Accommodation watch

You might like to check this out if you didn't see Brian's comment on my previous post. It's a new blog specifically devoted to the accommodationism debate.

What an historic day!

Julia Gillard 's rise to become Australia's 27th prime minister and first female prime minister is an extraordinary achievement. Now we wait to see how she'll perform in the role. I thought she made a damn good start in her interview on The 7.30 Report tonight - she handled Kerry O'Brien's sensationalist questions expertly. As far as I'm concerned at the moment, what matters is how she'll handle policy, not what may or may not have been said in private conversations between her and Kevin Rudd.

Meanwhile, in other news, the longest professional tennis match ever is currently taking place at Wimbledon! On any other day, that would have received first billing. Even on a day like today, the mind-boggling stats are worth a look.

Is torturing babies really, really wrong?

Or is it, as I argue, just really wrong? Find out the answers to all these questions and more at the Australasian Association of Philosophy annual conference at the University of New South Wales in a couple of weeks. The final conference program has just been published, and I guess I can start working out what sessions to attend (as well as writing my own paper, which I've been composing in my head for the last couple of months).

Cumulus shaped spirituality

This comment by Eric MacDonald deserves to be spread around.

Sample:

One of the things that bothers me more than anything in the absurd assumption that is being made when people talk about the compatibility of religion and science is the sheer diversity, and, so often, perversity, of religious belief. Religions come in so many different shapes and sizes, that the claim that religion is consistent with science is almost certainly false for most religions and for most religious beliefs. If the claim is being made that practicing a kind of cumulus shaped spirituality, without any clear ontological commitments, is consistent with doing science, then, of course the answer is, yes, there is no problem. You can even do it and take an interest in collecting match boxes. But if the religious belief happens to be that someone, somewhere, has authority to speak in the name of a transcendent being for which there is no evidence, that this transcendent being speaks to and communes with, human beings, that it has made an appearance in various guises in the world, that it causes miracles to happen and bodies to rise, or brings luck and good fortune to the favoured, punishes the wicked (for any given religious definition of what that word mean ins its various religious iterations) and authorises outrageous immoralities and injustices in its name, then it is not compatible, and it fatuous to suggest otherwise.

Yes, a cumulus-shaped spirituality with no clear ontology to be seen is consistent with science, or it can be. But of course, that's not something the anti-accommodationist crew have ever denied. Eric makes the point well.

We're not saying that there can never be any logical consistency between science and a sufficiently thinned out (or amorphously shaped) sort of religion. As we've explained so often, that was never the point.

But most real-world religion has plenty of ontology in its diet, and a lot more substance than a cloud. You can't move from the sort-of acceptability of certain kinds of ontologically starved or fuzzy or nice religion (or the kindness and niceness of your local Anglican or Lutheran minister) to a stark claim that: "Religion and science are compatible." That's a pious hope or a marketing slogan. It's the fairyhouse of wishes, baby, not a truth about the world.

What is the purpose of morality?

Over on the Center for Inquiry site, Ron Lindsay asks this question, which has also been occupying us here of late. Sample:

There have been innumerable articles, manifestos, and pamphlets that set forth some set of humanist values and principles that we are supposed to embrace. I don’t necessarily have a problem with the content of these lists of values and principles, but I am concerned that usually there is no explanation why a humanist or anyone else should adopt these values and principles. In other words, there’s little attempt to provide a method for approaching ethical issues. Sure, there is often a reference to using our reason, but although use of our reasoning powers is a good thing, by itself it doesn’t get you very far. If we are to be serious about developing a humanist morality, it seems to me that it is incumbent upon us to explain why we believe people should adhere to the values and principles that we advocate.

I am not proposing that we aim to develop a decision procedure that will generate the one right answer to all our ethical issues. Such a dreamy goal cannot be achieved, in part because there are a considerable number of ethical disputes to which there may not be one right answer. But we can develop a process of analysis and reflection that will provide some moral guidance by limiting the range of ethically acceptable answers -- which by itself would be a significant achievement.

One important element of our methodology should be a specification of the objectives of morality. If we can reach consensus on what morality is for , then it becomes a bit easier to resolve ethical dilemmas. One can critically examine a proposed course of action by considering whether it would further the objectives of morality.

Sam Harris would answer this question by saying that the purpose is "the well-being of conscious creatures", but that answer isn't obvious to everyone. (I've said before that I find it acceptable as an approximation, but even if that's right - and it's open to challenge - there's huge room to argue about "approximation to what?".)

Part of the problem is that it may be almost as difficult to get agreement on the answer to this question as it is to get answers to direct questions about which morality is "true". The purpose of something deliberately designed, like a car or a hammer, is pretty obvious in most contexts. When we're talking about something like morality, even the word "purpose" isn't quite right. Still, I think it's a good question, and you'll see me worrying at it further as time goes on. To me, it's one of the central questions of philosophy, as well as having practical urgency.

Book review - Everyday Practice of Science

I've been sent a review copy of Frederick Grinnell's Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic (Oxford University Press, 2009). Grinnell is a practising scientist (a cell biologist) and an expert in scientific and medical ethics. That's an impressive combination, so I felt very positive about the book when I opened it. It promised to do a good job of explaining how the practices of working scientists relate to the arguments that are eventually used to support scientific findings.

Grinnell makes a pretty good fist of this - although there is relatively little that would be unfamiliar to philosophers of science or to scientists who reflect on the foundations of the scientific enterprise, it's explained clearly, generally seems plausible, and gives due acknowledgment to both the messy elements of actual scientific practice and the sorts of arguments that are used to support scientific theory. There need not be an easy match - e.g. data obtained from a series of experiments meant to test hypothesis A may, serendipitously, give some help to hypothesis B that the researchers didn't even have in mind. While Popperian arguments based on hypothetico-deductive reasoning may provide powerful support for some body of theory, the actual process that was followed may have been rather different. When scientific papers are published, they may leave out much of the messiness of what actually happened, day-by-day in the lab, and instead describe the experiments in a way that reveals the logic of the argument.

By all means read this for yourself. I have no difficulty with this point, and even Karl Popper realised that something like this is true. He never claimed that hypothetico-deductive reasoning describes the actual process of scientific discovery, only that it is the logic of scientific discovery. Even that may be an exaggeration, as not all scientific arguments are necessarily about how observational data corroborate or falsify hypotheses. Still, these arguments are used, and it is useful to think about how they relate to actual practice.

I'm not sure I agree with all Grinnell's views about research ethics, but let that pass. Well, except for this: I can't help but cavil at a reference to Peter Singer's "moral skepticism", when the views discussed actually have nothing to do with moral scepticism. Singer may, in fact, be committed to a form of moral scepticism, if he's pursued far enough, but he's always been rather ambiguous about that. He is mainly known for his views about normative ethics, not metaethics, and here he does not look like a moral sceptic at all. He does reject many substantive moral positions that he considers wrong, and he is certainly sceptical about the content of traditional morality, but that's a very different point.

Moral scepticism is a metaethical position (or, rather, a cluster of such positions) from which there seems to be something bogus about the whole enterprise of morality or moralising. For a moral sceptic, there's a sense in which morality is bunk, that it can't deliver on what it claims (though there may still be perfectly good reasons for you to act kindly and cooperatively, to encourage others to do so, and so on). None of this has much to do with Singer, and certainly not with the views that Grinnell discusses.

My big problem with the book is rather different, and relates to the never-ending argument about religion and science. Grinnell considers their relationship in a chapter of almost 30 pages in a book of about 200 pages, so it's a good-sized chunk. He argues throughout the chapter that religion and science are "complementary", but his arguments for this are very weak.

The main point seems to be that science and religion cannot conflict if religion minds its place and only talks about matters of purpose, meaning, and an unseen world beyond "shared sensory space". This is, of course, a version of Stephen Jay Gould's principle of non-overlapping magisteria. And I agree that religions can avoid clashing with science if they thin out their truth-claims until they are no longer offering explanations of the way things are in the world that we perceive through the senses. That, however, is a lot to demand of religion.

But even if religion keeps to what Grinnell (like Gould) thinks is its proper turf, it's not at all clear why it is thought to have correct answers to questions about the "meaning" or "purpose" of life, or about the existence or character of any unseen order, or about moral questions. I see absolutely no reason to think that religion is authoritative on any of this, and Grinnell doesn't provide one. On the contrary, he notes that there are many different sets of supposed religious truth about the unseen order, etc. Given this "fragmentation", why assume that any of these sets of "truths" is actually correct?

Grinnell says: "Science provides the technology for doing things. Religion provides the values to do what should be done." But that is false. Some values may come from religion, but others may be innate - I may have an inborn tendency to value my own survival, or to value getting food, water, and sex - while others may be taught by parents or the larger culture, or emerge from reading literature or from a process of philosophical introspection, or from somewhere else again. To suggest that religion is the source of our values, working in a complementary way with science, is nonsense at worst and an extraordinarily controversial claim at best. Inverting a famous statement by Einstein, Grinnell says that "Science without religion is blind," but this is just not right.

There is no reason whatsoever to think that we need religion as our source of guiding values, or to prefer whichever values do come from religion to any others that we might obtain from numerous other sources. There may be good reasons for science to enter into productive relationships with literature, or the law, or secular philosophy, by why should it take any notice of religion? No reason at all that I can see, except a wish to pander to religion's grandiose self-conception as a fount of values and otherworldly knowledge.

What's probably true is that we need affective attitudes (desires, hopes, fears, values, and so on) as well as factual knowledge ... or we will never be motivated to do anything. But no one can seriously maintain that religion is or should be the source of all our affective attitudes. That would be a mad claim. How do intelligent people like Grinnell come to think this sort of stuff, and how do they get away with publishing it?

I don't want to be too hard on Grinnell in particular: he has written an interesting little book. But I'm tired of ill-evidenced claims that religion (or some particular religion) somehow provides an authoritative source of values or moral guidance or knowledge about some hypothetical "unseen world" or ... No, stop - we have no reason to think it provides any of those things. It's time to stop saying this placatory stuff about religion. Religion is something that science can well do without - and so can we all.

Big Brothers Rudd and Conroy are watching

Every day I get a little bit angrier with our current government, here in Australia. I'm not suggesting that the alternative is any better - quite the contrary - but the continuing creeping totalitarianism of the current bunch frightens me and pisses me off. No, I do not want a record kept of my email conversations or of the websites I've looked at. I've committed no crimes, and I don't want my privacy invaded as if I were a suspect being investigated or an accused criminal awaiting trial.

With no better alternative coming from the other side of politics - surprise! surprise! - something drastic must be done. Perhaps we need nothing less than an entire new mainstream political party. Sorry, but the Greens don't cut it - besides, I don't entirely trust them on issues relating to our personal freedoms. The newly-formed Sex Party has policies as good as any I've seen, but its relatively narrow focus takes it out of the mainstream. Still, it'll get my first vote at the next election, later this year. After that, into the future, who knows?

But wake up Australia. Somehow the people, energy, time, and money must be found to defend our liberties. The situation is pretty hopeless when even voting out the incumbents won't make things better - and will probably make them worse. I mean, for the Flying Spaghetti Monster's sake, do we really want Tony Abbott as our prime minister? No, we don't ... or at least I don't. But we can't go on handcuffed to the present crowd forever, just because it's the lesser of two evils.

If it's the lesser of two evils, we need to find an alternative that's actually not evil. But where?

Science/religion compatibility yet again

H/T Ophelia Benson and her commenters.

This topic is, of course, never ending. It's been brought up this time over at the Huffington Post, by Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Executive Publisher of Science, .

As usual with accommodationists, there is no real understanding of what non-accommodationists actually say, which has its nuances. What we say isn't just "religion and science are incompatible", which is ambiguous, and could mean various things that are false. We do say that, but we go on to gloss what we mean by it.

In my case, what I say is something like this: they are incompatible in a sense. Accordingly, it is misleading to state simply “science and religion are compatible” as if there's no problem. If you say that, you'd better gloss it, and you'd better acknowledge that, in the sense that actually matters to traditionally religious people, they may not be compatible, and that there's thus a big problem. When I was a religious person, I didn't care whether it was psychologically possible for some or even many people to be both (a) scientists and (b)religious. I cared about the consistency between (1) the truth claims of the sort of the religion I subscribed to and (2) the more robust truth claims of science, and inferences that could be reached from these together with other fairly plausible premises.

The position as I see it is something like this: viewed historically, religion needs to thin out its epistemic content, or to introduce notions of the capricious way supernatural beings act, or to adopt intellectually unacceptable ad hoc tactics of various kinds, in order to maintain a formal compatibility with the scientific picture of the world; the advance of science pushes God into smaller gaps; and some religious views are plainly inconsistent with robust scientific findings. All this reflects a general mismatch between the scientific approach to the world and the religious approach, which follows from (1) the fact that they use different methods for discovering the truth and (2) the methods of science do not, historically and contingently, reach the same conclusions as previously reached by religion. It turns out that religion needs to adapt constantly, thinning out its original truth-claims or making various ad hoc manoeuvres, or it find itself plainly contradicted by science.

All of this then feeds into arguments that the religions of the world are probably false across the board. The evidence is that they use unreliable means of looking for knowledge - but why, if they have access to gods, angels, etc.? Meanwhile, various specific religions are already falsified to the extent they are plainly or less plainly inconsistent with robust elements of the scientific picture of the world.

As far as I know, non-accommodationists like me, Jerry Coyne, and Ophelia Benson all see it much the same way. We are not clones of each other, and our views may have minor differences. Jerry and Ophelia might not sign on to every word in this post. But we are all prepared to spell out something like the above story – and we have done so on various occasions. We don’t claim that no religious view could ever be logically consistent with what is known by science at a particular point in history - that's palpably false because some religious views, such as an extreme Deism, are so thinned out as to be unfalsifiable - but we do object to simplistic, misleading claims that “science and religion are compatible”.

Nothing about the non-accommodationist accounts is falsified by telling us, over and over, that a lot of scientists are religious. That's really about psychological compatibility. Note, though, that the evidence suggests that a far higher proportion of scientists are not religious, compared with the general population.

Moreover, those who are religious tend to have a very thinned out view - in this survey data only 3.7 per cent of scientists found most truth in a particular religion! By contrast, 73.5 per cent thought there was basic truth in many religions, but one must wonder what those basic truths are, since 62.2 per cent either just plain do not believe in God or say they don't know and there's no way of finding out. Those figures must overlap heavily, so it looks as if the sort of truth that many scientists find in religion is most likely some kind of generic morality or the like. (Only 9.7 per cent believe in God without any doubts and only about 23 per cent attend church more than 1-5 times per year.)

More research needs to be done, but the data we have is totally consistent with the non-accommodationist idea that science tends to push people either away from religion entirely or into some sort of "thin" religion with little of the traditional content. That is not going to comfort religious people who are suspicious of science, and nor will it comfort those accomodationists who want to paint the picture that there's just no problem. For what it's worth, the data we have favour the non-accommodationist position, once the latter is understood - and not represented by a straw man version.

Frankly, I think the better evidence is what you get when you simply place the claims of various religions side by side with the more robust findings of science. Given what we now know, do the religious claims seem plausible or not?

Center for Inquiry - a letter from the Board of Directors

Please have a look at this letter signed by CFI chairperson Richard Schroeder. It puts the situation at the Center in a different light from much of the material you've probably been reading, though it's consistent with my interpretation from the bits and pieces of information that had been coming out: see my previous post.

Sample from towards the end:

Will this latest round of criticism hurt the organization and our cause? Candidly, it will do some damage to our work, which is a shame. But our movement is resilient enough to withstand these attacks. The vast majority of our staff and supporters understand the reality of the situation and understand that we are committed to moving forward with our work of promoting science and secularism.

I expect that we'll see further attacks on the CFI board and management. If they weren't already on the way, this letter from Schroeder will doubtless provoke them. The organisation's problems are compounded by the fact that nothing it does will please everybody - while the old guard attack it for becoming too "New Atheist" in its orientation, people like me will, from time to time, think some of its decisions are too accommodationist. I don't need to back away from my criticisms of any individual decisions to say yet again that CFI is broadly based and cannot possibly please everybody all the time. Indeed, any flagship organisation has that problem. CFI remains a flagship for advocacy of reason and science. It would be tragic to see it fail.

Please think carefully about whatever you read from the CFI's critics. It can't necessarily be accepted at face value.

As for me, I actually have no dog in this fight - I'm not linked in any substantial way either to Paul Kurtz or to the current management. No one had put me up to writing the previous long post, or suggested to me the interpretation that it contains. It was simply what I'd gleaned from the public evidence. I do think I have some feel for how these sorts of disputes happen, but I'm not going to try to pull rank and claim epistemic superiority, dismissing your viewpoint if you don't have life experience similar to mine. That's a reprehensible tactic in this sort of discussion.

You'll have to decide for yourself, but just think about it. Given the contents of Schroeder's letter, what do you really think is the more plausible scenario? Has the entire board gone crazy ... or was my previous post probably about right? Hey, forget my previous post if you want: does Schroeder's letter have the ring of truth? It certainly does for me, but you'll have to be the judge for yourself.

For Zeus's sake, get behind the CFI

This article by David Gibson at Politics Daily reflects on the current infighting at and around the Center for Inquiry. Gibson has spoken to the antagonists, and reveals more detail than we've seen to date as to how they perceive the situation. Some of his language, unfortunately, suggests a bias against the so-called "New Atheism" - the views of Richard Dawkins, et. al. It's especially tendentious, not to mention sneering and snarky, to portray current debates like this:

The wider debate among secularists over whether to engage religious believers, or whether snark and sneer are the best ways to defeat faith and rally unbelievers to atheism, seems destined to continue.

That suggests a writer who has never read, say, Dawkins' The God Delusion, or has read it with a tin ear. While mockery of religion's absurdities definitely has its place, there's far more than that to the varied "New Atheist" critiques.

Paul Kurtz gets the last word in Gibson's piece - and the most praise for what he's accomplished in the past. In a sense, that's understandable; Kurtz is a larger-than-life figure whose record is truly amazing. But if you read the article without the preconceived idea that the CFI's (relatively) new CEO, Ron Lindsay is the bad guy ... a different picture emerges from the background of facts.

Kurtz had known Lindsay for a long time when he supported Lindsay taking over the organisation's management:

The dispute between Lindsay and Kurtz has been festering for two years, almost since the board of directors named Lindsay as chief executive in June 2008 at the request of Kurtz himself, who has known Lindsay for 25 years. Until 2008 Kurtz had been both chief executive and chairman of the board of CFI, with complete control over operations, and the board wanted to diversify the authority structure, Lindsay said. But, he added, "Paul simply did not want to give up any significant authority. And it spiraled from that. ... Nothing apparently could be done to satisfy him."

Following this saga from the outside, I have to say that Lindsay's account has the ring of truth. This is a familiar scenario: an organisation's founder and powerbroker, someone with dictatorial authority, looks for a trustworthy, competent, and rather younger CEO. So far so good, but then he expects the latter to act like his puppet, getting angry when the new guy has anything like a mind of his own. From here, it looks as if Kurtz wanted Lindsay to have the heavy responsibility that goes with a management position, but no real authority to make his own decisions and lead the organization into the future. Kurtz tried to keep that for himself, and reserved the right to undermine the new guy at every turn. That has included going public to attack the CFI's policies while still sitting on its board.

There's a word for that. The word is "disloyalty". Another word is "unprofessional". As a board member of any organisation you have your say in-house - that and your vote that goes with it. Within the boardroom, you may command personal authority from your vision and experience. But you just don't wash the board's dirty linen in public, not if you want to stay there. Apart from the formal minutes of meetings, what happens in the boardroom stays in the boardroom. Grudges on the board are not aired in public. If you really must publicly attack the positions the organisation is taking, on which you had your say as a member of the board, then it's incumbent on you to resign.

We owe Kurtz a huge debt of gratitude for building the CFI and its associated entities, including Prometheus Books. This mini-empire of advocacy for reason and science couldn't exist without his talent, intellect, and energy, but now it's bigger than he is. If we have to choose between Kurtz and the CFI, I'm going to opt for the CFI every time.

While Kurtz has been softening his critique of religion, the CFI retains an edge - supporting initiatives such as Blasphemy Day and involving itself in constitutional litigation. Some of its recent decisions look like undesirable compromises (surely Chris Mooney is an odd choice as a CFI podcaster), but that's inevitable. After all, the organisation represents a spectrum of viewpoints. We'll inevitably see some of that in its activities and publications. Generally, though, the Center remains true to Kurtz's original vision - truer to it, I think, than Kurtz himself. He seems to want to lead it in new and quieter directions. He does, of course, have the right to change his mind and take a new path. What he can't do is complain publicly when others decline to follow - not if he wants to stay a board member.

I'm growing tired of the many complaints going round that Kurtz was somehow ill-treated. To me, it doesn't look that way at all. On the contrary, the board showed a lot of patience with him - perhaps, out of respect for him, a bit too much. The board ultimately acted properly to support its CEO after Kurtz's public attempts, as a director, to undermine him. Putting it bluntly, the CFI is not Kurtz's private fiefdom or a toy that he can play with as he pleases. For better or worse - I think for better - that isn't what he built. It's a serious organisation with a built-in mission of its own, the mission that he and others planned for it. Frustrating as he may find it, the CFI doesn't, and can't, follow its original master's changes of heart.

Kurtz's recent resignation from the board looks petulant, but at least it's more honorable than staying there and continuing with public criticisms. His ongoing campaign against the new management looks even more petulant: it's doing the job of harming the CFI, but it's unworthy of him.

But most importantly, I’m disappointed to read that the CFI's current appeal for donations had made only $50,000 at the time Gibson's article was written. I hope that a lot more has gone in by now. I do urge all my readers to donate a few dollars if you can.

The CFI and its management still deserve our support. The Center is still a flagship of reason and science. For Zeus's sake, let's all get behind it and the team led by Ron Lindsay.