I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Massimo Pigluicci lately, and for several reasons. I’ve been busy writing, and haven’t had time to read many websites. And when I have read Massimo’s site, Rationally Speaking, I’ve been put off by his arrogance, attack-dogishness (if you want a strident atheist, look no further than Massimo), and his repeated criticisms of New Atheists because We Don’t Know Enough Philosophy. (If you substituted “Theology” for “Philosophy” there, you’d pretty much have Terry Eagleton). But I haven’t gone after Pigliucci, either, for he’s left me pretty much alone.

That has changed, for he has just published a strong attack on New Atheists (mentioning me, albeit briefly) in a paper in Midwest Studies in Philosophy (free access and download at link; reference below): “New atheism and the scientistic turn in the atheism movement.” It’s a nasty piece of work: mean-spirited and misguided. It’s also, I suspect, motivated by Pigliucci’s jealousy of how the New Atheists get more attention and sell more books than he does—and that’s just unfair because people like Sam Harris and Dawkins don’t know any philosophy and ergo shouldn’t have any credibility. In fact, Pigliucci argues, their ignorance of philosophy is deeply injurious to the cause of both science and New Atheism.

I’ll leave the psychological factors aside for the nonce, but I have to say that the paper just drips and seethes with jealousy and the feeling that Pigliucci considers himself neglected because philosophy is marginalized by New Atheists.  And he has no good words for any of the new atheists, with the slight exception of Dennett (a fellow philosopher who nevertheless comes in for some drubbing), and Alain De Botton and A. C. Grayling, whom he sees as Not New Atheists (Grayling certainly is one of us, though!).

Pigluicci’s piece starts out all right, accurately identifying the distinguishing trait of New Atheism as its connection with science and its taking the idea of God as a hypothesis to be tested. The other characteristic is that it’s immensely popular—even more so than the works of “old” atheists like Ingersoll and Russell (but not Mencken).

But then Pigliucci begins to beef. He argues that “this isn’t a simple issue of turf wars between science and philosophy, but rather an attempt to clarify the differences—as well as overlap and mutual reinforcement—between the two fields, broadly construed.” It is no such thing. As I’ll show with some quotes, it clearly is a turf war for Pigliucci, and anyone who’s has followed him knows that this is the case. It’s bloody obvious, no matter how loudly he insists the contrary.

First, Pigliucci disposes of Hitchens as being largely irrelevant to his argument about science. Notice, though, the examples he gives of Hitchens’s work: a clue that there is something more here than just dispassionate academic analysis:

Beginning with Hitchens, there is actually relatively little to say. His God is Not Great is a straightforward anti-religious polemic, something at which the author notoriously excelled throughout his career, whether in defense of Trotskyism or of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.The book is simply not about science per se. . .

True, but why did he mention Trotsky and Iraq rather than, say, Mother Teresa or the Elgin Marbles? And of course the phrase “notoriously excelled” is simply a gratuitous slur.

Pigliucci then moves on to Dawkins, Stenger, and Harris, whose big mistake, he says, is to take god as a scientific hypothesis:

Nonetheless, in the end [Dawkins] has to resort to philosophical aid, what he refers to as his “argument from improbability,” which is essentially an invocation of Occam’s razor. That is not a problem in and of itself, since after all Occam’s razor—as much as it is clearly an extra-empirical criterion—is routinely invoked within scientific practice. The real issue is that Dawkins (and most if not all of the New Atheists) does not seem to appreciate the fact that there is no coherent or sensible way in which the idea of god can possibly be considered a “hypothesis” in any sense remotely resembling the scientific sense of the term. The problem is that the supernatural, by its own (human) nature, is simply too swishy to be pinpointed precisely enough.

I don’t know what Pigliucci means by “swishy” or “pinpointed,” but it’s simply wrong to claim that a). believers don’t see God as a real entity who interacts with the world in certain ways (making that a hypothesis), and b). that one can’t test the supernatural, an old and false argument often used by Eugenie Scott.  In fact, believers are constantly adducing “evidence” for God, be it Alvin Plantinga’s claim that our senses couldn’t detect truth without their having been given us by god, or Francis Collins’s argument that our innate “moral law” is evidence for God, or the common claim that the “fine tuning” of the constants of physics is evidence for God, or that our sense of “beauty” and “purpose” is evidence for God, or even the James-ian argument that our intuitions and emotions about God constitute a kind of evidence, or at least a reason to believe.

This is all evidence, and believe me, if credible evidence turned up, of the type I’ve mentioned before (Jesus returns, heals amputees, gets filmed, ascends back to heaven, etc.), the faithful would be the first to adduce it, as they already do now when canonizing a new saint. (I wonder what John Paul’s miracles were?) Believers have reasons for what they believe, and that makes god a hypothesis. Further, they have reasons why they reject other faiths. Ask a Christian why he rejects Islam, and he’ll adduce evidence, or rather the lack thereof. Ask a Mormon why she believes, and she’ll mention the Golden Plates—vouched for by two separate testimonies at the beginning of the Book of Mormon. Those who say they don’t need reasons to believe will nevertheless give you ample reasons for not believing in other faiths.

As reader Sastra has often mentioned, atheists do believers the honor of taking their claims seriously, for the believers don’t just pull God out of their tuchus: they have reasons for being Christians, Jews, etc., even if those reasons are simply “I was brought up that way.” And if there are reasons, then one can argue using both rationality (in the case of the “I was brought up that way” argument) and evidence. If you think the Moral Law is evidence for God, you can examine whether our primate relatives also show evidence for morality, and whether and how much of human morality really is innate. That’s science!

Finally, Massimo should know better, for science deals with the supernatural all the time. What else are scientific investigations of ESP and other paranormal phenomena, or studies of “spiritual healing” and intercessory prayer? If religions make claims about how God interacts with the world, then those claims, “supernatural” or not—and the word “supernatural” is notoriously hard to define—can be examined scientifically.

Throughout Pigluicci’s article we find digs at the philosophical ignorance of New Atheists, which belies his claim that this is not a “turf war.” Here’s one connected to the claim of “you can’t test God”:

Besides the obvious fact that one can genuinely be puzzled by what exactly qualifies Stenger (or Dawkins) to authoritatively comment on the straightforward philosophical matters that make up most of their books, the basic problem with Stenger is precisely the same as Dawkins: he treats the “god hypothesis” as if it were formulated precisely and coherently enough to qualify as a scientific hypothesis, which it manifestly isn’t, for the reasons already explained. It is, of course, this very insistence on the part of Dawkins, Stenger, and others that provides the bulk of the evidence for the conclusion that the New Atheism movement has a markedly scientistic flavor which was missing from its historical predecessors.

And here’s another, which is just wrong:

Moreover, it seems clear to me that most of the New Atheists (except for the professional philosophers among them) pontificate about philosophy very likely without having read a single professional paper in that field. If they had, they would have no trouble recognizing philosophy as a distinct (and, I maintain, useful) academic discipline from science: read side by side, science and philosophy papers have precious little to do with each other, in terms not just of style, but of structure, scope, and range of concerns. I would actually go so far as to charge many of the leaders of the New Atheism movement (and, by implication, a good number of their followers) with anti-intellectualism, one mark of which is a lack of respect for the proper significance, value, and methods of another field of intellectual endeavor.

Really, “most of the New Atheists haven’t read a philosophy paper”? I seriously doubt that. I won’t defend myself on this count, for I’ve read many, and so, I suspect, have Dawkins, Harris, Stenger, and others seen as important New Atheists.  The charge of anti-intellectualism is snobbish, and what Pigliucci means by it is that New Atheists harbor a “lack of respect” for his field: philosophy. It’s statements like the above that make it hard to take Massimo seriously as a dispassionate critic of New Atheism.  Did he ask any of us if we’d read any philosophy papers?

Another major gripe of Pigliucci is that people like me and, especially, Sam Harris construe “science” too broadly: we see it as any endeavor to find out truths about the universe using observation and reason. I’ve used the example of car mechanics and plumbing as science “broadly construed” (I used “broadly construed” to avoid confusion with “real” science as done by scientists). But really, formal science as done by scientists differs only in its trappings from what a plumber does when he tries to find a leak. Finding leaks, or working out an electrical problem in a car, involves hypotheses, tests, falsification, and so on. Sam has a fine essay about this issue that he wrote for Edge, “Our narrow definition of science”, and I recommend it.

Pigliucci calls this broadening of the term “science” as a form of “scientism” which, he says, is philosophically unsound (really? it’s just a definition)—a trait that actually hurts science by making us seem arrogant, and also hurts atheism by somehow enfolding philosophy into the term “science”. That, of course, is Pigluicci’s real complaint:

What I do object to is the tendency, found among many New Atheists, to expand the definition of science to pretty much encompassing anything that deals with “facts,” loosely conceived. So broadened, the concept of science loses meaning and it becomes indistinguishable from just about any other human activity. One might as well define “philosophy” as the discipline that deals with thinking and then claim that everything we do, including of course science itself, properly belongs to philosophy. It would be a puerile and useless exercise, and yet it is not far from the attitude prevalent among the New Atheists.

Well, you know, I wouldn’t have any objection to including science as a subset of philosophy—one that includes not only philosophy’s rational thinking but applies it to answering questions about what is true in the universe. After all, science used to be called “natural philosophy” in Europe. What’s important is to distinguish those disciplines that enforce reasons for believing in things (disciplines like science, math, and philosophy) from those that don’t (postmodern literary criticism, theology, etc.).

This complaint becomes even more curious because Pigliucci is willing to enfold both science and philosophy into a broader discipline, “scientia”:

Assuming my critique of what is actually new about the New Atheism hits the mark, one can still pose the reasonable question of what might be the most constructive way for atheists of the new generations to look upon their metaphysical position, and in particular upon how it relates to both sound philosophical and scientific notions. I think that atheists need to seriously reconsider how they think of human knowledge in general, perhaps arching back to the classic concept of “scientia,” the Latin word from which “science” derives, but that has a broader connotation of (rationally arrived at) knowledge. Scientia includes science sensu stricto, philosophy, mathematics, and logic—that is, all the reliable sources of third person knowledge that humanity has successfully experimented with so far. In turn, when scientia is combined with input from other humanistic disciplines, the arts, and first-person experience it yields understanding.

This is pretty much o.k. except that Pigluicci includes “arts” and “first-person experience,” with “scientia” as ways of understanding.  “First-person experience,” of course, includes the many forms of revelation used to justify the existence of God, and while “arts” are ways of “feeling,” it’s arguable about whether the kind of understanding they yield is equivalent to the kind of understanding produced by physics and philosophy, or, for that matter, by revelation.

At the end of his paper, Pigluicci once again bashes New Atheists for attempting to subsume philosophy under science (he’s already said this elebenty gazillion times in his paper), and makes a final dubious argument that this type of conflation hurts the progress of New Atheism. What would really further atheism, according to Pigliucci is—wait for it—a proper respect for philosophy!:

But what the New Atheists seem to be aiming at is a replacement of philosophy by science, or at the very least a significant demotion of the former with respect to the latter. And this appears to be the case even among the philosophers who count themselves as New Atheists, Dennett and Rosenberg chief among them. This ends up diminishing the case for atheism and allied positions about gods, as they lose some of the the strong intellectual ground that has been their hallmark since the Greek atomists.

. . .What the atheist movement needs, therefore, is not a brute force turn toward science at the expense of everything else, but rather a more nuanced, comprehensive embracing of all the varied ways—intellectual as well as experiential—in which human beings acquire knowledge and develop understanding of their world. A healthy respect for, and cooperation with, other disciplines should be the hallmark of the twenty-first century atheist, and this is precisely the direction toward which some post–New Atheism writers, such as De Botton and Grayling (not at all coincidentally, both philosophers) have been pushing most recently. That path, rather than the one attempted by the New Atheists, is the one that I think has the most potential to lead to a long-standing rational and persuasive case for atheism.

(Note to readers: when you see the word “nuanced” used in criticism of atheism, run!)

Now I am a fan of certain types of philosophy, including the moral philosophy of people like John Rawls and Judith Jarvis Thomson, the blending of philosophy with science as practiced by Dan Dennett and Peter Singer, and the philosophical examination of theological claims as done by people like Hermann Phillipse and Walter Kaufmann (note to Pigliucci: I’ve read all of them).  I like philosophy that deals with real-world problems, for the genuine benefit of philosophy, to me, is not arguing about useless things like the “meaning of meaning” (Pigluicci will of course object that that’s an important problem), but to help us weed out misconceptions, erroneous thinking, and logical errors in how we think about science, life, and morality. Philosophers have a lot to teach us about how to think rigorously. But what atheism needs is not arcane and “sophisticated philosophy”, but people like Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens who know enough philosophy of the nonacademic sort that they can point out errors in the thinking of regular religious people.

And they have done so—quite effectively. In fact, the success of New Atheism in recent years can be attributed mainly to “philosophically naive” books like The God Delusion, The End of Faith, and God is Not Great, as well as to the dissemination of New Atheist videos and writings via the Internet and the connection that the Internet provides between previously closeted and isolated atheists.

Let me return Pigluicci’s snark for a moment and argue that he himself, although a professed atheist, has had virtually no influence in the rising visibility and success of New Atheism. That seems to bother him, but what it’s really done is turn him onto an intellectual siding that dead-ends at irrelevance. Instead of the important task of dispelling religious mythology and getting people to examine their harmful beliefs, Pigliucci is on a campaign to damn other New Atheists because they don’t afford his discipline the proper respect. That has accomplished very little: it’s not only angered potential allies (something he says that New Atheists are doing by being scientistic and arrogant), but has marginalized him, though he doesn’t seem to realize it.

I was once favorably disposed to Pigliucci, but nasty and mean-spirited articles like this one, which really say nothing he hasn’t said before a thousand times, don’t make me see him as much of an ally. He is the Rodney Dangerfield of atheism, always pulling at his Philosophical Tie and claiming that he doesn’t get enough respect.

At any rate, Massimo’s dissing of New Atheists, especially Sam Harris, has caused a bit of an intellectual kerfuffle on the Internet. Pigliucci recently published this cartoon on his website Rationally Speaking, a cartoon explicitly aimed at Sam’s view of science (and mine) as something that can be construed broadly. (I take credit for the plumbing trope.)  This is very like a Jack Chick tract!

And Sam has responded on Twitter:

I’m pretty much with Sam: the important work is what people like Sam, Richard, Dan, and Steve Pinker have done (and that Hitchens did before he died), not the yapping at their heels done by the likes of Pigliucci. There are many “pigliucci units” between Massimo’s new paper and The End of Faith.

And if New Atheism has been such a miserable failure, why does Pigliucci admit this?

The extrinsic character of the New Atheism is to be found in the indisputably popular character of the movement. All books produced by the chief New Atheists mentioned above have been worldwide best sellers, in the case of Dawkins’s God Delusion, for instance, remaining for a whopping 51 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. While previous volumes criticizing religion had received wide popular reception (especially the classic critique of Christianity by Bertrand Russell), nothing like that had happened before in the annals of Western literature. The search for the reasons explaining such an unprecedented level of popularity is best left to sociologists, and at any rate is not really relevant to my aims here.

Of course it’s relevant; Pigliucci simply doesn’t realize it.

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Pigliucci, M. 2013. New Atheism and the scientistic turn in the atheism movement. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 37:142-153.