“The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.”
—Voltaire

I will try very hard to avoid calling Andrew Brown names in this piece, despite his ad hominem remarks about me and his obtuseness, which in this case is even more outrageous than he’s ever evinced in the Guardian. His latest essay, “There’s nothing wrong with Virginia Heffernan’s creationism,” defends technology journalist Hefferman’s explanation at Yahoo News why she prefers creationism over evolution. It’s because, she says, the Bible tells a better story than does evolutionary biology, and we get to choose what stories we believe.

While accepting the truth of evolution—reluctantly, I think—Brown nevertheless doesn’t like it because it’s a cultural flashpoint:

Evolution is a fact: it happens. It’s also a predictive theory: it explains why things happen and have happened in ways that allow us to find out more about the world. It is something that I find fascinating, but there are lots of things that fascinate me, from fly fishing to philosophy, which I don’t expect the rest of the world to take an interest in. In that respect, evolution is different. It has come to mean an explanation for everything, including all sorts of questions which were once, and rightly, treated as philosophical or ethical. Even more, it has come to be taken up as a banner in the American culture wars. In that context it is unattractive.

Yes, but precisely who took up evolution as a cultural banner? Not evolutionary biologists, who have simply fought the dismissal of their theory on religious grounds by nearly half the American public and a by large fraction of the rest of the world. Believe me, all of us would be delighted to stop fighting creationists and get on with our science.

And if evolution is unattractive because people don’t like its religious or moral implications, then so is global warming and geology.

As for the accusation of scientism—that evolution has “come to mean an explanation for everything”, well, that’s not right, either. Surely evolution can shed light on questions like “Why do we seem to have an innate sense of morality?”, but almost no scientist pretends that evolution has an answer to questions like “How should we live?” or “Is it right to torture one person to save a million?” or “Is Tolstoy better than Dostoyevsky?”

As if that isn’t enough, Brown then goes off on my own website, claiming that my stridency and “mansplaining” actually drive people away from evolution:

If you want to know why an educated American might decide evolution is untrue, spend some time at the website Why evolution is true, run by the Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne. The science there is great, but the tone of voice is something else: hectoring arrogant mansplaining with sputtering outbursts of extraordinary viciousness. If you don’t much care whether the science is true, this would convince you that there must be something wrong with it.

Here’s the definition of “mansplain” from Wiktionary:

Mansplain (colloquial, chiefly Internet) To explain (something) condescendingly (to a female listener), especially to explain something the listener already knows, presuming that she has an inferior understanding of it because she is a woman.

Andrew Brown has learned a new word from the internet, but he’s got it wrong! I suspect he thinks it simply means “a man explaining something.” And nobody has ever accused me of condescending to women. The rest I won’t bother to defend, except to deny the stupid accusation that I’m largely responsible for turning the American public away from evolution. I simply don’t have that kind of influence. This website started in 2009, and since then there has been no marked downturn in American acceptance of evolution—indeed, there’s been a slight uptick (from 9-15%) in the number of my countrymen who accept purely naturalistic (i.e., scientific) evolution.

The rest of Brown’s piece is devoted to showing two things: 1) there’s no reason why people should care why evolution is true, and 2) there’s nothing wrong with believing in what you want if it’s a good story.

Brown on why we needn’t care about evolution:

And, actually, it’s a bit hard to explain why anyone should care about the truth of evolutionary theory. It doesn’t make any practical difference in the life of a creationist that they are wrong. Modern civilisation is designed to be idiot-proof and only needs a few specialists to understand deeply what they are doing. We all rely on quantum physics every time we use a computer and almost all of us are bound to be badly wrong in our understanding of it. That’s fine, so long as the engineers who design the chips know what they’re doing.

To point this out goes against our self-image, and our belief that we ought to be generally curious about the world. But even if it’s granted that we ought to be omnivorously curious– certainly, I wanted my children to grow up like that – it’s humanly impossible to be equally curious about all of it. Life’s too short. And the question of what things we ought to care about most is not a scientific one and wouldn’t be even if it had a single answer.

But this entirely misses the point. I don’t expect everyone to share my enthusiasm for evolution. But I do expect them to share my respect for facts over fairy tales.

Why? Because if you don’t have good reasons for the things you believe, then you fall into errors, many of which can harm others.  If you reject evolution because the Bible is a better story, then you’re more likely to reject any rational argument if you find superstition more appealing.  And many of those superstitions, like the Bible that Heffernan finds so enthralling, are ineluctably entangled with moral codes—codes that, because they’re based on scripture and dogma rather than rationality, are often invidious. Think of all the harms done in the name of Catholic dogma: oppression of women, control of people’s sex lives, opposition to abortion, terrorizing children with thoughts of hell, instilling guilt into nearly everyone, promoting the spread of AIDS in Africa, and, yes, child rape—since I now see its coverup as an official policy of Catholicism. As Sam Harris has noted:

It’s more than an intellectual and moral failing, though: it’s also a social and political failing. If you believe what you want, and it’s that humans aren’t harming the ozone layer, then you’ll do nothing to stop the inevitable degradation of our environment.  If you believe that fetuses have souls, then you’ll oppose all abortion. Picking and choosing your own stories, regardless of the facts, is the worst way to conduct your life, and a terrible way to run society.

At the end, Brown decides to go after science again, somehow managing to imply that the way it’s conducted sort of makes it a story, too. Have a gander at these convoluted paragraphs:

But both sides are missing an important point here. In popular culture, arguments about evolution are not clashes of facts against stories. They are the clash of two competing stories. And, in fact, this is what almost all arguments in society come down to. It’s perfectly possibly for facts to smash up stories. But it’s rare. And if it happens in argument, it requires a considerable social moral and intellectual effort to arrange.

The classic modern example is a scientific experiment, where you can prove or disprove a theory based on observations of fact. But the formulation of the theory and the choice of observation are neither simple nor straightforward. The great scientist is often one who can design wonderful experiments, rather than the drone who carries them out. Lots of things aren’t susceptible to that sort of experimental investigation at all. The disciplines then required to work out what is a fact and which stories it can test are then rather different – think of historical inquiry; the idea that there are large social clashes with all the facts on one side and all the stories on the other is not itself factual. It is a story which derives most of its power from the way that believers suppose that it is true. But it is profoundly unconvincing to anyone not taken in.

Now I’m not sure exactly what this means, but I think Brown, by using obfuscation, is trying to suggest that either nonexperimental science, like cosmology, much of evolution, geology, and “science construed broadly,” like history and archaeology, don’t have good ways of distinguishing between facts and stories. But he’s wrong. Experiment isn’t the only way to acquire reliable knowledge. Does Brown really think it’s just a story that the Holocaust happened, or that Julius Caesar existed?  Yes, there are doubts about some historical questions that may forever be unresolved, like whether a historical Jesus really existed. But you don’t settle those by simply making up answers.

What it comes down to, apparently, is Brown’s view that made-up stories can give meaning to lives:

One response to that dilemma is to maintain that the scientific story is better, more wonderful, more uplifting, and so on, than all the others. This is the one taken by Professor Voldemort (who must not be named) and his followers. But of course it’s all balls. Does any adult really want to believe in a meaningless universe which is given sense only by our own heroic efforts? Love, courage, and all the other virtues actually exist. They change the world around them. How are they then not part of the universe, and how could a universe that contains them be called meaningless?

Remember, the man who wrote this is an atheist. He doesn’t share Heffernan’s belief in God or the Bible.  Ergo, Brown, like the rest of us unbelievers, has already found meaning in his life, his work, his family, his friends and so on.  What else is there for an atheist than to recognize that we must make our own meaning, weaving it from threads of our personality and the world in which we find ourselves?  And of course things like love, friendship, satisfying work (and good noms!) are meaningful, and are certainly part of the universe. But how utterly stupid of Brown to conflate those natural objects and emotions with something ordained by God! Those last three sentences comprise some of the most wilfully confused thinking I’ve ever seen. They’re worthy of a theologian!

*****

Meanwhile, at the Telegraph, Tom Chivers has written just the palliative for Brown’s and Heffernan’s nonsense, an essay whose title is “You don’t get to choose your own facts“. (It’s ironic when the Telegraph is more rational than the Guardian!) Go have a look, but I’ll give an excerpt from Chivers’s hard-hitting piece:

I’m not going to debunk her utterly flatulent piece with its litany of non-sequiturs and logical fallacies. Others have done a better job of that than I could. But I am going to say that post-modernist “deconstruction”, the belief that we get to choose the reality we live in, is idiotic and harmful. It might be more aesthetically pleasing to you to think that Iranian dissidents aren’t oppressed, they’re just living under a different truth-regime which makes it OK to smash their ankles with hammers when they say things the ayatollahs don’t like. It might be more “amusing and moving” to you to hear a story in which a snake talks to a woman or a man flies on a winged horse than it is to read the careful breakdowns of why astrophysics points to a universe 13.8 billion years old, why the X-ray crystallography of genes, the geographic spread of species and comparative anatomy all point to the same history of evolution, why the heavy elements that make us and the Earth were created in supernovae billions of years ago. (Personally I find that all pretty moving, and utterly astonishing. But you are entitled to your opinions.) But your amusement does not make it true.

Humans evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees about 6.3 million years ago. A dozen strands of evidence point to this. How a grown-up can openly admit that they choose their facts on which ones they find more aesthetically pleasing I simply do not understand.

Brown’s flatulence is equally noxious, and, next to Chivers, his arguments are as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

h/t: Many readers who called this to my attention