Month: April 2010

Jerry Coyne made a crucial point about this De Dorian Sci Ed 101 stuff.

…teaching evolution and dispelling creation provides students with a valuable lesson: it teaches them to think scientifically—surely one of the main points of a science class. They learn to weigh evidence and to show how that evidence can be used to discriminate between alternative explanations. It’s of little consequence to me that one alternative explanation comes from a literal interpretation of scripture. Indeed, it’s useful, for this is a real life example—one that’s going on now—of how alternative empirical claims are fighting for primacy in the intellectual marketplace. What better way to engage students in the scientific method?

Exactly. It’s a terribly narrowed and pinched version of teaching that De Dora is defending here. (He seems to be trying to claim this isn’t what he wants, it’s just what the law compels, but I don’t really believe him. I think he has a visceral dislike of all but the most apologetic atheism and I think that dislike infects everything he says on this subject. I could be wrong though – he writes so clumsily that it’s really impossible to be sure exactly what he is saying.)

Bizarrely though, De Dora said much the same thing himself at one point, but apparently without realizing he’d done it. He’s confused.

…the answer seems to be that we should ensure our high school science teachers are instructing students on how to think like a scientist, and imparting to students the body of knowledge scientists have accrued (and that all of our teachers generally are doing similar in their respective fields). From there, the children take that knowledge as they will.

God he’s a bad writer. But never mind that – the point is that he slipped up and said that teachers should be teaching students how to think like a scientist. So they should, but that means teachers need to teach students how anyone knows all this stuff, how the “body of knowledge” was collected and argued over and questioned and criticized – which includes for instance what it replaced, what previous claims to knowledge shaped it or got in its way or motivated it – and so on. It’s not enough to just open children’s heads and dump in a quart or two of Facts. If the Constitution requires science teachers to restrict themselves to such an impoverished version of teaching, then that’s a terrible worrying tragic situation. If it doesn’t, De Dora is talking nonsense.

Massimo is very annoyed that so many people are unimpressed by De Dora. Massimo does tend to exaggerate…

And speaking of content, what was so witless, wanky, wishy-washy, and witless about De Dora’s post? Oh, he dared question (very politely, and based on argument) one of the dogmas of the new atheism: that religious people (that’s about 90% of humanity, folks) ought (and I use the term in the moral sense) to be frontally assaulted and ridiculed at all costs, because after all, this is a war, and the goal is to vanquish the enemy, reason and principles be damned.

That’s rationally speaking?

Michael De Dora is concerned again.

…our government — and thus our public schooling system — is supposed to remain neutral on matters of religion. Federal and state governments cannot aid one religion, aid all religions, prefer one religion over another, or prefer non-religion to religion. This means that while I agree with Myers that the Biblical creation story is a “myth,” the public school classroom doesn’t seem to be the place where our message should be pushed.

Federal and state governments cannot prefer non-religion to religion, therefore, according to De Dora, as long as a mistaken claim is religious, it is against the law for public schools to say the claim is mistaken. That’s interesting. I went to a state university and I recall plenty of teachers who said particular religious claims were mistaken. I never knew that they were breaking the law by doing that. As a matter of fact I don’t believe that they were breaking the law by doing that; I think on the contrary that De Dora is talking creepy nonsense. Maybe he’s been reading Michael Ruse and Andrew Brown – they both love to announce that the Constitution forbids evil secularists to open their mouths within 500 yards of a public educational institution.

I suspect that this is not actually a bit of helpful legal advice but rather another occasion for De Dora to distance himself from the Bad kind of atheists and snuggle up to the Good kind: the ones who say snotty untrue things about Dawkins and/or Coyne and/or Hitchens a minimum of every three days. It’s all rather depressing coming from CFI. As PZ said, “Does CFI stand for the Church of Fatuous Incompetence now?”

Gita Sahgal states the problem.

The senior leadership of Amnesty International chose to answer the questions I posed about Amnesty International’s relationship with Moazzam Begg by affirming their links with him. Now they have also confirmed that the views of Begg, his associates and his organisation Cageprisoners, do not trouble them. They have stated that the idea of jihad in self defence is not antithetical to human rights; and have explained that they meant only the specific form of violent jihad that Moazzam Begg and others in Cageprisoners assert is the individual obligation of every Muslim…Unfortunately, their stance has laid waste every achievement on women’s equality and made a mockery of the universality of rights. In fact, the leadership has effectively rejected a belief in universality as an essential basis for partnership.

A dreadful thing to have to say about Amnesty International. It’s blood-chilling that even one of the pre-eminent human rights organizations doesn’t get it. If the Amnesty version of human rights prevailed, I would have no rights left. I resent that. I can’t begin to tell you how strongly I resent that.

I want to try to figure this out. I could just conclude that I simply don’t know enough about it to figure it out, and I ought to either learn more or leave it to people who do know enough. That’s certainly a possibility, of course. I’ve been thinking when reading Sam Harris’s posts in reply to his critics that he just doesn’t seem to know enough about it, and it’s certainly possible that I don’t know enough about what I’m prattling about, either. But the difference is, it seems to me, that Sam’s critics have made a lot of good arguments, while the arguments I’ve seen so far from the ‘overt atheists are wrong and bad’ faction are not very good. But then I would think that. But actually I wouldn’t, because I’m not invested in thinking Sam’s view is (partly) wrong. It just strikes me that way, that’s all. It strikes me that way because I’ve read a little about meta-ethics, among other reasons – but it’s not because I’m loyal to one view or another. But I am invested in the idea that overt atheism is not a bad thing – so maybe I can’t recognize the goodness of good arguments against it.

So I want to try to figure it out. Massimo first of all said that Sam would

get more mileage out of allying himself with philosophy (not to the exclusion of science), rather than taking what appears to be the same misguided scientistic attitude that Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have come to embody so well.

Our friend G challenged him on that, and he replied

my problem with Dawkins and Coyne is different, but stems from the same root: their position on morality is indeed distinct from Harris’ (at least Dawkins’, I don’t recall having read anything by Coyne on morality), but they insist in applying science to the supernatural, which is simply another form of the same malady that strikes Harris: scientism, the idea that science can do everything and provides us with all the answers that are worth having.

This is the part that I don’t understand. There was some discussion of it on that thread, in which it was suggested that Massimo has a rather special definition of ‘supernatural,’ but Massimo said no, it’s Dawkins and Coyne who have a different definition of science. I still don’t understand.

I don’t think the root is the same. I think Harris on morality is not the same kind of thing as Dawkins and Coyne on theism. That’s because I think morality is not the same kind of thing as theism. There’s some overlap, sometimes a lot of overlap, but not so much that they’re the same kind of thing. Theism is about an entity external to human beings, one that could in principle exist even if human beings didn’t exist and never had existed. Massimo’s version of ‘supernatural’ seems to be ‘entirely outside of nature such that science cannot inquire into it in any way.’ What I don’t understand is why Massimo thinks that describes theism. A supernatural god of that kind would be, as far as humans are concerned, the same thing as nothing. If it’s entirely outside, then it has nothing to do with us, and we have nothing to say about it (and atheists have no quarrel with it). That’s not the god that people who believe in god have in mind. People who believe in god do say things about their god. That god is supposed to be part of the world in some way, if only as its parent or creator or designer. I don’t see how it can be possible for a god to be any of that and still be totally out of reach of science and thus of any kind of inquiry. I can’t make sense of that.

What am I missing?