Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This one-hour video, put up yesterday, shows Philosopher Anthony Grayling “speaking on ‘Humanism’ at The National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secularist Student Societies 2014 Convention.”
I haven’t yet heard the whole thing, but there’s a bit starting at 19:08 that describes his visit to Kentucky’s Creation Museum. That might be a good place to start, since the earlier parts of the video describe what humanism is, something that most of us know. Grayling describes the Museum, and this has been reported widely (see here, for instance), as a “human rights crime”:
“I kid you not. My gast was flabbered the minute I set my foot across the threshold of that place. They have these sort of electronic vegetarian Tyrannosaurus rex playing with the children of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.”
“The really dismaying thing about it was the troops and troops and troops of small schoolchildren being taken through and presented with all this as fact. That seems to me to be a human rights crime,” he added.
Well, that’s a bit extreme, but I do see it as a reprehensible form of lying to children (but when has that been a crime, except in the public school science classroom)? I still, however, wish there were a way to prevent parents, or authorities like Ken Ham, from inculcating impressionable children with religion. Laws won’t work anywhere, so what can we do?
Grayling goes on to discuss value (which he sees as nil) of debating religious people. He sees it ineffective at changing those people’s minds, but is useful for addressing those on the fence, who might be unaware of the “rich humanist tradition. To quote the well-coiffed philosopher:
“Jonathan Swift said, ‘There is no reasoning a person out of a position they weren’t reasoned into,’ and this is the case with religion, because of course the vast majority of religious people are religious because of their early experience, they were indoctrinated as children.”
“The whole point in debating people with a real investment in a religious outlook is you are not going to change their minds,” he said. “You’re not really talking to them, because you’re not going to make a difference to them, but you might make a difference to people who are uncertain, people who are reflecting, people who are wavering on the brink.”
Well, that’s pretty accurate but not completely. I’ve met many people, and there are many readers here, who have been reasoned out of religion. Dan Barker, John Loftus, and Jerry DeWitt are three. There are indeed some people who, though immersed in faith, have a tiny seed of doubt that can blossom into full nonbelief.
When I moved into the freshman Honors dormitory at William and Mary in 1967, a skinny kid from Connecticut was moving into the adjacent room. His name was Kenneth Albert King, Jr., but he was called “Kenny.” We were all amused at his saddle shoes, a Fifty-ish item that he continued to wear for a few years until that kind of clothing was supplanted by jeans, paisley shirts, and love beads.
Kenny and I soon became fast friends—inseparable, really. Although he was an English major, and I wanted to be a biologist, we shared many traits—particularly a penchant for the bizarre and grotesque aspects of life, the desire to cram as much experience as we could into our short span, and a desire to go out “on the road” (our heroes were Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy).
And we did all that, traveling extensively over the next ten years. The highlight was a marathon hitchhiking trip from Fort Worth Texas (site of a friend’s wedding), up through South Dakota, and east to Boston. That trip included a ride with four stoned G.I.s returning from Vietnam carrying several “keys” of marijuana, and driving a car with no license plates—not a wise move. It also included a ride down the freeway at 100 mph in a car containing four drunken teenagers, with “Paint it Black” cranked up full volume on the radio, and a girl in a bikini sitting in the driver’s lap. (That’s the only time I’ve ever asked to be let out of a car.) And we were busted on the Dan Ryan freeway here in Chicago for hitchhiking: a state trooper had been killed that night, and they frisked and questioned us for an hour by the interstate before letting us off. That trip was the first thing I remembered when I heard the news about Kenny yesterday.
Here’s a photo from 1972, sent to me this morning by my friend Will, another of our classmates, and one whose parents lived in Fort Wayne Indiana. (Will was in fact the guy who got married in Texas.) Halfway through our Big Hitchhiking Trip, Kenny and I sought food, a bed, and solace from Will’s parents, showing up unannounced on their doorstep. They took this picture of us. Note my Mountain Master backpack.
On the road! Neal and Jack wannabees.
That was just one of many great times we had—often the kind of times that Tolkien described as difficult in the experiencing but wonderful in the retelling.
We read the same books (Vonnegut, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were favorites), dated the same women, and shared many mind-altering substances—this was, after all, the late Sixties. It was with Kenny that I had the LSD experience in which I received a profound revelation, duly scrawled on a piece of paper to be read the next day. As I’ve recounted, the revelation turned out, in the morning light, to be “The walls are fucking brown.” We went to many of the antiwar demonstrations in Washington together, and I visited his home in Enfield, Connecticut, meeting his siblings and his parents, the famous “Lefty” (an ironworker) and “Phil” (for “Phyllis”).
After college, I moved to Boston for graduate school, and Kenny took a job in Washington, D.C.. Although he aspired to be a world-class writer (and I still maintain that the raw materials were there—I have his letters to prove it), he took more mundane jobs that always left him stressed and unsatisfied. But we got together as often as we could.
Here’s a picture of Kenny and me taken in 1977 by a friend and former classmate—Clark Quin, who was (and is) a professional photographer—at his studio in Somerville, Massachusetts. Needless to say, both of us were drunk and stoned at the time. Kenny is holding a bottle of his favorite brew, Rolling Rock. (We drank so much of this beer that we memorized the motto on the bottle, something I can still recite today: “From the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe, we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the mountain springs to you. ’33′”.) Clark wrote the lovely sentence below the photo.
I loved Kenny; for years he was my best friend and I’ll probably never be closer to any man.
In Washington, Kenny met a wonderful British woman, married her, and moved to England, taking up a job at Whitbread Breweries as an IT expert and buying a house in the village of Kingsclere. We still kept in touch, and I visited him and Jane about once a year. They had two kids, a boy and a girl, and moved to the even smaller village of Denton, where they bought a lovely renovated barn that used to belong to the vicarage. It was a peaceful place—a place to walk, have scrumptious vegetarian meals (Jane was a vegetarian and and a great cook), and, most of all, to drink wine and chat.
Among the legacies that Kenny left is my love of wine. He was an oenophile, a collector far more serious than I, and introduced me to good wine. On my many visits to Denton, he’d break out some great bottles and we’d do blind, comparative tastings: say, four bottles of Hermitage with dinner. Needless to say, we’d polish them off and fall insensate into bed. The next day we’d walk it off through the neighboring fields.
The photo below is the way I’ll remember Kenny in the last years—proffering a great bottle. He was full of warmth and friendship—the kind of guy who would dig through his collection to offer me his special rarities. We bought cases and bottles together—I still have a few bottles of Maury from 1939 sitting in Denton.
Once every couple of months, a big manila envelope would arrive in Chicago from Denton. It contained newspaper clippings that Kenny had collected for me. Many of them were Jancis Robinson’s columns on wine, but others were about rock and roll (we shared the same passions there, too: Steely Dan; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Laura Nyro; Joni Mitchell, and the Beatles), literature, and all of our joint enthusiasms. I got one of these packets about three weeks ago, and haven’t yet finished going through it.
Yesterday, when I woke up at 4:30, I had an email from Kenny’s wife with the header, “Very sad news.” My heart sank: what could have happened? It couldn’t be! And then I opened the email, which began:
I am very sorry to send you bad news by email. Kenny died very suddenly on Sunday while we were staying with friends in Kingsclere.
All I could absorb was “Kenny died.” It went on, but the details are irrelevant. I stumbled to work, and what filled my mind was that big hitchhiking trip we took in 1972, and how the person who went with me no longer existed. Yes, those are the trite but human thoughts that strike us when this happens: the person is gone for good. Where did he go? As an atheist, I know he’s gone for good. We were planning a big wine-tasting trip together next year: an epic journey by car from England through France and down to Jerez in Spain. The person I would have gone with is no more. The only mercy is that he had an end that was sudden, rather than withering slowly and painfully into decrepitude. But it was way too soon: he was allotted another two decades!
We will all lose loved ones, and experience the horrible pain when that happens, and such is the curse of Homo sapiens. But who is to say that a lioness doesn’t experience the same grief when they lose a cub? The difference is that we know it will happen; we are the only species aware of our own mortality. We pretend that we’re immortal but know we’re not, and we know too that if we live long enough we’ll experience these losses over and over. One day there is a happy, wine-drinking human, and then he is no more. At such moments every word and phrase seems trite: he had a good life, the grief will abate over time, he did not suffer, and so on. There is no consolation for his wife and children save their mutual support; our love and sympathy are not anodyne, though we hope otherwise.
There is nothing to add except that I loved him, that my heart goes out to his family, and that we had many good times together on this planet. Without Kenny my life would have been immensely poorer. He will be buried Tuesday in Kingsclere, but I will not be there, for I have unbreakable commitments in California.
Kenny leaves behind his wife Jane, two children, Adam and Charlotte, and a recently born grandchild, Thomas, as well as his sister Pam and brother Peter (you may know Peter King from reading Sports Illustrated or watching football on television, where he’s a commentator).
I lifted a glass to my late friend last night, and it was a good one: a Rioja Alta Viña Ardanza Riserva from 2004. He would have liked it. It was full and rich—like his life.
Here’s a new Jesus and Mo showing that both prophets (praise be upon them) are deluded—but not in the way they think:
I’ll throw in a slide from my Storer Lecture a week from today in Davis, California (all are welcome), showing the health dangers of catering to faith in the U.S.:
This is “The President,” supposedly the world’s largest tree (probably not the third largest, as indicated below) if you’re considering volume. It’s a giant sequoia (Sequoiadendrongiganteum)in California, and these massive trees are one of the most amazing sights I’ve seen: certainly the most impressive single organism I’ve encountered in my life. When you first see one of these giants, you simply cannot believe that a tree can be this large.
To show how big they are, My Modern Met shows a photo made from many individual photos:
For the December 2012 issue of National Geographic, photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols journeyed to the Sequoia National Park in California in order to capture this image of the President, a giant sequoia that is the third largest tree in the world, if measured by volume of the trunk above ground.
Using a rig system made up of ropes, Nichols and his team raised a camera so that they could take shots of every part of the 247-ft-tall, 27-ft-wide giant. It took Nichols 32 days of work to photograph the tree and stitch together the final image from 126 individual photos, creating the first picture of the President captured entirely in a single frame. The result is a stunning image that shows the majestic tree in all its glory, towering high above the snowy ground and tiny people.
Look at this baby!
Their range is very limited, so it’s a special experience to see one. Here’s the range map from Wikipedia:
Here’s a National Geographic video about that tree:
One of the wonderful things about California is that it has the world’s oldest trees (the bristlecone pines), the world’s tallest trees (the giant redwoods), and the world’s most massive trees (see above). Two of these—the bristlecones and giant sequoias—are within a day’s drive of each other, and the giant redwoods only another day’s drive away. Throw in Death Valley, one of my favorite spots on earth, and you have four biological/geographical wonders easily accessible in a few days’ drive.
Take Professor Ceiling Cat’s word: go see these big and old trees if you get to California.
Episode 113 of the Bryan Callen Show is a podcast I did about two weeks ago. It’s about an hour long, and you can hear it here.
I can’t bear to listen to such things, but the conversation devolved into sundry matters. As I recall, I got into a small but interesting kerfuffle with Callen’s co-host, Hunter Maats. You’ll have to listen to figure out what that contretemps was about.
I admit that I haven’t yet read Dan’s whole piece, but Caruso gives an interesting excerpt, which suggests that Dennett may be rethinking the issue of free will. (As you probably know if you’re a regular here, Dan is a “compatibilist,” who feel that free will is absolutely compatible with physical determinism. He’s written two books taking this position, Freedom Evolves and Elbow Room.
Caruso quotes Dennett on the disparity between compatibilism and incompatibilism, a difference that seems semantic but in my view has repercussions for how we deal with punishment and reward in our society:
“The problem with answering this question is that the everyday concept of free will, to which we must somehow anchor whatever philosophizing we do, has two radically independent – indeed well nigh inconsistent – “criteria” that have coexisted for millennia without resolution. On the one hand free will is supposedly an important phenomenon because it is, in one way or another, morally important; as I have put it, free will is “worth wanting”. On the other hand, it has traditionally been supposed that if a choice is determined, this in itself shows it not to be a free choice. Which criterion should dominate, when we ask what we mean by “free will”? Both have venerable traditions and supporting examples. For many years, I operated on the assumption that free will worth considering must be free will worth wanting, and have thus supposed that if you are talking about a variety of free will that has no direct bearing on issues of responsibility or moral competence, you are not talking about free will.
But recently I have learned from discussions with a variety of scientists and other non-philosophers (e.g., the scientists participating with me in the Sean Carroll workshop on the future of naturalism) that they lean the other way: free will, in their view, is obviously incompatible with naturalism, with determinism, and very likely incoherent against any background, so they cheerfully insist that of course they don’t have free will, couldn’t have free will, but so what? It has nothing to do with morality or the meaning of life. Their advice to me at the symposium was simple: recast my pressing question as whether naturalism (materialism, determinism, science…) has any implications for what we may call moral competence. For instance, does neuroscience show that we cannot be responsible for our choices, cannot justifiably be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished? Abandon the term “free will” to the libertarians and other incompatibilists, who can pursue their fantasies untroubled. Note that this is not a dismissal of the important issues; it’s a proposal about which camp gets to use, and define, the term. I am beginning to appreciate the benefits of discarding the term “free will” altogether, but that course too involves a lot of heavy lifting, if one is to avoid being misunderstood.”
I was one of those scientists at Sean Carroll’s workshop, and Dan was pretty obdurate in defending compatibilism. At least he certainly didn’t show any sympathy for abandoning the term “free will.” Now, however, he seems to be relenting a little on that, and I’m wondering whether he’s rethinking the connection between compatibilism, incompatibilism, and moral responsibility. (I’ve expressed my view on this before: we must be held responsible for our acts, but not morally responsible.)
So I agree with Caruso when he says that that Dennett’s words reveal “an acknowledgement on his part that the concept of FW [free will] may be too loaded with anti-naturalist connotations that it may not be worth preserving for those naturalistically inclined philosophers and scientists. This is especially telling coming from Dennett, since no one has done more to try to naturalize the concept of FW than him!”
Recently I’ve had several emails from Dan saying that he’s going to write a big article pwning my views on free will, similar to what he did with Sam Harris (I didn’t think Sam got pwned), and telling me that I’m really a “closet compatibilist.” I’m not sure if this will ever happen, but before Dan claims that the proposal to jettison the term “free will” was his, I’m going to claim it as mine right now, by reproducing a slide I showed at that naturalism conference:
Actually, the words in red aren’t mine, but I can’t remember where they came from—perhaps from Anthony Cashmore or one of the numerous books and articles I’ve read on the topic. I do think that the term “free will” should either be abandoned or taken solely in its libertarian form, but it’s now so fraught with disagreement now that perhaps the former choice is wiser.
At any rate, I’m apparently in line for some Dennettian umbrage.
_______
UPDATE: As commenter Desmarets says below, the words on my slide have been sleuthed out:
These words ‘my decision was caused by internal forces I do not understand’ are from Marvin Minsky in The Society of Mind, p.306 Nr 30.6
