Creationists don’t have to debate college students—they have Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christoper Hitchens, Sam Harris, P Z Myers, Robert Wright—who all seem quite prepared to stoop down to their level as part of some kind of “gutter outreach” program.
There is a good point hidden here: they can indeed debate someone like Christopher Hitchens, a respected man of letters, who, though not scientifically trained, is adept enough at exposing creationism for the futile folly it is.
They “stoop”—in the sense of writing a lot of material on the topic.
It seems a shame to waste so many science writers on the area. If the anti-science brigade had aimed to waste the time of the science enthusiasts with unscientific trivia—in order to prevent them from leading and educating real young scientists from the front—I would have to say they had won. Rarely have so many science enthusiasts expended so much time and energy on such garbage.
I particularly lament the loss of Dawkins. His latest book lays out the evidence for an established scientific theory—for the sake of the ignorant American hordes. That’s two whole books from Britain’s leading science writer that target those in the scientific gutter. I would rather people like him showed the way forwards from the front.
Sure they do. Most of them have even written full length books on the topic of how theistic religion is bullshit. It seems like a pretty dead point to me. Scientists have not had any truck with god for a hundred years or so now.
Scientifically speaking, it’s rather like writing books on how the earth is round.
It’s not a scientific issue—and hasn’t been for a long time now. It is more a matter for educators and politicians.
Considering how many people in the world still believe in creationism, writing popular books about its faults is a worthy mission. It is not the same as debating creationists, though. Debating someone gives them the chance to positively espouse their ideas, whereas in writing about those ideas you can take a purely critical view. I mean, The God Delusion is no more a debate with theists than Atlas Shrugged is a debate with communists.
“Yes, of course I’d much rather have been spending my time working on consciousness and the brain, or on the evolution of cooperation, for instance, or free will, but I felt a moral and political obligation to drop everything for a few years and put my shoulder to the wheel doing a dirty job that I thought somebody had to do.”—Daniel Dennett.
Yes, someone had to do it—but since the job resembles mucking out the public toilets, it really shouldn’t have fallen to Daniel Dennett.
OK, I did. A page and a half, in the middle of something explicitly labelled (on the previous page) as a digression, explaining that he isn’t going to waste space arguing against creationism. One endnote, supporting that with some pointers to places where, if you want argument against creationism, you can find it. One endnote saying that a certain kind of behaviour, allegedly engaged in by many theists and annoying to Dennett, is also characteristic of the advocates of “Intelligent Design”. That’s it.
Since your point was (apparently) that Dennett wasted a lot of time and effort addressing creationism, I’m having trouble seeing how this supports it. (Well, actually, what happened is that someone said that people like Dennett don’t waste time engaging with creationism, and you said “but they write books attacking theistic religion” (I’m paraphrasing, I hope not misleadingly) as if that were the same thing, and in what follows you’ve repeatedly responded to comments about creationism in ways that would kinda make sense if they were comments about theism instead. So I don’t know whether pointing out one more time that Dennett’s book was not about creationism will help...)
“Creationism is the religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe were created in some form by a supernatural being or beings, commonly a single deity.”
Many followers of Abrahamic religions appear to think that.
I think this explains some of the misunderstandings in this thread. For example, the apparent controversy over whether Dinesh D’Souza is a creationist. He has written: ‘the Genesis enigma is solved, and its account of creation is vindicated not as some vague parable but as a strikingly accurate account of how the universe came to be’. That sort of thing makes him a creationist in my view. However, he is no young earth creationist.
If you define “creationism” so broadly that it encompasses all theistic religion then I will readily agree that yes, one of the things Dennett’s book is about is “creationism”. Congratulations. On the other hand, that fact is then of little relevance to the question of whether Dawkins and Dennett and others like them should, or do, “refuse to debate creationists” since (everybody, I suggest, knows) the word as used in that phrase is not meant to be equivalent to “theists”.
Whaat?!? Creationism is about a supernatural creator of the universe and man. Theism is about the existence of god—sometimes an interventionist god. They are different concepts. Theism is typically a broader concept than creationism—since you can believe in a god that answers prayers without also believing that she created the universe.
The inaccurate conclusion that I have these concepts muddled together seems to be without a basis in anything I have said. I do not know where you are getting it from :-(
I’m getting it from the fact that (as I said earlier) you’ve taken a statement about “creationists” and disputed it on the basis that the corresponding statement with “theists” in place of “creationists” is false.
Right—well, leaving aside the whole issue that I did no such thing, that appears to be some faulty logic you have there—creationists are theists (if you believe that god created the universe and man, you at least believe in god) - but not all theists are creationists.
Uh, my point was that the previous poster’s claim that “Dennett’s book had nothing to do with creationism” was flat wrong.
Dennett’s book is about the Abrahamic religions (mainly Christianity, but also Islam and Judaism) of which creationism is an instance—and he explicitly gives a long string of pointers to explain the problems with it in the book.
It seems that we understand different things by “had nothing to do with”. Suppose someone writes a book about the rise and fall of Nazism in Germany, with a particular emphasis on where Hitler’s hatred of the Jews came from and how he was able to get so many other people to share it, or at least act as if they did. And suppose that at one point in the book there is a brief digression in which the author says: yes, there are some Holocaust deniers out there, and of course their position is dead wrong, and here are a few pointers to places where you can find out why, and now if you don’t mind I’m going to get back to discussing some actual history, and what a bizarre nuisance it is that I had to spend a page talking about that nonsense. -- If someone then claimed that the author of this book was putting a lot of time and effort into refuting Holocaust denialism, and someone else said “don’t be ridiculous; the book has nothing to do with Holocaust denialism, it’s about the rise of Nazism and the road to the Final Solution”, which of them would you think more reasonable?
An irrelevant question, due to a faulty analogy: creationism is a component of many of the Abrahamic religions—whereas Holocaust denialism was not part of Nazi Germany.
The problem is that debates are a dime a dozen while bestsellers are one in a million. Anyone can debate a creationist. Not many can write a compelling and popular book refuting creationism. And it’s important enough that someone like Dennett doing it may save many other people the time of trying.
It still seems to me rather like getting Einstein to teach Kindergarden kids. Yes, he can teach classes twice as big as a regular teacher. However, aren’t there one or two other things he could be getting on with?
If the kindergarten kids controlled his research funding, spent half a trillion dollars on the military every year and were in charge of deciding who got to press the nuclear button, I’m sure he would be quite happy to speak to them, and I wouldn’t stand in his way. Teaching science is not a frivolous issue that can be left to those who are merely good at it, especially when your potential audience is not a classroom or an auditorium but everyone who can read. Religions certainly don’t confine their best assets to their studies; they put their most persuasive shysters front and center. It isn’t just Michael Behe and the Discovery Institute that scientific writers are up against—it’s Billy Graham and sermons on Sunday television, too.
In any case, individual scientists aren’t that important. They seem important because they got there first, but so what? Someone was going to discover relativity, and it didn’t have to be Einstein. If there were two or three or four times as many scientists thinking about the same problems at the time, it may well not have been him. And if Dennett convinces more people to do or support science, he might find his work a lot easier. Or he might be replaced entirely by people who are way better at it than him ;)
And, in fact, Einstein did put quite a bit of work into political activism, which on the face of it would be as much a waste of his talents as teaching small children, because he thought the danger of nuclear war was very great and that he might be a useful advocate against it.
Yes, they debate with theists all the time. Are you really going to make me demonstrate that theists are not the same as biblical creationists and that the debate over the existence of God is not the same as the debate over evolution?
Richard Dawkins argued with Ben Stein in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008), although he was duped into believing it would just be an interview about religion.
And interestingly enough, he admitted that there was a non-trivial chance that life on earth was designed (excactly the IDers’ claim!), albet with the designers themselves having arisen by a process like evolution if that were the case.
What exactly is the epistemological status of, “I think life on earth could have been designed by a higher intelligence, but, like, not when speaking to a creationist”?
The IDers’ claim is not exactly “that there is a non-trivial chance that life on earth was designed”. It’s that there’s compelling evidence that life on earth actually was designed.
Although the IDers generally say that ID-as-such has nothing to say about the identity of the designer, it’s notable that (1) they are almost all conservative Christians and (2) probably the single most prominent ID advocate, William Dembski, has said in so many words that “Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory”. (Though there is some reason to think that Michael Behe thinks some features of life on earth were intelligently designed by the devil—at least, that seems to me the most charitable interpretation of what he’s said about the malaria parasite.)
I would be interested to know if you have any evidence for the claim that when talking to creationists Dawkins denies the possibility that life on earth could have been designed (by some other entity with finite power and knowledge that arose evolutionarily, of course).
I think you might perhaps want to be a bit more careful about your own epistemic status...
I think you might perhaps want to be a bit more careful about your own epistemic status...
RAOW! Did I signal that I’m on the wrong “team” there? FWIW, Robin Hanson brought up the same thing here.
The IDers’ claim is not exactly “that there is a non-trivial chance that life on earth was designed”. It’s that there’s compelling evidence that life on earth actually was designed.
Yes, the probabilities are different, but critics of ID consistently, incessantly argue that ID and related concepts are not just wrong, but incoherent and totally outside the realm of science. Don’t you think it’s significant that Dawkins—without probably realizing it—just admitted that there’s a 1% chance of this incoherent, unscientific idea being true?
Although the IDers generally say that ID-as-such has nothing to say about the identity of the designer, it’s notable that …
Nope, not a good enough reason for refusing to address the case as presented without reference to the persons presenting it.
I would be interested to know if you have any evidence for the claim that when talking to creationists Dawkins denies the possibility that life on earth could have been designed (by some other entity with finite power and knowledge that arose evolutionarily, of course).
Well of course Dawkin’s doesn’t deny it when talking to Ben Stein ;-) But if you’re asking if there’s evidence Dawkins changes his claims when talking to creationists, well, sure, for one thing, he changes his claims to ”...” when talking to creationists by virtue of not debating them.
But as for the fundamental issue: all across YouTube and the blogosphere, anti-creationists (sorry, don’t know a better term to use, suggest a better one rather than criticize) were absolutely livid that Stein presented a Dawkins interview that he got under false pretenses and that this somehow makes the claims of the interviewees less significant. Now tell me, for purposes of ascertaining what Dawkins believes, why does it matter whether Dawkins made a statement in an interview with a creationist vs. in an interview “about” religion?
So that’s why I ask about the epistemological status of “I believe this, but not in a way that creationists are ever supposed to hear”.
The point is, when people like Dawkins so horribly fail at the use of probabilities, it makes it easier for people like me to be a devil’s advocate for creationists.
No, you said something I thought was obviously unreasonable. There’s a difference.
critics of ID consistently, incessantly argue that ID and related concepts are not just wrong, but incoherent and totally outside the realm of science.
Sorry, but if “related concepts” includes the possibility that life on earth might have been designed (really truly without any implication that the designer need be supernatural) then I don’t believe you.
(Two examples of such “related concepts”: In The God Delusion—notable among Dawkins’s works, of course, for its consistent open-mindedness towards religious ideas[1] -- Dawkins says, in so many words, (a) that it’s very likely that there are intelligent aliens whose powers we would readily classify as godlike, and (b) that if a genuine instance of “irreducible complexity” could be found, then indeed Darwinian evolution would be dead.)
Nope, not a good enough reason for refusing to address the case as presented without reference to the persons presenting it.
OK, so you don’t consider it a good enough reason. However, if Dawkins does—and it’s not hard to see why he might—it seems to me that your sneering at his “epistemologicical status” is un-called-for.
he changes his claims to ”...” when talking to creationists by virtue of not debating them.
Excuse me, but are you even slightly serious? (Perhaps I’ve made the mistake of responding seriously to what’s just 100% trolling, in which case I hereby apologize to anyone whose time I’ve wasted.) In what possible world is there any equivalence, as far as “epistemological status” goes, between (1) “Dawkins says one thing to one set of people and another incompatible thing to another set of people”—your earlier assertion—and (2) “Dawkins says one thing to one set of people and doesn’t talk to another set of people”?
all across YouTube [...] anti-creationists [...] were absolutely livid
What, please, does that have to do with Dawkins’s opinions, or practices, or attitudes, or honesty, or intellectual integrity?
for purposes of ascertaining what Dawkins believes, why does it matter whether he made a statement in an interview with a creationist vs. in an interview “about” religion?
I’m not aware that anyone has said it does. Would you care to make your argument a bit more explicit at this point?
when people like Dawkins so horribly fail at the use of probabilities
Er, is it just me or is this a complete change of subject?
it makes it easier for people like me to be a devil’s advocate for creationists.
Why should Dawkins, or anyone else, care how easy it is for someone to be a devil’s advocate for creationists? If what you actually mean is that it makes it easier for creationists to be advocates for creationists, then that would be more to the point, but it’s not quite clear to me what you’re now arguing. Earlier on, it looked like you were casting aspersions on Dawkins’s honesty or integrity or something; now it seems you’ve switched to commenting on his tactics.
Doesn’t that get me a little leeway on the tribalism?
Afraid not. It is my role (as Machiavelli’s advocate) to be as unreasonable in my interpretation of your position as I think I can get away with. ‘Devil’s Advocacy’ is seldom fully appreciated, even with warnings and it is (or would be) my role to encourage that. You can only appeal to Devil’s Advocacy so many times without appearing insecure, a defeat from which I would benefit far more than in merely proving you to be out-of-group.
No, it doesn’t matter if your arguments are good ones. It doesn’t matter if your contribution adds much needed rigour and balance to the discussion. It doesn’t matter if your efforts probing and challenging allows the in group to more clearly understand and communicate their position. Being a team player isn’t about doing what’s good for the team, it’s about playing the team.
That Robin Hanson has argued for your position helps, but once again I get to benefit from any doubt. On topics that are difficult or unintuitive Robin or Eliezer can expect effort to be expended understanding them before their controversial claims are harvested for status. But the topics are still difficult to understand or controversial so take some time to become a norm. Until that time you are still a ripe target if you express them yourself without the high status advocacy evidenced somewhere in the context.
But be careful. Make too much effort to convey that you are supporting the position of the high status guy and I can insinuate that you are a sycophant. Yes, it’s absurd to claim that you are both out-of-group and a sycophantic in-grouper, but an even moderately competent debater will get away with such nonsense. A token effort at subtlety and a couple of posts buffer in between are more than enough. After all, nobody is going to stand up for the out-of-group guy. That usually applies even if ‘stand up for’ is replaced with ‘even become conscious of the absurdity of the accusations levelled at’.
I’m afraid playing Devil’s Advocate just gives wannabe-angels a chance to try to prove that they’re the next Archangel Gabriel.
Interviewing someone is not the same as debating them. Dawkins interviewed all sorts of crazy people for his recent TV series “The root of all evil?” and “The enemies of reason”; doing so did not give them credibility in the way that holding a debate with one of them might have.
Indeed—Dawkins’ team controlled the camera, and could edit at they chose fit. No doubt any points the opponents might have made to give themselves credibility were edited out.
Seriously, these are often called “informal debates”. I would grant that they are not formal debates. They consist of animated discussions between the parties over a debating point, held in public. Even writing books enters into the public debate on the topic. My point is that science writers are spending their time on a point of no scientific interest. Dennet was doing science—but it was a relatively obscure branch of sociology associated with how people acquire and perpetuate their delusions—not a terribly inspiring area.
You’ve now completely lost the point of the initial discussion. Eliezer proposed having creationists debate students rather than credentialed scientists so as to maintain the institutions that sustain the marketplace of ideas while simultaneously making it clear that one should not consider creationists and scientists equally credible. Your initial comment was that creationists don’t need to debate students since they can debate all these famous atheist science writers. You haven’t been able to provide any recent (read: in the last two decades) examples of any of the people you named debating evolution with creationists in a formal setting. You seem bothered by the fact that the people you listed spend so much time dealing with creationism. But even if they were engaged in work on creationism for significant periods of time that doesn’t change the fact that they aren’t willing to engage creationists on an equal footing. Thus, the rationale for Eliezer’s proposal remains.
It strikes me that you may have just wished to complain about public intellectuals spending time on creationism and that you comment as such on this post because it was related. But if thats the case you really need to clarify that because as it stands you comments make very little sense in the context of Eliezer’s initial post. Look at the karma, its time to update.
Of course if this was you intent it still doesn’t change the fact that your list of public intellectuals at fault is really strange. Most of them aren’t biologists. Most of them work on issues unrelated to creationism. A few do more work on interpretations of evolution, but in that case the work is related to important questions in philosophy of science and philosophy of biology. The only person you named that seems to spend a preponderance of his time explaining basic science is Dawkins. And I don’t really see any reason to think Dawkins would be doing better than average work in research biology.
Re: You haven’t been able to provide any recent (read: in the last two decades) examples of any of the people you named debating evolution with creationists in a formal setting.
This guy was formally debated last month—he’s an evangelical Christian who believes in the virgin birth, immaculate conception, resurrection, the holy trinity, god’s covenant with the jews, a designed universe—and is from the Discovery Institute. A big enough nitwit for you?
Re: Your initial comment was that creationists don’t need to debate students since they can debate all these famous atheist science writers.
No it wasn’t. What I actually said was:
“Creationists don’t have to debate college students—they have Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christoper Hitchens, Sam Harris, P Z Myers, Robert Wright—who all seem quite prepared to stoop down to their level as part of some kind of “gutter outreach” program.”
I didn’t say the “stooping” was done via formal debates. That was an inference on your part. My list was of people who had recently bothered to write whole books on the subject—plus P Z Myers—who also apparently spends an enormous amount of time on the issue.
The topic under discussion is debates with creationists. You’ve claimed that the term debate should include books, blog posts and disagreeable interviews. But that definition is over broad for purposes of this discussion because it includes mediums that don’t come with the ‘giving credibility’ issues which brought about this post. The whole post was about why it would be best to pair creationists with students- all of the examples were like this. You don’t get pairing like that with people writing books. The whole back drop of all of this is several people leaving bloggingheads.tv because creationists were debated there. The people who left bh.tv have probably blogged about creationist issues before- but if that counted as debating in our context then it would be weird for them to quit blogging heads over someone else doing the debating.
Btw, of the people you listed only one has written a book on the subject of creationism. That book was published in 1986.
(I think I’m done with this thread as I’ve done my due diligence correcting errors.)
I don’t really see why you don’t get it: EY says creationists can debate college students. TT points out that they are already getting plenty of attention—as a result of all the TLC lavished on them by the “new atheists”. They appear on atheist documentaries, interview atheists on their documentaries, and generally bathe in the resulting media circus. There are many books written by learned men explaining why traditional religion is nonsense. Observers might be forgiven for thinking that there was some kind of real controversy here—instead of just a plague of ignorance and superstition.
You don’t get it. Different forms of engagement cause different amounts of prestige to flow. Writing a book mocking UFO cults doesn’t transfer prestige to UFO cults, but debating their leader in business suits does.
I am not clear on where I am supposed to have claimed equal effects on prestige.
People writing serious books about how there are no UFOs would probably have much the same effect as if they wrote serious books about how there is no God—it would make people think that there was a real issue there that was worth discussing and spending time on.
Ridicule is a bit different. Books by comedians taking the piss out of religious idiocy would not induce the same type of comments from me. For example, note that Pat Condell [http://www.patcondell.net/] was not in my list—even though he evidently spends a lot of time on religious issues.
My point is that science writers are spending their time on a point of no scientific interest.
Science writers aren’t scientists. They aren’t looking for scientific interest. They’re trying to educate the broad public about science. The most important subjects, to them, are the “most wrong” beliefs contradicting science that are common in the audience. They correctly try to fix those, even though the beliefs’ alleged theories (“a GOD created the universe in 7 days 6000 years ago!”) aren’t of any scientific interest.
Your point is perhaps that scientists shouldn’t become science writers because it’s lower-status or less beneficial work. But people very rarely choose work according to what is objectively most beneficial to humanity...
Someone rather more sceptical might propose that these authors are interested in selling books—are inspired by The God Delusion’s 1.5 million copies, and want in on the debate—irrespective of its scientific relevance—or lack thereof.
We have certainly have had a recent rush of top science writers towards the theistic gutter. I preferred it when they were talking about science. Maybe the sheer number of people in the gutter mean it is an interesting place to go. However, from my perspective, engaging with the theists gives them undeserved credibility, and effectively takes science writers out of circulation—by getting them to deal with mindless drivel all day.
In education, the most conventional structure is a ladder, with people teaching those a bit below them. Here we see those at the top reaching down to teach those at the bottom. Anyone can teach those at the bottom—it’s easy. The problem with those at the top doing it is it takes them away from their regular roles—at the top is important—it’s the leading edge, where progress happens.
If this were a plot by theists to take the science enthusiasts out of their usual orbits—from where they could teach and inspire the brightest of the next generation—I would have to say it is going well.
Anyone can teach at them, maybe. It’s easy enough to tell them, “there is no god, and evolution is true”. The hard thing is to make the masses at the bottom rung believe it. Even our best rhetoricians and scientists from way up the ladder have been having only meager success (measured against the amount of people in the world who profess belief in creationism).
Creationists don’t have to debate college students—they have Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christoper Hitchens, Sam Harris, P Z Myers, Robert Wright—who all seem quite prepared to stoop down to their level as part of some kind of “gutter outreach” program.
There is a good point hidden here: they can indeed debate someone like Christopher Hitchens, a respected man of letters, who, though not scientifically trained, is adept enough at exposing creationism for the futile folly it is.
Some of these people are nonstoopers. I don’t know if all of them are.
They “stoop”—in the sense of writing a lot of material on the topic.
It seems a shame to waste so many science writers on the area. If the anti-science brigade had aimed to waste the time of the science enthusiasts with unscientific trivia—in order to prevent them from leading and educating real young scientists from the front—I would have to say they had won. Rarely have so many science enthusiasts expended so much time and energy on such garbage.
I particularly lament the loss of Dawkins. His latest book lays out the evidence for an established scientific theory—for the sake of the ignorant American hordes. That’s two whole books from Britain’s leading science writer that target those in the scientific gutter. I would rather people like him showed the way forwards from the front.
Huh? None of those people debate creationists.
Sure they do. Most of them have even written full length books on the topic of how theistic religion is bullshit. It seems like a pretty dead point to me. Scientists have not had any truck with god for a hundred years or so now. Scientifically speaking, it’s rather like writing books on how the earth is round.
It’s not a scientific issue—and hasn’t been for a long time now. It is more a matter for educators and politicians.
Considering how many people in the world still believe in creationism, writing popular books about its faults is a worthy mission. It is not the same as debating creationists, though. Debating someone gives them the chance to positively espouse their ideas, whereas in writing about those ideas you can take a purely critical view. I mean, The God Delusion is no more a debate with theists than Atlas Shrugged is a debate with communists.
“Yes, of course I’d much rather have been spending my time working on consciousness and the brain, or on the evolution of cooperation, for instance, or free will, but I felt a moral and political obligation to drop everything for a few years and put my shoulder to the wheel doing a dirty job that I thought somebody had to do.”—Daniel Dennett.
Yes, someone had to do it—but since the job resembles mucking out the public toilets, it really shouldn’t have fallen to Daniel Dennett.
Dennett’s book had nothing to do with creationism.
Uh, check “creationism” in the index.
OK, I did. A page and a half, in the middle of something explicitly labelled (on the previous page) as a digression, explaining that he isn’t going to waste space arguing against creationism. One endnote, supporting that with some pointers to places where, if you want argument against creationism, you can find it. One endnote saying that a certain kind of behaviour, allegedly engaged in by many theists and annoying to Dennett, is also characteristic of the advocates of “Intelligent Design”. That’s it.
Since your point was (apparently) that Dennett wasted a lot of time and effort addressing creationism, I’m having trouble seeing how this supports it. (Well, actually, what happened is that someone said that people like Dennett don’t waste time engaging with creationism, and you said “but they write books attacking theistic religion” (I’m paraphrasing, I hope not misleadingly) as if that were the same thing, and in what follows you’ve repeatedly responded to comments about creationism in ways that would kinda make sense if they were comments about theism instead. So I don’t know whether pointing out one more time that Dennett’s book was not about creationism will help...)
Many people seem to use the term “Creationism” as though they think it is a synonym for “young earth creationism”—the 6,000 year squad.
If you look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creationism
...what it says is:
“Creationism is the religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe were created in some form by a supernatural being or beings, commonly a single deity.”
Many followers of Abrahamic religions appear to think that.
I think this explains some of the misunderstandings in this thread. For example, the apparent controversy over whether Dinesh D’Souza is a creationist. He has written: ‘the Genesis enigma is solved, and its account of creation is vindicated not as some vague parable but as a strikingly accurate account of how the universe came to be’. That sort of thing makes him a creationist in my view. However, he is no young earth creationist.
If you define “creationism” so broadly that it encompasses all theistic religion then I will readily agree that yes, one of the things Dennett’s book is about is “creationism”. Congratulations. On the other hand, that fact is then of little relevance to the question of whether Dawkins and Dennett and others like them should, or do, “refuse to debate creationists” since (everybody, I suggest, knows) the word as used in that phrase is not meant to be equivalent to “theists”.
Whaat?!? Creationism is about a supernatural creator of the universe and man. Theism is about the existence of god—sometimes an interventionist god. They are different concepts. Theism is typically a broader concept than creationism—since you can believe in a god that answers prayers without also believing that she created the universe.
The inaccurate conclusion that I have these concepts muddled together seems to be without a basis in anything I have said. I do not know where you are getting it from :-(
I’m getting it from the fact that (as I said earlier) you’ve taken a statement about “creationists” and disputed it on the basis that the corresponding statement with “theists” in place of “creationists” is false.
Right—well, leaving aside the whole issue that I did no such thing, that appears to be some faulty logic you have there—creationists are theists (if you believe that god created the universe and man, you at least believe in god) - but not all theists are creationists.
Uh, my point was that the previous poster’s claim that “Dennett’s book had nothing to do with creationism” was flat wrong.
Dennett’s book is about the Abrahamic religions (mainly Christianity, but also Islam and Judaism) of which creationism is an instance—and he explicitly gives a long string of pointers to explain the problems with it in the book.
It seems that we understand different things by “had nothing to do with”. Suppose someone writes a book about the rise and fall of Nazism in Germany, with a particular emphasis on where Hitler’s hatred of the Jews came from and how he was able to get so many other people to share it, or at least act as if they did. And suppose that at one point in the book there is a brief digression in which the author says: yes, there are some Holocaust deniers out there, and of course their position is dead wrong, and here are a few pointers to places where you can find out why, and now if you don’t mind I’m going to get back to discussing some actual history, and what a bizarre nuisance it is that I had to spend a page talking about that nonsense. -- If someone then claimed that the author of this book was putting a lot of time and effort into refuting Holocaust denialism, and someone else said “don’t be ridiculous; the book has nothing to do with Holocaust denialism, it’s about the rise of Nazism and the road to the Final Solution”, which of them would you think more reasonable?
An irrelevant question, due to a faulty analogy: creationism is a component of many of the Abrahamic religions—whereas Holocaust denialism was not part of Nazi Germany.
The problem is that debates are a dime a dozen while bestsellers are one in a million. Anyone can debate a creationist. Not many can write a compelling and popular book refuting creationism. And it’s important enough that someone like Dennett doing it may save many other people the time of trying.
It still seems to me rather like getting Einstein to teach Kindergarden kids. Yes, he can teach classes twice as big as a regular teacher. However, aren’t there one or two other things he could be getting on with?
If the kindergarten kids controlled his research funding, spent half a trillion dollars on the military every year and were in charge of deciding who got to press the nuclear button, I’m sure he would be quite happy to speak to them, and I wouldn’t stand in his way. Teaching science is not a frivolous issue that can be left to those who are merely good at it, especially when your potential audience is not a classroom or an auditorium but everyone who can read. Religions certainly don’t confine their best assets to their studies; they put their most persuasive shysters front and center. It isn’t just Michael Behe and the Discovery Institute that scientific writers are up against—it’s Billy Graham and sermons on Sunday television, too.
In any case, individual scientists aren’t that important. They seem important because they got there first, but so what? Someone was going to discover relativity, and it didn’t have to be Einstein. If there were two or three or four times as many scientists thinking about the same problems at the time, it may well not have been him. And if Dennett convinces more people to do or support science, he might find his work a lot easier. Or he might be replaced entirely by people who are way better at it than him ;)
And, in fact, Einstein did put quite a bit of work into political activism, which on the face of it would be as much a waste of his talents as teaching small children, because he thought the danger of nuclear war was very great and that he might be a useful advocate against it.
Yes, they debate with theists all the time. Are you really going to make me demonstrate that theists are not the same as biblical creationists and that the debate over the existence of God is not the same as the debate over evolution?
E.g.: “Dinesh D’Souza Debates Daniel Dennett”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw7J15TeDG4
“Richard Dawkins and Edgar Andrews”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_jjO7dG2Tc
The subject of the Dennett-D’Souza debate is “Is God a man-made invention?”. It is not “Did God create the world in seven days?”
The Dawkins-Andrews debate is 23 years old. The description of the video actually says Dawkins no longer debates creationists. See here.
Richard Dawkins argued with Ben Stein in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008), although he was duped into believing it would just be an interview about religion.
And interestingly enough, he admitted that there was a non-trivial chance that life on earth was designed (excactly the IDers’ claim!), albet with the designers themselves having arisen by a process like evolution if that were the case.
What exactly is the epistemological status of, “I think life on earth could have been designed by a higher intelligence, but, like, not when speaking to a creationist”?
The IDers’ claim is not exactly “that there is a non-trivial chance that life on earth was designed”. It’s that there’s compelling evidence that life on earth actually was designed.
Although the IDers generally say that ID-as-such has nothing to say about the identity of the designer, it’s notable that (1) they are almost all conservative Christians and (2) probably the single most prominent ID advocate, William Dembski, has said in so many words that “Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory”. (Though there is some reason to think that Michael Behe thinks some features of life on earth were intelligently designed by the devil—at least, that seems to me the most charitable interpretation of what he’s said about the malaria parasite.)
I would be interested to know if you have any evidence for the claim that when talking to creationists Dawkins denies the possibility that life on earth could have been designed (by some other entity with finite power and knowledge that arose evolutionarily, of course).
I think you might perhaps want to be a bit more careful about your own epistemic status...
RAOW! Did I signal that I’m on the wrong “team” there? FWIW, Robin Hanson brought up the same thing here.
Yes, the probabilities are different, but critics of ID consistently, incessantly argue that ID and related concepts are not just wrong, but incoherent and totally outside the realm of science. Don’t you think it’s significant that Dawkins—without probably realizing it—just admitted that there’s a 1% chance of this incoherent, unscientific idea being true?
Nope, not a good enough reason for refusing to address the case as presented without reference to the persons presenting it.
Well of course Dawkin’s doesn’t deny it when talking to Ben Stein ;-) But if you’re asking if there’s evidence Dawkins changes his claims when talking to creationists, well, sure, for one thing, he changes his claims to ”...” when talking to creationists by virtue of not debating them.
But as for the fundamental issue: all across YouTube and the blogosphere, anti-creationists (sorry, don’t know a better term to use, suggest a better one rather than criticize) were absolutely livid that Stein presented a Dawkins interview that he got under false pretenses and that this somehow makes the claims of the interviewees less significant. Now tell me, for purposes of ascertaining what Dawkins believes, why does it matter whether Dawkins made a statement in an interview with a creationist vs. in an interview “about” religion?
So that’s why I ask about the epistemological status of “I believe this, but not in a way that creationists are ever supposed to hear”.
The point is, when people like Dawkins so horribly fail at the use of probabilities, it makes it easier for people like me to be a devil’s advocate for creationists.
No, you said something I thought was obviously unreasonable. There’s a difference.
Sorry, but if “related concepts” includes the possibility that life on earth might have been designed (really truly without any implication that the designer need be supernatural) then I don’t believe you.
(Two examples of such “related concepts”: In The God Delusion—notable among Dawkins’s works, of course, for its consistent open-mindedness towards religious ideas[1] -- Dawkins says, in so many words, (a) that it’s very likely that there are intelligent aliens whose powers we would readily classify as godlike, and (b) that if a genuine instance of “irreducible complexity” could be found, then indeed Darwinian evolution would be dead.)
OK, so you don’t consider it a good enough reason. However, if Dawkins does—and it’s not hard to see why he might—it seems to me that your sneering at his “epistemologicical status” is un-called-for.
Excuse me, but are you even slightly serious? (Perhaps I’ve made the mistake of responding seriously to what’s just 100% trolling, in which case I hereby apologize to anyone whose time I’ve wasted.) In what possible world is there any equivalence, as far as “epistemological status” goes, between (1) “Dawkins says one thing to one set of people and another incompatible thing to another set of people”—your earlier assertion—and (2) “Dawkins says one thing to one set of people and doesn’t talk to another set of people”?
What, please, does that have to do with Dawkins’s opinions, or practices, or attitudes, or honesty, or intellectual integrity?
I’m not aware that anyone has said it does. Would you care to make your argument a bit more explicit at this point?
Er, is it just me or is this a complete change of subject?
Why should Dawkins, or anyone else, care how easy it is for someone to be a devil’s advocate for creationists? If what you actually mean is that it makes it easier for creationists to be advocates for creationists, then that would be more to the point, but it’s not quite clear to me what you’re now arguing. Earlier on, it looked like you were casting aspersions on Dawkins’s honesty or integrity or something; now it seems you’ve switched to commenting on his tactics.
[1] Why yes, that was a joke.
Yes, you’ve definitely been saying things that could be twisted for the purpose of gaining status at your expense.
I warned that I’ve played devils advocate on this issue. I’ve argued a position held by Robin Hanson. And I’m on Less-muthaf—in’-Wrong-dot-com.
Doesn’t that get me a little leeway on the tribalism?
Afraid not. It is my role (as Machiavelli’s advocate) to be as unreasonable in my interpretation of your position as I think I can get away with. ‘Devil’s Advocacy’ is seldom fully appreciated, even with warnings and it is (or would be) my role to encourage that. You can only appeal to Devil’s Advocacy so many times without appearing insecure, a defeat from which I would benefit far more than in merely proving you to be out-of-group.
No, it doesn’t matter if your arguments are good ones. It doesn’t matter if your contribution adds much needed rigour and balance to the discussion. It doesn’t matter if your efforts probing and challenging allows the in group to more clearly understand and communicate their position. Being a team player isn’t about doing what’s good for the team, it’s about playing the team.
That Robin Hanson has argued for your position helps, but once again I get to benefit from any doubt. On topics that are difficult or unintuitive Robin or Eliezer can expect effort to be expended understanding them before their controversial claims are harvested for status. But the topics are still difficult to understand or controversial so take some time to become a norm. Until that time you are still a ripe target if you express them yourself without the high status advocacy evidenced somewhere in the context.
But be careful. Make too much effort to convey that you are supporting the position of the high status guy and I can insinuate that you are a sycophant. Yes, it’s absurd to claim that you are both out-of-group and a sycophantic in-grouper, but an even moderately competent debater will get away with such nonsense. A token effort at subtlety and a couple of posts buffer in between are more than enough. After all, nobody is going to stand up for the out-of-group guy. That usually applies even if ‘stand up for’ is replaced with ‘even become conscious of the absurdity of the accusations levelled at’.
I’m afraid playing Devil’s Advocate just gives wannabe-angels a chance to try to prove that they’re the next Archangel Gabriel.
I’m not convinced our barriers for entry are all that high.
The tribalist I complained about wasn’t a low-karma newcomer ;-) (snark removed)
I would be interested to know what, as a matter of general principle, you think is sufficient evidence to justify calling someone a “tribalist”.
He’s been saying that for years—but it’s simply not true—e.g. see:
“Richard Dawkins interviews creationist John Mackay”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YorA7046Klo
Interviewing someone is not the same as debating them. Dawkins interviewed all sorts of crazy people for his recent TV series “The root of all evil?” and “The enemies of reason”; doing so did not give them credibility in the way that holding a debate with one of them might have.
Indeed—Dawkins’ team controlled the camera, and could edit at they chose fit. No doubt any points the opponents might have made to give themselves credibility were edited out.
Seriously, these are often called “informal debates”. I would grant that they are not formal debates. They consist of animated discussions between the parties over a debating point, held in public. Even writing books enters into the public debate on the topic. My point is that science writers are spending their time on a point of no scientific interest. Dennet was doing science—but it was a relatively obscure branch of sociology associated with how people acquire and perpetuate their delusions—not a terribly inspiring area.
You’ve now completely lost the point of the initial discussion. Eliezer proposed having creationists debate students rather than credentialed scientists so as to maintain the institutions that sustain the marketplace of ideas while simultaneously making it clear that one should not consider creationists and scientists equally credible. Your initial comment was that creationists don’t need to debate students since they can debate all these famous atheist science writers. You haven’t been able to provide any recent (read: in the last two decades) examples of any of the people you named debating evolution with creationists in a formal setting. You seem bothered by the fact that the people you listed spend so much time dealing with creationism. But even if they were engaged in work on creationism for significant periods of time that doesn’t change the fact that they aren’t willing to engage creationists on an equal footing. Thus, the rationale for Eliezer’s proposal remains.
It strikes me that you may have just wished to complain about public intellectuals spending time on creationism and that you comment as such on this post because it was related. But if thats the case you really need to clarify that because as it stands you comments make very little sense in the context of Eliezer’s initial post. Look at the karma, its time to update.
Of course if this was you intent it still doesn’t change the fact that your list of public intellectuals at fault is really strange. Most of them aren’t biologists. Most of them work on issues unrelated to creationism. A few do more work on interpretations of evolution, but in that case the work is related to important questions in philosophy of science and philosophy of biology. The only person you named that seems to spend a preponderance of his time explaining basic science is Dawkins. And I don’t really see any reason to think Dawkins would be doing better than average work in research biology.
Re: You haven’t been able to provide any recent (read: in the last two decades) examples of any of the people you named debating evolution with creationists in a formal setting.
Your claim about my actions is inaccurate—and I expect it is because you need to familiarize yourself with the top of this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creationism
If you want more evidence, try this:
“Creationism vs. Humanism: Christopher Hitchens vs. Jay Richards”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2rp_VB7MCE
This guy was formally debated last month—he’s an evangelical Christian who believes in the virgin birth, immaculate conception, resurrection, the holy trinity, god’s covenant with the jews, a designed universe—and is from the Discovery Institute. A big enough nitwit for you?
Re: Your initial comment was that creationists don’t need to debate students since they can debate all these famous atheist science writers.
No it wasn’t. What I actually said was:
“Creationists don’t have to debate college students—they have Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christoper Hitchens, Sam Harris, P Z Myers, Robert Wright—who all seem quite prepared to stoop down to their level as part of some kind of “gutter outreach” program.”
I didn’t say the “stooping” was done via formal debates. That was an inference on your part. My list was of people who had recently bothered to write whole books on the subject—plus P Z Myers—who also apparently spends an enormous amount of time on the issue.
I think my paraphrase was more than satisfactory.
The topic under discussion is debates with creationists. You’ve claimed that the term debate should include books, blog posts and disagreeable interviews. But that definition is over broad for purposes of this discussion because it includes mediums that don’t come with the ‘giving credibility’ issues which brought about this post. The whole post was about why it would be best to pair creationists with students- all of the examples were like this. You don’t get pairing like that with people writing books. The whole back drop of all of this is several people leaving bloggingheads.tv because creationists were debated there. The people who left bh.tv have probably blogged about creationist issues before- but if that counted as debating in our context then it would be weird for them to quit blogging heads over someone else doing the debating.
Btw, of the people you listed only one has written a book on the subject of creationism. That book was published in 1986.
(I think I’m done with this thread as I’ve done my due diligence correcting errors.)
I don’t really see why you don’t get it: EY says creationists can debate college students. TT points out that they are already getting plenty of attention—as a result of all the TLC lavished on them by the “new atheists”. They appear on atheist documentaries, interview atheists on their documentaries, and generally bathe in the resulting media circus. There are many books written by learned men explaining why traditional religion is nonsense. Observers might be forgiven for thinking that there was some kind of real controversy here—instead of just a plague of ignorance and superstition.
You don’t get it. Different forms of engagement cause different amounts of prestige to flow. Writing a book mocking UFO cults doesn’t transfer prestige to UFO cults, but debating their leader in business suits does.
I am not clear on where I am supposed to have claimed equal effects on prestige.
People writing serious books about how there are no UFOs would probably have much the same effect as if they wrote serious books about how there is no God—it would make people think that there was a real issue there that was worth discussing and spending time on.
Ridicule is a bit different. Books by comedians taking the piss out of religious idiocy would not induce the same type of comments from me. For example, note that Pat Condell [http://www.patcondell.net/] was not in my list—even though he evidently spends a lot of time on religious issues.
Science writers aren’t scientists. They aren’t looking for scientific interest. They’re trying to educate the broad public about science. The most important subjects, to them, are the “most wrong” beliefs contradicting science that are common in the audience. They correctly try to fix those, even though the beliefs’ alleged theories (“a GOD created the universe in 7 days 6000 years ago!”) aren’t of any scientific interest.
Your point is perhaps that scientists shouldn’t become science writers because it’s lower-status or less beneficial work. But people very rarely choose work according to what is objectively most beneficial to humanity...
Someone rather more sceptical might propose that these authors are interested in selling books—are inspired by The God Delusion’s 1.5 million copies, and want in on the debate—irrespective of its scientific relevance—or lack thereof.
We have certainly have had a recent rush of top science writers towards the theistic gutter. I preferred it when they were talking about science. Maybe the sheer number of people in the gutter mean it is an interesting place to go. However, from my perspective, engaging with the theists gives them undeserved credibility, and effectively takes science writers out of circulation—by getting them to deal with mindless drivel all day.
In education, the most conventional structure is a ladder, with people teaching those a bit below them. Here we see those at the top reaching down to teach those at the bottom. Anyone can teach those at the bottom—it’s easy. The problem with those at the top doing it is it takes them away from their regular roles—at the top is important—it’s the leading edge, where progress happens.
If this were a plot by theists to take the science enthusiasts out of their usual orbits—from where they could teach and inspire the brightest of the next generation—I would have to say it is going well.
Anyone can teach at them, maybe. It’s easy enough to tell them, “there is no god, and evolution is true”. The hard thing is to make the masses at the bottom rung believe it. Even our best rhetoricians and scientists from way up the ladder have been having only meager success (measured against the amount of people in the world who profess belief in creationism).
Sure: that’s one of the properties of blind faith—no amount of reasoned argument helps.
They recognize that it is the devil talking—and they know his reputation as a debater—so the fingers go in their ears and we hear the “la-la” song.