Fair to Middlin'

I was feeling a little left out at the recent flurry of activity here, so allow me to point all Quodlibeteers to a recent article on Cracked: 6 Ridiculous Myths About the Middle Ages Everyone Believes. The comments are pretty good in general, but I encourage you good folk to further educate the masses.

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A Brown Land of Beauty and Terror

We British are obsessed with the weather.  If it rains in the summer (which happens a lot) we get depressed.  If it snows (which happens occasionally) the country grinds to a halt.  And it only takes a day of sunny weather for crack teams of photojournalists to start hunting for nubile young ladies cavorting in public fountains.

So imagine what life would be like if you transported a few million Brits to a country where they get some real extreme weather.  Or if that is too painful, you only have to look at Australia.

The bush fires raging across the southeast of Australia are a tragedy for all those involved, especially people who have lost their homes and livelihoods.  But conflagrations are not an unusual feature of Australian summers.  Every January, as I shiver is rural Kent, my in-laws in Perth report sweltering temperatures of 40 degrees.  Leave an Australian city and you’ll see a plethora of road signs warning of the risk of fire.  Of course, current technology, especially air-conditioning, makes extreme heat more bearable than it used to be.  But modern life has also made Australians forget how hostile the environment in which they live really is.

Australia is a vast desert island.  Its north coast is swamp, the east and southwest scrubland.  The area which is both reasonably temperate and fertile is a small proportion of the whole.  Admittedly, a thin veneer of Englishness overlays the desert (and it’s getting thinner as the country’s population gets more diverse).  Bondi Beach looks surprisingly like Bournemouth and some of the older buildings in Australian cities can seem jarringly familiar to a visiting Englishman. But they didn’t ship convicts to Botany Bay because it was a holiday camp. 

In the olden days, Australians faced the intimidating climate with a frontier spirit.  They knew that carving a life out of the unforgiving environment was tough.  The national character still reflects that. And, until recently, every Australian schoolchild used to learn Dorothea Mackellar’s poem My Country by heart.  

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains,

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror,

The wide brown land for me.

As so often, the poet gives us truth less varnished than any prose, despite being constrained by metre and rhythm.   During the Queensland floods on 2011, Clive James, an elderly Australian exile and no mean poet himself, wrote a beautiful article for Standpoint about this poem.  Those flooding rains, like today’s fires, were a terror for all concerned.  But, contrary to the media narrative, they were not a surprise or a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe.  They were the inevitable consequence of living somewhere as inhospitable as Australia, even if modern comforts had made people forget where they were.

Today, Australia is fabulously wealthy.  That means that floods, droughts and fires cause enormous monetary loss, even while the cost in human lives is mercifully low.  And with a population of 22 million, there are now many more people living in marginal areas where these three apocalyptic horsemen like to gallop.  Their wealth and healthy economy will allow Australia to recover quickly and perhaps, once again, forget what a miracle it is that they have been able to turn their country into the wonderful place it is today. 

By the way, this blog post isn’t about climate change.  But if it was, it would say much the same as this excellent piece from the Tom Chivers in the Telegraph.  

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The Magic of Reality

I expect many young people will have received a copy of Richard Dawkins's book The Magic of Reality for Christmas.  I even saw someone reading a copy on the tube this week.  This was the paperback which lacks the illustrations by David McKean.  This is a shame since the pictures were the best feature of the original hardback edition of the book.

The Magic of Reality is intended to provide a general introduction to science for teenagers.  They can learn a great deal about the state of modern science from reading the precise prose.  Unfortunately, the book also gives a very misleading impression of how science works and why it is so successful. Dawkins is especially inaccurate about the relationship between science and religion.

Each chapter begins with an account of some of the myths with which humans once explained different aspects of nature.  These myths are admirably wide ranging.  We learn of the Tasmanian legend in which the god Moinee crafted the first men with kangaroo's tails. The African sky god, Bumba, is invoked for vomiting up the sun.  Dawkins lavishes careful attention on the gory Aztec practices of human sacrifice.  He includes tales from the Bible, such as Adam and Eve, or Noah's flood, in this picturesque gallery of pagan mythology to make his unsubtle point that these stories are all alike.

Dawkins then asserts that a scientific view of the universe has displaced all the myths.  Humanity, he implies, has grown out of the fairy tales that gave comfort to its youth.  As a mature species, we have now learnt how to discover the truth - a truth that is just as exciting as the legendary tales it replaced.  Of course, we no longer directly blame angry deities for earthquakes and plagues.  But Dawkins is peddling a naive myth himself to explain the rise of science.  He imagines that the only requirement for a scientific worldview to take root was for man to look upon the world with eyes unclouded by religion.  This is not only patronising to just about every culture that has existed on Earth. Propagating his own myth means that Dawkins distorts the story of science even if he accurately describes scientific theories.  And more dangerously, he explicitly states that science is the only road to truth and that alternative modes of thought have no value.

The story of how modern science really arose shows the danger of uncompromising rationality and the importance of other ways of looking at the world.  In particular, religion had an essential role in scientific advance.  Even by the standards of their day, many great scientists were especially devout, if not always orthodox, Christians.  Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were all unusually religious men.  And this ignores the host of Jesuit scientists, like Roger Boscovich, who have been written out of English-language histories of science. 

This should alert us to the risk that Dawkins's vision of science is overly simplistic.  Today, it is commonly believed that science was invented by pagan Greeks and held back by Christianity.  But Dawkins denigrates even the scientific achievements of ancient Greece.  For instance, he files the theories of the physician Hippocrates, which were the keystone of medicine until the nineteenth century, under mythology.  It is true that Greek science, Hippocratic medicine included, was very often mistaken.  But it had almost nothing to do with the legends with which we are all so familiar.  You don't find many mentions of Zeus or Apollo in the works of Aristotle.  Hippocrates specifically denied that the "sacred disease" of epilepsy had a divine cause at all. 

Aristotle's careful demonstrations, derived by a method of observation and logical analysis, meant that his science stood on a foundation of pure reason.  Dawkins should have been proud.  The trouble is, as Dawkins is well aware, Aristotle's science was almost completely wrong: wrong to say the sun and other planets orbit the earth; wrong to say that moving objects must be moved by something else; wrong to say heavier objects must fall faster than lighter ones; wrong to say vacuums are impossible; wrong to say the universe was eternal; and wrong to say animal species are fixed and unchanging.

All these mistakes are forgivable.  Aristotle did not fail to discover the workings of nature because he was careless or foolish.  His problem, like that of his fellow Greek philosophers, was too much reason and not too little.  He lacked the scientific method of experimentation and the radically irrational idea that we must test theories even if we already think they are right.  It is no good blaming religion or superstition for the Greeks' scientific errors.  And the central message of Dawkins's book, that modern science arose when faith was rejected for reason, is clearly wrong too.

Contrary to Richard Dawkins, Christianity has a central place in the rise of science.  And he is wrong to imply that modern science was something that happened when clever men and women started to investigate nature with their blinkers removed.  It was not the triumph of reason over faith.  Scientific advance requires us to look at the world in a very special way, and Christianity provided a reason to start doing it.  

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Creation according to the Greeks and Babylonians

In around 700BC, a shepherd left his flocks on the slopes of Mount Helicon in central Greece and travelled east.  When he reached the coast, he took passage to Chalcis on the island of Euboea, just off the mainland.  It was the first time the shepherd had been at sea.  At Chalcis, the funeral of a local king was taking place and, as part of the mourning rituals, athletes were competing in honour of the dead. As usual, alongside the sporting events, there was a poetry competition.  A later legend even pretended that Homer himself had entered the lists.  The shepherd from Helicon did take part in the contest and performed his poem about the origins of the gods.  His name was Hesiod and he won a bronze tripod.

The poem that Hesiod sang at the competition is today called Theogony.   Together with Homer’s epics, The Odyssey and The Iliad, it is among the earliest surviving Greek verse.  Theogony recounts how the gods were born, how they fought each other and how Zeus ended up as the leading deity.  The story is a Freudian nightmare of fathers eating their sons and sons mutilating their fathers. 

After a hymn of praise to the Muses, Hesiod began,

First came the Chasm, and then broad breasted Earth... Earth bore first of all one equal to herself, starry Heaven, so that he should cover her all about, to be a secure seat forever for the blessed gods.

Thus, for Hesiod the world just existed.  It was not created and had no creator.  The Earth simply sprang spontaneously into being from the emptiness of the Chasm (the Greek word is more usually translated 'chaos').  Here the gods, even the oldest, are of the world and exist only within it.  Zeus himself is among the third generation of the gods.  Despite being immortal and enjoying marvelous powers, he cannot claim any credit for making the world.  He is as much part of it as the humblest insect.  This must mean that the gods are comprised of the same stuff that the universe is ultimately made of.  As to what stuff that is, or where it came from, Hesiod provides no answer.  It is doubtful he ever thought to ask the question.

In the first episode of Theogony, the god Kronos castrated his father, Heaven, with a sharp-toothed sickle on the advice his mother, the Earth.  Admittedly, Heaven deserved it.  He had imprisoned all his previous children in a cavern deep within the Earth, which she found mightily uncomfortable.  

Kronos himself, now ruler of the gods, knew he was destined to be overthrown by one of his children.  He attempted to curtail this fate by swallowing them all at birth.  His wife, the goddess Rhea, grew angry with this behaviour, and substituted a large rock for her youngest son Zeus.  Kronos gulped down the boulder without even noticing the subterfuge.  Zeus was brought up in secret on the island of Crete.  On reaching maturity, he castrated Kronos and became king of the gods himself.  Zeus learnt that a son of his first wife, Metis, would replace him.  To avoid the fate of his father he swallowed his wife before she could give birth.  So far, this desperate measure seems to have worked.  Or at least, when Zeus was finally deposed, it was by the God of the Hebrews and not by the son of Metis.

All this raises very difficult questions about Greek religion.  If Hesiod and his fellow countrymen really did believe that the gods, and Zeus in particular, were fornicating patricides with a sideline in cannibalism, why did they worship them?  And if they didn’t believe this, how dare they say such things about the gods?  Because, with the exception of a few intellectuals, almost all Greeks did believe in the gods and worshipped them sincerely.  The amount of wealth that went into building temples and idols tells us that this was a genuinely religious society.  Hesiod was fully aware that Zeus had deposed his father and eaten his wife.  But he still expected that the king of the gods should be the guarantor of justice.

Classicists continue to argue over these issues.  Perhaps the answer can be found in the way that a monarch is regarded by his subjects.  They can distinguish between the sacred office of the king and the pathetic individual who might occupy the throne at a given time.  Kings demanded loyalty not because they were good, but because they were royal.  Maybe Hesiod worshipped Zeus because he was divine, not because he was Zeus.  And if he had been deposed by his son, as was foretold, Hesiod would have had no qualms in transferring his reverence.

Much of Hesiod's material for Theogony came from the mythology of other Middle Eastern civilisations such as the Babylonians.  But it is only since the original texts have been found in archaeological digs that scholars have realised the extent to which Greek myths have their roots in the East. 

The Babylonian creation myth preserved in these tablets is usually known as the Enuma Elish after its first two words.  For a long time, scholars assumed it must date from the early second millennium BC, making it far older than the Greek equivalent.  However, nowadays many prefer a date of about 1100BC. 

The Enuma Elish was primarily intended to celebrate Marduk, the chief deity of the Babylonians.  Nonetheless, it has some key similarities to the Greek story told by Hesiod.  Both the Babylonians and the Greeks imagined that creation sprang from pre-existing chaos or emptiness.  In the Babylonian cycle, the chaos was called Apsu and had some sort of evil personality.  His wife was a great monster called Tiamat.   

The initial creation is described as follows:

When the skies above were not yet named

Nor earth below pronounced by name,

Apsu, the first one, their begetter

And maker Tiamat, who bore them all,

Had mixed their waters together…

Then gods were born within them.

The reference to a mingling of waters sounds like some sort of sexual reproduction.  In any case, as a result, Tiamat had several children who resided inside her.  They started to make a racket and this led Apsu into a plot to murder the child-gods.  Tiamat helped their leader Ea to kill him.  The resemblance to the story of Kronos as told by Hesiod is obvious.  However, the motif of god slicing off his father’s genitals is found in a Hittite rather than Babylonian source.  These tales must have been carried westward by traders or settlers, perhaps, as Robin Lane Fox suggests, the Euboeans who hosted the poetry competition where Hesiod had triumphed.  As texts produced by the Hittites and other near eastern civilisations are translated and published, it has become clear that Hesiod, Homer and their fellow poets had a rich stock of traditions to draw upon.

Ea himself had a son called Marduk, like Zeus a third-generation god.  And like Zeus, Marduk did battle with the old gods, led by Tiamat.  After the battle, Marduk celebrated his victory by creating the earth and heavens from her carcass.  He then created plants, animals and mankind.  The Greeks would have instantly recognised the Babylonian legends as resembling theirs.  Both feature a plethora of gods engaged in an orgy of sex and violence.  But neither the Greeks nor the Babylonians claimed their gods created the universe.  Creation just doesn't seem to be a religious question.  No wonder the philosophers of Melitus stepped in.

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Eric Hobsbawn was still an old Stalinist

Over the Christmas period, The Guardian has been has remembering famous people who passed away this year.  Unfortunately, Neal Ascherson's piece on Eric Hobsbawn is as obsequious as the obitories at the time of his death in October.  Here's what I thought about that, from First Thing's On the Square.

The death of Eric Hobsbawn in October, at a grand old age of 95, has shown the British Left in its worst light.  Hobsbawn was a lifelong apologist for some of the most monstrous crimes in history.  For this, the British Establishment welcomed him to its bosom.  He was professor and then president at my alma mater of Birkbeck College at the University of London.  Prime Minister Tony Blair consulted him and advised the Queen to make him a Companion of Honour in 1998.  His death has produced the predictable deluge of tributes.  Labour Party Member of Parliament Tristram Hunt wrote a particularly oleaginous piece for the London Daily Telegraph concluding Hobsbawn was “a great scholar and undaunted public intellectual”.  Blair’s successor and the current leader of the Labour Party, Edward Miliband, mourned the loss of “an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics, and a great friend of my family”.

There are many who argue that Hobsbawn was indeed an excellent historian.  Others might disagree, believing that historians need to work at the coalface of the sources, mining information and refining it into new knowledge about the past.  Ironically, for such a defender of the working class, Hobsbawn rarely went near a coalface, metaphorically or literally.  He was a teacher (by all accounts, quite a good one) and a synthesiser (again, a good one).  

Leaving aside his academic achievements, Hobsbawn should have been notorious as the last of Stalin’s foot soldiers.  He joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and remained loyal even after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, when several of his comrades left.  While Khrushchev’s extinction of the Hungarian bid for freedom caused a crisis among British communists, they had been able to swallow Stalin’s purges and the Nazi/Soviet pact of 1939.  Hobsbawn has a particularly malodorous record in this respect.  He wrote a pamphlet with Raymond Williams defending Stalin’s alliance with the Nazis, thus destroying at a stroke the justification for their support of the Soviet Union as a bulwark against fascism.  On the purges, Hobsbawn told the Canadian journalist (and later, politician) Michael Ignatieff in 1994 that they would have been a price worth paying for the Marxist workers’ paradise.  

Eric Hobsbawn wasn’t the only Stalinist to rise high in the esteem of British academia and society.  His fellow traveller, Christopher Hill, was another example.  When he died in 2003, also in his 90s, encomiums filled the newspapers.  In Hill’s case there is now little doubt about his significance as a historian.  He was thoroughly second-rate.  He did read the primary sources relating to his favoured period of seventeenth-century England but his reconstructions were so tendentious that historians of the period no longer take them seriously.  My graduate research overlapped with Hill’s work on the subject of England’s universities, so I included a passage refuting his views in my PhD dissertation.  My supervisor rebuked me for flogging a dead horse. 

Whereas Hobsbawn thought Stalin’s murders might be justified, Hill simply denied they ever happened.  In a television interview broadcast shortly before his death, he insisted that he’d been in Russia in the 1930s and had seen no evidence for the atrocities.  And it’s true.  He was there.  Like many contemporaries on the Left, he enjoyed a carefully supervised tour of the Soviet Union’s wonderful achievements.  When Stalin died in 1953, Hill announced “He was a very great and penetrating thinker. Humanity not only in Russia but in all countries will always be deeply in his debt.” The reward for his unwavering admiration for Uncle Joe was election as Master of Balliol College, Oxford.  

How did these men remain fêted throughout their lives?  In large part, a popular misapprehension about communism saved them from the opprobrium they deserved.  Too many people still accept the good intentions of communists to make the world a better place, even if, in practice, it all went terribly wrong.  This is a fundamentally flawed analysis.  At its most basic level, communism must crush freedom.  It is the forcible merger of the individual into the system.  It is not a utopian system that went wrong, but the antithesis of much that is best about humanity.  That the perpetrators of communism’s crimes thought they were acting for the greater good is no mitigation.  In many ways, it made the situation worse.  As CS Lewis observed, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive... those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Stalin didn’t take in everyone on the Left, especially once his crimes were manifest.  George Orwell saw communism for what it was and, in Animal Farm and 1984, gave us dreadful illustrations of its true nature.  A one-time comrade of Hill and Hobsbawn, EP Thompson, became a fierce critic of Stalin while remaining on the hard left. Today, writers like Nick Cohen and Martin Amis keep alive the tradition of leftwing liberalism.  And the Labour Party itself, when in government, gave no quarter during the Cold War. 

So let us hope that, with Hobsbawn’s passing, we will no longer have to endure sentimental fawning over men like him: Men who can praise a society which would have packed them off to Siberia with alacrity and where they surely would not have lived into their nineties.

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Q&A

Happy new year everyone. I''m afraid - aside from a brief burst of activity at the beginning of last year - I haven't done a lot of blogging. I have however managed to settle into my adopted country, kit my house out with a load of cheap furniture and unnecessary plastic objects and - like the late historian John Keegan - adopt a very large and unruly Maine Coon cat which stands sentinel over my bookcase.

On the history front, I did come across a site called Quora. At first glance I wrote this off as some kind of Stephan Fry cult or a space for self styled 'entrepreneurs' to chest-beat about how much they know about 'freemium' and 'crowd sourcing'. However I can't resist the opportunity to delve into a few historical debates. Here's a few of my answers.

1) Would the USSR have collapsed if Reagan like polcies had occured earlier

Nope - the Soviets were raking it in from oil revenues in the 70s.

2) History of Science: Is the NoBeliefs.com chart comparing scientific advancement vs. time truthful?

No; it is the work of a half-wit.

3) What were the greatest events of medieval history?

There's quite a few of them....

4) Did Christianity cause the Dark Ages ?

The 'Dark Ages Boot Camp' is sorely needed

5) World History: Was it a right decision for Hadrian to surrender Trajan's conquest in Mesopotomia (Iraq)?

He had lost them anyway...

6) Why did Britain lose the American War of Independence?

Those damn colonials (and Euroscepticism)

If you get bored Tim O'Neil has about 230 answers on there which as always are worth reading.


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Labour is tough enough without the National Childbirth Trust

Kirstie Allsopp, the host of UK TV show Location, Location, Location, has discovered that the National Child Trust (”NCT”) is politicised,dogmatic and scary.  One of the NCT’s tutors has demanded that Allsopp be sued for describing the NCT as politicised, dogmatic and scary, which rather proves the point.

My youngest is now five, but I can remember all the NCT propaganda that we were subjected to.  We were assured that home births are the natural way to deliver a child and that anything other than breast milk for your new born is a sin.  But like Kirstie Allsopp, my wife endured two emergency caesareans.  Both our children were delivered by a surgeon in an operating theatre.  We had a friend who was determined to give birth at home.  She too ended up in an ambulance with her child emerging into this world through an incision in her abdomen rather than the more conventional orifice.  Thankfully, she gave up on the home birth malarkey for her next two children.  Experience is a wonderful school.

It is not often talked about, but labour can be sheer agony over a long period of time.  I’m not talking about “stubbing your toe and hopping around” agony.  It’s more like a red hot poker in your nether regions... for hours and hours and hours.  When you have seen what childbirth is like, the NCT leaflets no longer seem wrong-headed.  They become downright sinister.  The advice, to “welcome” contractions and that “pain is progress”, sounds like the preaching from a sect of flagellants.  But far worse is the way that mothers who have had caesareans or epidurals feel like failures, as if they haven’t given birth properly.  Worse follows once the baby is safely delivered, with massive pressure to breast feed.  Again, if this isn’t suitable for a particular mother, they feel like they have betrayed their child.  Breast milk remains slightly better than the artificial alternatives, especially for the first few months, but not by enough to get very stressed about.  

Where there are no complications, home births are fine.  It’s also true that delivering a baby at home is likely to be a less stressful for the mother.  But it’s impossible to know in advance that a labour will go smoothly.  Depriving the baby of oxygen for just a few minutes can lead to irreparable brain damage and that doesn’t seem to be a risk worth taking.  So, I would discourage home births even though the scientific literature remains inconclusive on their safety.  Certainly, I have little time for the earth-mothers who seem to think that “natural” birth is intrinsically better than taking advantage of modern medicine.

Luckily, the traumatic experience of giving birth almost always has a very happy ending.  Welcoming new life to the world is such a great reward that women are willing to go through labour all over again.  For that, men should be very grateful, while silently giving thanks that we don’t have to go through it ourselves. 

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Dennett, Darwin, and Deity

Several times in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, the author Daniel Dennett discusses religion in order to argue that it is incompatible with Darwinian evolution. However, he tries to portray himself as a reluctant convert to this position. He begins and ends the book with a hymn and claims that it is "a song which I myself cherish, and hope will survive 'forever.' I hope my grandson learns it and passes it on to his grandson." I'm afraid I simply don't believe him. The space in between the beginning and end of his book indicates that Dennett has nothing but contempt for any and all religious conceptions. He's playacting, trying to portray himself as the loving parent who very reluctantly tells his less knowledgeable children that Santa Claus doesn't exist. But Dennett obviously delights in mocking religious ideas and those who would take them seriously. There is no such thing as a weeping iconoclast.

One particular passage stands out, partially because Alvin Plantinga has recently commented on it in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, writing that "I'm sorry to say this is about as bad as philosophy (well, apart from the blogosphere) gets." So I would like to take a closer look at it. Dennett's passage is below, in red font, with my comments interspersed (like I did here). Note that by doing so, I am, however, putting it on the blogosphere and therefore Plantinga's qualifier is no longer necessary.

In the passage, Dennett is specifically discussing the origin of genetic information. This, allegedly, cannot be explained in a Darwinian fashion, since evolution only comes into play once this information is already in place. It is a precondition for evolution, and so cannot itself be explained by evolution. (Again: allegedly.) The probability that all of the parts that make up the simplest possible living being is so remote that it is effectively impossible by natural processes.

The probability is Vanishing indeed -- next to impossible.

First point: Dennett decides to capitalize the words Vast and Vanishing in order to draw attention to them. I found this a little silly. He also uses the word "kazillion" a disturbing number of times.

And it looks at first as if the standard Darwinian response to such a challenge could not as a matter of logic avail us, since the very preconditions for its success -- a system of replication with variation -- are precisely what only its success would permit us to explain. Evolutionary theory appears to have dug itself into a deep pit, from which it cannot escape. Surely the only thing that could save it would be a skyhook!

"Skyhook" is Dennett's name for any mind-first argument or claim, in contrast to a "crane" which explains things in a matter-first manner. Anything that ultimately suggests that mind precedes matter -- even if it only suggests it to Dennett -- is a skyhook, and such explanations are ruled out of court a priori. Of course, Dennett doesn't say this, since it would be inconsistent on his part, but he makes clear that any such explanation is disallowed, regardless of whatever merits it may have. Of course, calling such explanations skyhooks is an attempt to mock the very idea. The imagery he compares it to is deus ex machina solutions, where some god swoops in from on high (the sky) and solves the problem with a wave of his or her hand (the hook).

This was Asa Gray's fond hope, and the more we have learned about the intricacies of DNA replication, the more enticing this idea has become to those who are searching for a place to bail out science with some help from religion. One might say that it has appeared to many to be a godsend. Forget it, says Richard Dawkins:

What follows is an extended quote from Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker, wherein he makes a similar argument to what he spends an entire chapter on in The God Delusion.

Maybe, it is argued, the Creator does not control the day-to-day succession of evolutionary events, maybe he did not frame the tiger and the lamb, maybe he did not make a tree, but he did set up the original machinery of replication and replicator power, the original machinery of DNA and protein that made cumulative selection, and hence all of evolution, possible. 

This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is obviously self-defeating. Organized complexity is the thing we are having difficulty explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity. ... But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as the machine itself.

I suspect that, at this point, Dennett may regret having sanctioned Dawkins's argument as it has been sent through the ringer in devastating fashion since the publication of The God Delusion. I have heard it referred to as one of the worst arguments every posited. To just make one point that I've made before (here and here): traditionally the God of monotheism is conceived as being the simplest of all beings. In fact, this has been one of the central doctrines throughout Christian history: divine simplicity. It's not as accepted among philosophers of religion as it used to be, but even those who reject do not claim that God is complex, only that he is not as absolutely simple as was traditionally argued. Dawkins -- and Dennett by proxy -- are completely unaware of this major doctrine. Since a material intelligence is composed of many parts, and is therefore complex (in a sense), they assume that an immaterial intelligence must also be complex -- and the greater the intelligence, the greater the complexity. It's difficult to take this seriously: what are the parts that an omniscient God would be composed of? Is he composed of an infinite number of God-bits? Isn't it obvious that the issue of complexity does not transfer over from material beings to immaterial beings? Of course, Dawkins and Dennett would deny that an immaterial being (much less an immaterial intelligence) could exist, but that's irrelevant. The point they are trying to make here is that the traditional concept of God as an immaterial intelligence requires said God to be more complex than what it explains, and this is obviously false. Dawkins and Dennett don't understand what they are criticizing. They simply don't have enough information to justify even having an opinion, much less expressing it as vociferously as they do.

As Dawkins goes on to say, "The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity." This is one of the key strengths of Darwin's idea and the key weakness of the alternatives. In fact, I once argued, it is unlikely that any other theory could have this strength:

It's not evident that evolution explains in general how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity. Evolution is about biological organisms changing with respect to time. Dennett (and Dawkins) extend it into non-biological realms. Of course Dennett doesn't just assume this, he explains at length why he thinks this is a valid procedure, but it should be noted that it's a very contentious point. And Darwin certainly did not apply it this way: indeed, Darwin thought "the Universe is not the result of chance." What follows is a quote from an earlier essay by Dennett that was republished in Brainstorms.

Darwin explains a world of final causes and teleological laws with a principle that is, to be sure, mechanistic but -- more fundamentally -- utterly independent of "meaning" or "purpose". It assumes a world that is absurd in the existentialist's sense of the term: not ludicrous but pointless, and this assumption is a necessary condition of any non-question-begging account of purpose. Whether we can imagine a non-mechanistic but also non-question-begging principle for explaining design in the biological world is doubtful; it is tempting to see the commitment to non-question-begging accounts here as tantamount to a commitment to mechanistic materialism, but the priority of these commitments is clear. ... One argues: Darwin's materialistic theory may not be the only non-question-begging theory of these matters, but it is one such theory, and the only one we have found, which is quite a good reason for espousing materialism.

I haven't read this essay in its entirety, but Dennett brings the issue of question-begging explanations into play in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Skyhooks are question-begging and cranes are non-question-begging. In the quote above, mechanistic explanations are (or at least can be) non-question-begging, while non-mechanistic explanations are not (it is "doubtful" that any such explanation is forthcoming). This is of a piece with Dawkins's argument: to explain the emergence of the organized complexity that is mind by appealing to a primal mind is question-begging since it uses the very concept that we are trying to explain. A non-question-begging explanation would not appeal to the explanandum as explanans.

Unfortunately for both of them Plantinga absolutely nails them on this. Mind is only the explanandum given materialism. The whole claim of theism is that mind comes first, and is the explanation of matter. Since mind is primal, there can be no explanation of it. Of course, there can be an explanation of a particular mind (especially of a mind that is composed of matter), just so long as it is not the primal mind that explains everything else. Perhaps theism is wrong about this, but Dennett and Dawkins haven't given us any reason to think so. Rather, they have assumed that mind comes after matter and so is what must be explained. They have assumed that theism is false in order to argue that theism is false. In other words, their account is question-begging -- exactly what they are accusing theistic explanations of being.

Is that a fair or even an appropriate criticism of the religious alternatives? One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general,

This is an astute objection. Dennett is assuming that theism is functioning as a scientific hypothesis, which stands or falls according to its explanatory power (and other factors). But of course, most believers do not believe in God because of its explanatory power. Some may use the concept of God in an explanatory way, but even then, the alleged explanatory power is not why they believe in God (for a vaguely similar point, see here).

Dennett also makes an interesting statement here: "the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general." Failing to meet the standards of science does not mean that something fails to be rational. Science is a subcategory of rationality. To insist that theism must meet scientific standards is to ignore this distinction. I say this is interesting because Dennett is going to ignore this distinction, the very distinction he just made.

Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of faith.

Testing is the hallmark of scientific knowledge, but it is not the hallmark of "rational thought in general." One reason for this is that the suggestion that testing is a requirement for all rational thought is not itself testable and so fails to be rational. The suggestion is self-referentially incoherent.

Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully. The philosopher Ronald de Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was up. But we can lower it if you really want to.

Here it becomes obvious that Dennett is confused. He is apparently thinking that if something cannot be supported by purely rational considerations it is therefore not rational. But, as C. S. Lewis put it in Miracles, "Reason knows that she cannot work without materials. When it becomes clear that you cannot find out by reasoning whether the cat is in the linen-cupboard, it is Reason herself who whispers, 'Go and look. This is not my job: it is a matter for the senses.'" When theologians and philosohers of religion say that faith is "beyond" reason, they are saying it in the same way that knowledge of the cat's presence in the linen-cupboard is beyond reason. To say it's beyond reason is not to say that it contradicts reason. There's nothing contrary to reason about the cat being in the cupboard. It is not irrational, it is just not something that we argue to on purely rational grounds (given a particular definition of "rational"). There are other elements involved. That's all. And of course, if he weren't so dead-set on mocking faith as irrational, Dennett would agree to this. His philosophy is heavily indebted to science, and science is empirical, it requires information beyond reason, where we have to "Go and look."

It's your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. That's not much of a God to worship!"

Right, because if something is not a matter of pure reason, then it is irrational. Except evolution itself is not a matter of pure reason, it depends on observation like all scientific discoveries. So substitute "evolution" for "God" in Dennett's response (which, to his credit, he recognizes as rude) and see if you still think the objection has any force. Assuming you thought it did in the first place. Dennett's not only playing tennis without a net, he's playing it without a racket. And a ball. (And an opponent, since I doubt there's anyone who does philosophical theology in the manner he suggests.)

If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "Oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves? Either the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down, there are no rules and anybody can say anything,

So if something is beyond reason, it is completely arbitrary, "and anybody can say anything." But we can imagine Dennett responding to an evolutionist in the same way, since evolution, again, is not a matter of pure reason, but something we have to deduce from observation: we have to "Go and look" to see if it is true.

This also raises a point I've made before and will probably make again: supernatural explanations are not necessarily ad hoc or contrived. Often they are, no doubt. But not always. The idea here is that if we are allowed to appeal to supernatural causes, it would be a slippery slope, since we then could appeal to them in any situation to explain anything and everything. But if we have specific reasons for positing a supernatural cause or explanation, then it isn't ad hoc, whatever other failings you may think it has. So it's not a slippery slope to allow supernatural causation to have a seat at the table. Dennett doesn't say that it is, but I suspect it was at the back of his mind since it's a common enough claim (but of course this is speculative on my part).

a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down."

You know, the thing that irritates me most about this is that Dennett's whole project is the reduction of rationality to nonrational forces. He wants to explain mind entirely and exclusively in terms of the nonrational functioning of the brain (its physical, neurological, material elements). In so doing he is evacuating rationality of its rational force. This is emphatically not the same thing as allowing extra-rational considerations come in, for the latter suggestion does not remove reason from the game, it just adds other players. Dennett, however, is removing reason. For him to turn around and accuse those who make a significantly more modest point than his of being as radically irrational as his tennis analogy makes out is just hypocritical.

I recently heard Dennett give a lecture on Alan Turing, where he said Turing's genius was in recognizing that a rational act is composed of a bunch of smaller acts which are not themselves rational (nor are they irrational; they just don't take any degree of rationality to perform). He said that, prior to Turing, we assumed that comprehension comes before competence, that in order to be competent at something one had to comprehend what one was doing. But, Dennett argued, Turing showed us that it goes the other way: competence comes before comprehension. This is very consonant with Dennett's conception of evolution. We don't figure out how to survive and procreate before we actually do survive and procreate. We don't learn to behave in certain ways, we just do, and the behaviors which were beneficial were selected -- more strictly, propensities towards behaviors were selected -- and those that were not beneficial were not selected (generally speaking). Thinking that comprehension comes before, and leads to, competence is to appeal to a skyhook.

He took a few questions after his lecture, and I was fortunate enough to be able to ask one of them. I said if competence comes before comprehension, then why would comprehension ever arise? You have everything you need, everything evolution would select for, with just the competence. He responded by appealing to sociobiology, saying that at a certain point, consciousness arises (and makes civilization possible) because some things are difficult or impossible to achieve competence in without comprehension of it. I found this answer very unsatisfactory. Certainly, consciousness does have this effect, but I don't see how Dennett has the epistemic right to appeal to it. His whole point was that we don't have to appeal to consciousness and the comprehension that comes with it in order to account for competence. To simply jump ahead to comprehension and work back to competence when it suits him, when it becomes difficult to explain competence without it, is to appeal to one of those skyhooks he otherwise decries. I still don't see the answer to my question: if Dennett is right that competence precedes comprehension, why would comprehension ever arise?

My general impression of Dennett's lecture is that he's a performance artist. Just as he reveals himself to be playacting in his writings, so he revealed himself to be playacting in his speech. I found it impossible to accept the character he presented in his lecture as his actual persona. Of course I could be wrong; I may have been biased by reading accounts like this. But completely independent of his philosophical positions, the man strikes me overwhelmingly as a sophist.

Anyway, to return to my main point, Dennett is arguing that rationality consists of behaviors that are not chosen for rational reasons. For him to then mock his interlocutors as playing tennis without "the net of rational judgment" in place is a bit much. By his own standards, there is no net.

Now if you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play.

This passage confuses me, because Dennett seems to be saying that we have to provide an explanation in terms of pure reason of why faith is not a matter of pure reason (again, given a particular definition of "reason"). He seems to be demanding that the claim be self-referentially inconsistent. On the other hand, perhaps he just means that the extra-rational elements of faith not be irrational, that being beyond reason does not mean that it contradicts reason. If this is all he means (but I don't think it is), I have good news for him: this is precisely how faith has generally been conceived. In the same way, empirical beliefs are an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, since they are not arrived at by pure reason (they require us to "Go and look"); memory beliefs are an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, since they are not arrived at by pure reason; belief in other minds is an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, since it is not arrived at by pure reason; etc. (For that matter, reason is not arrived at by pure reason; you can't give a reasoned account of why we should trust reason, since any such account would be circular.)

In fact, this is the whole point of Plantinga and others. Plantinga's first book, God and Other Minds, compared belief in God to belief in other minds, and argued that the objections to one would apply equally to the other. Since you'd have to be a lunatic to deny the existence of other minds, the objections to belief in God don't work either. In Warranted Christian Belief (which he says functions as a sequel to both God and Other Minds and Warrant and Proper Function) he argues that there is a cognitive faculty, the sensus divinitatis, that causes us to immediately (i.e., non-inferentially) form beliefs about God when faced with certain circumstances. In the same way, we form beliefs about the physical world when faced with certain circumstances: I see a tree before me and form the belief, "There's a tree." I don't reason to this belief -- my senses indicate that a tree is before me; my senses are generally reliable; therefore there is probably a tree before me -- I just immediately form the belief. In fact, it would be irrational if I didn't. Of course, Plantinga may be wrong about this, but that has to be argued. Dennett doesn't even address it.

I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of geting to the truth,

You can't give a reasoned ground for taking sensory beliefs seriously as a way of getting to the truth. Or memory beliefs. Or belief in other minds. (Or reason.) In order to give a reasoned ground for taking sensory beliefs thusly, you would have to have evidence that your sensory beliefs are generally reliable. But how could you get such evidence? Because other people corroborate what your senses tell you? But you only know that these people are telling you, "Yes there's a tree in front of you" if your sensory beliefs are reliable. In other words, you have to presuppose that your sensory beliefs are reliable in order to obtain evidence that your sensory beliefs are reliable.

The point being that such beliefs are innocent until proven guilty. We do not have to provide evidence that they are reliable before we take them to be reliable. The burden of proof is on the one who demands that these beliefs be established via reason before they be taken to be reliable. Otherwise you get caught in an infinite regress: you have to have a reasoned ground that some class of beliefs is reliable; but then you have to have a reasoned ground that the reasoned ground in question is reliable; and then a reasoned ground of the reasoned ground of the reasoned ground; etc.

The claim of Plantinga, Alston, Wolterstorff, and others is that belief in God is in a similar position. It is innocent until proven guilty, and so the believer does not have to provide a reason for believing in God, anymore than she has to provide a reason for believing that there are other minds or that the physical world exists. This is a controversial claim, but again, Dennett doesn't even address it.

and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously).

Again, I don't mean any disrespect, but I simply don't believe Dennett considers this a worthy function or that he takes it seriously.

But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify.

Why not? I expect him to go along with my defense of sensory beliefs and memory beliefs as paths to truth, even though they cannot be established by appeal to reason alone. Putting religious beliefs into the same category as these other beliefs is certainly controversial, but Dennett doesn't give us any reason to think that there is a category at all. Since his philosophy is dependent on science and science is dependent on observation, which cannot be established by reason alone, this is inconsistent.

Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side.

"Abandon reason"? Who's abandoning reason? Am I abandoning reason when I realize that I have to "Go and look" to see if the cat's in the cupboard? Once again we see that Dennett is just confused about what the claim is: there is nothing in reason that tells us that we must rely exclusively on reason and not also on, say, our senses or memories. Indeed, it would be unreasonable to to reject these sources of information.

You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land?

This, and what follows, are what Plantinga called "as bad as philosophy gets." I think Plantinga's overstating the case. Dennett is certainly guilty of extremely sloppy thinking -- of not playing with the net up -- but philosophers have blind spots just as much as laymen do. I suspect that since Plantinga has been engaged in this subject for the last half century or so, he doesn't suffer a fool who comments on it in ignorance.

I don't really need to say anything more about Dennett's story about the murder trial. It's premised on the idea that reason is the only source of justified or warranted beliefs, something which Dennett himself would never accept since he believes a) our senses are a source of justified or warranted beliefs, and b) reason can be entirely explained in terms of nonrational factors. Well, I can say this: he points to sources of beliefs (mere emotion, sentimentality) that are not reliable. But the jump from "not all extra-rational sources of belief are reliable" to "no extra-rational sources of belief are reliable" is not a valid move. And this should have been obvious to him.

Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice?

What if the surgeon disregarded his medical training because of sensory beliefs? For example, he sees that the person's heart is in the right side of his chest instead of the left side. Would you want a surgeon who, when faced with such a scenario, continued to operate as if your heart was on your left side instead of your right? To ask this question is to answer it.

I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign arrangement.

Dude, seriously? No you don't. You revel in holding people's feet to the fire. You delight in mocking people who dare to disagree with you.

But we're seriously trying to get at the truth here.

Once again, we see the pose: "I don't want to have to say what I'm about to say, but the seriousness of the matter compels me to." You know who else writes like this? Flat-earth creationists. I've quoted flat-earthers before who insist -- insist -- that they are merely following the evidence where it leads and they are just "seriously trying to get at the truth." That's what you say when you know you don't really have the truth, but want to manipulate people into agreeing with you regardless.

And if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into this issue than any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this)

I'm not sure exactly what the issue is that no philosopher "has ever come up with a good defense of." If he means no philosopher has come up with a good defense of the compatibility of science and faith, this is obviously false. If he means no philosopher has come up with a good defense of faith-beliefs, such as that God exists, this is also false. Dennett may not think these arguments are successful, but he has not even told us what they are, so we (his readers) cannot tell whether the defenses in question are good or not.

On the other hand, if he means no philosopher has come up with a good defense of the claim that there are extra-rational sources of belief (like our senses) that are perfectly valid, then this may be true, but it is irrelevant, since the claim is that we don't have to defend such sources. (Although the claim that we don't have to defend them has been extensively and adroitly defended.) If he means no philosopher has come up with a good defense of measuring your words and not challenging people's dearly-held beliefs when there is no need to do so, then this may also be true but irrelevant, since I don't see how common courtesy is a philosophical subject.

or you are kidding yourself. (The ball is now in your court.)

Because . . . why? Do all the cosmological arguments fail? Why and how? Do we have to defend our senses and memories as valid sources of beliefs before we can trust them? Why, and how does Dennett avoid the infinite regress? You are kidding yourself because you disagree with Dennett, and nevermind why.

Dawkins' retort to the theorist who would call on God to jump-start the evolution process is an unrebuttable refutation,

Holy crap. Really? Does Dennett really think this? It's not only an unsuccessful argument, it is an obviously unsuccessful argument. It is question-begging (as Plantinga shows), it is premised on conditions that no form of theism accepts, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

as devastating today as when Philo used it trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier.

Hume's Philo lost that debate. Moreover, I'm not confident that Dawkins's argument is all that similar to Philo's. I'd have to reread Hume first though.

A skyhook would at best simply postpone the solution to the problem, but Hume couldn't think of any cranes, so he caved in.

Right, because Hume was known for caving in. Dennett is accusing David Hume of not being as intellectually bold as himself (just like he accuses other materialists like Fred Dretske). Moreover, the "problem" that a skyhook would not really solve is only a problem given materialism. And of course, we are not given materialism.

I'll stop the quote here and just reiterate a point I made above: Dennett is so ignorant of the subject he is pontificating on that he has no business even having an opinion about it. He doesn't have the first clue about the subject, and his "reasoning" about it is so faulty, so sloppy, so transparently feeble, that it should embarass him. Although I doubt it will.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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