Nagel reviews Plantinga in the NYRB

September 17, 2012 • 5:01 am

Update: Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll nicely picks apart (“unpacks,” to use the odious jargon of postmodernism) one part of Plantinga’s argument: the claim that science, like religion, ultimately rests on faith. As we all know, this is a base canard whose force depends on conflating two disparate ways to construe faith.”  Among Sean’s criticisms is this:

Sometimes you will hear that “science requires faith,” for example faith that our sense data are reliable or that nature really obeys laws. That’s an abuse of language; science requires assumptions, just like anything else, but those assumptions are subject to testing and updating if necessary. If we built theories on the basis of our sense data, and those theories kept making predictions that turned out to be wrong, we would examine and possibly discard that assumption. If the universe exhibited a chaotic jumble of non-lawlike behavior, rather than falling into beautiful patterns, we would abandon that assumption as well. That’s the most compelling thing about science: it always stands ready to improve by casting out an old idea when the evidence demands it.

_______

Philosopher and Sophisticated Theologian™ Alvin Plantinga recently published another book in his continuing attack on naturalism, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.  It’s a dreadful tome that I discussed in a recent post (see included links for more on Plantinga’s bizarre apologetics), and I’ll just quote myself to describe what the book is about:

My latest incursion into Sophisticated Theology™ involves reading Plantinga’s new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (2011, Oxford University Press).  His thesis is, as usual, that there is no conflict between science and religion, but a profound one between science and naturalism.  I won’t reprise his argument except to say that involves the specious claim that natural selection could not have given us senses that enable us to reliably detect the truth, so that ability must have been conferred by God (see my post on that argument here).

Plantinga also claims that our ability to detect the “truth” (which includes, of course, the presence of God and Jesus) must therefore be the result of a sensus divinitatis (“divine sense”) installed in us by God.

If you want to see Plantinga’s argument taken apart, read the short (77-page) book Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?., which is a back-and-forth between Plantinga and Dan Dennett. (Spoiler: Dennett wins by using the Supermanism Gambit.)

Plantinga has always evinced a sympathy for Intelligent Design, too, and in the book (and elsewhere) he praises the pathbreaking work of IDer Michael Behe of “irreducible complexity” fame.

So how could a famous real philosopher—not a theologian but an unbeliever—dole out any praise for Plantinga’s book? I’m referring to Thomas Nagel, who has reviewed Plantinga’s book in the last issue of The New York Review of Books.  Perhaps it’s germane that Nagel, a highly respected philosopher of mind at New York University, has just published his own anti-materialist book that attacks evolution:  Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Concept of Nature is Almost Certainly False, whose Amazon blurb includes this:

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.

Nagel’s NYRB review of Plantinga, “A philosopher defends religion,” isn’t wholly positive, but it’s laudatory enough to be disturbing, and make me wonder what in the world has happened to Nagel. From Nagel’s review:

God endows human beings with a sensus divinitatis that ordinarily leads them to believe in him. (In atheists the sensus divinitatis is either blocked or not functioning properly.) In addition, God acts in the world more selectively by “enabling Christians to see the truth of the central teachings of the Gospel.”

If all this is true, then by Plantinga’s standard of reliability and proper function, faith is a kind of cause that provides a warrant for theistic belief, even though it is a gift, and not a universal human faculty. (Plantinga recognizes that rational arguments have also been offered for the existence of God, but he thinks it is not necessary to rely on these, any more than it is necessary to rely on rational proofs of the existence of the external world to know just by looking that there is beer in the refrigerator.)

Here Nagel misses a big opportunity: to point out that the sensus divinitatis is also operating improperly in every religion except Plantinga’s own brand of Christianity: Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Mormons, Scientologists—you name them—have all perceived different truths with their sensi divinitati.  So have the many sects of Mormons, as a reader noted yesterday. And apparently that sense didn’t exist (or wasn’t working right) in humans anywhere outside of Eurasia until fairly recently. God really screwed up here.  But Nagel does get in a telling lick:

It is illuminating to have the starkness of the opposition between Plantinga’s theism and the secular outlook so clearly explained. My instinctively atheistic perspective implies that if I ever found myself flooded with the conviction that what the Nicene Creed says is true, the most likely explanation would be that I was losing my mind, not that I was being granted the gift of faith. From Plantinga’s point of view, by contrast, I suffer from a kind of spiritual blindness from which I am unwilling to be cured. This is a huge epistemological gulf, and it cannot be overcome by the cooperative employment of the cognitive faculties that we share, as is the hope with scientific disagreements.

Sadly, Nagel hands out approbation to other claims by Plantinga:

Still, when our faculties lead us to beliefs vastly removed from those our distant ancestors needed to survive—as in the recent production and assessment of evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson—Plantinga’s skeptical argument remains powerful. Christians, says Plantinga, can “take modern science to be a magnificent display of the image of God in us human beings.” Can naturalists say anything to match this, or must they regard it as an unexplained mystery?

This argument—that humans can do stuff that was never directly favored by natural selection—is identical to Alfred Russel Wallace’s argument for God based on the observation that the brain of a “savage” is “an organ quite disproportionate to his actual requirements.” Thus, although Wallace hewed in the main to his rival Darwin’s views, they diverged when it came to human cognition. Darwin saw this as just another product of natural selection; Wallace imputed it to God or another teleological force.

But hasn’t Nagel ever heard of a “spandrel“? Our complex brain, evolved to live in groups, produce language, and suss out the complex mentalities of our group-mates, has simply proven capable of being co-opted for other things.  Is playing the piano proof of God? What about building airplanes? Crows and monkeys can make tools to get food despite their ancestors never having done so (this ability is passed on culturally): did God give these animals a “Corvus divinitatis” or a “Simias divinitatis”?

In the last two paragraphs, Nagel foreshadows what will come in his own book, I think:

The interest of this book, especially for secular readers, is its presentation from the inside of the point of view of a philosophically subtle and scientifically informed theist—an outlook with which many of them will not be familiar. Plantinga writes clearly and accessibly, and sometimes acidly—in response to aggressive critics of religion like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. His comprehensive stand is a valuable contribution to this debate.

No it’s not. Read the book if you don’t believe me.

Nagel concludes:

I say this as someone who cannot imagine believing what he believes. But even those who cannot accept the theist alternative should admit that Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism are directed at the deepest problem with that view—how it can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those laws and understanding the universe that they govern. Defenders of naturalism have not ignored this problem, but I believe that so far, even with the aid of evolutionary theory, they have not proposed a credible solution. Perhaps theism and materialist naturalism are not the only alternatives.

Nagel has fallen for the God-of-the-gap trap. The credible solution is to do more work to find out how the structure of the mind produces consciousness, and how natural selection might have acted to promote that feature. Does Nagel think that science has used all its resources on this problem, and failed? Does he not know how relatively primitive neurobiology is right now? Nagel has just thrown up his hands and said, “You people haven’t explained it, therefore perhaps Plantinga is right.”  Or there might be “another alternative.” Curious that Nagel doesn’t propose what that alternative might be. I guess he’s purveying a Philosophy of the Gaps.

Alvin Plantinga, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 1995. Photo by Sijmen Hendriks, taken from NYRB review. LOLphilosopher annotations by JAC

Daily Mail screws up with two-headed pelican.

September 17, 2012 • 3:26 am

I don’t think so!. Yes, I know the Daily Mail is unreliable, but a moment’s consideration would show that this, touted as a rare, two-headed pelican (headline: “Talk about a double-header!  Amazing photograph shows pelican with TWO HEADS in flight!”), is either an early April Fool’s joke or massive journalistic incompetence. (The “Caters News Agency,” which provided the photo, is real.)

Two heads are always better than one, the saying goes, although one feathered fowl may disagree.

A pelican that appears to have two heads was captured in flight over the Danube River by a lucky Ukrainian photographer earlier this month.

The image was taken by Vladimir Kucherenko in the Danube Delta, Europe’s largest and best preserved delta which is a host to 300 species of birds.

Forget about the ungrammatical headline, implying that only the heads are in flight; the piece goes on to report other cases of two-headed pelicans and quotes the Massachusetts Audubon Society as saying that such birds aren’t expected to live long in the wild.  And there’s a bit of developmental biology as well:

The development of two heads in an animal could be the result of random chance, exposure to chemicals or a complication during the gestation period that prevents a pair of embryos from splitting.

Here it is!!!

Apparently they didn’t notice it has four wings as well. What a mutant!

And how many readers will believe this? A lot, I bet.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

A victory for evolution in South Korea

September 16, 2012 • 12:30 pm

In June I posted some depressing news about how South Korea, thanks to its Ministry of Education and creationist pressure, was set to purge some important examples of evolution from its school biology textbooks.  Well, according to Wired Science, it ain’t gonna happen:

As previously reported on Wired.co.uk, pressure group Society for Textbook Revise had managed to persuade textbook publishers to drop sections from their books that discussed the evolution of horses and the Jurassic-era early avian-like dinosaur Archaeopteryx.

Now, however, a special panel convened by the South Korean government has recommended that the publishers ignore the creationists’ arguments — which should mean that textbooks reintroduce the old segments before the start of the next school year.

The argument of the Society for Textbook Revise — an offshoot of the Korea Association for Creation Research — rested on there being debate among evolutionary scientists over whether Archaeopteryx could fly, or glide, or merely had feathers for decoration. This disagreement was extrapolated to cast doubt on the whole evolutionary history of birds.

In response, South Korea’s Ministry of Education, Science and Technology set up a panel experts to assess the campaign’s claims. They disagreed that their Archaeopteryx objection was a valid argument, and said it should remain in the textbooks. The campaign group also claimed that a section on the evolution of the horse was too simplistic, which the panel agreed with — but they have merely recommended replacing it with a more thorough explanation, or a new section on the evolution of another animal like the whale.

I don’t know what was in the horse section, but it may have been the old misconception that horses evolved linearly and “progressively” from a small, four toed Hyracotherium ancestor into the big single-toed horses of today. That’s not the way it happened: horse evolution was a branching bush, with some lineages getting smaller after they got larger, or fluctuating erratically in size.  There is of course one lineage from small, four-toed, small-toothed horses to big, one-toed, massive-toothed horses, but that’s just one line of descent among many. And many horse lineages went extinct without issue.  It would be an improvement to present the story to students in an accurate way, but if the Koreans want to use whales, that’s fine too.  Just keep the creationists out of textbook revisions.
To celebrate Korea’s victory for good science, I’ll put up this old but hilarious anti-creationist Doonesbury post. Coincidentally, it was recycled as today’s cartoon on Slate (thanks to several readers for sending it).

Help support major secular organizations—just by voting!

September 16, 2012 • 12:05 pm

Over at The Friendly Atheist, Hemant notes that three secular organizations—Camp Quest, The Secular Student Alliance, and Foundation Beyond Belief—are in the running to get big bucks from the Chase Community Giving Program so long as they accrue enough votes. I’m just going to paste in what Hemant said about voting (the deadline is in three days):

As I write this, the Secular Student Alliance, Camp Quest, and Foundation Beyond Belief are all within striking distance of *major* money courtesy of the Chase Community Giving Program.

. . . Voting runs until September 19th.

The top 46 charities are assured $50,000 or more. (Foundation Beyond Belief is *so* close to that position…) [JAC: SSA is now #38, and if everyone here voted, we might push the other two past the critical #46 threshold!]

How can you help?

If you’re on Facebook, you get two votes. If you want to vote for the Secular Student Alliance, go here. If you want to vote for the Foundation Beyond Belief, go here. If you want to vote for Camp Quest, go here.

Hate Facebook? Fine! Vote at Chasegiving.com for FBB, SSA, or CQ!

If you get your friends to vote (using your referral), you’ll get an additional vote!

And if you’re a Chase customer, you can get an additional two votes.

Make this happen before time runs out next week.

Why wouldn‘t you vote? It takes only a minute and can garner some big bucks for some good organizations.

I don’t sell you tee shirts with my face on them nor push cephalopodic geegaws to pad my income; all I ask, in return for my awesome posts, is that you consider clicking a few buttons to advance our cause.  We have several thousand readers here, and if every one of you voted, all three organizations would get $50,000.

kthxbye

 

A visit to the grave of W. D. Hamilton

September 16, 2012 • 8:16 am

If you’re an evolutionary biologist, you’ll know about the work of W. D. Hamilton, and if you’re not I don’t have the space to recount it.  Let me just say that he was one of the greatest evolutionary biologists of the twentieth century, who worked out the consequences of “inclusive fitness” (otherwise known as kin selection), its application to biological phenomena like sex ratios, and many other problems of social evolution. Born in 1936, he died way too young—in 2000—from complications of malaria contracted on a trip to Africa while investigating whether AIDS might have come from polio vaccine (he had some bad ideas as well as good ones!).

You can read more about his accomplishments at Wikipedia, or, better yet, order the new biography of Hamilton by Ullica Segerstrale, Nature’s Oracle: A Life of W. D. Hamilton, which comes out in January in the UK and February in the US.  I’ve had a look at the prepublication text, and it’s very good.  Many scientific biographies are dull simply because scientists don’t often have interesting lives, and the public wants more than just an analysis of their work (JBS: The Life and Work of J. B. S. Haldane, by Ronald Clark, is a welcome exception, though a tad light on the science). And Hamilton had an interesting life.

The editor of Hamilton’s biography for Oxford University Press is my friend Latha Menon, who, as you may recall, got Fred Astaire week started.  Yesterday she visited Hamilton’s grave to take pictures of the plot, and she sent me the photos and an account of the visit:

I visited Bill Hamilton’s grave yesterday, in the graveyard of Wytham Village just outside Oxford, next to Wytham Woods.  I have always meant to visit but didn’t know quite where his grave was. It isn’t obvious. Alan G [Grafen] gave me instructions or I wouldn’t have found it. It’s in a small grassy area which acts as an overflow graveyard, and is surrounded by hedges and accessed by a small gate, with no sign of any sort. But a very peaceful spot next to open fields and then the woods.

Here is a picture of his simple gravestone. Nearby is a bench on which his partner Luisa’s deeply affecting words spoken at the graveside are inscribed. It was a peaceful September afternoon. I was quite alone there and felt quite moved. I couldn’t resist placing a beautiful yellowing leaf on the grave—it seemed appropriate.

Note the beetle on the headstone: Hamilton was a keen natural historian as well as a theoretician, and he loved insects:

Here’s the bench with Luisa’s words, which I’ve transcribed below the photo in case you can’t read them. They do make me tear up:

BILL.  Now your body is lying in the Wytham Woods, but from here you will reach again your beloved forests. You will live not only in a beetle, but in billions of spores of fungi and algae brought by the wind higher up into the troposphere, all of you will form the clouds and wandering across the oceans, will fall down and fly up again and again, till eventually a drop of rain will join you to the water of the flooded forest of the Amazon.

Hamilton also wrote his own obituary in an essay called “My intended burial and why” (reference at bottom):

I will leave a sum in my last will for my body to be carried to Brazil and to these forests. It will be laid out in a manner secure against the possums and the vultures just as we make our chickens secure; and this great Coprophanaeus beetle will bury me. They will enter, will bury, will live on my flesh; and in the shape of their children and mine, I will escape death. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.

Every biologist should have an epitaph like one of those.

___________

W. D. Hamilton, ‘My intended burial and why’; reprinted in: Ethology, Ecology and Evolution, 12, 111–122.

We all worship the same God: version 1.2

September 16, 2012 • 5:54 am

On the advice of readers, Shuggy has updated his chart comparing the gods worshiped by differed faiths. There are new faiths! And new criteria, like bacon cheeseburgers!

I put a low-res version of the chart below, but click twice in succession to go to the third page, which is large and legible. But PLEASE leave any comments/suggestions below, not on the picture page!!!!!

Shuggy is soliciting feedback, and notes:

Here is the Mk II Guide to The One True God. When the WEITers have given their feedback I will make a higher-res  image for a poster. (I rather liked the simplicity of Mk I, but  things like bacon cheeseburger couldn’t be left out.)

One category might summarise several of the last few: “Strange things He demands:” for things lke Mormon baptising  of the dead, etc, but it’s funnier to spell them out and bring out their contradictions.

My own opinion is that we’ve reached a stopping point here, and although one might include other faiths and criteria, it would make the poster too fussy.

What do you think? At any rate, I’m sure Shuggy will make it available in poster quality soon.

R. Joseph Hoffmann blames P. Z. Myers, Eric MacDonald and me for murder in the Middle East

September 16, 2012 • 5:34 am

R. Joseph Hoffmann has kept his arrogance under wraps for a while, but this week it erupted again in a spectacular display of ignorant accommodationism. In his latest piece at The New Oxonian (oy, what a title; should I change the name of this site to “The New Harvardian”?), “Deja vu: how tone deaf atheists and blockheaded Muslim haters cost lives”, RJH accuses me, P. Z. Myers, and Eric MacDonald for being the species of god-hating Islamophobes named in his title.

I’m not sure what inspired this, except for our earlier refusal (a year ago!) to countenance severe treatment, including arrest, for the odious Florida pastor Terry Jones. Jones, you may recall, is vociferously anti-Muslim, burned copies of the Qur’an in both 2011 and April of this year, and, when the new movie Innocence of Muslims came out, promoted it vigorously (though he didn’t screen it) and then burned yet another copy of the Qur’an.

There’s no evidence that Jones’s latest shenanigans had the slightest effect on instigating last week’s riots in the Middle East, or on the death of the U.S. ambassador to Libya (apparently a preplanned attack), though word of Jones’s burning of Qur’ans in 2011 ignited riots in Afghanistan that led to the death of at least 30 people.

At that time, P. Z., Eric, and I all decried Jones’s stupidity and rancor, but refused to say that he should be punished. We have freedom of speech, and if it leads to murder then that is the fault of the murdering thugs and not the Qur’an burners.  Further, such cowardice, in which we abstain from criticizing Islam because it offends the tender feelings of Muslims and makes them even more prone to riots and beheadings, only empowers vile Muslim extremists and makes their faith the only one immune from criticism.

In contrast, Hoffmann wrote that Jones should be tried and convicted of murder. As I noted in April of 2011:

Pastor Jones is a religious nutcase, and I have no respect for him.  He’s nearly as nuts as Islamic extremists, though I doubt that Jones will be killing anyone.  But he did nothing illegal or, I think, immoral.  I agree with [Sam] Harris’s conclusion, which is that we need more criticism of Islam, not less.  And not just Islamic extremists, either, but criticism of those Islamic “moderates” who, by refusing to speak up against the violence and insane hypersensitivity of their coreligionists, create a climate in which Islamic extremism is tolerated.

Hoffmann seems to be one of these coddlers too.  Nowhere in his post will you find him indicting the murderers themselves for the murders!  He spends all his time blaming Pastor Jones instead. In fact, he spends more time criticizing atheists (he just can’t resist that) than criticizing the kind of faith that makes people kill.

Hoffman is back again with the same opinion, even though, as far as I know, virtually no atheist has written about Jones’s latest shenanigans.  Never mind; Hoffman manages to rekindle his hatred of atheists—even though he is one:

But religion-haters come in different flavours these days. The Florida cracker flavour is matched by the piquant sophistication of new atheist Islam haters–even Christopher Hitchens was one. The atheist tack, of course, was that the “greater principle” of free speech was at stake in this struggle, and that no matter how obnoxious Jones is (very), his right to be obnoxious, even dangerously obnoxious, was absolute. Of course, the fact that Jones’s views about Islam happened to coincide directly with the views of the hate-mongers was of no consequence: it was ONLY about the sanctity of the First Amendment.

–The blockheaded response from atheist heavyweights like Jerry Coyne and P Z Myers was immediate: “Hoffmann coddles Muslim”.  Eric MacDonald, in a singularly ill-informed piece, wondered out loud if I hadn’t paid attention to the “cartoons controversy,” evidently missing the fact that I had written extensively on the topic in 2008 and had conditionally defended the right of Free Inquiry magazine, where I was an associate editor, to publish the cartoons in the US.

Past is prologue and now we see how history can surprise us. The hyperactive Rev. Jones could not slumber forever, not when a man who likes a mirror thinks he can influence a presidential election–which is fact is what this trick is all about.

Jones promised he would do better, and he has: this time with deadlier consequences, through one of his more media savvy, Muslim-hating accomplices.

I have just one question for PZ: What are you thinking now? God save the First Amendment?

Let us first recognize that Jones had nothing to do with the making of the film, and nobody has adduced any evidence suggesting it. He did promote the film, but apparently didn’t even screen it.  So he’s responsible for the riots in the Middle East and the death of the ambassador? I don’t think so. Hoffmann is raising the spectre of guilt by association.

So are we now to suppress free speech against all religions?  Or is it okay to criticize Jews, Hindus, and Christians (viz., “The Life of Brian”) but not Muslims?  What, exactly, would Hoffmann have us do? We already, all three of us, have disassociated ourselves from Jones’s stupid activities and ill-advised Muslim-bashing, but we all defend strongly his right to criticize Islam however he wants.  If the rights of fringe minorities like those including Jones aren’t protected, then the rights of all of us are endangered. That is precisely why freedom of speech and religion are written into America’s Bill of Rights.

And yes, Ceiling Cat save the First Amendment! If it’s to mean anything, it means that all criticism of faith must be protected, even if ill-advised or motivated by hatred or bigotry.  Let a million stupid criticisms blossom, including accusations that Jews murder Christian children to make crackers from their blood. (More on that in a day or two.)

It’s curious that Hoffmann, who is, as I noted, an atheist, says absolutely nothing about the rampaging, murdering Muslim thugs. No, he’d rather go after the atheists who defend free speech, as if we were somehow complicit in murder.  Does Hoffmann recognize who wields the guns and knives, and who purveys only words?  Does he think Muslims have the right to kill when they’re offended? On these issues he is silent.

As Eric noted in his latest take on RJH’s views, “Hoffmann loses the thread of the story all over again“:

Religions shouldn’t be protected in this way. If Islam is a religion of peace, let them show us that that is what it is, and not go on rampages every time someone, no matter how foolish, insults what to them are holy things. They will be just as holy to them, though others despise them. PZ “desecrates” what Catholics think of as the body of Christ, but he thinks of as crackers, because Catholics pilloried a young man, and sought to endanger his future, because they believed he had desecrated something they hold sacred. This was not tone deafness; it was a justified response to what PZ considered to be a silly belief that should not be allowed to ruin lives. People are going to be offended, and sometimes hurt, when this kind of thing is done, but the harm will be done by the religious, until they grow thicker skins, and recognise that what an unbeliever does has no bearing on what they consider holy. The same goes for offences against Islam. Muslims need thicker skins. Every time someone denies that Muhammad was a prophet and avers that he did not receive a revelation from a god, they are being offensive to Islam. Of course they are. And being able to think and say such things is a right we should be willing to stand up for and defend. And that is why I said, and say again, that Hoffmann seems to have lost the thread of the story all over again.

And Hoffmann needs to have some new ideas instead of endlessly recycling his shopworn criticism of atheists.  Underneath it all, which you’ll recognize if you’ve had the stomach to read The New Oxonian, is Hoffmann’s deep-seated fear that his scholarly views have been unduly neglected, and that some New Atheists, lacking that scholarship, are undeserving of their fame.