Online encyclopedia article on New Atheism

Here's an article on "The New Atheists" in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's an interesting synthesis, though of course that has its dangers. It's not as if the people who are commonly labeled "New Atheists" form a philosophical school or even that any of them (even Dennett) necessarily has a comprehensive philosophical position. Once you take a hint here from one person, a hint there from another, an implication that one person says X so presumably his allies also think X ... then you'll present a composite picture that is not necessarily true to the beliefs of any one individual.

The criticisms of specific positions are interesting, and some may, I suppose, be fair. However, some are not. It's hardly fair charging someone with "scientism", which is then defined in a paradoxical way by you (not by them) and then claiming that they hold a view that is paradoxical. Someone somewhere may be guilty of a paradoxical epistemological position, such as scientism is supposed to be, but you'd better wait until they actually spell out the view that is supposed to be paradoxical before you accuse them of holding it.

The views from William Lane Craig that are relied on cannot really be used in the way that they are. It's no use saying that theologians see God as having a mind that is simple. The point is that if you start from a position of neutrality, moving in an incremental way from what we've discovered about the world, you will not end up drawing the inference that a simple mind designed something that, ex hypothesi, is incredibly complex. Human beings never see that sort of thing happening. We do, of course, see complexity evolve iteratively via simple mechanisms. However, any designing minds that we see are, in fact, incredibly complex things. If we were to draw the inference that the universe is a designed thing, the product of one or more designing minds, the natural inference to draw is that the designing mind(s) must be unimaginably complex. It may be logically possible that the universe somehow arose from a huge power source attached to a simple mind, but that is not something that we've ever seen, and it is not the sort of inference that we'd draw, based on our actual knowledge, from what we perceive of the universe and have learned about it.

In which case, we would want to know where that mind came from - the only complex designing minds that we've ever encountered are products of evolutionary development over vast tracts of time. So, given the knowledge we actually have, why wouldn't we then speculate that any designer of the universe is most likely also such a product? Either that, or if it was itself designed, why would we not assume that its designer was also unimaginably complex? The point is, William Lane Craig and the encyclopedia author are assuming what they need to demonstrate: that we have some reason to begin by favouring a theological notion of an essentially simple mind with complex contents - but why postulate something like that as the explanation of the universe when we've never encountered anything of the kind?

The discussion of how the New Atheists "must" be moral objectivists is obviously of interest. Perhaps they are. But if, in speaking to you, I criticise some social institution for having destructive consequences I don't thereby assume that having destructive consequences is an objectively bad thing. All I have to assume is that you and I both desire to avoid destructive consequence. If what we want from social institutions is that they not, for example, produce suffering, constrain human choice, and spread ignorance, but, rather, that they ameliorate suffering, empower individuals in various ways, and spread knowledge, then nothing stops us calling religion, or particular religions, "bad". If they are inefficient - indeed counter-productive - for ameliorating suffering, and so on, then we are entitled to make a negative evaluation. More generally, no one has to be committed to the idea of objective values or objective standards to make a negative evaluation of a social institution. We make evaluations against standards that reflect our actual values, goals, and purposes ... as we do all the time with other things.

Moral language may well often contain a claim of some sort of objective requirement or prohibition. That may well be part of the very meaning of some kinds of moral language. But no such claim necessarily lies in a judgment such as, "This is a bad social institution" or "This is a bad law" or "This is a bad political policy." All that's required is a sense of what counts, in the context concerned, as a good or bad social institution, etc., supported by some sharing of values, goals, and purposes.

(And even if someone says, "That was a morally wrong act," she may be using shorthand, or (rightly or wrongly) she may not accept that this means "an objectively forbidden act" ... or there may be other explanations other than that she is committed to moral objectivism.)

Again, it may turn out that the leading New Atheists really are all objectivists, but they needn't be. Even non-cognitivists make judgments of "good" and "bad", for Zeus's sake, and so do crude relativists, and they all offer stories about what it means when they do so. You really can't infer much about someone's metaethical position merely because he or she makes judgments of social institutions being good and bad.

How disconcerting is moral error theory?

Moral error theory interprets moral judgments as making truth-apt claims - and says they are all false. Now, in fact, it may not be so simple. While that's a position within a set of metaethical pigeonholes, no one who sees a problem with moral judgments necessarily has to claim that all moral judgments are simply false. Morality may turn out to be very messy. Perhaps some moral claims are best interpreted non-cognitively, and so as neither true nor false. Perhaps some are best interpreted cognitively, or as having a cognitive component, but are actually true. In The Myth of Morality, Richard Joyce thinks that moral language is pretty much seamless, so that all sorts of first-order moral judgments stand or fall together. Here, I'm not sure that I'm with him - and this an area where I'd like to find some time for more thought and research.

Still, skipping over that for now, Joyce and I (and Mackie and Garner, and a lot of other philosophers these days) agree that what are often thought of as the most central moral judgments are literally false. Those are claims such as "X-ing is morally wrong" or "Y-ing is morally obligatory". Actually, even here I'm not sure that I'm in full agreement. I think that part of the trouble is that we don't really know what we're saying when we make these claims. This sort of moral language may suffer from confusion and uncertainty as much as anything else.

So, I'm starting to look like an error theorist in only a minimal sense. Nonetheless, one of the things that people seem to be thinking and conveying when they use this kind of language is "X-ing is objectively forbidden" or "Y-ing is objectively demanded". I.e., there's a claim of objective prescriptivity here, and my position is that all such claims are false. Sophisticated moral relativists also hold that all such claims are false, but they argue that we don't make such claims when we make moral judgments. Such positions - which are rather remote from the kind of crude moral relativism that Sam Harris rightly atttacks, and which almost all philosophers hate - make moral judgments seem much like ordinary evaluations. Or, in one version, moral judgments can be interpreted (perhaps charitably) as being like that.

Although moral relativism has a bad reputation, I think the most sophisticated versions, which tend to be inspired by the work of Gilbert Harman, are actually quite attractive. As I've observed before, what separates them from the most common form of error theory is their moral semantic component. Whereas as an error theorist will interpret "X-ing is morally wrong" as "X-ing is objectively forbidden" or maybe "X-ing is forbidden by a standard that is objectively binding", a sophisticated relativist will interpret it as "X-ing is forbidden by standards that those in involved in this conversation share" or perhaps "X-ing is forbidden by standards that I invite others involved in this conversation to share". There may be a further thought that the standards being used could be justified to others involved in the conversation, perhaps by appealing to their values and/or widely shared values.

The problem for sophisticated relativists is that we really do tend - don't we? - to think, when we make these kinds of thin judgments, that we are stating objective requirements or prohibitions. In some sense, the requirement or prohibition exists in the nature of things, or is just a fact (of some sort), or is true as a matter of reason (in some sense of "reason" that we cannot ignore). In that sense, these sorts of moral judgments are not like other evaluations of "good" and "bad" where we don't seem to think that the standards used are binding. As I've discussed in the past, other evaluations leave room for at least some legitimate disagreement. Perhaps more importantly, they don't usually involve the idea that the standard used is objectively binding, even on rational creatures who don't share the desires, goals, purposes, or whatever that underwrite it. We get by making evaluations that are useful to us in particular social contexts.

Towards the end of my interview with Common Sense Atheism the other night, I was asked a question to the effect of how I could reassure someone who is worried about the idea that the standards on which moral judgments are made are not objectively binding.

I had a fair bit to say, but I was conscious as I thought about it once more, that a lot of people really are going to find the idea disconcerting. What can be said to them, at the end of the day, is going to involve a whole lot of theory that they need to grasp, and something important does at least seem to be lost if moral requirements and prohibitions are not, in the sense that I'm denying, objective ones. Putting myself into the mind of an objectivist who is an ordinary good person (note again that I don't think that the word "good" is necessarily tainted with any error), it is quite a lot to be asked to give up the idea of objective prescriptivity.

As Richard Garner emphasises in his publications, there is also a dark side to objective prescriptivity. In the end, we may be better off without it. I'm definitely not suggesting that abandoning it will cause chaos and suffering. But it's a psychological wrench for most people, or at least that's my perception. I don't think we can simply embrace sophisticated relativist moral semantics, because it looks to me at the moment that the folk (and hence the language they use) are committed at least to some extent to the idea of objective prescriptivity. But nor can we expect them to give up that idea lightly. Sophisticated relativists like Harman make some good points, but they are too optimistic about our ability to expunge objective prescriptivity from our thinking and our discourse.

Again, the problem is not that chaos would ensue if we all agreed to think of moral judgments as much like other evaluations, finding an eventual foundation in various human values and projects - with the addition that these will be especially important and salient values, such as social survival and amelioration of suffering. I expect that we can get by just fine if we think like that, and it's a useful way to think when actually doing practical philosophy. I'll go on arguing this. The problem is the psychological wrench involved if we ask people in general, not just a few philosophers and philosophically-minded folks, to think this way.

Interviews on moral theory

I did my two interviews last night - both long ones, and both about the Sam Harris book, David Hume, moral realism, moral scepticism, and related ideas. The first was with Common Sense Atheism, at 7 pm my time. Then at 2 am my time I did one with the Minnesota Atheists. The latter was live to air and is already, I gather, available in podcast form (I'll dig out a link later on). The Common Sense Atheism one will be podcast at a later date.

I'll have a bit more to say about the individual interviews later on. More generally, it was an unusual experience for me doing all this media work in one night - it doesn't happen that often, and it was just a coincidence that the same day turned out to suit both organisations. I also don't do this sort of thing often enough to feel especially polished at it, and I look on it as a learning experience. On the other hand, I enjoyed the interviews and thought that both went pretty well. I was a bit tired for the second one, and we had some problems with the line dropping out a couple of times. All in all, I thought I was a bit sharper in the first one.

In both cases, I spent quite a lot of time defending Sam Harris/explaining what I agree about with him. Basically this comes down to the important point that religion doesn't provide an authoritative source of guidance in how we should lead our lives, and neither does the local culture. We shouldn't be accepting a practice merely because it is accepted in the culture where it happens. I emphasised that when we evaluate cultural traditions, moral norms, laws and legal systems, customs, and so on, we should look at their consequences for the people they affect.

I didn't manage to say anything quite this cogent, but I suppose I could have put it that consequences are salient to evaluation of these things - not their source in tradition, or a holy book, or a priestly class. I did try to convey that insofar as Harris is saying these sorts of things there's an important message that I agree with.

This was worth making a bit of fuss about, I think, because my review of The Moral Landscape stresses that the most interesting things I could say were about where and why I disagree with the book. That's true if we mean "philosophically interesting", but there's also a take-home message that I can get behind, and these interviews provided an opportunity to spell it out in a bit of detail.

At the same time, both interviews provided opportunities to defend David Hume, and to point out that science cannot determine our deepest values or the totality of our values, even if we otherwise accept the Harris analysis, since that analysis presumes a value of "the well-being of conscious creatures" rather than showing how this is an empirical finding. Thus, TML leaves Hume's point about the is/ought distinction unscathed: Hume never denied that you could derive an "ought" conclusion if you include in your argument an "ought" premise, such as "we ought to value/pursue/maximise the well-being of conscious creatures". His point was that you cannot derive a conclusion containing the relation "ought" solely from premises that do not contain it, but only the relation "is". So, he said, some explanation is required as to where the "ought" relation comes from or how propositions containing it are justified.

There was also an opportunity in each interview to stress that I am not proposing to stamp out talk of "well-being", which can be perfectly useful, but that I don't think it can be pressed beyond a certain point. I explained how well-being may not be just one thing but a mixture of things that we do in fact value - though some of us may weight some of these things differently from others, with no further truth as to who is "correct" to do so. This alone leaves some room for legitimate disagreements, unless all the aspects of what we call "well-being" are lined up in the same direction, as they will be in extreme cases.

The interviews got really interesting - and into the deepest philosophical water - when they turned to questions about moral scepticism, error theory, and so on (all the core metaethical stuff). Unfortunately, we ran out of time in the Minnesota Atheists interview, and had to cut it short at an interesting point where I was about to discuss the example of my disagreement with Peter Singer about radical life extension proposals. That was just a bit frustrating. It was, however, partly because my answers were a longer and more diffuse than I'd have ideally liked.

Still, these were two good opportunities to talk about my philosophical ideas to a popular audience, which is rather different from delivering them to academic colleagues or putting them in written form. The change in forum can make you look at your ideas in a different way, as you wonder how well you're explaining them to such an audience and how they'll come across. Philosophers should do more of this.

More on that later - I'm planning to reflect a bit more about each experience in separate posts. All in all, once again, an interesting night for me last night, and I just hope it went well from the point of view of others involved.

Back soon with more reflections.

They're never satisfied

In the Australian state of Victoria, religious employers are allowed to discriminate in employment where demanded by the inherent requirements of the job. In practice, this is likely to mean that the Catholic Church can insist on male priests - no female priest could consistently uphold the Church's doctrine that only a man can exercise the function of Christ in transmuting the bread and wine, or whatever, exactly, the relevant doctrine is. It is likely to mean that a Catholic teacher employed specifically to teach the Church's miserable doctrines about sexual sin could not expect to hold the job if he or she were openly acting in defiance of those doctrines. Presumably the Black Muslims could insist on a black priest, and a white supremacist cult could insist on a suitably blond and blue-eyed priest or whatever its nutty doctrines demanded.

We could have an interesting discussion about whether these sorts of exceptions are justifiable. They certainly give the various churches and sects considerable scope to discriminate. In any event, folks, that's the current state of the law ... but some of these people are never satisfied.

The religious lobbies in Victoria have pushed for much wider exemptions from anti-discrimination law, and the recently-elected Liberal (i.e. conservative) government is all too willing to comply. It looks like legislation will be enacted that goes far beyond pastoral positions, or those involved in moral teaching or public advocacy, or whatever other areas might come under the "inherent requirements of the job" test, to allow the churches and sects to run enterprises that openly and pretty much freely discriminate in employment.

This is advocated on the grounds of freedom of religion. But hang on, anti-discrimination laws are not enacted for the purpose of suppressing religions. Moreover, that can't even be the effect - not even a collateral effect - as long as there is an "inherent requirements of the job" test in place. The core work of churches and sects, including public advocacy of their respective doctrines, can go on with no real impediment from anti-discrimination law. Once we move beyond pastoral positions and others that are particularly sensitive for whatever reasons - positions where agreeing with, and being seen to agree with, the doctrines concerned really is needed to perform the job competently, safely, and with the employer's trust (which shouldn't be withheld unreasonably by ordinary standards) - where's the problem?

Well, I suppose the problem is that conformity to the law may be inconvenient for religion-sponsored enterprises. It might be easier and "nicer" to have a workplace where everyone from the CEO to the gardener thinks the same things and acts, even in private life, in accordance with the same canons of conduct.

But all enterprises experience a certain amount of inconvenience from obeying the law. Inconvenience does not trump public policy.

Religious or religion-sponsored enterprises don't have any more claim than anyone else to be able to do things in whatever way is most convenient to them, even where it undermines the secular purpose for which a law is enacted. Once churches and sects move into the secular labour market, they should meet the same employment standards as anyone else. Those standards can even include the same flexibility as everyone else gets - the inherent requirements of the job test gives some flexibility to ordinary businesses in various circumstances, as well - but why should religious enterprises get special privileges?

Interview at Common Sense Atheism

The other interview that I'll be doing tonight will be for a podcast at Common Sense Atheism. I'm not quite sure when this will be available online, but I'll let y'all know.

Jenny Blackford revamps her website

Jenny's website has undergone a bit of a facelift over the last couple of days, getting a lot of the information in one accessible place. I laughed out loud at one of the photographs she included (with Felix). You're invited to go and have a look.

Radio appearance with Minnesota Atheists

Very late tonight my time, but Sunday morning American time, I'll be doing a radio interview with Minnesota Atheists (most of the detail is on page 2) about moral realism, moral scepticism, and all the rest of it. Wish me luck. Hopefully the timelag on the phone + my accent, which some Americans seem to find a problem, won't be too much of a factor.

More on accommodationism - the strange case of Aikin and Talisse

I'm a bit late getting to this, but I should comment on the piece by Scott Aikin and Robert B. Talisse over at 3quarksdaily.

I think this piece is very unfortunate, not because I am unlikely to enjoy the authors' new book or because they strike me as stupid, or anything of that nature. However, they have painted themselves into the corner of accepting the label "accommodationist" when they seem to be nothing of the sort.

The term "accommodationism" applies to people who say, in a naive (or disingenuous), unqualified way that "science is compatible with religion". More particularly, it applies to people who think that it is possible to accommodate traditional religious beliefs, without any great intellectual strain, within a science-based view of reality.

Anti-accommodationists do not deny that there are vaguely religious views that avoid direct conflict with science - a non-literalist view, perhaps, or a very austere Deism - and we've said this many times. But we do see real problems, historically and philosophically, when religion encounters science. Some religious views are in blatant logical conflict with science because the space-time universe that they describe simply cannot be reconciled with the facts (the most obvious example is the fundamentalist Christian who believes that the Earth is only 6000 years old). Others are more subtly in conflict with reasonable inferences from the scientific picture - for example views that are held even by many supposedly "moderate" Christians to the effect that there is some kind of sharp discontinuity between Homo sapiens and other animals. In some cases, there may be no outright logical inconsistency, but certain religious views simply become highly implausible given our scientific picture of the world, as with the common elements of anthropocentrism/human exceptionalism that we find in many religious views. In other cases, longstanding theological problems, such as the Problem of Evil, are made more pressing or more difficult as we find out more about the world.

Moreover, anti-accommodationists note the way that religion needs to be constantly reinterpreted to maintain even logical consistency with our empirically-based secular knowledge. This process in itself leaves religious beliefs looking ad hoc and implausible.

We also tend to be very critical of specific philosophical theses that are supposed to leave religion a sphere of authority that is not threatened by science. For example, we tend to criticise Gould's NOMA theory rather harshly - but certainly not only that theory.

There is much more to be said about the anti-accommodationist critique, and much of it has been said in detail in one place or the other. But the upshot is that we say it's unsurprising that scientific knowledge tends to erode religion, or at least lead to a severe thinning out of its truth-claims. A scientific understanding of the world, combined with minimal reflection, leads quite naturally to scepticism about religion and to an overall picture of reality that is pretty much impossible to square with the old religious pictures. To refer to this as "compatibility" is absurd. In many cases it may be disingenuous; at best, it is woolly and misguided.

Anti-accommodationists are also prone to use the word "accommodationism" to describe anyone who accepts the views I've sketched above but who basically says that we should keep quiet about them, perhaps for political reasons.

Often, alas, it can be difficult to tell whether someone really thinks that science and religion are "compatible" ... or whether this is someone who just thinks that this is what we should say.

At any rate, by these definitions, Aikin and Talisse seem pretty clearly to be anti-accommodationists. They seem to think that traditional religious positions are false, their reasons for this seem like they might include perceived implausibilities in reconciling a scientific picture of the world in space and time with what religion has historically offered, and they don't seem to oppose criticism of religion (including criticisms whose premises include scientific findings). How can they be accommodationists, then? From what I can see so far, they are not.

This suggests that people communicating with them, or criticising them, not be in a hurry to call them something they are not. I take it that they mainly want to put their case against religion in a way that they hope will be persuasive to believers, and they think that this involves sounding - or being - reasonable. By that, I take it they mean not sounding too personally hostile.

As I've said before, I think there's a place for scorn and mockery in these debates, though I prefer it to be directed at the absurdities of religious doctrines and associated arguments than at individuals. However, there is also a place to direct it at individuals in some cases - especially those who possess power and influence. But at the same time, there's a place for persuasive advocacy that tries to reach opponents and get them to change their minds, and it's true that a low-key, non-hostile approach is often most effective. You'll see this from the best courtroom advocates, who are very selective in when they choose to display aggression (though they are capable of it when required).

So I don't have any reason to call these two authors accommodationists, but I do think that it's very unfortunate that they have (a) distanced themselves from their natural allies in their post (and, possibly in their book? I don't know yet), and (b) added to the popular myth of the gnasty gnu atheist who is thoughtless and uncivil when dealing with others.

I do hope they'll rethink this and change their approach to this issue. You can damage your own cause in many ways: in this case, accommodationism is only one way to throw your allies under the bus. Anti-accommodationists can do that, too.

The Tangled Bank now available in print

Chris Lynch's anthology The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution has now been published in a print version in time for Darwin Day 2011. This book contains stories, poems, and other material relating to biological evolution, including my essay "Science and the Sea of Faith". High-profile writers include Sean Williams and Brian Stableford - though in fact, it's a strong anthology in terms of writers with high reputations in their various fields.

I'm told that The Tangled Bank will be available from various outlets including Amazon, but meanwhile your best bet is to order it via the link provided.

Some Saturday supervillainy: Zeus vs the Hulk

Well, almighty Zeus isn't really presented in Marvel Comics as a villain, exactly, but I couldn't resist the alliteration.

I see around the intertubes that Marvel created a minor controversy this week when it presented a clash between one of its major heroes, the Incredible Hulk, and the king of the Greek gods - Zeus himself. Guess who won?

Now some Hulk fans are complaining about the Hulk, who almost never loses a fight, being taken down so badly by a "mere" king of a pantheon of imaginary deities. Others are observing that if Hulk fans have reached the point where they expected a different outcome ... well, it was about time something like this happened. I tend to the latter view: heroes are supposed to be physically beatable. They are not supposed to solve their problems by overwhelming force - at least not time after time - but through resourcefulness and courage and a certain amount of luck (and, where relevant, teamwork). Which was why I could never see the point of Superman when I was a kid ... and still can't really.