The Undergraduate Atheists’ Thesis

by Massimo Pigliucci

I am not particularly friendly to the so-called New Atheism. While I respect (and often respectfully disagree with) Dan Dennett, I have been a fairly strong critic of Dawkins, Harris, and the late Hitchens (not to mention other NA’s, such as Jerry Coyne). I have even written a technical paper analyzing the NA movement from a philosophical perspective. 

So it was with some interest that I recently read a piece by David V. Johnson at 3QuarksDaily, entitled “A refutation of the undergraduate atheists,” which promised to deliver some guilty pleasure for my weekend readings. It did deliver, but only in part. In the following I will outline Johnson’s arguments and where, I think, he goes astray. I have also invited him to respond here at Rationally Speaking, and he has graciously agreed, so stay tuned for a follow up.

Johnson adopts the (obviously derisive) language of philosopher Mark Johnston, referring to the NA as “undergraduate atheists” (notice that while Johnson seems to be some kind of deist, Johnson is an atheist). Since the NA’s themselves are notorious for their, shall we say, aggressive sarcasm, I think that’s a fair enough shot.

More substantively, here is the summary of the Undergraduate Atheists’ Thesis (UAT): “Humanity would be better off without religious belief.”

Before anyone cries “simplistic!” let me add that that’s also my own understanding of at the least a prominent position endorsed by the NA and their followers. So, let’s proceed to examine Johnson’s arguments against the UAT.

He unpacks the notion in the following way: “[the UAT] asks us to compare two different lines of human history, one in which the vast majority of human beings have held and continue to hold religious beliefs, and one in which they haven’t and don’t. Their argument is that the world will be better off in the latter scenario.”

Johnson’s first (and indeed, chief) objection is that to demonstrate the UAT is impossible, because it would require endlessly complex (and highly subjective) calculations, comparing the actual historical time line of humanity to the alternative world imagined by the NA. He therefore accuses the New Atheists of making a statement that is impossible to substantiate with empirical evidence, and that amounts to nothing but faith (ouch!).

This strikes me as entirely correct, as far as it goes, and it exposes the kind of simplistic, scientistic, anti-intellectual streak of self-professed “rational” thinking that too many atheists quickly and shamelessly engage in. Even though I don’t agree with Johnson’s judgment that endorsing the UAT is just as bad as “the ranting of any superstitious windbag,” it’s still pretty darn bad. We talk a lot about supporting critical thinking in the skeptic/atheist community(es), but we aren’t necessarily that good at cleaning up our own sloppy reasoning.

Johnson — again, rightly — accuses the NA of thinking that their alternative time line would have obviously been better for humanity, supporting this bold conclusion with (mostly cherry picked) examples of the evils allegedly caused by religions throughout the ages.

The problem, of course, is that some of those evils were justified using religious grounds, but more likely perpetrated because of the usual suspects: greed, political power, and the like. And similar evils — pace Dawkins’ convenient denial — have demonstrably been carried out by “atheist” governments, as recently as, well, now. Just think of Stalin’s Russia or the recent and current China. Ah, but those are not really the fault of atheism, the NA’s loudly complain, they are cases of political ideology taking up the cover of atheism. Sure, and what, exactly, makes anyone think that the same argument cannot be applied to the Inquisition, or to the various Christian massacres (often aimed at other Christians)? It’s called the no true Scotsman fallacy, you know.

There is, however, an important assumption behind Johnson’s reasoning (as well as, ironically, that of his targets), which one need not buy into. The two-timelines comparison is an exercise in consequentialist ethics, but if one is inclined to adopt either a deontological or a virtue ethical framework the whole idea of criticizing (or defending) religion on this basis crumbles into logical dust. Both Kantians and virtue ethicists, for instance, could object to religion on the grounds that they are based on untruths, as within both frameworks it is not acceptable to believe in things that are not true just because they make us feel better.

It is also a bit naive, I think, of both Johnson and the NA’s, to set up the problem as the comparison of two alternate time-lines. As Johnson says, this comparison is actually impossible to carry out, so either side can easily claim victory based on the “obvious” fact that their time-line is overall better for humanity. But if that were the only way to compare alternative scenarios affecting human wellbeing, then the same exact problem would apply to, say, political ideologies, with neither conservatives nor liberals ever being able to rationally make a case in favor of their programs. Instead, as any serious consequentialist would argue, these kinds of complex problems need to be broken down into smaller bits for which we can actually claim sufficient epistemic access to make at the least a reasonable guess as to the most likely outcome.

For instance, we can measure the effects of superstitious beliefs on people’s decision making and life quality, though the outcome of such analyses may not come down in clear favor of the New Atheist position. Indeed, it may very well turn out to be the case that atheists are better off staking their claims using deontology or virtue ethics (which is ironic, given that many of them seem to be consequentialists).

In a similar vein, Johnson points out that there are well documented cases of positive emotional effects from religion. Even though from an atheist perspective these are akin to placebo effects (and, the atheist would argue, unlike medical placebos they likely have ill “side” effects), Johnson’s argument remains valid. Remember, he is not defending the existence of gods, he is just trying to undermine the UAT.

Still exploring the alternative timelines argument, Johnson writes: “in this alternate universe, there would be no religious wars — but I suspect there would be wars. There would be no superstition — but I suspect there would be nonsense and folly all the same. But what this universe would lack is the ability of human beings to have religious faith and reap its subjective psychological benefits.” My hunch is that he is correct, but the crucial point is that we don’t know. That is, Johnson doesn’t have to show that the alternate universe would still suffer from huge problems, or even that the actual timeline is better all things considered. All he has to do is to show that the positive claim at the core of the UAT cannot be empirically substantiated, and that, a fortiori, it is far from obviously true.

In the second section of his essay Johnson takes on studies showing that religious belief comes naturally to human beings, that we are somehow hardwired for it. This is likely true (though I tend to be somewhat suspicious of any neuroscience- or evopsych-based claims to hard-wirededness), and needs to be addressed by the New Atheists. Indeed, the most astute of them, Dan Dennett, has devoted a whole book to “breaking [that particular] spell,” so to speak. (See also this technical paper of mine on the merits of various scientific hypotheses for the origin of religious belief.)

However, even if we buy Johnson’s premise of hard-wired beliefs in the transcendent, it doesn’t follow that people wouldn’t be better off without them, nor that this cannot be accomplished (you’d be surprised by how much genetically-influenced behavior turns out to be plastic, i.e. alterable by environmental influences). For instance, we are also naturally bad at reasoning about probabilities, and yet we can be taught how to avoid been duped by casinos.

But Johnson goes further and presents a thought experiment of his own, inviting us to imagine what an alternate world where people where incapable of religious faith would look like. After a brief nod of regret that such world would be unlikely to be populated by the likes of David Hume (I’m in complete agreement with that regretful sentiment!), he calls our twin-earth equivalents “Dawkinsians,” named after you-know-who: “Would Dawkinsians dread their own deaths? Would they have any capacity for mystical feeling? Would they suffer existential angst? Would they worry about the ultimate grounds of good and evil? If they did, then they would likely be worse off, I submit, than a world of human beings with religion. If they didn’t, then Dawkinsians are a species that is so unlike ours that it’s not a fair comparison.”

But wait a minute. To begin with, now Johnson seems to be making the exact same sort of unsubstantiated statements that he accuses the New Atheists of so carelessly engaging in (after all, the Dawkinsians are imaginary creatures). Moreover, we know that real human beings can and do cope with those problems, at least in part. Plenty of people in the world are non religious and yet do not seem to suffer more existential angst than their religious counterparts — for instance many within the so-called Buddhist “religion,” not to mention of course most atheists and agnostics. And religion is demonstrably not the only way to deal with these sort of problems, as plenty of philosophers and philosophical schools — from Epicureanism to Existentialism — have amply demonstrated. These aren’t hypotheticals about Dawkinsians, they are statements of fact concerning real human beings, statements that can be scrutinized and whose evidentiary weight can be assessed. Except, of course, that many atheists don’t care too much to study either comparative religion or philosophy.

In sum, I think Johnson’s main point is essentially correct: too many (new) atheists make bold claims without evidence, and they ought to be rebuked for that. However, the UAT can be refined and improved at the least to the level of a Graduate Atheists’ Thesis, if not better, by pursuing some of the lines of argument and inquiry I have outlined above.

Time to talk about Islamophobia

by Massimo Pigliucci

There is almost no way I’m not going to get in trouble with this one, and my name isn’t even Carlos Danger! But I’ve been asked several times by readers to comment on accusations of “Islamophobia” aimed at prominent New Atheists (henceforth, NA) — particularly Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins — and it seems time to get down to work.

A few prelims, though. First, this isn’t my attempt at sitting, Q-like, in judgment of the whole shebang, rendering the final verdict on the matter. Yes, I will provide my (solicited, in this case) opinion, but that’s all it is, an opinion. Second, the reason I have not touched on this before is twofold: on the one hand, I’ve logged a substantial number of posts critical of several New Atheists, and there is only so much one can criticize the same people before getting annoying rather than constructive. On the other hand, for a while now I’ve been busier with matters of science, philosophy and epistemology than with political ones, as testified to by the significantly lower frequency of posts on political issues at RS. Third, this cannot and will not be a comprehensive examination either of Islamophobia as a concept or even just of what Dawkins, Harris, etc. have written about Islam. Instead, I will focus on what seem to be some of the most aggressive accusations to the NA in this regard, those made in two posts over at  Salon, by Nathan Lean. I wanted to get an idea of what the criticism was based on, both in terms of evidence and in terms of arguments. In other words, lower your expectations a bit, and let’s see where we can get with some reasoned discourse.

The first article by Lean was published on 30 March 2013, and was sparked by a series of tweets posted by Dawkins. Lean doesn’t start out too well. He accuses NA’s of sharing an “unholier-than-thou worldview” and of having “built lucrative empires” with their works. Not only can this sort of generic accusation be easily aimed — which much more reason — at a number of writers on the religious side of things, but it is irrelevant. The better-than-thou attitude may be irritating, but most certainly not uncommon among writers and commentators (including Lean himself); as for making money out of one’s books, as an author myself I seriously don’t see the problem, as long as one does it out of honest toil, as opposed to say plagiarism.

Lean proceeds with the suggestion that the whole NA phenomenon is the result of the 9/11 attacks, and particularly of the (surprising, even astonishing, in my mind) revival of the religious American fervors that followed them. He’s probably right, though again the identification of the causes of a social phenomenon is no indictment of said phenomenon.

And here comes the first incriminating quote, according to Lean, uttered by Dawkins a few days after 9/11: “Those people [the terrorists] were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards ... On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East, which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place.” Well, I think Dawkins got it partially right here. I say partially because I think religion is better thought of as a symptom, as well as a reinforcer, of these kinds of events, more than anything like a root cause. Regardless, religious fanaticism certainly had a lot to do with 9/11, together of course with a number of other causes that ought to be more deeply troubling for Americans: their military presence in Arab countries, their interference with said countries internal policies (often, though not always, not in the best interest of the people of those countries), their manipulation of Middle Eastern dictators, and of course their abysmal and willful failure to broker a fair peace in Israel-Palestine.

Lean also chastises Hitchens for mocking Muslims with the very title of his book, God is Not Great (because Muslims recite “God is great” during their prayers). So what? Atheists have always mocked religion, and for darn good reasons. And the best refrain to mockery is counter-mockery, not indignation. The latter only makes the receiver of the mockery look even more silly than he did before. But of course a number of religious fundamentalists are not exactly known for their sense of humor. Indeed, humor and sarcasm have always been among the most terrifying enemies of every strict religion. (btw, for the rest of this post it should be assumed that when I say “religion” I mean the fundamentalist, intransigent variety of the Abrahamic flavor, not religions or religious people in general. Please keep this in mind, it’s an important distinction.)

Now it’s Harris’ turn. He is quoted from Letter to a Christian Nation: “The idea that Islam is a ‘peaceful religion hijacked by extremists’ is a fantasy, and is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge.” That’s where things get complicated. Taken at face value, Harris is spectacularly wrong: terrorist attacks by Muslims do represent a small fraction of what’s going on in the Islamic world. But it is true that by far the larger number of terrorist attacks in recent years has been carried out in the name of Islam (of course, it depends on what one means by terrorism: include government actions, like the US war in Iraq, and we are talking about a completely different ball game). I don’t think that’s because Islam is an inherently more violent religion than Judaism and Christianity. Jews and Christians, after all, have been responsible for their share of massacres, genocides and ethnic cleansing throughout history. It’s just that in this particular historical moment they are violently affecting through terrorism far fewer people in far fewer areas of the world. (The last few lines, of course, represent my interpretation of what is essentially an empirical question. I will be happy to be corrected if I got the facts wrong.)

And now we are back to Dawkins’ twitter “rant” about the Quran: “Haven’t read Koran so couldn’t quote chapter and verse like I can for Bible. But [I] often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today.” Well, that’s just shabby, Dick. First off, criticizing books that one hasn’t read (or at least hasn’t read serious secondary sources about those books) is simply unacceptable for a major public intellectual. Second, here we go again with “greatest” and “evil.” Once more, fundamentalist adherence to Islam (and of course by far not all Muslims are fundamentalists) is likely one of the causal factors in a number of acts of violence in recent history, but to talk about it as the cause of it is unbelievably naive. (See partial list of other causes above; to which we should of course add lack of education and health care, major variables related to the success of religious fundamentalism.)

Another “incriminating” tweet from Dawkins: “Islam is comforting? Tell that to a woman, dressed in a bin bag [trash bag], her testimony worth half a man’s and needing 4 male witnesses to prove rape.” Lean thinks this sort of reasoning is ludicrous, but I think he is just as much off the mark as Dawkins, only in the opposite direction. Yes, Dawkins doesn’t seem to understand that some Muslim women truly do find wearing a burka comforting, and even a sign of respect. But Lean seems to ignore that that’s not really a sign of respect: it is a blatant sign of male oppression, and said women have simply been indoctrinated, sometimes violently, into a particular worldview. I’ll call this particular skirmish a draw.

More evidence: “Dawkins’ quest to ‘liberate’ Muslim women and smack them with a big ol’ heaping dose of George W. Bush freedom caused him to go berserk over news that a University College of London debate, hosted by an Islamic group, offered a separate seating option for conservative, practicing Muslims.” To begin with, to accuse Dawkins (unlike, say, Hitchens) of endorsing W.’s foreign policy is highly disingenuous. Second, Lean goes on to point out that at a recent event (a concert by Israeli violinist Itzhak Perlman) at the newly minted Barclays Center in Brooklyn the organizers offered separate gender seatings (as an option) to cater to the local Orthodox Jewish population. So why pick on the Muslims? Islamophobia! Setting aside the fact that Dawkins probably didn’t know about the latter event, how on earth is this “see? they do it too!” reasoning compelling at all? Dawkins was criticizing a British institution, qua British intellectual. Someone else in New York ought to have done the same in the case of the Barclays Center event (yes, I know, I missed that boat, wasn’t paying enough attention). And notice that just because the separate gender seating was facultative it doesn’t make the whole idea right to begin with, contra what is implied by Lean. (And of course it is worse in countries where this sort of thing is in fact mandatory, legal, and almost universally enforced. None of those countries can be found in the Western hemisphere, and not by chance...)

Lean is on better ground where he mentions that Dawkins has apparently praised right-wing extremist Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician known for saying that he hates Islam and that the Quran should be banned in the Netherlands. Dawkins is also alleged to have praised the short film Fitna, produced by Wilders, which draws a strong parallel between the Nazis (oh no, the Nazis!) and Muslims. Bad move indeed, Professor Dawkins.

And back to Harris (I know, this is causing you a headache from swirling around too much, but I’m following Lean almost paragraph by paragraph). Lean disapprovingly quotes Harris (in The End Of Faith) as writing: “The Israelis have shown a degree of restraint in their use of violence that the Nazis never contemplated and that, more to the point, no Muslim society would contemplate today.” Well, that strikes me as just about right on Harris’ part. Then again, it’s lowering the bar for Israel a bit too much to un-ironically say that the Israeli military is not quite as bad as the Nazis, no?

Finally (as far as the first essay is concerned) Lean impugns the very motives of the NA: “That’s not rational or enlightening or ‘free thinking’ or even intelligent. That’s opportunism. If atheism writ large was a tough sell to skeptics, the ‘New Atheism,’ Muslim-bashing atheism, must be like selling Bibles to believers.” I hardly think this is fair. I have no reason (nor, I suspect, does Lean) to think that the only, or even major motive for Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens and others to write what they write is to make money. It seems to me that they really do believe what they are saying. Which of course doesn’t automatically mean that it is intelligent or particularly informative.

Now to Lean’s second article, published on 10 August 2013. This time the focus is squarely on Dawkins, and again the occasion is offered by a tweet: “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” Yeah, that’s vintage Dawkins all right. But factually he is, of course, correct. And while one may not appreciate the sarcasm, there seemed to me little to criticize here, especially in terms of Islamophobia (since the number of Christian and Jewish Nobel winners is pretty high, I think, making picking on Islam fair.)

So on what bases, other than an accusation of superfluous sarcasm, does Lean criticize Dawkins? He begins by saying “Yes, the truth is that Muslims have received fewer Nobel Prizes than the sophisticated academic specialists at Trinity. But who in the hell cares apart from people like Dawkins.” Well, I would hope that Muslims cared. Assuming for a moment that the number of awarded Nobels in, say, science is a rough reflection of actual contributions to science (it is), then a society or societies whose recognized contributions are disproportionately less than their share of the world’s population ought to be worried. Of course, not all is well in Dawkins’ quarters either. I’m sure he meant to suggest that it is, again, religion that is responsible for this; and I again maintain that religion is more likely a co-causal factor as well as a symptom of the state of things, not the root cause. Investment in scientific research, level of and access to education, and so on, are also very much at the top of the list of explanations.

Lean: “there’s a difference between problematizing a religion’s tenets and persecuting its adherents.” Here perhaps we are simply using different dictionaries, since I don’t see how sarcastic tweets in any way constitute “persecution.” Persecution, rather, is what a number of Islamic countries do to their own freethinking citizens. (Of course they are not alone: see, just for a case recently in the news, Russia’s crackdown on gays and lesbians.)

Lean goes on to bring up again the University College debate (he must not have that many examples of Dawkinsian bigotry after all), and then moves to point out that Dawkins uses far too broad a brush when he talks of “Muslims” or “Islam” indiscriminately. This is definitely true, as the target should be more narrowly defined (say, Islamic fundamentalism), and the NA’s haven’t exactly made their mark in the Subtlety and Nuances department.

And then Lean slides into politically correct innuendos like this: “Sure, the Nobel Prize is an honorable recognition like no other. But it’s not insignificant that in Dawkins’s haste to come up with something cheeky to say about Muslims, he would use an accolade created by a Swedish philanthropist and awarded by an all-white committee of Scandinavians as a measuring stick for Muslim contributions in the world.” No, sorry, no go. This is sloppy to a vertiginous degree. First off, Lean is committing the genetic fallacy, criticizing X because of the origin of X (in this case the Nobel prize because it was established by a white dude and is awarded by other white dudes). The Nobels in science are always pretty much on target, and it is to the shame of Muslim countries that their scientists don’t have proportional entries in that roster. Second, Lean proceeds by pointing out that six Muslims have been awarded the Nobel for peace, notoriously the most politicized and questionable of the awards. Indeed, in the previous paragraph Lean himself had pointed out that Obama had been preemptively given the peace prize, going on to authorize drone strikes and secret surveillance operations on his own people. Finally, Lean reaches the absolute lowest point of his article when he says: “Muslim Nobel Prizes to date: 10. Dawkins Nobel Prizes to date: zero. That too, is a ‘fact,’ Mr. Dawkins.” Yes, and that is an irrelevant and childish comment to make, especially for someone who’s been ranting all along  — for months — about the responsibilities of public intellectuals, a group to which surely a journalist writing for Salon belongs, or would like to belong.

So where does all of this leave us? Hard to keep score, given the bizarreness of comments on both sides. I’m pretty sure Dawkins and other NA’s are in fact guilty of over-focusing on Islam. Then again, there are somewhat good reasons to do so provided by recent history, given that the Christian Crusades and Inquisition have been over for a while. Dawkins & co. are also overly sarcastic, certainly not subtle, and they do seem to use far too wide a brush to paint their nemeses. But it’s not like one reads writings such as Lean’s and finds shiny examples of restraint, subtle humor and focused targeting. The obvious casualty of all this is serious criticism, of both Muslims and New Atheists.

New Rationally Speaking collection: A Skeptics' Skeptic

What? Another Rationally Speaking collection? So soon? What can I say, it’s summer, and I really like putting together these e-booklets of selected essays from the blog (this is the fifth, the second this year...). The one you are hopefully holding on your iPad, Kindle, smart phone or whatever is one that I had thought about for a long time before assembling it.

You see, I’ve been writing about “skepticism” (meaning, taking a skeptical stance on pseudo-science, pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-politics, and a few other “pseudos”) since as far back as 1997, when I began organizing Darwin Day events at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. From time to time, over the intervening 16 or so years, I found myself turning my gadfly-sh keyboard toward other skeptics, usually famous ones.

The reason is that it seems to me that a community — such as the skeptic / atheist / humanist (S/A/H, for short) one — that prides itself in its intellectualism and openness to reason and evidence, ought to critically examine its own tenets and positions, especially when espoused by prominent members of said community. Indeed, one of the gratifying things about being a skeptic is precisely that, by and large, we don’t act like a church. We recoil from dogmas, and we don’t ostracize dissenting members of our community, immediately rushing to build a new church down the street. Or do we? Well, okay, the recent history of the S/A/H community actually does sometimes eerily recall religious schisms and doctrinal disputes. Still, at least we don’t burn people at the stakes, or launch fatwas against them!

The gentle reader will notice that several of the essays included in the Skeptics’ Skeptic collection are, ahem, quite ironic, even sarcastic at times, certainly more so than the typical Rationally Speaking post. There are reasons for that. To begin with, the people targeted here are Big Boys who can definitely take the heat (many are academics, and academics are selected for having a thick skin). Moreover, rest assured that they can (and have, in several cases!) fight back with equal or larger force.

But the most important explanation for my above-average forcefulness here is that I take public intellectualism seriously, and these people are somewhat major public intellectuals. They influence countless others, and they therefore bear the responsibility of writing rigorously as well as clearly. When they don’t (in my opinion, of course) I call them out.

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it any way: contra persistent insinuations to the contrary (by, say, The Discovery Institute, the inane “think tank” that promotes Intelligent Design creationism), these and other writings by yours truly do not signal the beginning of a move away from my philosophical naturalism, support for science, or defense of reason. They are simply cases in which I deploy precisely those tools to engage the best minds of the S/A/H, so that we as a broader movement can keep Carl Sagan’s famous “candle in the dark” alit against the always numerous and always powerful forces of obscurantism and repression.

Testing the supernatural

by Massimo Pigliucci

Time to reconsider the relationship between science and the supernatural. A number of colleagues in both science and philosophy argue that the supernatural is nothing special, that god-related hypotheses can be tested by ordinary scientific methods, and that — given the repeated failure of such tests — the only rational conclusion is that science has pretty much shown that there is no such thing as the supernatural.

I am a bit skeptical of this sort of sweeping statement, on two grounds: I think the power of scientific investigation is significantly more limited than the above mentioned colleagues seem to admit; and I think the ideas about god(s) and the supernatural are so confused and borderline incoherent that to raise them to the level of a scientifically testable hypothesis grants them far too much.

Before proceeding, let me state clearly my position: I agree that specific claims made by supernaturalists can and have been shown to be false on empirical grounds. The obvious example is the idea that the earth is only a few thousand years old. But what I maintain is that even in such obvious cases this does not amount to a scientific rejection of the supernatural, for the simple reason that there is no coherent and precise enough relationship between the specific claim (the earth is young) and the general idea (there is a god) — contra, of course, the situation for actual scientific hypotheses (say, the relationship between the general theory of relativity and its prediction that gravitational fields bend light by a certain, precise, degree). For instance, a number of young earth creationists reject the empirical disproof of their claims on the grounds that god made it appear as if the earth is old, but that this is really a test of our faith. Crazy, I know, but that is exactly where such ideas belong — to the dustbin of completely ludicrous notions — quite regardless of whatever science may have to say about them.

Think of the creationist’s strategy as a comically inflated version of the Duhem-Quine thesis against falsification of ordinary scientific hypotheses: Pierre Duhem pre-empted Popper’s famous analysis of scientific progress in terms of falsifiability of theories on the grounds that scientists usually do not, in fact, discard a theory as soon as its predictions do not match the data. Rather, they look first to the ancillary hypotheses that go into the test itself, such as whether the instrumentation was working correctly, whether the data were analyzed properly, and so on. W.V.O. Quine made the same point more broadly, suggesting that our knowledge of the world depends on a complex web of notions, any one of which may need to be re-evaluated and possibly discarded, if there are sufficient reasons to do so. Quine included logic itself in the number of notions that we may be forced to modify, though not many philosophers, I think, would go that far (especially not many logicians!). The point is that the supernaturalist’s web of belief and set of ancillary “hypotheses” is much, much wider, and much, much fuzzier, than the web scientists deploy when they evaluate their ideas about the world.

So let’s examine a couple of specific examples that I hope will clearly highlight the limits of scientific investigations of the supernatural: the (alleged) virgin birth of Jesus and the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. I will argue that while the first seems to be within the realm of empirical investigation, such investigation is not only not possible in practice, but likely not even in principle. As for the second case, I simply don’t see how any scientific analysis could possibly be performed that would settle the matter. Again, I don’t think of these as limitations of science, but rather as indicative of the fuzziness and possible incoherence of the idea of the supernatural.

Richard Dawkins (pp. 82-83 of The God Delusion) asks: “Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is a strictly scientific question with a definite answer in principle: yes or no.” Let us set aside the quasi sophistic use of the locution “whether or not there is enough surviving evidence” (since Dawkins damn well knows that there is no evidence at all), it would seem prima facie that he is right: either Jesus was born of a virgin mother via supernatural means or he had a much more earthly fatherly origin. How would anyone test such a claim, assuming for the sake of argument that we could go back in time and collect all the evidence we want? Easy: just sample Jesus’, Mary’s and Joseph’s DNA and compare their profiles, right? Not even close. You see, that sort of approach works excellently well to establish natural paternity, but we don’t know what a supernatural paternity entails in terms of biological traces (i.e., the concept itself is hopelessly vague). The point will be even more, painfully, I would say, clear in a moment, when we turn to transubstantiation, but it should be obvious even now. A DNA test (or whatever else Dawkins would like to do in this case) assumes a number of notions about biology and physics, which are the very notions that — by definition — are being violated when there is a miracle [1].

David Hume famously pointed out that rational-empirical investigations of any sort, including scientific ones, are possible only under a certain number of assumptions, the major one being that nature does not behave capriciously. If it did, all bets would be off and we wouldn’t even know where or what to look for. But all bets are off when we are talking about miracles, since that’s what miracles are: violations of the continuity of nature’s operations. Indeed, in his famous essay Of Miracles, Hume advanced the argument that the reason we shouldn’t believe in them is because no testimony could ever be sufficient to establish a violation of the laws of nature against the alternative hypotheses that there has been fraud or a mistake (the argument can and has been made rigorous within a Bayesian framework):

When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should have really happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of the testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

So Dawkins is right in dismissing the possibility of a supernatural conception of Jesus, but not because the hypothesis is scientifically testable — regardless of the actual availability of evidence. It is because we have no good reason, and plenty of contrary ones, to subscribe to the very notion of miracles itself. This, needless to say, is a philosophical, not a scientific, argument [2].

Let us now turn to the idea of transubstantiation, which is an “allied dogma” to the central dogma referred to by Catholics as the Fact of the Real Presence (whatever). This is, of course, the idea that during the sacrament of the Eucharist the substance of both wine and bread are not just metaphorically, but literally, the flesh and blood of Christ, even though — and this is the clincher — all that our senses can actually approach is the appearance of things, i.e. bread and wine.

The doctrine has been around at least since the 11th century, but here is how the fourth Lateran Council put the matter in 1215: “His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been transubstantiated, by God’s power, into his body and blood.” Not clear enough? Well, then, how about the definition given by the Council of Trent in 1551: “that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood — the species only of the bread and wine remaining — which conversion indeed the Catholic Church most aptly calls Transubstantiation.”

What are we to make of that? The idea of transubstantiation is, I suggest, simply incoherent. But incoherent with what? Well, at the very least with the laws of physics (and biology) as we know them. One can simply not make sense of the claim that something is at the same time both blood and wine, or both flesh and bread and still talk about blood, wine, flesh and bread as made of molecules and the corresponding subatomic particles. More fundamentally, the idea seems to violate the law of identity in basic logic: A is A, and therefore A is not ~A.

Logically incoherent concepts do not need to be investigated empirically: we know that they must be false, if we wish to rely on logic at all (pace Quine). But let’s say that Dawkins wanted to prove on scientific grounds that transubstantiation does not actually happen. How on earth would he do that? He cannot simply get a piece of bread and a sample of wine during a Eucharist ceremony, analyze them chemically and then triumphantly say to the world: “See? There is no blood or flesh here! So there.” That would move precisely no fervent Catholic at all, nor should it. Indeed, the scientist who insisted in making such a move would make a fool of himself in a way very much parallel to the famous episode of Samuel Johnson “refuting” George Berkeley’s idealist doctrine: the latter maintained that matter does not exist, it only appears to exist (sounds familiar?). To which Johnson (in a conversation with James Boswell) replied by kicking a nearby stone and smugly concluding “I refute it thus!” The joke, to this day, is of course on Johnson, who simply did not understand Berkeley’s idealism, a doctrine that — much like transubstantiation — is simply immune from any conceivable empirical disproof. In neither case, however, should we conclude that this built-in resistance to falsification is a virtue: Berkeley’s idealism is conceptually possible, but not that interesting; transubstantiation is conceptually incoherent and therefore not even wrong.

Examples such as the ones above could easily be multiplied ad nauseam. Take “research” on the effectiveness of intercessory prayer, for instance. Not surprisingly, the results have been negative. But this says nothing about the existence of a god who answers prayers, for at least two obvious reasons: first, if you were that god and you saw that a bunch of earthlings had the audacity to try to “test” you in a controlled experiment, wouldn’t you simply refuse to play along to teach those mortals some respect? I mean, the hubris of putting god under the microscope! Second, as my Catholic friends often remind me: god answers all prayers, it’s just that some time (most of the times?) the answer is “no.” Talk about the ultimate unfalsifiable hypothesis!

Ah, but what if we did get positive results, say from the intercessory prayers experiments? Wouldn’t that be proof positive that the supernaturalists are right? I’m not so sure. As scientists, we would want to know how such a thing is possible within the Humean conceptual framework for science: naturalism. Accordingly, we would first check the reliability and repeatability of the results and methods deployed in the experiment; then we would double check the data analyses; then we would attempt to eliminate any possibility of fraud. And then? Well, at one point we may have to admit either that there is a strange natural phenomenon of unknown origin, or that there is some intelligence at play. But even at that point, nothing would compel us to admit to the supernatural: remember Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Or watch again this beautifully on target episode of Star Trek — The Next Generation, and watch Captain Picard, in perfect Humean fashion, unmask the devil herself [3].

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[1] The savvy reader could reasonably ask, at this point: what about paranormal phenomena? Should we dismiss them also as being outside of the scientific purview? The answer there is: it depends. If the paranormalist claims that we are dealing with a lawful, if mysterious, natural phenomenon (say, the existence of Nessie, or the ability to read other people’s minds), then we can certainly carry out meaningful scientific studies of it. But the more said phenomenon begins to acquire supernatural connotations (ghosts come to mind), the less we can (or need to, really) say about it on scientific grounds. And yes, to make things more interesting, I have just outlined a continuum, not a sharp natural/supernatural dichotomy.

[2] When successful, philosophical arguments simply preempt — as in make unnecessary — scientific ones. Just as showing something to be logically impossible makes it superfluous to show that it is also empirically untenable.

[3] Of course, at some point Picard would have to admit that it becomes increasingly unreasonable to deny the supernatural, if the devil keeps defying his attempts at naturalistic explanations. But even at that point, there is no science that the Enterprise could deploy in order to further understand the phenomenon. Because science assumes the continuity of nature and the understandability of its laws. Hume docet, as usual.

Enjoying natural selection on multiple levels

by Leonard Finkelman

Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins was picking another fight.

Normally, this would not be an occasion worthy of comment. The best way to distinguish between Professor Dawkins’ waking and sleeping states is probably on the basis of how contentious he is at a given time. Nevertheless, I’m compelled to say something for two reasons. First, this particular fight happens to be taking place right in my proverbial (and professional) wheelhouse; second, I’ve just finished my annual re-reading of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park duology.

That last bit requires some explanation, I know. As I mentioned in my last post, Crichton spent most of his later career playing the role of anti-establishment gadfly. For The Lost World, his sequel to Jurassic Park, he set his sights against the theory of natural selection. Indeed, the centerpiece of the book—almost literally, coming precisely halfway through the page count—is a chapter entitled “Problems of Evolution,” wherein Crichton asked the following about the evolution of human intelligence:

“... where does natural selection act? Does it act on the body … on the developmental sequence … on social behavior … Or does it act everywhere all at once—on bodies, on development, and on social behavior?”

This is an issue known to philosophers of biology as the “levels-of-selection problem” (I’ll abbreviate it as LOS hereafter). Biologists don’t have a clear answer to Crichton’s question, and so he took it to be the case that the theory of natural selection is deeply flawed. But Crichton missed an important point: that LOS is a philosophical rather than biological problem.

Professor Dawkins’ newest fight is about LOS; as it happens, so too is my PhD thesis.* I’m therefore going to take this opportunity to summarize the debate and to show that we do have decent answers to Crichton’s question—so long as we ask those questions in the right context.

Let’s start with a big question. What exactly does the theory of natural selection say, and why is LOS a problem?

There’s a reason that Thomas Henry Huxley (AKA “Darwin’s Bulldog”) responded to the publication of The Origin of Species with the exclamation, “How stupid not to have thought of that!” The reason is that the theory is, very broadly speaking, incredibly simple. It says that individuals that are better equipped for survival in their environments will leave more offspring in a population than worse-equipped individuals, and so each subsequent generation will see a greater proportion of beneficial traits in the population—and this spread of traits is evolution.

More specifically, evolution requires three things: first, that there is variability between the individuals in a population; second, that the variations can be inherited by individuals in the population’s next generation; third, that there is a consistent reason that individuals with one kind of variation leave more offspring than individuals with a different kind of variation. We can call these the requirements of variability, heritability, and differential reproduction. We can imagine these requirements combining into a sort of informal formula for evolution:

Variability(x) &; Heritability(x) &; Differential Reproduction(x) ➝ Evolution(y)

In this formula, x is a variable that stands for the individual and y is a variable that stands for the population. Bottom line: if a variable trait benefits most individuals x that have that variation, then you’ll eventually (over multiple generations) see that variation spread to most of a later population y.

Benefit therefore plays an important role in evolution. But cui bono?

To hear Darwin tell it, the correct answer to Crichton’s question is “the body” (as Crichton put it), since whole organisms benefit from their advantageous variations. To wit: tigers have stripes because any individual tiger with stripes—as opposed to one with, say, spots—will (all else being equal) blend in better with its grassy surroundings, thus giving it a better chance of ambushing its prey and surviving long enough to leave lots of tiger babies. This works as an explanation of most organisms’ traits, but there was one trait that always defied Darwin’s explanation: altruistic behavior.

By definition, altruistic behavior—that is, being helpful—benefits organisms other than the one that behaves altruistically. I spend a lot of time helping to care for my infant nephew; that’s time that I could be spending, say, going out on dates that might eventually secure me a child of my own. Helping to care for my nephew benefits him, but it hurts me (evolutionarily speaking). The impulse to care for nieces and nephews should therefore be rare among humans. It’s not. Why not? Cui bono?

If you know of Dawkins at all, then the odds are slightly better than even that you know something about his response to the altruism problem. The so-called “selfish gene” theory, technically known as gene selection, is an elaboration of work done by W.D. Hamilton and G.C. Williams on a phenomenon known as “kin selection.” Kin selection is predicated on the idea that the impulse I feel to care for my nephew is stronger than the impulse I feel to care for (say) my neighbor’s nephew. I know that my nephew is my sister’s son, and that my sister and I were born of the same parents; I therefore know that he carries 50% of my sister’s genetic alleles, and that there’s a 50% chance that any one of my sister’s alleles is one that I also carry. For any one of my nephew’s alleles, then, there’s a 25% chance that I also carry that allele. If I care for my nephew, then my genes have a one in four chance of helping themselves; if I care for my neighbor’s nephew, the odds are much, much lower. Gene selectionists therefore argue that genes are the individuals who benefit in the process of natural selection. Hence Dawkins’ famous claim that organisms are “gigantic lumbering robots” for carrying genes around: I have an impulse to care for my nephew because it helps (some of) my genes, even though it hurts me as a whole.

In 2010, E.O. Wilson and two collaborators wrote an article in Nature attacking the viability of kin selection. We won’t get into the details of their mathematical argument; the bottom line is that things rarely work out so neatly as “my nephew has half of my sister’s genetic alleles and she has half of mine,” and the complexities ultimately call into question the idea that gene selection can explain altruistic behavior. In his newest book and a recent New York Times “Stone” column (interestingly, a philosophy blog!), Wilson proposes an alternative that he calls “multi-level selection.” His account is so called because Wilson believes that nature sometimes selects genes, sometimes selects organisms, and sometimes selects groups—and that the latter option is the one that explains altruism. It was this claim that prompted Dawkins’ scathing review of Wilson’s book, linked in the first paragraph. Undermining the very foundation of Dawkins’ account of selection probably had something to do with it, too.

Group selection says that I may not benefit from caring for my nephew, but my family does, and if my family prospers then so too will I. Altruistic behavior evolves in organisms that develop strong social bonds because benefit ultimately comes back to the altruistic organism through those social bonds. Groups maintained by social ties will therefore be “individuals” that nature can select.

To summarize: LOS is a debate over what gets plugged into x in our evolution formula. Darwin said x=organisms; Dawkins says x=genes; Wilson says x=social groups. (And Crichton says that the spread of possible answers makes the formula wrong, which is about as valid an argument as saying that the equation “2x=y” is wrong because there are just so many numbers that can fit into each variable.)

Between Dawkins and Wilson, each side of the LOS debate gets things right and each side of the debate gets things wrong. We’ll see how by asking another big question: why is there a theory of natural selection?

Darwin once wrote that “all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.” Recognizing what natural selection stands against should therefore be useful towards recognizing what natural selection stands for. Remember creationism? How about intelligent design? Natural selection provides a (vastly superior) alternative to these theories in explaining why organisms seem so well-adapted to their ways of living; it is an answer to what we might call the design question.

To date, gene selection has provided an astoundingly successful answer to the design question. In addition to explaining altruism, it also explains things like why tigers have stripes: after all, traits like stripes are coded (at least in part) by genes, and so selection of tigers with stripes is also selection of the genes for stripes in tigers. Gene selectionists like Dawkins argue that their account works better than organism-level selection because it explains more, and this seems very largely correct.

Group selection, by contrast, doesn’t do as well at answering the design question, because plugging “social groups” into x raises a number of problems. Let’s assume that my family does benefit from my altruism. Cui bono? Maybe my nephew learns the value of altruism and behaves similarly towards his nephew. My nephew therefore has the altruistic impulse; what sense does it make to say that my family has it? The family is altruistic only if it has individual organisms that are altruistic. Doesn’t that mean that it’s really the organisms that benefit? Groups aren’t coherent individuals in the same sense as organisms or genes, and so it’s much more difficult to say that they have beneficial traits. Without beneficial traits, there’s no evolution formula. Again, Dawkins is very largely correct on this count.

Still, it does seem that group selection is at least theoretically coherent. It may work; what does it work for?

As it turns out, the design question is not the only one that the theory of natural selection is meant to answer. Organisms are well-adapted to their environments, yes, but there’s also the fact that organisms in different species are well-adapted to a very wide variety of different environments. Why? This is what we’ll call the diversity question.

As it turns out, group selection may provide a much more direct answer to the diversity question than does gene selection. Understanding why requires that we understand extinction.

Diversity requires extinction. Tigers are well-adapted to jungle hunting and lions are well-adapted to savannah hunting, but why aren’t there big cats that hunt in both the jungle and the savannah? Natural selection predicts that this hypothetical intermediary group once existed, but went extinct; since the intermediary no longer links the tiger and lion groups, those groups are now distinct species.

Extinction is not random. Certain traits—amount of genetic variability, population size, etc.—have a very strong influence on which species go extinct. But take notice: these are traits of groups, not organisms or genes. In fact, gene selection has a difficult time explaining diversity: it can explain why there are feline jungle hunters and feline savannah hunters, but not so much why there aren’t any remaining feline part-timers that hunt in both. On this point, Wilson is correct: a multilevel account of selection can draw on gene selection to answer the design question and group selection to answer the diversity question, and so benefits from the strengths of both accounts.

This has been an admittedly broad sketch of an overview of a deeply nuanced topic, and I’m sure that more than a few readers inclined towards evolutionary biology are now engaged in the harmful act of banging their heads against a wall. (Some of them may be on my dissertation committee.) Sorry: it’s tough to capture nuance in a blog post.

Nevertheless, I hope all readers can take this much away: the question of where natural selection works is one that depends on a philosophical question. What is an individual in biology? We’re used to thinking in terms of organisms—if we don’t count humans as individuals, then what would we count?—but we have compelling reasons to think of entities at other levels of organization as individuals, too. Are my genetic alleles individuals with “interests” distinct from mine? Why should I be able to call the group Homo sapiens a biological individual, but deny that individuality to the group “Finkelman family”? It’s difficult to imagine what sort of empirical data could decide these questions, and this is where the philosopher makes his living.

So: fight on, Professor Dawkins. Fight on, Professor Wilson. It’s a hell of a view from here in the wheelhouse.
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* If I make fewer attempts at humor here than I normally do, it’s only because this is obviously the most important problem that anyone can possibly work on, under any circumstances, and it must be treated with all due severity.