I have written a fairly rude review of Dan Dennett’s new book on God, which will in due course appear in the Guardian. But the piece that the New York Times published on it fills me with sympathy for the aged philosopher. I skim-read it on Saturday, then someone sent me a copy this morning, and I so I had to have another go at the most offensive paragraph:
bq. It will be plain that Dennett’s approach to religion is contrived to evade religion’s substance. He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief.
this seems to me quite untrue, and sums up all the – er – reasons that I am in favour of Dennett. DCD assumes the untruth of a lot of the content of a lot of religious beliefs but this must be the beginning of any reasonable enquiry. A quick glance through the Bible will show you any number of stories that are untrue, in the essence that they didn’t actually happen, and couldn’t actually have happened; the old atheist argument that everyone disbelieves in thousands or millions of Gods and the atheist just disbelieves in one more has a bearing here.
Everyone, Weiseltier included, believes that most religious beliefs are untrue, especially the ones which distinguish any particular religion not their own. The problem is not to explain the persistence of true belief. The problem we face is explaining the persistence of palpably false belief, and it is dishonest to supply an account of atheism that ignores this point.
I personally think that what Dennett calls “belief in belief” is not really propositional. It is more a matter of group loyalties, and conformism. But it is certainly and obviously the case that very few people, believers or not, come to their beliefs by a process of rational
deliberation.
This is a very revealing mistake. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism.
But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett’s natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection.
How is it “in service to natural selection”? — assuming that he means human reason — we have no way at all of knowing whether it is in service to natural selection. We can only be certain that it is less powerful. Obviously, it is a product of evolution. There was a time when there were no reasoning beings on earth. That there now are such beings is the result of natural selection, chance, genetic drift, and all the other processes of evolution.
But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.
“If reason is a product of evolution, how much confidence can we have in a
rational argument for natural selection?” This makes no sense to me at all. The alternative LW would like presumably that reason is a product of God. OK, in that case, how much confidence can we have in what reason tells us about God?
What on earth does it mean to say that the power of reason is owed to the independence of reason? Independence of what? It is independent of our own views and desires, certainly. But so is mathematics. Yet we know we can grasp mathematical truths. We know we can understand some of the ways that they work. The proof is when things don’t fall down. But the capacity to reason is not independent of our minds, and it’s not independent of our brains. In all this Dennett is entirely right.
LW seems to be saying that nothing can explain itself, which is a kissing cousin of creationism, while not so much dismissing empiricism as ignoring it. I suppose all these are examples of ‘creaturely reason’, as opposed to the variety (as yet unnamed) on display here.
R
The review is “here”: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/books/review/19wieseltier.html
and wow, what a nasty review it is! I particularly like his misunderstanding over biological determinism: it is not a biological fact that I speak English, but it is a biological fact that it is possible for me to speak English…
I’ve had a flurry of correspondence from Cambridge MA about this, which I will place on the blog a bit later.
For the moment I just want to say to Rupert that I agree this sneering about “creaturely” reason is just the religious equivalent of calling yourself “bright”. It’s just a way of saying that your opponents only have access to inadequate forms of reasoning, whereas agreeing with the speaker automatically makes you cleverer and sublime.
Brian Leiter “trashes”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/02/why_review_a_bo.html Wieseltier here.
I look forward to your rude review. I’m curious about Dennett’s alleged “misrepresentation” of James; I don’t find Dennett’s stuff particularly rewarding, but I may have to sneak a peek.
“The belief that belief in God is so important that it must not be subjected to the risks of disconfirmation or serious criticism has led the devout to ‘save’ their beliefs by making them incomprehensible even to themselves,” is a good line, true and funny.
The “stupid 500 error” showed up, but contrary to its suggestion, it happened on a preview, not a post. Browser back and Preview a second time did the trick.
And here is one of those comments from Massachusetts…
Andrew,
thanks for going after a piece of Weiseltier’s review. May I take it that you are comfortable with the rest of the spanking he gave DCD?
I just don’t find it helpful to embrace the coin-flip attribution of truth/untruth to propositions. Little that interests me can be described as merely true (or untrue). And scientists in general, I think, itch to get back to the lab or into the field when they come upon philosophers’ little proofs (i.e. "If reason is a product of evolution, how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection?") Apologetics tends to be full of this stuff (part of what puts me completely off of CS Lewis).
As I have written to you before, I do find that atheists can make their critique too easy by arguing against God the tangible noun rather than treating God the way we treat democracy or freedom as aspirations that transcend any particular instance and retain a hold on the imagination even when eclipsed by empire. We often allow less abstract words like pollution, epidemic, and poverty to act as spurs to our imagination which demand entering into the world to trace and track and define and understand context. Shouldn’t we atleast start there with religion?
Many religious folk can easily hear something quite empty in a critique that points out untrue stories in the bible. Doesn’t untrue, the adjective, lose some force when applied to stories? Truth as applied to stories could have the property of being always present – to the extent that you are.
I mutter to myself and to others when I hear people talk about their myths with the same intonation and matter-of-fact tones they use for day to day surface descriptions (%(sane) "and then they drilled a hole in the roof, which reminds me of when we were working on the roof just last year, any way, they picked up the lame man and carried him to Jesus…" % see Luke 5:17-26). Now this may be just the flightless quail that Dennett wants to flush. But this is lame story telling not because it ain’t true but because it inhibits interpretation by reinforcing such a thin and pedestrian description.
Where you want to simplify false belief (into the "palpably false"), I would allow for the possibility that we could complicate false belief (into "resonant truths"). I run the risk of becoming too individual/psychological insisting on a world as interesting as a good essayist can make it, (i.e. what Stephen J Gould used to do, or what Jeffrey Steingarten, my favorite food essayist, does). You run the risk of burning to the ground and crushing a façade that fronts houses where no one lives and sidesteps engaging a conversation with the very people who hold the beliefs that you want to explain.
As I mentioned at the start, these Aha!-gotcha logic games require painful caricature from both parties. Still I do think Weiseltier notices something consistent and flawed about the Evo-Psych style of argumentation that origins = explanations or at least that origins = justification and most of what might be interesting about explanation. Despite all their loud insistence that is does not equal ought (and we presume was does not equal ought). I find this caution in their butt-covering introductions or responses to criticism not in the bulk of the Dawkins/Pinker/Dennett output.
You put your finger on by far the weakest part of Weiseltier’s review. I agree that this argument, if it were valid, has a broadly corrosive impact on any discussion and thinking. And as you point out dispatches God as well.
Why math works and whether humans discovered or invented it hasn’t been resolved has it? What does account for the power of reason?
You seem to be pulling in two directions at once; I hear you embracing simple correspondence theory; the claim that epistemology works because it accurately reflects/captures ontology; "The proof is when things don’t fall down." That position should be hard to sustain at this point, after 40 years of historicism and anthropology of science. I think only ascientific philosophers of science and theologians talk like that. But then you embed our minds in our brains (a popular gambit/truism) but I am not sure what constraints you imply in that move.
Even Dennett thinks that something magical (though he wouldn’t call it that) happened along the way. When he and I sat down for tea a few years ago (he was trying to dissuade me from publishing my too long and too mean Biology and Philosophy paper which hung him out to dry for his a priori selectionism) he was sure that sentience was a big step. A qualitative disjuncture that separates whatever he has going on from whatever cockroaches and fish have. This is a generally shared sentiment and often revolves around language (a handy device because like Catholic ensoulment it conveniently leaves (by definition) the other animals out).
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I was very glad to read Weiseltier’s review as the other ones I saw were pretty toothless. I was even happier to get your comments, you point out some ways to improve his critique. I struggle to find a path that allows thoroughgoing criticism of the religious excess without flattening it into a caricature that religionists won’t recognize. I got a note (from one of the 4 people who sent me this NYTimes review) asking if I considered myself to be a bright. This suggests that I don’t do a particularly good job at not coming off as self-righteous myself.
And yet I just can’t muster the empathy you have for DCD. I really do think that he tilts at windmills that are conveniently placed and sized by his own imagination.
– jeremy
[channelled by acb]
Of course Andrew is right about mathematics. I was even more amazed, au contraire, that W. wrote a fairly good review at all, since he’s known as a pretty poor philosopher. So it’s simply an instance of Hilary Putnam’s famous proof that there are an infinite number of philosophers, because for every philosopher, one can find a dumber one. (One is welcome to do the rankings as one’s wishes)..
More seriously, like you I’d welcome examples from Andrew as to what he does find so compelling about D. and whole EP business. The more and more I’ve looked at it – the less and less convincing it becomes to me, as a matter of sheer science: it’s like gene therapy – really now, what are the bridges it has built that haven’t fallen down? or that it has built at all? what experiments and results? and so on and on. (I suppose it might be a ‘way of thinking’ — sure.) I just don’t see any science though. Examples, please? Otherwise, as Kripke once noted about other claimed-as-science subjects w/o empirical results, it should just be consigned to the flames. (oops, sorry about the reference…just kidding)
OK Jeremy — enough dancing around this idea of truth. When I say a religious belief is true or untrue, I mean in general any belief which involves the suspension or dislocation of physical law and / or lies about historical fact.
General theories of truth are problematical, I agree. But it is not problematical to say, for instance, that the holocaust really happened, but the Garden of Eden didn’t; that the book of Mormon does not describe the history of North America; that the Koran is a human production, and not a message from the creator of the universe; that the witch doctors charms will not in fact protect you from bullets; that the preacher can’t cure Aids; that no one has ever been raised from the dead; that the earth did not stop in its course so that Joshua could continue to slaughter his enemies.
All these things are believed as matters of factual truth by millions of people, and they are none of them true. You can play elegant, and, I agree, civilised games at places like EDS, with people who know that myths are just myths. But within religions as elsewhere the civilised and educated are a minority,
Andrew you are deputizing the mass of religionists as standard bearers for a particular kind of simplistic correspondence theory that was only ever current for the briefest period.
I can both affirm that the holocaust happened and resonate with lessons in the Cain and Abel story. And to do so could open up important conversations that I would miss if I insist that there is only one species of truth for both.
I totally get the wish for truth(s) so reliable that they speak authoritatively to power. Who wouldn’t, when watching the Bush Administration cynically invoke convoluted definitions which license torture by asserting that what they sanction isn’t quite torture because the victims aren’t covered by our previous conceptions.
We don’t need to embrace a simplified epistemology or ontology in areas of religious understanding or scientific understanding because liars and thugs define public discourse.
As you suggested early on in this discussion, making religion about propositions and beliefs in those propositions misses important aspects of group loyalty, practice, etc… Even doubt and diversity and the ebb and flow of the locus of authority have parts to play in the history of religious practice.
Are we at the point in the discussion that for the sake of frisson we collapse all religions into literalist fundamentalism? Seems premature to do that. I enjoy the avenues that open when differing and divergently opinionated people come into conversation.