If someone comes along claiming a creationist position, but is completely unable to even describe what the evolutionary position is, or what might be good about it, then their idea is bunk.
Replace “creationist” and “evolutionary” in that sentence with “atheist” and “religious” respectively and you have the most common theist criticism of Dawkins.
Therefore, since theism is more-or-less the mainstream position, wouldn’t following your rule force you to conclude that Dawkins’ atheism is bunk?
It would. I’m aware of what Dawkins has said about this—that one doesn’t neeed to be an expert on fairies in order to conclude that they don’t exist, and that this ought to apply to Gods as well. This is fair enough.
It’s a rule of argument. If someone doesn’t want to learn about fairies, that’s their own concern. But if they want to persuade some other people who do believe in the fairies, they ought to take the time to learn enough about what those people say about fairies to plug into their world.
Theories are like languages, I think. If someone has a mental vocabulary which involves fairies, you will more easily persuade them if you can use the language too.
What too often happens is that a critic doesn’t learn the other person’s language. They then end up misrepresenting what the other party believes, and to follow that up, they tell them that their first step to knowledge is to throw away a language that they find useful in favour of a different one that they’ve never used. They then go on to make arguments to which they have no idea how I’m going to respond. As a persuasion strategy, this is a non-starter.
I’m not at all saying all theories/languages are equal, some are far better than others. But if you want to persuade an outsider, learning their language is only courteous, and gives you a huge advantage. You learn where the real problems of the other belief system are. You discover what it does successfully explain. You discover how to partially express your beliefs in their system, which makes it easier for them to accept and test what you’re saying.
My original point is that, as an optimisation, you can immediately reject any arguer who hasn’t realised that they need to talk the language of their hearers.
It does explain why Dawkin’s book has resulted in more heat than light. Reading it, Dawkin’s book can be summarised as saying “Your theism seems completely ridiculous, for all these reasons. I don’t know how you believe it.” The reply has more or less been “Yes, I can see that you don’t know how we believe it. Perhaps if you did know that, you would have written a better book.”
In the case of the theists, this is in fact quite difficult. I am actually a Christian myself so I can give you the inside track here. The formal ‘arguments’ that Christians put forward for believing in God actually have little to do with the real reasons that they do believe. Christians in particular are persuaded principally by the part of their mind that deals with relationships and morality—they believe God is so much more morally right than anything else they’ve heard about that only his existence explains the improvement. It’s not based on the faculty of reason, though, it persuades through the interpersonal brain. Reason comes later, and actually maps quite poorly onto what the essence of their faith is for the most part. The outcome is what Dawkins observes—you can give those religious arguments a terrible intellectual thrashing, and it makes very little difference to what they believe afterwards. He’s not really speaking their language.
Another example of this is the opposite phenomenon—Christians, speaking in their own language that doesn’t connect to atheists, say they don’t believe in atheism because it’s immoral. If you can imagine how likely such an argument is to impress Richard Dawkins, you have perhaps a mirror image of why his argument doesn’t impress the theists.
Trying to express yourself in the language of the other party makes a huge difference. Let’s take as an example Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis—the ultimate ensemble theory. Suppose he’s right about part of this—that everything that’s mathematically rationally describable ‘exists’ - whatever that is. But suppose he’s wrong about the other part—that this forms an ensemble. Suppose instead it forms a network—that everything that exists is actually a conceptual network of interconnected mathematical concepts—an ultimate network of ideas. Not inherently implausible—it certainly is about the simplest possible description of what might exist that I can think of.
It also is pretty much a description of an omniscient God. But if I’d just talked about that in my language, it wouldn’t have been as interesting.
Atheism isn’t really Dawkin’s main focus either. Dawkins isn’t primarily against God - he’s against faith. He believes people ought to believe things for rational reasons, not because they ought to, or that they’ll be saved eternally if they do. Where Dawkins is most readable is when he’s talking about ‘survival machines’, or the way each individual gene in an organism is out to optimise its own survival in its own way—whether that’s good for the organism / species or not. Rationality and reason are his first love—atheism is more of a consequence of this than a belief in its own right. I very much share his view that people ought to believe things for rational reasons. Dawkins knows what systemic understanding is—I find the creationists assertion that there is no such thing—both in their arguments for rejecting science and in their own woeful lack of a systemic alternative view—very disturbing. I’d rather read Dawkins any day.
My original point is that, as an optimisation, you can immediately reject any arguer who hasn’t realised that they need to talk the language of their hearers.
Why is this a good optimization? Do you have any particular evidence that an arguer who is willing to learn and use your language is more likely to have accurate beliefs?
It’s the other way about—I can’t think of an example where someone who didn’t know the language of any field of learning has successfully convinced that field of anything (other than that they are a fool).
I’m not saying that person is particularly ignorant—they may be quite smart in some ways—but they’re not doing what’s necessary to convince. My optimisation is to ignore them until they put in the effort—it’s much easier for them to learn the language than to do the novel thinking, after all. If that makes them frustrated, so be it.
Quite the reverse—it guides me to pay attention to those people who do take the trouble. It’s not as if I’m in any danger of running out of information these days.
Replace “creationist” and “evolutionary” in that sentence with “atheist” and “religious” respectively and you have the most common theist criticism of Dawkins.
Therefore, since theism is more-or-less the mainstream position, wouldn’t following your rule force you to conclude that Dawkins’ atheism is bunk?
Sorry to take a while to look at this.
It would. I’m aware of what Dawkins has said about this—that one doesn’t neeed to be an expert on fairies in order to conclude that they don’t exist, and that this ought to apply to Gods as well. This is fair enough.
It’s a rule of argument. If someone doesn’t want to learn about fairies, that’s their own concern. But if they want to persuade some other people who do believe in the fairies, they ought to take the time to learn enough about what those people say about fairies to plug into their world.
Theories are like languages, I think. If someone has a mental vocabulary which involves fairies, you will more easily persuade them if you can use the language too.
What too often happens is that a critic doesn’t learn the other person’s language. They then end up misrepresenting what the other party believes, and to follow that up, they tell them that their first step to knowledge is to throw away a language that they find useful in favour of a different one that they’ve never used. They then go on to make arguments to which they have no idea how I’m going to respond. As a persuasion strategy, this is a non-starter.
I’m not at all saying all theories/languages are equal, some are far better than others. But if you want to persuade an outsider, learning their language is only courteous, and gives you a huge advantage. You learn where the real problems of the other belief system are. You discover what it does successfully explain. You discover how to partially express your beliefs in their system, which makes it easier for them to accept and test what you’re saying.
My original point is that, as an optimisation, you can immediately reject any arguer who hasn’t realised that they need to talk the language of their hearers.
It does explain why Dawkin’s book has resulted in more heat than light. Reading it, Dawkin’s book can be summarised as saying “Your theism seems completely ridiculous, for all these reasons. I don’t know how you believe it.” The reply has more or less been “Yes, I can see that you don’t know how we believe it. Perhaps if you did know that, you would have written a better book.”
In the case of the theists, this is in fact quite difficult. I am actually a Christian myself so I can give you the inside track here. The formal ‘arguments’ that Christians put forward for believing in God actually have little to do with the real reasons that they do believe. Christians in particular are persuaded principally by the part of their mind that deals with relationships and morality—they believe God is so much more morally right than anything else they’ve heard about that only his existence explains the improvement. It’s not based on the faculty of reason, though, it persuades through the interpersonal brain. Reason comes later, and actually maps quite poorly onto what the essence of their faith is for the most part. The outcome is what Dawkins observes—you can give those religious arguments a terrible intellectual thrashing, and it makes very little difference to what they believe afterwards. He’s not really speaking their language.
Another example of this is the opposite phenomenon—Christians, speaking in their own language that doesn’t connect to atheists, say they don’t believe in atheism because it’s immoral. If you can imagine how likely such an argument is to impress Richard Dawkins, you have perhaps a mirror image of why his argument doesn’t impress the theists.
Trying to express yourself in the language of the other party makes a huge difference. Let’s take as an example Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis—the ultimate ensemble theory. Suppose he’s right about part of this—that everything that’s mathematically rationally describable ‘exists’ - whatever that is. But suppose he’s wrong about the other part—that this forms an ensemble. Suppose instead it forms a network—that everything that exists is actually a conceptual network of interconnected mathematical concepts—an ultimate network of ideas. Not inherently implausible—it certainly is about the simplest possible description of what might exist that I can think of.
It also is pretty much a description of an omniscient God. But if I’d just talked about that in my language, it wouldn’t have been as interesting.
Atheism isn’t really Dawkin’s main focus either. Dawkins isn’t primarily against God - he’s against faith. He believes people ought to believe things for rational reasons, not because they ought to, or that they’ll be saved eternally if they do. Where Dawkins is most readable is when he’s talking about ‘survival machines’, or the way each individual gene in an organism is out to optimise its own survival in its own way—whether that’s good for the organism / species or not. Rationality and reason are his first love—atheism is more of a consequence of this than a belief in its own right. I very much share his view that people ought to believe things for rational reasons. Dawkins knows what systemic understanding is—I find the creationists assertion that there is no such thing—both in their arguments for rejecting science and in their own woeful lack of a systemic alternative view—very disturbing. I’d rather read Dawkins any day.
Why is this a good optimization? Do you have any particular evidence that an arguer who is willing to learn and use your language is more likely to have accurate beliefs?
It’s the other way about—I can’t think of an example where someone who didn’t know the language of any field of learning has successfully convinced that field of anything (other than that they are a fool).
I’m not saying that person is particularly ignorant—they may be quite smart in some ways—but they’re not doing what’s necessary to convince. My optimisation is to ignore them until they put in the effort—it’s much easier for them to learn the language than to do the novel thinking, after all. If that makes them frustrated, so be it.
The point is not that it keeps them frustrated, the point is that it keeps you ignorant.
Quite the reverse—it guides me to pay attention to those people who do take the trouble. It’s not as if I’m in any danger of running out of information these days.
The question still remains why you think your heuristic is particularly good.