John Holbo has devised a wonderfully useful coinage (don’t be afraid to follow that link! It’s only two paragraphs; he’ll have to work it over for a few more weeks to expand it to Holbonian mass) that he applies to Jonah Goldberg’s intellectual evasiveness.
To put it another way, Goldberg is making a standard rhetorical move which has no accepted name, but which really needs one. I call it ‘the two-step of terrific triviality’. Say something that is ambiguous between something so strong it is absurd and so weak that it would be absurd even to mention it. When attacked, hop from foot to foot as necessary, keeping a serious expression on your face. With luck, you will be able to generate the mistaken impression that you haven’t been knocked flat, by rights. As a result, the thing that you said which was absurdly strong will appear to have some obscure grain of truth in it. Even though you have provided no reason to think so.
Hey, that sounds familiar! John Quiggin also notices its utility in the
nature-nurture debate. It’s an easy dance to elicit, too: find someone who’s trying to defend his daily prayers to a personal, loving god against a Dawkins-like assault, and you’ll see heels hammering like machine guns as they try to defend the Big Man in the Sky with philosophical abstractions and appeals to Ineffable Existence. Bring castanets and you could call it a flamenco!
I’m not sure there needs to be an intellectual defense of religion. In fact, much of the time apologists get into difficulty, and say the craziest, oddest and least Christian-like things, in a futile search to find intellectual justification, especially against something that does have evidence behind it, like geology, or biology.
Which is not to say there is no intellectual justification for religion, only that science is an unlikely place to find it much. We are a social species, after all, as are many living things (including some trees, it appears). We are not robots whose gear wear, short circuits, and dirty oil can explain all dysfunction, nor whose engineering in the first place can explain all function.
Do you really need an intellectual justification for your love of pirates, P.Z.? Isn’t any such justification challenged, or perhaps nullified, by the evils of piracy? But neither do you offer your pirate fetish as an answer to great questions of the day, nor especially of all great questions of today and forevermore.
Any thing or philosophy that calls us to act contrary to our best interests at the moment needs a powerful justification. Vaccines and tooth cavity filling are painful, but they produce significant medical benefits downstream. We endure the pain for the benefit.
I think where organized religion — or disorganized religion as much of it is today* — runs off the rails is in trying to find “evidence” of a scientific nature to justify faith. If we had evidence, faith would not be necessary. If we had Jesus’ empty tomb, the deed to Jesus’ summer place with Jesus’ signature, photos of the miracles, investigative reports of the healings by the Mayo Clinic certifying that there is no medical explanation other than miracle, and if Jesus had a weekly television program beamed in from different pulsars, we’d all be agnostics, functioning on what the evidence is, and not on faith.
Religion goes bad, often, when it tries to claim we can be agnostic since the evidence is in.
Of course, if we say it’s faith, then a Dawkins-like assault is relatively ineffective.
That so many religionists react so strongly to Dawkins-like assaults suggests they lack the faith they claim to be under attack.
Holbo is on to something. Are we sure Aristotle didn’t have a name for that? (Here’s an area where John Angus Campbell should actually have some expertise — has he weighed in?)
There’s still a nature-nurture debate? I thought that everyone has realized by now that they’re inseparable and the debate is pointless. I’m taking a class with Paul Ehrlich and he’s fond of saying it’s like arguing whether the height or width contributes more to the area of a rectangle.
I just read the whole Goldberg piece. Triumph of triviality. I was less informed coming out of it. How the mighty have fallen — from Buckley to Goldberg.
[P.S. — I was listening to Neil Young’s “Massey Hall 1971” disc when I read your post, P.Z. As I finished reading the post, Young’s “I see the sky about to rain” finished, too, and the crowd on the disc burst into thunderous applause and shouts of “More! More!” A materialist might take that as coincidence. To creationists, however, it can only be read as God’s whole-hearted approval of your post, don’t you think?]
If I were running for elected office on the Pirate platform, if I were arguing that national policy ought to be defined by the historical record of pirate actions, if I were demanding that pirate language be taught in the schools, and if I were preaching that this was a Pirate Nation, and we therefore ought to drive out all the ninjas or at least make them wear eyepatches … then damned right, I better be able to come up with an intellectual justification.
Same with religion. If people want to sing old songs and talk about the gospels on Sunday, no problemo, go for it. I’m not proposing that we tear down the churches (although I do think we ought to tax them, and I could think of more productive uses for big elaborate buildings like that). We just need to stop taking religion so seriously. It’s play-acting for grownups, just like pirates.
Ed Darrell,
While I agree with your general point I can’t help but wonder why then have faith in what you say you have faith in? For what reason?
That would be evidence used to convince people. Wouldn’t it have more value than what you propose here? Your idea does preclude a serious ripping on the existence question but not the why take it seriously question.
Is the existence of God more like “the love of pirates” or is it more like “the existence of pirates?” Is God supposed to be a positive feeling some people have — or is it supposed to be a Spiritual Being, a disembodied Intelligence, towards whom some people have positive feelings?
Hate to say it, but sounds like someone is doing a bit of a two-step here.
The faith flamenco!
Noisier than the faith foxtrot and more dignified than the faith frug. Challenged only by the faith fandango!
It seems to me that this *does* have a name, and the name is “equivocation”.
And this sort of thing is the kind of trouble you frequently get into when you don’t bother to nail down definitions *first*.
FWIW, that’s always been my reaction to the Anthropic Principle in cosmology. I keep hoping that some day, the light will go on and I will understand why it isn’t one or the other.
Is this the ‘No True Scottish Straw Man’ argument?
The problem, as PZ pointed out, is that they don’t just believe, they try to use that belief to set policies. And even that is when they run into a problem. You can’t make sound policy decisions on wishful thinking, only on solid facts. Hoping that God will give you more oil, so you don’t have to spend money on alternatives, won’t work, nor will anything else in the real world where “God” becomes the defacto answer. Yet, their belief demands that it “is” the answer. Since this can’t be reconciled with actual existing facts or evidence, and they know it, the only way to justify their answer, even to themselves, is to try to *prove* God through a mixture of horribly disfunctional bending of facts to try to make them fit, or rejection of the ones that don’t, in favor of some invented BS that has no evidenciary basis.
You can’t build a car based on prayer. If you want to build a car using prayer, you first have to convince people that God builds cars and that all you are doing in following his blue prints. To do that you, ironically, first have to convince everyone that Henry Ford was a) inspired to make his car based on those mythical blue prints, and b) lied about it for some reason. What reason? Obviously to undermine the true faith of course. This is the logic being employed here. And it all stems first and foremost from the inability of **anyone** that believes to keep belief independent from the empirical and scientific world, which you seem to think is what they should be doing. But that can’t happen or their belief becomes nothing more than one of the goofy dreams I have after watching some sci-fi show or anime, where I go, “Well, for the moment this is real in my head, so I guess I will roll over and go back to dreaming.”, but where I inevitably have to get up and go back to dealing with a world in which I don’t personally know Naruto, am not a ninja and can’t throw magic fireballs.
Religion, by definition, **cannot** give up those fantasies in the real world without admitting that all they are is fantasies *first*. And if they are not fantasies, then they **must** apply in some fashion to how the real world actually works. Since it doesn’t, it has to be the people claiming it doesn’t that are lying, not the people stuck in the day dream. Q.E.D.
The lesson from Dawkins et al is that science debunks most concepts of religion.
I could go one step further than perhaps Dawkins does and say that science casts deism as dubious. The safe zone seems to be somewhere around where some pantheists claims that godhood is love or some other emotion. But at that time it seems to be simplest to drop the double meaning.
It is indeed a possible way of using AP. The Tautological AP would be absurd even to mention it, the Strong AP is so strong it is absurd (or rather equivalently, is religiously motivated).
The other way is to make a definition up front and stick with it. This is what papers using AP does, most often with the physically plausible Weak AP. It is even possible to drop the anthropic condition and use neutral definitions of physics allowing observers (environmental principles).
The lesson from Dawkins et al is that science debunks most concepts of religion.
I could go one step further than perhaps Dawkins does and say that science casts deism as dubious. The safe zone seems to be somewhere around where some pantheists claims that godhood is love or some other emotion. But at that time it seems to be simplest to drop the double meaning.
It is indeed a possible way of using AP. The Tautological AP would be absurd even to mention it, the Strong AP is so strong it is absurd (or rather equivalently, is religiously motivated).
The other way is to make a definition up front and stick with it. This is what papers using AP does, most often with the physically plausible Weak AP. It is even possible to drop the anthropic condition and use neutral definitions of physics allowing observers (environmental principles).
I am reading “Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think–Reflections by scientists, writers, and philosophers”, Edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley, Oxford, 2006. Contributor Richard Harries (identified in the contributor list as Rt Revd Bishop of Oxford) lauds Dawkins as a fellow humanist, but he seems puzzled by his antipathy to religion. So he essays to explain; here is an excerpt:
A theologian will want to see this phenomenon [“shuddering before the beautiful”, Dawkins quoting Chandrasekhar]as grounded in a reality that lies beyond the visible universe. The fact that mathematicians look for and discover equations of extraordinary elegance and beauty, and that these enable scientists to explore the true nature of physical reality, seems to cry out for an explanation. The religious explanation is that the human mind and the way the universe reveals its secrets to rational exploration is grounded in the logos, the divine rationality and ordering of all things. There is no final compelling logical proof that can take this step for us. Nor, on the other hand, is there any finally compelling philosophical or scientific reason why that step should not be taken. (I will be merciful, and stop quoting here)
******************
I would like to read the above to the Geico caveman. After each sentence, I would pause, the cave man would exhibit a pained exasperated look, and say, “…..What!?”
The “logos” sentence is a classic. There is a religious explanation for the way all godless scientists do their work–they just don’t know it! The author is kind enough to tell us what logos means: divine rationality…..What!?
It is indeed a possible way of using AP. The Tautological AP would be absurd even to mention it, the Strong AP is so strong it is absurd (or rather equivalently, is religiously motivated).
Another thing bothers me about the fine-tuning argument: Let’s assume that our universe is designed especially to support the development of complex intelligent life. This was done by an intelligent designer that was not of our universe: he/she/it is from another universe or plane of existence, let’s say Dimension X.
If Dimension X doesn’t have the exact same properties as our universe, the fine-tuning argument predicts that it cannot support the development of complex intelligent life. So how did Dimension X end up having an intelligent designer? Was he hired over from somewhere else?
I like Ther’s comment on Eschaton:
If the question is, “how come the left blogosphere is so reflexively derisive whenever they encounter an argument from people like Goldberg and May,” I think that May actually puts his finger on exactly why this is so:
It’s because so many conservatives want to argue things like global warming is fake and that there were significant ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_04_08_atrios_archive.html#117658358153550876
Or that dinosaurs lived alongside humans in a garden of eden. Or that I.D. is a science. Or that bananas prove I.D. Or that the Rapture is coming. Or that the Pope is infallible. Etc., etc., etc.
Andrew Sullivan went through a long debate with Sam Harris without ever giving any real intellectual defense of religion or thinking he needed to. He pretty much claimed that he didn’t come to faith by reason and reason couldn’t remove it. He just sort of feels it.
That doesn’t mean he isn’t open to criticism. I had plenty to give him:
First Post
2nd Post
Andrew talks death
Last post
I don’t think Sam’s or my own “Dawkins-like assault” on Sullivan is ineffective.
P.Z., regarding pirates and policy: You said it better.
The difficulty is not when what is (or might be) fantasy and reality agree on a course of action. The difficulty is when someone urges a course of action which cannot be justified in the real world.
Which gets us very much to Jefferson’s viewpoint, I think. Take the philosophy of Jesus in social interaction, it makes a lot of sense. Try to suggest that the philosophy urges action contrary to common sense, or worse, contrary to physical reality, it makes no sense.
I don’t think Jesus urged actions counter to common sense and reality. That’s where I disagree with creationists, and that is where they depart from usefulness, and become counterproductive.