Ed Feser Eviscerates Jerrry Coyne's New Book

I didn't even know Coyne had another book out. His first book is a logical mess as I have concluded here, before. Ed Feser takes a look at Coyne's next shot at "religion":

Omnibus of Fallacies

The book flies off the rails before it reaches page one. In an unintentionally comic passage in his preface, Coyne explains what he has in mind by “religion.” First, he tells us that his main target isn’t religions that emphasize practice, such as “the more meditation-oriented versions of Buddhism.” Rather, it is religions that emphasize controversial truth claims about the world—in particular, “theistic faiths,” those that affirm the existence of a God or gods. But even more specifically, he says, he will “concentrate on the Abrahamic faiths: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.” Two sentences later we learn that in fact it is “mostly the various brands of Christianity that occupy this book.” But far from all the brands, since in the very next sentence he adds that, actually, he “will talk mostly about science and religion in the United States.”

By the following page he qualifies this even further, indicating that the views of “regular believers” interest him more than do the fancy arguments of theologians. Next it is conceded that it is “only a few specific areas of science,” such as Darwinism, that are rejected by religious believers. Yet, as Coyne admits, even “evolution . . . is accepted by many Jews, Buddhists, Christians, and liberal Muslims.” In short, when all the qualifications are in, it seems that Coyne’s paradigm of “religion” is Bible Belt creationism. Apparently, he was absent the day his college statistics class covered the notion of a representative sample.

But to be fair to Coyne: He doesn’t always use the term “religion” in this idiosyncratic way. And that’s the problem. He has no consistent account at all of what religion is. On one page, he will tell you that Jainism is not really the sort of thing he means by “religion.” Forty pages later, he’ll offer Jainism as an example of the sort of thing he means by “religion.” If the views of some theologian are clearly compatible with science, Coyne will assure us that what theologians have to say is irrelevant to determining what is typical of religion. But if a theologian says something that Coyne thinks is stupid, then what theologians have to say suddenly becomes highly relevant to determining what is typical of religion. When churchmen refuse to abandon some doctrine, Coyne tells us that this shows that religion is dogmatic and unwilling to adjust itself to modern knowledge. When churchmen do abandon some doctrine, Coyne tells us that this shows that religion is unfalsifiable and desperate to adjust itself to modern knowledge. It seems Coyne also missed that lecture in logic class about the fallacy of special pleading.

[...]

Of course, Coyne will disagree about whether the evidence really shows what theologians say it does. The point, though, is that whether we should have evidence for what we believe is not what is in dispute. Coyne acknowledges that “theologians intensely dislike” the definition of faith he proposes. So, he not only attacks a straw man but implicitly admits that that is what he is doing. Indeed, you will find in Coyne’s book more straw men than you would at a casting call for The Wizard of Oz. Coyne mocks John Paul II’s claim that “truth cannot contradict truth,” insinuating that the pope sought merely to conform science to religious doctrine. In fact, the pope was no less concerned to emphasize that theology has to take seriously the findings of science.

[...]

If Coyne can’t get his story straight about what he means by religion, neither does he offer a coherent account of science...

It gets even better, starting here with Coyne's vacillations on science, his own trade. Read it ALL, THERE. And there is even more, HERE.

Coyne is a poster boy for the dogmatic Atheist Ideologist who eschews logic completely in order to defend his own evidence-free and logic-free faith. His false characterizations of his hated Class War denizens proves conclusively his bigotry. Apparently the new book is a fitting companion to his previous logic-free and evidence-free book, "Why Evolution is True".

Edward Feser On Anthony Pagden's "Enlightenment"

I defer to Dr. Feser's analysis, because I haven't read Pagden's book, and because it appears that Pagden receives a suitable critiquing by the inimitable Ed Feser. I will provide a little background on the Enlightenment, though.

The Enlightenment was predicated on the premises that naturalistic education of the masses and the use of reason would result in the elimination of religion and the promotion of reason as the sole source of knowledge and morality. The French Encyclopedists under Diderot set forth a set of volumes containing "all the knowledge of man".

"The Encyclopedie was both a repository of information and a polemical arsenal. It was an idea of the editors that if civilization should by entirely destroyed, mankind might turn to their volumes to learn to reconstruct it. No other collection of general information so large and so useful was then in existence. Yet mere learning was not what lay nearest to the hearts of Diderot and his fellows; the prided themselves even more on the firm and bold philosophy of some of the writers. The metaphysics is founded chiefly on Locke, who “may be said to have created metaphysics as Newton created physics,” by reducing the science to “what in fact should be the experimental physics of the soul.” Beyond this there is little unity of opinion, though the same spirit rules throughout. It includes a prejudice in favor of democracy, as the ideal form of government, and the worship of theoretical equality, but contempt for the populace, “which discern”; the reduction of religion to sentiments of morality and benevolence, and great dislike for its minister, especially the religious orders. By its generous professions of philosophic tolerance, and apparent acquiescence in what for the moment it was too weak to overpower, the philosophic school won a hearing for doctrines which were essentially subversive of the established order of things in both Church and State, and prepared the way for overt revolution."(Note 1)
[Emphasis added]

And,

" Western Europe's worship of reason, reflected only vaguely in art and literature, was precisely expressed in a set of philosophic ideas known collectively as the Enlightenment. It was not originally a popular movement.

Catching on first among scientists, philosophers, and some theologians, it was then taken up by literary figures, who spread its message among the middle classes. Ultimately, it reached the common people in simplified terms associated with popular grievances.

The most fundamental concept of the Enlightenment were faith in nature and belief in human progress. Nature was seen as a complex of interacting laws governing the universe. The individual human being, as part of that system, was designed to act rationally. If free to exercise their reason, people were naturally good and would act to further the happiness of others. Accordingly, both human righteousness and happiness required freedom from needless restraints, such as many of those imposed by the state or the church. The Enlightenment's uncompromising hostility towards organized religion and established monarchy reflected a disdain for the past and an inclination to favor utopian reform schemes. Most of its thinkers believed passionately in human progress through education. They thought society would become perfect if people were free to use their reason."(Note 2)
[Emphasis Added]

With this brief background, and the knowledge that the new, unfettered and ungrounded thinking led directly to the French Revolution and the slaughter of the opponents by the "rationals" then in control. The ideals of "liberte, fraternite, egalite" were never achieved, since only two of the three were humanly possible at any given time: liberty and equalitarianism are never compatible, for example. Totalitarianism by clique reigned until Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself the new dictator.

Dr. Feser starts out with this analysis:

"For Pagden shows, albeit inadvertently, how little the rhetoric of Enlightenment owed—and owes today—to intellectual substance, and how much to attitude, posturing, and sheer bluff. The Enlightenment matters insofar it is perceived to matter. To a very great extent, what was true in it wasn’t new and what was new wasn’t true."

Because today's political turmoil seems related, even if obliquely, to the Enlightement fiasco, go ahead and read Feser's review for the full import. He concludes,

"But then, it seems that for Pagden, “Enlightenment” has nothing essentially to do with getting your facts right or being fair to opponents, at least if the opponents are religious. Nor does it really have much to do with reason (though it has a lot to do with chatting up reason). It is fitting that Pagden admires the British moral sentiment thinkers as much as he does, for sentiment is what he — and the Enlightenment itself, at the end of the day — are really about. Enlightenment is about having the right sensibilities, uttering the right shibboleths, and, perhaps above all, hating the right people. To be Enlightened is to be in love with the idea of being Enlightened, never to shut up about how wonderful it is to be Enlightened, never to stop insisting how very awful and unenlightened are those who don’t like the Enlightenment. It is about excluding those people from the ever-widening circle of inclusion, and keeping their ideas off the freethinker’s limitless menu of options. Critics of the Enlightenment have accused it of hypocrisy. Pagden’s attempt to defend it only confirms the accusation."
[emphasis added]

The Enlightenment promoted the idea that reason could and would produce morality, better morality, than Christianity; then it went directly into slaughter mode. The American revolution was tempered by the religious morals of the founders; the French revolution was unfettered by morals, period, a consequence of its Atheist foundations. One fan of the French revolution and its consequences was V.I.Lenin.

Notes:
Note 1: http://www.iep.utm.edu/encyclop/
Note 2: http://history-world.org/age_of_enlightenment.htm

Quote of the Day: Feser on Eliminative Materialism

"Patricia and Paul Churchland, [are] two very real professors of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego,… [and their] advocacy of “eliminative materialism”, the theory that beliefs, desires, and other mental phenomena do not exist and ought to be eliminated from our description of human nature and replaced by concepts derived from neuroscience. Hence, on this view, it is, strictly speaking, always false to say something like “I feel anxious”, for “feelings” and “anxiety” are mental states, and there are no mental states according to eliminative materialism, only brain processes." [Last Superstition, pg 229]
…

"The whole eliminative materialist enterprise is founded on the notion that science gives us the only accurate picture of reality. Yet science is in the business of making assertions about the world, developing theories, putting forward explanations, extending our knowledge, and so forth; and every on of these notions is utterly suffused with intentionality, which as we saw... is the central and defining feature of the mind. Insofar as an assertion, theory, explanation or knowledge claim represents, means, "points" to, or is "directed" toward something beyond itself, it is every bit as intentional as the mind is, so that if the mind goes, science goes with it. Indeed, reason in general - another paradigmatically mental phenomenon - goes with it also, and thus so too does any rational argument anyone has ever given, including any argument anyone has ever given or could give for eliminative materialism. Worse, as Hilary Putnam points out, the very notion of truth would have to be abandoned by a consistent eliminative materialist, inextricably tied as it is to the idea of a claim, or belief, or thought that accurtely represents reality. As M. R .Hacker and P. M .S. Hacker put it, the 'eliminative materialist saws off the branch on which he is seated'. In the name of reason, truth, science, he destroys all reason,truth and science.

Eliminative materialists sometimes acknowledge that this may well be, you know, a problem with their position. Their response is to shrug their shoulders and lament that we just don't yet have the resources even to state the theory in an adequate way, since the neuroscientists are still so far from completing their work of discovering all the physiological goings-on that underlie human behavior. But one fine day they'll be through, and then, just you wait. We'll no longer speak in terms of "truth", but rather in terms of what Churchland has called a "successor concept", that will replace truth (though by his own admission he has no idea what this "successor concept" will be. We'll also have "successor concepts" to replace the concept of rationality, and every other concept that science depends on. (Again, don't ask what those might be either, since even the Churchlands don't claim to know.) Presumably we'll also have to have a "successor concept" for the concept of a concept, since talk of "concepts" reeks of intentionality; or rather, I should say, we'll need a "successor something-or-other". Or maybe... well, let's not worry about that now. This Brave New World will be here eventually, and when it is, then all of us, including the Churchlands themselves, will finally know what the hell they're talking about." [Ibid, pg 234]

The Churchlands’ attempt is to eliminate everything which cannot be explained, materially, by redefining it in material terms. Intentionality, agency, and rationality are all not explainable under material terms, so they must be eliminated to avoid explaining them. But this results in non-coherence and gibberish, as Feser points out. Intentionality is a huge probelm for Atheism and evolution.

Sphexism, Physicalism, Syntactical Engines and Semantic Engines, Not to Mention Cognitive Zombies

An interesting article over at Feser's place, with a different approach from the Chinese Room argument, and yet much the same. This time it is the robotic actions of the Sphex wasp as compared to the intellectually exploratory capacities of humans.

"Now, Dennett, perceptive fellow that he is when he wants to be, argues in Chapter 2 of his book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting that any purely physical system is going to be essentially sphexish. The reason is that qua physical such a system can only ever be sensitive to syntactical properties, and syntactical properties can never add up to semantic properties. Now a non-sphexish creature would have to be sensitive to semantic properties. Hence a purely physical and thus purely syntactic system is inevitably going to be a sphexish system. Dennett thinks it can at least approximate non-sphexishness, however, because a sufficiently complex “syntactic engine” will in his view at least approximate a perfect “semantic engine.” And sphexishly dogmatic materialist that he is, Dennett insists that human beings are purely physical. Hence, though we seem non-sphexish, Dennett insists that we really are sphexish, but -- being exquisitely complex syntactical engines -- in so subtle a way that for practical purposes we can treat ourselves as if we were not.

But as Howard Robinson points out in the introduction to his edited volume Objections to Physicalism, Dennett’s position is a muddle. A purely syntactical engine will not even approximate a perfect semantic engine, because it will fail to be semantic at all. Syntax by itself doesn’t get you imperfect semantics; it gets you exactly zero semantics, just as the ketchup kids use for blood at Halloween time will never get you even imperfect real blood no matter how much of it you pour out. Dennett knows this, which is why (as Robinson notes) he has to resort to the essentially instrumentalist position that our sophistication as complex syntactic engines makes it useful for us to interpret ourselves as if we were semantic engines. But this too is a muddle, for interpretation is itself an act that presupposes real semantics rather than a mere ersatz. Dennett’s further reformulations of his position (e.g. in his paper “Real Patterns”) only ever paper over this fundamental incoherence rather than resolve it, but his dogmatic materialism makes him think there must be some way to make it something other than the reductio ad absurdum that it is.

As is the usual case, the Materialist seeks only to justify his presuppositions, not to investigate and accept logically derived conclusions.

There is magic associated with "complexity" just as the magic which is designated to "deep time": these can turn X into Z, just because. This magical thinking is necessary to bend the mind away from noticing the actual non-material nature of human existence. It can be explained in terms of magical capabilities of complexity and deep time etc. even though there is no possible mechanical cause which is attached; just the magic. It is another symptom of the religiosity of Atheists as they protect their own theory of origins with unprovable, antirational dogma.

Says Feser:

"It is not a kind of inductive inference to the effect that since we usually act unsphexish, we must really be unsphexish (as if further empirical evidence could in principle lead us to revise this “opinion” about ourselves). It is much simpler and more obvious and conclusive than that. It is that we have things sphexish creatures do not have: concepts. End of story. The reasoning isn’t: “We don’t act very sphexish; therefore we must have concepts.” It’s rather: “We have concepts; that’s why we don’t act very sphexish.”

And finally,

Now, you’ll recall from a recent post the notion of a cognitive zombie -- a creature physically and behaviorally identical to a normal human being, but devoid of concepts and thus devoid of the other aspects of rationality. You might think that a cognitive zombie would be sphexish, but that is a mistake. If it was sphexish, it wouldn’t be behaviorally identical to a normal human being, and thus by definition wouldn’t be a cognitive zombie. A true cognitive zombie would be something which would, like a sphexish creature, be devoid of concepts, but which, like a normal human being, would behave as if it had concepts.

The notion of sphexishness thus helps to clarify the notion of a cognitive zombie. If ya think I’m sphexy, then you don’t think I’m a cognitive zombie. A sphexy Rod Stewart on his best day wouldn’t pass for a cognitive zombie. A James Brown sphex machine wouldn’t pass either. People magazine’s Sphexiest Man Alive definitely wouldn’t be a cognitive zombie. The notion of a cognitive zombie is the notion of something as utterly devoid of concepts as the simplest of any of Dennett’s purely syntactical engines, but whose lack of concepts is nevertheless more perfectly undetectable than that of even the most complex and perfect of Dennett’s syntactical engines. Is this notion even coherent? I think not, but that is a topic for another time.

The Conversion of Edward Feser

Contemporary Philosopher and author, Edward Feser, documents his somewhat lengthy conversion from Atheism in his blog post, the Road From Atheism. Feser's conversion was out of what he considered to be rational necessity as he came to more clearly understand the Theist arguments (largely Aristotle and Thomasian), rather than the superficial understanding and summary dismissal given them by most Atheist philosophers.