In a recent post, Bill Vallicella chides Christopher Hitchens for a humorous jab at religion that he and Richard Dawkins often make. The offending remark, in its general form, is that since we are already all atheists as regards Poseidon, or Osiris, or Thor, all that is needed to finish the job is to go “one god further”. It always gets a laugh, but not from Dr. Vallicella.

Bill argues that this is, as he puts it, a “howling non sequitur“. And as a rigorous argument intended to disprove the existence of the traditional monotheistic God, indeed it is. A disbelief in the existence of Thor in no way commits us to any belief one way or another about anything else at all, really.

It isn’t surprising that a man who is both a theist and a professional philosopher would make this perfectly valid objection, but it does miss the point a bit: Hitchens knows quite well, as do all the others, that he is not going to prove the nonexistence of God. What this remark is meant to do is to illustrate, since we all can appreciate how unnecessary all these outmoded ideas of God seem to us now, that it is no different, for the atheist, also to deny the existence of the monotheistic God that so many of us still cling to. “Come on, you can do it! It’s easier than you think.”

But now, I’m afraid, this is where Hitchens and Dawkins miss the point. Although to them (and to me too, I have to say), there really is no more reason to believe in the Christian or Jewish or Muslim God than in Baal, for many people there is indeed a difference — a very major difference indeed — between supplanting earlier notions of God with a more “refined” version, and replacing them with nothing at all.

Bill makes a somewhat different point. We read:

What people like Daniel Dennett, another key Dawkins Gang member, cannot get through their heads is that religion might be subject to development and refinement just as science is. Such people cannot understand development of the God concept as anything different from deformation. They think, quite stupidly, that the crudest anthropomorphic conceptions are those with which religion must remain saddled. But they would never say something similar with respect to science. Why the double standard?

Well, here’s why: scientific models undergo refinement not by way simply of cloistered ecclesiastical debate, private revelation, or papal edict, but by a relentless process of theory-making, prediction of expected results, experimental testing, and withering peer review. There is nothing whatsoever in the evolution of religious dogma that is even remotely similar to the ruthless testing against the real world that is the hallmark and guiding principle of science. Does anyone imagine that they might open the paper tomorrow to find that some new fact about God had been discovered that throws conventional theology off its rails?

What, then, have the “refinements” of religion achieved? If you think it likely, as I do, that religion is primarily an exquisitely designed and adapted mechanism, of immense complexity, whose primary function is to provide a durable framework for social cohesion, then its refinements are likely either going to be those that improve its social utility — that is to say, that cause it to confer a relatively greater advantage upon groups that use it as an organizing principle — or those that improve its durability, its defenses against erosion from without or within.

As for understanding the latter, a useful metaphor is that of religions as memetic organisms that have an interest in avoiding rejection by their hosts, namely the minds of their believers. In this sense, then, a “refinement” is an evolutionary improvement — a new trick or feature of some sort, analogous, say, to an octopus learning to change its color, or to release billows of ink — that makes it less vulnerable to attack. And successful religions have evolved such features in spectacular abundance.

Foremost, of course, is the reliance upon the transcendant inaccessability of God. Where once men imagined their gods to be of quite definite description — the jackal-headed Anubis, say, or lame Hephaestus toiling at his forge — the more “refined” God of modern theists is, in definite terms, little more than a daunting collection of infinities. His existence is conspicuously irrefutable on any specific grounds, as there is very little for the skeptic to take hold of.

Likewise, much of theology consists of examining the places where a critic might in fact get a purchase, and buffing those surfaces to an intractable smoothness. Why do people do evil? Because God needed to create them with free will. All right, then why does God cause suffering in natural forms such as earthquakes? Well, perhaps because He is wrathful. Or even better, as an acquaintance of mine recently suggested, citing C.S. Lewis, perhaps our suffering is the chisel God uses to reveal our deeper character.

What is to be done with such reasoning? It is impossible to argue against. A highly evolved religion is like a polished steel sphere.

Another example is the placing out-of-bounds of certain areas of critical inquiry for being “offensive”, as discussed in a recent thread. It is an immensely effective defense against skepticism.

Say I have a package of beliefs X. Included in X is the belief that belief in X will confer upon me many extremely important advantages, but only if I maintain my belief in X. Furthermore, believers in X are warned that there are those in whose interest it is that believers in X be deprived of these advantages, and that these enemy agents will attempt to achieve this goal by luring the faithful away from their belief. Included also in X, therefore, is the belief that to express skepticism about X is threatening, offensive, and constitutes a personal assault of the gravest severity, in response to which even sanguinary violence may be considered justifiable, or even mandatory.^†

What a splendid set of memes! What a marvelous bag of tricks! It is so well-tuned that it is hard to see it as anything but the product of a lengthy and reiterative design process, which indeed I believe it to be. It is particularly impressive to note that it hardly even matters what X is about. But just for insurance, the system is made even more bulletproof by having whatever X is about be completely beyond the reach of any means of detection or empirical confirmation.

A splendid example of this sort of thing at work was given by Hitchens himself in a discussion of the recently published letters of Mother Teresa, in which she acknowledges having lost all faith in God long ago. Rent with anguish, she confessed this to her religious superiors, and received a reply that is simply stupendous in its brilliance: she was told that her crisis of faith, and the intense torment it caused her, must be a gift from God, because it allowed her to join in the sufferings of Jesus upon the cross.

On the atheist’s view, then, these are some of the “refinements” of religion. They are comparable, one might argue, to those evolutionary refinements of the AIDS virus that allow it to disable the immune system of its host. Note also that the fact that this comparison may itself arouse shock and give offense is yet another example of their outstanding effectiveness. They are impressive indeed.

1. † This is one of the central themes of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.

It startles me how differently people can see things. We all like to flatter ourselves that our opinions are guided by naught but sweet reason, but we overlook that reasoning is in general terms simply a manufacturing process, and like all such processes its output depends sensitively upon its input. That input, however, depends in turn upon a constellation of evaluative judgments, unquestioned assumptions, intuitions, and cultural preferences that vary across so many dimensions, and which are sensitive to perturbation by so many contingent influences, that in fact, although the machinery of reason itself may function similarly in us all, the finished product may vary enormously among people who seem outwardly to be as similar as two peas in a pod.

For example, we have the vexatious war in Iraq. I, for reasons that for the sake of brevity and focus I won’t rehearse here, considered there to be adequate moral and strategic justification for our undertaking a military action to depose Saddam Hussein. (I was not alone in this, a fact I mention only to illustrate that this conclusion was not uniquely aberrant on my part.) Like most people who felt this way, I had no doubt of victory, but was of course concerned that the subsequent occupation would be a tricky business, and had ample reason to worry that the statesmen at the helm — the subtlety of whose mentation I had reason to doubt — might make a considerable mess of things. This indeed has turned out to be the case, as readers will likely be aware, and now we are engaged in a great national debate as to whether we should cut our losses and leave, or hang in for the long haul. Reasonable people may differ, and do.

There are those, however, who not only think we shouldn’t have gone in in the first place, but who actually hope that the situation deteriorates further, on the theory that bad means should not lead to good ends. I have one very close friend in particular, a man of truly exceptional intelligence and unimpeachable honor, who feels this way, and I am, frankly, baffled, though I realize that there are many others on the Left who share his sentiment. My friend and I have argued the matter to bitter exhaustion for four years now, utterly unproductively, and I have on one recent occasion even gone so far as to make (not to my credit) ad hominem assaults upon his moral architecture — for which I now feel painful remorse, as he is a good friend and a good man, and his underlying ethical rectitude should never have been in doubt.

So why do I mention this? Simply to grouse about the seemingly unalterable fact that no matter how obviously correct our worldview (and the reasoned opinions we derive from it) may seem, the truth is that everyone you pass on the street is, in a very literal sense, in a world of his own. The situation is scarcely different from a roomful of people all asleep and dreaming. The degree to which the subjective underpinnings of our thinking can vary is something we rarely take into account, and so we call each other’s reason into question. But that isn’t the problem at all.

We have just passed the 10th anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa, and much is being made of letters, recently publicized, that indicate that she had grave doubts about the existence of God, and was deeply tormented by her own lack of faith.

As all of this was making the rounds a few days ago, I assumed that we might expect to hear a few words from Christopher Hitchens, who was, to put it gently, no great admirer of Teresa. I visited his website, found nothing there, and, distracted by one thing or another, looked no further. But Hitchens did indeed write an essay as expected; it appeared in Newsweek on August 29th, and Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has brought it to our attention today in a characteristically interesting post about atheism and mysticism. (Do go and have a look.)

Dr. Vallicella, a theist, argues that there are some of us (for example Christopher Hitchens) who are simply not constituted for belief in God, and he likens such people to those who are tone-deaf, or who cannot appreciate the beauty of mathematics. He writes:

There are people who lack entirely any feel for poetry and music. They lack the ‘spiritual organ’ to appreciate them, and so their comments on them are of little interest except as indicative of the critics’ own limitations. I have met mathematicians and scientists who have zero philosophical aptitude and sense and for whom philosophy cannot be anything other than empty verbiage. These people do not lack intelligence, they lack a certain ‘spiritual organ,’ a certain depth of personality. And of course there are those with no inkling of the austere beauty of mathematics and logic and (let’s not leave out) chess. To speak of their beauty to such people would be a waste of time. They lack the requisite appreciative organs.

This is certainly an understandable suggestion for a believer to make. As one who is just the sort of person Bill refers to, however, I think he is mistaken in his imagination of what it is like to be someone like me, as well as overlooking an important weakness in the analogy itself.

I do agree that there are some people who, it seems, simply cannot believe in God. I appear to be one of them. That such a being as God (and here I am referring to God as customarily imagined: an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent Creator, who sustains everything that exists, and whose divine Plan encompasses the entire scope of the Cosmos, throughout all of time) exists as anything more than a creation of the human imagination is, it seems to me, unlikely in the extreme, and I find it profoundly strange — frankly, astonishing — that so many intelligent and educated people actually believe it. So Bill clearly has that part right.

Where he goes wrong, however, is in the further assumption that nontheists lack the capacity for spiritual or mystical experience. I for one have been pulled all my life by the sense that there is in Man a hidden potential for an enlightened inner understanding, for a higher awareness of our deep connection to the Cosmos, for a transcendent consciousness of the numinous beauty and harmony that unites all and everything. To this end I have thoughout my adult life sought this understanding, this awakening, along many different paths, in the belief that behind the veil of ordinary perception, and beyond the sleep of inattention in which we pass our lives, there is a unitary Truth that, with the right sort of conscious effort, it is within our power to apprehend. Because I do think that this truth is not fragmentary, not relative, but One, I imagine that there are many roads to this summit: science, philosophy, music, art, literature, and mathematics, to name just a few. And there are other avenues as well: esoteric and exoteric systems of inner development — some of which I have worked at for many years, and which have offered me priceless glimpses of what is possible for us all.

Does Dr. Vallicella imagine that an atheist like me is incapable of deeply spiritual experiences? He is utterly wrong. By conflating this feeling of oceanic awe — of a beauty, depth and wonder that both dwarfs and exalts us — with the necessity of an explicit belief in God, he mistakenly tries to fit the immense breadth of human spiritual potential into his own, narrow, Procrustean bed.

Finally, his analogy itself is critically flawed. While there are indeed, for example, those who cannot enjoy music, it is nevertheless a public, objective, indisputable fact that music exists. What Bill conspicuously, and tellingly, ignores is that the same cannot be said for God. We have no need of that hypothesis.

We note with grave concern that the legendary Shaolin Monks, the state-sponsored Chinese “wushu” outfit, have got their saffron-hued knickers in a knot over some incendiary remarks made by an anonymous commenter in an online forum of some sort.

According to Reuters, it’s “on”. The charges are serious:

The Internet user, calling themselves [sic] “Five Minutes Every Day”, said on an online forum last week that a Japanese ninja came to Shaolin, asked for a fight and many monks failed to beat him, the newspaper said.

“The facts that the monks could not defeat a Japanese ninja showed that they were named as kung fu masters in vain,” the Internet user was quoted as saying in the post.

As if this weren’t bad enough, my confidential sources inform me that “Five Minutes Every Day” then compounded the offense by inserting his thumbs in his ears, waggling his fingers in the air, and saying “Nurny Nurny Nur Nur” in a high-pitched, nasal tone.

This is surely unwise: in addition to being able to bounce like Pogo sticks on a single rigid forefinger (wondrous to behold, of course, and a useful fighting skill if ever there was one), the Shaolin Monks have now, apparently, schooled themselves in some fearsome Western combat techniques as well. In particular, they appear to have mastered the use of lawyers to harass people they don’t like (a practice referred to in the Orient as “I Soo”).

I find all of this more than a little worrisome, and not just for the impact it’s likely to have on international relations, world financial markets, and so forth — I have personal interests at stake as well. I’ve been practicing “Shaolin” kung fu myself for over thirty years; I had no idea, however, that I was complicit in a trademark violation all along.

Please don’t tell anyone. Those flappy swords can give you one heck of a wind-burn.

Labor Day weekend is here, and while a lot of folks are moping about summer coming to an end, you won’t hear any griping from me. Just as the advancing weeks of May and June fill me with a gathering dread each year as the heat and fetor approach, when I get to the end of August I begin to realize — with woozy incomprehension at first, but then with a growing sense of elation — that deliverance is at hand, and that against all the odds I have staggered and sweated through another summer in New York without taking my own life (or anyone else’s).

Now come the most beautiful months of all: September and October, when a reliable succession of Canadian fronts will drape, in graceful catenary arcs, across the weather maps in the Times, sweeping the skies clear of summer’s viscous murk. The air will sparkle and invigorate, the gentle harvest sun will bathe the countryside in its golden radiance, and our mighty city will rouse itself from its sweltering torpor and get about its important business once again. The days, clear and mild at first, will turn cool, then crisp, and the leaves will flare again with impossible, incandescent beauty.

Above all, though, as I’ve said before, what I love the most about the fall is the gathering rush of change, as the massive pendulum of the seasons, having rested briefly in the summer’s heat, turns and begins its ancient transit once again, taking us all along for the ride.

The Gypsy Scholar, Horace Jeffery Hodges, discussed the question of absolute national sovereignty in a recent post. It’s an important and difficult issue, and opinions vary greatly.

Here’s one view: national borders are never to be violated under any circumstances. Every nation has the right to conduct its internal affairs as it sees fit. In a world without an overarching and absolute standard of social rectitude, what right does any society have to criticize how another is organized? This nation may be a Western liberal democracy, that one an Islamic theocracy, that one a totalitarian dictatorship — but without any higher authority to which we may appeal, what could possibly justify one nation imposing its will upon another?

Here’s another: in the absence of such a higher authority, why should a nation not impose its will upon another? Within societies, individuals are part of a system of interlocking social obligations; to see to it that the network functions at all, individuals cede certain freedoms — most importantly, the freedom to impose their will upon others by any means they like — to the state. But nations stand in a different relation to one another: lacking any greater authority to which they may cede the use of force in the expectation of a just resolution of their differences, they confront each other in a Hobbesean “state of nature”. They will form alliances, and violate them, as they like; they may indeed enter into long-term cooperative agreements with suitable partners, and by honoring these treaties, increase their own reputations for trustworthiness — but at bottom it is power, and self-interest, that are paramount.

In such a “state-of-nature” relationship, there are enormous implicit costs: if my nation builds aircraft carriers, or increases the size of our army, yours must build them too, or lose military (and therefore diplomatic) parity. In fact, if your nation even thinks that this is what mine is doing, you must do so too, or risk all. The same principle can be seen, quite clearly, in nature itself: for example, a redwood tree makes a stupendous investment in trunk-building, for the sake of getting itself up above the other trees, up to where the sunlight is. Mightn’t they all just stop a few hundred feet lower, and save all that effort? Yes, but then those who violate the agreement would prosper easily, at the expense of the others. There is no mechanism here for punishing “cheaters”, so the trees simply strain upward to the limit of their natural ability, at enormous cost.

But we aren’t trees; we are rational agents. So perhaps all nations might work together to find a way out of this Hobbesean circle of arms-races and mutual distrust. The goal, it would seem, must be a functioning world government. But there are major obstacles.

The foremost is, of course, is the question of incentive. What do the most powerful nations stand to gain? When there are several of equal strength, they may indeed find in a world government a framework whereby they may be able to begin to “stand down”, freeing some of their wealth for diversion from military costs to improving the welfare of their own citizens. But the only way that such agreements are reliably enforceable is if the world body itself has the physical power of such coercion, and the only way this in turn can be is if the most powerful nations themselves have sufficient confidence in a world government that they are willing to place superior military power in its hands.

But for that to happen, not only must all parties trust that such a government will be above corruption, but there must also be broad agreement on the form of the government itself. What ought it to be? A numerically representative democracy? Would that not swiftly become merely an engine whereby the wealth of liberal nations, those of the slowest population growth, is voraciously consumed by teeming Third World countries? How can you ever expect a nation like the United States, which already stands alone in terms of power and influence, to submit to being tied down, like Gulliver, in this way? But without the actual concession of superior physical authority to a world government by the world’s mightiest nations, the project can never get off the ground.

What we have in fact seen, first in the League of Nations, and now in the United Nations, is a rudimentary and well-intentioned effort, helpful at times, but deeply and fundamentally flawed.

But in the absence of a reliable arbiter of international conflict, what, then, of the sovereignty of nations? Is it simply a “right”? I think that is utter nonsense; the very notion of “rights” is a purely human construction, and is subject to continuous revision. For that matter, what does it even mean to be an entity that might have a “right” to sovereignty in the first place? Is it purely a question of geographical borders? Of course not. How can a patch of land have rights? Whose rights, then, are violated when borders are? The citizenry’s? The government’s? What about situations where the government does not rule with the consent of the governed?

Well, that is still an internal matter, one might argue. If a government doesn’t rule with the consent of the people, then it is up to the citizens themselves, not other nations, to do something about it. But we will find ourselves on difficult moral ground here. If a sadistic megalomaniac succeeds in hijacking and imprisoning an entire nation, what then? Should the world give license to tyrants to use entire nations at their pleasure, simply because they have managed to subjugate them? And beyond the ordinary brutality one always sees in such situations, what about cases of genocide? And what about nations bled and ravaged by intractable civil war?

But there is more than just moral rectitude at stake. The noxious effects of toxic or dysfuctional governments can spill far beyond their own borders. Refugeeism, environmental destruction, and the creation of havens for dangerous international organizations are common results as well.

We have seen again and again how both the League of Nations and the UN, when confronted with such cases, have been paralyzed by internal disunity, philosophical incoherence, and, at bottom, their own inherent powerlessness.

So, when faced with other countries that are morally reprehensible (such as brutal, repressive, or genocidal tyrannies), toxic to their surroundings (such as failed states in constant turmoil, generating immense misery and hordes of refugees) or actually menacing (imagine a radical Islamic theocracy in possession of a nuclear arsenal), what are we to do? Until such time as a genuinely plenipotent world government exists — and don’t hold your breath — there is, I think, a rational procedure to follow, one that any nation that is sincerely interested in working toward a more united and peaceful world, but that is also sensible enough to recognize the Hobbesean realities of things as they actually are, should adopt (and, in general, they already do).

First, give the highest-level body — the UN — a chance. If such world bodies are ever going to work, then we must make every reasonable effort to give them the authority they need to do so. But as we saw in the UN’s feckless irresolution over Iraq, and the subversion of the US diplomatic effort by the corruption of the Oil-For-Food program, the UN simply cannot be relied upon to act.

Second, as broad a consensus, and as unified a coalition as possible, should be arrived at through normal diplomatic processes. If our position is really as reasonable as we think it is, then other like-minded nations ought to share our view as well. If they don’t, then we ought to be fully willing to take a long and searching look at why they don’t. We should make every effort not to act unilaterally.

But in the final analysis, and in the absence of a functional world government (and in the presence of a world still very much in a state of nature), we must continue to act in the defense of our interests, and to follow the guidance of our own conscience — together with friends and allies whenever we can, but, yes, alone if we must. But is there, in any meaningful sense, an absolute right of sovereignty, of inviolable borders? Absolutely not. The larger point is that the very concept of “rights” itself means little, in the absence of a framework in which they can be effectively guaranteed.

I haven’t written about martial arts much lately, but I thought I’d like to give readers a glimpse of a kung-fu style they may not have heard about: Southern Praying Mantis.

Although I have devoted myself pretty much exclusively to Hung Gar for the past twenty-five years or so, the sifu I studied with when I began my kung-fu education back at the end of 1975, Master William Chung, had been trained in both Lam Sai Wing Hung Gar and Kwong Sai Jook Loom Praying Mantis. His Praying Mantis sifu was the famous Gin Foon Mark, and in addition to making sure that we had a solid foundation in the Hung system, Master Chung saw to it that we learned some Praying Mantis as well.

Like most Southern Chinese systems (including, of course, Hung Gar), Southern Praying Mantis (SPM) relies mostly on strong hand techniques, rooted stances, low kicks, and what is known in the business as “short” power. What that term refers to is the ability to deliver full power when the hand is already close to, or even in contact with, the opponent’s body. This in turn means that once a block is made, or the practitioner gains control of an opponent’s arm with his forearm “bridge”, it is not necessary then to draw his own hand back to in order to make a powerful strike. In this way striking can flow smoothly from blocking, with no time lost; once you have forced open a path to the opponent’s body you can seize it at once.

The key to this short power in SPM lies in having your feet rooted to the ground, and in generating torque through the midsection that can flow in turn through the arms to the target. Control of the breath is essential, as is “opening” and “closing” the upper body. When closing, the elbows and shoulders tend to draw together, the waist pulls back slightly, the breath sinks earthward, and the palms rotate so as to face upward. In opening, the shoulders pull back, the hips and waist drive forward, and the palms turn downward.

The other fundamental skill in SPM is “sticking”. What this means is that once the forearm bridge makes contact with the opponent’s arm, preserving the contact enables the practitioner not only to read the opponent’s intention with great speed and accuracy, but also, by interpreting subtle shifts of the opponent’s weight and direction, to move in such a way as to control and redirect the attacker’s arms, creating small openings that one can then drive through with short-range power. The hands work together fluidly so that when one takes control of an opponent’s arm, it will often pass control to the other hand so that the original blocking hand can get “on top”, or can get through to the body.

SPM is purely a fighting art; it does not, unlike many other systems, including Hung Gar, contain any elements (at least as far as I know) that are there for purely aesthetic reasons. It is an outstanding close-quarters fighting system, and although I’ve chosen to focus on the Hung style, I still practice the SPM I know, not least because it comes in handy when I need to sneak one in on my most advanced students and training brothers, some of whom are getting awfully good these days.

If you’d like to see some of this stuff, there are quite a few videos online. Here is a good look at some of the kinds of hand techniques I’ve mentioned (just ignore the silly music, and the swaggering tone generally), and here is some very old footage of Master Mark himself, making mincemeat of a Choy Li Fut expert.

In Peter Berkowitz’s response to Christopher Hitchens’s god Is Not Great, he make some worthwhile points, but also trots out some familiar and flimsy ones as well. Let’s have a go at those first; we’ll take up his better arguments — and he does indeed make some — in a subsequent post.

The defenders of the faith have often made an unwitting ally of the late Stephen Jay Gould (that he is “the late” SJG is convenient for them, as he cannot clarify and correct the sometimes breathtakingly audacious adductions to which his remarks have been put). Dr. Berkowitz cites Gould’s famous declaration that religion and science are “non-overlapping magisteria” as support for the notion that religion is an equal partner of science in our efforts to know the truth of the world:

Gould was correct to think that both conventional religious belief and atheism are compatible with natural science, in part because “there are many questions that by their very nature must be recognized to lie beyond the legitimate scope of the scientific method.” Such questions–toward which the mind naturally wanders, though it is susceptible to ambush by the crude scientism of which Mr. Hitchens occasionally avails himself–include: Where did the universe come from, and is it governed by purpose?

It may indeed be that there are questions to which science may never provide an answer (although marking off regions of the natural world as forever beyond science’s reach has had a bad track record so far; for example the composition of the distant stars was once thought to be utterly beyond our ken). But, as Richard Dawkins asks, if scientists cannot tell us where the Universe came from, what possible reason would we have for thinking the preisthood can? The mere possibility that there are facts that are inaccessible to scientific inquiry makes no brief for the superior capabilities of religion in these areas. Likewise, imagine that science, baffled by the question of whether the Universe is “governed by purpose”, and at its wit’s end, does decide to turn to religion for the answer. Which religion should it consult? The Druse, perhaps, or should it be the adherents of a Polynesian cargo cult? No, religion has no special expertise in these matters; what it has is clout, and that only because it is so supinely granted it by so many of us.

Dr. Berkowitz continues:

As for his claim that the Bible abounds in falsehood and contradiction, Mr. Hitchens makes great sport with an old straw man. Yes, traditions teach that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, yet the Pentateuch refers to Moses in the third person and tells the story of his death. Yes, Matthew and Luke disagree on the Virgin Birth and the genealogy of Jesus. And so on. The literalness of Mr. Hitchens’s readings would put many a fundamentalist to shame.

However, isolating the supposed religious significance of the Bible from the communities and interpretive traditions that have elaborated its teaching is invalid. It is like deriving the meaning of the Constitution today by reading its provisions without reference to “The Federalist Papers,” which provides authoritative commentary on its principles; without reference to the two centuries of cases and controversies through which the Supreme Court has sought to construe its meaning; and without reference to the two centuries of experience through which the American people have sought to put the institutional framework it outlines into practice.

The important difference here, of course, is that the Constitution is not put forward as the divine and infallible word of the Almighty, but is simply a public document, written in public view by a committee of all-too mortal men. It makes no claims of supernatural agencies, and it even contains instructions for its own revision. It is, in short, a very different sort of thing altogether. And to the extent that the religious traditions that have “elaborated” the Bible’s teaching are religious at all, they cling always to belief in the existence of its central character, namely the overbearing, inescapable figure of God: a being whose behavior in the Bible, as Hitchens and others have rightly pointed out, hardly seems worthy of veneration.

Mr. Hitchens shows no awareness that his atheism, far from resulting from skeptical inquiry, is the rigidly dogmatic premise from which his inquiries proceed, and that it colors all his observations and determines his conclusions.

“Far from resulting from skeptical inquiry”? On what basis is this allegation made? Hitchens was raised in the Anglican Church, and it was exactly the awakening of skepticism in his young and curious mind that roused him from his religious education’s slumbrous spell. Anyway, on the basis of what “skeptical inquiry” are the dogmatic assertions of religion made? Skepticism, perhaps, about theological inconsistencies and minutiae. But about the existence of God Himself? No, to the faithful, that door is, by definition, nailed shut.

Of all the Bible’s sublime and sustaining teachings, none is more so than the teaching that explains that humanity is set apart because all human beings–woman as well as man the Bible emphasizes–are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).

Sublime and sustaining, perhaps, for a mind that needs desperately to cling to all-too-human notions of superiority and privilege. To others of us, the message of science: that we are not “set apart” from the Universe, but are, rather, deeply connected to it in ways that we might never have imagined under the cramped and pinching cosmology of religious dogma — that we are, quite literally, made of the ashes of stars, and are the agents by which the vast and churning Cosmos can awaken and behold itself — is far more uplifting.

That a teaching is sublime and sustaining does not make it true. But that, along with its service in laying the moral foundations in the Western world for the belief in the dignity of all men and women–a belief that our new new atheists take for granted and for which they provide no compelling alternative foundation–is reason enough to give the variety of religions a fair hearing. And it is reason enough to respect believers as decent human beings struggling to make sense of a mysterious world.

Indeed, that some may be sustained by religious beliefs certainly does not make them true; Dr. Berkowitz is quite right about that. That their absolute truth is noisily and often brutally asserted, however, when they may well be utterly false, has in fact been, to put it mildly, rather a recurring historical nuisance, and I recall a day a few years back when that truth was driven home in a most unpleasant way, right here in my home town. But, after all, perhaps Mohammed Atta and his pious comrades, as believers, were just struggling to make sense of a mysterious world.

But enough vitriol. Dr. Berkowitz does indeed make some good points. And to be fair, he does want us to keep in mind the “crucial distinctions” between gentle, wholesome religions, like, of course, the one we Americans have right here at home, and nasty ones, like “militant” Islam (we assume the regular version is considered to be OK too). We’ll be nicer in the next post, and I do apologize, by the way, for harping on this topic so much lately.

I don’t comment over at Bill Vallicella’s website any more, but I still follow the conversations there, as they are often interesting, and attract a number of intelligent participants.

Bill has put up an odd post today, however, which he calls The Humanity Delusion, in an obvious swipe at Richard Dawkins’s atheist manifesto The God Delusion.

I say this is an “odd” post because Bill is usually so meticulous with language that it is surprising to see him build an entire essay on an equivocation, but that is exactly what he is doing here. The post begins:

You don’t believe in God, but you believe in man? There is even less justification for believing in the latter than for believing in the former.

Admittedly, the fact of natural and moral evil makes belief in a providential power difficult. But it also makes belief in man and human progress difficult. There is the opium of religion, but also that of future-oriented utopian naturalisms such as Marxism. Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?

Now I couldn’t agree more that the utopian social-engineering programs of the radical Left — Bolshevism, the Cultural Revolution, the depredations of the Khmer Rouge, and many more — have been unmitigated disasters, and I realize that Bill’s agenda in this post is to point out the universal folly of such misguided schemes, which in their naive dismissal of human nature were doomed to failure all. But Bill makes two errors here. First, he artificially conflates Leftist utopianism with philosophical naturalism — beliefs that, while they may often have gone hand in hand, have no inherent connection or interdependency. Second, he equivocates on the phrase “believe in”. Coming from some, this might be seen as prosaic license, but this is just the sort of thing he routinely calls others on the carpet for, and I am surprised to see him do it here. He is contraposing belief in the very existence of God with belief in the perfectibility of Man; an apples-to-oranges comparison if ever there was one.

Dr. V. continues:

And isn’t it more difficult to believe in Man than in God? We know man and his wretchedness and that nothing much can be expected of him, but we don’t know God. Man appears impotent to ameliorate his condition in any fundamental way. We have had centuries to experience this truth, have we not? Advances in science and technology have brought undeniable benefits but also unprecedented dangers. The proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, their possession by rogue states and their terrorist surrogates, bodes ill for the future of humanity. We know our ilk and what he is capable of, and the bases of rational optimism seem slim indeed.

There is also the scarcely insignificant point that there is no such thing as Man, there are only men at war with one another and with themselves. But God is one. You say God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn’t and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively.

Bill argues that we have had centuries to see if Man can improve himself on his own — presumably he is referring to the increasingly secular period stretching from the Enlightenment forward — and concludes that “we need help that we cannot provide for ourselves”. But this overlooks that in the thousands of years prior to the Enlightenment, when presumably we were relying, as he prescribes, upon the guidance of the Almighty, perfect human societies were hardly, to put it mildly, abundant. And it is only in recent years that we have begun to see slavery, suppression and ownership of women, torture, and so forth — practices both endorsed in the Bible and unopposed during the religious hegemony of earlier centuries — as unequivocally unacceptable. As Stephen Pinker argues here, we actually do seem to be making moral progress in these increasingly Godless days.

Bill concludes:

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left’s utopian Kool-Aid.

This is a startling capitulation. Are we then to believe in God, even if such a belief is indeed the delusion Dawkins claims it to be, simply to ease our journey to the grave? Are we to surrender our quest for Truth in favor of comforting anodynes? Bill, I’m shocked to hear you suggest such a thing. In your loathing of the politics of the far Left (and I admit there is much there to loathe), you seem content to throw out the baby — the secular program of skepticism and rational inquiry that is the fruitful legacy of the Enlightenment — with the bath.

It’s awfully (infernally?) hot in Phoenix right now; perhaps the explanation is that the man has simply been out in the sun too long.

Over at Dr. William Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website there is a dicussion thread underway, prompted by a silly item in the New York Times about cognitive neuroscience and the soul. In the original article, the author, obviously unfamiliar with the labyrinthine convolutions of mind-body philosophy, embarrasses herself with the following:

But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes, brain structures and other physical correlates to feelings like empathy, disgust and joy. That is, they are discovering physical bases for the feelings from which moral sense emerges — not just in people but in other animals as well.

The result is perhaps the strongest challenge yet to the worldview summed up by Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who divided the creatures of the world between humanity and everything else. As biologists turn up evidence that animals can exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition once thought of as strictly human, Descartes’s dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” loses its force.

I winced when I read this. As Bill V., an unrepentant dualist, correctly points out, it is the purest hogwash. It is so incoherent that, as scientists often say of a poorly organized hypothesis, “it’s not even wrong”.

That we are deepening our understanding of how our brains bring about our minds — and learning that other animals may perform some of the same tricks — undermines not in the least Descartes’s cogito, which is simply a demonstration by the mind, to the mind, that the thinker exists.

The aspect of Descartes’s model that is almost universally rejected among scientists these days is his assumption that the mind is a “substance” unto itself, capable of independent existence, and that it is in this nonmaterial substance that all our reasoning, decision-making, hoping, fearing, hypothesizing, and, of course, doubting, take place. The Mind, in this dualist model, then exerts its Will upon its puppet body in some unknown way; Descartes speculated that the point of entry might be the pineal gland.

The way that all this actually happens in the brain is now at the convergent focus of a number of scientific disciplines, equipped with brand-new tools of amazing power and resolution, and as has been the case in so many other areas of scientific inquiry, much that was previously regarded as ineffably mysterious is beginning to be understood as explicable natural phenomena. The manner in which the physical processes of the brain result in subjectivity itself is still outside the circle of illumination, but that we have not yet explicated how the trick is done is not in itself evidence for interactionist dualism, any more than not understanding the physics of lightning was evidence that thunderbolts were hurled by Zeus.

However, there is still deep resistance on the part of many philosophers, such as Dr. Vallicella (and Titus Rivas, whose paper on epiphenomenalism we looked at here and here, and will return to in a forthcoming post), to the idea that our subjective awareness can be the product of, or an aspect of, our material brains. In a comment in the thread linked to above, Dr. Vallicella says:

There is this incredible naivete on the part of science writers and most neuroscientists. They don’t think about what a correlation is or proves. A correlation is not an identity. To establish a correlation presupposes the distinctness of what is being correlated. And the correlations are consistent with substance dualism.

Yes, to establish a correlation is to presuppose the distinctness of what is being correlated, but that is often merely a first step toward a deeper synthesis that establishes that the correlated concepts have as their referent the same underlying phenomenon. For example, consider the commonplace phenomenon, familiar since time immemorial, that we call “heat”. As we delve into its physical underpinnings, we find that there is always a correlation between the state of motion of a physical object’s individual molecules, and how “hot” the object is. “Well, that’s all very interesting,” one might say, “but all you have done is establish a correlation; you still haven’t told me where the ‘hotness’ comes from. Indeed, the very fact that you establish a correlation between ‘heat’ and molecular kinetic energy presupposes that they are philosophically distinct.”

But this is misguided, of course; heat simply is molecules in motion. Scientific inquiry often begins with correlation and ends up establishing identity; it’s commonly the way our understanding of nature advances. Time and again in the history of science correlations have led investigators to deeper, more fundamental symmetries, to the realization that apparently disparate phenomena are in fact merely different aspects of a single natural entity.

Another example: to the ancient Greeks, the morning star, Phosphorus, and the evening star, Hesperus, were distinct objects. We might imagine observing that changes in the appearance of one were always correlated with changes in the other, and argue that there is some supernatural influence that passes between them: but pace Dr Vallicella, it turns out that they are one and the same object, namely the planet Venus.

Might substance dualism be true? Yes, perhaps it might, though the only reason to think so is that we have yet to understand the nature of subjectivity; and one can hardly be blamed for seeing it as just another “god of the gaps” spackle-job. Dualist philosophers simply declare that material systems cannot possibly be conscious, or intentional (as if they were already in possession of an exhaustive understanding of what “mere” matter is and is not capable of), and then adduce that “fact” as evidence for their position. Is there any justification whatsoever for considering mind-body dualism the only respectable postion, and for saying that to assume otherwise is “incredible naivete”? Of course not. It really does get downright tiresome and unhelpful after a while.

Among the books and periodicals I have hoarded here at home are quite a few old issues of National Geographic: I’ve been a subscriber since the early 80′s, and don’t throw them away. I’ll often pull out an old copy in an idle moment, and yesterday I was looking at one from December 1988. The theme was Our Endangered Earth, and one of the stories was about the Urueu-Wau-Wau, an isolated tribe from the western Brazilian rain forest.

They live the customary “Noble Savage” existence: naked in the jungle, they hunt and gather food, are experts on the local flora and fauna, and are inclined to kill strangers. Their corner of the forest is an area called Rondônia, and it is rich in resources: rubber, ore, and plants of medicinal value. These assets, once they became known to outsiders, attracted prospectors of various sorts — some of whom were killed, but more have come. The government restricts access to the area, but realizes that wider contact is inevitable, and has set up “attraction” stations in the bush to offer gifts in an attempt to convince the natives that no harm is intended, and to disincline them to kill outsiders on sight.

The author makes no secret of his admiration for the Urueu-Wau-Wau. It is a paternalistic affection, however, and I very much doubt that he or any of the rest of us would like to join their dwindling band, however noble it may seem as an anthropological curiosity. He quotes a local agent, who says, describing the gift-giving (which was, of course, gratefully appreciated by the natives, who had no steel tools, and wanted them): “I felt suadade, heartache; each time Indians come for presents or medicines, a little of their freedom slips away.”

This is an interesting remark. The forest people live in a tightly constrained world: a few square miles of steaming jungle in one of the remotest corners of the globe. They know their forest well, but they do not know that the species to which they belong has billions of members, has learned the true story of the Earth’s origins, and has sent its exploratory craft to the outermost reaches of the solar system. They cannot read or write; they know nothing of mathematics, metallurgy, masonry, or modern medicine (there is a photograph of a young boy extracting a tooth from his naked sister’s mouth as she writhes in pain in the dirt). Were they to learn about these things, they might still make an informed choice to reject them (although aboriginal societies never do, as the products of the modern world are simply too useful), but is it right to imagine that exposing them to these facts — facts of which nearly everyone else on Earth is in possession — diminishes their freedom?

Imagine, if we may borrow the notion from Plato, someone who has lived his life in a cave, with no idea that there is a tunnel nearby that leads to the surface. He may be well adjusted to his subterreanean existence — he knows where the fish are, etc., and how to catch them — and he may even be fairly content with his lot. But, in his ignorance, it is certainly the case that he is not in any meaningful sense free to leave the cave, whereas as soon as he learns of the tunnel his range of options increases dramatically. Do we preserve the “freedom” of isolated, fossilized Stone Age cultures by willfully perpetuating their ignorance?

Daniel Dennett, in considering whether the state might have any duty to protect children from being indoctrinated with extremist religious views, takes up this point in his book Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon [pp. 324-5]:

The resolution of these dilemmas is not (yet) obvious, to say the least. Compare it with the closely related issue of what we, on the outside, should do about the Sentinalese and the Jarawas and the other peoples who still live a stone-age existence on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, far out in the Indian Ocean. These people have managed to keep even the most intrepid explorers and traders at bay for centuries by their ferocious bow-and-arrow defense of their island territories, so little is known about them, and for some time now the government of India, of which the islands form a distant part, has prohibited all contact with them. Now that they have been drawn to the world’s attention in the wake of the great tsunami of December 2004, it is hard to imagine that this isolation can be maintained, but even if it could be, should it be? Who has the right to decide the matter? Certainly not the anthropologists, although they have worked hard to protect these people from contact — even with themselves — for decades. Who are they to “protect” these human beings? The anthropologists do not own them as if they were laboratory specimens carefully gathered and shielded from contamination, and the idea that these islands should be treated as a human zoo is offensive — even when we consider the even more offensive alternative of opening the doors to missionaries of all faiths, who would no doubt eagerly rush in to save their souls.

It is tempting, but illusory, to think that they have solved the ethical problem for us, by their adult decison to drive away outsiders without asking if they are protectors, exploiters, investigators, or soul-savers. They clearly want to be left alone, so we should leave them alone! There are two problems with this convenient proposal: Their decision is so manifestly ill informed that if we let it trump all other considerations are we not as culpable as somebody who lets a person drink a poisoned cocktail “of his own free will” without deigning to warn him? And in any case, although the adults may have reached the age of consent, are their children not being victimized by the ignorance of their parents? We would never permit a neighbor’s child to be kept so deluded, so shouldn’t we cross the ocean and step in to rescue these children, however painful the shock?

Do you feel a slight adrenaline surge at this moment?

This question bring two powerful motives into collision: the desire of any civilized society to prevent harm to children, and the instinctive feeling that the sanctity of the parent-child relationship should be inviolate. “Harm” can take many forms, however. Forcing a child to live her life in near-total ignorance of the very existence of the civilized world can reasonably be thought of as a form of abuse, however well-intentioned. What about ignorance of the facts of human origins?

One of the warmer and more persistent disagreements between liberal and conservative viewpoints in recent years has been over the commingling of religion with politics. We hear a steady drumbeat from the Left alleging that the Bush cadre is trying to turn the USA into a “theocracy”, and in academic circles, where the prevailing attitude toward religion is pitying scorn, if not downright hostility, conservative Republicans are as rare as hen’s teeth. Meanwhile, in the opposite corner, reactionary firebrands like Ann Coulter inflame the pious with books such as her recent screed, Godless.

So it was interesting to see CNN present a program over the weekend in which the current crop of Democratic presidential aspirants fed the electorate great helpings of santimonious treacle in an effort to demonstrate that their worldview was informed not only by the shrewd and worldly calculus of political advantage, but also by the sine qua non of American public life, namely “faith”.

Why is this necessary? Why must American politicians demonstrate not only that they have the intellect, statesmanship, and grasp of complex issues required to pilot the ship of state, but must assure us also of a full-duplex link to Heaven?

It’s easy enough to point out that Americans, 90% of whom believe in God, and more than half of whom reject the idea that we humans are descended from nonhuman ancestors (the scientific equivalent of denying the roundness of the Earth, or the existence of atoms) are far more religious than citizens of other liberal democracies around the world. But even so, we don’t vet our doctors or lawyers for belief in the supernatural; why must it be so for our politicians?

Well, you might say, in a democracy, our elected representatives are our proxies; we want them to be as much like us as possible, in order that society shall move in the direction we would have wished it to ourselves. Interestingly, though, what seems to be paramount is not that the candidates share our particular religious beliefs: all that matters, apparently, is that they not be altogether Godless, that they can be trusted to have some sort of religious commitment.

I think this is a fascinating fact. The actual content of their beliefs or superstitions matters, apparently, less than that we be convinced that they don’t lack them entirely. Watching the program I was struck by the scrupulous care that was taken to avoid questions like “Well, tell us, Mrs. Clinton, we’ve talked a lot about faith — in fact tonight’s entire program is all about your faith — but what is it, really, that you actually have faith in? What, exactly, is your image of God? What specific role do you believe God plays in the management of the world? Do you think that there is a place in Heaven for non-Christians? …” And so on.

But there is none of that. We wouldn’t want to examine any of it too closely, because one of two outcomes would be the likely result: either that the candidate actually possesses very specific doctrinal views that would, almost necessarily, contradict the beliefs of many potential voters, or else it would be revealed that there really isn’t anything very solid there at all, other than a vague and somewhat incoherent jumble of bracing generalities.

No, this is a perfectly illustrative example not of a genuine interest in what the candidates actually believe, but of what Daniel Dennett refers to, in his book Breaking the Spell, as “belief in belief”. I think the reason it expresses itself so strongly in politics has to do with the prevalence of the notion among religious folks that morality requires a supernatural basis: that even though, once our politicians are in office, we can’t make sure they behave, at least they will have the fear of God to keep them in line. This fits in well with our requiring that publicly binding oaths be sworn on a Bible, or “so help me God”, but it’s far from foolproof, since a scurrilous nonbeliever would presumably have no qualms about faking the whole thing in the first place — so the only ones you are really filtering out by these proceedings are the corrupt believers who might well have tried to get away with something if you hadn’t pre-empted them with an oath. But to the faithful among the electorate, of course, God is watching the whole game anyway, so it will all get sorted out eventually — and I suppose they are solaced to imagine that things will go even worse, come Judgment Day, for our crooked pols if they have gone so far as to swear falsely upon the Bible, or to piously and publicly avow a false belief in the Almighty in order just to get ahead.

To those of us who see the whole business as a sort of mass hypnosis, however, it all seems quite bizarre, and not at all reassuring.

Meanwhile, just to pile it on, there is this item from today’s paper. But that’s another story.

Dr. William Vallicella, in a recent post, considers the following quote from the atheist author Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation, pp. 38-39):

If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral.

Dr. V., no fan of the recent crop of books promoting atheism, takes issue with Harris’s formulation. Let’s have a look.

Bill writes:

Harris’ enthymeme can be spelled out as an instance of modus tollendo tollens, if you will forgive the pedantry:

1. If religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers.
2. Atheists are not less moral than believers.

Therefore

3. Religious faith does not offer the only real basis for morality.

The problem with this argument lies in its first premise. It simply doesn’t follow that if religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than theists. This blatant non sequitur trades on a confusion of two questions which it is essential to distinguish.

Q1. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are people who profess some version of theism more ‘moral,’ i.e., more likely to live in accordance with the agreed-upon code, than those who profess some version of atheism?

The answer to this question is No. But even if the answer is not in the negative, I am willing to concede arguendo to Harris that it is. In any case (Q1) is not philosophically interesting, except as apart of the run-up to a genuine philosophical question, though it is of interest sociologically.

Q2. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are atheists justified in adhering to the code? …

Bill astutely differentiates the question of obeying a moral code from questions about its ontological underpinnings, and suggests that Harris has missed this important distinction. But I think Bill is misinterpreting Harris’s phrase “religious faith offers the only real basis for morality”, and by doing so is missing the point altogether.

It is important here to distinguish between religious faith itself, and the presumptive referent of that faith, namely an existing supernatural being from whose goodness objective moral truth is derived. The point Bill appears to be making is that if there is an “agreed-upon moral code”, then atheists certainly might happen to adhere to it just as well as religious believers, as seems indeed to be the case. The believer will tell you that the source of his moral intuition is God, while the atheist, denying that account, will offer some other explanation. But if we assume that all people have the same moral intuitions (which seems roughly true), then the moral rectitude of the atheist says nothing about the truth value of the believer’s faith. In other words, the fact that atheists behave morally casts no light upon the correctness of religious beliefs.

But this is not what Harris is addressing here. He is not considering the proposition that God is the only real basis of morality, but rather that faith itself is. It isn’t a question about the truth of religious beliefs, but about whether such beliefs are necessary for moral behavior, and in this sense the difference between the atheist and the believer is a significant one. This is the same point that Michael Shermer has made, and which Bill quotes in a comment below the post:

“What would you do if there were no God? Would you commit robbery, rape, and murder, or would you continue being a good and moral person? Either way the question is a debate stopper. If the answer is that you would soon turn to robbery, rape, or murder, then this is a moral indictment of your character, indicating you are not to be trusted because if, for any reason, you were to turn away from your belief in God, your true immoral nature would emerge…If the answer is that you would continue being good and moral, then apparently you can be good without God. QED.” [Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil, pp. 154-155].

I had exactly this conversation, or at least the beginning of it, many years ago, with an intelligent but unreflective assistant engineer — a Catholic fellow, in his early twenties, from Bayonne, NJ — at a New York recording studio. He asked me, a few days before Easter, if I had any special plans for the holiday. I explained that, being an atheist (I was in one of my more confident periods), I had nothing lined up. He seemed shocked, and gave a nervous laugh. “You’re kidding, right? “, he said. I said that no, I wasn’t kidding at all, actually, and this gave him pause. After a minute he said that he didn’t know what he would do if he didn’t believe in God. I found this interesting, of course, so I asked him what he meant. “Well, you know, I’d probably do all sorts of awful things!” I found this hard to believe, as he was such an affable fellow, so I asked if he really meant it: that he really thought he would be out raping and pillaging if he didn’t think that God had given him a set of rules, and was watching to make sure he didn’t break them. He said he needed to think about it — and I hope he did — but I could tell the whole idea was quite unsettling to him.

This is what Daniel Dennett calls “belief in belief”, and is, I think, what Harris is questioning in this context: not the truth of religious beliefs about the source of morality, but rather the importance of belief itself in getting us to behave well. Many folks are quite sure, as was my young friend, that such faith is necessary to keep us in line. Harris is telling us that it ain’t necessarily so.

Say what you like about New York City, there’s always something going on. At lunchtime today I walked into Grand Central Station, which is only a hundred yards or so from my office, just as some of the world’s top “competitive eaters” were about to begin a buffalo-wing smackdown. My sense of journalistic duty awakened, I forced myself to watch, with the same mix of horror and fascination that might grip us as we pass a gruesome traffic fatality on the highway.

I’ve never paid any attention to competitive eating — in fact, I can hardly imagine anything less dignified, with the possible exception of competitive defecation — so I certainly wasn’t familiar with its big names. Apparently two of them were on hand, however, namely Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, and Joey “Jaws” Chestnut. Ms. Thomas, at a mere 105 pounds, is just a tiny slip of a woman, but she is apparently one of the world’s foremost gurgitators, having been at the top of the US field for several years. By some presumptive anatomical anomaly she is easily able to hog down more feed at a sitting than men over twice her size — a talent that I should have thought most civilized folks would keep to themselves, but after all, this is America.

The contest itself, hosted by a garrulous popinjay in a straw boater, was a tawdry and revolting spectacle: human beings reducing themselves to the level of barnyard animals for the amusement of the mob. When it was over, twelve minutes later, the tiny Sonya, beslimed from chin to eyeballs with glutinous scarlet goo, had devoured over six pounds of wings. But it wasn’t good enough; she was outdone by the trencherman who has emerged in recent years as her nemesis: the gangling macrophage Chestnut, whose intake exceeded seven pounds. Yes, that’s seven pounds of buffalo wings in twelve minutes. His parents must be so proud.

You can watch the event here. If you have the stomach for it.

There’s a quirky little item in the science news today: some researchers in Germany have been studying fruit flies, and have observed that their behavior seems surprisingly flexible.

The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is a simple little fellow, tiny, short-lived, and with few pretensions to grandeur. In particular, being only a couple of millimeters long, he has an itty-bitty brain, and is not assumed to possess a supple mind. But Dr. Björn Brembs and his colleagues spent some time examining the activity of flies that had been attached to a tether in a featureless white enclosure, and contrary to their expectation — that given a perfectly uniform environment, the fly’s behavior would be robotically repetitive as well — the flies zoomed around in patterns that varied in interesting, nonrandom ways. This is an intriguing result: the fly’s brain, even though it is a pretty simple one, as brains go, is still able to generate innovative, difficult-to-predict patterns of movement.

This is all good, interesting science. I have a problem, though, with the way it is being reported. I first got wind of the story from a news screen in the elevator at my office (a service that calls itself, forthrightly but rather depressingly, the “Captivate Network“). The headline said something like “Fruit Flies Found To Have Free Will”, which, as you can imagine, certainly got my attention. I found the story online a few minutes later, and the spin was the same. This is most unfortunate, as this tagline will predictably be picked up again and again, by legions of earnest-looking local news reporters and chuckleheaded bloggers. You can hear it now:

“Well, that’s it for the weather. Back to you, Bob.”

“Thanks, Jessica. And now, one last item. In what just might settle an age-old philosophical controversy, researchers in Germany are reporting that they have found evidence that fruit flies have ‘free will’.”

“Well, I flunked philosophy in college, Bob, but I guess if fruit flies have free will, that means we must too, right?”

“Not me, Jessica. I’m a married man!”

[Laughter. Fade. Music up. Credits roll.]

What it appears that the researchers have found is a feature in the fly’s brain that generates movement that is, while nonrandom, difficult to predict. It is simple to imagine why this would be useful; anyone who has tried to snatch a fly out of the air has been frustrated by its ability to move, at quite ordinary speeds, in ways that are maddeningly elusive. To be able to do this is strongly adaptive: a fly that lacked this ability, and moved always according to foreseeable patterns, would be easy prey. This is a remarkable accomplishment for a brain so tiny, and it will be enlightening to learn how the trick is done, but it is certainly not “free will” in the traditional philosophical sense, even though it may have a great deal to tell us about why we seem to have free will. The researchers are quite clear about this themselves. Says one of the authors, George Sugihara:

“The results of our analysis indicate a mechanism which might be common to many other animals and could form the biological foundation for what we experience as free will”.

Note the language. A “mechanism”. “The biological foundation for what we experience as free will.”

I’m what you’d call a “compatibilist”, which means that I think two ideas that are usually thought to be contradictory actually aren’t: I believe that our minds, and our choices, are solely the product of physical processes in the brain, but I also think that this fact is compatible with our being every bit as free, and as responsible, as we could coherently wish to be (this is a topic I should return to in future posts). But the subject is confusing and elusive enough to give even competent, hardworking philosophers a nagging headache, and after reading that headline in the elevator, I don’t look forward to seeing how this story is going to bumble its way through the popular culture.

You can read the media reports here, or here, but for Dr. Brembs’s own account, see his own website, here. One amusing note: the facility where the work was done? The Free University of Berlin.

I’ve finally had a chance to get back to considering Titus Rivas’s paper, in which he and Hein van Dongen argue that the mind-brain model known as epiphenomenalism — which says that subjective mental phenomena are indeed ontologically real, that they are “irreducible” to physical processes, and that they exert no causal influence on the physical world — is false. In a previous post I agreed that their principal objection, which has to do with how the brain might ever come to express a belief in subjective mental phenomena in the first place if epiphenomenalism were true, is a good one. But if we are to discard epiphenomenalism, what alternatives are we left with? Rivas and van Dongen see only two alternatives: eliminative materialism and interactionist dualism — but I think they narrow the field unnecessarily. I’d like to go over the paper in some detail, and see where there might be implicit assumptions that could be leading us astray — a job that will require several posts (and which, given my lack of free time at the moment, may unfortunately be a slow go). Readers can find the original here.

But before beginning, I’d like to make clear the most important aspect of the view that I incline toward: first and foremost, I think that the mind is the result of the activity of the brain. This in itself does not rule out certain sorts of dualism, and that is what I’d like to focus on tonight.

Dualism has long been the model of choice for those who, for religious or “spiritual” reasons, have wished to introduce the notion of a “soul” as an ontologically distinct substance that interacts closely with the physical body during our lifetime, but which is capable of an independent existence (variously described) upon our death. In fact, it seems that most interactionist dualists progress quite naturally from an initial rejection of the mind as anything that matter might be capable of to a full-blown two-party system in which the immaterial mental part has a robustly independent existence, in which its association with the physical body is only a temporary phase, or is perhaps only one of a series of such associations. This is “interactionist substance dualism”, and there are some assumptions here that I’d like to have out in the open.

It is often suggested that we are driven to positing an ontologically distinct “mental” substance because it is quite plain that “mere” matter cannot be the substrate of subjective experience. Do we know this? Is our understanding of what subjectivity actually is sufficient to warrant such an axiom? Can we say that we have exhaustively enumerated all of matter’s properties and capabilities? One might argue, by varying what we take as the more parsimonious assumption, that we plainly haven’t, as we see special bits of matter — our brains — that seem to be doing just the thing that we are declaring that matter is incapable of.

And if we do posit a new kind of philosophical substance in the world’s ontological inventory, call it “mind”, and declare it to be ontologically distinct from “matter”, what have we achieved? Have we gained any insight into what it is about mind-substance that bestows upon it its gift for subjectivity? Have we any deeper understanding? No, we have simply added, rather arbitrarily, a new class of thing about which we can say nothing other than that it is able to be the locus of subjective experiences. How does this improve upon the view that matter, under conditions that are not yet understood, might do the same? If nobody had ever seen a magnet, it might seem equally reasonable to deny that a chunk of metal could push another chunk of metal around without touching it — to insist that for one piece of iron to move another they would have to be in direct contact — but as it turns out, that is not the case: magnets exist, and they show us that matter is capable of odd, counterintuitive tricks.

But let us assume that this substance-dualistic axiom is a good one, and that there are two kinds of substance — mind and matter — and that they can causally influence one another. As we know, this fits nicely with the “soul” model, in which the mental “self” is capable of independent existence. But it also allows for another description: that the mental is brought into existence, and sustained in that existence, by the action of the physical (why not, if we’re already allowing them to interact?). A two-way causal interaction between mind and body could take the form of a physical event A causing mental event B, which in turn causes mental event C, which then causes physical event D, and so on. In this view the mental, although ontologically distinct, still supervenes on the physical body, which acts as a sort of generator. Damage to the brain will cause an imperfectly generated mind (as certainly seems to be the case), and shutting off the brain would shut off the mind as well. Our mental part would “come on line” gradually, as the construction and outfitting of our brains progressed during embryonic development and infancy (as again seems to be the case), and upon our deaths our minds would simply cease to be.

This is a very different notion from the conventional “soul”-based model: it is interactionist dualism with the dog wagging the tail. I have contended that, in principle, at least, any view that posits a causally efficacious non-physical mental susbstance will be amenable to scientific verification, as it should leave footprints in the form of causal-closure violations, and this model would do so as well.

But as mentioned above, I don’t see that we gain much by insisting that mental phenomena are an ontologically distinct non-physical substance; to do so we simply deny by arbitrary fiat that matter can muster up subjectivity, then invent a new type of substance that can, about which we can say nothing else.

In the next post we’ll look at some of the other assumptions made in this paper, in particular having to do with axiology and morality. We also need to take a look at the concept of “reducibility”.

Today was, like yesterday, a day to set aside introspection, brooding and contemplation; a day to live life rather than examine it.

It began early, by my standards at least, with a jaunt to Wellfleet Harbor’s Indian Neck Beach at 8:15 a.m. to pit, once again, man against oyster. I prevailed, of course — although no man is a match for an oyster physically, I have learned to outwit them — and I brought home several dozen, shown below.

Next it was off to the northern tip of the Cape, just a few miles away, for a bracing two-hour hike through the Province Lands. This remarkable landscape consists entirely of enormous sand dunes that have been deposited, over the ten thousand years since the Cape was left behind by the retreating ice sheets, by the action of wind and sea upon the marine escarpments just to the south. One ascends from a small parking area on Route Six by way of a steep sandy trail through the woods, and emerges quite abruptly upon several square miles of undulating upland, with towering dunes that shelter wind-stunted groves of pitch pine, scrub oak, heather and mosses in their scooped valleys. It is a dramatically beautiful place, almost Saharan in its barer stretches, and on a clear day, under the famous Cape light, the colors of sand and sky and grass, of sea and moss and heather, combine with sublime effect. I’ve never seen anyplace else quite like it, and many visitors to the Outer Cape have no idea it’s even there. I’m not about to tell them.

It’s tough going on the dunes — they are high and steep, and hiking in loose sand can be hard work. After a couple of hours of heavy slogging in the warm sun we were in need of refreshment, so we moseyed down to the town of Chatham, at the “elbow” of the Cape, where, after a peasant stroll through town, we planted ourselves at a local tavern for victuals and libations, and watched the Kentucky Derby on the television. (It was won by some horse or other, ridden by a slender fellow in a loud shirt.)

On the way back up to Wellfleet we stopped at Rock Harbor, near the town of Orleans, to glimpse the sun setting over Cape Cod Bay. There was scarcely a breeze, and the tranquil sea seemed as smooth as glass. See below.

But after such a day, in which I have not only subdued dozens of enraged molluscs, but have also traversed some of the harshest landscape in all of Barnstable County, I’m afraid I lack the stamina, semicentenarian that I am, to spend further hours tonight grappling with the persistent philosophical and cultural questions that we usually wrangle here at waka waka waka. Do forgive me; things should get back to normal soon.

In the wake of the horror at Virginia Tech, folks around the world, and here at home, are expressing a predictable variety of responses. The Left is calling for stricter gun control, the Right for stricter immigration, the Europeans are criticizing our violent culture, and all sorts of people are focusing on the Asian-ness, or more specifically the Korean-ness, of the shooter. (For the Korean viewpoint, I recommend that readers pay Kevin Kim a visit.) President Bush, with breathtaking clumsiness and insensitivity, prefaced his first remarks to the nation with an oafish assertion about his position on gun ownership. News anchors are cautioning us against racist outbursts; there will undoubtedly be some. (The Wall Street Journal today carried a level-headed editorial that readers may find of interest.)

When this sort of thing happens, the natural reaction here in the U.S., where we are able to live our lives at a level of safety and comfort that is unparallelled in the history of the world, is to ask how we can prevent it from happening again. This isn’t some horrid Third World backwater, after all, where life is cheap; this is America, and if something is broken, we want the government to fix it. But underlying this attitude is the assumption that everything can be fixed; that we have an inalienable right to live tranquil and sheltered lives, and that what we get for living here and not, say, Darfur, or East Timor, or Baghdad, is that our children will be safe. And the amazing fact is that generally, they are.

But we must take a step back from our indignation to realize that we live brief and precarious lives on a tiny speck of dust in a vast and indifferent Cosmos, and that despite our very best efforts — and by all means, let us see what we can do, not with a hysterical backlash, but by a reasoned examination of our options and priorities as a society — despite our very best efforts, the chaos, the blackness, the uncaring and infinite Wild that we so effectively manage to keep just beyond the gates is going to creep in now and then, and pick some of us off. We live in a firelit glade in the forest, and sometimes we forget how recently the ground was cleared, and how small a place we occupy in the wilderness all around us.

The madness that took those infinitely precious young lives on Monday was not a localized instance, nor is it “fixable” by legislature. It was an eruption of a molten pool that lies beneath us all, and while our species passes through its awkward and painful adolescence — as the world is compressed ever more tightly, and as more and more of us are brought, willy-nilly, into random and kinetic interaction with one another — that heat and pressure will find its way to the surface again and again, until we transform not our governments, not our laws, but ourselves.

In the last three posts in this series on mind-body interaction, we looked at some of the more serious objections to what is known as “interactionist ‘substance’ dualism”. After laying out a litany of difficulties with this model, I ended the previous entry by asking why anyone would defend such a view.

There are several reasons. Let’s look some of them over.

The most obvious problem arises from the uniqueness of the phenomenon in question. Materialist science concerns itself with the objectively observable features of the world, but the subjectivity of my conscious experience means that it is available only to one observer only, namely me. These subjective “experiencings” — the redness of an apple, the taste of a Martini, the painfulness of pain — are known as qualia, and nothing else that science has ever examined is like them. It is difficult to see how any description of brain activity, physical states, or electrochemical processes will ever “explain” my qualia. As a commenter at Maverick Philosopher put it in a recent thread:

“Now could it be true that all of my sensing, perceiving, thinking, etc. is just complex processes transpiring in my brain and central nervous system?”

In short, NO, for it’s an incoherent notion.

Just insert the elided word: ‘…complex material processes…’. As in micro-neuro-biochemical processes, which science has revealed are nothing but atoms bumping into each other. Now exactly where in that bustling arena of meaningless atomic motion do I find the ‘sensing, perceiving, thinking, etc.’?

Nowhere. Therefore that notion doesn’t make ‘prima facie sense’. Nothing in that picture of complicated processes but thoughtless protons, electrons, and neutrons, responding 1E26 times per second to the zero-point field, and incidentally, far more slowly to some extremely minor perturbations we call molecular forces.
(I believe Locke raised this objection long ago but I guess it’s been ignored ever since.) No room left over for reductionism, eliminativism, or epiphenomenalism. In principle, our mentality is wholly inexplicable in material terms.

Fair enough. Our mentality is inexplicable in material terms, given our current inventory of “material terms”. Another word that pops up often in this context is “unintelligible“.

But other aspects of the physical world have seemed “unintelligible” as well, until science formed a conceptual framework for them: magnetism, for example (how can a stone move another stone without touching it?) or the propagation of light waves through empty space (the existence of the luminiferous ether was considered an unassailable fact prior to the Michelson-Morley experiment, because of the “unintelligibility” of waves traveling through a vacuum). Despite this history of mystery yielding to comprehension through the slow and patient weathering of scientific effort, though, there are dualists who flatly insist that it is a settled fact that there can never be a materialistic account of consciousness. One of them, of course, is Dr. Vallicella himself, who, weary of my “maybe-it’s-just-too-soon-to-tell” objections whenever such blunt assertions were made, excommunicated me altogether.^† (I think it’s telling that he had also recently written this post, in which he expresses the view that there is little to be learned from history.)

Another argument in support of dualism has been given by philosopher David Chalmers, who invokes the idea of the “zombie”: something that looks like a person, and behaves just like a person, but that has no inner life whatsoever — no consciousness, no qualia, no experiencing at all. Chalmers argues that since we can imagine a zombie that is identical down to the smallest details of brain structure and activity, but which has none of the subjective experiences that we do, then there must be something that is “left over” after the physical description has been completely elucidated.

The strength of this argument depends on the assumption that because we can conceive of such zombies, they are actually possible. But this is not necessarily a valid assumption; this sort of question was examined by the philosopher George Seddon in a 1972 paper^†† in which he asks us to conceive of a floating bar of iron. Iron does not float, as we know; if we imagine, then, a floating iron bar, something has to give somewhere. Either the bar is not what we usually mean by “iron” (a metal having a certain specific gravity, etc.), or it is not floating on “water”, or it isn’t really “floating”. In the same way, I suspect that Chalmers’ assumption that permits the existence of zombies that are physically indistinguishable from conscious humans may be an unjustifiable move, one based on our present ignorance of the physical underpinnings of consciousness.^†††

There is also the issue of free will. For many, I think that one of the strongest motivations to accept a dualistic viewpoint is the reluctance to surrender our decisionmaking to a mechanism that proceeds according to everyday physical causality; this is seen by many as corrosive to our sense of moral responsibility, and indeed to our notion of ourselves as dignified autonomous agents. (I think this view is wrong, but to begin that discussion would be out of context here.) A dualistic model, while not answering all of the problems swirling around causality and will, does at least emancipate the mind from the shackles of merely physical causation, and I think that is a large part of its appeal. Note, however, that “it must be this way, because anything else would be just too awful” is not an argument, but merely a wish.

Finally, I think that many who endorse mind-body dualism are theists as well, and see our faculties of reason and moral responsibility as important aspects of our relationship to God. This is, of course, simply a matter of faith, as there are perfectly coherent accounts of both of these phenomena as products of our evolutionary history.

So, I think it might have been premature for Daniel Dennett to claim ^†††† that dualism has, as he puts it:

…been relegated to the trash heap of history, along with alchemy and astrology. Unless you are also prepared to declare that the world is flat and the sun is a fiery chariot pulled by winged horses — unless, in other words, your defiance of modern science is quite complete — you won’t find any place to stand and fight for these obsolete ideas.

In fact, despite the points outlined in this series of posts, mind-body dualism is alive and well, and remains, for the present at least, beyond conclusive refutation by either science or philosophy.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t wrong, of course.

1. † Not that I’m angry, mind you — though I was certainly surprised, and more than a little disappointed. Dr. V. is under no obligation to provide a forum for dissenting views.
2. †† G. Seddon, Logical Possibility, Mind, 81 (1972), pp. 481–94
3. ††† For a more in-depth look at this objection to Chalmers’ argument, see this paper, by Tamler Sommers, of Duke University.
4. †††† in Kinds of Minds, 1996, p. 24

In the two previous posts (here, and here) in our ongoing examination of mind-body dualism, we looked at the “interaction problem” — the question of how an entirely non-physical Mind might push the necessary neural buttons and levers to get the body to do anything.

We noted that philosopher William Valicella, in looking for a loophole, had suggested that there might be exotic interpretations of causality that let the dualist off the hook — a “regularity” model, in which no actual medium of interaction is on offer, but in which all that can be said is that A “causes” B if whenever an event A occurs, it is followed by an event B. In the last post we passed over in silence a serious objection to this view, namely that all of the examples of causal interaction we have yet observed require a transfer of energy, and that causation of the sort Dr. Vallicella imagines might in fact result in observable violations of conservation-of-energy principles. Nevertheless, this narrow philosophical ledge seems to him broad enough to stand upon, and he goes so far as to say that with this argument, causality objections have been “disposed of”. But as we saw in the last post, examples of such causation should leave empirically detectable clues, and to find violations of causal closure, and therefore of conservation principles, will be surprising, to say the least. We shall see.

Another area where the skeptic might request clarification is the question of origins. We know that there was a prebiotic era in Earth’s history, during which there were no creatures to embody minds. How, then, as organic life got underway, did immaterial Minds arrive on the scene to join us, and by what process did they attach themselves to the animals they are bound to? The same question applies to the ontogeny of the individual; where was my non-physical Mind prior to my physical existence? Should we imagine that the development in utero of our bodies somehow summons a Mind to join it? Also, if we are considering “substance” dualism, in which the Mind is, by the philosophical definition of “substance”, capable of independent existence, why is my mind attached to my body, instead of another?

This line of questioning leads us to another troublesome area: if the Mind is immaterial, then why is it so exquisitely vulnerable to the state of the body? Why do drugs, blows to the head, and other physical insults have the deleterious effect they do? An answer sometimes given to this question is that the physical body stands, somehow, in the same relationship to the Mind that a radio receiver does to the signal it amplifies; a damaged receiver will produce garbled audio. This won’t do, though, because in the case of physical meddling with the brain, it is the content itself that is affected. A damaged radio receiver won’t cause the newscaster to trail off in midsentence, for example, or burst into laughter for no apparent reason, but even tiny lesions in the brain can have enormous effects on the mind itself.

A more subtle response for the dualist is to acknowledge this objection, but to say that even though a Mind is by definition a metaphysically independent substance, once it is an embodied mind, it has entered into a two-way causal marriage with a physical system, and so is quite naturally going to be affected by changes in the brain. Though this is indeed a clever move, it comes at a high cost, because once we begin to consider the enormous effects that such physical changes can have, we seem to be forced to relegate the immaterial Mind to a decidedly subordinate position — and we must ask what, if anything, such a “substance” is actually bringing to the party. Is it the faculty of reason, as C.S. Lewis would have it? But our ability to reason can be swiftly destroyed by trauma or drugs. Is it our personality, then? There are countless examples of brain injuries causing radical personality changes; the most famous, perhaps, is the case of Phineas Gage, who had an iron bar driven through his skull, but case studies abound, and researchers now can even predict with confidence what sort of personality alterations will result from trauma to specific brain regions. Is it a temporal continuity of self, a binding of our experiences over time? All of that can be wiped away with a bullet or a scalpel. Is it the flow of our conscious thoughts and impressions in real time? Our “qualia”? Those, too, can be overridden by physical influences; electrical stimulation of tiny areas of the brain can produce smells, emotions, memories, sounds, and much more.

So what, then, is the “metaphysically independent” part? What is the special kernel of Mind that is held apart from the merely physical? Why cling to this model, when there are so many reasons to doubt it? If we are willing, instead, to adopt the materialist view — to imagine that the mental arises somehow from the activity of the physical — all of these problems melt away. The problems of origins and attachment vanishes at a stroke; we needn’t wonder where the minds were before the bodies arrived. The problems of causal interaction need trouble us no more; the neural activity that gives rise to our mental world proceeds in an ordinary causal sequence, with no worries about conservation violations. And of course if the brain is what generates the mind in the first place, it is entirely unsurprising that altering its functioning will affect our mental experiences, dispositions, and abilities.

So why does anyone defend interactionist mind-body dualism? We’ll talk about that next.