Author: Ophelia Benson

Peter Hess, a Catholic theologian who is director of something called ‘the Faith Project’ at the National Center for Science Education (the what? at the where? yes, you read that correctly) recently said in a Washington Post ‘On Faith’ article (have we got enough name checks of faith yet?):

Too often, debates over the public perception of evolution are dominated by the fringes, by fundamentalist Christians and others who reject basic science due to their literal reading of the Bible and by ardent atheists who reject religion because they’ve embraced metaphysical naturalism ― that nature is all that exists. But the silent majority ― that spans the spectrum from theism to atheism ― have no problem reconciling their religious beliefs with established sciences such as evolution.

Spoken like a true journalist, theolgical credentials notwithstanding. Yes right: atheists who decline to believe in supernaturalism are waaaaaaaay out there on the freaky fringe of extreme maniacal militant crazy as a bag of rats fringe, while all the nice, normal, sensible, mainstream, average, just like you and me people are here in the middle smiling and agreeing that everyone can have an activist god who answers prayers and sciency stuff like evolution. It’s only lunatics who say anything else. That’s the way to frame things! Just declare your own view Normal and then describe two views that differ from yours as fringey-extreme.

Chris Mooney is full of approbation of this tawdry gambit.

I heartily agree–my sense, too, is that the silent majority doesn’t side with either of the extremes.

See? There you have it again. Those other views are Extreme, while good decent family-oriented views are silent majority middle and Good.

[I]n the science blogosphere, we don’t hear a lot from the “silent majority.” Rather, and admittedly with some important exceptions, we hear from the New Atheists.

Whom it is important always to refer to by an epithet of some sort and treat as a bloc. At any rate – it doesn’t seem to occur to Mooney that the reason for the silence of the ‘silent majority’ in the science blogosphere is that the putative extreme has a better case than does the putative silent majority. It ought to occur to him.

Jerry Coyne is not as impressed by Peter Hess as Mooney is.

As I’ve maintained repeatedly, religion is neither set up for finding truth nor very good at finding truth. Let me correct that — faith is incapable of finding truth, or at least no more capable than is astrology. The methods of ascertaining “truth” via faith are either revelation or acceptance of dogma. These methods have produced “truths” like a 6,000-year-old Earth and the Great Flood. Not a very good track record. In fact, I have yet to find a single truth about humans, Earth, or the universe that has come uniquely from faith.

Same here. I’ve tried – I really have – as I mentioned the other day, I asked the Templeton shill exactly that question:

What exactly do you ‘believe’ that the world’s religious traditions have to contribute to understanding human experience and our place in the universe? Can you specify one theory or explanation or bit of evidence that a religion has contributed to understanding human experience and our place in the universe?

But the Templeton shill didn’t answer.

Jerry Coyne says this matters.

In all these debates about the compatibility of science and faith, I have yet to see an intellectually respectable answer to this ultimate dichotomy between “ways of knowing.” Instead, people like Mooney go after us for our tone, for polarizing people, and so on…Instead of beefing about our “militancy,” why don’t accommodationists start addressing the question of whether faith can tell us anything that’s true? Let’s hear about whether you can coherently accept a Resurrection on Sunday and then go to the lab the next day and doggedly refuse to accept any claim that lacks evidence. Now that would raise the tone of this debate.

Mooney does, at last, give a straightforward answer.

I don’t believe that faith can tell us anything true, or at least, anything that we can reliably know to be true. I don’t think we can know anything except based on evidence. In this I’m in full agreement with Coyne, Dennett, Dawkins, and all the rest.

Well done. But then he veers off into a false choice.

I don’t see a need to pry into how each individual is dealing with these complicated and personal matters of constructing a coherent worldview…I know that many very intelligent people are struggling all the time to make their peace with this incongruity in their own way–a peace that works for them. And so long as they’re not messing with what our kids learn–or, again, trying to ram their views down our throats–then good on ‘em.

But that’s a false choice, because anti-accommodationists also don’t see a need to pry into how each individual is dealing with epistemology; that’s not the issue; as has been pointed out a thousand times, the issue is what it is reasonable and fair and useful to talk about in public. It’s not a question of grabbing every American over the age of ten for an inquisition on beliefs, it’s a question of writing and discussing and debating in public fora. As has been pointed out a thousand times, Jerry Coyne didn’t break Ken Miller’s door down to challenge him, he reviewed a book for a magazine – a book that Miller himself wrote. This isn’t private, this isn’t prying into people’s heads, it’s public discourse. It’s not fringe public discourse, it’s just public discourse. We’re allowed to do that.

Update: see Russell Blackford’s comments @ 128, 129, 138. Beware of the oceans of Anthony McCarthy you have to wade through to get there.

Update 2: see Russell’s post on the subject.

Chris Mooney also read the Lawrence Krauss piece in the WSJ. He saw it as yet another chance to say methodological naturalism is different from philosophical naturalism and that scientists have no business going from the first to the second and they’d just better not or else.

What Krauss is effectively saying is that it is rational to go beyond science’s methodological naturalism to also become a philosophical naturalist…But it is an omission on Krauss’s part not to admit more explicitly that in making this move, one is leaving beyond the realm of science per se and developing a philosophical worldview. I think–though I’m not sure–that in a conversation Krauss would probably admit as much. But by not doing so in the Journal, Krauss is helping along the misconception that science itself is inherently atheistic. It isn’t.

Krauss agrees in a comment that that is what he was doing:

I agree with you about it being a philosophical leap… and that is why I began the argument with Haldane, who makes it clear that it is such.. or at least it was clear to me.

But Tom Clark and Russell Blackford dispute this idea of a Great Separation or a leap.

First Tom:

Seems to me Haldane isn’t making a “leap” from his atheistic scientific practice to his global atheistic naturalism, rather it sounds like he believes it’s ethically required of him to apply the same (reliable) cognitive standards in all domains. It’s not only rationally permissible, but epistemically responsible to do so because the standards are reliable. Not to do so is, as he says, intellectually dishonest if we’re interested in truths about the world.

Then Russell:

Science and philosophy are continuous with each other. Yes, Krauss is not speaking as a physicist, carrying out specialist research in an area of cosmology or whatever, when he makes the claims that he does in this article. He is stepping back from that; he is speaking as a person who has an overall familiarity with the image of the world that comes from modern science – which you’d hope any high-level scientist possesses – and is capable of comparing that with the typical claims of religion. Yes, that is an example of what we mean by doing philosophy, but you make it sound as if “doing philosophy” is some kind of exercise discontinuous from all our rational investigation of the world.

Krauss is doing exactly what Dawkins does, or what a philosopher like Philip Kitcher does. There’s no conspiracy to hide this and pretend that Krauss’s article in the WSJ is reporting findings from his lab.

Chris Mooney please note. (Not that he will. He never does. He just keeps repeating his mantra.)

Laurence Krauss says God and science don’t mix.

He has joined his friend Ken Miller in telling school boards that ‘one does not have to be an atheist to accept evolutionary biology as a reality. And I have pointed to my friend Ken as an example.’

This statement of fact appears to separate me from my other friends, Messrs. Harris and Dawkins. Yet this separation is illusory. It reflects the misperception that the recent crop of vocal atheist-scientist-writers are somehow “atheist absolutists” who remain in a “cultural and historical vacuum” — in the words of a recent Nature magazine editorial. But this accusation is unfair. Messrs. Harris and Dawkins are simply being honest when they point out the inconsistency of belief in an activist god with modern science…Though the scientific process may be compatible with the vague idea of some relaxed deity who merely established the universe and let it proceed from there, it is in fact rationally incompatible with the detailed tenets of most of the world’s organized religions.

Cue the defense of ‘pluralist naturalism’ – whatever that is.

Back to talking about things that actually matter. What the thugs did to the family of Neda Soltan is quite staggering.

Neighbours said that her family no longer lives in the four-floor apartment building on Meshkini Street, in eastern Tehran, having been forced to move since she was killed. The police did not hand the body back to her family, her funeral was cancelled, she was buried without letting her family know and the government banned mourning ceremonies at mosques, the neighbours said…Amid scenes of grief in the Soltan household with her father and mother screaming, neighbours not only from their building but from others in the area streamed out to protest at her death. But the police moved in quickly to quell any public displays of grief…In accordance with Persian tradition, the family had put up a mourning announcement and attached a black banner to the building. But the police took them down, refusing to allow the family to show any signs of mourning. The next day they were ordered to move out. Since then, neighbours have received suspicious calls warning them not to discuss her death with anyone and not to make any protest.

How fiendishly brutal is that? Less fiendishly brutal than murdering Neda Soltan in the first place, but fiendishly brutal all the same.

“We are trembling,” one neighbour said. “We are still afraid. We haven’t had a peaceful time in the last days, let alone her family. Nobody was allowed to console her family, they were alone, they were under arrest and their daughter was just killed. I can’t imagine how painful it was for them. Her friends came to console her family but the police didn’t let them in and forced them to disperse and arrested some of them. Neda’s family were not even given a quiet moment to grieve.” Another man said many would have turned up to show their sympathy had it not been for the police. “In Iran, when someone dies, neighbours visit the family and will not let them stay alone for weeks but Neda’s family was forced to be alone, otherwise the whole of Iran would gather here,” he said.

Yes well of course that’s exactly why they wouldn’t allow it – they couldn’t be doing with the whole of Iran gathering there. Bastards.

So this Ramsey fella is still at it, so now it’s six days instead of five. He is, clearly, getting some kind of jollies out of goading me – and of course he is succeeding at goading me. I find him highly irritating. But then – that is because he is being so 1) belligerent 2) dishonest. Snake swallowing tail. He succeeds at irritating me by being so obviously determined to irritate me. Naturally that does succeed (unless one is a Buddhist monk, of course). Somebody making a big point of a repeated personal attack is naturally bound to be irritating (except to a Buddhist monk).

At any rate – Ramsey is having himself an enjoyable time, but at the price of displaying himself as a dishonest troll with a vendetta. He is insisting on claiming that he can tell that the book is bad on the strength of four paragraphs. Like today for instance – Jeremy told him, “And lastly, READ THE BOOK, then criticise it. It’s much better that way around.” Ramsey replied:

Stangroom: “And lastly, READ THE BOOK”

With all due respect, I prefer to read books when I see signs that they are likely to be good. Every quote that I’ve seen from it so far–and quotes cited by the authors at that–show problems, and not just in tone but in content.

Jeremy didn’t say, ‘read the book,’ period, of course, he said ‘READ THE BOOK, then criticise it‘. In other words, don’t criticize the book when you haven’t read it. Criticizing a book you haven’t read is dishonest and unethical. Ramsey’s way of carrying on is disgusting.