Ignorance Indefatigable: Jerry Coyne Surprised by Divine Impassibility

Jerry Coyne claims to have "spent several years reading theology before [deciding] that it was a mind-numbing and largely worthless exercise." He also claims to have made "extensive incursions into theology and science."

Now Coyne is certainly not a respectable commentator on religion and its relation to science. A certain lack of intellectual rigor for a non-academic is inevitable. But he is a blogger who has something a following online, and he is known as a hanger-on of the New Atheist movement. His ineptitude when it comes to religious matters, then, is a case study of the low intellectual standards of the New Atheists.

I've previously offered several examples in which Coyne shows that he doesn't grasp the most basic claims of Christian theology. Coyne's descriptions of what Christian theology shows pretty clearly that his "years of reading theology" is a fib.

Consider these examples:

• Coyne claims that Augustine and Aquinas don't think God is the source of being. In fact, Augustine said that God is being itself, "the absolute fullness of being and thus the sole primeval source of all being ...." Likewise, Aquinas held that God is "ipsum esse subsistens" (subsistent being itself).
• Coyne thinks that the doctrine of the Incarnation says that "God turning himself into his son ...." But Christians don't believe that Jesus Christ is the Father made into human form. This sort of thing has always been rejected as a heresy related to Sabellianism. (Sabellianism was condemned as a heresy upon its appearance around the turn of the Third Century.
• Coyne claims that "the theological notion of original sin didn’t arise until several centuries after Jesus supposedly lived ...." Coyne's years of studying theology didn't acquaint him with Romans or I Corinthians, apparently.

Divine Impassibility: A Pervasive Christian Doctrine

Coyne has recently been adding more weird claims about theology. In a post entitled "An Eastern Orthodox priest says I know nothing of God," Coyne seems determined to demonstrate that, in fact, he knows nothing of God.

The doctrine that God lacks emotions and is unaltered by the world is called "Divine Impassibility." Impassibility is one of the major attributes Christians believe God has.

The doctrine of Impassibility is grounded in the Scriptures and was formulated at least as early as the Second Century AD. Those who did not believe in it were deemed heretics. Patripassionism, a school that taught that God the Father suffers, was condemned in the Second Century AD.

The doctrine of Divine Impassibility is pervasive in Christian theology: it was held by every major theologian before the modern period and affirmed in official church proceedings such as the Nicene Council.

Surprised by Divine Impassibility

Given Coyne's claims to have spent "years" studying theology, one would think he would be familiar with the doctrine. But Coyne states that he has never heard anyone say that the Christian God does not have emotions. In responding to an Orthodox priest who mentions impassibility, Coyne says:

"In other words, God completely lacks emotion, nor is He altered by the world. Well, Fr. Kimel, that’s a new one to me. You’ve managed to find one theologian who says that."

Coyne apparently thinks few Christian theologians hold God to be impassible. But, of course, every major patristic and medieval theologian held this view. Here are some theologians, just off the top of my head, who believe God is impassible:

• Augustine
• Thomas Aquinas
• Martin Luther
• John Calvin
• Origen
• Ignatius
• Justin Martyr
• Cyprian
• Tertullian
• Theodoret
• Gregory of Nyssa
• Basil the Great
• Gregory Thaumaturgus
• Eusebius
• Anselm
• Bonaventure
• Duns Scotus
• Rufinus
• Ignatius
• Irenaeus

The notion that God is without emotion is a central aspect of theism, Christian or otherwise. You can find the notion of divine impassibility in Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus.

This alone would suffice to show that Coyne never spent "years" studying theology. Even had Coyne not shown the basics of Christian theology to be news to him in his previous posts, this would be enough.

A New Trend in the Sciences: Making Things Up

So let's recap. Jerry Coyne claims he has spent years reading theology. Then Coyne goes on to say that he's never heard anyone say that God is impassible. But divine impassibility is held by every major orthodox theologian up to the eighteenth century. It's rejected as a heresy at least as far back as the second century!

Coyne is just making things up. This, it turns out, is the new trend among scientists. Marc Hauser, a famous evolutionary biologist at Harvard, was discovered to have fabricated research data. Hauser's career, incidentally, was largely focused on claiming primates had many human-like cognitive functions.

Another recent case, also at Harvard and also involving a biologist, involved an influential paper in stem-cell research written by Haruko Obokata.

I've wondered in the past how Coyne, as a trained biologist, could have total disregard for the data and for intellectual rigor when it comes to matters of religion. Perhaps, though, it is the case that his sloppy reasoning, refusal to revise his views in light of contrary evidence, and his fabrications concerning his past work are actually bad habits that come from certain sectors of the sciences.

A few years' training in the methods of theology might do wonders for the quality of Coyne's thinking.

Jerry Coyne, Theologian

Anyone who wishes to assess Jerry Coyne's credibility may wish to start with his claim that "I spent several years reading theology ...." And elsewhere, Coyne invokes his "extensive incursions into theology and science."

Statements Coyne has made subsequent to this claim make it about as credible as Al Gore's invention of the internet. Let's consider a few:

Coyne claims that the Roman Catholic Catechism "hardly paints the picture of God as a ground of being ...." But of course, the Catechism directly portrays God as the source of being, not only in the sense that he initially created all things, but also that he sustains them in their being. Paragraph 301 says that God "not only gives [finite things] being and existence, but also, and at every moment, upholds and sustains them in being ...."

Coyne claims that "the Christian morality tale of the crucifixion and resurrection" involves "God turning himself into his son ...." Of course, Christians don't believe that "God turned himself into his son." The notion that God turns himself into his son is modalism, which Christian orthodoxy has always rejected as a heresy.

Coyne claims that "the theological notion of original sin didn’t arise until several centuries after Jesus supposedly lived ...." St. Paul, of course, stated "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come."

What has got Coyne confused is that some claim that the predominate interpretation of original sin in the West arose with Augustine. Even if that is true, that's just one way of understanding Paul's notion of original sin. And even if Paul hadn't considered original sin theologically in Romans and Corinthians, Irenaeus wrote about it in his Against Heresies around 180 AD--hardly "several centuries" after Jesus' life.

Coyne thinks St. Thomas Aquinas is a "Church Father." But of course, the period of the church fathers was the period before the Scholastic age. St. Thomas Aquinas is as much a church father as Einstein is a renaissance natural philosopher.

Coyne claims that "if there was a conflict" between the metaphorical and literal sense of Scripture, "people like Aquinas and Augustine" took the literal sense over the metaphorical sense. Augustine, of course, rejected a literal six-day creation, and said that when statements in Scripture about the physical world conflict with reason, those statements in Scripture should be construed non-literally.* (Coyne is also unaware that for Aquinas, metaphor is one type under the literal sense.)

Coyne claims that the notion of "God [as] the unconditioned cause of reality ...," and as "what grounds the existence of every contingent thing" is not how "Aquinas, Luther, [and] Augustine" saw God. This one is quite baffling: any theologian who believes in the doctrine of creation believes that the universe exists because God created it, and would not have existed had God not created it. Aquinas, Luther, and Augustine all held to a doctrine of creation. Furthermore, they all held that God sustains the universe in its existence. See for example, Augustine's Confessions, VII, 7. Or take Aquinas, who said "every being in any way existing is from God.... [A]ll beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation." And again: "Now it has been shown above (44, 1,2), that nothing can be, unless it is from God, Who is the universal cause of all being. Hence it is necessary to say that God brings things into being from nothing."

In fact, virtually every instance where Coyne describes the beliefs of Christians or of theologians he does so inaccurately. I'm not necessarily saying Coyne is lying about spending years reading theology. There is one other alternative: the he cannot understand basic theological claims well enough to restate them. But this is no ordinary misunderstanding. When I read Paul Cohen's proof that the continuum hypothesis is independent of the ZFC axioms, I know that I do not understand what Cohen is saying. Because I know this, I would not assert my own misunderstanding. Coyne, on the other hand, doesn't seem to know enough to know that he doesn't understand.

For instance, it could be that Coyne reads a Christian account of the Incarnation (saying something like "the Word of God became flesh by the power of the Holy Spirit"), he is only able to conceive this as the claim that "God became his son." This is not what is objectively on the page of course, but that is not the point. It may be the case that Coyne's mind experiences some kind of process whereby semantic content Coyne receives is so altered that he literally cannot perceive the content on the page in front of him, nor understand why it is that others do understand what is said.

Or Coyne it could be that Coyne was simply making the "years of theology" thing up. In the end it doesn't much matter.



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* The quote is: "[I]f anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical world] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation."

Jerry Coyne's Precambrian Rabbits

When last we left Jerry Coyne, we had coined the term "coyning, v." to mean attempting to disprove the arguments in a book without having read it. Apparently determined to clear his name, Coyne has been reading David Hart's new book and writing about it, to somewhat comic effect.

Coyne's arguments are deeply premised in his facile understanding of religion, despite his claim to have spent years studying theology. For example, Coyne identifies the claim that God refers to the "Ground of All Being" (Coyne's words) is a notion that begins with modern theologians such as Tillich. This claim is, of course, falsifiable--and false.

Just as a pre-Cambrian rabbit would falsify the current account of evolutionary history, so a statement by a pre-Modern theologian would disprove Coyne's "history of dogma." And Coyne's pre-Cambrian positively teems with rabbits.

John of Damascus, born in 676 AD, said of God:

God does not belong to the class of existing things: not that he has no existence, but that he is above existing things, nay even above existence itself.

And John of Damascus offers this as a summary of the Christian theologians who lived before him. This is well known to anyone who has studied the history of theology. One of the most famous aspects of the theology of Augustine and Aquinas is their claim that God is Being, the ground of all beings. In fact, the view that God is a particular being is a distinctively modern view, peddled by the likes of William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga.

So the question is this: will Coyne revise his position in light of the evidence falsifying it? Or is his ignorance indefatigable? Will he hold on to his faith that the notion of God as the ground of being is modern, in spite of the evidence disproving it?

My suspicion--and I am happy to shown wrong--is that Coyne faith is so desperate that he will hold onto his beliefs even after they have been falsified. And if he does so, he will have proven that his supposed commitment to evidence is a smokescreen that hides a blind faith.

P.Z. Myers' Corrections Keep Rolling In

P.Z. Myers has corrected just about everything in his recent response except for his coprophagia. However, there are still two glaring errors left to fix.

1. P.Z. Myers claims that I am an intelligent design apologist. I am not. In fact I have written refutations of ID theory that date back to my college days. For example, in 2008 I wrote:

“ID theorists are guilty of procedural errors, and the scientific community has already focused on the specific scientific errors…. ID as an intellectual movement has its essence in ontological ambiguity and methodological error.”

2. P.Z. Myers thinks that Jerry Coyne did not make conclusions about David B. Hart's arguments in his book The Experience of God. Instead, Myers says, he made conclusions merely about reviewers of the book, which he had read, rather than Hart, who he had not read.

This too can be disproved by simple quotations. Here's Jerry Coyne, making conclusions about Hart's arguments:

• "Hart’s god, therefore, is immune to refutation."
• "Hart’s argument fails in the only way it can be tested."
• "Hart’s arguments are simply made-up stuff, and even though he’s smart and uses big words, there is no more evidence for his God than there is for the anthropomorphic Gods of Alvin Plantinga, Pat Robertson, and Rick Warren."
• "People like Hart, despite their intelligence, have no more handle on the nature of God than do Joe and Sally in the street."

But, on second thought, perhaps its best that P.Z. Myers not correct these mistakes. If he did, the only thing left would be his portrayal of his own coprophagia. Better factual errors, perhaps, than his revolting portrayal of his dietary adventures.

The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It: A Review of Free Will, by Sam Harris, Part III

Click here to see Part I of this review and here to see Part II

Much of Harris' argument against free will is fueled by assertions--assertions that simply assume what he is trying to prove. In fact, much of his case consists of sheer bluff, as if saying what he is trying to prove with enough bravado is sufficient to prove his case:

"There is," he says, "simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this." No denying this. Check. "There is no question that (most, if not all) mental events are the product of physical events." No question. Got it. "My mental life is simply given to me by the cosmos." Right. Blessed be the Almighty Cosmos.

He argues that we are not aware of the neurological events that produce our thoughts, moods, perceptions, and behavior, and that, since we are not aware of them, they must produce our thoughts. Not only does this not logically follow, it simply assumes that these things are "produced" by neurological events, when this is the very point at issue.

He is singularly impressed with the evidence that neurological events seem to precede the thoughts they "produce":

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain's motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move ... More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict that 80 percent accuracy a person's decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it.

"These findings," he adds, "are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions." Why? He argues that this shows that "some moments before you are aware of what you will do next, your brain has already determined what you will do." But before we can decide what we can infer from the evidence we have to ask exactly what the evidence is.

He appears to be saying that there are two chemical events being detected by scientific instruments: one which is the physical event that causes the decision, and one which is the physical event that constitutes our awareness that we are making the decision.

The first question is how we know which event--the one that Harris identifies as pre-determinative and the one that he identifies as the awareness of making the decision--is the decision itself. He seems to identify the latter event--the awareness of the decision--as the decision itself. But an awareness of a decision isn't necessarily the decision. In fact, on the face of it, it would make more sense to think that the awareness of making a decision is a separate act from the decision itself. The mental act of thinking about something and the mental act of thinking about your mental act of thinking about something would clearly be two mental acts.

In other words, by what reasoning does he say that the first chemical event is pre-determinative and the second what is pre-determined? Why couldn't the first event be the decision and the second the awareness that we have made the decision? Given Harris' penchant for making assumptions he has not justified, it seems like we are justified in being suspicious. There may be some reason to interpret it the way he does, but he does not give us enough information to know what it is. It is not even clear that he has considered any alternative interpretation than the one that favors his case.

So when Harris asks us what we should think about a situation (which he clearly considers possible) in which   experimenters could know, a split second before you made it, what your decision would be, we could simply ask what justifies them in thinking that the neurological event they had thought was the event which caused the decision was not the decision itself, and the latter the neurological event co-incident with awareness of the decision they had just made?

In fact, one question is whether we can ever reliably know the answer to this question at all.

And then Harris makes this rather strange statement:

Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors.

You would? Think of what would be necessary, if what Harris says here is true, to drive a car: You would need to be aware of all the factors that make the car go, and you would have to have complete control over them. Now I'm pretty sure most people on the road have no clue how their engine was put together or how it works, and they have very little control over how these factors work together at any given moment. But they seem to get around just fine. In fact, Harris' assertion here is just silly.

Then Harris makes statements which are simply ludicrous. He says, "If you don't know what your soul is going to do next, you are not in control." Huh? You have to know what your decision is before you make it in order for it to be a free will decision? Why? And if this is the case, then what about the neurological event that Harris would say would have to constitute the knowledge of what the decision will be? Would we need to know what that knowledge would be before we had it too? How far back do we need to go?

Then there are the statements full import of which one must meditate on for long periods of time in highly oxygenated air in order to fully appreciate: "A voluntary action," he says, "is accompanied by the felt intention to carry it out." No kidding? Really? "We do not know what we intend to do until the intention arises." No! Get out!

And all this in preparation for the next chapter, in which we are told that it is those who believe in free will who are not being rational.

To be continued in Part IV.

The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It: A review of Free Will, by Sam Harris, Part I

This is the first part in a week-long series of posts on Sam Harris' recent book, Free Will:

In a recent article in Britain's New Statesman, Steven Poole lamented the glut of what he calls "neurotrash"--the attempt to explain every human thought and action in terms of neuroscience and cognitive psychology:

An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.

Free Will, by Sam Harris, must now take its place in this plague of panegyrics to the pre-frontal cortex.

The first thing we must get clear is something that Harris himself, given his thesis, must certainly agree with: he had no choice in writing this book. But it has little to do with the neurological state of his brain. He operates under a necessity only a little less deterministic: the necessity that follows on the nature of his dogma.

As an atheistic materialist, Harris really has no choice but to champion the idea that free will is a delusion. The materialist, said Chesterton, "is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle." Materialists like Harris keep asking why we make the decisions we do, and what other explanation there could be than the physiological. The answer, of course, is the psychological, the philosophical, the whimsical, and about a thousand others.

But these violate the central tenets of his narrow atheistic dogma, and so have been dealt with severely by his materialistic philosophical Inquisition.

There is something ironic about the position of atheists like Harris on issues like this: they claim that their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic). Their belief is the consequent, in a ground/consequent relation between their evidence and their conclusion. But their very stated position is that any mental state--including their position on this issue-- is the effect of a physical, not logical cause.

By their own logic, it isn't logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if they are not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent which must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order.

And this is not only a mortal consequence for Harris as the one trying to prove his point, it is also problematic from the reader's perspective: If we are convinced by Harris's logic, we would have to consider this conviction as something determined not by the rational strength of his logic, but by the entirely irrational arrangement of the chemicals in our brains. They might, as Harris would have to say, coincide, but their relation would be completely arbitrary. If prior physical states are all that determine our beliefs, that any one physical state is no more rational than any other. It isn't rational or irrational, it just is.

If what Harris says is true, then our assent to what we view as the rational strength of his position may appear to us to involve our choice to assent or not to assent to his ostensibly rational argument, but (again, if it is true) in truth cannot be any such thing, since we do not have that choice--or any other.

Indeed, it is hard to see how, if free will is an illusion, we could ever know it.

But this complication does not appear to have occurred to Harris, so let us confine ourselves on those that have occurred to him and see what we can make of them.

To be continued in Part II

Lawrence Krauss Don't Know Nothing: A review of "A Universe from Nothing"

The philosopher Martin Heidegger has been often (and not entirely unjustly) ridiculed for having once said, "The Nothing nothings." Science, we have been told, is scrupulous in its avoidance of this kind of meaningless gibberish. Science is clear and precise. So it is ironic that Case Western Reserve cosmologist Krauss now comes to us with the equally inscrutible "The Nothing somethings."

Krauss' A Universe from Nothing is yet another in a series of New Athiest tracts that have come out in recent years, all attempting to make the case for the scientistic pretense that science has superseded philosophy and theology, and that the latter discipline is no longer necessary. And, like most other New Atheist books, it only ends up proving just how necessary these disciplines are--and how naive is the view that science is some sort of universal intellectual elixir that can carry the weight of both scientific and philosophical inquiry.

The book takes the reader on a tour of the universe, or rather, a tour of the contemporary cosmological view of the universe (scientist like Krauss have been known to confuse the two). It is, of course, an imaginary place, existing only in the minds of contemporary cosmologists, although, claims Krauss, we have every reason to believe it exists in reality--if only, by believing it, he doesn't have to believe all that business about God.

The ancient philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides disagreed over the nature of the universe, Heraclitus saying there was only change, and Parmenides that there was only permanence. The history of science has always had a noticeable likeness to a Heraclitean stream: you can never step into the same one twice. But while cosmology, like the state of what it purports to describe, is always in a state of flux, Krauss, like most other scientists before him, is convinced that his view is the permanent one.

Science is Heraclitean; scientists are Parmedian. Undoubtedly, the scientist who comes along next and overturns Krauss' view will be equally confident in the permanence of his position.

The cosmological tour Krauss gives us, which is sandwiched in between the preface and the latter part of the book which seem to contain the central argument of the book, is not only not particularly lucid in its own right, but seems to have little to do with his argument.

And what is the central argument?

Well, if one were to read the cover of the book, he would come away with the distinct impression that the book has something to do with answering the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" That impression is hard to shake when there, staring at you on the front cover is the subtitle, "Why there is something rather than nothing."

And this impression is given some weight when Krauss says, in the preface:

The purpose of this book is simple. I want to show how modern science, in various guises, can address and is addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing: The answers that have been obtained ... all suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem. Indeed, something from nothing may have been required for the universe to come into being. Moreover, all signs suggest that this is how our universe could have arisen.

It is rather curious for someone who claims to be manning the barricades of Reason in defiance of the irrational religious hordes to infer from the fact that his theory requires the universe come from nothing, that the universe therefore must do so (Would that simply having a theory about the universe ipso facto confered necessity on a theory's own assumptions about it).

In the somewhat embarrassing recent interview by Ross Anderson in The Atlantic, Krauss begins dissembling about this in the face of Anderson's questions about what, exactly, he's arguing in the book. When Anderson presses him on whether the book is actually trying to answer the question of whether something can come from nothing, Krauss backpedals, saying "Well, if that hook gets you into the book that's great. But in all seriousness, I never make that claim. In fact, in the preface I tried to be really clear that you can keep asking 'Why?' forever. At some level there might be ultimate questions that we can't answer, but if we can answer the 'How?' questions, we should, because those are the questions that matter."

"Never make that claim"? He not only makes the claim, he makes it in the very subtitle of the book.

In fact, the physics in the book is not half as head-spinning as the rhetorical contortions Krauss engages in about what exactly the book is for. I don't mind reading about quantum leaps, I just wish the author wouldn't engage in them in the course of his actual arguments.

Krauss' Redefinition of 'nothing'
First, Krauss simply takes the concept "nothing" and gives it a definition that conveniently avoids all the difficulties Krauss claims to be resolving in the book. Nothing, it turns out, is, for Krauss, not nothing. He blasts philosophers and theologians, who have the temerity to define "nothing" as, well, nothing.

[N]othing upsets philosophers and theologians who disagree with me more than the notion that I, as a scientist, do not truly understand "nothing" ... 

"Nothing," they insist, is not any of the things I discuss. Nothing is "nonbeing," in some vague and ill-defined sense ... 

But therein, in my opinion, lies the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy. For surely "nothing" is every bit as physical as "something," especially if it is to be defined as the "absence of something."

He really can't understand where anyone would get the crazy idea that "nothing" means "no thing." What were they thinking?

By nothing, I do not mean nothing, but rather nothing, in this case, the nothingness we normally call empty space.

Apparently there is something about italics that allows you to engage in equivocation with impunity. In fact, in Krauss' rhetorical shell game, the definition of "nothing" bears a striking resemblance to "something." And his discussion of the traditional philosophical and theological positions on nothingness is simply incoherent. He clearly has no familiarity with the philosophical or theological views on the subject, characterizing them in one way in one paragraph, and a different way in the next. It's kind of hard to dispute your opponent if you don't know what your opponents position actually is from one paragraph to another.

After criticizing philosophers and theologians for thinking that "nothing" means the lack of anything, he then digs himself in deeper by misportraying them too as having asserted that nothing is, in fact, something, namely, empty space:

A century ago, had one described "nothing" as referring to purely empty space, possessing no real material entity, this might have received little argument. But the results of the past century have taught us that empty space is in fact far from the inviolate nothingness that we presupposed before we learned more about how nature works.

Huh? Who is he talking about here? What philosopher describes nothing as simply "empty space"? And even if they exist (or existed), do they constitute the whole of the philosophical tradition?

In fact, Krauss is completely ignorant of any of the necessary philosophical distinctions philosophers and theologians have employed to make sense of a concept like "nothing." Although it's hard to make out exactly what he's criticizing (largely because he clearly does not know himself), every once in a while you can vaguely recognize the stray hints of what he at least thinks he's referring to. In one place he refers to what is apparently the Aristotelian view that anything that has any potentiality cannot be nothing! Would that he actually understood Aristotle or St. Thomas whose view he attempts to criticize (the distinction between potentiality and actuality). As it is he fails because he has absolutely no clue what he's talking about.

What he does instead is to mischaracterize all such views as invoking God when, in fact, they don't do that at all--that, and arguing that philosophers have "changed the playing field" on the issue of "the nature of nothingness." Science per se has never addressed the nature of nothingness for the simple reason that it is not a scientific question. But Krauss has it in his head that by simply being a scientist and redefining "nothing" as "something" (the one thing that it absolutely, positively can't be), he has magically brought the question into the realm of science. In the process he acts as if he represents some kind of scientific tradition that has come to terms with the issue, when in fact, there is no such thing. In fact, his whole account of nothingness, as philosopher of physics David Albert pointed out in the devastating New York Times review of the book, makes not sense at all.

Veni, vidi, halicinatus est: "He came, he saw, he rambled incoherently."

In short, Krauss is philosophically and theologically illiterate, a condition that ill-equips him to criticize philosophers and theologians, a problem compounded by the fact that he doesn't realize it and wouldn't think it mattered if he did. It is also one which causes him, in addition, to mischaracterize the limits of the science he does know something about because the question of what science is or isn't is not a scientific question, but a philosophical one.

Changing the Question
Second, he reformulates the very idea of explanation in a way that relieves him of the trouble of answering the very question he claims to be answering. After just repeating, in chapter 9, his statement that he is going to answer the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" He then rewrites the question in a way that changes its essence:

At the same time, in science we have to particularly cautious about "why" questions. When we ask, "Why?" we usually mean "How?" If we can answer the latter, that generally suffices for our purposes ... Why implicitly suggests purpose, and when we try to understand the solar system in scientific terms, we do not generally ascribe purpose to it.

So I am going to assume that what this question really means to ask is, "How is there something rather than nothing?" "How" questions are really the only ones we can provide definitive answer to by studying nature, but because this sentence sounds much stranger to the ear, I hope you will forgive me if I something fall into the trap of appearing to discuss the more standard formulation when I am really trying to respond to the more specific "how" questions.

Appearing to discuss the more standard formulation? Not only does he "appear" to discuss it, he says in plain English that that is exactly what he is doing. In fact the paragraph just before this reads: "I want to return to the question I described at the beginning of this book: Why is there something rather than nothing?"

When once the reader is told in unambiguous terms that Krauss is going to address this question, he discovers that Krauss doesn't actually do this. It's not just that Krauss says he's going to do it and then doesn't; it's that he says he's going to do it, and then says, just as firmly (in the same book), that he's not going to do it.

If Krauss doesn't want anyone to mistake him for asking a "why" question, then a useful expedient would be to avoid telling people in the first place that that's exactly what he's going to do.

What are we to say about a book that keeps repeating what it is about, only to find out on p. 143 that the author is not doing that at all? At that point in the book it is so clear he is making a mess of his whole stated project that he throws up his hands and basically says, "And now for something completely different."

It works for Monty Python, but it's kind of hard to justify it in a science book.

On p. 134, Krauss quotes Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek, who has likened the science of string theory to throwing a dart against a blank wall and then, only afterward, drawing a target around it.

What Krauss doesn't seem to realize is that his own argument that science explains how something can come from nothing is of the same nature. His argument, though designed to prove that science can explain even the most intractable philosophical mysteries, only serves as a testimony of the prejudicial nature of his case, a case which he states in a way that, at one and the sane time, serves to guarantee that he can accomplish his purpose and yet prevents him from actually doing so.

Can science explain how something came from nothing?

One of the dogmas of the New Atheism is that science is superior to philosophy and theology as a means to truth--in every way, on every question. The trouble is, every time its exponents make a pronouncement based on this assumption, they get schooled by some philosopher or theologian on whatever non-scientific issue they have waded into, thinking that the only thing they needed was their science.

Just check out the exchanges between New Atheist biologist Jerry Coyne and Catholic philosopher Ed Feser if you want a good example.

Now we have New Atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss, whose new book A Universe from Nothing purports to explain how something came from nothing (as he defines it). My review of the book will be up this week, but in the meantime, there is philosopher David Albert's takedown of Krauss' book in the New York Times, which he summarizes as "the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb."

Of course the issue of where scientific explanation begins and ends is not, as scientists like Krauss seem to believe, a question in the field of science, but, ironically, in the field of philosophy, philosophy of science in particular. Albert points out one of the central flaws of Krauss's entire position:

It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electro­magnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.

...The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this ...and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.

But it's not like Krauss or any of the other New Atheists are actually going to pay any attention to the fact that their field of expertise has nothing to do with the questions they think they can use it to address. That would be an admission that the scientism they champion is completely bogus.

He also points out one of the central problems of the book, which is Krauss' definition of "nothing," which, it turns out, happens to be something, namely vacuum states:

But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-­theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! ... And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

The book is, indeed, a mess, which, of course, didn't stop fellow New Atheist Richard Dawkins from hailing the book. Read the rest here.

Atheists with judgmentalism issues

One of the reasons celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins says he refuses to debate Christian apologist William Lane Craig is that Craig, according to Dawkins, is "a deplorable apologist for genocide" because of Craig's explanation of the Old Testament passages on the Hebrew invasion of Canaan.

These atheists are so judgmental anymore. You'd think they believed in some absolute, universal morality or something.

Quiet Please. Atheist Zone.

Increasingly wimpy atheists, who apparently lay awake nights worrying that someone, somewhere might be having religious thoughts, have just had their nights rendered sleepless by a Kentucky appeals court. The court ruled that language in Kentucky's homeland security law "stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth" doesn't violate the state's constitution because, uh, you know, the same acknowledgement of God is in the preamble of the state's constitution.

Next thing you know atheists will be arguing that the Constitution is unconstitutional--which, come to think of it, is exactly what they were indirectly arguing in this case.

American Atheists, the cross-appellant in the suit, was suing because the law was causing them to suffer sleep disorders and "mental pain and anguish."

Many of us remember the good old days, when atheists didn't cower in fear at the mere mention of God. In fact, all that talk from the New Atheists about how brave they are because they face the world without the comfort of religion is kind of hard to square with atheist groups like this one whose tender psyches are reduced to a trembling puddle of emotions whenever they hear religious language.

They just don't make atheists like they used to.

On Ducking Debates: Is Dawkins really chickening out?

I don't normally comment on charges that the-fact-that-someone-won't-debate-someone-else-so-he-must-be-scared. You might not want to debate someone for a lot of reasons. But the recent dust-up over Richard Dawkin's refusal to debate Christian philosopher William Lane Craig just begs for comment. 


Dawkins said in the Guardian recently that he won't debate Craig despite Craig's challenge to meet him this month at Oxford. Dawkins gives several reasons for avoiding Craig, and none of them seem very convincing. And putting them all together doesn't add up to much either. 


Here is philosopher Victor Reppert, commenting on what indeed seems like Dawkins avoiding a debate because he's scared (and someone with Dawkin's lack of knowledge of philosophy ought to be):

Dawkins makes the claim that the theist is delusional, by which I take it he means that the case against theism is overwhelming. Yet he doesn't, in any serious way, engage any of the arguments in natural theology, and he seems to imply that it is beneath him to engage leading defenders of belief in the existence of God, and their arguments. I don't care whether he does it in a debate format or some other format, but somewhere, somehow, he needs to show that he knows how the Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Thomistic Cosmological Argument restrict the class of what needs a cause, so that a simplistic "Who made God" can't refute them in any direct way.

Craig is a leading defender of arguments for the existence of God. Regardless of whether some of his statements are morally repugnant, Dawkins needs to come to terms with him and those like him if he is to have any credibility with respect to his delusion charges. Putting his nose in the air with the "Courtier's Reply" does not replace confronting the actual relevant arguments.

Read the rest here.

Review of Edward Feser's Last Superstition

There is an excellent review of Edward Feser's The Last Superstition in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review by Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J. It contains a nice summary of Feser's book, which is the best refutation so far of the New Atheists philosophically vulnerable position:

The secularists and naturalists have created the myth that there is a war going on between science and religion. There never has been a war between religion and true science. In fact, the first universities were founded by the Church in the Middle Ages in connection with cathedral schools. The conflict is not scientific, but philosophical—that is, the philosophical interpretation of the results of scientific investigation. The atheists claim that everything in the universe can be explained without any reference to purpose, meaning and design. The atheists have to eliminate purpose from nature because purpose means striving for a definite end, and that implies intelligence. For the universe, that intelligence can only be God. Therefore atheists try to remove purpose and replace it with various forms of evolution, which has been called a “universal acid.” Feser states this well: “And the elimination of purpose and meaning from the modern conception of the material universe was not and is not a ‘result’ or ‘discovery’ of modern science, but rather a philosophical interpretation of the results of modern science which owes more to early modern secularist philosophers like Hobbes and Hume…than it does to the great scientists of the last few centuries” (11). He goes on to say that the war between science and religion is not a scientific or religious dispute, but a conflict between two “rival philosophical worldviews”—moderate realism and materialism. 

The author’s arguments are based on the certain metaphysical principles worked out by Aristotle and perfected by Aquinas, namely, the four causes that are involved in the production and motion of all material things: material, formal, efficient and final. The final cause it the most important for, without it, no agent would act. Aquinas said that the final cause is “the cause of causes.” Every agent acts for an end; to deny that is either stupid or perverse. Those who deny final causes are trying to persuade others that there are no final causes—that is their purpose. So they use final causality to deny it and that is a contradiction that should be obvious to any intelligent observer.

Read the rest here.

HT: Carl Olsen

Is P. Z. Myers a sorry excuse for an atheist?

In his "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," C. S. Lewis' senior devil Screwtape addresses a banquet of tempters in training and apologizes for the poor quality of the souls on which they are having to dine. "[I]t would be vain to deny," says Screwtape, "that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality. Not all the most skillful cookery of our tormentors could make them better than insipid."

Screwtape compares the souls of contemporary sinners unfavorably to those of bygone days:

Oh, to get one's teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII or even a Hitler! There was real crackling there, something to crunch; a rage, an egotism, a cruelty only just less robust than our own. It put up a delicious resistance to being devoured. It warmed your inwards when you'd got it down.

Scott Stephens makes a similar point--a point made earlier this year by David Bentley Hart--about the intellectual quality of modern atheists.

I have said many times before that the New Atheists are a pale imitation of the old atheists of late 19th and early 20th centuries who were not simply cultural barbarians, but men widely learned beyond science, most of whom actually understood much of what they criticized. The Thomas Huxleys and H. L. Menckens have, alas, been replaced by the likes of Myers and Richard Dawkins.

Huxley, of course, claimed to be an agnostic, an intellectual character George Barnard Shaw once called an atheist without the courage his convictions. But Huxley was just as much an enemy of the Church.

Where are the atheists now who can come with lines like Huxley's, "extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science like snakes around the cradle of Hercules"? Or Mencken's "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing"?

They were wrong, of course, but they were magnificently, gloriously wrong--unlike Myers and his ilk, who, when they go wrong (which is not infrequent), do it with an unfortunate lack of rhetorical sophistication. If you're going to be wrong, you should at least provide your audience with something to marvel at. To read Mencken's Treatise on the Gods is, if not to be philosophically impressed, at least to be wondered at for its creativity (he basically makes up the history of religious belief as he goes along).

When the old atheists missed, you could at least admire the impressive explosion, but when the New Atheists miss (which they do at least as often), you find yourself standing there disappointed, gazing on a logical dud.

When the old atheists fired a barb, you often found yourself tipping your hat. With the New Atheists, you just find yourself shaking your head. To read Myers is to have to wade knee high through sophomoric vitriol that someone like Mencken would scorned as juvenile, if not simply insipid.

They also had stouter constitutions, these paleo-atheists. Today's atheists--like the ones now suing the state of Kentucky over God language in its Homeland Security statute--have even taken to claiming to be emotionally traumatized by mentions of God. The expression "put on your man pants" suffered severe overuse in the last election, but if it has a legitimate use, it would be here.

No self-respecting atheist of yore would claim he experienced "mental pain and anguish" because of theism. He would instead have tried to inflict it on his theistic opponents.

Hand it to Myers, he at least tries to do this, if he doesn't exactly succeed.

In a new post at his blog, Myers complains about these unfavorable comparisons of him and his fellow New Atheists to the Great Atheists of Old:

This is such a dreary and dishonest approach; it involves puffing up dead or less popular atheists into demigods who strode the earth with cosmic seriousness, while anyone new and slightly less moribund is sneered at as inferior, the weak and enfeebled scions of a diminished age, and therefore deserving nothing but dismissal.

Well, at least he produced a mildly competent alliteration in that first sentence. And I do like the "strode the earth" bit. Oh, and the "scions of a diminished age" isn't too bad either.

Maybe there's hope.

But it's all downhill from there. Myers retorts that he and his New Atheist friends place greater stress on science--something he apparently thinks the old atheists knew nothing about:

I disagree — these New Atheists are simply basing their ideas more strongly on science, something the theistic critics don't seem to comprehend — and I don't consider them less than the Old Atheists, just different, and even there, we're all making the same argument that gods don't exist.

The point Myers seems to miss is that at least the Old Atheists knew enough about science to know the difference between science and philosophy, a distinction people like Myers, Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking run roughshod over without apparent notice. In fact, Myers seems to have a generally troubled relationship with philosophy, the one discipline competence in which is required to conduct the kind of discussion in which he thinks he is competent to engage.

So Myers, seemingly unequipped with a philosophy gland, beats his chest and let's loose the atheist yell which he hopes will resound throughout the religious forest, attracting an opponent:

And if the New Atheists are such scrawny, flabby specimens, why aren't you simply clobbering us with those powerful arguments you developed to crush our predecessors?

Um, maybe because he wouldn't recognize a powerful argument if it had a sign saying "Powerful Argument Here" on it? There are a multitude of arguments offered by thinkers far more substantive than Myers that have been presented over the last 2,000, and the fact that Myers isn't impressed with them tells us very little about the quality of the arguments themselves. They tell us more about Myers.

Myers has confronted the theistic enemy before, only to come away scratching his head. He complains that Stephens doesn't offer any real arguments and then compares him in this regard to Terry Eagleton and David Bentley Hart.

It's interesting that he should mention Hart, who is one of the theists Myers has ham-handedly tried to confront, only to walk away thinking he has encountered the enemy successfully when in reality he has only encountered his own philosophical inadequacies.

The technique Myers and others (I'm thinking especially of Ed Brayton here) use is this: they troll the Internet for stupid things Christians say, present them to their readers as representative of theistic thought, shoot them down, and then high five each other as if they had really accomplished something. Call it the Shooting Fish in a Barrel Method of atheistic apologetics.

It's sort of like going down to the local pay lake, catching a big fish and thinking that you're God's gift to sportsmanship.

If he were really interested in competent theistic opposition he could go over to Frank Beckwith's blog--or Ed Feser's. But no. That would require some actual intellectual exertion. Or maybe it's because every time he does do this, he simply embarrasses himself.

As soon as Myers encounters a competent thinker like Hart, he seems to experience some sort of intellectual breakdown that causes him to rhetorically wander around mumbling imprecations against his target that indicate he knows nothing about what the person is talking about or simply become oblivious to what the person is saying, not understanding the person' simplest statements.

Myers recent responses to two of Myers posts on Hart have been dealt with in detail by my co-blogger Thomas here and here. But suffice it to say they are not exactly inspiring intellectual displays.

Nope. Stephens is right. They just don't make atheists like they used to.

The anatomy of a bad atheist argument

There is one argument against religious belief that New Atheist types love to employ, that is not only a bad argument, but one in which I can't imagine even the philosophically naive bunch that make up the New Atheist would see any rational force.

I am reading Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, a book which expends a great amount of effort doing everything but what the title promises. And one of the many things he mentions that have nothing to do with the central claim he makes in the book is this argument:

There are many revealed religious available ... the idea that each of these mutually contradictory doctrines is inerrant remains a logical impossibility.

Harris uses the term "inerrant" here, but it makes no real difference to simply use the term "true," as many versions of this argument do. But pay careful attention to the term "each" in this statement. Does it mean "any particular one"? Or does it mean "all"?

If it means "all," then it is sound argument: All of the religions that make truth claims that are mutually exclusive cannot be true at the same time in the same world. But if it means "any particular one," then the argument is not sound, since it is not logically contradictory to say that one is true and the others are not, which is what each individual one (with the exception of something like Bahai, which makes the former claim) asserts.

Harris and other New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins rely on an equivocation of this term "each" to make their argument. They think that to say that "all religions cannot be true at the same time in the same world" means the same thing as "no one of them could be true at the same time in the same world." But these are two entirely different statements. And they nowhere state how you get from one to the other.

Can't we think of numerous questions on which there is a plurality of opinion as to what is true and what is false? In fact, one wonders how Harris would react to the same argument aimed at his own cherished science. There are numerous scientific controversies that have attracted mutually exclusive explanations. Is each of them false simply by virtue of the fact, that there are others that logically contradict it?

There is now a debate over Global Warming and whether it is caused by humans are not. There are two mutually exclusive sides--one saying it is, and one saying it isn't. Under the argument of Harris and the New Atheists, neither of these positions can be true.

There is a controversy going on about whether Intelligent Design can be proven scientifically. There are two mutually exclusive sides--one saying it can, and one saying it can't. Under the atheist argument, neither one can be true.

There is a controversy over whether same-sex marriage is constitutional. There are two mutually exclusive sides in the debate: one argues it is, one that it isn't. Under this argument, both must be rejected.

I could go on. But the point is, this argument makes absolutely no sense, and it's a measure of the philosophical sophistication of the New Atheists that they think it does.

Facebook readers can access "Vital Remnants," Martin Cothran's weblog on politics and culture here.

Jerry Coyne's Scientific Faith: Is science more rational than religion? Part I

One of the recurrent themes in the rhetorical arsenal of the New Atheism is that science is rational and religion is not. This dogma is repeated by New Atheist writers as if it were a part of their creed, which, of course, it is.

The dogma is articulated once again by one of its loudest advocates on the Internet, biologist Jerry Coyne in yesterday's article in USA Today. I say "articulated rather than "argued" because, like most dogmas, it is never never actually argued for, but only asserted. If you keep up with the proclamations of atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Jason Rosenhouse, P. Z. Myers, and Sean Carroll, you will see this canard invoked repeatedly in their assertions that religion and science are mutually exclusive. It is utilized almost as if it were an incantation.

If scientific rationalists had prayer wheels, this is the mantra they would chant.

Science and faith are fundamentally incompatible, and for precisely the same reason that irrationality and rationality are incompatible. They are different forms of inquiry, with only one, science, equipped to find real truth.

This is just another form of the scientistic creed: Credo in scientiam omnipotentem.

Part of Coyne's problem is that he is haunted by the ghost of scientist Stephen Jay Gould. Gould was the godfather of what he and his fellow atheists derisively call "Accommodationism," the view that science and religion are two "non-overlapping magisteria"--two realms of thought and practice that simply have nothing to do with each other. It is the modern rendition of Sigar of Brabant's medieval doctrine of Two Truths: that the truths of faith and the truths of religion operate in complete independence of one another.

But in a panicked response to this Gouldish apparition, Coyne and other New Atheists take refuge at the other extreme--in the idea that religion and science not only overlap, but are mutually exclusive. Like many such arguments against religion as a legitimate mode of thought, Coyne's tangles himself up in his own reasoning--an ironic eventuality given the fact that it is on the ground of rationality itself that Coyne claims to set up his headquarters.

Coyne prosecutes his case on this point (in the USA Today piece and elsewhere) in two ways: the first is to simply confound scientific methodology with reason; the second is to simply assert that religion is illogical and non-evidential. Regarding the first of these, Coyne never really articulates what definition of reason he is employing in his critique--and, indeed, his confusion may be less a confusion between two terms than it is a general confusion about what reason is.

In a New Republic article last year, Coyne invokes something he calls "secular reason." No one is exactly sure what this "secular reason" is, since he appears to have invented it himself. But it apparently includes "science, but also embraces moral and political philosophy, mathematics, logic, history, journalism, and social science--every areas that requires us to have good reasons for what we believe." In other words, the criterion each of the disciplines on his list meets--and that religion does not--is the employment of reasons to justify them.

Note the lack of an actual argument. Assertion will do in a pinch.

In fact, for someone who makes such a show of being rational, Coyne displays a noticeable lack of familiarity with what reason consists of and what it entails. Indeed, he seems largely unacquainted with the basic nature of logic. Let's join Coyne in progress as he makes his closing argument in the case that science and religion are incompatible in his New Republic article:

It would appear, then, that one cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time. That alleged synthesis requires that with one part of your brain you accept only those things that are tested and supported by agreed-upon evidence, logic, and reason, while with the other part of your brain you accept things that are unsupportable or even falsified. In other words, the price of philosophical harmony is cognitive dissonance. Accepting both science and conventional faith leaves you with a double standard: rational on the origin of blood clotting, irrational on the Resurrection; rational on dinosaurs, irrational on virgin births.

We'll cut him some slack on his knowledge of neuroscience and assume he is speaking figuratively, but clearly Coyne has no understanding of the difference between the formal requirements of logic and their relation to the assumptions involved in reasoning. Formally speaking, what you reason about has little to do with how well you may reason--or whether you reason at all. As Chesterton once pointed out,

Logic and truth, as a matter of fact, have very little to do with each other. Logic is concerned merely with the fidelity and accuracy with which a certain process is performed, a process which can be performed with any materials, with any assumption. You can be as logical about griffins and basilisks as about sheep and pigs.

You can be as rational about astronomy as about astrophysics, and just as irrational about the Fibonacci Sequence as about fortune telling. But these distinctions mean little to Coyne, whose thinking appears to operate on the basis of some dreamy connection he imagines to exist between science and rationality that he has caught by contagion from the his atheist brethren.

If you're going to talk about whether you can be coherently religious and scientific at the same time, you ought to at least be coherent when you address the question. Coyne clearly has trouble making this fundamental distinction between the content and the process of reasoning, a distinction a mere journalist like Chesterton could employ with ease:

On the assumption that a man has two ears, it is good logic that three men have six ears, but on the assumption that a man has four ears, it is equally good logic that three men have twelve. And the power of seeing how many ears the average man, as a fact, possesses, the power of counting a gentleman's ears accurately and without mathematical confusion, is not a logical thing but a primary and direct experience, like a physical sense, like a religious vision. The power of counting ears may be limited by a blow on the head; it may be disturbed and even augmented by two bottles of champagne; but it cannot be affected by argument.

Logic has again and again been expended, and expended most brilliantly and effectively, on things that do not exist at all. There is far more logic, more sustained consistency of the mind, in the science of heraldry than in the science of biology. There is more logic in Alice in Wonderland than in the Statute Book or the Blue Books.

You can disagree with religion. You can argue with the evidence for it. You can say it's nonsense. But to say it's not rational is simply an ignorant statement. To say in the first place that religion does not employ reason is simply to disregard the whole history of religious thought. There are more syllogisms in a page of St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas than in whole scientific treatises. In fact, a freshman student at the University of Paris in the 13th century could reason circles around Coyne and his fellow atheists without breaking a sweat.

It is interesting to note that the most thoroughly Christian period of civilization, the late Middle Ages, was also the most concerned with logic. Not only was it rational, it was rational to a fault. The Christian intellectualism of the later Middle Ages was remarkable, not for its lack of rationality, but its obsession with it. The criticism often heard about debates over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin was directed, not at people who didn't use logic, but people who used it to the exclusion of almost all else--including, in a few cases, common sense.

In his magisterial Science and the Modern World, philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead goes so far as to call the Middle Ages a "rationalist orgy." Medieval thinkers such as Duns Scotus, the "Subtle Doctor," were criticized for going overboard on their application of reason, not for disregarding it.

But this, clearly, is not Coyne's problem.

To be continued...

P. Z. Myers: Not Understanding Even the Simple Things

P. Z. Myers thinks he’s starting to understand David Bentley Hart. Is it because he’s studied Hart’s work on the meaning of suffering in the context of the doctrine of evil as privatio boni? Has he read Hart’s comparison of Heidegger and St. Gregory of Nyssa’s ontology? Or maybe it’s more modest: maybe he’s studied up on the basic philosophic vocabulary used in the cosmological argument that had him completely baffled.

Nope. He’s read Hart’s new essay on Julian the Apostate, and he claims to have understood Hart’s worldview. But almost every claim in his post is flatly wrong.

Myers says that Hart has written “a column praising Julius the Apostate”, an article that not only praises him, but “heap[s] praise on him.” How he got this from Hart is a bit of a mystery. Here’s Hart’s judgment of him:

[W]hile he was a gifted ruler, his errors of judgment were legion, his hatred of the Christians often degenerated into childish spite, and he was destroyed more by callow egotism than by tragic hubris.

Myers adds that Hart “acknowledges” Julian’s intelligence. Here’s Hart on the subject of Julian’s intelligence:

Far from being any sort of rationalist, he was a particularly credulous religious enthusiast, who delighted in blood sacrifice, magic, astrology, and mystery; when he tried his hand at philosophy, the results were embarrassing.

Indeed, Hart claims that it is precisely Julian’s “naivete” that he finds interesting. There’s nothing particularly difficult about this essay: Hart doesn’t engage in much philosophy or theology at all. If Myers cannot even understand a whimsical essay that simply explicates the sensation of standing at a turning point in history where an old order is passing away, how credible is his claim to “tackle all the arguments for the existence of God"?

There are other silly falsehoods in Myer's post. Myers claims that Hart believes everything in the past was better, when Hart has written at length about the cruelty of the pre-Christian Classical world. Myers claims that the Middle Ages were a "trough" in terms of scientific progress, burdened by an "anti-scientific" Church, when in fact the Middle Ages were a time of great learning, sponsored by the Church; the Middle Ages were the time when science came into its own as a discipline (primarily because of the Aristotelian development in theology). The idea that the Middle Ages were a dark time for science or that the Church bore down on scientists is a well-known myth, and I think it not unlikely that Myers will soon be telling us that Christians believed in a flat earth. These falsehoods are simply Myers' historical ignorance on display.

Myers' central claim about Hart's piece is that Hart believes that:

Substance is unimportant, just so long as he believed. It's a strange world the modern defenders of religion live in, where they've given up hope in fighting for the specifics of their dogma, and are reduced to desperately hoping that someone somewhere will be nestled in a delusion of some kind.

Where Myers got this is a mystery. The claim that Hart doesn't believe in fighting for the specifics of dogma is absurd given Hart's well known track record of harshly criticizing other theologians over theological matters. Further, this claim contradicts Myers' own (atrociously misguided) summary of Hart's essay: Myers at least recognized that Hart "doesn't admire [Julian] for his views" (one of the very few propositions in Myers post that is correct). So where does the claim come from?

My own view is that he's just making it up. Myers has no concept of rigor for any kind of inquiry outside biology (and for all I know, not even in biology). He claims to attack every formulation of the arguments for the existence of God, yet he expresses dismay upon encountering the basic terminology. His description of Hart's assessment of Julian is directly contrary to Hart's own words. He thinks the Middle Ages were a dark time for science, overrun by an anti-scientific Church. And so on.

Which just gets me back to my original point: Myers shouldn't be taken seriously.

P. Z. Myer's Tacit Admission: I Shouldn't be Taken Seriously by Philosophers

This much, at least, can be reasonably inferred from his recent post on Pharyngula, a response to David Hart's new essay in First Things. Despite Myers' claim that he attacks all arguments for the existence of God, he frankly admits that he does not comprehend the terms employed in the cosmological proof for God's existence: "composite", "contingent", "finite", "temporal", "absolute plenitude of being", and so on.

These terms are, of course, slightly technical; but they are the basic vocabulary used in metaphysics in general, and the cosmological argument in particular. Hart is prone to unusual verbiage, but this is simply not the case here. Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the cosmological argument from the original texts knows these basic terms.

"Composite" just means a thing composed of matter and form; two elementary concepts from Aristotle's metaphysics. "Contingent" is simply a being that might exist or might not, but doesn't exist necessarily. "Finite" simply signifies that a thing is circumscribed within limits. "Temporal" signifies that a thing is subject to change over time. "Absolute plenitude of being" is simply a reference to God as pure actuality in Book VIII of Aristotle's Physics. This is Philosophy 101 level material.

P. Z. Myers' bafflement indicates that he has not made the slightest effort to familiarize himself with the cosmological arguments as it appears in the primary texts or, for that matter, anywhere. Even Richard Dawkins would have made the effort to scurry on over to infidels.org, so that he could at least find the (incorrect) stock response. Myers didn't even bother to do a quick Google search.

I won't say the cosmological argument is easy; it certainly can be formulated in many ways, and implicates the deepest questions of ontology (as I've written about before here). In fact, my only complaint about Hart's piece is that he doesn't make the cosmological argument, he just describes it in an oversimplified way. It's a bit as though P. Z. Myers explains to someone that evolution is a biological process whereby fitter animals survive, speciation occurs, and the animal kingdom gets more complex over time, on which his interlocutor would express dismay that anyone could possibly understand the concepts "fitness", "speciation", or biological complexity. Myers would no doubt end the conversation there, and instruct his interlocutor to at least get the basic ideas down so that the subject may be intelligently discussed.

The same thing is going on in Myers post. He doesn't understand the most basic of the philosophic issues involved, and he cannot expect competent philosophers or theologians to take him seriously. Why should they? They can't read the Physics for him; he must do that for himself.

What would Myers think of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason? Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit? Heidegger's Being and Time? If he can't get the concept of actuality straight, I can only imagine what he would think of transcendental idealism or an immanentalist ontology. Or what he would think of David Hart's academic philosophical writings (which are actually difficult).

In the end, Myers just proves Hart's point. Unlike the great atheists of yesterday, the neo-atheists don't have the faintest clue about the very arguments they claim to reject. Myers has the courtesy not to pretend that he does. For his honesty, I suppose, we should be grateful.

The atheistic pot calling the theistic kettle black

Philosopher Edward Feser, responding to Daniel Dennett's 1993 review of philosopher John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind, in which alleged philosopher Dennett complains about the "supremely confident" Searle characterizing naive materialism as "daft," "monumentally silly," and "obviously false":

A “supreme self-confidence” that condescendingly treats serious thinkers as “daft” and their views as “monumentally silly” and “obviously false” – why, one would almost think Dennett was describing the author of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon!

In fairness, though, there are some crucial differences between Searle and Dennett. Searle knows what he is talking about when he criticizes cognitive science. Dennett demonstrably does not know what he is talking about when he criticizes the traditional arguments for the existence of God. By Dennett’s own account, Searle has made “progress” by providing a book-length argument in defense of his objections to cognitive science. Dennett, by contrast, never progresses beyond a couple of pages of sophomoric objections aimed at straw men. Also, Searle’s funnier.

Read the rest here.

The Tortured Logic of the New Atheism

Given the number of comments on this post, I have moved it back up to the top of the blog, where it is scheduled to remain until the end of the week. I will also have some comments on this discussion in another post that should be up today and tomorrow.

From the new issue of The Classical Teacher Magazine

The atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once told the story of a cave in the East in which, for many years after the death of Buddha, visitors could still see his shadow:

God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be cast.— And we—we still must vanquish even his shadow!

Nietzsche was wrong about the death of God, but he was realistic about what the rejection of God implied, and he despised those who rejected God but refused to accept the logical implications of that unbelief. He may have been wrong, but at least he was consistent. In particular, he reviled those who rejected Christianity but refused to give up Christian morality. He sarcastically called such people “Englishmen,” because he saw the English of the Victorian period in which he lived as especially guilty of acknowledging the shadow of Christian morality in the wake of the death of the God in whom alone such morality could be justified.

One wonders what choice words Nietzsche would have for the new breed of atheists who now populate the bestseller lists. Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great are just several examples of the spate of books by prominent modern atheists, known as the “New Atheists,” that have climbed the bestseller charts with surprising ease over the last two or three years, all of whom purport to reject God, but who nevertheless cling to a form of Christian morality.

Nietzsche is not alone in his assumption that religion and morality are intimately bound together. It has long been assumed by most people that their moral beliefs are dependent upon religious conviction. “If there is no God,” asserts Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamozov, “then everything is possible.” A belief in morality, they think, must be undergirded by a belief in God.

But the New Atheists beg to differ. Morality, they say, has no need of God.

One of the most common problems in argument is agreeing on the question that is really in dispute. There are two ways in which this can be a problem. The first is when the terms are not clear. When we ask whether morality requires a religious foundation, for example, we should be very clear on what we mean by “morality.” Which virtues are we talking about when we ask this question?

There were, in fact, moral beliefs before Christianity came along. There are two kinds of virtue: the cardinal (or classical) virtues: Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Courage; and the theological (or Christian) virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity. The first four, the cardinal virtues, not only can be sustained without explicit religious belief; they in fact were. They arose in a world, not without religion, but without religions that said much about morality.

The cardinal virtues have also been called the “practical” virtues. They had mostly to do with getting along in life. The most familiar examples of this were Aesop’s Fables. Aesop was reputed to have been a Greek slave in a Roman household, and the ethics in his stories have to do exclusively with the practical virtues. Faith, Hope, and Charity are absent, but the practical virtues, particularly Prudence, are there in abundance. The tortoise knows the virtue of patience and determination and wins his race with the hare; the crane learns that, in serving the wicked, there is no reward; the boy who cries wolf learns that honesty is the best policy.

All these cases involve sheer self-preservation. This is of the essence of pagan morality: it is exclusively self-preservative or at least self-gratifying (and usually applied only to other members of one’s tribe or race). There is nothing wrong with the practical virtues, as long as we acknowledge them to be incomplete. They may be said to be “rational” virtues in the sense that we can identify reasons for practicing them; namely, that they will help us make it through life with less pain and more pleasure.

But there is nothing in Aesop like the parables of the Good Samaritan, or the Lost Sheep, or the Prodigal Son. The theological virtues are completely different from the practical or classical virtues in this: there is literally no practical reason for them. What purely self-preservative reason is there to act selflessly? Why love your neighbor if you can take from him and benefit yourself? Why would any shepherd, looking to benefit himself, lay down his very life for his sheep?

It is theoretically possible for the practical virtues to be rationally justified without a belief in God. But this is not the case with the theological virtues. The theological virtues cannot survive the abandonment of religion. And yet the New Atheists want to say that they can.

The problem with the atheist’s argument is that it confounds these two kinds of morality—the practical and the theological. A case in point is their argument that morality can be explained through a Darwinist view of evolution: morality, they say, has survivability value. Those who are moral are more likely to survive than those who aren’t. Therefore, those who are more moral are morely likely to survive than those who are less moral.

But how can evolution explain why we should treat others with selfless charity? How can evolution explain the survival value of seeing a beaten and half-dead man at the side of the road who cannot possibly do anything for us, and treating his wounds and taking care of him, and then giving two silver coins to the innkeeper and saying, “look after him”? How can this be said to have any survivability value, and what rational reason can we point to that justifies going and doing likewise?

Evolution cannot explain this.

The second problem in trying to determine the question at issue has to do with how the question is stated. The question is whether an atheist can rationally justify moral belief. The question is not whether athiests can be moral. This is a completely different question.

When, in his chapter, “The Roots of Morality: Why are We Good?,” Dawkins argues that morality is the product of evolution, he completely confuses the two questions. His argument is designed to explain why people are good; not why they should be good. It explains the physical cause, but does not provide the logical ground of their (or our) good behavior. It doesn’t provide a rational ground for being good; it only provides a historical explanation (and not a very convincing one) for why, in fact, we sometimes are.

But the process by which an act comes about can tell me nothing about whether or not it was a good or bad act, since bad acts are brought about by a process just like good acts are. I can explain the physical factors leading up to the Holocaust just like I can explain the physical factors leading up to Mother Theresa’s mission to the poor in Calcutta, India. But the chronology of these two events can tell me nothing about why one is bad and the other is good.

The past arrangement of molecules may tell me something about why I feel a certain way, but it tells me nothing about why I should feel a certain way.

New Atheists like Dawkins are either confused themselves about these distinctions, in which case they are not qualified to talk about morality, or they are clear about the distinctions but are counting on their listeners themselves being confused about them, in which case they are being deceptive.

If I am faced with a situation like that of the Good Samaritan, and I see a man lying by the side of the road who needs help, I can get no help from the argument of Dawkins and the neoatheists. Their theory can tell me nothing about whether I should help the man or whether I should simply go on about my business and not trouble myself with helping him. I can do either one and be justified in knowing that my genes have made me do it.

There are only two logical positions a person can hold on the issue of religion and morality. Here is the Christian argument:

If God does not exist, then morality cannot be justified
But morality can be justified
Therefore God must exist

Nietzsche and existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre agree to the first, or “major” premise but supply a different second, or “minor” premise, and take the argument in a different logical direction:

If God does not exist, then morality cannot be justified
God does not exist
Therefore, morality cannot be justified

Both of these arguments are equally logical: the Christian performs what, in logic is called a modus tollens, which is a way of reasoning negatively backwards; the existentialist performs what, in logic, is called a modus ponens, which is a way of reasoning affirmatively forwards. Both reasoning negatively backwards and reasoning affirmatively forward are logically valid.

The existentialist understands his predicament, which is why existentialists like Nietzsche and Sartre rejected Christian morality (and meaning and purpose) outright. They were wrong, but they were intellectually consistent.

The New Athiest, however, tries to deny the obvious. He questions the major premise: “If God does not exist, then morality cannot be justified.” He wants to have his philosophical cake and eat it too. But, as we have seen, he can find no competent argument to justify moral beliefs such as charity, but he holds them anyway.

He is an “Englishman.”