objective evidence. But that this kind of impartial critical reflection is impossible doesn't mean that some sort of critical reflection on our gods is impossible. The best philosophy is an exercize in self-transcendence, in which human beings who are embedded in an array of communities and practices turn their critical attention inward. They look at and wrestle with some of the presuppositions which have so far defined who they are and how they live; and as a result of this introspection--inevitably shaped by the totality of these very presuppositions--they revise or modify some subset.