Daniel Dennett’s NYT essay on intelligent design is spot on from beginning to end. If you’re confused about this issue, this is the place to go.

Dennett concludes:

Since there is no content, there is no “controversy” to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?

OK, that’s a good high school question. But how about a question for adults? Has the hegemony of secularism in public institutions, such as the schools, generated it’s own backlash? Is intelligent design a symptom of a much deeper problem: the failure of our public institutions to embody the ideals of liberal neutrality?

In an actually useful HuffPo post, Michael Shermer discusses intelligent design, offering an updated version of Philo’s objections in Hume’s Dialogues. Namely, if the best explanation of various phenomena is design, then we require a theory of the designer. And the best theory may simply be a committee of super-intelligent but fallible aliens. Which, clearly, get us no closer to the God of Abraham than we were before.

Here’s Hume:

Now, Cleanthes, said Philo, with an air of alacrity and triumph, mark the consequences. First, By this method of reasoning, you renounce all claim to infinity in any of the attributes of the Deity. For, as the cause ought only to be proportioned to the effect, and the effect, so far as it falls under our cognizance, is not infinite; what pretensions have we, upon your suppositions, to ascribe that attribute to the Divine Being? . . .

Secondly, You have no reason, on your theory, for ascribing perfection to the Deity, even in his finite capacity, or for supposing him free from every error, mistake, or incoherence, in his undertakings. There are many inexplicable difficulties in the works of Nature, which, if we allow a perfect author to be proved a priori, are easily solved, and become only seeming difficulties, from the narrow capacity of man, who cannot trace infinite relations. But according to your method of reasoning, these difficulties become all real; and perhaps will be insisted on, as new instances of likeness to human art and contrivance. . .

And what shadow of an argument, continued Philo, can you produce, from your hypothesis, to prove the unity of the Deity? A great number of men join in building a house or ship, in rearing a city, in framing a commonwealth; why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing a world? This is only so much greater similarity to human affairs. By sharing the work among several, we may so much further limit the attributes of each, and get rid of that extensive power and knowledge, which must be supposed in one deity, and which, according to you, can only serve to weaken the proof of his existence. And if such foolish, such vicious creatures as man, can yet often unite in framing and executing one plan, how much more those deities or demons, whom we may suppose several degrees more perfect!

Or, try this. ID, even if true, puts us in an explanatory spiral, an unclosed regressive loop.

Assume ID is the best explanation for ordered complexity. That means, our best theory of ordered complexity posits the existence of an intelligent designer, meaning that we posited intelligence as an explanatory fundamental. However, intelligence as we know it is a property of biological beings, and a form of the kind of ordered complexity we initially sought to explain.

If it is suggested that “higher” intelligence is not a form of ordered complexity analogous to our own intelligence, then there is no ground for calling it intelligence after all. If it is itself a form of ordered complexity, then we have made no explanatory advance, for we will be left positing an even higher order intelligent designer for each higher order intelligent designer.

If it proposed that we stop the explanatory spiral by positing an undesigned designer then a new question arises: What explains the emergence of the undesigned designer? Whatever the explanation for the ordered complexity of the undesigned designer may be, then it seems that that explanation could be applied to first order ordered complexity, and Occam demands we excise the useless proliferation of higher order designers.

If it is replied that there is no mechanism that gave rise to the undesigned designer, then first order ordered complexity is still unexplained, only it is now more elaborately unexplained.

Even if it’s the best explanation, ID would get us nowhere, which means its probably not.

My take on ID is that if there were any evidence for it, then the probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life would be non-zero. We would then have a proximate explanation for ordered complexity as it appears on Earth. But we’d be no closer to an account of ordered complexity as such.

Camille Paglia attempts to explain the absence of women in the BBC’s ridiculous philosopher popularity contest.

I feel women in general are less comfortable than men in inhabiting a highly austere, cold, analytical space, such as the one which philosophy involves. Women as a whole – and there are obvious exceptions – are more drawn to practical, personal matters. It is not that they inherently lack a talent or aptitude for philosophy or higher mathematics, but rather that they are more unwilling than men to devote their lives to a frigid space from which the natural and the human have been eliminated.

OK. There may be something to this. But she goes deeper.

Today’s lack of major female philosophers is not due to lack of talent but to the collapse of philosophy. Philosophy as traditionally practised may be a dead genre. This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity. The web mimics human neurology, and it is fundmentally altering young people’s brains. The web, for good or ill, is instantaneous. Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry. Today’s philosophers are now antiquarians.

Fascinating. But as far as I can tell, philosophy as traditionally practiced is at its high water mark. If I had to bet, I would put money on the claim that more books of philosophy were published in the last ten years than in any other ten year period of history. There are, without a doubt, more people well-trained in rigorous methods of philosophical inquiry than ever before. And as travellers to this little piece of the information superhighway may be aware, philosophical conversations and debates can be conducted over the internet, and they are. It’s probably a good bet that there were more words written last year in online discussions of philosophy than were written about philosophy in any other year of human history.

Now, Paglia wants to say that philosophy is no longer as culturally central as it once was. I think she’s right. But then again, nothing that used to be culturally central is as culturally central as it once was because we’ve got a more polyglot decentralized culture. At her AEI talk a few months ago, Paglia seemed panicked by the breakdown of institutions of cultural hegemony. Hollywwod films aren’t what they once were (and nobody cares about the Oscars). Elite universities have become so so. You can’t get classical music over the radio in Buffalo. Etc. She was agitated because, apparently, she passed into old-cooterism some time around 1994 and evidently doesn’t grasp that the age of centralization and hegemony is definitely over, doesn’t understand the new institutions and mechanisms of cultural transmission (other than the fact that this mysterious revolutionary thing, the internet, exists, and matters), and so sees the decline of HOLLYWOOD, and THE IVY LEAGUE, and NETWORK TELEVISION, and BROADWAY — the old familiar institutions of centralized cultural hegemony — as symptoms of general decline. The fact that philosophers aren’t being interviewed by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News means that philosophy is more or less invisible to Camille Paglia, despite the fact that it is flourishing by any historical standard, and despite the fact that women, such as Martha Nussbaum and Christine Korsgaard, are at the absolute top of the game.

Now, I agree that academic philosophy is insufficiently engaged with the public, and could hold a more priveleged place is the fragmented popular consciousness. And I think this is due to straightforward institutional reasons. Academia as it is presently constituted does reward a kind of bloodless scholasticism. One reason I decided to drop out of academia was that I thought direct engagement with current policy debates and cultural concerns would make me a better philosopher. Greats like Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill, Marx were not academics, but men involved in thinking through the practical political matters of their day. Our political philosophy would be more publicly engaging if more philosphers were directly involved in politics. We would be more likely to produce American BHL’s and latter day de Beauvoirs and Rands. But that is a long, long way from the claim that philosophy is a dead genre.

[Link from Chris Sciabbara, who brings out the Paglia's comments on Rand.]

Eugene Volokh comments on this passage from a Michael Shermer post:

In March of 2001 the Gallup News Service reported the results of their survey that found 45 percent of Americans agree with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” while 37 percent preferred a blended belief that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,” and a paltry 12 percent accepted the standard scientific theory that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”

Eugene says:

Well, if “the standard scientific theory” is that “God had no part” in the process of evolution — not just that human beings developed in a particular way, but that God didn’t guide this — then it seems to me that the theory of evolution is a challenge to many people’s deeply held religious convictions. And that’s so not just as to the young-earthers who believe the Earth was created several thousand years ago, but also to people who are willing to embrace the scientific evidence but see the guiding hand of God in the process.

What’s more, how exactly do scientists come to the conclusion that “God had no part in this process”? What’s their proof? That’s the sort of thing that can’t really be proved, it seems to me — which makes it sound as if scientists, despite their protestations of requiring proof rather than faith, make assertions about God that they can’t prove.

I think Quinean ontological principles can help us properly understand Shermer’s statement, and avoid what seems to me to be a confusion on Eugene’s part.

Quine says that to exist is to be the value of bound variable in the formal statement of our best explanatory theory of the world. That is, if your best theory of something requires you to posit some entity or property in order to state it, then you are ontologically committed to that entity or property; you’re saying it exists. The best explanatory theory of the emergence of life and the development of biological variety is the theory of evolution by natural selection. The statement of this theory does not require us to quantify over, or commit to, any supernatural properties. That “God had no part in the process” is straightforwardly implied by the fact that the theory does not mention God or God-properties. The “proof” that God is no part of the process is simply the statement of the theory, and the fact that the theory is the best, whatever our criteria for “best” are. You can tell that something has no part in the process by checking the list of things one is ontologically committed to by dint of accepting the theory. If it isn’t on the list, it plays no part. Surely Eugene would agree that God is not on the ontological list we would compile by scouring the formulation of the standard theory of evolution to see the kinds of things it quantifies over. But that is, I think, all Shermer is saying.

Now, the fact that the theory of evolution by natural selection doesn’t quantify over God-properties does not, by itself, “challenge” the conviction that god exists, unless that conviction is based on the explanation of biological phenomena. If no part of our OVERALL best theory (or collection of theories) of the world requires God-properties, than that is a challenge to the conviction that God exists, because commitment to God’s existence just is the belief in the claim that Godmaking properties figure in to the best overall theory of the world. If he doesn’t figure in, then he isn’t listed in the catalog of things we have reason to believe in.

It seems that Eugene almost flirts with Meinongian nonsense, where not existing is a property something can have, just like existing, so that something’s not existing requires that it exist, in a superspecial not-existing way, in order for there to be something that is doing all that not-existing. In that case, the claim that something doesn’t exist (or does) is substantive, since one is attributing a property to it, and it makes sense to ask for evidence that it does have that property. But to say that something doesn’t exist is not in fact substantive. It is simply to point out a formal absence, like the fact that there is no ‘p’ in ‘beer’. (If you’re lucky!)

All this relativism talk. Velleman posts on relativism because he isn’t satisfied with what he sees. Me neither, even after reading Velleman. Allow me to ruminate.

The correct thing to say about relativism is that some version of relativism is true, and the correct thing to say about absolutism is that every version of absolutism is false. If you don’t think there is a BOOK OF RULES from the transcendent PLANE OF MORAL TRUTH, then you’re likely some sort of relativist. And that’s OK. Don’t worry.

Velleman’s use of “agent-relativism” is confusing. Generally agent-relative is contrasted with agent-neutral with respect to value or reasons for action. My reason to get a drink of water is agent-relative, because its MY thirst. My reason to go to dentist school is agent-relative because being a dentist is MY goal. Etc. Whether or not there are agent-neutral reasons, reasons not based in our individual aims, reasons we just have because we’re rational agents, or what have you, is a tricky question. (The answer is yes and no. You can have a reason to do something that is independent of your particular aims and projects. Your reason not to murder me is not agent-relative in the way your reason to go to scuba classes is. But agent-neutral reasons don’t get off the ground without the enterprise of coordinating agent-relative reasons.) Anyway, if you are sane, you are an agent-relativist in the sense that you believe there are agent-relative reasons. Some thing really are right for me and wrong for you, because you and I want different things.

Any non-transcendent moral standard is relative to SOMETHING, isn’t it. Aristotle, for example, is a species-relativist. What is right for me to do is relative to what natural kind I’m an instance of. In updated terms, you can be a genomic relativist. The right thing to do is relative to your genome. This is not, however, any kind of transcendent standard. The human genome, say, is a contingent kludge. Evolution could have taken a left and that species (not us) would have a different genome, and a different moral standard based in their “nature.” So, yes, if you believe in SCIENCE and believe in a human nature-based morality, then you’re a kind of relativist. But that’s not so scary, is it?

Utilitarians may seem like absolutists. But the right thing to do for a utilitarian is relative to contingent empirical facts about what does and doesn’t cause pleasure in sentient beings. (Am I just playing with words?)

The Pope I suppose, is worried more about cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is a little bit true, though. Being a member of one culture rather than another can give you a reason to do something that you wouldn’t otherwise have. There ARE culturally relative reasons. Is it morally OK to impale kittens on pikes because your culture says so? Probably not. To kill your sister if she is accused of whoreishness? No. Does anybody think so? (People who think its OK to kill their allegedly whoring sister don’t think its OK because its THEIR culture that says so. They think its OK because that’s what they think the transcendent BOOK OF RULES says.)

Actually, I don’t have any idea what the Pope is talking about. It actually sounds like he’s sort of longing for the days of moral hegemony that died with Luther, and confusing pluralism for relativism.

Anyway, here are some things my reasons are relative to: my genome; my capacity for sympathy and moral imagination; my personal goals and projects; my social and family commitments; other parochial allegiances; the conventional terms of social cooperation where I live; lots more. And yours too!

I meant to say something usefully clarificatory, but oh well. Coherence will return in future posts.

My friend Stephen Hicks, a professor of philosophy at Rockford College, has written an outstanding book, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. Steve is an incredibly lucid writer, and has a rare talent for making fordbidding ideas accessible. Steve traces the dismal fortunes of reason from Kant’s Copernican Revolution, through subsequent German philosophy, down to contemporary postmodernism. I especially enjoyed the clear explanation of the famously obscure Heidegger. Steve notes that postmodernism isn’t just nihilist or anti-rationalist, but is uniformly leftist. (If nothing’s true, there is no fact of the matter about the quality of reasons to believe things, and belief is just a commitment backed by power, then it makes just as much sense to be a money-grubbing natural rights minarchist as a turtlenecked chainsmoking Trotskyite.) His account of the way the increasingly evident failures of communism in terms of reason and evidence are tracked by the increasingly extreme postmodern rejection of reason and evidence is utterly compelling, and has influenced my thinking since I Steve first gave a talk on the topic to a student group I ran at Northern Illinois way back in 1997. Anyway, it’s a lovely little book, and if you’ve never been able to make heads or tails of postmodernism, or would just like to get a particularly sharp and fresh take on it, pick up Steve’s book.

I’m sure Blackburn isn’t being altogether fair to Sam Kerstein (a friend and former professor) in this paper [.pdf], but I very much liked the overall gist of his argument. And I liked the conclusion, which puts me in mind of an ongoing conversation I’ve had with Julian over the last few years.

…the kinds of [rationalist] argument [against expressivism or sentimentalism] I have been discussing, are very deep-rooted. Partly, they represent a noble dream. They answer a wish that the knaves of the world can be not only confined and confounded, but refuted – refuted as well by standards that they have to acknowledge. Ideally, they will be shown to be in a state akin to self-contradiction. Kerstein acknowledges that Kant and neo-Kantians have not achieved anything like this result. But it is still, tantalizingly there as a goal or ideal, the Holy Grail of moral philosophy, and many suppose that all right-thinking people must join the pilgrimage to find it.

We sentimentalists do not like our good behaviour to be hostage to such a search. We don’t altogether approve of Holy Grails. We do not see the need for them. We are not quite on all fours with those who do. And we do not quite see why, even if by some secret alchemy a philosopher managed to glimpse one, it should ameliorate his behaviour, let alone that of other people. We think instead that human beings are ruled by passions, and the best we can do it to educate people so that the best passions are also the most forceful. We say of rationalistic moral philosophy what Hume says of abstract reasonings in general, that when we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning.

Lovely.

From Lindsay Beyerstein’s comments in her post about freezing in line to see Harry Frankfurt talk about his book On Bullshit on the Daily Show, here’s the segment.

I found it delightful to see a real philosopher on The Daily Show. And I was pleased to see that Stewart was smart enough to have genuine respect for a genuinely erudite and wise man like Frankfurt.

For those of you who didn’t have to read any Frankfurt essays in grad school, he is a philosopher of unusual sensitivity, creativity, subtlety, and depth. He is most well known for his work on free will, especially his famous thought experiment designed to show that the openness of alternative possibilities is not a necessary condition for freedom. Frankfurt’s work on the structure of the self, and the relation between higher and lower order aims and desires, is central to contemporary discussion of the nature of agency. And Frankfurt’s ideas about care and love as sources of normativity I find to be more satisfactory than almost all the alternatives.

If you’re one of those people who thinks that contemporary analytic philosophy is obscure, scholastic, and irrelevant to real human concerns, you need to read Harry Frankfurt.

Here’s an interview with Frankfurt on “the necessity of love.” [.pdf]

And here you can see video of Frankfurt in his natural habitat giving a lecture on “Some Mysteries of Love” at UC Riverside in 2000. [Realplayer]

Books at Amazon:

The Importance of What We Care About
Necessity, Volition, and Love
The Reasons of Love

For some time I have been persuaded by Georges Rey’s account of meta-atheism. (Georges was one of my teachers at Maryland.) His claim is that many people who say they believe in God don’t really. It’s not that people are lying about what they really believe. It’s just that we’re often wrong about our own beliefs. (Our own beliefs are just another thing to have beliefs about, and we can get it wrong about our own beliefs just like we can get it wrong about anything else.)

This weekend, I had a thought which is a version of Georges’s point (6) in favor of meta-atheism. Here’s point (6):

(6) Betrayal by Reactions and Behavior People’s reactions and behavior (e.g. grief, mourning) do not seem seriously affected by their supposed “belief” in a Hereafter. Imagine a young “believing” couple. He is dying from a painful disease. Would she really rejoice at the prospect of his going to heaven, and of joining him herself when she dies, as though he’d just gone off for a great –eternal!- cure in a luxurious resort in Miami? I betcha she’d grieve and mourn “the loss” like anyone else. (Note that most all religious music and rituals surrounding death are deeply sad -seldom, if ever, joyous).

In a related vein, if people really believe in the efficacy of prayer, they should be willing to have the National Institute of Health do a controlled study of the effects of prayer, just as they would if they believed that soy beans cured cancer. (And why does no one expect prayer to cure wooden legs?)

Let it not be said that Georges is an ideal diplomat to the theistic community. Nevertheless, I believe his observations are sound.

In a fit of Beckerite rational choice reasoning, I decided that theists ought to have higher rates of death by accident. If I believe that heaven is infinite bliss, then I should be quite eager to join my maker. Suicide is a disqualification for paradise, but dying in a car accident isn’t. So, one should expect that theists who believe in perpetual Miami would take more risks than those who do not so believe, and that thus, death-by-accident ought to be higher among believer than non-believers.

My guess is that there is no difference in rates of death-by-accident among believers and non-believers. If my guess is correct, then there’s another reason to believe that many people don’t really believe in God, even though they think they do. Or, at least, there’s a reason for rational choice economists to believe meta-atheism.

All this was stimulated by a Ross Douthat post that touches on Orwell’s attitude toward a character in a Graham Greene novel. Orwell:

Scobie is incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women . . .

Douthat:

If he really felt that adultery is a mortal sin, he would stop committing it. This is astonishingly obtuse, and something that could only be written by the most bloodless and Puritanical of Christians — or by a devout atheist like Orwell. For him, I suspect (and perhaps for Hitchens?), the always-upright Christian is fairly comprehensible: he has his dogmas and he lives by them, with the same lack of nuance, backsliding, and self-doubt that Orwell brought to his staunch unbelief. Whereas understanding the tormented Christian, the questing agnostic, the atheist who takes a gamble on God and the Catholic who commits suicide — the stock-in-trade of Greene’s great novels, in other words — requires an imaginative leap into religious experience that an atheistic critic is often ill-equipped to make.

The Orwell’s astonishing bit of obtuseness (“obtusity”?) is the core of Georges’ point (6) and my little Beckerite addendum. Is Georges obtuse on this point? Am I? Well, let’s concede the possibility of weakness of will. Discount rates won’t help here because no matter how sharply you discount infinite bliss, it’s still infinite. But if I truly believe the hype about my celestial reward, or my infernal punishment, how can I fail so utterly to align my actions with my incentives. Ross’s point makes it sound like it is obtuse to question the coherence of a character who truly and hosetly loves life, but flings himself from a rooftop anyway.

I submit that meta-atheism is the key to understanding the “nuance, backsliding, and self-doubt” that Ross sets out as central to the religious experience. Many of us believe that we believe because the social and psychological benefits of appearing to be a believer seem to us greater than the costs, and the most compelling way to appear a believer, but to avoid the behavioral costs of actual belief, is to earnestly but falsely believe that one believes.

Our “faith” is shaken when we find we cannot stop cheating on our wife, or whatever our transgression may be, because, on some level, we know that if we really believed what we believe we believed, cheating on our wife would be psychologically impossible — like peeling the skin off your screaming baby out of sheer boredom. Yet the general value of our self-deception is so high that we cast about looking to preserve it. If our religion is a good one, well-adapted to survive in the forbidding habitat of a human psyche, it will tell us that we are fundamentally and irremediably broken, flawed, and unsuited to virtue. And THAT explains why we can be so abjectly and arbitrarily irrational. So grateful are we for the explanation of the possibility of our misbehavior, and thus the possibility of retaining the deep benefits of religious conviction and a religious form of life, we redouble our faith in our faith, and our religion tightens it’s embrace on us we tighten our embrace on it.

John Tomasi is right (see “Should Political Liberals be Compassionate Conservatives?: Philosophical Foundations of the Faith-Based Initiative” Social Philosophy & Policy 21/1, January 2004″) and Rawlsian political liberalism requires that if the state is going to provide certain services, then the state should also provide funds to non-secular providers of those services, otherwise, they get crowded out, and the comprehensive worldview common in the adminstrative state is, in effect, illiberally imposed.

So if the state pays for mental health services, they should also pay for alternative treatments, such as Scientology training (Scientology is rabidly anti-psychiatry), and Christian “treatments” for homosexuality. The state must not discriminate against those who do not believe in the secular mental health profession’s definition of our spiritual and behavioral woes, or those who don’t believe in Ritalin, Prozac and grief counseling as the cure for their spiritual ills.

Right?

In a monumental post on Stephen Toulmin, Michael Blowhard writes:

The impression I’ve gotten from a few timid looks into up-to-date philosophy is that it’s a matter of filling in the few remaining (and really tiny) squares — an activity for specialists and tenured-prof-wannabes only. Between you and me, and off-the-record only, my philosophy-prof friends giggle at the idea that anything major remains to be done in modern Western philosophy.

So what are philosophers good for? I think this requires a good long answer that I’m not going to take the time to assay, but it’s a question that deserves some reflection. Michael seems to be under the impression that the dialectic of the traditional problems of philosophy–free-will; realism vs. anti-realism; mind/body; etc.–is worn out. I agree, but that’s because I think there are right answers to this questions, or at least ways of framing them that dissolve the question (that shows the fly the way out of the fly bottle, I should say). And I think that the correct answer to many of these questions has practical import. If we get it right, it changes how we live, or at least stops us from worrying about something we shouldn’t have been worried about.

My naturalistic bent leads to me see the role of philosophy as that of clarifying traditional questions to the point that they can be approached with the tools of scientific method. When that occurs, a lot of the philosophy drops out. But science remains a kind of applied philosophy that requires the right kind of conceptual and inferential framework for asking the right questions, and for interpreting the results of experimentation. Philosophy of physics is an interesting field, for instance, because physics turns out to be so weird, and requires philosophical counsel.

And science tells us things that settles old philosophical disputes, and that helps reframe old scientific questions. Human beings are not, we now know, a blank slate. And the sciences of human nature help us reconceive old questions. The kinds of social order that are possible depends on what human beings are like, and we are learning a lot about what human beings are like. Philosophers, if they are doing there job, ought to be applying the results of the best relevant science and showing how that changes the way we think about old questions.

Anybody have any good ideas about areas where philosophers are making a really important contribution to knowledge, other than just filling in a few really tiny squares?