Category Archives: Reason and Religion

Is Dawkins really hoisted by his own petard?

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‘Krudt’ is ‘gunpowder’ in Danish, ‘Lunte’ a fuse

Well, William E. Carroll believes that he is. In an article in The Catholic Thing — Catholics have so many journals and newspapers, organisations and institutions, that they seem to be running out of names for them! — called “The Dawkins Challenge“, Carroll thinks he has caught Dawkins out in a contradiction — ‘hoist by his own petar’,’ as Hamlet says of his uncle Claudius, the king, whose letters to the King of England, borne by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (R & G), are supposed to compass Hamlet’s destruction. But Hamlet alters the letters, so that R & G become the victims, and Claudius is “hoist by his own petar’,” while Hamlet — delving “a yard below their mines, … blow[s] them at the moon.” A petard is a small bomb or mine (in contemporary French, a firecracker), leaned against or attached to a gate or barrier to weaken or destroy it. Has Dawkins blown himself up with his own bomb?

Here’s Carroll’s argument:

Dawkins, in recent statements, has said that Catholics should be held to account for their nutty belief in transubstantiation. According to Catholic dogma the bread and the wine of the Eucharist really become — that is, metaphysically change their substance — from bread and wine to “body and blood, soul and divinity of Christ.” According to Catholic doctrine, while the substance changes, the accidents do not. As Carroll says:

The rationale behind the doctrine, which is known as transubstantiation, employs categories of substance and accident, which have their origin in the philosophy of Aristotle. According to the Church, the underlying substances of bread and wine are replaced by the body and blood of Christ while the external appearances of bread and wine remain. A scientific analysis of the consecrated host and wine would only detect these external appearances.

Now, this is an amazingly nutty thing to believe, as Dawkins says, and the Church should be ridiculed for teaching it as revealed doctrine. There is nothing — absolutely nothing — in the supposed revelation of God to Christians, that either suggests or implies this doctrine. When the gospel Jesus says, at the Last Supper, “This is my body” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for you” (Luke 22.19), or when Paul says “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10.16), there is simply no reasonable understanding of these words, as then spoken (that is, supposing that the gospel records are accurate reports of what a man called Jesus, who was shortly to be crucified, actually spoke on that occasion), that implies either that Jesus is speaking other than figuratively, or that Paul is interpreting the words in terms of a strictly literal meaning.

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The Tide of Religious Idiocy at the Full

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People like Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne continue to play gentlemanly games with words in which they pretend that they are reconciling religion and science. Despite their assurances it is clear that no such reconciliation takes place. If it had, scientists would use religious insights and categories for their usefulness to science, and the religious would help to deepen religious faith by preaching about the wonders of science. It really is only a pretence, no matter how much accommodationists continue to distort the relationship of science and religion, and regardless of the attempt by scholars in the supposed discipline of “Religion and Science” to assimilate science to religion by persistently fictionalising the history of the relationship of religion and science.

Thomas Dixon shows us how this is done. In his little book, Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, he tries to marry religious doctrine to scientific theory using various strategies. One of the most popular is to point out that religious scientists see no conflict between their religious beliefs and their scientific conclusions, seeing each as in some sense complementing the other. Of course, this in itself proves nothing more than that it is possible to compartmentalise our lives. Collins can work on the human genome project during the week, and then on Sunday entertain a completely different set of beliefs, entirely unrelated to what he does in the laboratory. That’s one reason why Elaine Ecklund’s “research” is pointless. Asking scientists about their religious beliefs shows no more than that it is possible to insulate some of your beliefs from others, so that you feel no cognitive dissonance. But people are continuously deceiving themselves about the scope of their beliefs. Roman Catholics, for instance, speak of the sanctity of life, but it is not obvious that the church can hold both this and then, at the same time, largely ignore the fact that children are dying of poverty, malnutrition and preventable disease at a startling rate, without ending up in a contradiction. Nor can they extol the sanctity of life, and then oppose controlling population growth, when excess population in some parts of the world puts so much stress on the environment that, sooner or later, the number of the dying will begin to increase from its already imposingly high number.

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The fatal ambiguity of Religion

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The most salient difference between science and religion is that science comes to (relatively) unambiguous conclusions, whereas religion is left swimming around in a slough of imprecise and fatally ambiguous promissory notes as to what its devotees are to believe and hold to be true. We have recently been blessed with a signal example of this in the person of one of the commentators here on choiceindying,com — one David Roemer, whose blog, New Evangelist, is something of a paradigm case of religion’s failure to make sense. For example, Roemer writes this (on the linked page):

Richard Dawkins in his latest book said evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because of the sun. He must have gotten this idea from a peer-reviewed article published in the American Journal of Physics. Catholic Truth in England just published my explanation of why the article is absurd.

The trouble with people like Roemer is that he imagines that things that he has read are also determinative for the positions of others. The article in the American Journal of Physics to which he refers was published recently (2009), and one may be assured that Dawkins was saying that evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics long before this. Indeed, the second law only applies to closed systems, which the earth patently is not, so even if you don’t understand the math of the article, it is plain that, if evolution defies the second law, it must be because there is another energy source which militates against increased entropy here on earth (in select instances), and that that source provides the energy needed to defeat the suggestion that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.

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Faith is a Cognitive Sickness

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I’ve been listening to some of Peter Boghossian’s public lectures about the nature of faith. Here are a couple of examples, and they’re worth watching straight through. Here’s the first — entitled “Jesus, The Easter Bunny and Other Delusions: Just Say No!”

That is quite long, and there is a shorter version, dealing with roughly the same things, accessible here — entitled “Faith: Pretending to know things you don’t know”

Now, as most of you will know, when philosophers and others begin to criticise faith as believing things, people of faith will immediately turn round and claim that faith has nothing to do with believing. They will begin, as the Archbishop of Canterbury did with Richard Dawkins, talking in poetic language, which, no matter how you read it, simply cannot be understood as belief about things “out there,” but become, instead, about things “in here” — “in my head,” “conformable to my feelings,” and so on.

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We are puzzled along with Dawkins. What could Rowan Williams actually mean by nature “opening itself up to its own depths”? But by slipping off into poetic language it seems as if he is no longer talking about things “out there,” and so the language of faith seems to escape the epistemic conditions necessary for us to be talking about “the same thing,” about something that could claimed with justice to be true.

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Science will win, because it works

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A day or two ago I criticised Stanley Fish on his piece “Citing Chapter and Verse,” in which he purports to show that science and religion are really on all fours so far as evidence goes, and that both require an initial act of faith before either enterprise can get going. Not content with the depth of his own grave, he has decided to dig it a bit deeper, but this time he has chosen to lie down and let his critics bury him. He thinks he has escaped suffocation by a long disclaimer, but it won’t work. Let’s hear the disclaimer first:

This, I take it,  is what many readers meant when they said, in a tone of triumph,  that science works. Yes, it does, but so does literary criticism (it settles interpretive disputes, at least for a while) and so does therapy (it enhances the ability to socially interact, at least sometimes), and so does religious faith (it gives meaning and direction to life,  at least for some people).  The parenthetical qualifications in the previous sentence acknowledge that the certainty these practices give us is, at least from the perspective of the long run, provisional; it can be replaced or overturned or dislodged. But so can the certainties science gives us. Johnny E points out that not long ago “in geology everybody believed in geosynclines, there was lots of  published data about them, but … now geosynclines don’t exist and everybody … believe[s] in seafloor spreading.”  Now you see them,  now you don’t.

However, this simply won’t do. If Fish hasn’t noticed the difference between the provisionality of, say, literary criticism, and the provisionality of science, perhaps we can chalk it up to age and dementia, but certainly not to acuity of vision and insight. Hermeneutic provisionality is toto caelo different to scientific provisionality. In fact, it’s perfectly reasonable for two people to disagree about the interpretation of a particular poem, and continue to disagree, although all the facts of language, rhyme, metre, metaphor, subtlety, and so on are agreed by both. But it is unreasonable to suppose that the disagreement between, say, Jerry Coyne and Jim Shapiro — see Jerry Coyne’s “Jim Shapiro continues his misguided attack on neo-Darwinism“ – can continue on indefinitely without resolution. It seems clear that Shapiro’s claim that the molecular structure of the immune system is still a characteristic of organisms that either has survival value or not, and that it is either selected for, and contributes to the survivability of progeny, or it is not, and does not, and that there is something true about the world that determines one or the other. This is not something about which scientists can happily differ, as literary critics, however deeply convinced they are about the adequacy of their own interpretations, and however grudgingly, must do regarding interpretations that disagree with theirs.

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Darwin, Science, God and the Education of Children

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I’ve been reading Janet Browne’s biography of Darwin over the last few days — riveting stuff, by the way! One of the things that becomes increasingly clear as Darwin gets closer and closer to discerning the final shape of his theory of evolution by means of natural selection, is how very careful he felt he had to be about the impact of his developing theory on the society around him. Indeed, it would not be going too far to suggest that he was afraid of being socially ostracised, both as a scientist and as a member of the society of his day, because of the theory’s implied materialism and godlessness. This concern was related to his deeper concern about its effect on his wife Emma, who was deeply devout, and who struggled with Darwin’s growing disbelief, about which he did not deceive her.

In 1843, after finishing his work on volcanic islands, he decided to put his species theory into a much more deliberate and refined form. He had already produced, in 1842, a brief pencil sketch of the theory, but this time, says Browne, “he wrote clearly …, methodically and comprehensively, covering nearly 230 pages over a period of five or six months.” (vol. 1, 446) This time he put his best foot forward. It was an attempt to persuade and convince, with an audience in mind; and, notably, he avoided, as Browne says, “dealing with any of [his wife] Emma’s concerns beyond adding a peroration glorifying the grandeur of an evolutionary view of life.” (As he does, as well, at the very end of the Origin.) Then, having worked through this task systematically and scrupulously, “he wrote Emma,” says Browne, “the strangest letter of his life”, a letter which she quotes in detail (446-7). The letter speaks of “my sketch of my species theory,” and explains what she should do with it should he suddenly die, suggesting, in strict order, men of science whom, he believes, would publish and promote the theory, and that she should consider it “the same as if legally entered in my will, that you will devote £400 to its publication & further will yourself, or through Hensleigh, take trouble in promoting it.”

Browne’s comment is striking:

Reading between the lines [she writes] was not hard. He would prefer to be dead rather than suffer the controversy which he knew would break over his head. He would prefer to be dead rather than deliberately hurt Emma’s feelings, or, even worse, be the cause of her social ostracism. [447]

Those who speak confidently of the peaceful relation between religion and science, and the ready acceptance which the theory of evolution met with in Victorian England, should consider Darwin’s well-founded fears. Shortly after this, in October 1844, Robert Chambers published, anonymously, his book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which adumbrated a transmutationist theory of development, and, while popular, going through several publishing runs in the year of publication, and several editions, showed Darwin what the response to his own work might be. To start with, Darwin was stunned, thinking that Chambers had, in a sense, preempted his own work. The work itself, though ingenious, and well-written in a popular style, had many faults, and little to commend it as a work of science, but it stirred up a storm of protest and opposition.

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Round and Round the Mulberry Bush

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Mark Vernon responded to Julian Baggini’s series on the Heathen’s Progress in a recent piece in the Guardian, and now, in his turn, Baggini has responded to Vernon. Since it seemed to me that, in his latest Heathen’s Progress piece, Baggini had lost the thread of the story, his latest contribution adds a new and important wrinkle; for here, at last, he comes to the question of the ground of or justification for religious belief. Of course, had he started this way, the series may have been over before it was well begun, but these are, after all, crucial questions to ask when confronted by any proposal of belief. What grounds it? On what basis do I consider this belief to be true? Is it appropriate to hold this belief on quite slender grounds, or on grounds that seem inadequate to the importance that this belief will play in the system of beliefs in which it plays an important part? And so on.

We hold all sorts of beliefs on very dubious grounds, yet usually such beliefs do not play a defining role in our understanding of ourselves and the world. But when a belief plays a central role in the structure of our beliefs, it becomes very important for us to make sure that we hold that belief on reputable grounds, and this, I think, is seldom the case when it comes to religion. Indeed, the scientific understanding of the reasons why religious beliefs have come to be held seems to show that religious beliefs fulfil certain psychological conditions which enable them to be held without and even in the teeth of the evidence. Take Thompson and Aukofer’s book, Why We Believe in Gods. In a general statement about the conclusions of their book they state:

Religion utilizes and piggybacks onto everyday social-thought processes, adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved to help us negotiate our relationships with other people, to detect agency and intent, and to generate a sense of safety. [Kindle, loc 374-5]

This is important. If religious beliefs are, as Thompson and Aukofer claim, merely hitching a ride on already developed mechanisms that have evolved for other reasons having to do with social interaction and the detection of threats and benefits in the environment, then it is doubly important that we trace them back to their origins.

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Hitchens’ “god is not Great”: An Assessment: VI: The Design of Things

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I want to return today to the series that I began some time ago on Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great. The last instalment of the series was about the metaphysical claims of religion. The question I raised there was whether the more refined of the arguments for the existence of God require closer attention than Hitchens gives them. It’s one thing to say that, if you posit god as a designer, this raises the question of who designed the designer; it’s a completely different thing to say why there is no way of stopping the regress. Modern Thomists like Edward Feser think that Thomas Aquinas had a way of doing that, so that the question becomes simply a misunderstanding of the arguments themselves. This applies especially to the first way of Aquinas, where what is at issue is not a first move in the order of time, but a first mover in the order of being.

I feel myself on very unsteady ground when considering these arguments, and perhaps that is because the arguments do not provide the kind of definitive proof that Thomists like to think they do, but I assume that, as philosophical arguments, they demand a response. I suspect, though I do not know this, that much hangs on the Aristotelian way of thinking about causes and effects, and how things come to be. If you can make a distinction between the essence of something and its act of existing, then it might seem that we need a prior thing (prior in the order of being) in order to actualise any existing thing, and then it might seem absurd — and I’m not sure that it is — that there is not something existing in its own right, that is, something whose essence is pure act (of existing), in order to explain why there is anything at all. I simply do not have confidence that the metaphysical arguments are that compelling, or that the premises of the argument are satisfactorily demonstrated, and I sometimes wonder whether this has more to do with the presuppositions that are brought to the argument rather than with the details of the argument itself.

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Baggini: A sheep in sheep’s clothing, claiming to be a wolf?

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In the next of his series on modern paganism – or whatever the series is about now — Baggini really comes to the point where I think it is time to simply cut him loose. I was going to comment on the pope’s Christmas message, but didn’t think it worth the bother, but Baggini actually thinks the gilded virgin has something to say to us, and what he has to say this time, however irrational, seems to point out to Baggini the limits of rationality. All along he has been trying to tell us what is and what is not rational to believe, and he came to a conclusion which was, in most respects, not very far distant from the position of the new atheists; basically, that religion is effectively based on unfounded beliefs, and is not just a matter of practice, as some of the critics of the new atheism have been saying, in their scramble to escape from the clutches of the new atheists, who make belief statements foundational, and criticise religion on the grounds that those beliefs are unfounded.

Now, Baggini is paddling backwards rather furiously, and is willing to grant the pope all the leeway he wants to say nonsensical things, claiming, meanwhile, that rationality has its limits. I must say that Baggini’s chopping and changing is getting a bit tiresome, and is sadly unphilosophical to boot. If he thinks that reason hits a blank wall at the points where the pope is busy jumping over it, then he should explore what he means by this, rather than giving up so supinely, as he seems to me to do. Here’s the beginning of his piece:

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No Design Option in the Theory of Evolution

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This is something that has to be put simply and firmly: There is no design option in the theory of evolution by natural selection. The words ‘natural selection’ rule it out, and for someone like Plantinga to say that this is not settled is simply farfetched nonsense. In his Gifford Lectures, Where the Conflict Really Lies, which I forbear to buy, based on the Kindle sampler, Plantinga argues the improbable theory that Christianity and science are compatible whilst naturalism and science are not. Of course, once again he depends upon the hopelessly quixotic argument that naturalism, dependent as it is on the merely chance occurrence of the existence of intelligent organisms, cannot make good its claim to knowledge, for there is no reason to suppose that the deliverances of such an organism might be true. As he says (in the Kindle sampler of his book):

I argue that it is improbable, given naturalism and evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. It is improbable that they provide us with a suitable preponderance of true belief over false.

I find it truly hard to believe that Plantinga can repeat, without blushing, such vacuousness. The point is that our cognitive faculties are not reliable, as he says, and that they do not provide us with a suitable preponderance of true belief over false, and this is precisely why science is so necessary, and why religion is almost sure to be simply wrong. Science depends upon the cooperation of many minds. It is a self-correcting methodology, that corrects for the lack of reliability of our cognitive faculties. As Plantinga must know, this is the earliest of philosophical problems: the conflict between appearance and reality. This conflict was recognised very early. Indeed, the whole of early Greek philosophy may be seen as a way of dealing with the disagreement and dialectic that this conflict produces. The Sophists, after all, prided themselves on their rhetorical ability to make the weaker reason appear the stronger.

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