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You know, as a science and science education advocate thoroughly in the humanities end of pool, I often find the fights between different sides of the debate about how best to advocate science and secularism to be interesting, enlightening, and sometimes painfully petty. The fights seem to be largely and bitterly over elements that have a lot more to do with style than substance, or about the flash points of religious belief.
Case in point: I was planning on buying Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum anyway, but as what appeared to be a review war, with linked flame wars, starting on Facebook, Sciblogs, and the Science Blogs at Discover Magazine, I realized that I had to read it. The debate between PZ Myers on one end and Mooney/Kirshenbaum on the other made me read the book in an hour and a half this afternoon.
I need to disclose somethings: First, I deeply respect and partially agree with both sides of this debate. Despite the fact that PZ Myers can spin an insult like no one else and whose writing is abrupt to the point of being misread, I love his blog. I don’t, however, love the cheer leading and sycophancy I see amongst some of the commenters on his blog, but that is largely beside the point. I also really like Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s blog. Chris understands how those of us in the humanities have been isolated by attacks on our fields due to a few stupid remarks by particular post-structuralists whose influence was largely hyperbolic and whose critique was never intended to be used the way it was used by conservatives and relativists.
Furthermore, people I respect have come down on both sides on both sites in this debate: Ophelia Benson with Myers, John Kwok with Mooney/Kirshenbuam, Tauriq Moosa with Myers, and so on. Forgive me for name dropping, but these are all people I have read, quoted, and respected. See a theme developing?
I also tire of this debate at some point: it feels like a rehash of so much I have seen in the past two decades. Carl Sagan being extremely critical of religion, but always watching his tone. Gould, who I deeply respect as a writer, making what appear to be solely political concessions to religion through NOMA argument. Dawkins who is a wonderful science writer, but uses tone as a weapon, and does not hide his contempt for most–if not all–forms of religion. I can list people on both sides going all the way back to the middle of the 19th century, perhaps even further back.
While scientific knowledge has progressed, the debate over science’s place in culture seems to be a loop that constantly replays slight variations of the same arguments echoing down from William Cliffords’s literary debate with William James on the morality of belief without evidence to P.Z. Myers and Kenneth Miller having strong disagreements.
I honestly don’t expect this to get resolved today, tonight, or maybe ever.
Those are my caveats, let’s get to the merits of the arguments involved. Let’s start by looking at P.Z. Myer’s second paragraph in response to Mooney:
That was before I got to chapters 8 and 9, however, which open with very direct and personal attacks on me and on Pharyngula, atheists in general, and anyone who fails to offer religion its proper modicum of respect. “Oh, that’s why they warned me,” I realized, “it’s like asking the victim of a hatchet job to hold still for a moment so they can get in a good whack.” They definitely did need to request my forbearance, so I wouldn’t just toss their hypocritical and ignorant paean to mealy-mouthedness in the trash right away, which was one perceptive moment on their part. And yes, I freely admit that my opinion of the book is colored by the palpable contempt they hold for me.
I have seen insults and invective that good since 17th century. Oh Thomas Paine and Jonathan Swift where art thou? (I know they’re dead, so bugger off), but like with Paine and Swift, we don’t know if this even can be a cogent argument. Did Mooney and Kirshenbaum attack Myers in chapters eight and nine? Yes. Was the attack personal? I actually have a hard time dealing because of the language here is slick. In Unscientific America(Basic Books, 2009), Mooney and Kirshenbaum say:
It is no accident, then, that PZ Myer’s Pharyngula is such a popular science blog, though its content is hardly limited science. Meyers currently receives more than 1.5 million unique visits each month and approaches 3 million page views, with nearly 2 million unique visits during the month that he posted an image of his desecration of a communion wafer. This may have been the single biggest opportunity yet for science content to break out of the science corner of the blogosphere, but it was likely also the most alienating one. (114)
There is nothing untrue or libelous in that statement, but the entire chapter is contrasting Meyers with an global warming denial site which beat Myers in a blog contest in 2008. One can read the implication seems to be either: crackergate is related to that lose or PZ Myers is only barely better than a global warming crank. I understand Mooney and Kirshenbuam’s point, but even if we admit that Crackergate was alienating for many… Meyers couldn’t have gotten that many hits without the controversy.
Mooney and Kirshenbaum did comment on this:
Myers claims that our book contains “very direct and personal attacks on me and on Pharyngula, atheists in general, and anyone who fails to offer religion its proper modicum of respect.”
It is hard to know precisely what he means by “very direct and personal attacks,” as he doesn’t back up the charge with any evidence. Certainly we do directly mention Myers. We describe the infamous desecration of the communion wafer, which we criticize. Later, we also talk critically about Myers in the context of discussing the face of science on the Internet.
Even if these constituted “personal attacks”–and we don’t see how–they still wouldn’t be attacks on “atheists in general, and anyone who fails to offer religion its proper modicum of respect.” Chris is an atheist. We’re quite sure he did not attack himself in the book.
As for Myers, he is a very public figure, and never was he more public than in what he refers to as “Crackergate.” Does he not expect to be criticized when he puts a desecrated communion wafer on the Internet? Was everyone who criticized him on that occasion attacking him personally?
On this, I am equally confused. In a way, this debate is summed up by Crackergate, but Crackergate is ultimately not of singular relevance to Myer’s overall message. During “Crackergate” I was actually watching many people’s response and outside of the atheist/skeptic community, many people were horrified at the public relations nightmare that it could become. I have many agnostic and pagan friends aghast at the tone, but I saw Myer’s point myself: a communion wafer is not literally transubstantiated in G-d’s flesh unless G-d’s flesh is very much like flat bread. Still, I can agree with Myer’s point and think the whole thing was a problematic as a public relations stunt.
So was this an unjustified personal attack or not? Honestly, I don’t think it was meant to be, but I sure see how it can be viewed as such.
Let’s more on to the next point that Myer’s made:
How, exactly, are we to accomplish it [popularizing science and making it soundly accepted in the culture] without challenging anti-scientific attitudes? Like the Pluto incident, what Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to want is that science conform itself to that common culture, that somehow science will accommodate itself to the popular will, and everyone will be happy. They lack the realization that what they’re actually proposing is a rather radical change in cultural values, and that that will not come without some pain and conflict.
Valid point if that’s what what Mooney and Kirshenbaum meant. Mooney and Kirshenbaum respond:
Myers doesn’t appear to grasp this point; he seems to think we’re saying science should have been decided by referendum in the Pluto instance. “Are there other scientific matters that should be decided by popular vote?” he asks. Of course not. The results of science should never be subject to popular vote. But that’s a red herring, since the whole point is that unlike, say, whether an atom is larger than an electron, whether Pluto is a “planet” is not purely a scientific matter. It is, to a very large degree, a matter of semantics. Moreover, it also involves history (Pluto had been a “planet” since 1930) and culture–which the scientists involved in Pluto’s demotion were pretty insensitive to.
Is Pluto’s planetary status purely an issue of semantics? Partially, but it was semantics influenced by scientific observation. If the definition of planet is to continue to have meaning, it had to refined and many other heavenly bodies would have be reclassified as planets. While there is cultural weight to most changes in the meanings of words, and generally these changes are organic and occur over a span of decades, sometimes jargon and nomenclature within a field must be changed to reflect new findings. Was this decision without detractors even within the scientific community? No, Alan Stern did not approve of the situation and thought that actually many of the inner planets wouldn’t meet standards by the criterion set out by IAU. Also, the public was not really privy to all the information involved mainly because of poor science journalism.
You can see the complications.
So let’s get to what I see as the crux of the disagreement between Myers, Mooney, and Kirshenbaum:
In chapter eight, Mooney and Kirshenbaum say,
The American scientific community gains nothing from the condescending rhetoric of the New Atheists—and neither does the stature of science in our culture. We should instead adopt a stance of respect towards those who would hold their faith dear, and a sense of humility based on the knowledge that although science can explain a great deal about the way our world functions, the question of God’s existence lies outside its expertise. (105)
Myers respond is what I would expect:
Science and reason give us antibiotics, microwave ovens, sanitation, lasers, and rocketships to the moon. What has religion done for us lately? We have become accustomed to objective measures of success, where we can explicitly see that a particular strategy for decision-making and the generation of knowledge has concrete results.
To appeal to pragmatic epistemology that Myers makes here is sound, but the its also question begging. What has religion done for us lately? It’s hard to say, religion a a concept is EXTREMELY vague. The bulk of charity in the US is religious based, but then again, the tax code makes that possible and even likely. The civil rights movement was inspired in the Black churches, but there were secular members from the earliest parts of that movement.
These sorts of monolithic claims are school-yard philosophy. I could ask “what has string theory given us lately” and equally stacked the deck. If Myer’s stopped there, I would have to give him a harder time, but he doesn’t:
Now, now, I can hear the defenders of religion begin to grumble, there’s more to life than merely material products like microwave ovens — there’s contentment and contemplation and a sort of subjective psychology of ritual and community and all that sort of thing. Sure. Fine. Then stick to it, and stop pretending that religion ought to be a determinant of public policy, that it can inform us about the nature of our existence, or that it provides a good guide to public morality. Get it out of our schools and courthouses and workplaces and governments, take it to your homes and your churches, and use it appropriately as your personal consoling mind-game. And stop pretending that it is universal and necessary, because there are a thousand different religions that all claim the same properties with wildly different details, and there are millions of us with no religion at all who get along just fine without your hallowed quirks.
And this is why breaking this debate down in parts so difficult: in substance, Myers seems to be arguing that there is nothing positive to “religion” (again without really defining it), but there are some criteria in which it is separate and subjectively rated it may hold up. At least, when its away from public policy and away from spreading.
I think I agree with him on the explicit public policy part of the argument, but even if you did accept that science needs to be 180 degree outside of that debate, values and public policy are entirely mixed together. The fact that even atheist scientists and philosophers have a HUGE variety of political ideologies means that there is no ONE answer to these questions: religion involved or not. So while explicit public policy should not involve churches on constitutional grounds, I don’t think ANY values philosophy can avoid having policy implications.
But Myer’s epistemological take of the New Atheists stance is sound:
There is no philosophical or metaphysical certainty on the part of us “New Atheists”, and we have no problem admitting it. Dawkins wrote it down forthrightly in his book when he scores himself as a 6 on a 7-point scale of atheism: “6. Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. ‘I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.’” It’s genuinely remarkable how many people say they’ve read his book, and then walk away to claim that Dawkins says science “entirely precludes God’s existence.”
I agree entirely with Dawkins’ sentiment. I also turn it around to use an agnostic sentiment on religious interlocuters: “I don’t know for sure, and you don’t either, so why are you being so high-handedly specific in your claims that god was a Jewish carpenter, or his prophet was a polygamist with a flying horse, or that Ragnarok is imminent? Give me a method for evaluating your claims, tell me what rational reason you have to believe that, show me the evidence!” And then they don’t. I’m just supposed to have faith.
He’s right, on a scale of probability I believe we can make judgments of likelihood. On the question of God, particularly of the interventionist variety, the evidence is not there. It is true that there are forms of theism and Deism that are completely outside of testable knowledge because they involve either non-contradictory deities, or deities that exist entirely outside the natural world. There is no reason to posit such deities necessarily, but there is also no reason not to. However, these theological formations of G-d are not the personal G-d spoken about by most believers.
Honestly, in this argument I am reminded of Neil DeGrasse Tyson comments to Richard Dawkins at the Beyond Belief conference in 2006 where Tyson said he primarily agreed with Dawkins, but he felt his words as much as heard them. Does that change the argument? While tone does matter, it doesn’t really change any of the arguments involved.
How do Mooney and Kirshenbaum feel about this element of the debate? I’ll quote Sheril Kirshenbuam:
As I just wrote at The Intersection:
Science and religion are not mutually exclusive and must not continue to be portrayed as such. Though some very vocal voices in the science community disagree, I assure you they are not representative of the whole. I continue to work day to day with scientists who hold a very broad array of beliefs across fields from molecular biology to physiology to conservation. And when it comes to issues like climate change and ocean acidification, everyone must be be engaged if we’re to get anywhere. The new atheist movement takes an adversarial approach, but only succeeds in alienating the majority of the planet away from science. When it comes to enacting sound policies on what really matters, this will always be a losing strategy.
I’ll end this discussion with an expanded version of what I replied to her with on one of her articles:
I think we agree more than we disagree–trust me, I been tarred as an accommodationalist before myself because I think even if we do have a naturalistic stance on the world, we have to admit that there are some things that different religions are speaking to in people that hit a core, otherwise I don’t think religious ideas would exist. I have also been accused of being rabidly anti-religious because I think there is much that can be empirically falsified about most religious claims and because I think many religious concepts are so philosophically incoherent they can’t addressed.
That said, I don’t think science can be reconcile with every type of faith and we must insist on methodological naturalism. When there are faith claims made that can be tested empirically and within normal experimental grounds, they should be. I do think, however, that there are some things we can’t back down on and no amount of media savvy is going to change how the dominant culture responds to that at moment. I may over a long period of time, and if that’s the case, we need both a soft approach (Gould, David Sloan Wilson, Chris Mooney and Yourself), a hard approach (all the “new” atheists, Coyne, Myers, etc) and everything in between from Degrasse Tyson to E. O. Wilson even to Collins.
I still believe those comments. Now, I am not going all the sniping and griping between the two camps–I think some parts of Myer’s reviews were hyperbolic bordering on vitriolic and some of the replies by Chris Mooney seemed to miss the point. I don’t like to engage in exercises in missing the point.
I also will say that I am not done commenting on Unscientific America. I think it is worth reading despite the way I feel about some of the framing in Chapters Eight and Nine. I have some things to say about its length, literary style, and to comment on some of the other mixed reviews of the book. I honestly wish Mooney and Kirshenbaum had written MUCH more about the humanities issues and the relationship between science and Hollywood.
Leave it to Tauriq Moosa to say something I have been trying to get at for a long time:
To the Ancient Greeks and Romans, ethics did not stop at the end of philosophical sentence. The thought continued well after, spilling into the everyday life. Everything was part of making life good because, according to Socrates, “the unconsidered life was not worth living.” How are we to live? To inculcate all Greek and Roman thinking into one miasmatic contortion is false, since this also could rescind discussions of whether one is a Sophist, a Sceptic, a Cynic, and so on. Not to mention the Stoics, whose philosophy was so broad and wonderful and resonant, that an emperor, Marcus Aurelius, and a slave, Epictetus, are considered the best writers and sources for Stoic thought.
It is difficult to come to grips with a lot of ancient philosophy; or to not come off as arrogant when considering and promoting it. People would rather consult the torrid garbage of Hay House and its clones. The horrible influence of mystical thought that conveys mystery about the mysterious. Or it swings its pendulum of bullshit smashing through a wall of sensibility to the other side, to give one-off points about making contact with angels. It may appear arrogant to most people that we can dismiss such drivel as, well, drivel. And we really can.
This is not meant to convey that we can know for certain that angels do or do not answer our prayers. Who knows? More importantly, who cares?
Now the ancient Greeks did have their dogmatists, but really, when it comes down it: doubt is useful, and probability is more useful. If you look at the dialogues of Plato, Socrates illustrates time and time again, we may not be able to prove what’s right, but we can dismiss was is self-contradictory or without bounds.
Sadly, Plato seems to lived in a time without Occam’s Razor or the skepticism of the medieval nominalists, so he posits a lot of things that are rational but anti-empirical such as the absolute forms or the pre-awareness of all knowledge. Still to get hung up on these historical matters is to miss my point: certainty is not required or even advisable, but we can have relative knowledge by several guidelines–both the empirical and the pragmatic guidelines. This leads me to accept the claims of scientists when the evidence is there in a way that is superior to claims of that can’t be tested empirically or have no evidence empirically speak of AND/OR produce no results that can be empirically measured within either an experimental or an observational framework by several parties.
In short, doubt everything, but realize that all things are not equally likely. There are times when the way of Pyrrho isn’t helpful.
Grasshopper: So return to skepticism of the ancient variety.
Master Pretense: That’s awkward sentence structure.
Grasshopper: Irrelevant.
Master Pretense: Is it now? Many people say that language reflects thinking patterns?
Grasshopper: I am skeptical of that.
Master Pretense: You would be. Anyway, back to Pyrrho of Elias. We don’t know much about him as I already indicated. We have that one quote. We know that his major disciple, Timon, probably wrote about him, but we don’t have that. We have some fragments that are probably from Timon in Aristocles. Diogenes gives up highly anecdotal stories which are quite funny, but also quit improbable. Pyrrho seems to be superhumanly calm in Diogenes, but also so doubtful he almost gets himself killed on a regular basis.
Grasshopper: Nutty professor style.
Master Pretense: Greeks seemed to like these stories. Diogenes also has major Stoic and Cynic philosophers holding their breathes until they die even though we know that to be practically physically impossible.
Anyway, so Pyrrho’s skepticism seems to have died or been reintegrated into Stoicism or eaten by Academic skepticism or just not written about until Aenesidemus in the first century BCE. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Aenesidemus may have been a member of the Academy of Plato, linking him to the other major ancient school of Greek Skepticism. Cicero, however, does not mention this, which is odd. (We’re get to the importance of that when we talk about the Academic Skeptics).
So Sextus Empiricus is where we get most of ideas about Pyrrho, but Aenesidemus is who really revived the school in Greece.
Grasshopper: So what did Aenesidemus believe or not believe, as the case may or may not be?
Master Pretense: Let’s take a look at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy shall we:
Aenesidemus’ Pyrrhonian Discourses (Pyrrhoneia), like the rest of his works, have not survived, but they are summarized by a ninth century Byzantine patriarch, Photius, who is remarkable in his own right. In his Bibliothêkê (= Bib. ), he summarized 280 books, including the Pyrrhoneia, apparently from memory. It is clear from his summary that he thinks very little of Aenesidemus’ work. This is due to his view that Aenesidemus’ skepticism makes no contribution to Christian dogma and drives from our minds the instinctive tenets of faith (Bib. 170b39-40). Nevertheless, a comparison of his summaries with the original texts that have survived reveal that Photius is a generally reliable source (Wilson [1994]). So despite his assessment of Aenesidemus’ skepticism, the consensus is that he provides an accurate summary of the Pyrrhoneia. The proper interpretation of that summary, however, is disputed.
So we don’t really know what Aenesidemus thought. but we think he ten modes:
The kinds of conclusion that Aenesidemus countenanced as a Pyrrhonist can more clearly be seen by considering the kinds of arguments he advanced to reach them. He apparently produced a set of skeptical argument forms, or modes, for the purpose of refuting dogmatic claims regarding the natures of things. Sextus Empiricus discusses one such group, the Ten Modes, in some detail (PH 1.35-163, M 7.345, see also Diogenes Laertius’ account of the Ten Modes at 9.79-88, and the partial account in Philo of Alexandria, On Drunkenness 169-205, and see Annas and Barnes [1985] for detailed and critical discussion of all ten modes).
The first mode is designed to show that it is not reasonable to suppose that the way the world appears to us humans is more accurate than the incompatible ways it appears to other animals. This will force us to suspend judgment on the question of how these things are by nature, in and of themselves, insofar as we have no rational grounds on which to prefer our appearances and insofar as we are not willing to accept that something can have incompatible properties by nature. If, for example, manure appears repulsive to humans and delightful to dogs, weare unable to say that it really is, in its nature, either repulsive or delightful, or both repulsive and delightful. It is no more delightful than not-delightful, and no more repulsive than not-repulsive, (again, in its nature).
Just as the world appears in incompatible ways to members of different species, so too does it appear incompatibly to members of the same species. Thus, the second mode targets the endless disagreements among dogmatists. But once again, we will find no rational ground to prefer our own view of things, for if an interested party makes himself judge, we should be suspicious of the judgment he reaches, and not accept it.
The third mode continues the line of reasoning developed in the first two. Just as the world appears in incompatible ways to different people, it also appears incompatibly to the different senses of one and the same person. So, for example, painted objects seem to have spatial dimensions that are not revealed to our sense of touch. Similarly, perfume is pleasant to the nose but disgusting to the tongue. Thus, perfume is no more pleasant than not-pleasant.
The fourth mode shows that differences in the emotional or physical state of the perceiver affects his perception of the world. Being in love, calm and warm, one will experience the cold wind that comes in with his beloved quite differently than if he is angry and cold. We are unable to adjudicate between these incompatible experiences of the cold wind because we have no rational grounds on which to prefer our experience in one set of circumstances to our experience in another. One might say that we should give preference to the experiences of those who are healthy, sane and calm as that is our natural state. But in response, we may employ the second mode to challenge the notion of a single, healthy condition that is universally applicable.
The fifth mode shows that differences in location and position of an observed object relative to the observer will greatly affect the way the object appears. Here we find the oar that appears bent in water, the round tower that appears square from a distance, and the pigeon’s neck that changes color as the pigeon moves. These features are independent of the observer in a way that the first four modes are not. But similar to the first four, in each case we are left without any rational grounds on which to prefer some particular location or position over another. Why should we suppose, for example, that the pigeon’s neck is really green rather than blue? And if we should propose some proof, or theory, in support of it being really blue, we will have to face the skeptic’s demand for further justification of that theory, which will set off an infinite regress.
The sixth mode claims that nothing can be experienced in its simple purity but is always experienced as mixed together with other things, either internally in its composition or externally in the medium in which it is perceived. This being the case, we are unable to ever experience the nature of things, and thus are unable to ever say what that nature is.
The seventh mode appeals to the way different effects are produced by altering the quantity and proportions of things. For example, too much wine is debilitating but the right amount is fortifying. Similarly, a pile of sand appears smooth, but individual grains appear rough. Thus, we are led to conclude that wine is no more debilitating than fortifying and sand is no more smooth than rough, in their natures.
The eighth mode, from relativity, is a paradigm for the whole set of modes. It seeks to show, in general, that something appears to have the property F only relative to certain features of the perceiving subject or relative to certain features of the object. And, once again, insofar as we are unable to prefer one set of circumstances to another with respect to the nature of the object, we must suspend judgment about those natures.
The ninth modes points out that the frequency of encountering a thing affects the way that thing appears to us. If we see something that we believe to be rare it will appear more valuable. And when we encounter some beautiful thing for the first time it will seem more beautiful or striking than it appears after we become familiar with it. Thus, we must conclude, for example, that a diamond is no more valuable than worthless.
Finally, the tenth mode, which bears on ethics, appeals to differences in customs and law, and in general, to differences in the ways we evaluate the world. For some, homosexuality is acceptable and good, and to others it is unacceptable and bad. In and of itself, homosexuality is neither good nor bad, but only relative to some way of evaluating the world. And again, since we are unable to prefer one set of values to another, we are led to the conclusion that we must suspend judgment, this time with respect to the intrinsic value of things.
Grasshopper: You know you CAN paraphrase.
Master Pretense: Let me now: So it appears that Aenesidemus thought that Pyrrho was sort of relativist. We, however, can’t figure out if Anesidemus thought there was no truth (which would make his argument ontological) or that we just couldn’t know it (which would make his argument epistemic).
Grasshopper: I suppose you’re going to push this forward, or tell me someone else viewed Pyrrho differently.
Master Pretense: There is a koan from the Shaseki-shu:
Hogen, a Chinese Zen teacher, lived alone in a small temple in the country. One day four traveling monks appeared and asked if they might make a fire in his yard to warm themselves.
While they were building the fire, Hogen heard them arguing about subjectivity and objectivity. He joined them and said: “There is a big stone. Do you consider it to be inside or outside your mind?”
One of the monks replied: “From the Buddhist viewpoint everything is an objectification of mind, so I would say that the stone is inside my mind.”
“Your head must feel very heavy,” observed Hogen, “if you are carrying around a stone like that in your mind.”
To be continued.
