Surface Level Thinking Bores Me to Tears: NOMA, Evolution and the Philosophy of Religion

Michael Ruse, who recently came to speak at the University of Chicago, seems to have exactly the kind of deeply reasonable ideas which are entirely correct and yet useless precisely because they never engage with the more difficult aspects of the topic. Because these kinds of ideas are so obvious in theory, all of their flaws arise in application. That’s probably uncharitable. Knowing the atheist community as I do, it actually is a controversial notion that in order to be better, more convincing, not to mention more ethical arguers and persuaders for our truth claims about the universe, it helps to understand the other side. And when I say understand the other side, I mean take religion seriously, possibly as seriously as it takes itself. In human history, ideas tend not to last this long unless they are very compelling, either because they are true or because they have something else, and dubbing that something else ‘comfort’ or ‘usefulness’ and then completely ignoring it when you make arguments (either because you don’t acknowledge the need for comfortable/useful/something else ideas and thus fail to build back up pillars, or because you don’t take it into account when you’re discussing the very question of how religion has lasted so long) is really not acceptable. So I was gratified to hear Ruse say something very much along these lines, though I harbor little of the hatred of New Atheists that seems to burn bright in his chest. (Though he did say this, interestingly enough).

Nonetheless, because I am entirely convinced of this proposition and I think any intellectually honest and curious person should be, too, it strikes me as an argument without an insight, a talk without a catalystic novelty at its base, and this is disappointing. Especially since it soon became clear that Ruse falls prey to a common trap: in order to emphasize the similarities or compatibilities of two worldviews or philosophies, only criticize the most egregious wrongs of either side and claim that the middle is really anyone’s game. Please, people, do not do this. Do not claim that you are both a Baarthian and a Kierkegaardian but also a Humean, and therefore believe that resurrection-believers are nuts. Do not claim that so far, religion (qua religion) has donated nothing of use to science, but perhaps in the future, it very well might. Do not appeal to the strawman of ‘scientism’ and then grasp the remaining scraps of straw in the form of wrongly-asked questions (why is there something rather than nothing?) or examples of where religion might be of some descriptive use. And, while this is a but off-topic, do not sweat arrogance and pomposity out of every pore by claiming to be a conservative Protestant atheist, and thus better than the religious by being an atheist and better than the atheists by claiming that if you were religious, you’d be better at it then them.

Ruse actually did have some really interesting things to say about metaphor and its use in science, but I’m going to leave that to another piece. I really want to focus on this question of the philosophical intersection between science and religion, how they conflict and why, and whether NOMA, which Ruse seems to generally favor, should be taken seriously.

No, I don’t, actually, because H. Allen Orr did it better. Read this: http://bostonreview.net/BR24.5/orr.html. (hattip: Charles Huff). Now. Then come back.

Let me be absolutely clear: I love (almost) everything about this piece. This piece needs to be spread far and wide. I will begin to try to emulate this piece through my blogging. It is fantastic.



More specifically:
1. The exquisite self-awareness redolent in the acknowledgement of not only weak or shoddy but simply pathetically overused arguments is so refreshing I can't even stand it. I have arrived at a point in my intellectual life where I find novelty and creativity in thinking so very much more important than being right by sheer virtue of never saying anything that borders on unreasonable, which is mostly a result of cowardice. Orr's quip about the Natural Law of Scientists (by which he really means atheist internet arguers) Mentioning Crusades made me want to cheer.

2. The entire first paragraph is just...right. Exactly and fundamentally correct.

3. Of course I deeply appreciate Orr's call against an oversimplification of religion, but what's so funny is even to call it that would be an oversimplification. A charge of oversimplification only makes sense when it is brought against an argument which has made attempts to sincerely understand and categorize a topic or phenomenon, and has made some unfortunate and grievous mistakes by overlooking important analytic distinctions. But, that's not even the issue here. Gould undertook a radically absurd redefinition of religion. To call it an oversimplification would be a compliment.

4. The bit about Gould's nonsensical use of pseudo-Aristotelianism: LOVE. LOVE times a million. I mean, really. No only is that a bastardization of Aristotle, a philosopher who should really be taken more seriously insofar as he is revered but in my opinion not well-understood, but I also read David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity this summer, and he along with many others in the rationalist community are pretty sick of the idea of truth as an average. When two predictions come about as a result of two entirely different explanations of how the world or something else works, picking and choosing bits is really not the way to go. In fact, you're just going to get shoddier data. How this relates to politics is a fascinating set of confusions I currently have bouncing around.

5. Orr's incisive analysis of Gould's conception of religion coming squarely out of a scientific tradition is not only right on, but is something I'm especially sympathetic to since I'm reading Abraham Joshua Heschel's God in Search of Man, which is decidedly not materialistic in its philosophical approach. Really beautiful book, by the way.

6. I didn't know that, as Orr says, "J.B. S. Haldane was an unabashed mystic" but it makes so much sense! Dawkins quotes his, "Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." all the time as an example of positive scientific awe and wonder, but it's always struck me as pretty mystical and anti-scientific. It depends on how you interpret it, of course. The context is that the prior sentence is "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine." which may imply that the second sentence is simply a furthering of the thought that the future will be exciting and progress between now and then will be so wonderfully expansive that we simply cannot even conceive now of the questions that will be asked in the future, let alone the answers. But if the first sentence is a personal opinion which is drawn from the larger philosophy explicated in the second sentence which appears to posit fundamentally ineffable concepts, we have a problem.

7. The offhand description of different spheres as a probably "bastardized legacy of Kuhn's" is right on and also hilarious.


Small points of disagreement:

1. "The point is that it is dishonest to pretend that the Crusades count against theism but that Stalin doesn’t count against atheism." Possibly true, but possibly not. There's a different between incidental truths and relevant truths, and which is which depends largely on the neurobiology of religion and what your philosophy of religion is. So...not quite as clear cut as he's making it out to be. Maybe I should write to him!

2. I get seriously annoyed when people bring up 'scientism' as a thing, as I said above. It's not a thing. Yes, there are logical/mathematical truths. Some people have made what I find to be compelling arguments that those are in fact themselves empirical. You can make all kinds of logical systems if you want; logical is not a single thing. All the other examples are or could be scientific (if they were done more rigorously). Certainly not everything is scientific, but everything is subject to reason. If you don't believe that, that's fine, but seriously, people, it's not a weakness of the rational worldview. Ruse got this totally wrong.

That’s all for now; if you think I got something wrong, or right for that matter, please tell me!

Objectification and Sexism on the Interwebs

So, the atheo-scientific-feminist-liberal blogosphere sort of exploded over the last few weeks about a post I can’t link to because it’s been taken down over at Common Sense Atheism. The blogger decided to create a list of 15 Sexy Scientists, which was composed of both professional looking pictures and photos clearly intended to have some kind of sexual value (such as a woman in a bikini or some such). This has been discussed to an extent I couldn’t hope to match in all of the places mentioned here . As a result, I won’t be commenting a great deal on whether what he did was ethical or not, but rather some general lessons to be learned from the experience.

Lesson 1: Women are different from men

Don’t misinterpret: I think that gender ought to be completely abstracted out from sex, that the dichotomy of gender identity is harmful and obsolete, that gender is clearly a spectrum rather than a duality, and that placing people into two categories that they have little control over and making judgments and decisions based on those classifications is a major problem and leads to a great deal of misunderstandings at best and highly unethical actions at worst. Regardless of these opinions, which I might discuss another time, the fact remains that we do not live in a genderless society. We may never live in such a utopia, but that’s irrelevant. The point is that, at this moment, despite the fact that based on the criteria you choose, I might be much better categorized with female-bodied people who identify male, or male-bodied people who identify as male or any possible combination you can think of, there are things I have in common with female-identified people that I do not have with male identified people. And I mean this in the societally-identified way, not the self-identified way. We are a political minority. In many ways, we are marginalized, harassed, mistreated, oppressed and discriminated against. It is hard to be a woman.

It should be eminently clear from this lesson that therefore, arguments like, “well, it was ok when we did it to men. You feminists are all about equality, right? So this must be ok. Shut up” simply do not hold water. Making a list of sexy men is different from making a list of sexy women. They are seen differently, treated differently, and the ramifications are vastly different for the people involved. More later.

Lesson 2: The actions of individuals have implications for the culture as a whole, whether they are intended to or not

This list perpetuates the notion that women are always first female, then scientists, first to be judged based on attractiveness, then on quality of work. For the women in the photos, they have been sexualized, perhaps without their desire, in a way that is simply impossible for men. For those not in the photos, they simply didn’t make it. Their unattractiveness makes them invisible to the world of the internet, and there’s really nothing they can do about it. For all women, especially women in science, it sends the message that their work, their vocation, is secondary to the ratios of their nose to the length of their face and other such meaningless qualities.

The post also just made science feel that much less appealing for women. Whatever the intent of the blogger, it felt skeevy and creepy. I heard the argument, online and from a male friend, that because the photos were on the internet, it was no longer up to the women to decide what was done with them. To some extent, that’s true, but we can still criticize the way in which they were used. For the professional looking pictures, it’s like women who go out in public and are ogled by strangers. Of course they’re in a public place, of course it’s legal, but it can still create a culture of discomfort no matter what a woman is doing or wearing. For the sexier pictures, it implies that women aren’t allowed to organize their lives the way they see fit. If they were ever a model, or have ever publicly demonstrated that they like to be found attractive, from then on, the professional work they do will be colored by that fact. For example, see Olivia Munn from the Daily Show.

I realize that emotion-based morality is not particularly tenable, but in this case, it’s relevant. If women feel that in the male-dominated world of science (or atheism or whatever), all of the same rules apply about proper conduct that make it very difficult to be a woman, to be female, to be visible, it will almost certainly make science a less appealing prospect. And that’s really a shame. The ratios in math, physics and other disciplines are skewed enough as it is. Let’s not waste more talent through poorly thought out jokes.

Lesson 3: What does objectification mean?

Ok, there are a lot of spectrums in many dimensions to get a hold of here. What should women look like? According to whom? What should they wear? In what contexts? Should they do what works for them or pay attention to the messages they’re sending? Can we compartmentalize? Essentially, what does it mean to be a woman?

My basic analysis looks something like this. Women should feel comfortable going about their daily lives. In one sense, that means they should wear what makes them feel comfortable, whether that means sweatpants because they don’t give a damn what people think, pencil skirt and heels because they feel like powerful professional women who matter, jeans and a T-shirt because who gives a damn what you wear to the lab, or a hot dress because dammit, they’re a sexual being comfortable with their attractiveness and sexuality, and that’s what’s up. All of that is important. What makes it ok for them to do such things and not as ok for men to comment or ogle or catcall or make judgments is that when the women take actions they are comfortable with, they are subjects, active conscious participants in their own lives. When men comment in disparaging or sexist ways, they are objects, sexual or otherwise. And therein lies the difference. There are some other subtleties that go along with this, too. For example, I would find it inappropriate for a girl to wear very sexual or revealing clothing to class, because she would be perpetuating the culture of women being perceived first as sex objects, then as, in this example, intellectuals, which would reflect negatively and make things harder for me. But in general, the lesson is that it’s very important to understand objectification and how it works in society.

Lesson 4: Sexism is not only perpetuated by sexists

The blogger at common sense atheism is not sexist. He seems to be an intelligent, deep thinking intellectual who values ethical conduct. He had a mature and appropriate response, and sought to learn from the process and in general reach a better understanding of the topics at hand. Even so, he screwed up. We need to learn then, to give people the benefit of the doubt, and make sure that while they realize their error, they are not thrown to the gutter in an instant. Feminist men are great; let’s not alienate them. At the same time, just because a man feels he is not sexist does not mean he can use that as a defense. In fact, he should work to maintain that classification by remaining sensitive and keeping his judgments mutable.

I think these are sort of the broad ideas that should be explored in further depth if we are to reach a consensus on appropriate, respectful, community-oriented behavior online, IRL, and in general.