Dawkins Versus Pell

Just reading the ABC transcript of Richard Dawkins versus Cardinal Pell answering questions. Richard Dawkins is coming across more and more like the Dr Terry Tommyrot parody of himself. Here is Dawkins:

RICHARD DAWKINS: "Why?" is a silly question. "Why?" is a silly question. You can ask, "What are the factors that led to something coming into existence?" That's a sensible question. But "What is the purpose universe?" is a silly question. It has no meaning.

Tommyrot: Well, for one fairly obvious reason: these people believe any book which has Dawkins' name on the cover, and these books say a lot of very silly things.

Dawkin's bandies the word "silly" around with a fervour that would even have one of the Monty Python team wondering if they had too many said "silly" too many times in a sketch, and it did him no favours, because it meant that Pell could come back with a soft question that completely changed the mood of the discussion:

RICHARD DAWKINS: The question why is not necessarily a question that deserves to be answered. There are all sorts of questions that people can ask like "What is the colour of jealousy?" That's a silly question.

GEORGE PELL: Exactly.

RICHARD DAWKINS: "Why?" is a silly question. "Why?" is a silly question. You can ask, "What are the factors that led to something coming into existence?" That's a sensible question. But "What is the purpose universe?" is a silly question. It has no meaning.

GEORGE PELL: Could I just interpose very briefly.

TONY JONES: Very briefly.

GEORGE PELL: I think it's a very poignant and real question to ask, "Why is there suffering?"

Pell has, of course, done his homework thoroughly, but Dawkins just as obviously is just appearing as a pundit, and has not really looked for weakness in Pell's position prior to their meeting. This comes through to quite strong effect in the following exchange:

TONY JONES: Well, can I just put a question to you? Could you ever provide Richard Dawkins with the sort of proof he requires for belief? Scientific proof of the existence of God?

GEORGE PELL: No, because I think he only accepts proof that is rooted in sense experience. In other words he excludes the world of metaphysics, say the principle of contradiction, and he excludes the possibility of arguments that don't go against reason but go beyond it. But could I make one little suggestion as to why Richard calls himself an atheist? Because in one of his blogs in 2002, he was discussing whether he's an agnostic or a non-theist. He said he prefers to use the term atheist because it is more explosive. It's more dynamic. You can shake people up, whereas if you're just going around saying you're an agnostic or a non theist, it's - these are his own words.

TONY JONES: Well, let's let Richard Dawkins respond.

RICHARD DAWKINS: I don't remember saying that. It wouldn't totally surprise me. It's...

GEORGE PELL: It's in 2002.

And again, by doing his homework, Pell not only wrong foots Dawkins, because he has evidently done more reading up that Dawkins of Krauss:

RICHARD DAWKINS: Well, something can come from nothing and that is what physicists are now telling us. I could give you - you asked me to give you a layman's interpretation. It would be very, very layman's interpretation. When you have matter and antimatter and you put them together, they cancel each other out and give rise to nothing. What Lawrence Krauss is now suggesting is that if you start with nothing the process can go into reverse and produce matter and antimatter. The theory is still being worked out. It is a very difficult theory, mathematical theory. I'm not qualified to answer the question but what I am sure about is that it most certainly is not solved by postulating an intelligence, a creative intelligence, who raises even bigger questions of his own existence. That certainly is not going to be the answer, whatever else is.

TONY JONES: George Pell.

GEORGE PELL: Thank you. The trouble well, there are many troubles with Richard's teachings but a fundamental one is that he dumbs down God and he soups up nothing. He continually talks as though God is some sort of up market figure within space and time. Now, from 450, 500 BC where, with the Greek philosophers, God is outside space and time. God is necessary, self-sufficient, uncaused, unconditioned. That's the hypothesis you've got to wrestle with. The second thing is that Krauss says nothing about the big bang coming out of nothing and admittedly he comes clean about six pages from the end of his book and I don't know whether Richard has read it that far because he gave it a forward. What he says is what Richard is describing as nothing is a sort of mixture of particles and perhaps a vacuum with electromagnetic forces working on it. That's what Krauss is talking about under the heading of nothing and there's a very good review of this in the New York Times, not a pro religious paper at all, where Krauss is absolutely denied and demolished, although especially by his supporters claiming that he says things come out of nothing. He doesn't say that.

There was also later a very interesting, and quite amusing discussion with Pell on whether atheists could go to heaven. I love the presenter's comment "you're the only authority we have here"!

MATTHEW THOMPSON: I am an atheist. What do you think will happen when I die and how do you know?

TONY JONES: George Pell, we'll start with you? You ought to be an authority on this, I imagine?

GEORGE PELL: Well, I know from the Christian point of view, God loves everybody but every genuine motion towards the truth is a motion towards God and when an atheist dies, like everybody else, they will be judged on the extent to which they have moved towards goodness and truth and beauty but in the Christian view, God loves everyone except those who turn his back turn their back on him through evil acts.

TONY JONES: So atheism is not an evil act?

GEORGE PELL: No, not - well, no, in most cases it's not.

TONY JONES: So I guess to get to the point of the question, I suppose - I mean he may be having a little wager here but is it possible for an atheist to go to heaven?

GEORGE PELL: Well, it's not my business.

TONY JONES: You're the only authority we have here.

GEORGE PELL: I would say certainly.

It's an interesting discussion. Pell seems to have the odd notion that evolution means that human beings are descended from Neanderthals. For once, he doesn't seem to have done his homework. Nevertheless, he does not disbelieve in evolution as such - "Well, science and religion are two different activities and in the Catholic Church you can believe, to some extent, what you like about evolution"

Dawkins corrects him and calls them "nearest cousins" thus showing his ignorance of more recent DNA findings which indicate some interbreeding, which was first a news story from a study in 2010, and has since been confirmed by other studies - "A newly mapped Neanderthal genome reveals that between one and four percent of DNA of many humans today came from Neanderthals."

I'd say that mostly Dawkins and Pell try to score points rather than try to listen to what the other is saying.

Dawkins weakness is that he always goes for the facile type of sound-bite presentation, as for instance:

TONY JONES: Yes, Richard Dawkins, I'm a bit confused about this because you just referred to yourself moments ago as being an atheist and yet, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, you referred to yourself as an agnostic?

RICHARD DAWKINS: In the God Delusion I make a seven-point scale. One is I'm totally confident there is a God. Seven is I'm totally confident there is not a God. Six is to all intents and purposes I'm an atheist. I live my life as though there is no God but any scientist of any sense will not say that they positively can disprove the existence of anything. I cannot disprove the existence of the Easter Bunny and so I am agnostic about the Easter Bunny. It's in the same respect that I am agnostic about God.

He sidesteps evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould, who have a very different idea of agnosticism. As Gould's widow stated: ""For the record, my late husband, Stephen Jay Gould, told me many times that he was an agnostic and not an 'atheist.'" Indeed, Gould once described how he was asked whether religion and evolution were compatible:

At lunch, the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. What, they wanted to know, was going on in America with all this talk about "scientific creationism"? One asked me: "Is evolution really in some kind of trouble. and if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both entirely satisfactory and utterly overwhelming. Have I missed something?"

A lively pastiche of French, Italian, and English conversation then ensued for half an hour or so, but the priests all seemed reassured by my general answer: Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a homegrown phenomenon of American sociocultural history-a splinter movement (unfortunately rather more of a beam these days) of Protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean. We all left satisfied, but I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of Catholic priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief.

I can't imagine that happening with Dawkins. But for Gould, agnosticism meant keeping the matter of belief in reserve, of not deciding whether there is a God or not. As he stated:

I am not a believer. I am an agnostic in the wise sense of  T.H Huxley, who coined the word in identifying such open-minded scepticism as the only rational position because, truly, one cannot know. Nonetheless, in my own departure from parental views, I have great respect for religion. The subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball).

Dawkins seems to be using the term agnostic in a much more provocative way, with his introduction of the "Easter Bunny", which is an example of a cheap shot fired off mainly for effect.

On the other hand, Pell doesn't do very well when pressed to defend the notion of the "body of Christ"

GEORGE PELL: No, I don't. I follow it, I understand it, according to a system of metaphysics. It was spelled out by the Greeks before Christ came, which we have adopted and that is there is a substance which is the core of a being and it is revealed to us through what are called accidents. Now, I believe that the core of the being becomes the bread, becomes the body and blood of Christ and continues to look exactly as it was. We believe that in the Catholic Church. Now, I know you're a cultural Anglican and we can't blame the Anglican...

Fortunately for him Dawkins is no philosopher, or he would have pressed Pell to answer if the Aristotelian substance / accidents schema was a philosophical interpretation which has no place in modern physics, and cannot be seen as underlying the text of the New Testament.

Pell is also rather vindictive in his notion of hell as punishment:

GEORGE PELL: Thank you. Preparing them for the first communion and they were very patriotic young lads and one of them announced very breezily to me that he didn't believe in hell and I mean certainly the idea of any child being sent to hell, I agree that that is grotesque and that's not the Christian God but, anyhow, I said to this kid - I said simply "Hitler. You think Hitler might be in hell? Started the Second World War, caused the death of 50 million or would you prefer a system where Hitler got away with it for free?" Anyhow the little kid was quite patriotic and he said, "Mm." He realised hell was in with a chance if Hitler was going to go there.

TONY JONES: What about a system where he was obliterated and didn't exist anymore?

GEORGE PELL: Well, he would have got away with too much, as far as I am concerned.

In conclusion, it is an interesting debate, but I don't think I'd agree with either side. Dawkins is too keen to score cheap shots, and has clearly spent so much time as a TV pundit that he's not been doing his homework properly, as seen by his forgetting the recent discoveries on Neanderthal DNA. Pell, meantime, has done a lot of work before the debate, but some of his statements need a proper philosopher to challenge, and unfortunately Dawkins has no philosophical training, nor seems to have made up for this deficiency since he was trounced by Mary Midgeley for the slippery use he made of the term "selfish" in "The Selfish Gene".

Links
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3469101.htm

       

Richard Dawkins on "Faith Schools"

"It is absurd to suppose that ends are not present [in nature] because we do not see an agent deliberating."
-Aristotle, Physics

"Nothing in the body is made in order that we may use it. What happens to exist is the cause of its use."
-Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

Unlike Richard Dawkins previous forays into television broadcasting, his film about faith schools was not so strident or polemic and actually made quite a good case. This was a Dawkins who acknowledged the cultural legacy of religion and considered it to be important for that to form part of a school curricula, and who declaimed whole passages from the King James version of the Bible. He also praised Christianity for its accommodation of the theory of evolution, especially in the Church of England, although if he knew a little more history, he would have been aware that Christians like Charles Kingsley supported evolution from the first; it was Thomas Huxley who invented the myth of conflict, along with his trouncing of Bishop Wilberforce in debate.

At the beginning, Dawkins spoke to Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary responsible under New Labour for the expansion of faith schools. Clarke acknowledged that there was a problem, but basically took the attitude that any government which attempted to force faith schools to survive with out government sponsorship would thereby be forcing them to close, and the general public as voters would never countenance any government which did that. Mildly, Dawkins commented that the whole argument seemed to be based not on whether faith schools were discriminatory but simply whether their removal would be an unpopular vote loser.

I was surprised that Clarke did not also bring to bear the argument that where faith schools are subsidised by the government but not only wholly funded, then their replacements would impact upon increased public expenditure and probably higher taxes. He was trying to get to this, when he asked Richard Dawkins what an Education Secretary would do if the schools simply closed down rapidly after funding had been withdrawn (as happened with some adoption agencies), and whether that would be responsible, but he was sidetracked by the argument about what the public wanted. Yet this would certainly be the case in Jersey, where an increased burden, plus the cost of building extra schools, would fall to the public purse.

Dawkins was able to show that faith schools gave a discriminatory entrance based upon whether parents were churchgoers or practicing Jews or Muslims. He even found a woman who had converted to Catholicism in order to gain a place for her daughter at a Catholic primary school. This of course is nothing new -- it was highlighted to comic effect but making the same point in the first episode of "The Rev", where the Reverend Adam Smallbone suddenly finds his congregation boosted in numbers just prior to entrance selection at the local Anglican secondary school. But Dawkins also made a very good argument: if we would not tolerate discrimination based upon race, why should we tolerate discrimination based upon religion?

Moreover, the argument about the schools conducting their own inspections, or having independent inspections of their religious teaching by people from their own religious tradition did not really stand up to scrutiny. As Dawkins so rightly observed, if the inspection was "as good as OFSTED", and the teaching was up to scratch, then why on earth did they not let the OFSTED inspectors examine it with the rest of the curriculum? The implication, unstated, but present, was that it was not up to standards, but Dawkins cleverly left the viewer to draw this conclusion themselves.

The one school which opened its doors to the cameras was a Muslim school. Here, despite being told that 60 pupils receiving science education from a science teacher were "left to make up their own minds" upon whether evolution was true, all 60 believed that it was false! Cleverly, Dawkins let this blatant improbability stand without making too much comment - as the numbers themselves demonstrate that whatever else was happening in the teaching, there was a strong bias against evolution; this was clearly influencing precisely how the pupils made up their own minds "independently".

It was also clear that the science teacher and pupils had absolutely no idea of what evolution really was. A pupil said that it was about human beings being descended from apes and asked if that was so, why were there still apes around? Dawkins painstakingly explained that human beings were members of the ape family, but not descended from apes; instead both human beings and apes were descended from a common ancestor millions of years ago.

I was surprised that he didn't take a leaf out of the late Stephen Jay Gould's book, because the model that the pupil and science teacher working from was clearly that which Gould identified as a ladder, often shown in cheap popularisation of evolution where a fish gives way to an amphibian, a reptile, a mammal, an ape, an apelike man, and modern day human beings, implicitly suggesting that one replaces the other. Gould came across this misrepresentation time and again:

Evolution usually proceeds by 'speciation'-the splitting of one lineage from a parental stock-not by the slow and steady transformation of these large parental stocks. Repeated episodes of speciation produce a bush. Evolutionary 'sequences' are not rungs on a ladder, but our retrospective reconstruction of a circuitous path running like a labyrinth, branch to branch, from the base of the bush to a lineage now surviving at its top.(1)

Dawkins concluded by reading the letter to his daughter about the value of evidence in assessing what is true, and the false modes of truth such as tradition, holy books, and revelations. This works fine with the domain of science and I wished at this point that he had put in place the kind of demarcation between science and that which is simply not science that one finds in the works of Karl Popper. The "evidence" base upon which Dawkins bases his understanding of the world is really quite weak for any robust philosophy of science, as Popper explains:

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appear to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred...The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which "verified" the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasize by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation - which revealed the class bias of the paper - and especially of course what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their "clinical observations." (2)

Moreover the danger and the weakness of the evidential position is that it deals only with matters of fact and not with matters of value. As the philosopher Mary Midgeley has shown, making moral judgements, while sometimes being critical of moral traditions from which they came, requires those traditions which Dawkins would discard -- one cannot create morality from scratch. The notion that a mythological story or parable may also tell us something important about moral behaviour is also excluded by Dawkins' methodology and yet such stories shape our culture and understanding of the world as much as science. We are creatures whose understanding of life is bound in narrative as much as fact.

But science itself can become "scientism", a modern myth. As seen in the final section when Dawkins was responding to primary school children on matters of science, while some of his answers stressed the need for evidence, and gave the evidence, with others he was simply conveying information - which was good - but there wasn't time for "evidence" to the quick-fire questions, and I didn't see him give that much. [As an aside, it was wonderful to see how well he engaged with the children here, and in the playground later; he is a born and gifted educator.]

Yet science without the evidence base is in danger of itself becoming a kind of secular religious narrative, dispensing its own mythology of human beings as "selfish gene machines", or the brain as essentially some kind of computer, drawing upon metaphors from popular culture rather than "evidence".

Isaac Asimov's masterly Encyclopedia of Science avoids this by presenting science through the history of discoveries and problem solving, and much the same was done by Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield. Science programmes on BBC3, such as the ones on Chemistry, or Light, do this extremely well. But Horizon has degenerated into a vapid presentation of science which often lacks any evidence but covers up with glossy visuals. But far too much science in schools is compressed into mere facts devoid of the contexts of discovery.

One interesting point which emerged was that young children are prone to seek explanations in terms of purpose in nature and natural events. As Dawkins argued, this makes them ripe for believing that kind of explanation -- technically called "teological" - when it is presented to young minds by religions.

That is a good argument but it would be equally interesting to know why some people despite, like Dawkins himself, being conditioned at an early age, nevertheless discard this kind of explanation. Clearly whatever indoctrination is given in faith schools, it is far from perfect in ensuring that all the adults who have been through the process will believe, and it would be interesting to know the numbers involved.

I know that, for example, Christian converts at University to the kind of Christianity espoused by Evangelical Unions often "fall away" in large numbers much to the distress and discomfort of the organising body which has developed its own narrative for explaining and coming to terms with this phenomena. I am therefore not convinced that however receptive a child's mind may be that the Jesuit adage - "Give me a child until he is 7, and I will give you the man." - is true. Yet Dawkins, without any evidence, appears to believe it's so.

Dawkins starts with the child and gives good evidence for how children's beliefs are shaped by projections of purpose in the natural world; he doesn't look at the adult sifting through those beliefs and discarding them. Perhaps that should form the subject of another programme - why do people not believe? I don't believe that "evidence" is the whole story, and that most people who have lost their childhood faith have rationally decided that it is false; people are more complex than that..

Links:
(1) "Bushes and Ladders," Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, Stephen Jay Gould
(2) "Conjectures and Refutations", Karl Popper

Referenced in the text:
"Can't We Make Moral Judgements" by Mary Midgeley
"The Architecture of Matter" - Toulmin and Goodfield
"The Fabric of the Heavens" - Toulmin and Goodfield
"The Discovery of Time" - Toulmin and Goodfield

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/legend.html
On the way in which the Huxley / Wilberforce legend was created by Huxley.

The Quest for Unicorns

I was reading about the new Dawkins style atheist "summer camp", Camp Quest, which comes from an idea of an American to provide a scout like experience without the religiousness. This is, as usual, over the top. From my year in the scouts, there was only one single religious occasion, which was the annual church service, and which I always disliked. When my son was in cubs, again there was no religious elements to what the kids did except for that one church service. This is hardly the stuff of indoctrination! As usual, the heavy mob weigh in with an "atheist alternative", which for the most part seems just as secular as scouting was.

But there are alternatives to scouting already around, such as the "Order of Woodcraft Chivalry". It was founded in 1916 by Ernest Westlake, and "differed from it in that it did not have the perceived military overtones of Scouting, instead focusing on the virtues of kindness, fellowship, animal conservation and woodcraft". (1) The affirmation of the Order is: ""To respond to the call of the world of nature, seeking from it simplicity, good sense and fortitude. To pursue bravely and gaily the adventure of life, cherishing whatever it holds of beauty, wonder and romance, endeavouring to carry the chivalrous spirit into daily life." (2). It still exists today.

On the whole, the British camp seems less dogmatic in its atheism than the American one. There is one notable atheist thought experiment in the UK Camp Quest, a game from the American concept:
 
The British camp has imported one prominent element from the original concept: a mind game centred on imaginary unicorns. The children are told to imagine that the camp is surrounded by unicorns which cannot be seen or touched, but which are there because there has to be 'faith' that they exist. They are then encouraged to develop rational arguments to prove that the unicorns cannot and do not exist, with anyone who manages it awarded a prize - a £10 note signed by Richard Dawkins.  It does not take a genius to work out that the 'unicorns' are, of course, an unsubtle metaphor for any 'invisible' deity, whether Christian, Muslim or otherwise, though Ms Stein denies this is the case.  'The unicorns are not necessarily a metaphor for God,' she says. 'They are to show kids how to think critically. We are not trying to bash religion, but it encourages people to believe in a lot of things for which there is no evidence.' (3)

Of course, it is easy to muster an argument that unicorns exist and have all those properties. There are a huge number of theoretical physics constructs which may or may not exist, such as gravity waves, tachyons, the Higgs Boson etc. They cannot be seen or touched, and no experimental apparatus has as yet conclusively shown that they exist. That they do exist is a matter of making assumptions that the physical models that predict their existence are accurate, and that is of course no guarantee that they do. Like phlogiston, or the ether, they may turn out to be fictions produced by physicists. Which just shows how difficult it can be even in the realm of so-called empiricism to do without faith in invisible entities!

On the subject of the existence (or otherwise) of unicorns, my favourite fable is that by James Thurber, the American writer and humorist (4):
 
Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said. "Eating roses." She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him. 

"The unicorn is a mythical beast," she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there; now he was browsing among the tulips. "Here, unicorn," said the man, and he pulled up a lily and gave it to him. The unicorn ate it gravely. With a high heart, because there was a unicorn in his garden, the man went upstairs and roused his wife again. "The unicorn," he said,"ate a lily." His wife sat up in bed and looked at him coldly. "You are a booby," she said, "and I am going to have you put in the booby-hatch."

The man, who had never liked the words "booby" and "booby-hatch," and who liked them even less on a shining morning when there was a unicorn in the garden, thought for a moment. "We'll see about that," he said. He walked over to the door. "He has a golden horn in the middle of his forehead," he told her. Then he went back to the garden to watch the unicorn; but the unicorn had gone away. The man sat down among the roses and went to sleep.

As soon as the husband had gone out of the house, the wife got up and dressed as fast as she could. She was very excited and there was a gloat in her eye. She telephoned the police and she telephoned a psychiatrist; she told them to hurry to her house and bring a strait-jacket. When the police and the psychiatrist arrived they sat down in chairs and looked at her, with great interest.

"My husband," she said, "saw a unicorn this morning." The police looked at the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist looked at the police. "He told me it ate a lilly," she said. The psychiatrist looked at the police and the police looked at the psychiatrist. "He told me it had a golden horn in the middle of its forehead," she said. At a solemn signal from the psychiatrist, the police leaped from their chairs and seized the wife. They had a hard time subduing her, for she put up a terrific struggle, but they finally subdued her. Just as they got her into the strait-jacket, the husband came back into the house.

"Did you tell your wife you saw a unicorn?" asked the police. "Of course not," said the husband. "The unicorn is a mythical beast." "That's all I wanted to know," said the psychiatrist. "Take her away. I'm sorry, sir, but your wife is as crazy as a jaybird."  So they took her away, cursing and screaming, and shut her up in an institution. The husband lived happily ever after.

Moral: Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.

Links:

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Woodcraft_Chivalry
(2) http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pringles5/owc/owc2.htm
(3) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1202810/Camp-faithless-Is-Britains-atheist-summer-camp-harmless-fun-worried.html
(4)  http://english.glendale.cc.ca.us/unicorn1.html

 

The Importance of Philosophy

Watching the final episode of Richard Dawkins "The Genius of Charles Darwin", I was struck by the way in which he and his opponents both bandied the word "evidence" about without considering the philosophy of evidence, that branch of thinking called epistemology. They kept on at each other, the creationist Wendy Wright saying "We want to teach the evidence", and Dawkins saying "no that's not what evidence is", and producing lots of examples of what he considered evidence, indeed evidence so obvious to him that he just could not understand why they didn't understand what scientific evidence is.

Personally, to state my own position, I do believe there are good evidential grounds for believing that evolution is true, and that the earth is 4.6 billion years old. On evidential grounds, that is, on grounds of well-attested historical evidence, I do believe that there may be grounds for believing that what are today called "miracles", but which the ancients termed "signs and wonders" have occurred. I will not rule out something in a narrative source on the philosophical principle "'If miraculous, then unhistorical" as an a priori rule, on the grounds of my own scientific omniscience. I keep an open mind on dowsing, despite Dawkins' experiments, because experimental designs can be flawed. Like a doctor testing hypotheses for an illness, experiments often are restricted to a narrow range, and the blood sample on the way to the Pathology Lab has a specific focus. A world of blind men would find it difficult to understand the nature of light, of day and night, but patches of darkness in trees, caves, and houses, where the rare sightedness of a few failed, in each case for different reasons. Tests in the dark would produce futile results. But this is to digress.

Philosophy matters because it exposes assumptions, and considers the different means by which we evaluate what we call "evidence". Historical evidence for unique events is obviously of a different order for the repeatability of scientific experiments. Dawkins mentioned the existence of Napoleon as something backed up by evidence, but did not go into any detail, or show how this was a different kind of evidence. But how we understand the different nature of evidence is important, and avoiding that kind of question leads to all the slippery conflicts between Dawkins and his opponents. But there is a parable of G.K. Chesterton which illustrates all this far better:

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good-" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

The Genius of Charles Darwin: A Review of Part Two

Another chance to see Richard Dawkins confronting an African bishop, and posing the deliberately provocative question: "I am an ape. Are you an ape?"

The presentation of apes to humans via skulls suggested that brain size was the deciding factor in our evolution. In fact we know that this is again a simplification, and not a good one. If Dawkin's had taken some time to look at Alfred Russell Wallace's work, rather than merely considering it the same as Darwin's, he would find this problem. Another biologist, Professor Ramachandran, states it succinctly:

The hominid brain reached almost its present size - and perhaps even its present intellectual capacity about 250,000 years ago . Yet many of the attributes we regard as uniquely human appeared only much later. Why? What was the brain doing during the long "incubation "period? Why did it have all this latent potential for tool use, fire, art music and perhaps even language- that blossomed only considerably later? How did these latent abilities emerge, given that natural selection can only select expressed abilities, not latent ones? I shall call this "Wallace's problem", after the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace who first proposed it.

To consider this problem when looking at human evolution would have been more interesting that suggesting that brain size alone was the contributory factor, which is what Dawkins tended to do with his presentation of skulls. Skulls are all very well, but they are rather unformative in showing what was going on within them. That is where the cutting edge of work on human evolution is becoming focused, and that was entirely missing from the programme.

There was the usual muddle about self-genes, which according to Dawkins may contribute to acts of altruism towards members of one's own family, but only do so with humans towards the wider world because they "misfire". When he says that genes strive to make more copies of themselves, he means: "selection has operated to favour genes that, by chance, varied in such a way that more copies survived in subsequent generations." But when he says we can overcome our selfish genes, and considers selfish behaviour to be the outcome of the selfish gene, he is perpetuating the same muddle over the use of the word "selfish" that an animal specialist accused him of earlier in the programme. He stated that most biologists now accepted his notion of the selfish gene, which from a brief survey of the academic literature, looks more like wishful thinking than anything else.

In fact, to promote his idea of the selfish gene is not to celebrate the genius of Charles Darwin, because for Darwin, natural selection had to act on individuals. The reason for this Stephen Jay Gould makes very apparent:

No matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is one thing that he cannot give them-direct visibility to natural selection. Selection simply cannot see genes and pick among them directly. It must use bodies as an intermediary. A gene is a bit of DNA hidden within a cell. Selection views bodies. It favours some bodies because they are stronger, better insulated, earlier in their sexual maturation, fiercer in combat, or more beautiful to behold.

If, in favouring a stronger body, selection acted directly upon a gene for strength, then Dawkins might be vindicated. If bodies were unambiguous maps of their genes, then battling bits of DNA would display their colours externally and selection might act upon them directly. But bodies are no such thing. There is no gene "for" such unambiguous bits of morphology as your left kneecap or your fingernail. Bodies cannot be atomized into parts, each constructed by an individual gene. Hundreds of genes contribute to the building of most body parts and their action is channelled through a kaleidoscopic series of environmental influences: embryonic and postnatal, internal and external. Parts are not translated genes, and selection doesn't even work directly on parts. It accepts or rejects entire organisms because suites of parts, interacting in complex ways, confer advantages. The image of individual genes, plotting the course of their own survival, bears little relationship to developmental genetics as we understand it.

The philosopher David Stove showed just how deficient the "selfish gene" argument actually is with his witty and erudite demotion job on the concept:

The truth is, 'the total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances', genes. This is a thumbnail-sketch, and an accurate one, of the contents of The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins. It was not written by Dawkins, but he quoted it with manifest enthusiasm in a defence of The Selfish Gene.... His admirers even include some philosophers who have carried their airs and graces to the length of writing good books on such rarefied subjects as universals, or induction, or the mind. Dawkins can scarcely have gratified these admirers by telling them that, even when engaged in writing those books, they were 'totally prostituted to the blind purposiveness of their genes Still, you 'have to hand it' to genes which can write, even if only through their slaves, a good book on subjects like universals or induction. Those genes must have brains all right, as well as purposes. At least, they must, if genes can have brains and purposes. But in fact, of course, DNA molecules no more have such things than H20 molecules do.


Moreover, to suggest that genes alone are responsible for wider altruism is to completely ignore matters like "mirror neurons", which Armand Leroi, himself an evolutionary biologist, has explored, looking at the neurology of altruism, imitation and empathy.

Mirror neurons were so named because, by firing both when an animal acts and when it simply watches the same action, they were thought to "mirror" movement, as though the observer itself were acting. These neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to exist in humans and in some birds. As Professor V.S. Ramachandran observes:

Mirror neurons can also enable you to imitate the movements of others thereby setting the stage for the complex Lamarckian or cultural inheritance that characterizes our species and liberates us from the constraints of a purely gene based evolution

Dawkins cannot find a place easily for altruism alongside his selfish gene hypothesis, so he postulates that altruism is because of "misfiring selfish genes". Genes would have been capable of promoting kin selection, but on a global scale kin selection cannot differentiate between close kin and strangers, hence altruism, acts of generosity to complete strangers. Why this occurs in some case, such as the kindly Professor Dawkins, who is clearly a caring man, but does not occur in other people, such as Robert Mugabe, is not satisfactorily explained; instead it seems more like an "explaining away" difficulties with the theory, or what Karl Popper called "immunising the theory" against any possibly falsification.

But to return to the Bishop, who said "I am a human being" and asked why monkeys were still around if evolution was true, Dawkins then went on to explain that in evolutionary terms, we shared a common ancestor, and we both had evolved. He also went on to comment that with the number of shared genes, it might be possible for human and genetically close ape relative to breed. In fact, this has occurred, but not in Oxford, so that is why Dawkins probably did not know about it.

The Soviet Union, in its effort to stamp out religion, was determined to prove that men were descended from apes. In 1926, a Soviet scientist named Ilya Ivanov decided the most compelling way to do this would be to breed a "humanzee" - a human-chimpanzee hybrid. Ivanov set off for a French research station in West Africa. There he inseminated three female chimpanzees with human sperm. Not his own, for he shared the colonial-era belief that the local people were more closely related to apes than he was. He stayed long enough to learn that his experiment had failed.

With regard to "social Darwinism", in a fascinating section, Dawkins concentrated on "big men", the Rockefellers etc, as promoting "the business survival of the fittest", which led to cases like Enron where a blanket policy of firing employees who were not ruthless enough led to people with no business ethics at all running the company to financial disaster. But he overlooked in his interview with a businessman, the idea that companies diversify and then see where the consumer buys, and expand on that, and cut back on other areas of their business. This kind of "corporate Darwinism" fits an evolutionary paradigm rather well, but it was just ignored, and not explored at all with Dawkin's focus on the Herbert Spencer school of Social Darwinism.

Lastly, apart from the incessant tinkly music (from a glockenspiel?), what also seemed most odd was Dawkin's anthropomorphisms. Repeatedly, again and again, he thrust at the viewer - alongside footage of predators catching and eating prey - the idea that nature was "brutal" "savage" "cruel". Perhaps he should read some Mary Midgley - in "The Concept of Beastliness: Philosophy, Ethics and Animal Behaviour". She notes:

We have thought of a wolf always as he appears to the shepherd at the moment of seizing a lamb from the fold. But this is like judging the shepherd by the impression he makes on the lamb, at the moment when he finally decides to turn it into mutton. Lately, ethologists have taken the trouble to watch wolves systematically, between meal-times, and have found them to be, by human standards, paragons of regularity and virtue. They pair for life, they are faithful and affectionate spouses and parents, they show great loyalty to their pack, great courage and persistence in the face of difficulties, they carefully respect each other's territories, keep their dens clean, and extremely seldom kill anything that they do not need for dinner. If they fight with another wolf, the fight ends with his submission; there is normally a complete inhibition on killing the suppliant and on attacking females and cubs. They have also, like all social animals, a fairly elaborate etiquette, including subtly varied ceremonies of greeting and reassurance, by which friendship is strengthened, co-operation achieved and the wheels of social life generally oiled. All this is not the romantic impressions of casual travellers; it rests on long and careful investigations by trained zoologists, backed up by miles of film, graphs, maps, population surveys, droppings analysis and all the rest of the contemporary toolbag.

She comments on the trap which Dawkins, alongside others, is falling into:

Actual wolves, then, are not much like the folk-figure of the wolf, and the same goes for apes and other creatures. But it is the folk-figure that has been popular with philosophers. They have usually taken over the popular notion of lawless cruelty which underlies such terms as "brutal," "bestial," "beastly," "animal desires," etc., and have used it, uncriticized, as a contrast to illuminate the nature of man. Man has been mapped by reference to a landmark which is largely mythical.

In the old days, Disney used to put on supporting items to the main feature, which were a kind of nature documentary which false attributed all kinds of human like motivation to animals. Although Dawkins is very selective in his examples of predators, it is not apparent whether he is not indulging in little more than a Film Noire version of Disney. He doesn't show how cruel and savage pandas are, or how brutal the average cow is, or indeed any one of a dozen herbivores who are present only as illustrations of carnivores at work.

If only in his contempt for theology, Dawkins had not been so dismissive of the notion of anthropomorphism when it has occurred - and been rejected - with respect to ideas of God, perhaps he would be more aware of it occurring in his own work.

And if I had to answer the question ""I am an ape. Are you an ape?" I would be inclined to say that I was a perpendicular hairless tree shrew. If you are defining lineage by past speciation, why stop - arbitrarily - with the ape? Why not go back to when we were common cousins with the vole?

Links:

The Genes That Make Us Human by Dr Armand Leroi

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/interviews/interview/563/

The Nature of Normal Human Variety by Armand Leroi

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/leroi05/leroi05_index.html

The Concept of Beastliness: Philosophy, Ethics and Animal Behaviour by Mary Midgley

http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/midgley02.htm

Human Evolution: From Tree Shrew to Ape

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/anthro/bioanth/ch10/chap10.htm

Human Evolution

http://www.dorak.info/evolution/human.html

The Genius of Charles Darwin: A Review

I watched Richard Dawkins' latest offering, "The Genius of Charles Darwin", which was a high speed whistle-stop tour of Darwinism - as understood by Richard Dawkins; at times, I did wonder if "The Genius of Richard Dawkins" might not be a better description. According to Dawkins, you would be forgiven for thinking that Darwin's theory of evolution explained all there is to know about how life came to be on earth. He neatly avoided Darwin's own significant omission - the beginning of life from inanimate matter. Darwin knew full well the limits of his theory, and avoided areas where there was insufficient evidence. Indeed, he wrote in the last (1872) edition of The Origin of Species:

As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position-namely at the close of the Introduction-the following words: "I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification." This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

Dawkins, alas, was not so modest. Evolution, he proclaimed, was the greatest scientific idea of all time, as if one could somehow take scientific ideas and weigh them in some kind of balance for brilliance. Newton and Einstein were somehow sidelined, as well as the plethora of times we have "Days the universe changed" that James Burke is always so fond of reminding us. Inventions such a printing, which enabled ideas to spread, or advances in optics, which enabled Dawkins to see clearly were not important. It was that James Burke kind of connectivity that was somehow missing from his picture of Darwinism, that for instance ideas about evolution - in terms of change and progress - had become so part of the word itself, that Darwin deliberately chose to write Origin of Species without once using the term that has become synonymous with his ideas. Alfred Russell Wallace also had short shift, just as someone "who had similar ideas".

"Nature red in tooth and claw" quoted Dawkins from Tennyson's "In Memoriam", after which we were treated to night shots and sounds of hunts on the African plains, punctuated by a rather ghoulish green visage of Dawkins himself. In fact, Tennyson was drawing not upon Darwin, but upon Robert Chambers "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" (1844) which had quite different ideas about evolutionary mechanisms, although it did propose - before Darwin - the transmutation of species over time by what its author called evolution. But as I noted, ideas about "evolution" were everywhere at the time. Dawkins mentions Darwin's book selling out at once but in fact Vestiges outsold The Origin of Species up until the early 20th century.

This was one of the weaknesses of the presentation, explaining exactly what Darwin understood by "natural selection". An average viewer would assume it was a fight for survival against competition for limited food resources, and it is true that this element, drawing on the economic ideas of Malthus, plays a significant part, but it is not always such an individualistic struggle as Dawkins makes out. David Attenborough, in "The Living Planet", observes numbers of cases when groups of predators work together co-operatively to hunt their prey. Group selection was not mentioned, and most of the focus was on carnivores hunting ""The total amount of suffering in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation" - herbivores and plant life barely got a mention. Moreover, the random element, as with the Cambrian extinction, or the end of the dinosaurs, in which the changing environment plays a hugely significant part, barely got a mention. Symbiosis had not mention, and yet we (and all mammals) are colonized by multitudes of symbiotic bacteria

Along with the presentation of predation, was mention of "escalation", where predator and prey both evolve in an "arms race". This is a local predictability, and Stephen Jay Gould notes that this is "documented in increasing strength of both crab claws and shells of their gastropod prey through time). But laws of nature do not tell us why we have crabs and snails at all, why insects rule the multicellular world and why vertebrates rather than persistent algal mats exist as the most complex forms of life on the earth." The way in which historical accident plays a role was minimised, and instead evolution was presented as a universal explanation far beyond its capacity.

Dawkins, on the beach with schoolchildren mentioned invertebrates evolving from bacteria, fish evolving from lesser creatures, land animals evolving from them, and human beings evolving from them. This was the worst part of the presentation, giving the impression of a progressive sequence of change, and while Dawkins noted that mankind was like the last string on a piano, in terms of the age of the earth, he did little to alter this image.

Yet, as Gould points out, when this is presented in this way, as a series of pictures: "We never stop to recognize the almost absurd biases coded into this.. No scene ever shows another invertebrate after fishes evolved but invertebrates did not go away or stop evolving! After terrestrial reptiles emerge, no subsequent scene ever shows a fish (later oceanic tableaux depict only such returning reptiles as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs)". The differences are striking: Dawkins in this programme, presents life as a branching tree - Stephen Jay Gould, as a low bush, because as he notes: "The most salient feature of life has been the stability of its bacterial mode from the beginning of the fossil record until today and, with little doubt, into all future time so long as the earth endures. This is truly the "age of bacteria" - as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be."

Dawkins's story on the survival of an HIV woman in Africa, and others like her, is an outcome of evolutionary forces. Her offspring carry the gene, and survive, so over time, those Africans who succumb to HIV will die out, and given long enough (around 1,000 years), mostly the genetic population with the survival gene will predominate. He compares this with survival genes for the Black Death. This was extremely weak - a kind of evolutionary fairy story, which does not take into account either the random factor or the time it takes to breed. For instance those who survived the Black Death may have had a gene which helped their survival, or equally, it could have been luck (a word he is not too keen on), because it had swept through Europe like a bush fire, and those behind the fire zone were simply too few in number and number of contacts for it to continue. What he does not consider is that the HIV population may happily breed before they die, or that the HIV virus may mutate. Historical contingency is not high on his agenda, and yet if he was looking for viral infections, he might note that the influenza outbreak of 1919 did not confer much immunity on those who survived. As Gould notes: "The history of life is not necessarily progressive; it is certainly not predictable. The earth's creatures have evolved through a series of contingent and fortuitous events."

When Dawkins was talking to the school children - and where did he find such a devout lot, because there are
none like that at any schools my sons have attended in Jersey - he noted with amazement that four out of 10 Britons still believe, in some form or another, that God created the world. That (and where is that survey, I've not found it?) is the Dawkins method of "pulling a fast one", and by presenting first people who believe in a literal rendering of Genesis - which Augustine and Jerome did not, for example - he then presents this statistic as a way of saying that this is what the people surveyed thought, which may or may not be true.

As a way of looking at "God created the world", which does not involve any conflict with cosmology or evolution, consider this presentation by C.S. Lewis

"Looking for God -- or Heaven -- by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play. But he is never present in the same way as Falstaff or Lady Macbeth, nor is he diffused through the play like a gas. If there were someone who thought plays exist on their own, without an author..., our belief in Shakespeare would not be much affected by his saying, quite truly, that he had studied all the plays and never found Shakespeare in them.....To some, God is discoverable everywhere; to others, nowhere. Those who do not find him on earth are unlikely to find him in space. (Hang it all, we're in space already; every year we go a huge circular tour in space.) But send up a saint in a spaceship and he'll find God in space as he found God on earth. Much depends on the seeing eye."

How Dawkins fits committed evolutionists and theists like Kenneth Miller (author of "Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution") who have fought against creationists and proponents of intelligent design in debates and in the law courts of America into his picture is unclear; I suspect he hopes they would go away because they don't fit his very literal ideas about what belief should be. But then Miller (like Lewis and Augustine) operates with a very different idea of "creation" than the literalists who are Dawkins' bête noire. "Can a Darwinian be a Christian" asked the philosopher and atheist Michael Ruse, and concluded that while some aspects of Christianity - looking at it in all its diversity - caused problems, these need not always be insuperable.

My main gripe is that Dawkins presents evolution as (a) all embracing, which Darwin said it was not (b) extremely simplistically, which may lead people to reject it because it is presented in a flawed manner.

In my opinion, Stephen Jay Gould have a much more nuanced presentation of evolution, and its limits, when he wrote these words:

Natural selection is an immensely powerful yet beautifully simple theory that has held up remarkably well, under intense and unrelenting scrutiny and testing, for 135 years. In essence, natural selection locates the mechanism of evolutionary change in a "struggle" among organisms for reproductive success, leading to improved fit of populations to changing environments. ( Struggle is often a metaphorical description and need not be viewed as overt combat, guns blazing. Tactics for reproductive success include a variety of non-martial activities such as earlier and more frequent mating or better cooperation with partners in raising offspring.) Natural selection is therefore a principle of local adaptation, not of general advance or progress.

Yet powerful though the principle may be, natural selection is not the only cause of evolutionary change (and may, in many cases, be overshadowed by other forces). This point needs emphasis because the standard misapplication of evolutionary theory assumes that biological explanation may be equated with devising accounts, often speculative and conjectural in practice, about the adaptive value of any given feature in its original environment (human aggression as good for hunting, music and religion as good for tribal cohesion, for example). Darwin himself strongly emphasized the multifactorial nature of evolutionary change and warned against too exclusive a reliance on natural selection, by placing the following statement in a maximally conspicuous place at the very end of his introduction: "I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification."


References:

"The Seeing Eye" , C.S. Lewis (1963)

Can a Darwinian be a Christian, Michael Ruse
http://www.amazon.com/Can-Darwinian-Christian-Relationship-Religion/dp/0521631440

Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, Kenneth Miller
http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Darwins-God-Scientists-Evolution/dp/0060930497

http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/tabid/68/id/3079/Default.aspx
A review of Finding Darwin's God by Michael Ruse

A gut issue: Bacterial symbiosis shapes a healthy immune response
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7195/edsumm/e080529-01.html


The Evolution of Life, Stephen Jay Gould
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/2948/gould.html
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1151

Indefinite?

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'

I've been looking at how "indefinite" is treated, especially regarding the headline in the Jersey Evening Post on Saturday -: "Now they can lock you up indefinitely." The States sitting recently covered this.

The full text is at http://www.statesassembly.gov.je/documents/hansard/22715-25297-2662008.htm, and I have yet to see a more shifty evasive performance by a politician who, it seems, does not have the grace to simply say "I got it wrong" but has to apologise not for herself, but over the way in which it entered the public domain.

Senator W. Kinnard (The Minister for Home Affairs) said:

I make this statement because of public and Members' concern following an article that appeared on the front page of the Jersey Evening Post on Saturday, 14th June, under the headline: "Now they can lock you up indefinitely." The report alleges that I had authorised the indefinite detention of suspects without charge under delegated powers and that I had not consulted with interested parties. The word "indefinite" means "not clearly defined or stated." In my view therefore, it is quite wrong to associate this with the law in Jersey on limits for detention and subsequent review.

This was picked up by Deputy R.G. Le Hérissier:

Would the Minister not accept 2 things; that the popular usage of "indefinite" is: "Lasting for an unknown and unstated length of time" and that to say "indefinite" is not indefinite is utterly confusing.

Senator W. Kinnard returned stating that the word "indefinite" must be interpreted in the way in which she stated because of the legal and procedural measures which the order must be consistent and fit in with:

First of all, the word "indefinite" does not fit with the actual situation, which is the long-stop of 96 days and, indeed, the situation where the police are required to bring people before the court promptly. I do not accept what is being asserted by the Deputy.

And yet, earlier, Mr. W.J. Bailhache Q.C., H.M. Attorney General, used the word "indefinite" in the other sense of the word because he is talking in terms of limits (or no limits):

The fact that there are no statutory limits to detention before charge does not mean that the police can detain a person indefinitely

In fact, indefinite, like many words, is slippery in meaning, having a broad semantic sweep. The Oxford English Dictionary gives several meanings to it, and two of the main ones are:

"Without distinct limitation of being or character; having no clearly defined or determined character: indeterminate, vague, undefined. "

"Of undetermined extent, amount, or number; unlimited. "

It is important to understand what dictionaries do - they do not dictate what the meaning of words are and should not be used in a prescriptive way. They collate the different meanings that have arisen over the years, and list common usage, together with some etymological notes.

Words may change meaning, and may pick up extra meanings over the years. Arguments over "real meanings" belong to the Victorian Age of prescriptive grammars, where verb infinitives could not be split because the model was Latin, where a split infinitive is impossible. Original meanings of words are not "real meanings" either - in Semantics, that is caused the genetic fallacy. They are important, because if looking back at old documents - and old laws - the words used may have changed significantly.

C.S. Lewis noted how the 1928 revision of the Prayer Book altered "may truly and impartially administer justice" to "may truly and indifferently minister justice". He asked his gardener, Paxtead as an experiment to see what an ordinary man thought. Paxstead answered that he knew well enough what it meant to minister justice indifferently: that was fairly, without making any difference between people. But as for impartially, "I don't know that word, guv'nor". Nowadays, the meaning of "indifferent" has changed significantly to mean more like unconcerned, incurious, aloof, detached, disinterested - we see this in headlines such as "Black juveniles face indifferent justice system", or "Murderous clients and indifferent justice".

It is ironic that one of the definitions of "indefinite" is "Unclear; vague". I wonder whether it is sensible for politicians to criticise the JEP, simply on the Humpty Dumpty approach of saying "'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."

Generally, they will slip between meanings, much as Richard Dawkins does in "The Selfish Gene", where he says he uses the word "selfish" as a technical term - "Selfish", when applied to genes, doesn't mean 'selfish' at all. It means, instead, an extremely important quality for which there is no good word in the English language: "the quality of being copied by a Darwinian selection process." - and then comes out with tripe like this: "Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs", in which he mixes up his "technical term" with the common usage.

Reading the debate in the States over the use of the word "indefinite", it is clear that it is changing in meaning take place all the time, and Wendy Kinnard is using the imprecise meaning (and the JEP using it) as a shield against criticism against the crux of the matter, which wasn't the JEP use of "indefinite" but the wording of the order regarding continual reviews and detention, a point well picked up by Gerald Baudins -

"That all that does not alter the meaning of the Order because I would like the Minister to advise why her Order included the words: "and may conduct further reviews and authorise further periods as such detention" which is quite unambiguous and the crux of the matter because it clearly indicates a never-ending process. It is not a misinterpretation, Sir, as alleged by the Minister but I believe a failure on her part to create an Order that did what was allegedly intended. "

Senator S. Syvret later asked a very good point:

It would appear from what the Attorney General has said and what the Minister has said that this wording of the now removed Order is simply not compatible with and is in conflict with statutory legislation. Would the Minister not then accept that this is simply an unholy mess and she might have got more credit from this Assembly had she simply come here and admitted this is a mistake and an error rather than engage is this sophistry?

Completely ludicrous memes for which there is no evidence

Came across this quotation:

Moderate believers implicitly encourage the idea that faith is something to be respected - that it's all right to believe in
completely ludicrous things for which there is no evidence. - Susan Blackmore

It might be a good argument, or the start of one, if it didn't come from someone who describes themselves as "psychologist and memeticist Susan Blackmore" on her website, and who has written a whole volume about the existence of memes "The Meme Machine". Where's the evidence, Susan?

When you see religions as mind viruses that evolved over thousands of years in competition with other, similar, mind viruses, it's easy to see why they have acquired the powerful adaptations they have....Religious memes capture people's time to get themselves spread. Just as the common cold virus makes people sneeze to get itself spread, so religions make people sings hymns and say prayers, and chant and so spread the word of God. They also induce them to part with large sums of money to build glorious mosques, churches and synagogues and to pay the wages of priests who in turn spread the word of God. And how did they get this way? They got this way because less effective versions of the religions, with less dangerous tricks and weapons, failed to infect enough people.

Analogy is not proof. C.S. Lewis, writing many years ago, described this mode of argument as "Bulverism". Bulverism is a logical fallacy where rather than proving that an argument is wrong, a person instead assumes it is wrong, and then goes on to explain why the other person held that argument. It is essentially a circumstantial ad hominem argument. He noted that:

"You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly."

He also notes how this method works, and in a good deal of detail, shows how it is fallacious, and how the user - in this case Susan Blackmore - assumes that her own beliefs are somehow "pure" and "immune" to these "memes"; she has, in other words, claimed a priveliged position, on which she can see how people believe silly things.

Here is Lewis in detail on the problem:

The Freudians have discovered that we exist as bundles of complexes. The Marxians have discovered that we exist as members of some economic class. In the old days it was supposed that if a thing seemed obviously true to a hundred men, then it was probably true in fact. Nowadays the Freudian will tell you to go and analyze the hundred: you will find that they all think Elizabeth [I] a great queen because they all have a mother-complex. Their thoughts are psychologically tainted at the source. And the Marxist will tell you to go and examine the economic interests of the hundred; you will find that they all think freedom a good thing because they are all members of the bourgeoisie whose prosperity is increased by a policy of laissez-faire. Their thoughts are "ideologically tainted" at the source. Now this is obviously great fun; but it has not always been noticed that there is a bill to pay for it. There are two questions that people who say this kind of thing ought to be asked. The first is, are all thoughts thus tainted at the source, or only some? The second is, does the taint invalidate the tainted thought - in the sense of making it untrue - or not?

If they say that all thoughts are thus tainted, then, of course, we must remind them that Freudianism and Marxism are as much systems of thought as Christian theology or philosophical idealism. The Freudian and Marxian are in the same boat with all the rest of us, and cannot criticize us from outside. They have sawn off the branch they were sitting on. If, on the other hand, they say that the taint need not invalidate their thinking, then neither need it invalidate ours. In which case they have saved their own branch, but also saved ours along with it. The only line they can really take is to say that some thoughts are tainted and others are not - which has the advantage (if Freudians and Marxians regard it as an advantage) of being what every sane man has always believed. But if that is so, we must then ask how you find out which are tainted and which are not. It is no earthly use saying that those are tainted which agree with the secret wishes of the thinker. Some of the things I should like to believe must in fact be true; it is impossible to arrange a universe which contradicts everyone's wishes, in every respect, at every moment. Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is "wishful thinking." You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant - but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.

If some of the thinkers like Dawkins or Blackmore took notice of this, we'd have a little less of the "mind virus" nonsense.

If I was going to be naughty, I'd ask: can a "virus of the mind" show up visibly as a side-effect, for instance, in funny hair colouring that really doesn't suit someone, so that they don't notice it?

Deluded Dawkins - Survival Machines

We are survival machines , robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it. One of my hopes is that I may have some success in astonishing others.

What I have always found astonishing about this paragraph is the way in which it brings in metaphors - most notably the idea of the machine - and treats it as an exact simplification of the complexity of living creatures. The use of "selfish" at this stage - before he has even explained what he means (or thinks he means) is also a very poor metaphor, especially as later on in the book, he sloppily uses it in various senses, mixing them all up. Just look at this sentence!

I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. 'Special' and 'limited' are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.

Later, when taken to pieces by Mary Midgeley for such a sloppy piece of writing, he would say that he was using "selfish" in a purely technical sense; Dawkins, in his response to her review, claimed that she "no good point to make" and argued that the details of her criticisms were incorrect because they were based on a misunderstanding and misapplication of a technical language! That has to be a most pathetic piece of avoidance strategy when a thinker is caught out using sloppy language. What is purely technical about the phrase "ruthless selfishness"?

Deluded Dawkins - The Case of the Suicide Bombers

In "The God Delusion", Dawkins asks:

 

Why did these cricket-loving young men do it? Unlike their Palestinian counterparts, or their kamikaze counterparts in Japan, or their Tamil Tiger counterparts in Sri Lanka, these human bombs had no expectation that their bereaved families would be lionized, looked after or supported on martyrs' pensions. On the contrary, their relatives in some cases had to go into hiding. One of the men wantonly widowed his pregnant wife and orphaned his toddler. The action of these four young men has been nothing short of a disaster not just for themselves and their victims, but for their families and for the whole Muslim community in Britain, which now faces a backlash. Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.

 

Note the rhetorical trick of the last sentence, which tries to argue that if we have excluded every other option, only religion could produce such an effect. Actually, I'm not really sure that the Palestinian bombers, or the Basque seperatists, or the Japanese pilots on suicide missions (for the honour of their country) had at the front of their minds that their families would be looked after or lionised; that may have been known to be the case, but surely was of marginal import - a comfort, but not a necessary one. Or does Dawkins seriously think that if that was not the case, they would have said "no!"?

 

February 12, 1894. Emile Henry set a bomb in Café Terminus, killing one and injuring twenty. During his trial, he declares: "There is no innocent bourgeois".

 

September 16, 1920. The Wall Street bombing kills 38 and wounds 400 in Manhattan's Financial District. Anarchists associated with Luigi Galleani are widely believed responsible although the crime remains officially unsolved.

 

What have these in common with Georges Sorel's "Reflections on Violence" (1908), which remains a controversial text to this day. It unashamedly advocates the use of violence as a means of putting an end to the corrupt politics of bourgeois democracy and of bringing down capitalism.

 

They have to do with the "deed of propoganda" advocated by some branches of the anarchist movement. They are not religious motivations, but ideological ones. Contrary to Dawkins, history shows that ideology is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.

 

 

Dawkins sloppy language again

The Huffington Post had a good article re Dawkins' sloppy logic.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-berreby/richard-dawkins-jewish-q_b_68644.html

Richard Dawkins' Jewish Question by David Berreby

Posted October 16, 2007 12:58 PM (EST)


"A scientist looking at nonscientific problems,'' said the great physicist Richard Feynman, "is just as dumb as the next guy.'' That's not necessarily anyone else's concern -- unless the scientist in question is claiming to speak, with scientific authority, for the rest of us.

A fresh case in point is this analysis by Oxford's Richard Dawkins, from an interview published earlier this month in Britain's Guardian (see the sixth paragraph). As part of his ongoing campaign to get "downtrodden,'' apologetic atheists stand up for themselves, Dawkins suggests that we secular humanists emulate other minorities. For instance, the Jews:

"When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told -- religious Jews anyway -- than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolize American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place."

The historian David H. Fischer identified this kind of rhetoric as "the fallacy of equivocation.'' That's where, he wrote, "a term is used in two or more senses within a single argument, so that a conclusion appears to follow when in fact it does not.'' Dawkins starts with the "Jewish lobby'' (by which one presumes he means the pro-Israel lobby, from his later reference to foreign policy). Then he says "they'' are less numerous than atheists (so now the referent is not an office-full of people, but rather, American Jews). Then he qualifies the term to mean "religious Jews.'' We've gone from (1) AIPAC to (2) "the Jews'' to (3) Jews who believe in God and (4) Jews who follow traditional practice. (The term "religious Jews'' could describe both types of person, and there is no reason to think that everyone in category 4 is also in category 3.)

In short, quite a muddle. I cannot tell who we secularists should be trying to copy -- lobbyists, ethnically Jewish Americans, believers in a deity or people who hold to traditional practice without reflecting on ultimate questions. Only one thing is clear: By casually echoing the rhetoric of anti-Semites, Dawkins has made a fool of himself and, by extension, those of us for whom he claims to speak.

The interesting question is: Why? How could Dawkins, the holder of Oxford's Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science, miss the differences among the kinds of people he lumps together, both in the Guardian interview and on the website? Those distinctions are well-documented. Pro-Israel lobbyists get plenty of support in the US from non-Jews (importantly including conservative evangelical Christians). Meanwhile, plenty of Jews, in Israel and throughout the world, do not support the goals of this lobby. Take a look here for an example. Then too, there are religious Jews who most emphatically do not support the State of Israel or its goals. Have a look here (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-berreby/www.nkusa.org/activities/), for instance.

As it happens, the potency of pro-Israel lobbyists has been much in the news lately, since John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt just published a long-germinating book that analyzes the effect of the lobby in the U.S. (You can read a shorter version of their arguments here. Briefly, they say lobbyists for Israel have been highly successful in influencing government policy -- as have the National Rifle Association or the AARP. Perhaps the controversy over their book inspired Dawkins' remark.

But they don't say what Dawkins is saying. In fact, Mearsheimer, offered a chance to say precisely what Dawkins claimed, instead explained that this picture is not supported by his and Walt's study. You can see him saying it here (http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/).

Anyone can get his facts wrong and later correct himself. But Dawkins' confusion suggests a deeper problem -- a conceptual misunderstanding about identity. That mistake may stem from his casting himself as a leader of downtrodden atheists. In any event, it explains why his movement is doomed.

The problem, briefly, is just this: Identity-based behavior is not a unitary phenomenon. It comes in many forms. And what people do in one mode does not predict what they will do in another. The forms overlap (you can be at the same time a Dawkinsian secular humanist and a Jewish person and an activist for Palestinian rights). We often use the same language for the different types. All that makes the fallacy of equivocation easy to commit. But it's still an error.

Dawkins' statement, for example, invokes at least three different modes of identity. First, there is identity based on a consciously chosen belief. (You've thought about U.S. policy in the Middle East and come to a conclusion about what you want the Government to do.) Second, there is identity based on habit and upbringing. Maybe you don't believe in God or approve of West Bank settlements, but you go to seder at your grandparents (it's family, it's childhood, it's what "we'' do). Third is identity based on a trait that is perceived to be involuntary, and often thought to be inherited. You can decide to support Palestinian rights or choose to go to the movies on Yom Kippur, but somehow, you feel, you can't change where you come from.

Identities of the second type, like knowing yourself to be Irish or Catholic or a Yankees fan or a hunter, come to you through early experiences, where you're taken through the rites and patterns of life that teach you "what we do'' and "who we are.'' Such identities are learned by the body, in sights, smells, sounds and movements that arrive before reason. The mode was well described by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, when he wrote:

We acquire habits of conduct, not by constructing a way of living upon rules or precepts learned by heart and subsequently practiced, but by living with people who habitually behave in a certain manner: we acquire habits of conduct in the same way as we acquire our native language.

This sort of identity is rather impervious to rational thought and official declarations, and a good thing too. I, for one, am glad that my sense of being American -- my sense that home is home -- does not depend on the policies of the federal government.

Identities of the third type are imposed. They arise out of the encounters you have with the rest of the world; encounters you cannot refuse to see and cannot wish away. You can decide how to deal with such an identity -- whether, for example, you want to be an out and proud member of the GLBT community or a total closet case. But you cannot decide to leave such an identity behind you. The rest of the world won't allow it.

Now, atheism is an identity of the first type, the conscious, thought- out sort. That is the point Dawkins makes when he says we should not refer to a "Catholic child'' or a "Muslim child,'' because a child can't decide what s/he thinks about the existence of God.
The problem, though, is that identities based on opinions feel ephemeral, because opinions change all the time. With an identity based only on opinion, you have two unattractive choices: (1) Admit that tomorrow you could no longer belong to the tribe, because you might change your mind; or (2) admit that in order to preserve tribal feeling, you will have to behave as if your opinion is much more certain and consistent than a normal thought.

This second choice is what Dawkins advocated, I think, when he wrote this on his web site:

I admit, I sympathize with those skeptics on this site who fear that we are engendering a quasi-religious conformity of our own. Whether we like it or not, I'm afraid we have to swallow this small amount of pride if we are to have an influence on the real world, otherwise we'll never overcome the 'herding cats' problem.

But the problem with atheist solidarity (and the reason atheist groups are comically riven by orthodoxies, inquisitions, purges and schisms) is not that all members are nuanced, independent thinkers. It is that atheism, unlike sexual orientation or religious upbringing or beloved cultural tradition, is an easily-changed conviction, and everyone knows it. Dawkins can't admit this because he wants to lead his people into the Promised Land, and to do that he needs to have a people. He thinks atheists just need to go slumming, and pretend for a bit to believe the same thing. But identities that matter are not based on belief at all.

Most everyone knows this, and so very few people can take atheism seriously as a basis for understanding "what kind of person I am.'' Instead, the identities that make people glad, mad, and weepy are those about which people feel they have no choice: The identities they learn at their parents' knees, the experiences imposed on them by the beliefs of the neighbors. Not coincidentally, it is those identities that make people cough up money to support effective lobbyists in Washington. Identities like "hunter'' (National Rifle Association) and "gay person'' (Human Rights Campaign) and "old person'' (American Association of Retired Persons).
Could atheism be made then into such an identity? For example, by atheist parents who raise atheist children with explicitly atheist annual rituals and beloved cultural icons? (The standard American Christmas is fairly secular but it pretends not to be, so it wouldn't count.) Well, sure. You can make a convincing identity out of anything, if you put generations of effort into it. And perhaps, with his t-shirts, buttons, instructions for holding meetings, this is what Richard Dawkins is aiming at. In the meantime, though, he is fooling himself and making the rest of us secularists look like idiots.

Dawkins' Deflecting Technicques

Some interesting stuff by Andrew Rilstone on Dawkins' deflecting technicques.

 

http://andrewrilstone.blogspot.com/2007/09/everything-you-never-wanted-to-know.html

 

Dawkins has elected to treat a criticism of his book as if it had been an ad hominem attack on himself. What Stanford has called into question is the credibility of the arguments which Dawkins puts forward in support of his opinion. Dawkins has responded by defending his right to hold such opinions in the first place.

It's an astonishing maneuver. It's rather as if you had said "I'm not going to give much credence to your critique of the Iraq War, since you appear to think Iraq is in South America" and you had responded "Oh, I suppose you have to have A Level Geography in order to be a pacifist nowadays, do you? " Or if I had said "I'm not sure how much attention we should pay to this debunking of cryptozoology since the author appears to think that Loch Ness is a salt-water lake" and you had said "I don't need to read learned books on marine biology in order to know that there's no such thing as sea-serpents."

A stock response to Dawkins' stock response to what he claims is a stock criticism would be "No: but if you are going to charge people twenty quid for 150,000 word demolition-job on leprechology, you probably ought to get your facts straight first."

If you limit yourself to saying "I refuse to consider any question about What Christians Think because there is no God" then theological ignorance may be quite forgivable. Once you start to say "One of the reasons for thinking that there is no God is that What Christians Think is absurd / contradictory / hairsplitty / immoral / child-molesty" you need to have quite a good grasp of What Christians Do In Fact Think. Not a degree in the academic study of the History of What Christians Do In Fact Think: not specialist knowledge of every writer who has ever written a technical tome on What Christians Think, but some general grasp of how St. Paul thinks that Old Testament is related to the New; or some appreciation that, even among evangelicals, Penal Substitution is not the only game in town.