Penn Jillette: this i believe

Here's Penn Jillette's contribution to the NPR series this i believe. Forget about the subtle distinctions between positve atheism, negative atheism, agnosticism, and so forth: Penn just cuts to the chase. "I believe there is no God." He expresses my belief exactly, but more wittily and with a bigger audience ;-) Key quote:

Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, 'I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.' That's just a long-winded religious way to say, 'shut up,' or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, 'How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.' So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that's always fun. It means I'm learning something.

(Via Susan.)

Krauthammer on the stupidity of ID

Charles Krauthammer had an excellent piece in the Washington Post, entitled Phony Theory, False Conflict, on the farce of intelligent design. Money quote: "The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an 'unguided process' with no 'discernible direction or goal.' This is as ridiculous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an 'unguided process' by which Earth is pulled around the sun every year without discernible purpose. What is chemistry if not an 'unguided process' of molecular interactions without 'purpose'?"

As I've always said, creationists and ID'ers aren't simply attacking evolution. They may not realize it (since they seem to have difficulty with logic), but they are taking on all of science - evolution, biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astrophysics, mechanics.... And ironically, by turning their backs on science they are rejecting the principles that underpin the technologies (radio, TV, computer networks) that they use to spread their ignorant blather.

Now I know that I'm not "supposed" to belittle these people. I'm supposed to treat their (presumably genuine) religious beliefs with respect. (Next thing you know, someone will hail their views as a "different way of knowing" - ugh!) But they are ignorant, in much the same way that a witchdoctor is ignorant of antibiotics and by-pass surgery. As a species, we have collectively learned important things about the world, and in many cases this knowledge has superseded earlier beliefs. For example, anyone who still thinks that epilepsy is caused by demonic possession is, quite simply, ignorant, and we expect that a parent who uses physical force to "drive out the demon" in their epileptic child will be arrested for child abuse. To fail to call the believers in creationism what they are - ignorant - is either patronizing or hypocritical.

(Via Sully.)

Good idea, but the analogy is too concrete

Alec blogged a link to Brent Rasmussen's DarkSyde's What It Feels Like to be an Atheist with the comment "One for Geoff". (Thanks, Alec.) Here's Brent's DarkSyde's intro:

"I'm amazed everyday of my life that everyone isn't an atheist like me. But they're not, I have no idea why that is, but it is reality. And based on many questions over the years it sounds possibly hard for someone who is not one to understand it. So follow me for a bit if you can. And I'll try to describe the world as seen through atheist eyes."

As rants go, it's a real tour de force, and it's definitely worth reading. However in the final analysis it didn't really work for me. Rather than tackling theism head-on, Brent DarkSyde offers an analogy:

"Say they believe in Santa Claus; beard, the big red suit, the flying reindeer, the sled loaded with a billion gifts, the North Pole Workshop, Mrs. Claus and the elves; all of it. But in this fantasy world, they're not content merely to believe in Santa Claus, they want you to publicly agree all the time that you also believe in Santa, in their specific version of same, and they pressure everyone else in numerous ways to pretend that they're not strange or childish for believing in this."

While many of his subsequent points are effective, the Santa Claus parallel falls down in two important respects. First, it is too damn specific, too concrete. Different people use the term god to mean totally different - and grotesquely incompatible - things, from concrete physical phenomena to vague psychological or emotional tendencies. On the other hand, Santa Claus is pretty much defined by a handful of 19th century stories and carols and an avalanche of Disneyesque Hallmark products.

Secondly, Santa Claus doesn't have all of the baggage that the various god-ideas are encumbered with. The importance of this is not that passages like this are a stretch:

"Just two or three-hundred years ago it was totally SOP to take folks, men, women, children, who didn't believe in a specific version of Santa and stick red-hot steel objects into their rectums and vaginas, boil their limbs, beat them senseless with padded clubs, tear them apart with teams of horses, cut open their stomachs and rip out their intestines while they're still alive in front of their loved ones, or slowly burn them alive in public; all in the name of Santa's good will and often on the mere anonymous allegation from some two-bit ten-year old kid or a crazy deranged nutcase suffering from schizophrenia that you once said you don't believe Santa can really fly."

No, the problem is that the Santa Claus analogy misses one of the key aspects of being an atheist: the sheer head-spinning contradictions and hypocrisy that we encounter all the time in believers. For example, I simply don't understand why liberal Anglicans don't rip out the pages of their Bibles that glorify ethnic cleansing, rape, pillage, and stoning to death for just about everything, or why Bible-belt footballers violate the Sabbath rules set forth in what they view as the word of their god. I guess tradition and tribal identity are more important than intellectual honesty these days.

Brent DarkSyde followed up this piece with one on why he's an atheist. This was less interesting. Since he claimed he'd been an atheist since he was a small child, he should perhaps have called this one "ideas that sustain my identity as an atheist". No big deal.

UPDATED 20-Nov-05: As Brent pointed out, the original piece (and follow-up) were written by DarkSyde.

"What kind of humanist are you?"

A nice little quiz from the New Humanist. Rather specifically English, which has led to some confusion.

Handholder

You go out of your way to build bridges with people of different views and beliefs and have quite a few religious friends. You believe in the essential goodness of people , which means you’re always looking for common ground even if that entails compromises. You would defend Salman Rushdie’s right to criticise Islam but you’re sorry he attacked it so viciously, just as you feel uncomfortable with some of the more outspoken and unkind views of religion in the pages of this magazine.


You prefer the inclusive approach of writers like Zadie Smith or the radical Christian values of Edward Said. Don’t fall into the same trap as super–naïve Lib Dem MP Jenny Tonge who declared it was okay for clerics like Yusuf al–Qaradawi to justify their monstrous prejudices as a legitimate interpretation of the Koran: a perfect example of how the will to understand can mean the sacrifice of fundamental principles. Sometimes, you just have to hold out for what you know is right even if it hurts someone’s feelings.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

(Via Majikthise, who got the Hairshirt card.)

The United States of Mass Delusion

CBS News has published another survey on American attitudes towards evolution: "Most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Instead, 51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process."

Personally I'm going to ignore the second number, since "guided" is such a wishy-washy term (almost as ill-defined as "God"). But when over half the population is willing to deny that humans are connected with the rest of the animal world, things have come to a pretty pass. I'd love it if CBS would ask the following question: "The efficacy of many drugs is based on the theory that tests of these drugs on animals are reliable predictors of their effects on humans, because humans and animals share a well-understood biological and genetic relationship. Is it hypocritical for someone who does not believe in this relationship to use these drugs?"

(Via BoingBoing.)

UPDATE: I feel much better after reading The Abstract Factory on ID. Thanks, Susan!

Morally bankrupt, my good man?

Occasionally someone will post a comment on a blog entry that deserves a more prominent response than simply adding a further comment. A few hours ago, Alec commented on my criticism of Thomas Friedman:

"Morally bankrupt" - that's one of the phrases that even scientifically hip biology-teaching evangelical Christians use on me when I deny the existence of God and generally toast their tootsies with atheist rejection of their belief.

Does it actually mean anything to you, or have you too succumbed to subjective mudslinging as a means of argument, however odious the target, my good man?

The belief that morality is impossible without a belief in God, and that to be an atheist "shows a recklessness of moral character and utter want of moral sensibility" [1] is widespread; indeed it used to be the law of the land. One would expect those theists for whom the existence of [some kind of] God is an "objective fact" to argue from this that morality has an objective basis. What is curious is that some atheist philosophers have historically conceded the consequent of the argument, and have argued that, in the absence of a God, morality is necessarily "subjective" or "invented". (See, for instance, Mackie [2].)

Yet the notion that morality and ethics are God-given is hard to sustain these days. Indeed it is under attack from both science and theistic philosophy! For philosophers and theologians such as Swinburne, the notion of "goodness" must be independent of God, otherwise the assertion that "God is good" is simply a tautology. On the scientific front, we are developing better and better models of how creatures develop social behaviours, including cooperation and altruism: Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue [4] provides an excellent high-level account of this work, though geeks should also dive into Axelrod's fundamental work. [5] The key insight of researchers such as Kagen, Wilson, and Frank is that morality derives not from reason, but from instinct:

Wilson chides philosophers for not taking seriously the notion that morality resides in the senses as a purposive set of instincts. They mostly view morality as merely a set of utilitarian or arbitrary preferences and conventions laid upon people by society. Wilson argues that morality is no more a convention than other sentiments such as lust or greed. When a person is disgusted by injustice or cruelty he is drawing upon an instinct, not rationally considering the utility of the sentiment, let alone simply regurgitating a fashionable convention.
[4, p.143]

So to return to Alec's charge: when I refer to Thomas Friedman as being "morally bankrupt", I am inviting the reader to join me in an instinctually-based reaction, which derives from our shared heritage as social animals. These instincts are perfectly objective: the behaviours to which they give rise can, and have, been measured and modelled in a variety of ways. And the source of these instincts is, quite simply, our old friend natural selection. No theistic hypothesis is required.

[1] Odell v. Koppee, 5 Heisk. (Tenn) 91. Quoted in [3].
[2] John L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1979)
[3] Michael Martin, Atheism, Morality and Meaning (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002)
[4] Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (London: Penguin Books, 1997)
[5] Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984)

As cool as one can be... in the circumstances

I always like to think that when I meet someone famous, I can bottle up my enthusiasm, and act cool, calm, collected, and adult. But looking back on each occasion, I have to confess that I've failed. Check out this piece by Maralily about her magical airport encounter with Teller (complete with photo). The refreshing honesty is, well, refreshing.

(Via Susan.)

'You haven't explained everything yet' is not a competing hypothesis

Nice op-ed piece on ID in the NYT by Dan Dennett entitled Show Me the Science. Key paragraph:

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, 'You haven't explained everything yet,' is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.

K.I.S.S.

All this god stuff is really simple when you get right down to it.

(Thanks to Alec.)

The wackos are crawling out of the woodwork

In the spirit of equal opportunity, the Huffington Post is providing a platform for that Sensitive New-age Guy Deepak Chopra*. For an M.D. (lapsed?) he seems remarkably ignorant when it comes to science. For example, one of his "leading principles" is "Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe." Paging Steve Weinberg....

UPDATE: Michael Shermer deals with Deepak in a kinder, gentler, and more comprehensive manner.

--
* Last heard of on a Buddha Bar Volume II track called "Desire (The Lover's Passion)/Do You Love Me/Come to Me/Desire", vocals by Demi Moore.

Science and varieties of theism

My contribution to the Priests in Lab Coats debate going on at Salon.com:

Science, including evolution, says nothing about theism in general. Given the wide variety of gods that people have believed in, this should not be surprising - it's not clear that ANYTHING speaks to theism in general.

However it is true that science - evolution, of course, but also geology, physics, and biology - is incompatible with certain religious viewpoints, particularly those that hold inerrantist positions concerning various ancient texts. Science explores regular relationships between phenomena - gravitational (stuff falls), chemical, kinetic, and so forth. If such relationships are merely the whimsy of a capricious deity - if water can be conjured into existence to create a flood and then made to vanish - then such regularities are impossible. Evidence becomes meaningless: we may as well believe in solipsism or Last-Thursdayism (the reductio ad absurdum that the universe was created last Thursday, complete with people with memories of a longer existence).

Scientists MUST disbelieve in a world that is phenomenally capricious. If a theist believes in such a world, they cannot accept science. There is no coherent worldview that is consistent with both. But this is not an argument about theism, merely about a particular fundamentalist worldview.

Cardinal Schönborn channeling ID

Over at Body and Soul there's an interesting piece about the background to Cardinal Schönborn's recent op-ed in the NYT "clarifying" the Roman Catholic position on evolution. Not only does it seem that the red-hatted one was working from an outline prepared by the creationist Discovery Institute, but: "The cardinal's essay was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the Discovery Institute."

Now why would the former Count Christoph Maria Michael Hugo Damian Peter Adalbert von Schönborn require the services of a PR firm in Virginia?

(Via Suburban Guerilla.)

UPDATE: It turns out that Creative Response Concepts has an interesting notorious history. They became (in)famous as the PR firm responsible for packaging the Swift Boat Veterans' libel The principals include Greg Mueller and Mike Russell, formerly communications directors for Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson respectively. They've been caught out trying to feed stories into the blogosphere as part of their PR work on behalf of various right-wing groups, to the extent that they actually had to (vaguely) apologize for it.

Biblical literalism, Constitutional "original intent": it's all the same thing

I was reading Slacktivist this evening and came across a piece that contained a simple idea that I had never thought about. (It seems so obvious now that I wonder if I'm the only one who hasn't got it.) Put simply: religious conservatives and political conservatives are both obsessed with the primacy of authority over reason. Their sacred texts must never be subjected to reasoned interpretation, because then they cease to be magical tokens of authority.

Let me quote the author, Fred Clark:

At the FRC's "Justice Sunday"... clergy and religious leaders... railed against any judge who dared speak of a "living Constitution"...

[they cited] a Supreme Court ruling barring the execution of the developmentally disabled. That decision was based, in part, on evolving community standards, and that idea -- the evolution, or progress, or development of moral understanding -- is what these religious leaders find dangerous and terrifying. From their perspective, community standards have been devolving ever since Mt. Sinai. The idea that the Constitution, or any revered text, might be read differently over time due to evolving community standards is the very idea these folks have been fighting against for the past century.

This is simply a continuation in a new arena of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the early 20th century. The fundamentalist "battle for the Bible" has escalated to include the battle over another sacred text: the U.S. Constitution. The terms of this battle are exactly the same. So too is the underlying motivation. It's all about control. A "living Constitution" threatens that control as surely as the living word of the Bible.

A superficial reaction would be to assume that the fundamentalists of both types adopt this stance - authority instead of reason - because they are incapable of defending their positions rationally and reasonably.* A more nuanced view is that capability has nothing to do with it: conservatives are temperamentally drawn to arguments from authority. (This is perhaps the fundamental distinction between the conservative and liberal worldview, although many conservative intellectuals might disagree.) And finally a cynical view is that conservative leaders - intellectual, organizational - adopt this stance simply because it is a path to power, to command and control the mass of people. Demagogues have always known the power that comes from unshakable conviction coupled with unquestionable authority.

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* The last thing a Biblical fundamentalist wants is to be dragged into a debate about why Leviticus is authoritative about homosexuality but not shellfish, let alone slavery and mixed fibres.

Ten commandments that are worthy of respect

With all this blather about if and when it is proper to display the (Biblical) "10 Commandments" (but which version? there are so many), it's worth remembering that the "Ten Commandments" which truly underpin our system of ethics, democracy, and law come from a very different source. The commandments in question are those of Solon the Athenian. He lived from 638 BCE to 558 BCE (approximately), and in 594 BCE he was chosen to draw up the first written civil constitution, something that no prophet or rabbi did. Solon is the founder of democracy as we know it, and his commandments have stood the test of time. They don't include prescriptions that apply only to one small sect, nor do they include ideas (such as sabbath-keeping and proscribing graven images) which few acknowledge and vanishingly few actually pay any attention to. The only reference to religion is the good advice to be appropriately respectful of everybody's deities:

1. Trust good character more than promises.
2. Do not speak falsely.
3. Do good things.
4. Do not be hasty in making friends, but do not abandon them once made.
5. Learn to obey before you command.
6. When giving advice, do not recommend what is most pleasing, but what is most useful.
7. Make reason your supreme commander.
8. Do not associate with people who do bad things.
9. Honor the gods.
10. Have regard for your parents.

See Richard Carrier's The Real Ten Commandments for the whole story - including Solon's claim to fame as the author of the RKBA! If any set of ancient commandments deserve a place in our courtrooms, it is those of Solon.

Michael Shermer channels the Intelligent Designer

Check out Michael Shermer's delightful creation myth parody over at the Huffington Post: all the way from:

"In the beginning - specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon - out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang. The bang was followed by cosmological inflation. God saw that the Big Bang was very big, too big for creatures that could worship him, so He created the earth. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created out of Quarks and other subatomic goodies) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

to a satisfying conclusion:

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply (but not in those words). They took God literally and 6,000 years later there are six billion humans. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.
By now God was tired, so God said, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.

The scary thing is that there are people out there that might take it seriously....

Evolving evolution

In discussing Pigliucci's review of Jablonka and Lamb's controversial book Evolution in Four Dimensions, Jason Rosenhouse (a.k.a. Evolutionblog) makes a key point that it's easy to overlook:

...the problem facing evolutionary biologists is never 'How could bit of anatomy X possibly have evolved naturally?' Rather, the question is 'Of the many possible mechanisms by which this system might have evolved, which is the correct one?' It seems that scientists are constantly discovering new mechanisms for explaining evolution....

Of course, any talk of fiddling with the neo-Darwinian synthesis tends to make the hearts of creationists go pitter pat. They know that any suggestion that the nineteen fifties version of evolution may have been incomplete can be spun into a statement that evolution is dying. They will conveniently ignore the fact that the discoveries that are persuading scientists of the incompleteness of the original synthesis are all in the direction of making evolutionary change easier, not harder, to explain.

[Emphasis added.]

Refuting the argument from fine tuning

In my earlier posting about Antony Flew's Introduction to God and Philosophy, I noted that Flew had identified the "argument from fine tuning" as a "development" which future authors in this area should take into account. In this post, I want to explain what this argument involves, and why it is completely devoid of merit.

The argument from fine tuning is a derivative of the argument from design. (It is also one of several theories that have been associated with the phrase "anthropic principle", but since this term has been applied to various mutually contradictory theses, wise people will avoid it.) One of its chief proponents is the former astronomer Hugh Ross. A summary version of the argument runs as follows:

There are many fundamental parameters in physics which determines what kind of a universe this is. Examples include the Plank's constant, the mass and charge of the electron, the gravitational force constant, the speed of light, and many others. It turns out that if some of these numbers are slightly different than their actual values, our universe would not be able to support life. It is virtually impossible that the universe came to have these correct parameters for life by chance, because so many of these numbers must all lie in such a small range of values. So it appears that the constants of the universe were fine-tuned for life. The being who did this fine-tuning must be God; without such a being, there would be virtually no chance that life could exist. *

At first glance, it is tempting to argue against this proposition on its own terms, by examining the actual values of cosmological and physical constants and calculating whether or not the proposition describes the circumstances accurately. The web site from which this quotation is drawn cites one such argument, and goes into great detail to refute it. However this is (mostly) beside the point, for the following reason:

Every intelligent species that observes the universe that it lives in will find that the constants of its physical and cosmological models of this universe appear to be fine-tuned to support its own life - even if these constants are radically different from those in another universe, such as ours. If the constants of a particular universe are such that life is not possible, there will simply be no species to observe this fact. And we have no a priori reason to say how many possible universes fall into each category, and therefore no basis for asserting how likely or unlikely life is.

Consider the following thought experiment. In another possible universe, the cosmological and physical constants are such that large dense bodies such as planets cannot form; instead, stars are surrunded by shells of gas. Stable patterns can form in this gas due to some resonance phenomenon, and over time self-replicating patterns emerge. Since this patterns can change, and gas resources are finite, Darwinian evolution will occur, and one may suppose that in time intelligence may arise. Such cloud-creatures might develop cosmology and physics, and may think to themselves, "How fortunate we are that the constants of the universe are so finely tuned. If they were slightly different, solid planetary bodies might form that would gravitationally disrupt our fragile forms; life as we know it would be impossible!"

The proponents of the argument emphasize the "fine" in "fine tuning", but this seems unwarranted. In any universe, every system of cosmological and physical science devised by a sentient species will include a wide range of constants and other fundamental properties. Some of these will be such that the overall system is particularly sensitive to their values; for others, the precise values will be relatively unimportant. Chance alone will dictate that some of these constants will seem to be finely balanced. Since these properties are largely emergent and are likely to be contingent in ways that we do not understand today, this "balance" may well be completely illusory. **

So where does this leave us? Every intelligent life form in any universe will necessarily perceive a "fine tuned" situation, whether it is true or not. There is no reason to believe that there is only one type of universe that might support life, no way to observe those universes that do not, no way to assess the significance of particular constants. (Indeed the argument is consistent with the hypothesis that a malevolent designer is manipulating physical constants to reduce the probability of life!) The bottom line is that the argument is a bust. It purports to derive an ontological statement from a contigent epistemological argument, but the unquantifiable character of the argument renders it meaningless.

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* I struck out the final sentence because it is such a grotesque non-sequitur that I'm sure no reasonable person would want to be associated with it.

** In his important new book A Different Universe - reinventing physics from the bottom down, the Nobel physicist Robert Laughlin makes the point that many of the "laws" of chemistry and physics are dramatically insensitive to precise numbers, pure samples, and other properties that we might expect to be important. Since we only know the large-scale properties of one universe - this one - we are on very shaky ground if we presume certain kinds of sensitivity.

Antony Flew: at last, the book

The story so far...

Last year there was a flurry of media attention around the "revelation" that Antony Flew, the British philosopher, had renounced his lifelong atheism and now believed in god. The main impetus for this was the publication of a book and video of a "debate" between Flew and a number of Christian writers and philosophers. In response to questions from various people, Flew made a number of comments, which I documented in previous blog entries. He also advised people to wait for the new edition of his 1966 book God and Philosophy, and promised that the new introduction to that book would answer all questions. I have now obtained a copy of this. Now read on....

First, a comment on the book itself. It was out of print, and has now been reissued by Prometheus Books. Apart from a Publisher's Forward and the new Introduction, the text is unchanged, so if you already have God and Philosophy (also published as God: A Critical Enquiry) you should only buy this if you really have to have the new Introduction - 7 pages, plus a page of end-notes. As for the place of this book in a library of the philosophy of religion, I'd recommend it only for "completists"; it has largely been superceded by newer treatments of the subject.

"But what does he say in the Introduction?", I can hear you asking. The short answer is: nothing earth-shattering. Flew does not claim any particular position, whether atheist, desist, theist, or whatever. (Indeed if it were not for the Publisher's Forward by Paul Kurtz of SUNY Buffalo, there would be little reason to pay much attention to the Introduction.) Rather, Flew lists a number of recent developments which "any intending successor to God and Philosophy would need to take into account", but without indicating whether such developments have caused him to change his position. As Kurtz notes, there were four drafts of the Introduction submitted to Prometheus, and "it is up to the readers of his final introduction published below to decide whether or not he has abandoned his earlier views."

Those who were looking for a definitive answer to l'affaire Flew can stop reading here. Those who would like to dig for clues will presumably want to learn which "recent developments" Flew considers significant. Let's examine them in order.

• Flew first draws attention to the "multiverse" theory, citing Geneziano and Paul Davies. He doesn't explain why this is relevant, and in re-reading his treatments of the Cosmological Argument and other classical moves, I couldn't see how they would be changed by replacing the Big Bang by a multiverse model. (One form of the multiverse idea would rehabilitate the notion of an infinite chain of causation. Since this would presumably remove any need for an "uncaused cause", it wouldn't give comfort to any theist.)

• Secondly, Flew raises the "fine tuning argument". His choice of words is careful, yet disturbing: he simply says that "whatever [its] merits or demerits, it must... be allowed that it is reasonable [for believers in theistic religions] to see [it] as providing substantial confirmation of their own antecedent religious beliefs." But this, surely, is beside the point: believers have many reasons for their positions which are wholly out of the scope of rational inquiry. The fine tuning argument would only be relevant to a successor to God and Philosophy if it constituted a substantial move in the debate. And it doesn't: it is a wholly specious proposition that falls apart under even a cursory examination. (I'll defend this position in a subsequent blog posting, for reasons of space.)

• The third point that Flew raises is that of abiogenesis: how the first forms of life on Earth might have arisen from inanimate matter. Flew is "delighted to be assured" that science has this question in hand, and cites Richard Carrier's excellent papers on the subject.

• The fourth "development" is puzzling. Flew simply draws attention to Roy Abraham Varghese's book The Wonder of the World, and says that it "provides an extremely extensive argument of the inductive argument from the order of nature". Now Flew's review of this book is on the web. In it, he wrote "until a satisfactory naturalistic explanation has been developed, there would appear to be room for an Argument to Design at the first emergence of living from non-living matter.... You have in your book deployed abundant evidence indicating that it is likely to be a very long time before such naturalistic explanations are developed, if indeed there ever could be." Thereafter Flew noted that his views diverged with Varghese. Yet just above we noted that Flew was "delighted" that the scientific accounts of abiogenesis were in good order. So which is it?

• The fifth "development" cited by Flew is a "revival", due to David Conway, of "the classical conception of philosophy" and the Aristotelian notion of god. If one re-reads the original text of God and Philosophy, it seems that Flew has already considered all of the points that he raises (at inordinate length) in this "development"; there is, literally, nothing new here.

• Finally, Flew says that "mention must be made of the radically new and extremely comprehensive case for the existence of the Christian God made by Richard Swinburne in his Is There a God?" Radically new? Why haven't we been told?! In fact, as Flew is forced to admit, Swinburne's argument, "is, like the fine tuning argument, something that [believers] may very reasonably see as... confirmation." For myself, I found Swinburne's arguments remarkably unoriginal: he merely recycles the Paley argument for design and then makes an unsupported move from designer to personal montheistic deity.

So what's the verdict? My reading is that Flew got drawn into an unsustainable position, realized his mistakes (as noted in my earlier blog entries), backed off, and removed anything controversial from the Introduction. However he still felt compelled by duty of friendship to give a favorable reference to those that he corresponded with during 2004: Varghese, Swinburne, and Conway. The end result, despite Paul Kurtz's attempt in the Forward to whip up a controversy, is a damp squib. Oh, well.

Establishment clause? Never heard of it

Here's a press release from the mayor of Lebanon, Tennessee. Apparently we should "regardless of religion... come together as Christians". Note also that "tolerance" is singled out as evil....

"Man has achieved highs and suffered lows during our history of struggling with the wiles of Satan in Satan's quest for our souls.... When our only recourse was to have a savior, God sent us Jesus....tolerance by Christians has caused our nation to slide further and further away from God.... Let us call upon the Lord together by gathering on the National Day of Prayer.... We do this when we, regardless of religion, sing and pray together calling upon God to intervene and forgive our sin and heal our land. For one hour, surely we can leave the signs on the buildings and come together as Christians"

Coincidentally, I read that "cheerful piece of religious propaganda", as Andrew Sullivan calls it, just after I'd finished an article which provided the perfect context for it. In the May 2005 edition of Harper's Magazine, there's a piece by Chris Hedges called "Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters". After a thoroughly depressing account of the annual convention of the NRB, he concludes with a personal recollection:

"I can't help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the 'Christian fascists'. He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance."

Exactly. Today, Lebanon, Tennessee and Colorado Springs. Tomorrow?

(All links and emphases are mine.)

Sullivan on religion and politics

Following his thoughtful piece in The New Republic on faith and conservatism, Andrew Sullivan has been responding to some of his critics. Here's the core of his argument, which has nothing to do with right and left, and everything to do with how we live together. Quoted at length, because it deserves it:

"A conservative of doubt" [or indeed any sincere person - c'mon, Andrew] "may believe that he has a very clear grasp on moral truth. He may believe he is in the grip of divine revelation. He may believe he is so brilliant that he has solved the riddle of truth for all time. But he is also aware that he is not the only one on the planet, that others may have equally certain views of the truth, and that turning politics into a place where one eternal truth is pitted against another is a recipe for civil war and social conflict. The result would be a religious war.... Avoiding this kind of conflict was the crux of the liberal state and of the American founding. It requires bracketing your own moral truth in favor of political peace and pluralism. This is a big sacrifice, as Hobbes and Locke and the American founders fully understood. It may even, as Nietzsche suspected, sap religious faith of much of its power. But they were prepared to make it."

PZ Myers on Intelligent Design

The biologist PZ Myers (who blogs as Pharyngula) has a beautifully written op-ed piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. After contrasting how real science is done, compared with the unproductive sniping of "the hodge-podge of lawyers, philosophers, theologians, rhetoricians, and rare scientists willing to abandon scientific principles found in the ID movement", and giving a quick tour of the state of evolutionary biology today, he concludes:

"ID is a sterile philosophy whose proponents spend their time lobbying school boards, producing nothing new, and with no promise of new ideas for the future. Asking our schools to teach ID is like suggesting that they offer instruction in buggy whip manufacture - it's a futile exercise that is going to leave the students unprepared for both college and the real world. As a university instructor, I want my incoming students to be well versed in the fundamentals of biology, which includes evolution but not the empty pseudoscience of ID, so that we can move quickly to the real excitement of modern biology...which is almost entirely informed by the concepts of evolution."

(Via Evolutionblog.)

Penn & Teller & Dawkins

Check out this account by Teller of how he and Penn received the 2005 Richard Dawkins Award from the Atheist Alliance International. I've had dinner with Doug Hofstadter; next on the schedule are P&T. (Hey, I can dream.)

(Via Susan - thanks.)

Getting a sense of perspective

In his weekly opinion piece for the BBC, the British political commentator (and ex-Labour MP) Brian Walden wrote: "Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, wrote something recently that chilled me to the bone. Sir Martin is the winner of the Michael Faraday Prize awarded annually by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. In my case he did almost too good a job. He pointed out that though the idea of evolution is well-known, the vast potential for further evolution isn't yet part of our common culture. He then gave an example. He said: 'It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be entities as different from us as we are from bacteria.'"

Now, why should this chill someone to the bone? After all, we've known for about a century that humans have only been around for a tiny fraction of the lifetime of this planet, let alone the universe. Furthermore the extrapolation of this pattern to the future is not scientifically hard. There's no reason to believe that evolution stopped once homo sapiens arrived on the scene.

But then Walden brings in religion. "A growing number of people believe that we need a fresh dialogue between science and religion. I mean religion in its widest sense - a belief in the value of human life. [Don't use those code-words, Brian.] Apparently the direction of scientific progress means that we have to make moral judgements about what's permissible and what isn't. We need a moral consensus. Most emphatically, I don't mean that we need to create a sort of blancmange morality that wobbles about, containing a bit of God, a bit of physics, a dash of Catholicism plus a smattering of Buddhism and a few sprigs of well-meaning atheism. That kind of ethical coalition wouldn't survive, and we need something that will. What we all need is to acknowledge our interdependency."

I'm all for a robust debate about ethics, for creating a coalition that will survive. But I'm not sure that religion as we presently understand it is capable of adapting to this role. We've just gone through a series of religious holidays in which everybody - bloggers, magazine editors, broadcasters, politicians - seem fixated on a handful of people, events, places, and ideas from a brief period of time, roughly 2500 to 1500 years ago. It's going to be hard to open your mind to the future if you insist that some historical events are uniquely privileged. Forget about six billion years: a hundred thousand years from now, nobody will remember, or care about, any of those ideas.

If Walden wants to talk about "religion in its widest sense", I suspect most of his opposition will come from those who espouse religion in the narrowest and most retrograde sense. Perhaps we need a new label. Humanism? In the meantime, he might want to contemplate the role that religion's historically narrow perspective may have played in creating an intellectual climate in which cosmology "chills him to the bone."

Thought for the day: "When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions: that is the heart of science." - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Carrier on Flew

I've just come across a lengthy post on the Internet Infidels DB by Richard Carrier, which goes into considerable detail about the Antony Flew debate.
Key quotes:
"It bothers me that Flew has not [...] even bothered looking for critiques of Schroeder, much less considered them. He told me so--just as he told me he has not kept up on current science, even of biogenesis, much less cosmology."

"[Flew] thinks that life started with a DNA molecule (that is false--no biologist today believes that), and that the smallest possible replicating DNA molecule is so complex that it could not have arisen by chance (that is also false--or at most remains unproven--even assuming life did begin with a DNA molecule)."

"It is still unclear to me why or how Flew's imagined Deity thus accomplished the origin of life if it was (essentially) physically impossible, without supernaturally interfering in the natural order of the universe (since Flew insists he does not believe his Deity does that). This is one of several contradictions in Flew's overall position that bothers me. Flew's conclusion makes more sense as resulting from a fine-tuning argument, not an impossibility-of-life argument, yet he tells me the fine-tuning argument isn't what impressed him. I can't make sense of this.".

Carrier's other comments are extremely interesting, and will have me re-reading some of Flew's earlier work. (As for probabilities and protobiont sequences, see Ian Musgrave's excellent tutorial.)

[UPDATE] Richard Carrier has now updated his piece on SecWeb about Flew's "conversion".

"Antony Flew has retracted one of his recent assertions. In a letter to me dated 29 December 2004, Flew concedes: 'I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.'"

Flew inaccurately blames Dawkins for this. According to Carrier, he goes further: "Flew also makes another admission: 'I have been mistaught by Gerald Schroeder.' He says 'it was precisely because he appeared to be so well qualified as a physicist (which I am not) that I was never inclined to question what he said about physics.'"

Sad, but c'est la vie. If Flew does indeed feel that "I am just too old at the age of nearly 82 to initiate and conduct a major and super radical controversy about the conceivability of the putative concept of God as a spirit,", perhaps it would have been wiser if he had resisted the temptation to publicise his recent series of statements and retractions.

In the circumstances, Carrier's conclusion, though harsh, seems to be justified: "Flew has thus abandoned the very standards of inquiry that led the rest of us to atheism. It would seem the only way to God is to jettison responsible scholarship. [...] Theists would do well to drop the example of Flew. Because his willfully sloppy scholarship can only help to make belief look ridiculous."

Antony or Anthony? Confusion reigns.....

If you look at my two recent blog entries on "l'affaire Flew", you will see that the first spells the philosopher's name Anthony Flew and the second Antony Flew. Which is correct? I'm pretty sure that the answer is Antony Flew, but it's by no means as clear as it should be. First, that unreliable but influential yardstick - the Google hit count - gives Anthony 36,300 and Antony 32,800. (Curiously there are 618 pages that include both forms!) How about publications? Amazon lists his books under both names, but I assumed that this was simply data entry error. But then I consulted my bookshelf, and found both forms!

Perhaps we should simply use the construction which appears in much of his professional vita: A. G. N. Flew (or even AGN Flew).

More on Antony Flew

Update on my recent blog entry about Antony Flew:

The Raving Atheist published an unhelpful satirical piece, and in a comment to this someone posted a link to an interview between Flew and the philosopher/theologian Gary Habermas. In the interview, Flew accepts Habermas' description of him as a "deist", in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and other 18th century thinkers.

Perhaps the most disheartening statement by Flew was this: I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. [in Schroeder's The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom] That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation. The idea that Flew believes Schroeder's laboured interpretation of Genesis might be "scientifically accurate" simply shows how little Flew knows of science. Schroeder's bizarre notions of probability would cause him to fail Statistics 101, and his howlers in genetics and relativity are equally juvenile. (For a thoughtful analysis of Schroeder from a religious - Jewish - stance, I recommend R. David Hazony's review in Azure.)

Towards the end of the interview, Habermas asked: "Do you think any of [Bertrand Russell, J. L. Mackie, and A. J. Ayer] would have been impressed in the direction of theism? " Flew replied, enthusiastically: "Russell would have regarded these developments as evidence." On this, I think Flew is dead wrong. Russell was, first and foremost, a mathematician: he would not have been taken in by the innumeracy and illogic that pervades the works of Schroeder et al.

The bottom line seems to be that Flew has decided that the scientific evidence demands a designer. It's unfortunate that he doesn't seem to have bothered to ask any real scientists: cosmologists, geneticists, geologists. What a pity.

The Anthony Flew brouhaha

While I was visiting my mother, she mentioned that she'd heard that "Anthony Flew has got religion". This means that the rumours of Flew's possible recantation must have spread from the phil. of religion blogosphere to BBC Radio 4, so I thought I'd check out the state of play.

In October, Richard Carrier documented the history of Flew's supposed conversions in a piece in SecWeb, and reported that Flew was questioning whether an "impersonal spirit" of some kind might be the best explanation for "why a universe exists that can produce complex life". Carrier's recently updated the piece with some quotes from Flew himself, explaining this Deist-like position:

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

Is this simply an argument from incredulity? In his 1993 Atheistic Humanism, Flew points out that "Absent excellent evidencing reasons [...] it becomes preposterous to postulate a" CEB [Cosmos-Explaining Being]; in the same chapter he also argues against the uncritical use of various forms of the anthropic principle. Recently Flew has admitted to being impressed by Gerald Schroeder's The Hidden Face Of God, but Schroeder's (widely criticised) arguments seem to fall short of the "excellent evidencing reasons" that Flew demanded 12 years ago. (See Perakh and Carrier.)

Various religious types have been running around claiming Flew's supposed "conversion" as evidence for the supernatural. J. P. Moreland made this argument on PAX TV, and Carrier quotes Flew as emphatically rejecting it: "my God is not his. His is Swinburne's. Mine is emphatically not good (or evil) or interested in human conduct".

However Flew seems to have gone beyond the position that he described to Carrier, although it should be noted that the source is a story in Fox News. Last May Flew took part in a debate organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas; a video of the debate has been released under the title Has Science Discovered God?. Typically, the press release from Varghese's "Institute" is triumphal in tone, and does nothing to distinguish Flew's "impersonal spirit" from popular religious notions of god. And to increase the confusion (according to Fox),

Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

All of this is frustratingly incomplete, of course, and I hope the arguments will be fleshed out in the new edition of Flew's God and Philosophy, coming next year. Presumably if Flew is postulating an intelligent designer, he has an answer for the question of "who designed the designer", as well as all of the other arguments that he himself has articulated over the years in books such as the account of his debate with Terry Miethe. Nonetheless it's hard to know how to reconcile alignment with "intelligent design" with his assertion that he "has in mind something like the God of Aristotle, a distant, impersonal 'prime mover.' It might not even be conscious, but a mere force." Perhaps we expect too much: as Carrier wrote:

Flew's tentative, mechanistic Deism is not based on any logical proofs, but solely on physical, scientific evidence, or the lack thereof, and is therefore subject to change with more information -- and he confesses he has not been able to keep up with the relevant literature in science and theology, which means we should no longer treat him as an expert on this subject.

Of course such a disclaimer is unlikely to prevent people like Moreland and Varghese from using Flew as a poster child for their causes.

POSTSCRIPT, 12-Aug-05: To my amazement, this entry continues to attact comments 8 months after I wrote it. The sad thing is that so many of the comments raise points that I addressed in later postings. So please: if you stumble over this entry, and feel compelled to comment, please read the other entries on Flew before you do so. See here, here, and here. And thanks.

Rowan Atkinson on the right to offend

In today's Daily Telegraph, there's coverage of a press conference including Rowan "Mister Bean" Atkinson. He and others criticized proposed changes to UK "hate speech" laws that have been interpreted as covering criticism of religious ideas. "The freedom to criticise ideas - any ideas even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. And the law which attempts to say you can criticise or ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed." Exactly.

(Via Sully.)

Religious belief in the US

Thanks to Kate and Hannah, here's a link to a detailed (and perhaps more than usually accurate) survey of religious belief in the US. The detailed tables are fascinating. One example: with respect to educational attainment, broad belief in God went from 82% for "High school or less" to 73% for "Post graduate". However absolute certainty about God went from 72% to 53%. (Of course as Flanagan points out, many believers don't actually care very much about whether their belief is well grounded, or strongly held, or even if it's true....)

Americans, evolution, religion, and post-modernism

During the recent US election campaign, the issue of American's attitudes towards evolution popped up again. It's usually presented as "X million Americans don't believe in evolution...", with the corollary at election time "...and they all vote Republican". As I was dozing on the flight from Boston to Seattle on Friday, I found myself musing about this "fact" in various ways.

• Do non-evolutionists get flu shots? After all, they don't believe in the science that underlies the development of flu vaccines, and some of them (in Kansas) clearly don't want their children growing up with the kind of education that would equip them to work on new vaccines.
• How do Biblical inerrantists pick and choose those bits of the Bible they'll use and those bits they'll ignore? There are so many bits of blatantly allegorical and magical thinking, not to mention contradictions galore. Does consistency actually matter? If not, why not? Etcetera.
• Why should I worry about all of this? Things like belief in quaint creation myths, or circumcision, or not eating meat on Fridays, are all just tribal membership memes, ways of identifying that you are a member of a group in a way that is relatively resistant to mixing or diaspora. True... but it becomes important when people seek to impose it on others, whether it be banning the teaching of evolution in Kansas or orthodox Jews stoning tour buses in Jerusalem on Shabbat.

After all this fact-free speculation, it was nice to be proved wrong... or at least to get a chance to appreciate the true complexity of the situation. Over at People for the American Way there's a fascinating report on Evolution and Creationism in Public Education [PDF format]. It's based on a 1999 survey of 1,500 people. Among the more intriguing findings is the fact that for many people the inclusion of creationism in schools is based not on their religious beliefs, but on what the report calls a "Post Modernist" perspective.

A second important contextual point is what we term the “post-modernist” influence. For about a third of Americans, their fundamentalist religious beliefs drive their support for including Creationism in the public school curriculum. However, for most Americans who would like to see some mention of God or a Divine role in the development of humans, along with the teaching of Evolution, it is not primarily religion behind their opinions. It is much more of what can be called a Post Modernist perspective (a “Hey, you never know” mentality). This perspective is characterized by a wide tolerance for many different beliefs, since no single belief is seen as the final and complete answer to any issue. Also, many parents want their children to be exposed to a wide range of views. Their reasoning is, “our kids should be given enough information so, when they grow up, they can make up their own minds.”

Of course this meant that the vast majority of people were opposed to the Kansas evolution decision because it reduced the "wide range of views" that kids would be exposed to. And as one would expect, support for creationism and opposition to evolution were generally linked with poor education and based on ignorance of the ideas involved. Ironically, people were far more confident in the "proven" status of the Theory of Relativity than of Evolution. The basis for such a belief seems hard to understand....

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

In one of my recent pieces on Dennett and Wright, Steve Esser offered the following interesting comment; with his permission, I'm repeating it:

On Wright's notion of subjective awareness as a kind of extra epiphenomenal stuff, I've come to agree this is wrong. But I am also one of those who read Dennett's Consciousness Explained a number of years ago and came away thinking "no, not quite". First-person subjective experience, stripped of all the other cognitive apparatus, is a different beast than the other things we explain scientifically (i.e. from an "objective" stance). The fact that we have experience is prior to everything else we know -- there is no reality without it. So, I don't think we have the whole story solved yet.

I agree with the first and last sentences, and while I too have reservations about some of Consciousness Explained, I suspect that my issues are different from Steve's.

"First-person subjective experience, stripped of all the other cognitive apparatus"... OK, stop right there. I don't believe that there is any such thing. It is that cognitive apparatus which converts raw sensory stimuli into experience. No cognitive apparatus, no experience. Here I use the word experience in the sense of "the apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind", with the emphasis on apprehension. Some people use experience as an opposite of thinking; for example one dictionary defines it as "the feeling of emotions and sensations as opposed to thinking". I deny the distinction implied here: for me, all experience involves the processing by cognitive apparatus of internal and external stimuli. To the extent that these stimuli do not involve cognition, they are sub-conscious: inaccessible, and therefore not experienced.

I'm not sure what Steve means by subjective here. The dictionary provides a wealth of possibilities, some of which are essentially question-begging (since they would define the experience as, e.g. "Particular to a given person"). Later he puts objective in quotes and couples it with science, so perhaps subjective is intended to mean unscientific - but that, too, seems to beg the question. I tend to use first person, as Steve does too, because I view the objective/subjective dichotomy as a (mostly) social construct.

Ultimately Steve's assertion that "First-person experience is a different beast" seems to rest on his view that "the fact that we have experience is prior to everything else we know -- there is no reality without it". What does prior mean here? A precondition? I can perhaps understand an instrumental relationship between experience and knowing - thought experiments about sensory deprivation and brains-in-vats seem pertinent - but how does this justify the claim that experience is a "different beast"? Eating is "prior" to digestion, but both are amenable to scientific inquiry. (I'm afraid I don't understand the "no reality" comment at all.)

Ultimately I think Steve seems to be arguing for the familiar "uniquely privileged" viewpoint: that there is something about first-person experience that is real - accessible to the individual concerned - but is intrinsically inaccessible to scientific, "objective" inquiry. It seems to me that such a radical claim must be either a matter of faith (mysterian), or must be explicable in terms of the known properties of individuals and brains. If one backs off from the claim of intrinsic inaccessibility, first-person experience presumably moves into the realm of the empirical - which is how I view it.

Wright and Dennett, encore une fois

Wright still doesn't get it. In his latest update to his response to Dennett he writes:

Some of Dennett’s defenders have e-mailed to accuse me of playing “Gotcha”. They say I take two separate parts of Dennett’s interview [A and B in the transcript excerpts above], note that they logically imply the existence of evidence of higher purpose, and then attribute that conclusion to Dennett even though he never states the conclusion explicitly.

But it's more than that. At the very beginning of the interview, Dennett explicitly disavows the position which Wright seeks to deduce from his later answers. One might reasonably expect Wright to pause and reflect on whether Dennett was in fact conceding the position, or whether he (Wright) was making a mistake in drawing the conclusion. And as Wright wrote:

Dennett didn't volunteer this opinion enthusiastically, or for that matter volunteer it at all. He conceded it in the course of a dialogue with me—and extracting the concession was a little like pulling teeth.

In his latest response, Wright concedes:

Granted, I should have used less dramatic language in attributing this conclusion to him. Rather than saying in paragraph 3 of the Beliefnet piece that he had “declared” the existence of evidence of higher purpose, I should have said he “acknowledged” it.

Rubbish. Try: "...I should have said that I put those words into his mouth, without checking that this what what he meant."

Wright insists that Dennett's complaint "...continues to strike me as wholly untenable. But I suppose I could be wrong." As I noted, his approach seems fundamentally dishonest. He seems more interested in preserving what he seems to view as his "scalp" than in reaching a meeting of the minds, and this is not to his credit. Based on all that has passed, does Wright still seriously believe that Dennett "acknowledges a higher purpose"? (If he does, is this belief falsifiable?)

The obvious solution would be for Wright to simply state:

"When I wrote the Beliefnet piece, I believed that Dennett's statements during our interview constituted an acceptance of a 'higher purpose' viewpoint. However it is clear from what Dennett has said, in that interview and subsequently, that he does not hold this viewpoint. I therefore recognize that my inference must have arisen from a mutual misunderstanding."

Would that be so hard? Even the RavingAtheist would probably accept it.

Wright, Dennett, and Occam's Razor

Dan Kaplan pointed me at Wright's response to Dennett's complaint about his piece in Beliefnet. I don't see that Wright gets himself off the hook. Leaving aside the validity of the argument, the ethics just stink. To reduce it to bare bones:

- Dennett said A and B
- Later on, Dennett said C
- After the interview, Wright concludes that C can be interpreted as if A then not B
- Wright therefore concludes, and announces to the world, that Dennett believes not B

Now before taking this last step, a reasonable person would have noted that this conclusion meant that Dennett had claimed B and not B. Moreover, all of Dennett's previous statements had been consistent with B. There seem to be three possibilities:

- Dennett believes both B and not B.
- Dennett has changed his mind and now believes not B.
- Dennett still believes B; there is an error somewhere in the chain of reasoning - an equivocation, or a misunderstanding, or a subtle ambiguity.

Common sense suggests that the last of these is the most likely: in spoken (as opposed to written) discussion, such miscommunication occurs quite often. It certainly is more likely than someone changing a deeply-held belief.

So what does Wright do? Does he contact Dennett to double-check what was said and the conclusion that he's drawn, or does he publish without checking? The first approach is most likely to lead to a true reporting of the exchange. The second has the better "Gotcha!" potential, even though it's likely to lead to an acrimonious follow-up. (Like this.)

Maybe Wright got carried away, and thought this was a political debate in which zingers were more important than getting at the truth. That would seem to be a lousy way to practice philosophy.

UPDATE:I think I understand why Wright might have behaved in this way. If you watch the whole interview between Dennett and Wright, from about 30:00 through 45:00, you can see Dennett absolutely destroying Wright's incoherent notion of epiphenomenalism. (I guess I should commend Wright for being honest enough to publish the interview even though he comes off so badly in it, trying to "defend indefensible positions" as he put it, but I can't imagine that he was happy.)

More on Dennett and Wright

Yesterday I wrote of Robert Wright's dishonest piece about Daniel Dennett in BeliefNet. After watching the video of the Wright-Dennett interview again, and re-reading Wright's piece, I sent the following email to Wright, cc: Dennett.

I read the piece "Planet with a purpose" and then watched your interview with Dennett. I have to say that I find your triumphal announcement that:

> I have some bad news for Dennett's many atheist devotees.
> He recently declared that life on earth shows signs of having a
> higher purpose. Worse still, he did it on videotape, during an
> interview for my website meaningoflife.tv. (You can watch the
> relevant clip here, though I recommend reading a bit further
> first so you'll have enough background to follow the logic.)

to be wholly unjustified, based on the video interview. You attempt to couple Dennett's agreement with your hypothetical ("to the extent that... it would support ...") with earlier elements in the discussion in order to draw the conclusion that you were seeking. I don't find that this argument works - the earlier discussion does not support your assertion that "He has already agreed that evolution does exhibit those properties". Furthermore you don't even have the courtesy to ask Dennett whether or not he agrees with the conclusion that you draw. In a discussion full of analogy, hypotheticals, and probabilities, the likelihood of inadvertent or intentional equivocation is extremely high. The upshot is that your written piece smacks of "Gotcha!", rather than reasoned argument.

Even more important, earlier in the interview Dennett spells out very clearly an alternative ("natural selections happens because it can") which is wholly inconsistent with your "higher purpose" conclusion. Unless you believe that Dennett is supporting two inconsistent positions, this should have caused you to question whether you had drawn a valid conclusion from the discussion as a whole. Yet you completely ignored Dennett's naturalistic position when you came to write your Beliefnet story. This seems dishonest.

For myself, I find the attempt to apply the language of evolution, or natural selection, to "the system of the planet" is unhelpful and misleading. Natural selection, as you mention in the interview, arises from a combination of differentiated replication and scarce resources. The "system of the planet" is not obviously replicating, differentiating, or competing with anything else. To treat an aggregation of planetary phenomena, living and inert, as a "system" is one thing; it certainly helps us understand things like the salinity of the oceans and the recycling of atmospheric gases. To go from "system" to "organism" is at best a metaphor of limited value, and at worst a sentimental distraction.

As you may know, at least one commentator (Andrew Sullivan) read your story and interpreted it as "An Atheist Recants". While in most cases it is the journalist who misleads with a simplifying headline, here I believe that he accurately summarized your - wholly unjustified - conclusion.

Geoff Arnold

Dissing Dennett

I was reading Andrew Sullivan's blog (yes, I know he's infuriating, but he's such an entertaining contrarian - and at least he doesn't have Christopher Hitchens' vicious streak), and I came across a little piece that I'll reproduce in full:

AN ATHEIST RECANTS: Philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of the influential 1995 book, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," now says he sees a higher purpose in the universe. Bob Wright breaks the news.

Now anyone seeing that headline would naturally conclude that Dennett had "recanted" his atheism - that he now believed in God. Puzzled, I read the piece by Robert Wright that Sullivan linked to. And Wright certainly launches into the topic with enthusiasm, asserting:

I have some bad news for Dennett's many atheist devotees. He recently declared that life on earth shows signs of having a higher purpose.

So what is this "higher purpose"? We're meant to assume that it is "God", obviously. Yet here's the money quote, later in the piece:

1) Dennett's climactic concession may not sound dramatic. He just agrees reluctantly with my assertion that "to the extent that evolution on this planet" has properties "comparable" to those of an organism's maturation—in particular "directional movement toward functionality"—then the possibility that natural selection is a product of design gets more plausible. But remember: He has already agreed that evolution does exhibit those properties. Ergo: By Dennett's own analysis, there is at least some evidence that natural selection is a product of design. (And this from a guy who early in the interview says he's an atheist.)

[Interjection: Note the assumption that "directionality" implies (not merely "is compatible with") "design", and that "design" implies a divine, non-natural designer - otherwise how is this incompatible with atheism? Sloppy. Back to Wright:]

2) Again: to say that natural selection may be a product of design isn't to say that the designer is a god, or even a thinking being in any conventional sense. Conceivably, the designer could be some kind of natural-selection-type process (on a really cosmic scale). So Dennett might object to my using the term "higher purpose" in the first paragraph of this piece, since for many people that term implies a divine purpose. But "higher purpose" can be defined more neutrally.

So now "higher purpose" may just be an emergent property of a higher-level natural system - for example, natural selection applied to a many-worlds cosmology. I don't see anything that Dennett has said that is incompatible with atheism.

Wright's agenda is all too clear, as his closing paragraph shows:

Still, one could mount an argument that evolution on this planet has at least some of the hallmarks of the divine—a directionality that is in some ways moral, even (in some carefully delineated sense of the word) spiritual. In fact, I've mounted such an argument in the last chapter of my book Nonzero. But Dennett hasn't signed on to that one. Yet.

And having read most of Nonzero, I'm reasonably confident that Dennett wouldn't sign on to it. While there are some very interesting ideas in the first half of the book, the last chapter is full of equivocation, particularly around the notions of "design", "purpose", and "divine". It's nowhere near as good as Wright's earlier The Moral Animal.