Another New Atheist setting his hair on fire

The 19th century mathematician and historian of philosophy Augustus DeMorgan once issued a warning for the scientist who tried to venture into metaphysics: "[W]hen he tries to look down his own throat with a candle in his hand," he said, he needs to "take care that he does not set his head on fire."

Despite the warning, scientists have been setting their hair on fire ever since. And with the onset of the New Atheists, the need for philosophical fire extinguishers has grown exponentially.

The result has been scientists who, rather than assent to the existence of God, will believe in almost anything. One example is multiple universes, recently proposed by, among others, physicist Stephen Hawking. The belief in this, we are told with a straight face, is more rational than believing in God.

This is not a new idea, of course, having already been thought up--and rejected--by the Greeks.

Another more recent example is Jerry Coyne, a biologist who regularly practices philosophy without a license. He wrote an opinion piece for USA Today a month or so back wherein he announced to the world that free will was an illusion. Coyne's intellectual gears too are stuck in an earlier time, in his case, the early 20th century positivistic materialism that most philosophers themselves--including most of those who came up with the idea in the first place--abandoned back about the 1960s.

But Jerry still hasn't gotten the memo.

In his new post, he wrestle's with the only other theory of free will more absurd than is own materialistic one, namely compatiabalism--the idea that determinism and free will are consistent with one another. Coyne at least realizes that won't fly, but then, seeing that the only other alternative is to go outside his little materialistic world, he bites the bullet and denies free will.

At least we can credit Coyne with being consistently wrong.

Is there such a thing as an objective belief?

I have been in a discussion with a science-minded friend of mine about the virtues, or lack thereof, of the positivist mentality--that the methods of science can be applied to disciplines outside of science, he being favorable to it, and me being hostile.

One of the points of his defense is that post-modernists are infected with (among other things) emotion and that their intellectual positions are therefore subjective, whereas scientists are objective, and their intellectual positions are therefore not subjective.

Then comes this blog post from Mother Jones, in which the writer, in an attempt to explain why many people "don't believe science," argues that the reason is that many people's reasoning is inextricably bound up with emotion and prejudice:

... an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.

Now there are several interesting things about this supposed "finding." The first is that it is yet another example of what I call "Duh" Science, which consists of studies that tell us what we didn't need a study to tell us. In this case, we are told that people are not completely objective in the process of forming their opinions.

Gee, who'd o' thunk it?

But applying multi-syllabic Latinate words to this truth does yield that warm, fuzzy science feeling, I'll have to admit: "The 'cultural cognition of risk' refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk."

Then there is the tendency in the discussion of this study that itself displays how the finding applies to those who are touting the study:

So is there a case study of science denial that largely occupies the political left? Yes: the claim that childhood vaccines are causing an epidemic of autism. Its most famous proponents are an environmentalist (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) and numerous Hollywood celebrities (most notably Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey).

This is really the only case they can find among the lefties? Isn't that convenient. This problem of emotional and prejudicial opinion profiling turns out to be mainly a problem on the right . "No one here but us objective liberals." Add this to the list (Popperian falsifiability, the positivist verifiability criterion) of principles that apply to everyone but those to spout them.

But, getting back to my friend defense of positivism, it seems to me that, if the findings of this study are correct, it explodes his hypothesis that scientists are objective, since the finding that there is a "tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values" would seem like it should apply to positivists as much as everyone else. And if the positivist types who promote such studies themselves then exempt most of their own beliefs from the findings of their own studies, they have unwittingly provided further evidence for their thesis, making the positivist position even more untenable.

Marilynne Robinson against the Abolition of Man

The inimitable Marilynne Robinson speaks up for consciousness in her new article in Commonweal magazine. Robinson, the author of Gilead, and Housekeeping: A Novel, eloquently states the case for the uniqueness of consciousness and what is says about who we are as human beings:

There is much speculation about the nature of the mind, its relation to the brain, even doubt that the word “mind” is meaningful. In his book Consilience, the biologist E. O. Wilson claims, “The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbor a nonphysical mind.” But if such a site could be found in the brain, then the mind would be physical in the same sense that anything else with a locus in the brain is physical. To define the mind as nonphysical in the first place clearly prejudices his conclusion. The experimental psychologist Steven Pinker, writing about the soul in How the Mind Works, asks, “How does the spook interact with solid matter? How does an ethereal nothing respond to flashes, pokes and beeps and get arms and legs to move? Another problem is the overwhelming evidence that the mind is the activity of the brain. The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals,” and so on. By identifying the soul with the mind, the mind with the brain, and noting the brain’s vulnerability as a physical object, he feels he has debunked a conception of the soul that only those who find the word meaningless would ever have entertained.

This declension, from the ethereality of the mind/soul as spirit to the reality of the mind/brain as a lump of meat, is dependent, conceptually and for its effects, on precisely the antique dualism these writers who claim to speak for science believe they reject and refute. If complex life is the marvel we all say it is, quite possibly unique to this planet, then meat is, so to speak, that marvel in its incarnate form. It was dualism that pitted the spirit against the flesh, investing spirit with all that is lofty at the expense of flesh, which is by contrast understood as coarse and base. It only perpetuates dualist thinking to treat the physical as if it were in any way sufficiently described in disparaging terms. If the mind is the activity of the brain, this means only that the brain is capable of such lofty and astonishing things that their expression has been given the names mind, and soul, and spirit. Complex life may well be the wonder of the universe, and if it is, its status is not diminished by the fact that we can indeed bisect it, that we kill it routinely.

In any case, Wilson’s conception of mind clearly has also taken on the properties of the soul, at least as that entity is understood by those eager to insist that there is no ghost in the machine. As Bertrand Russell pointed out decades before Gilbert Ryle coined this potent phrase, the old, confident distinction between materiality and nonmateriality is not a thing modern science can endorse ...

It is amusing to see people like Harold O. Wilson and Stephen Pinker, presumably conscious beings, trying essentially to explain consciousness away--doing it in a way only conscious beings could and in a way that only other conscious beings could understand. Robinson does a brilliant job explaining that those like Wilson and Pinker, who want to reduce all things to the material, themselves assume an outmoded duality between the material and non-material.

I wonder if people like Wilson and Pinker are even capable of understanding Robinson's case, since Robinson speaks in the very language of the human, whereas the materialists have reduced the human (a category of which they themselves are members) to non-human categories. There seems to come a point at which the advocates of the human (Robinson, Berry, Chesterton, Lewis) face the skeptics of the human (Wilson, Pinker, Dawkins) over a yawning and unbridgeable intellectual chasm.

The Abolition of Man, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, is self-inflicted.

Has man been diminished by the modern mechanistic world view?

In an earlier post, I made the tongue-in-cheek observation that Jeffrey Shallit at Recursivity could not, in critiquing Rebecca Bynum at The New English Review from a materialist reductionist perspective, logically expect anyone else to derive any meaning from his critique since, from the perspective of his reductionist materialism, all his words are are collections of pixels on a computer screen.

Art, a frequent commenter on this blog and a science professor at the University of Kentucky, appeared not to get the jist of this at all and tried to argue that, in disagreeing with Shallit's attempted refutation of Bynum, I was somehow committing myself to the soundness of Bynum's arguments in her article, an article which I had not read and on which I was not making a comment. I simply pointed out to Art that the disagreement with a critique of something is not an automatic affirmation of whatever it was a critique of--an obvious truth which Art didn't seem to understand either.

Well, now I have read Bynum's article and I'll say for what it's worth that I think it is quite good. Bynum argues, in the article tited "The Progressive Diminishment of Man," against what Arthur Koestler has called the "Ratomorphic Fallacy": the idea that studying man as one would study any other natural thing, he becomes, by virtue of that scientific act, just a natural thing. I have pointed out elsewhere the self-defeating nature of this procedure, since the one doing the observing is diminished to the extent that man in general is diminished, throwing the whole project into doubt and inconsistency.

Art's chief argument against Bynum is that--through intellectual carelessness or simply a typo--she got the chemical composition of water mixed up in an illustration of one of her points, indicating that water was made up of one hydrogen and two oxygen atoms rather than two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. He seems to think that this one error somehow calls her entire argument into question. This is sort of like saying that if a scientist, in trying to illustrate a scientific point using a literary analogy and got Rosencrantz mixed up with Guildenstern his whole scientific case would crumble, which, let's face it, is just silly.

Bynum's case is a philosophical, not a scientific one. But when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And Art--like Shallit--seems to think that the scientific manner of analysis is the only legitimate one, and can't seem to get past the chemical composition of water.

Bynum simply points out that the kind of scientific rationalism of which Art and Shallit are proud practitioners has displaced a real humanistic view of the world:

In the space of a few short generations, man has descended from seeing himself as a little less than the angels to king of the beasts to nothing more than a complex machine. The effect this has had on culture, on art and literature, has been devastating. For as the essential importance of man has decreased, so has his ability to portray life in anything other than absurd terms. In literature the concept of tragedy, which once hinged on the idea that the individual loss of freedom was of tragic proportions, has been all but lost. In Shakespearean tragedy, for example, a character flaw often compelled the central character to follow a predictable, tragic fate. But even in Shakespeare the idea of the hero, so prominent in Greek tragedy, was already diminished. Satire remained, of course, and continued from Pope through Byron. Then, in the 19^th Century, we witnessed the rise of the psychological novel which then waned as the anti-hero rose to dominance. Today, literature has been reduced to a prolonged and tedious exploration of the aberrant. The hero has long been vanquished, with the exception of children’s comic books, because man no longer sees himself in a great spiritual struggle with eternal stakes. Even that last bastion of heroism, the military, has reduced the description of its mission to nothing more than a “job.” Indeed, the importance of human life has been so reduced that certain philosophers argue, with dead seriousness, that it is actually immoral to prefer human life over than the life of an animal.

Not only is this true, it's so obvious I'm trying to conceive what the argument against it could be. So what is Art's response?

It's a collection of unsupported assertions, plainly stupid statements, and a vague defense of vitalism as a valid description of reality.

... On the bright side, Bynum's world view is but a short hop, skip, and jump from the sorts of relativistic thinking that ID proponents embrace.

Vitalism? Bynum's argument is a fairly standard articulation of classical literary humanism. It operates on an organic metaphor of how the universe works, which is common to any classical view of the world. That is, of course, in contrast to the mechanical analogy upon which modern scientism operates. If Art thinks the mechanistic metaphor better captures what the world is than the organic metaphor, then he should argue for it. Just calling the other view stupid is fairly typical of those of his viewpoint, but it isn't very convincing.

Relativistic? That Art--and Shallit--can't even recognize the type of thing they are criticizing is a measure of the intellectual impoverishment they represent. Exactly what is relativistic about it? Art doesn't say. Apparently the process of taking Bynum's essay and analyzing with his laboratory instruments hasn't yielded much in the way of understanding.

I guess Ludwig Wittgenstein, who she quotes concerning the limitation of the scientistic world view, is just an ignorant hack too, huh?

Now of course Art believes that if you disagree with someone, then you must agree with everyone who disagrees with him, and must accept all his beliefs. I guess we can put Art down as believing, with Darwin, that thoughts are just secretions of the brain, and that organic creatures are just complex machines, and that the one discipline of science contains all truth.

Materialists inhabit a very small world indeed.

He who lives by materialism must die by it

Jeffren Shallit at Recursivity, complains about an editorial in the New English Review which he characterizes as "anti-science":

Here is yet another "oh those nasty scientists" rant from the senior managing editor of the New English Review, Rebecca Bynum. Some highlights:

For example, science can describe the effects of electricity, but it cannot tell us what electricity is any more than it can tell us what life is or what gravity is. This poor woman obviously did not attend 10th grade science, or she would know that electricity consists of a flow of electrons.

... And if pattern does not exist in mind or as mind, then where does it exist? Utterly moronic. Pattern exists as a configuration of atoms and molecules. I wonder what she thinks differentiates hexane from dimethylbutane.

Shallitt's arguments are easily refuted, however, since all they are are collections of dots on a screen in a particular arrangement and transmitted digitally over the Internet. Didn't he learn this in 10th grade science?

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.

If man is what he eats, then...

Ludwig Feuerbach, who was famous for the phrase, "Der mensch ist was er isst" ("Man is what he eats"), attributed the failure of the worker's revolution of 1848 in Europe to their dietary dependences on potatoes. "Shall we therefore despair," he asks, in one of his more materialist moods:

Is there no other foodstuff that can replace potatoes among the poorer classes and at the same time nurture them to manly vigour and disposition? Yes, there is such a foodstuff, a foodstuff that is the pledge of a better future, which contains the sees of a more thorough even if more gradual revolution. It is--beans!

--From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx, Sydney Hook, 1938, p. 260.