Premature termination
Bryan Appleyard cuts through all the verbiage and sets everyone straight with just a few words – nineteen words, to be exact.
…the new, militant atheism of Richard Dawkins and friends…The disputes didn’t amount to much then and they don’t amount to much now. Put it like this: it is blindingly obvious that claims about a spiritual reality can neither be proved nor disproved by material means. End of argument.
End of argument! So tidy! Except for the tiny little fact that proving and disproving don’t exhaust the possibilities, so there is argument after all. Quite a lot of it, in fact. So much for ‘End of argument’ – and for bossy attempts to end arguments.
In order to make their case meaningful, the Dawkinsians must prove that religion is demonstrably a bad thing…they can’t prove this…because the persistence of religion in all human societies strongly suggests that, even in the most basic Darwinian terms, it has been good for us as a species.
Uh huh, and the persistence of rape and murder and general violence and paranoia and crabbiness in all human societies also strongly suggests that it has been good for us as a species, does it? No complexities there? No issues about what is good for the individual, not to mention the gene, not being good for ‘us as a species’? No issues about adaptations to one environment persisting into a different environment? Nothing to indicate that that claim might be a little simplistic?
The point is not how the watch was designed but the fact that it is designed. Some process has led to its existence and it is that process that matters because the mechanism and purpose of the watch clearly make it different in kind from, say, rocks. Equally, humans also require a different type of explanation from rocks. It may be natural selection or it may be some innate force in the universe. Either way, it is reasonable to associate this force with morality and God.
Or immorality and Devil. Or gymnastics and Energy. Or technopop and Noise. Or – you get the idea.
This is an entirely decent and persuasive argument against the intolerance of the atheists, in that it shows religion makes perfect sense, and getting irritated because you think it’s “untrue” is just silly.
Okay, I give up, this stuff is too sophisticated, I can’t keep up with it.
Hm let’s see if this works.
Ben Nelson is super awesome and deserves lots of money. END OF ARGUMENT!!
Also translated as: “I assert there is a deity, therefore there is. The atheists are asking for evidence of my assertion! What?! Never. End of argument!”
Wow, I read Appleyard’s review, and found it to be even worse than what you presented with these quotes. It’s amazing how much science gets twisted by those who want to claim that it is compatible with religion. (Or, in some other cases, how religion gets twisted to something that almost no religious person actually believes in order to make it compatible with science.)
I think the most telling bit is when he says that those of us who criticize what is untrue are just being silly. Talking to someone like this is like trying to give moral reasons to a psychopath.
By the way, Ophelia, I’ve been following Butterflies and Wheels for a little while now, and I very much appreciate what you’re doing. Thanks.
The next time someone accuses the “new atheists” of using dubious panglossian sociobiology to justify their claims, I’m going to show them this quote.
Thanks CR!
“Either way, it is reasonable to associate this force with morality and God.”
EPIC FAIL!!!!!
Aw, yer just one of them pesky new atheists, whadda you know.
For effect, I think all readers should play this right after they finish the words “End of Argument”:
He must have a bet with someone about the number of logical fallacies he can perpetrate in one article. I can’t remember the last time I read such bad arguments.
I can’t believe Bryan Appleyard actually makes a living from his writing. That review is so poorly written it is like reading an A-level essay. He comes across as an over-enthusiastic teenager struggling to comprehend ideas he has just heard about for the first time.
It is also quite annoying the way he describes some claim then says “that’s wrong” or “that’s right” as if his unexplained snap judgements in an area where he clearly has no competence are somehow useful to the reader. Does he understand the purpose of a book review?
“In order to make their case meaningful, the Dawkinsians must prove that religion is demonstrably a bad thing — otherwise, why bother to stamp it out? Even after 9/11, they can’t prove this because, especially in the 20th century, non-religious nastiness was infinitely worse than religious, and because the persistence of religion in all human societies strongly suggests that, even in the most basic Darwinian terms, it has been good for us as a species.
“Wright’s case is that, from a purely materialistic perspective, it is indeed good for us, and even that God exists, though perhaps both ‘God’ and ‘exists’ should be in inverted commas. At the heart of his case is the idea that…” and blah de blah de blah.
Where Appleyard says “especially in the 20th century, non-religious nastiness was infinitely worse than religious” one would hope he would be specific. What “non-religious nastiness” could he possibly have been referring to? As he does not say, one can only guess.
My guess is that he had in mind Wooloomooloo in inner Sydney; replete with naval dockyards, brothels galore, and sailors’ pubs where prostitutes standing up on the bar are raffled at closing time. Christian (or any other religious knowledge) indeed wilts in such a setting, and the Salvation Army inclines to give it all a miss.
But nobody there is tortured or stoned to death or burned alive, or stood up before a firing squad for failing to conform, as people were in those other highly religious environments, mediaeval Europe, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany (etc) and still are today in areas under Muslim fundamentalist control (etc).
So I am really at a loss to understand who or what he might have been referring to.
But I join CR: I have been following B&W for years and regard it as one of the (mere handful) of best sites on the Net. And OB is one in 6,000 million.
Appleyards are two a penny.
Geez, this guy sounds like the Master Control Program from Tron: “End of arguement. End of line.”
Ophelia
I’ve kind of stopped challenging this stuff now purely because I’m sick of having to wade through the same dull, tired arguments, in differing variations of self-satisfaction. The whole anti-atheist thing has become a smug, soporific drone. You get sick of the sheer poverty of imagination and poverty of thought.
I admire your tenacity in sticking with it – you have a stronger intellect than I do!
As a rule of thumb I regard the expression ‘End of argument’ (or the more demotic ‘End of.’) as just another way of saying ‘I’m out of my depth now. Stop talking.’
…because the mechanism and purpose of the watch clearly make it different in kind from, say, rocks. Equally, humans also require a different type of explanation from rocks.
No. The watch requires a different type of explanation to the rocks and trees and birds and bees because it is clearly different from them in kind. It is not part of the natural world, it is manufactured. That’s why it is noticeable when we see it in a field. Leaf mould, lichen, bugs, hedgehogs and people on the other hand are not clearly different in kind from the rest of the natural world and do not require a different type of explanation.
Aw shucks, Ian – thanks.
Max I think my willingness to stick with it is probably a sign of a weaker intellect, not a stronger one!
I have some kind of morbid fascination with this brand of woolly thinking – although I do hit a wall when I attempt to argue and the other party just moves the goal posts with every reply.
I’ve been following B&W (etc) for six months or so, often having to pinch myself in disbelief: are the arguments of theists always so poor? (Appleyard certainly reaches a new low) All the power and pomp and paraphenalia of religion comes down to a threadbare sack of arguments that would shame a fourth former. P.S. Just for interest’s sake, has anyone even come across a apologist for religion/faitheism who doesn’t employ the same tired old tropes?
Mike, I’m sure I could play devil’s advocate for the belief in belief, making use of only arguments I find somewhat persuasive. I just don’t really want to.
Still, if I were to do that, I couldn’t avoid tropes. But frankly, a taboo on tropes is an unfair restriction, since the really clever people who had something interesting to say about religion have been dead for centuries.
I haven’t, at any rate. That’s not to say that there isn’t anything better, just that I haven’t seen anything better. (Mind you, I always suspect that if there were anything better, the apologists would know about it and use it, because it would be so useful to them. Since they don’t…well, one wonders.)
Well, I have to say, I’ve just read Antony Flew’s book – ‘There is a God: how the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind – and I recently read the Francis Collins book, too, I guess because I really wanted to find some really difficult, compelling argument, and they’re quite shockingly dreadful.
Flew’s whole argument is just a version of ID, really, which declares God to be the only possible answer to various difficult questions (the Goldilocks enigma stuff, basically).
Nevertheless, I think those questions are interesting, and Dawkins, for instance, doesn’t give particularly convincing answers to them in my view.
And it does seem to me that the argument that you can neither prove nor disprove God (the deist one, anyway) has some force.
Deism is neither here nor there. What matters is the authority (intellectual, moral, etc.) of actual religions. Deists, if they really are deists, are on the same side as atheists when it comes to that. If I am ever convinced, by some argument or other, of the truth of deism, it won’t change my mind on anything of real-world importance.
I think Plantinga is a better place to look for “really difficult, compelling argument” than Flew or Collins.
One can neither prove nor disprove an infinite array of things (an omnipotent dragon with 4,879,201 jewels in its crown, an omnipotent dragon with 4,879,202 jewels in its crown, etc) but that’s not a reason to believe in all of them or any of them.
Flew did not write that book:
Yeah. I wrote a feature about all that for TPM. A sordid tale.
Quote from Appleyard: “You may find it a hard read, not because it is difficult, but because Wright lacks a prose style and narrative gifts.”
…which Appleyard also lacks.
I concur with Jakob: I’ve rarely read a worse written review of anything.
Russell: “Deism is neither here nor there. What matters is the authority (intellectual, moral, etc.) of actual religions…”
I guess that’s right, intellectually. Being convinced of deism wouldn’t make me a – say – Christian, either. (And one of the weird things about Flew’s and Collins’ books is that they leap from arguments which might be a sort of evidence for deism to a defence of Christianity. Flew’s doesn’t do this quite so explicitly, but there’s something in the use of language which implies it, and there’s an appendix about Jesus). Maybe I just find the argument (about deism) more interesting than you do.
OB: “One can neither prove nor disprove an infinite array of things…”
Sure. But one of the points in contention, as I understand it, is whether or not God’s existence is a scientific hypothesis. The existence of your delightful dragon obviously isn’t. Ergo…?
Thanks for the tip about Plantinga, I’ll have a look. And I’d read part of that stuff about Flew (not sure now why only part.) but yes, a miserable affair.
For my money, Plantinga is a logical fantasist. He plays tricks with logic, and, while complicated, certainly, is not compelling. He believes, against all reasonable odds, that evangelical Christianity can be philosophically defended.
If you want someone who is brings his reasoning within the compass of the rational, Eric Reitan’s relatively new book, Is God a Delusion, at least begins with an acknowledgement that the ‘new atheists’ provide fairly strong opposition. He is not more successful than Plantinga, but he at least provides something to chew on.
As to Flew, it’s really quite shocking to see what the ‘parties of god’ have done with an old man, a man whose philosophical reputation was secure, and who was used in the most cynical way by religious nuts looking for a cause célèbre – like Boswell, haunting Hume’s deathbed.
“one of the points in contention, as I understand it, is whether or not God’s existence is a scientific hypothesis. The existence of your delightful dragon obviously isn’t. Ergo…?”
Ergo we have two choices: either the postulated god or well-dressed dragon has no effect on the world we know in which case believers have no grounds to make any claims about it, or it does, in which case it is a scientific hypothesis. What believers usually seem to do is pick a little from each column as convenient – it’s just outside enough to elude scientific testing but not so outside that it doesn’t answer prayers. That seems to me to be incoherent, not to say opportunistic.
“like Boswell, haunting Hume’s deathbed”
I’ve always hated Boswell for that – it makes me want to kick him. So prurient, so intrusive, so obnoxious. Le bon David should have barred the door to him.
The Darrel Falk piece that Jerry Coyne links to shows that, for him, anyway, there is no empirical test for the God hypothesis. Nothing will test for God’s existence, even though they refer to claims made by religious that God has interfered in the design process along the way. Perhaps verifcationism is not a general theory of the meaning of propositions, but it is, surely a reasonable theory about the meaningfulness of empirical claims. Your bejewelled dragon has a better chance of turning up on the empirical radar than Falk’s God.
Falks article on beliefnet.com: The Vision Lives On The ‘vision’ here, refers to Francis Collins’ vision of the work of Biologos, I think. What meaningful emptiness this all is, and we are supposed to sit idly by and let them spread their nonsese like jam!?
I too feel like kicking Boswell, but not as much as the idiot who claimed that Darwin spent his last moments cramming for finals. These religious parasites do have an thoroughly emetic effect. Le bon David was too thoroughly the gentleman to show Boswel the door.
Here is the only quote on the Biology Department webpage for Point Loma Nazarene U:
“For by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. – Col. 1:16-17”
They also don’t have an evolution course listed in their catalog.
Plantinga also has raged against evolution while admitting he knows nothing about it and has said the following about belief:
“I’ve been arguing that theistic belief does not (in general) need argument either for deontological justification, or for positive epistemic status, (or for Foley rationality or Alstonian justification); belief in God is properly basic.”
Doesn’t Appleyard’s claim boil down to asserting that a universe without god is observationally identical to one with a god? Isn’t that rather a massive concession? Why does he think this is to the theist’s advantage?
“And one of the weird things about Flew’s and Collins’ books is that they leap from arguments which might be a sort of evidence for deism to a defence of Christianity.”
In my experience, there are very, very few honest deists—the majority of people advancing those arguments seem to be stealth theists of one flavor or another, who are just playing a kind of three-god monte.
I think it comes back to the idea at the heart of the Discovery Institute’s wedge strategy–once you’ve demolished the idea of naturalism by getting people to accept a creator of some kind, you can then bring your big theological guns to bear. The question is whether Collins and the faitheists and the like are echoing the DI’s arguments consciously or unconsciously.
“a kind of three-god monte”
Hahahaha
That’s pretty much what I meant by “What believers usually seem to do is pick a little from each column as convenient.” Bait and switch would be another term for it.
Yes, this is the first question that Appleyard’s review prompts, and it’s pure bait and switch. You first make the existence of a god plausible – well, you get the idea! – and then you begin, without any justification, making claims, about the god so implausibly hypothesised, based on some putative revelation. But I do like the idea of the three-god monte – then the stuff about the revealed specifics is just misleading patter.
That’s what Collins does, I gather, using CS Lewis as the bait, and the waterfall as the switch. If he takes Lewis seriously, then practically anything can be seen as a revelation, as an unheimlich event that demands explanation. All very scientific, no doubt. In fact, it’s so pathetic that one wonders why the laughter hasn’t relegated him to a small backwater Bible college.
I got my masters at OSU and interacted with Eric quite a bit. In terms of opponents of Dawkins, he’s unique. He concedes to Dawkins that Hell is a repugnant concept (and he rejects it entirely), he denies the Divine Command theory of morals (good bye, CS Lewis), and he has no qualms with saying that physical phenomena should be given a natural explanation. Instead, his argument rests largely on “experience”, and you’re right, it’s not as easy to refute as, say, Francis Collins or Alister McGrath.
But he still insists on the cosmological argument and the anthropic principle, both of which seems scientifically untenable to me. Also, like it or not, his much more attenuated conception of religion is wholly detached from religion as normally practiced in Oklahoma. And he’s keenly aware of that.
Oh, and Eric might give M&K something to chew on as well. In the introduction to his book, he lumps Carl Sagan in with Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens among the “New Atheists”
Mills is a turd, and I have no problem with Reitan attacking him. But Wolper and Sagan tend to be much more conciliatory when addressing religion, and yet they are still perceived as “attacking” religion, even by very liberal non-literalists such as Reitan. Chris Mooney is probably not aware of this.
The recent flurry really brought home to me the stark division between atheists and theists. If a choice had to be made between a student understanding and accepting evolution or the big bang or AGW and that same student believing in god, theists would overwhelmingly choose the latter. The primary thrust of works by theistic evolutionists is to keep the faithful from losing their faith – understanding the natural world is a distant second. Everything is done to shelter religion from criticism.