Category: Atheism

If you look at my two recent blog entries on “l’affaire Flew”, you will see that the first spells the philosopher’s name Anthony Flew and the second Antony Flew. Which is correct? I’m pretty sure that the answer is Antony Flew, but it’s by no means as clear as it should be. First, that unreliable but influential yardstick – the Google hit count – gives Anthony 36,300 and Antony 32,800. (Curiously there are 618 pages that include both forms!) How about publications? Amazon lists his books under both names, but I assumed that this was simply data entry error. But then I consulted my bookshelf, and found both forms!

Perhaps we should simply use the construction which appears in much of his professional vita: A. G. N. Flew (or even AGN Flew).

In today’s Daily Telegraph, there’s coverage of a press conference including Rowan “Mister Bean” Atkinson. He and others criticized proposed changes to UK “hate speech” laws that have been interpreted as covering criticism of religious ideas. “The freedom to criticise ideas – any ideas even if they are sincerely held beliefs – is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. And the law which attempts to say you can criticise or ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.” Exactly.

(Via Sully.)

Thanks to Kate and Hannah, here’s a link to a detailed (and perhaps more than usually accurate) survey of religious belief in the US. The detailed tables are fascinating. One example: with respect to educational attainment, broad belief in God went from 82% for “High school or less” to 73% for “Post graduate”. However absolute certainty about God went from 72% to 53%. (Of course as Flanagan points out, many believers don’t actually care very much about whether their belief is well grounded, or strongly held, or even if it’s true….)

During the recent US election campaign, the issue of American’s attitudes towards evolution popped up again. It’s usually presented as “X million Americans don’t believe in evolution…”, with the corollary at election time “…and they all vote Republican”. As I was dozing on the flight from Boston to Seattle on Friday, I found myself musing about this “fact” in various ways.

• Do non-evolutionists get flu shots? After all, they don’t believe in the science that underlies the development of flu vaccines, and some of them (in Kansas) clearly don’t want their children growing up with the kind of education that would equip them to work on new vaccines.
• How do Biblical inerrantists pick and choose those bits of the Bible they’ll use and those bits they’ll ignore? There are so many bits of blatantly allegorical and magical thinking, not to mention contradictions galore. Does consistency actually matter? If not, why not? Etcetera.
• Why should I worry about all of this? Things like belief in quaint creation myths, or circumcision, or not eating meat on Fridays, are all just tribal membership memes, ways of identifying that you are a member of a group in a way that is relatively resistant to mixing or diaspora. True… but it becomes important when people seek to impose it on others, whether it be banning the teaching of evolution in Kansas or orthodox Jews stoning tour buses in Jerusalem on Shabbat.

After all this fact-free speculation, it was nice to be proved wrong… or at least to get a chance to appreciate the true complexity of the situation. Over at People for the American Way there’s a fascinating report on Evolution and Creationism in Public Education [PDF format]. It’s based on a 1999 survey of 1,500 people. Among the more intriguing findings is the fact that for many people the inclusion of creationism in schools is based not on their religious beliefs, but on what the report calls a “Post Modernist” perspective.

A second important contextual point is what we term the “post-modernist” influence. For about a third of Americans, their fundamentalist religious beliefs drive their support for including Creationism in the public school curriculum. However, for most Americans who would like to see some mention of God or a Divine role in the development of humans, along with the teaching of Evolution, it is not primarily religion behind their opinions. It is much more of what can be called a Post Modernist perspective (a “Hey, you never know” mentality). This perspective is characterized by a wide tolerance for many different beliefs, since no single belief is seen as the final and complete answer to any issue. Also, many parents want their children to be exposed to a wide range of views. Their reasoning is, “our kids should be given enough information so, when they grow up, they can make up their own minds.”

Of course this meant that the vast majority of people were opposed to the Kansas evolution decision because it reduced the “wide range of views” that kids would be exposed to. And as one would expect, support for creationism and opposition to evolution were generally linked with poor education and based on ignorance of the ideas involved. Ironically, people were far more confident in the “proven” status of the Theory of Relativity than of Evolution. The basis for such a belief seems hard to understand….

In one of my recent pieces on Dennett and Wright, Steve Esser offered the following interesting comment; with his permission, I’m repeating it:
On Wright’s notion of subjective awareness as a kind of extra epiphenomenal stuff, I’ve come to agree this is wrong. But I am also one of those who read Dennett’s Consciousness Explained a number of years ago and came away thinking “no, not quite”. First-person subjective experience, stripped of all the other cognitive apparatus, is a different beast than the other things we explain scientifically (i.e. from an “objective” stance). The fact that we have experience is prior to everything else we know — there is no reality without it. So, I don’t think we have the whole story solved yet.
I agree with the first and last sentences, and while I too have reservations about some of Consciousness Explained, I suspect that my issues are different from Steve’s.
“First-person subjective experience, stripped of all the other cognitive apparatus”… OK, stop right there. I don’t believe that there is any such thing. It is that cognitive apparatus which converts raw sensory stimuli into experience. No cognitive apparatus, no experience. Here I use the word experience in the sense of “the apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind”, with the emphasis on apprehension. Some people use experience as an opposite of thinking; for example one dictionary defines it as “the feeling of emotions and sensations as opposed to thinking”. I deny the distinction implied here: for me, all experience involves the processing by cognitive apparatus of internal and external stimuli. To the extent that these stimuli do not involve cognition, they are sub-conscious: inaccessible, and therefore not experienced.
I’m not sure what Steve means by subjective here. The dictionary provides a wealth of possibilities, some of which are essentially question-begging (since they would define the experience as, e.g. “Particular to a given person”). Later he puts objective in quotes and couples it with science, so perhaps subjective is intended to mean unscientific – but that, too, seems to beg the question. I tend to use first person, as Steve does too, because I view the objective/subjective dichotomy as a (mostly) social construct.
Ultimately Steve’s assertion that “First-person experience is a different beast” seems to rest on his view that “the fact that we have experience is prior to everything else we know — there is no reality without it”. What does prior mean here? A precondition? I can perhaps understand an instrumental relationship between experience and knowing – thought experiments about sensory deprivation and brains-in-vats seem pertinent – but how does this justify the claim that experience is a “different beast”? Eating is “prior” to digestion, but both are amenable to scientific inquiry. (I’m afraid I don’t understand the “no reality” comment at all.)
Ultimately I think Steve seems to be arguing for the familiar “uniquely privileged” viewpoint: that there is something about first-person experience that is real – accessible to the individual concerned – but is intrinsically inaccessible to scientific, “objective” inquiry. It seems to me that such a radical claim must be either a matter of faith (mysterian), or must be explicable in terms of the known properties of individuals and brains. If one backs off from the claim of intrinsic inaccessibility, first-person experience presumably moves into the realm of the empirical – which is how I view it.

Wright still doesn’t get it. In his latest update to his response to Dennett he writes:
Some of Dennett’s defenders have e-mailed to accuse me of playing “Gotcha”. They say I take two separate parts of Dennett’s interview [A and B in the transcript excerpts above], note that they logically imply the existence of evidence of higher purpose, and then attribute that conclusion to Dennett even though he never states the conclusion explicitly.
But it’s more than that. At the very beginning of the interview, Dennett explicitly disavows the position which Wright seeks to deduce from his later answers. One might reasonably expect Wright to pause and reflect on whether Dennett was in fact conceding the position, or whether he (Wright) was making a mistake in drawing the conclusion. And as Wright wrote:
Dennett didn’t volunteer this opinion enthusiastically, or for that matter volunteer it at all. He conceded it in the course of a dialogue with me—and extracting the concession was a little like pulling teeth.
In his latest response, Wright concedes:
Granted, I should have used less dramatic language in attributing this conclusion to him. Rather than saying in paragraph 3 of the Beliefnet piece that he had “declared” the existence of evidence of higher purpose, I should have said he “acknowledged” it.
Rubbish. Try: “…I should have said that I put those words into his mouth, without checking that this what what he meant.”
Wright insists that Dennett’s complaint “…continues to strike me as wholly untenable. But I suppose I could be wrong.” As I noted, his approach seems fundamentally dishonest. He seems more interested in preserving what he seems to view as his “scalp” than in reaching a meeting of the minds, and this is not to his credit. Based on all that has passed, does Wright still seriously believe that Dennett “acknowledges a higher purpose”? (If he does, is this belief falsifiable?)
The obvious solution would be for Wright to simply state:
“When I wrote the Beliefnet piece, I believed that Dennett’s statements during our interview constituted an acceptance of a ‘higher purpose’ viewpoint. However it is clear from what Dennett has said, in that interview and subsequently, that he does not hold this viewpoint. I therefore recognize that my inference must have arisen from a mutual misunderstanding.”
Would that be so hard? Even the RavingAtheist would probably accept it.

Dan Kaplan pointed me at Wright’s response to Dennett’s complaint about his piece in Beliefnet. I don’t see that Wright gets himself off the hook. Leaving aside the validity of the argument, the ethics just stink. To reduce it to bare bones:
– Dennett said A and B
– Later on, Dennett said C
– After the interview, Wright concludes that C can be interpreted as if A then not B
– Wright therefore concludes, and announces to the world, that Dennett believes not B
Now before taking this last step, a reasonable person would have noted that this conclusion meant that Dennett had claimed B and not B. Moreover, all of Dennett’s previous statements had been consistent with B. There seem to be three possibilities:
– Dennett believes both B and not B.
– Dennett has changed his mind and now believes not B.
– Dennett still believes B; there is an error somewhere in the chain of reasoning – an equivocation, or a misunderstanding, or a subtle ambiguity.
Common sense suggests that the last of these is the most likely: in spoken (as opposed to written) discussion, such miscommunication occurs quite often. It certainly is more likely than someone changing a deeply-held belief.
So what does Wright do? Does he contact Dennett to double-check what was said and the conclusion that he’s drawn, or does he publish without checking? The first approach is most likely to lead to a true reporting of the exchange. The second has the better “Gotcha!” potential, even though it’s likely to lead to an acrimonious follow-up. (Like this.)
Maybe Wright got carried away, and thought this was a political debate in which zingers were more important than getting at the truth. That would seem to be a lousy way to practice philosophy.
UPDATE:I think I understand why Wright might have behaved in this way. If you watch the whole interview between Dennett and Wright, from about 30:00 through 45:00, you can see Dennett absolutely destroying Wright’s incoherent notion of epiphenomenalism. (I guess I should commend Wright for being honest enough to publish the interview even though he comes off so badly in it, trying to “defend indefensible positions” as he put it, but I can’t imagine that he was happy.)

Yesterday I wrote of Robert Wright’s dishonest piece about Daniel Dennett in BeliefNet. After watching the video of the Wright-Dennett interview again, and re-reading Wright’s piece, I sent the following email to Wright, cc: Dennett.
I read the piece “Planet with a purpose” and then watched your interview with Dennett. I have to say that I find your triumphal announcement that:
> I have some bad news for Dennett’s many atheist devotees.
> He recently declared that life on earth shows signs of having a
> higher purpose. Worse still, he did it on videotape, during an
> interview for my website meaningoflife.tv. (You can watch the
> relevant clip here, though I recommend reading a bit further
> first so you’ll have enough background to follow the logic.)
to be wholly unjustified, based on the video interview. You attempt to couple Dennett’s agreement with your hypothetical (“to the extent that… it would support …”) with earlier elements in the discussion in order to draw the conclusion that you were seeking. I don’t find that this argument works – the earlier discussion does not support your assertion that “He has already agreed that evolution does exhibit those properties”. Furthermore you don’t even have the courtesy to ask Dennett whether or not he agrees with the conclusion that you draw. In a discussion full of analogy, hypotheticals, and probabilities, the likelihood of inadvertent or intentional equivocation is extremely high. The upshot is that your written piece smacks of “Gotcha!”, rather than reasoned argument.
Even more important, earlier in the interview Dennett spells out very clearly an alternative (“natural selections happens because it can”) which is wholly inconsistent with your “higher purpose” conclusion. Unless you believe that Dennett is supporting two inconsistent positions, this should have caused you to question whether you had drawn a valid conclusion from the discussion as a whole. Yet you completely ignored Dennett’s naturalistic position when you came to write your Beliefnet story. This seems dishonest.
For myself, I find the attempt to apply the language of evolution, or natural selection, to “the system of the planet” is unhelpful and misleading. Natural selection, as you mention in the interview, arises from a combination of differentiated replication and scarce resources. The “system of the planet” is not obviously replicating, differentiating, or competing with anything else. To treat an aggregation of planetary phenomena, living and inert, as a “system” is one thing; it certainly helps us understand things like the salinity of the oceans and the recycling of atmospheric gases. To go from “system” to “organism” is at best a metaphor of limited value, and at worst a sentimental distraction.
As you may know, at least one commentator (Andrew Sullivan) read your story and interpreted it as “An Atheist Recants”. While in most cases it is the journalist who misleads with a simplifying headline, here I believe that he accurately summarized your – wholly unjustified – conclusion.
Geoff Arnold

I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog (yes, I know he’s infuriating, but he’s such an entertaining contrarian – and at least he doesn’t have Christopher Hitchens’ vicious streak), and I came across a little piece that I’ll reproduce in full:
AN ATHEIST RECANTS: Philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of the influential 1995 book, “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” now says he sees a higher purpose in the universe. Bob Wright breaks the news.
Now anyone seeing that headline would naturally conclude that Dennett had “recanted” his atheism – that he now believed in God. Puzzled, I read the piece by Robert Wright that Sullivan linked to. And Wright certainly launches into the topic with enthusiasm, asserting:
I have some bad news for Dennett’s many atheist devotees. He recently declared that life on earth shows signs of having a higher purpose.
So what is this “higher purpose”? We’re meant to assume that it is “God”, obviously. Yet here’s the money quote, later in the piece:
1) Dennett’s climactic concession may not sound dramatic. He just agrees reluctantly with my assertion that “to the extent that evolution on this planet” has properties “comparable” to those of an organism’s maturation—in particular “directional movement toward functionality”—then the possibility that natural selection is a product of design gets more plausible. But remember: He has already agreed that evolution does exhibit those properties. Ergo: By Dennett’s own analysis, there is at least some evidence that natural selection is a product of design. (And this from a guy who early in the interview says he’s an atheist.)
[Interjection: Note the assumption that “directionality” implies (not merely “is compatible with”) “design”, and that “design” implies a divine, non-natural designer – otherwise how is this incompatible with atheism? Sloppy. Back to Wright:]
2) Again: to say that natural selection may be a product of design isn’t to say that the designer is a god, or even a thinking being in any conventional sense. Conceivably, the designer could be some kind of natural-selection-type process (on a really cosmic scale). So Dennett might object to my using the term “higher purpose” in the first paragraph of this piece, since for many people that term implies a divine purpose. But “higher purpose” can be defined more neutrally.
So now “higher purpose” may just be an emergent property of a higher-level natural system – for example, natural selection applied to a many-worlds cosmology. I don’t see anything that Dennett has said that is incompatible with atheism.
Wright’s agenda is all too clear, as his closing paragraph shows:
Still, one could mount an argument that evolution on this planet has at least some of the hallmarks of the divine—a directionality that is in some ways moral, even (in some carefully delineated sense of the word) spiritual. In fact, I’ve mounted such an argument in the last chapter of my book Nonzero. But Dennett hasn’t signed on to that one. Yet.
And having read most of Nonzero, I’m reasonably confident that Dennett wouldn’t sign on to it. While there are some very interesting ideas in the first half of the book, the last chapter is full of equivocation, particularly around the notions of “design”, “purpose”, and “divine”. It’s nowhere near as good as Wright’s earlier The Moral Animal.

A thought for the day: from Fran Lebowitz‘s book Progress, excerpted in the October 2004 Vanity Fair:
Reversion of rights:
[…]
(3) All religious texts will be vetted and, if necessary, revised, by ad hoc committees composed of public librarians, English teachers, literary critics, and writers, in order to ensure that no representative of the secular community is in any way offended.
This seems only fair….
Update: Apparently I should have decorated this with :-) or otherwise indicated that this was intended in fun, as a reductio ad absurdum. Of course I don’t want to vet religious texts, any more than I want religious types vetting, or censoring, secular texts. (And nor does Fran Lebowitz, I imagine.) I guess irony is out of fashion….