Massimo Pigliucci says why Fish is wrong and silly.

[T]he problem lies with Fish’s cheap rhetorical trick: Stanley seems to think that once one has refuted the naive logical positivist view that human beings can adopt a purely objective viewpoint and grasp reality for what it actually is (a position that in philosophy has been abandoned since the 1950s, by the way), voilà, all knowledge has ultimately been shown to be a matter of faith…It is simply not true, as our friend cavalierly maintains, that “once the act of simply reporting or simply observing is exposed as a fiction — as something that just can’t be done — the facile opposition between faith-thinking and thinking grounded in independent evidence

Stanley Fish is back.

Evidence, understood as something that can be pointed to, is never an independent feature of the world. Rather, evidence comes into view (or doesn’t) in the light of assumptions…that produce the field of inquiry in the context of which (and only in the context of which) something can appear as evidence.

Yes yes yes, but it doesn’t follow that any and all assumptions are reasonable and sane and that therefore any old evidence is good evidence as long as it ‘comes into view in the light of’ some assumptions.

Then there is a swerve into a new topic, the fact that some people who commented on his previous musings on God claim that religion is … Read the rest

Brandon does some passive-aggressive self-chastisement:

I at least try to follow principles of amiability on this weblog. I do not always succeed; in a recent argument with Ophelia Benson in the comments thread to this post, when her response seemed to me to be a set of equivocations and red herrings of a pernicious kind that should not be tolerated on such an important subject as people’s lives, I became impatient and lost my temper; whatever the reason, however, the lapse of amiability was simply inexcusable.

I would say it’s not really the lapse of amiability itself that is inexcusable; I think a certain amount of heat is to be expected in substantive disagreements, and can be harmlessly … Read the rest

The Guardian continues its commitment to publish commentary from excitingly reactionary clerics and fans of clerics with the vomitings-forth of George Neumayr. His comment is an exceptionally lazy and vulgar diatribe.

Notre Dame’s now-infamous president, Father John Jenkins, is very fond of politically correct patter…This year Jenkins has rolled out his broken wheelbarrow of inane PC clichés to justify honouring the most pro-abortion American president ever.

And so on; it’s all like that.

A brilliant commenter posted a list of bishops taken from a Dallas Morning News list of Catholic bishops who protected sexually abusing priests. There are 19 bishops on the list, out of 61 who signed a petition protesting Notre Dame’s invitation to Obama. She suggested a … Read the rest