Teaching people to think may have the ancillary effect of destroying their credulity
Jerry Coyne says why it’s nonsensical to say that atheists have to be quiet or else the Supreme Court will rule the teaching of evolution unconstitutional:
And yes, it’s likely that teaching evolution probably promotes a critical examination of religious beliefs that may lead to rejecting faith. But teaching geology, physics, or astronomy does that, too. In fact, education in general leads to the rejection of faith…What Brown is really saying is that we should be worried about promoting rational values of any type, or any notion that beliefs require evidence. He doesn’t seem to realize the difference between cramming atheism down people’s throats and teaching them to think, which may have the ancillary effect of eroding faith…I repeat, so that Brown can get it: teaching evolution is not promoting atheism, it’s promoting a scientific truth. And the promotion of any scientific truth may have the ancillary effect of dispelling faith. This is almost inevitable, for the metier of science — rationality and dependence on evidence — is in absolute and irreconcilable conflict with the with the metier of faith: superstition and dependence on revelation. Too bad.
Jason Rosenhouse points out how helpful Michael Ruse has been to the fight against creationism and ID:
In 2004 he edited a book with William Dembski called Debating Design, published by Cambridge University Press. In doing so he effectively cut the legs out from under those fighting school board battles on the ground. It’s pretty hard to argue that the evolution/ID issue is a manufactured debate when Ruse has one of the most prestigious university presses in the world certifying that it is, indeed, a real debate. Making matters worse was the fact that the four essays Ruse chose to represent “Darwinism” added up to a very weak case for the good guys…More recently Ruse said, in a public debate with Dembski, that the book The Design Inference was a valuable contribution to science…When the ID folks were putting together a book in honor of Phillip Johnson, Ruse was happy to contribute an essay to a section entitled “Two Friendly Critics.”
Oh…really? How odd then that he emailed Jerry Coyne just the other day to say: “I don’t know who does more damage, you and your kind or Phillip Johnson and his kind. I really don’t.”
Strange fella.
Michael Ruse also made the idiotic statement that if evolution discourages religious belief, it should not be taught. Ruse says things like this because, like Stephen J. Gould, he thinks that he gets to decide what constitutes religious belief (oh, but creationists aren’t REAL Christians.) But he doesn’t. Religious believers do, and there is no scientific fact that does not refute some religious belief somewhere.
I fully expect Ruse to be called as the witness for the defense in some future creationist legal challenge. And the idiot might well win it for them.
Strange fella indeed. I’ve been trying to understand what Ruse is about for some time – though this has not prompted me to buy any of his books! But I have read quite a bit of his stuff online, and have listened to a few videos.
In one video he says that his beef with Dawkins is not that Dawkins is wrong in thinking that Christianity doesn’t quite work. Ruse claims that he also doesn’t really think that it works (at least for him). However, Dawkins does a disservice to unbelief, Ruse says, because ‘he doesn’t take seriously the kinds of things that believers believe.’ Christians have articulated ‘a reasoned defence that we can then argue about,’ and this is something that unbelievers should take seriously and engage with seriously.
At this point he raises the question of the sacrifice of Isaac. No Christian, he suggests, would say that a Christian had done something praiseworthy, if he were to take his son and sacrifice him. They’d see that he was taken to a psychiatrist. So using the sacrifice of Isaac, or the ethnic cleansing god of the OT, is irrelevant to the contemporary critique of religion. (I think that’s quite wrong, because the Christian doctrine of the atonement is based upon the idea of sacrifice, linked directly to the sacrifice of Isaac, but that is another issue.)
Part of what is wrong with Ruse is that he tends to think of the world as like academia, where the expectation is that participants will respect each other and be prepared to discuss endlessly. (I’m not sure that that is an accurate description of the academic world!) He also suggests that Christianity (and religion in general) pertains to something inaccessible to science, so we can’t approach it scientifically. We have to move onto religion’s turf if we are going to take it seriously.
This is actually a fairly serious philosophical mistake, for which, I think, Wittgenstein is partly to blame. The language of Christianity may indeed provide an enormously complex articulation of a ‘form of life’, but this, in itself, is not enough to provide it with an intelligible reference to the world in which we live. When you are on the inside of such a form of life, it all seems to make perfect sense, though it is always threatened with collapse from other forms of religious life, and now, of course, especially, from the nagging doubts prompted by science, which leads religious believers either ridiculously to proclaim their beliefs in the teeth of the evidence, or to retreat to the hazy ambiguity of theology, and the inspissated gloom of sacred space.
Ruse wants to suggest that both these strategies are worthy of intelligent response. I think he needs to tell us why he believes this is necessary or desirable, and why trying to understand religious phenomena scientifically would not be a more helpful way of coming to terms with religious believing. Understanding or empathising with those who believe that the universe is only 6000 years old seems, quite frankly, pointless. But trying to understand why people hold so desperately to beliefs which are demonstrably untrue is probably very important. Ruse’s makes the mistake of thinking that the first kind of understanding is the important one. Strange guy.
“We have to move onto religion’s turf if we are going to take it seriously.”
And that is precisely the problem. It all makes sense provided you move yourself into an enclosed bubble insulated from all alien thinking – but that’s a disastrous thing to do.
That’s the problem with Gould’s NOMA, at bottom. We don’t want two completely different kinds of thinking with no overlap – we want one, that works. Some of us also want mere brute belief, but that’s not a kind of thinking, it’s something else.
“That’s the problem with Gould’s NOMA, at bottom. We don’t want two completely different kinds of thinking with no overlap – we want one, that works. “
Thanks for putting it this way, which I think is more honest than statements about “consilience,” where the one, unitary way of thinking is an established fact, not a desideratum.
You don’t need to be a theist, or believe in anything “supernatural” whatsoever, to desire a pluralistic naturalism, where our one Cosmos is described differently depending on the focus of the moment. Reductionism and anti-supernaturalism are not synonymous.
I’m not sure if that’s carefully limited language or carefully vague language. (It can be hard to tell the difference. Just yesterday I was accused of being deceptive when in fact I was being careful to stipulate what I was not claiming. ‘I am not saying’ was read as shifty.)
I don’t know what ‘pluralistic naturalism’ means and I don’t know what is meant by ‘describing’ the cosmos. One could of course write a Wordsworthian poem about the cosmos, but that wouldn’t have anything to do with naturalism as such. In short I’m not sure what is being claimed here.
Before I went to the gym I tried to deal with ‘pluralistic naturalism’, and then decided, no, I’ll leave that one to Ophelia. And that was the right thing to do. Thank you.
This will probably be an inadequate explanation of what I mean by pluralistic naturalism, but at least it’s an exposure to the idea that not all philosophers see naturalism as necessarily reductionist.
I’ll start with Rorty:
I define naturalism as the claim that (a) there is no occupant of space time that is not caught up in a single web of causal relations to all other occupants and (b) that any explanation of the behavior of any such … object must consist of placing [it] in that causal web. I define reductionism as the insistence that there is not only a single web but a single privileged descrpotion of all entities caught in that web.
This is Elizabeth Baeten (I recommend pressing on if the first few sentences rankle you; she may not mean what she at first seems to mean):
Nature is a locution meant to convey the contention that nothing need be excluded from inquiry, nothing need be closed to scrutiny because it is metaphysically irrelevant, nothing need be ignored because it is nonreal, unreal, irreal, or quasi-real. There is no term to oppose nature used in this way; it does not function the way most other metaphysical terms function. It does not work to divide whatever is, providing a contrast that can be used in granting ontological priority to one of the divisions. We neither assert nor predicate anything when “nature” is used in this manner. Nor do we accord any honorific status to what is “natural” ( as in opposing it to the artificial). What we claim is that there is nothing that is “ouside” of nature. … Atoms, ideas, minds, hallucinations, ignorance, chairs and computers are all equally natural, and each is available for philosophical consideration. The task of the naturalist philosopher is not to decide which of these is really real… The task for the naturalist is to investigate the ways in which things exist.
Finally, this is Sterling Lamprecht:
[Nature] may of course be, and probably always is, much more than it is empirically found to be. But the point of the argument is that everything is at least what is given in experience.
Yes, that’s an inadequate explanation. I wanted something lucid and succinct. I also don’t know what you mean by ‘reductionist.’
Could it be that Ruse takes the perpetrators of apologetics at their own estimation? You know the sort of thing – “there is a really sophisticated answer to this but I won’t bore you with it here” when no such sophisticated answer actually exists. It took me a surprisingly long time (I now see in retrospect) to rumble this one precisely because I used to give the people who used it the respect they seemed to deserve. To think of the time I wasted reading Aquinas because so many people said that it was all in there…
I don’t think so – it appears to be more cynical than that. He’s always saying he loves a fight, he’s looking forward to pissing off philosophers, etc etc. Somebody – I think a commenter on Jason Rosenhouse’s post – reported asking Ruse if he knew that one of his allies was also an HIV denialist, and Ruse…laughed and said yes.
Blimey. That is the kind of thing that most upsets me on the Internet. I can cope with people having different opinions to my own – indeed I differ from you OB on several issues, which is why references to this blog as an echo chamber make me smile. But we are both adults so I don’t conclude that having different opinions on things is a sign of evil. Not giving a monkeys about the truth at all is a mindset I find hard to understand, or thinking of the truth as a special thing to be restricted only to an elite that the writer happens to be in themselves, so it doesn’t matter what is sold to the “common herd”. I may cover more of this if I ever finish my paper “What Can’t Be Said About Cricket: Apophasis and the Duckworth-Lewis Method”.
Ha!
“Not giving a monkeys about the truth at all is a mindset I find hard to understand…”
It sounds like Frankfurt’s formal definition of bullshit.