Author: Ophelia Benson

There’s a passage in Ray Bradley’s ID article –

Science, I came to realize, doesn’t rule out the possible existence of a supernatural world. It isn’t logically committed to metaphysical naturalism. But it is committed to methodological naturalism, the view that, in our attempts to understand how the world works, we should look for naturalistic explanations rather than taking easy recourse to supernatural ones. The successes of science in bridging the gaps that used to be plugged by the gods creates a strong presumption in favour of the idea that gods not only aren’t needed but don’t exist. It doesn’t prove, but it does probabilify to a high degree, the truth of metaphysical naturalism. And by the same token, it makes all supernatural beliefs highly improbable.

In our attempts to understand how the world works, we should look for naturalistic explanations rather than taking easy recourse to supernatural ones – for one thing because the naturalistic ones are the ones we can test while the supernatural ones are the ones we can’t. So the supernatural ones are not only easy, they’re also a cheat (they’re easy because they’re a cheat). It’s just an illegitimate shortcut to say ‘I don’t know so I’ll make it up.’ It’s a combination illegitimate shortcut and cheat to say ‘I don’t know so I’ll make it up and because I simply made it up I can’t test it so I don’t have to test it so that’s nice for me.’ But there’s no other way to resort to supernatural explanations – it’s not as if one can select a testable kind, is it. If it’s testable it’s not supernatural. So supernatural explanations are tainted from the outset by this immunity problem. This is abundantly obvious in many contexts – we know that if the car is making a sinister grinding sound, we should take it to a garage, not a church – but it seems to escape people’s notice in others.

And then the whole thing is further obscured, especially in the US, by the habit of translating it into stupid boring dreary political categories – by deciding that it’s a left-right issue and should be discussed on those terms, when in fact it’s an epistemic issue and should be discussed in those terms.

For instance this comment on Scott Jaschik’s article on academic controversies at Inside Higher Ed.

This is an interesting and though-provoking article. It would have been even more interesting if you had discussed the incidents at various colleges in which professors and other scientists are being censored or discriminated against by their colleagues and institutions for expressing support for intelligent design, and the prevailing academic climate in which graduate students in science are reluctant to express public support for intelligent design for fear of jeopardizing their chances of receiving a Ph.D. Why is it that academia doesn’t condemn censorship of conservative viewpoints on such topics with the same vigor that it defends the unfettered right of academics to express liberal viewpoints?

Classic. The whole subject is translated into the language of grievance, persecution, discrimination, fear – as if it were [arbitrary and unjust] discrimination to expect and demand certain basic competencies in a university setting. Well – at that rate, universities might as well give up the project of education altogether. If it became discriminatory to distinguish between warranted conclusions and invented nonsense, then what would remain to teach? ‘Liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have nothing to do with it. But years and years and years of whining and nagging by the Christian right have trained people to think otherwise, or at least to deploy rhetoric to that effect. It’s very tiresome, especially since it works.

One more dig at I mean comment on Steve Fuller. I think it’s the last for the moment, but who knows. The spirit bloweth where it listeth, etc.

It’s a point about arguing from authority. We’ve noted the arrogance of his tone in the thread at Michael’s – the way he seems to take for granted that he is The Expert in the subject and everyone else is some kind of supplicant or mendicant or rank outsider (an assumption not borne out by the comments, which would seem to reverse the equation – everyone commenting seems to be far more knowledgeable and clear-thinking than he does).

I’m sorry if this sounds patronising but I’d hate you to think you’ve been having a serious discussion worthy of people who claim ‘criticism’ as a profession. You guys simply take at face value what the media presents and then back it up with whatever you can dredge up. Haven’t you people heard of cultural studies? (It was also touching that one of you thought the New Yorker piece was harsh on me—you must lead a sheltered life, if you think that’s harsh!]

I just want to quote something that I think relevant to that tone. It’s from Jon Pike’s review of Ted Honderich at Democratiya.

But, since not even the first year undergraduate sees anything in truth by conviction, perhaps there is something else going on. Perhaps it’s not the strength of convictions themselves that matters, but the fact that they are Honderich’s convictions. Honderich is a Philosopher, after all, and an eminent one at that. He used to be the Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at UCL. He has thought about these things a lot, (as if time, on its own, mattered) and his conclusions are controversial. But he is an Authority, so perhaps the persuasive force is supposed to come from some strange mix of truth by conviction and truth by authority. It’s an odd conclusion to come to, because the very basis of doing philosophy, especially critical political philosophy is a rejection of all of these notions. In order to do serious critical political philosophy, you shouldn’t care about someone’s credentials, or the strength of his or her convictions. What matters, all the time, and only, is the argument.

There it is, you see. You shouldn’t care about someone’s credentials or strength of conviction. What matters, all the time, and only, is the argument.

It’s depressing (Susan Haack has pointed this out in great detail) how heavily social constructionism relies on rhetoric to do the work of argument. (It’s also immensely ironic that a social constructionist who is programmatically suspicious of hierarchies and authority in science is so quick to resort to them himself.)

Back to Fuller. Same thread at Michael’s place. Notice a certain tension in the main post. Third para:

In particular, I am a little disturbed by the ease with which humanists and social scientists justify deference to scientific expertise, almost in a ‘good fences make good neighbours’ vain [he means vein] (Stanley Fish comes to mind in criticism, but analytic philosophy and sociology of science have their own versions of this argument). In this respect, ‘our’ side pulled its punches in the Science Wars when it refused to come out and say that the scientific establishment may not be the final word on what science is, let alone what it ought to be. I guess we just never got over the embarrassment of the Sokal Affair.

Never mind for now all there is to wonder at in that passage. Just consider these from para four and para seven:

You might want to read what I actually say – in print, in the trial, and in the written expert report I submitted before the trial…I should say that my status as an expert in the trial had nothing to do with the textbooks under scrutiny.

He seems happy enough about referring to his own putative expertise, but curls the lip at ‘deference’ (loaded word) to scientific expertise.

(Something else I noticed, just in passing – he certainly doesn’t write very well on the fly. Compare his comments with P Z Myers’s, for instance. Both were writing quickly, but one did it well and the other pretty badly. In fact often very badly – leaving out crucial words that are needed to make sense of what he is saying, for instance.)

Some other weird items.

Frankly, I think the public disposition of the Dover case is over-influenced by hatred of Bush and especially fear of the role of fundamentalist Christians in shaping the Bush agenda. (I have in mind here the propaganda campaign being waged on webpages associated with the ACLU: Don’t they have more important civil rights violations in the US to worry about?) I’m certainly no fan of Bush, and have never even voted for a Republican, but I don’t think that this trial is the right place to ‘send a message’ to Bush. Why not work instead toward getting an electable Democrat – perhaps even one that can relate to the vast numbers of religious folks in the US, as the liberal evangelist Jim Wallis (‘God’s Politics’) suggests?

Er? What’s he talking about? Why not who ‘work instead toward getting an electable Democrat’? Us? Instead of talking about what was wrong with his testimony at Dover? Because that’s not what we’re doing, we’re doing something else. What’s the point of asking why not do something completely different?

In fact, the scientists these days who most loudly flaunt their anti-Christian, atheist colours can’t escape smuggling some kind of theistically inspired thought, including James Watson’s desires to play God…But even evolution’s staunchest defenders have remarked on the strong iconic role that Darwin continues to play in this field, which is quite unusual in the natural sciences. An important reason is the politically correct lesson that his life teaches: the idea that science causes you to lose your faith. Newton, unfortunately, thought his theory confirmed his reading of the Bible. Not very politically correct.

Whaat? Politically correct? When did Bill O’Reilly enter the discussion, and why? Politically correct where, according to whom, in which circles?

In the next century, historians will marvel at the ease with which we assume that it’s psychologically credible to think that religious and scientific views can be so neatly separated from each other. This is just our old Catholic friend, the double truth doctrine, dressed up in political correctness.

Same again only more so.

And so on. As you’ll have seen if you read it – as some or perhaps all of you already have – it’s all like that – along with a thick frosting of ineffable condescension poured over everything, which is quite surreal given the quality of the comments from the opponents compared to his own. He gives the impression, on top of everything else, of being a thoroughly unpleasant character.

Quick thing. I just want to note it. I have noted a dislike for Joseph Epstein before. I’m going to do it again. I dislike a remark in this article in Commentary – which Arts and Letters Daily for some reason quoted in its teaser (which is why I saw it in the first place). Why flag up such a – well, here is the remark:

Wilson at his meanest shows up in Dabney’s account of his marriage to the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy—a marriage made in 1937 when he was forty-two and she was twenty-five. “I was too young,” McCarthy would later claim, and “I was too old,” Wilson would counter. It would be closer to the truth to say that both were too selfish and wanting in the least human insight. McCarthy always mistook her snobbery for morality; Wilson mistook life for literature. Dabney, summing up this wretched partnership, writes: “American letters has not seen another alliance so flawed and so distinguished.” So flawed and so distinguished – what a way to characterize the union of a true bitch and a genuine bully.

That’s disgusting. I’m not going to bother saying why, because I think it’s obvious. I’m tempted to call Epstein all sorts of foul names, but I won’t, because I’m better than he is. I will, however, point out that he has a mediocre intellect and McCarthy did not. Maybe that’s why he calls her foul names.

How funny – a harmonic convergence, or something. The very day that I noted the oddity of Steve Fuller’s comment on Meera Nanda’s book at Amazon, in view of his testimony at Dover – Michael Bérubé commented on exactly the same thing.

I’m working on something that I’ll explain more fully next week (when, I hope, it will be done), but in the course of my work on it I found that sociologist Steve Fuller blurbed Meera Nanda’s 2003 book, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India by writing, “This first detailed examination of postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists.” Right, well, it so happens that I’m down with much of Nanda’s argument myself, as I explain in a bunch of things I’ve been writing lately. But wait! This Steve Fuller is that Steve Fuller, the author of Social Epistemology (and much, much more) who showed up in Dover, Pennsylvania this past October to testify that Intelligent Design is a legitimate science…

Snap. All the more interesting because Michael has told me that it was reading Meera’s articles here (at B&W) that caused him to worry about these politically reactionary consequences himself, and that’s why he’s writing about the subject now. Which is good since he’s an influential fella, on account of being such a damn brilliant writer (well, on other accounts too, but the writing is like some kind of atomic magnet). So that means B&W is useful, in its plodding little way, and it’s always good when I get to think that B&W is useful, because it keeps me going when discouragement over hackers and my inability to fix things that need fixing threatens to cause me to run away from home and become a confectioner.

So then, to add to the interest, Steve Fuller commented on Michael’s post, and Michael turned that into a new thread with comments from a lot of knowledgeable people like P Z Myers and John Emerson. There is also a comment at the Valve. And there’s a post from October at Panda’s Thumb.

I’ll just offer a few of Fuller’s…stranger remarks.

It’s not clear – at least not to me – that there is some psychologically credible line to be drawn between ‘revelation’ and ‘reason’. This distinction exists, if at all, at the public level of how you would have your ideas tested: By calculations? By experiments? By the Bible?

And

But in my circles people don’t talk much about their religious beliefs, so I just go on my reading and intermittent outbursts of others. I do wonder what might be the motivation for atheists to do science in the grand unifying sense: Why do they believe there’s sufficient order in the universe to merit the systematic efforts at inquiry?

Because they think there can be order without design, and because there’s an immense amount to find out about that if so (or, in another way, if not). That question is oddly reminiscent of Nicholas Buxton saying in that Guardian article that the only rational thing for people who think the universe is uncaused to do is jump off a cliff.

And

Actually if you’re a Darwinist ‘all the way down’, you should say that life began as some random collocation of micro-units of matter that happened to stabilize long enough to reproduce and then mutate: i.e. the self-bootstrapping theory of life. However, Darwinists don’t want to commit to this because it’s not empirically provable – which means it allows room for more feint-hearted Darwinists to believe that God kicked off the whole process.

Provable – oh dear. That’s a very basic mistake for someone in this field, especially when he does such a lot of de haut en bas condescending to everyone else on the thread.