Author: Ophelia Benson

Let’s talk about sin. We don’t talk about sin enough, I’ve noticed. We’re very slack that way. Very lax. Very slothy and loose and – well – sinful. So let’s give it a look-see.

First let’s see what a godless philosophy type has to say about it.

…ideas of right and wrong can be entirely separated from ideas of what is sinful. Aristotle, for example, thought of good and bad in terms of what allowed human beings to flourish as rational animals, with no reference to God’s will. Whereas sin separates us from the divine, doing wrong separates us from our true natures or our fellow humans.

Got it. Okay. Sin separates us from the divine, so for those of us who don’t think the divine is actually there (or divine if it is there, in fact if it is there it’s a right bastard, so separation from it is just what we want, as far off as possible, please), sin separates us from an empty signifier, so it turns out we don’t need to talk about it much, because there’s nothing much to talk about. Got it. Now let’s see what a goddy type has to say about it.

Julian Baggini’s article on sin (G2, May 9) misunderstands the significance of sin. There is in fact no distinction to be made between doing something contrary to God’s will, and doing something contrary to our own good. The Aristotelian guiding principle of human happiness, to which Baggini refers, is not intrinsically without reference to God’s will – if human beings have been created by God, then the happiness of the rational animal will involve conformity to God’s will, as only God can satisfy the human body and soul.

Yes, ‘if’. Certainly, ‘if’. Of course, ‘if’. But that’s just it. If. You think the answer to the question implicit in that ‘if’ is yes, but others of us think it is no, so it’s slightly pointless to re-inform us of what follows from answering yes when we in fact answer no. The people who answer yes mostly already take your point (sort of, more or less, perhaps with some leeway), but you’re addressing Julian and the rest of us no-sayers, on whom your argument is wasted, because it relies so heavily on that ‘if’. In fact since our answer to the implicit question is No, we tend to think that the putative conformity to God’s will is in fact conformity to what a long line of church boffins and theocrats have asserted God’s will to be, and we prefer not to conform to that, thanks.

A commenter raised an interesting point on the pontifical post, a point that I’ve been pondering on and off (mostly off) ever since JS cc’d me his replies to the HERO interview.

The point the commenter raises is the same one JS raises: the idea that it’s good to teach pseudoscience in universities because otherwise people get smug and lazy. Bridget in comments:

Students who are not exposed to a range of theories with stronger or weaker truth claims, do not develop the ability to critically judge the validity of what they are taught – they become lazy thinkers.

JS in the interview:

I’m not comfortable with consensus, so I think if it turned out that the kinds of views that B&W advocates became mainstream and taken-for-granted, then I’d have to adopt alternative positions. This isn’t just bloody-minded contrarianism; I think there is value in dialectical engagement. It inoculates against the possibility of a smug complacency over our truth-claims.

I told JS that I’d tell him why I disagreed with his replies if he had more time (if he weren’t working on 57 books), but he doesn’t have more time (because of working on 57 books), and my thoughts on the subject are as it were burning a hole in my pocket. I feel dissatisfied and irked keeping them to myself. It’s kind of like keeping a sexual urge to yourself, only different. I have informed one or two people I know about my thoughts on the subject, and they were immensely pleased and thankful, but I find I still want to air them some more.

One problem I think that idea has is that it contradicts what JS himself wrote about B&W on the About page when we first set it up.

There are two motivations for setting up the web site. The first is the common one having to do with the thought that truth is important, and that to tell the truth about the world it is necessary to put aside whatever preconceptions (ideological, political, moral, etc.) one brings to the endeavour.

There’s a reason for that thought, surely. The reason is that preconceptions get in the way of telling the truth about the world (and of finding out what the truth about the world is) because they are extraneous. They impede, they get in the way, they detour, they introduce the irrelevant, they distort. (Of course, we’re all only human, and we can’t get rid of all our preconceptions, but that doesn’t mean we should just shrug and let them run riot.) They replace the endeavour to find the truth with the endeavour to find whatever matches up best with one’s preconceptions – and that’s the wrong way to go about trying to find the truth. And it seems to me that deciding in advance to ‘adopt alternative positions’ when the views one thought were true become mainstream, is simply bringing another preconception to the endeavour. It seems to me that displaces asking to the best of one’s ability ‘are these views true?’ in favour of asking ‘are these views mainstream?’ and that that is the right way to get at what is or is not mainstream, but the wrong way to get at what is or is not true. It seems to me to be introducing an irrelevance.

I’m not very fond of conventional wisdom and received opinions and the tepid waters of the mainstream myself, but the fact remains that in scientific or factual matters, popularity is irrelevant to truth. It is of course relevant to ‘truth,’ to what passes for truth, as Susan Haack puts it; but it’s not relevant to actual truth. So I don’t quite see why concerns about potential smug complacency should trump concerns about telling the truth about the world. Smug complacency is irritating stuff, no doubt about it, but is it really worse than lying? And does it make sense to lie for the sake of avoiding smug complacency over our truth-claims? And then of course there’s the obvious problem that resisting consensus and the mainstream can lead to smug complacency over our truth-claims at least as easily as simply going along with consensus can. So maybe it’s more sensible just to do one’s best to get at the truth with whatever methods seem to do the job and not worry about smug complacency, rather than deciding to talk nonsense and risk being a smugly complacent anti-consensus rebel.

I found something at Wikipedia. It’s quite amusing.

The entry is: Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?

“Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?” is a quotation from Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot of 1735, which has entered common use and has become associated with more recent figures.

Ah – has it? Who’s that then?

The philosopher Mary Midgley used a variation on the phrase in an article in the journal Philosophy written to counter a review praising The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, where she cuttingly said that she had “not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to break a butterfly upon a wheel.” Dawkins replied that this statement would be “hard to match, in reputable journals, for its patronising condescension toward a fellow academic.” The name Butterflies And Wheels was then adopted by a website set up to oppose Pseudoscience, Epistemic relativism and those disciplines or schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents.

Why – that’s us. (By ‘us’ I mean all of us, here, reading this and occasionally writing it.) They’re talking about us – me, you, the butterflies, and the wheels. Don’t know why they didn’t make the name a hyperlink, the silly prats, but anyway – it’s fun to make a cameo appearance in an entry.

A reader sent me an article from Nature Immunology a couple of weeks ago – it’s about the part that immunology played in the Dover trial, and very interesting it is. Immunology and the stacks of evidence for how it evolved blew Behe and his black box out of the water. There’s a nice illustration of a tall pile of books with another thick pile of papers on top of it; the caption reads “We can look high or we can look low, in books or in journals, but the result
is the same. The scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system.” The footnote of course is to Darwin’s Black Box.

Here’s the best part:

That background set the stage for the crucial
face-off at the trial…Rothschild then presented
Behe with a thick file of publications
on immune system evolution, dating from
1971 to 2006, plus several books and textbook
chapters. Asked for his response, Behe
admitted he had not read many of the publications
presented (a small fraction of all the
literature on evolutionary immunology of the
past 35 years), but summarily rejected them as
unsatisfactory and dismissed the idea of doing
research on the topic as “unfruitful.”

Judge Jones commented in his decision on that summary rejection:

In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe
was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that
science would never find an evolutionary explanation
for the immune system. He was presented
with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine
books, and several immunology textbook chapters
about the evolution of the immune system;
however, he simply insisted that this was still not
sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was
not ‘good enough.’
We find that such evidence demonstrates that
the ID argument is dependent upon setting a scientifically
unreasonable burden of proof for the
theory of evolution.

That reminds me of something Dawkins says in ‘Root of All Evil?’ to the effect that no matter how much evidence scientists present of evolution or natural selection, it makes no difference at all; creationists don’t trouble to look at it or worry that there’s so much of it, they simply ignore all of it – summarily. A mountain of evidence has exactly the same effect as a grain of it: none whatever. That’s a good point, you know – there’s something badly wrong with a way of thinking that is as blithe about dismissing a mountain of evidence as it is about dismissing a thimblefull.