I won’t prolong my dispute with Eric MacDonald about whether we have free will, whether our behavior is truly deterministic, or whether there are “ways of knowing” other than empirical observation and reason (science construed broadly). I’ll just post and comment briefly on two statements that he made in his response to my critique of his views on Monday. These appear in yesterday’s piece on his site Choice in Dying, a piece called “Lurching sideways.”

#1. Responding to a famous characterization of “scientism” in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Eric says this:

“Nobody espouses scientism it is just detected in the writings of others.”

This, I am sad to say, is not true, as a number of recent remarks by Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins have suggested, and all the discussion around this issue has not convinced me that Kitcher, Haack, Hughes, etc. are wrong in their belief that scientism is a growing problem. I happen to think that any doctrinaire belief system is a problem – even one that gives the palm of victory to science. Science is a marvellous human achievement. It also constitutes a problem, and may, indeed — the signs are ominous — spell the end of human life as we know it on this rapidly overcrowding, polluted planet. How long does it take to “kill” an ocean? Does anyone know? And what would be the effect of that on life on this planet? Yet it seems that we are well on the way to acidifying the ocean so ruinously as to make it uninhabitable by the creatures that make their home there, without knowing how quickly this essential ecosystem could collapse. You may say that these consequences are the result of the misuses of science, or the continued hegemony of religion, but that is not at all clear. However, I think the dehumanising possibilities of doctrinaire scientific atheism are just as real as the dehumanising possibilities of religious tyranny. Indeed, the sheer power of science makes the dangerous effects of scientific dogmatism even more likely.

So science is responsible for polluting the oceans? And enablers of science, like Pinker, Dawkins, and I, are implicated in this?  Really, isn’t this the result of human greed (dumping crap into the oceans and overfishing)? How can we make science responsible for that? We might as well, as Steve Pinker said, indict architecture as responsible for the Nazi gas chambers. The problems here are technology in the hands of immoral or greedy people.  Do we blame toolmakers because people have used shovels, chisels, and hammers to murder people, or chemists for gas attacks in World War I?

And as for the “danger of doctrinaire scientific atheism” and its supposed similarity to religious tyranny, all I can say is that no “scientific atheist” has ever threatened to kill somebody, bombed marathons, shot girls for going to schools, or flown planes into buildings. (Note, too, Eric’s subtle transformation of “doctrinaire scientific atheism” into “scientific dogmatism.” Where did the “atheism” go?) Are climate-change denialists “scientific dogmatists,” too? What about creationists?

Both of Eric’s claims above are so ludicrously wrong, and yet so similar to those made by theologians (“science does stuff as bad as religion does”, and “science is just as fundamentalist as the worst forms of Christianity”), that I am wondering if Eric really is undergoing a confluence with theology. He may still reject God, but he adopts the same arguments theologians use against science to protect their god.

#2: About determinism:

There is far more evidence, if you take philosophical reasoning to be a rational kind of critical enquiry that provides evidence in the form of reasons, for “compatibilist” free will, than there is for outright determinism, if it even makes sense to “speak” in terms of determinism. I assume, therefore, that determinism is merely a doctrinaire or dogmatic claim, and should be, for that reason, rejected, until there is some evidence one way or the other for affirming one or the other stance as true.

Really, we should reject determinism until more evidence is in?  Has Eric ever flown in a plane, dropped a rock, played pool, or cut himself? The consequences of such actions are pretty much predictable, and much of our technology—technology Eric must use—depends on physical processes whose results are absolutely predictable.

The statement that there is far more evidence for “compatibilist” free will—a concept that varies among philosophers and cannot necessarily be confirmed empirically—than for physical determinism is simply silly.  In fact, it’s not even wrong.

I’ve often reported on Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford who, after having studied an evangelical Christian sect in America—and published a Templeton-funded book on it, When God Talks Back—now writes prolifically about faith in popular magazines and newspapers. What galls me is that the New York Times has taken her aboard as a sort of pet accommodationist who writes weekly op-eds about the benefits of faith and prayer, how prayer works, and how getting God to hear you is hard. (See some of my posts here.) It’s not clear to me why the Times gave her a venue to spread such thin ideas about religion on a weekly basis. I’d much rather read a weekly column by someone like, say, Steve Pinker, who would actually say something interesting.

When I criticized Luhrmann for accommodationism, I got an email from one of her friends and colleagues, taking me to task for my posts.  She was, said the friend, only reporting the doings of the faithful as a good anthropologist, without passing judgment on them. But I don’t think that’s the case. True, she doesn’t come out and explicitly say that speaking in tongues is good, but she says it’s good for the practitioners and shouldn’t be stigmatized. And she maintains that faith isn’t really about belief, but about joy:

And that was not really what I saw after my years spending time in evangelical churches. I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it. These days I find that it is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold.

If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good. The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now.

That sounds like what I used to say in college when I was stoned.

Well, how much joy would a Muslim have if he knew for certain that Mohamed was fictional, or a Christian if she knew that Jesus was made up, like Santa Claus?  My impressions are that Luhrmann has a very blinkered view of religion, gleaned largely from the Vineyard sect she studied, and that she is in essence an apologist for faith, regardless of her cred as an anthropologist.  One can’t help read her book or columns without sensing an approbation of faith, a feeling that it’s good for you—what Dan Dennett calls “belief in belief.”

So I’m glad to see that Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, agrees with me on this. In a piece called “Tongues and Brains” in his Washington Diarist column (the piece is not online free, but judicious inquiry might yield it), he takes Luhrmann’s feel-good apologetics apart.

Now Leon (my editor for three pieces at TNR) is no New Atheist.  He’s a secular Jew, but far more religion-friendly than I. After his father died, he went to synagogue daily for a year, writing a book about his experience called Kaddish. He regularly goes after New Atheists, and you’ll remember him for his dust-up about scientism with Steve Pinker in The New Republic (see here, here, and here), where Leon was a severe critic of the hegemony of science. He also criticizes New Atheists like Dawkins, but this new piece shows that he has no love for Luhrmann, either.

His main beef is that she’s extolling a stupid rather than a thoughtful form of faith. Now I’d maintain that while there are “intellectual” versus “nonintellectual” forms of faith, in the end a thoughtful faith is no more credible than a stupid one. Nevertheless, Leon has some juicy snark about Luhrmann, grasping immediately, as did I, that she’s really an apologist. And he also levels some criticism about religion in general.

A few excerpts, which also show Leon’s ambivalence about faith:

Prayer without a plausible metaphysics is just me. In such circumstances, the cosmological picture is a cosmological fantasy; and fantasy provides pleasure, not certainty. It trivializes an attempt to change the world, which prayer is, when it suffices with the good feelings that are generated by the attempt. The question of delusion hangs over all good feelings. And so I have always sided with the cautionary observation of the rabbi in the Talmud who wryly warned that “whoever protracts and overly ponders his prayer will arrive at an aching heart.”

Clearly Leon,, like me, is a dolorous secular Jew. (Jewish telegram: “Start worrying. Details follow.”) The next pogrom could be right around the corner.

But The New York Times has been running promotions for praying in tongues, and for the usurpation of theology by psychology, which is the American innovation in religion. “Why We Talk in Tongues,” was the title of a recent column by T. M. Luhrmann. We? Luhrmann is an anthropologist at Stanford who not long ago authored an impressive study of evangelical religion in America, and it is the evangelicals, and their fervent wordlessness, that she is recommending in her columns to the hardened rationalists at smoked-fish counters everywhere. She notes that “18 percent of Americans spoke in tongues at least several times a year,” as if polling can settle a philosophical matter. She reports on her excitement at a charismatic Christian service in Ghana, where for three hours the worshippers spoke in tongues. They told her that they employed the same technique privately as well. “They said they did so because it was the one language the devil could not understand, but what I found so striking was how happy it seemed to make them.”

Ah, I love the reference to smoked-fish counters, for the hardened rationalists who patronize them are, of course, mostly Jewish.

You can see here some differences between Leon and me, for I don’t think that the “philosophical matter” of religion can be settled by anything, at least insofar as those matters involve truth claims. Nor do I even see religion as a “philosophical matter,” as philosophical matters are susceptible to reason, even if many of them can’t be settled. Nevertheless, Leon’s take on what the Times is doing is absolutely correct. He explains further:

Religious thinkers since Philo have been wrestling with the incomprehensibility of any concept of the deity that appropriately honors its sublimity. Luhrmann proposes that we give up and babble. “As a technique,” she explains, “tongues capture the attention but focus it on something meaningless (but understood by the speaker to be divine).” Myself, I would rather my nonsense not be sacred and my sacred not be nonsense. “There’s plenty here to alarm secular liberals,” she writes, invoking the stereotype that is designed to embarrass all skepticism. Actually, there’s plenty here to alarm religious conservatives, too. Many of the world’s great religious traditions have consecrated themselves to the ideal of spiritual articulateness, and to the discovery of valid propositional content for the substance of faith. All this, for Luhrmann, is only “abstract and intellectual,” when it is merely the natural activity of thinking creatures who seek.

Finally, a zinger or two:

“The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated,” Luhrmann declares, “as anthropologists have long known.” Who gave anthropology the last word? This is like saying that the role of beauty in art is greatly overstated because there is so much ugliness in art. My fellow Americans, there are questions that do not allow of empirical answers! I leave aside the place of ideas in the evangelicism that Luhrmann adores. Are we really suffering from a surfeit of thoughtful belief? Have we been neglecting our felicity? “Secular liberalism,” with its demand for the justification of metaphysical opinions, has more to offer religion than the immediate gratifications of a credulous joyriding. Luhrmann is peddling another intellectual argument for anti-intellectualism, another glorifcation of emotion in a culture enslaved to emotion. I choose to shun the unintelligent light and remain in the intelligent darkness, and sweat it.

Again, the concept of “thoughtful belief” seems oxymoronic to me. There is belief that involves thought, and can be expressed in fancy words (viz., Alvin Plantinga and Karen Armstrong), but the substantive content of that thought always turns out to be nil.  It is simply hope expressed in academic language.

But in the end Leon’s accusation is correct: Luhrmann is telling Americans to just give up and abandon themselves to the Great Unknown. Don’t bother trying to figure out if there’s a God, because that’s not useful. Instead (and this is a trope of John Haught), just voluntarily immerse yourself in the Mystery Behind the Universe.

I approve of thoughtful religion rather than speaking-in-tongues-and-talking-to-God religion for one reason only: if you dedicate yourself to thought, there’s a decent chance you’ll give up your faith completely.