Certainly one of the first things I thought about as a maturing child was “Why is there polio? Why are there diseases?” If there is a good God why are there these things? The answer of the religious person is “God has a plan we don’t understand.” That wasn’t enough for me. There are people who don’t know anything about science. One of the reasons I recommend Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, is that basically he explains the relationship between science and atheism. But I don’t think people are really persuaded into atheism by books or by debates or anything like that. I think people become atheists because they think about the world around them.

When Andrew Sullivan posted a link to Jacoby’s interview at his blog, a minister reader of his took exception:

Why is there polio? Why are there diseases? If there is a good God why are there these things? The answer of the religious person is “God has a plan we don’t understand.”

That is not the religious answer. That is a religious answer. It happens to be a bad answer. It is bad theology. Atheism is a rational rejection of bad theology – and more power to them. But there is also good theology out there – good religious answers which do justice both to our reason and to our spirits.

It’s interesting that the minister is so dismissive of Jacoby’s answer. What she is proposing is essentially the idea of “skeptical theism.” Skeptical theists go a bit farther than Jacoby, arguing not simply that, as it happens, we don’t understand God’s plan, but also that, as finite human creatures, we can not reasonably even expect to understand it. Far from being some fringe answer offered by theologically naive people, it is one of the most common arguments served up by philosophers of religion.

I can understand why the minister would be dismissive. Among its other problems, skeptical theism is not so much a counter to the problem of evil as it is a concession that there is no reasonable answer to be had. So let us have a look at what he regards as good theology; the kind that does justice to our reason and our spirits.

Why does God allow polio and disease and other bad things to happen to good people? Because God is not an omnipotent manipulator of the world. Because God works through the system, not over-powering it. Because we have free will that allows us to create justice and love, and also evil. God’s power is not coercive (“you must not do that horrible thing and I will stay your hand”) but patiently persuasive (“there’s a better way, make a better choice”). God’s “plan” was not to create polio, or human beings, but to set the conditions and watch what we do, and to use that “still, small voice” to gently urge all creation toward divine ideals of deep rich experience, consciousness, love, marvelous beauty, and thoughtful theology.

As any teenage theologian can see, the idea of a simultaneously all-powerful and all-loving God is impossible based on the evidence of the tragedies that befall us everyday. But there is better theology available. The churches should be better teachers. And atheists shouldn’t give up so soon.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that very little of that actually makes sense. It is not very helpful to say that God works “through the system.” He created the system, and that system makes things like polio and suffering inevitable. We can reasonably ask why the system was created as it was, when it certainly does not seem too difficult to conceive of better systems. Moreover, we can question the wisdom of God’s decision to work through the system. Is it admirable that he chooses not to overburden the system (whatever that even means)? Perhaps we should also ask about miracles. According to most versions of Christianity, God, in fact, does not always work through the system. Sometimes he chooses to indulge in a miraculous intervention. The question, then, is why does God sometimes choose to intervene and sometimes choose not to?

Nor do casual invocations of free will really help all that much. Yes, people must have the freedom to choose evil. How does that solve the problem? To choose a recent example, whose free will would have been endangered if the devices constructed by the Boston Marathon bombers had been caused to malfunction? And for all the minister’s talk about how God is gentle and persuasive and loving, traditional theology holds that he turns into quite the judgmental dictator upon our deaths.

The idea that there is good and serious theology that makes religion seem reasonable, as opposed to the naive and unsatisfying version practiced by the masses, is, for me, a complete inversion of the truth. I’ve been an atheist for as long as I’ve been old enough to think about these questions, but I didn’t start to get really contemptuous of religion until I started reading theology and the philosophy of religion in a serious way.

I don’t have much of a problem with the Christmas and Easter Christians. The people who are members of a church because it enriches their social lives, or because it provides a safe environment for their children, or simply because they find it comforting. These are people who, if you ask them point blank whether they believe the doctrines, will claim that they do, but really they don’t think about them much. If you throw the problem of evil at them they are likely to say, “How should I know why God allows evil? But every view has its existential mysteries, and I know that my faith is so satisfying in so many ways that I’m not going to sweat it if I don’t understand everything.”

I can understand that. It’s not how I choose to live, but if other people feel differently that’s fine. Rather, it’s what the theologians are doing that I find tawdry and disreputable. If it amuses them to talk to each other about their latest invented-from-whole-cloth notions for explaining God’s ways then they are welcome to do so. But let us please have no illusions that they are contributing to humanity’s grand search for truth, or that their work should be taken seriously by anyone outside their little community of believers.

The minister requests that atheists not give up so easily, and criticizes teenaged theologians for worrying about the problem of evil. I would encourage him instead to consider the possibility that he has too quickly accepted facile answers to serious questions.

Okay, just calm down. Yes, I know, she was crazy. She took some good ideas about freedom and indviduality and took them to absurd degrees. In her novels, characters say things to each other that no human beings have ever said to one another. All true.

But she certainly had her moments! I started reading the novel on a whim, and I was surprised by how gripping and suspenseful I found the story. It’s actually pretty hard to put down, as long as you don’t mind that the action is occasionally interrupted so the characters can hold forth on politics and economics.

Anyway, whatever you think of Rand, just try not to smile as you read the following excerpt. This is being spoken by Ellsworth Toohey, one of the novel’s villains. He is explaining — Screwtape letters style — how to break the spirit of people by crushing individuality, by rewarding mediocrity and punishing achievement, and by urging collectivism. The “you” in what follows refers to the imagined, would-be dictator trying to gain power by preying on people’s weaknesses.

Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it. But be careful. Don’t deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give your hand away. Don’t say reason is evil — though some have gone that far and with astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there’s something above it. What? You don’t have to be too clear about it either. The field’s inexhaustible. `Instinct’ — `Feeling’ — `Revelation’ — `Divine Intuition’ — `Dialectic Materialism.’ If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you your doctrine doesn’t make sense — you’re ready for him. You tell him there’s something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it. You’ve got him. Can you rule a thinking man? We don’t want any thinking men.

That’s pretty good!

Here’s another excerpt that made me smile. The story’s hero, Howard Roark, is a brilliant architect whose buildings are too avant garde for the unwashed masses to appreciate. He was commissioned to design a temple that would celebrate the human spirit. When the finished product was revealed, it was considered blasphemous and obscene. (The whole fiasco was orchestrated by Ellsworth Toohey specifically to discredit Roark, whom he despised as too much of an independent thinker, but we don’t need to go into that.) Roark was sued by the man who commissioned the temple, and the following excerpt takes place during the lead-up to the trial. The “he” refers to Roark. “The Banner” refers to a prominent tabloid newspaper.

He was asked for a statement, and he received a group of reporters in his office. He spoke without anger. He said, “I can’t tell anyone about my building. If I prepared a hash of words to stuff into other people’s brains, it would be an insult to them and to me. But I am glad you came here. I do have something to say. I want to ask every man who is interested in this to go and see the building, to look at it and to use the words of his own mind, if he cares to speak.”

The Banner printed the interview as follows: “Mr. Roark, who seems to be a publicity hound, received reporters with an air of swaggering insolence and stated that the public mind was hash. He did not choose to talk, but he seemed well aware of the advertising angles in the situation. All he cared about, he explained, was to have his building seen by as many people as possible.”

Yep. Sounds about right.

Prior to 1849, there was no such thing as a “normal chess set.” At least not like we think of it today. Over the centuries that chess had been played, innumerable varieties of sets of pieces were created, with regional differences in designation and appearance. As the game proliferated throughout southern Europe in the early 11th century, the rules began to evolve, the movement of the pieces were formalized, and the pieces themselves were drastically transformed from their origins in 6th century India. Originally conceived of as a field of battle, the symbolic meaning of the game changed as it gained popularity in Europe, and the pieces became stand-ins for a royal court instead of an army. Thus, the original chessmen, known as counselor, infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots, became the queen, pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively. By the 19th century, chess clubs and competitions began to appear all around the world, it became necessary to use a standardized set that would enable players from different cultures to compete without getting confused.

In 1849, that challenge would be met by the “Staunton” Chess Set.

The Staunton chess pieces are the ones we know and love today, the ones we simply think of as chess pieces. Prior to its invention, there were a wide variety of popular styles in England, such as The St George, The English Barleycorn, and the Northern Upright. To say nothing of the regional and cultural variations. But the Staunton quickly would surpass them all. Howard Staunton was a chess authority who organized many tournaments and clubs in London, and was widely considered to be one of the best players in the world. Despite its name, the iconic set was not designed by Howard Staunton.

While the Staunton design is nowadays the only one that is acceptable in tournament chess, that still leaves considerable variation in the specifics. Occasionally you will run into one of those bizarre sets where the ball on the top of the queen, and the cross on top of the king is the opposite color from the rest of the piece (so that the black queen will have a white ball on its top, and so on…) Another popular set these days has exceptionally short and fat pawns, leading to quite a comical effect.

Attention must also be paid to the material out of which the pieces are made. Plastic is the tournament standard. If you’re pieces are constantly jangling around in whatever bag you’re carrying them around in, you will inevitably acquire a few chipped pieces. You don’t want to use anything too nice. Wooden sets are far nicer, though. Proper chess pieces are also heavily weighted, so that you won’t knock them over during time scrambles.

In the above video, the math/chess teacher says, “Chess trains logical thinking. It teaches how to make decisions, trains memory, strengthens will power, motivates children to win and teaches them how to deal with defeat. It’s the only school subject that can do all this.”

That is a very interesting insight. Not only does chess help train the brain, but it also teaches children basic life skills. In our culture, we hand out trophies to winners and losers — or neglect to keep score at all — out of some misguided, politically-correct notion that we should never hurt anyone’s feelings. But, in Armenia, schools are teaching children reality: Sometimes you lose. That’s an important lesson, and it should be taught at a young age.

My high school had a student opinion magazine, and I once wrote an essay for them saying the same thing. I have some experience teaching chess to kids, and you’d be surprised how easily you can get most of them to take to it. And Berezow is right that chess teaches a lot of skills in a way that is considerably more fun than standard classroom lessons.

A lot of schools already have chess programs. In fact, kids are playing chess in record numbers. My friend Ned, who you might remember from this post, pointed out to me that if he wanted to start a chess club today everyone would just assume it was meant for kids. Go to any large chess tournament, and you will be amazed by the number of younglings. Alas, the flipside of this is that the adult game is slowly dying. Most of those kids are going to stop playing chess as they grow up. Oh well.

Anyway, let me close with two of my favorite chess quotes, both, alas, attributed to anonymous. “The ability to play chess is the sign of high intellect. The ability to play chess well is the sign of high intellect gone wrong.” And my all-time favorite, “Chess will never appeal to the masses until the masses realize that the joy of removing an enemy’s toenail with red-hot pincers pales in comparison to the joy of taking his pawn on the tenth move, and forcing him, for want of that pawn, to resign on the eighty-seventh.”

My comment is this: Wowee wow wow! What a great tournament!

This was the tournament meant to determine the next challenger for the current World Chess Champion, Viswanathan Anand of India. The participants were eight giants of the chess world, who qualified for the tournament in various ways. Going in, virtually everyone would have picked Magnus Carlsen, of Norway, as the clear favorite. Levon Aronian and Vladimir Kramnik were also plausible winners, but anyone else was a very dark horse indeed.

And that’s exactly how things played out. At the halfway point, Carlsen and Aronian were well ahead of the pack at plus three. They were completely dominant, with Kramnik, at the point, only managing a series of draws. Kramnik was a bit unlucky, since he had both Carlsen and Aronian on the ropes in their first individual games before letting them escape with draws. But no one really took him seriously when he said, at a press conference, that he had not yet given up on the tournament.

Then Kramnik got hot! He won four of his next five games, including a win against Aronian in their second game of the tournament. Carlsen, for his part, stumbled badly when he lost to cellar dweller Ivanchuk. After round twelve, with just two rounds to go, Kramnik took the lead. Suddenly he was the favorite to win the tournament, which would have been interesting, since Kramnik was the World Champion before Anand beat him to win the title. Rematch, anyone?

Round 13 seemed to be heading towards Kramnik’s coronation. Carlsen was getting nowhere as black against another cellar dweller Radjabov, while Kramnik was spanking Gelfand pretty severely. But then Gelfand found a miracle draw, and Carlsen managed to reach an endgame in which he had a slight advantage. That’s all Carlsen, needed, and after going all boa constrictor for 89 moves, he forced Radjabov to resign.

This set up what was probably the most suspenseful last round of a chess tournament in recent memory. Because of how the tie breaks worked, Kramnik needed to do strictly better than Carlsen. Either a Kramnik win against a Carlsen draw, or a Kramnik draw against a Carlsen loss, would have given Kramnik the title. Since Carlsen was playing white, it was mostly taken for granted that he would be able to make a draw at will. So Kramnik had to go gunning for a win, as black, against Ivanchuk.

What happened? Kramnik and Carlsen both lost.

Interestingly, Vassily Ivanchuk, who finished next to last and mostly was not taking the tournament very seriously, nonetheless notched up wins over both Kramnik and Carlsen.

So Carlsen wins. That is appropriate, since he has clearly been the strongest player in the world over the last two years. The fact is, I think most chess fans really wanted to see a Carlsen vs. Anand match. This is a match, incidentally, in which Carlsen will probably be considered the favorite. The event might take place as soon as November. Stay tuned!

I don’t have the patience right now to annotate one of the games, so here’s an amusing problem I came across recently. It’s white to play and mate in two. Keep in mind that the convention is that black is always moving down the board. So, that black pawn on a2 currently has no moves. If the black king moves, then the pawn will be able to promote. This was composed by the great American chess composer William Shinkman in 1894. It’s not too difficult, so have a go!

I’m sure someone will manage to leave the solution in the comments.

An old friend and mentor of mine, Ernan McMullin, was a philosopher of science widely respected in his discipline. He was also a Catholic priest. I don’t know how many times fellow philosophers at professional meetings drew me aside and asked, “Does Ernan really believe that stuff?” (He did.) Amid all the serious and generally respectful coverage of the papal resignation and the election of a new pope, I often detect an undertone of this same puzzlement. Can reflective and honest intellectuals actually believe that stuff?

Here I sketch my reasons for answering “yes.” What I offer is neither apologetics aimed at converting others nor merely personal testimony. Without claiming to speak for others, I try to articulate a position that I expect many fellow Catholics will find congenial and that non-Catholics (even those who reject all religion) may recognize as an intellectually respectable stance. Easter is the traditional time for Christians to reaffirm their faith. I want to show that we can do this without renouncing reason.

Since I am one of those who reject all religion, I am certainly interested to hear what Gutting has to say. There’s something about Roman Catholicism, at least as presented by its leaders, that I have always found especially indefensible. It is already hard to believe the theological teachings about Jesus that are a part of Protestantism no less than Catholicism. But Catholicism then adds an extra level of dubiousness, by teaching that its leaders are singularly capable of interpreting scripture, that the Pope can speak infallibly under certain circumstances, that its moral teachings are definitive, and so on. I was looking forward to Gutting’s effort to make an acceptance of such beliefs seem intellectually respectable.

Alas, I was destined for disappointment. Gutting defends none of those things. In fact, what he defends is a very theologically liberal form of Catholicism. Indeed, what he defends seems like little more than a sort of vague, cultural Catholicism. I have no objection to cultural religion, as readers of this blog are aware. My atheism did not stop me from participating in two Passover seders last week. But it does seem like a bit of a cheat to say you are going to make Catholicism seem intellectually respectable, and then not address any of the reasons people ever thought it wasn’t respectable.

Gutting continues:

Toward the end of James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, rejects the Roman Catholic faith he was raised in. A friend suggests that he might, then, become a Protestant. Stephen replies, “I said that I had lost the faith . . . but not that I had lost self-respect.” Factoring out the insult to Protestants, I would like to appropriate this Joycean mot to explain my own continuing attachment to the Catholic Church.

Factoring out the insult to Protestants? There’s not much left of the quote after you do that.

I read “self-respect” as respect for what are (to borrow the title of the philosopher Charles Taylor’s great book) the “sources of the self.” These are the sources nurturing the values that define an individual’s life. For me, there are two such sources. One is the Enlightenment, where I’m particularly inspired by Voltaire, Hume and the founders of the American republic. The other is the Catholic Church, in which I was baptized as an infant, raised by Catholic parents, and educated for 8 years of elementary school by Ursuline nuns and for 12 more years by Jesuits. For me to deny either of these sources would be to deny something central to my moral being.

The Enlightenment and the Catholic Church? Yes, that needs some explaining. But first let me explain my attachment to Catholicism. My Catholic education has left me with three deep convictions. First, it is utterly important to know, to the extent that we can, the fundamental truth about human life: where it came from, what (if anything) it is meant for, how it should be lived. Second, this truth can in principle be supported and defended by human reason. Third, the Catholic philosophical and theological tradition is a fruitful context for pursuing fundamental truth, but only if it is combined with the best available secular thought. (The Jesuits I studied with were particularly strong on all three of these claims.)

At this point you might suspect that it’s a pretty liberal version of Catholicism that Gutting is going to defend. I have never heard a Pope or a Bishop say that Catholic teaching needs to be supplemented with secular thought. In fact, I thought the whole point of Catholic teaching was to protect us from the utter corruption of secular thought. As for speaking stirringly about the effect of Catholic education on his upbringing, that makes me understand why he might see himself as culturally Catholic, not why he would defend the intellectual respectability of Catholicism.

Moreover, it sure seems to me that, to the extent that we can know anything about where human life came from and what it is meant for, it is science, and not Church teaching, that will show the way. As for how life should be lived, I would say that is something everyone has to work out for himself. If we are looking for a fruitful context for investigating that question, a Church that claims exclusive insight into absolute truth does not come immediately to mind.

Careful readers will note that these three convictions do not include the belief that the specific teachings of the Catholic Church provide the fundamental truths of human life. What I do believe is that these teachings are very helpful for understanding the human condition. Here I distinguish three domains: metaphysical doctrines about the existence and nature of God, historical accounts from the Bible of how God has intervened in human history to reveal his truth and the ethics of love preached by Jesus.

Okay, now he’s just messing with us. The Church itself seems quite certain that its teachings represent nothing less than the fundamental truths of human life. If you’re not defending the Church’s special authority to hold forth on such questions, then what, exactly, are you defending?

You might have noticed that Gutting is being awfully vague about what he actually believes. What, exactly, does it mean to say that the Catholic philosophical and theological tradition provided a fruitful context for pursuing fundamental truth? To judge from this latest paragraph, he does not find it so fruitful that it actually leads to fundamental truth. So what then? And if it’s just bits and pieces of Jesus’ teachings that you like, well, you can have those without the baggage of the hierarchy.

This vagueness is one of the reasons I sometimes sympathize with fundamentalists over more moderate believers. With the fundamentalists, you are simply never left wondering about what they believe and why they believe it. By contrast, moderate, intellectual defenders of religion, like Gutting, frequently find it difficult to express themselves with any clarity.

The ethics of love I revere as the inspiration for so many (Catholics and others) who have led exemplary moral lives. I don’t say that this ethics is the only exemplary way to live or that we have anything near to an adequate understanding of it. But I know that it has been a powerful force for good. (Like so many Catholics, I do not see how the hierarchy’s rigid strictures on sex and marriage could follow from the ethics of love.) As to the theistic metaphysics, I’m agnostic about it taken literally, but see it as a superb intellectual construction that provides a fruitful context for understanding how our religious and moral experiences are tied to the ethics of love. The historical stories, I maintain, are best taken as parables illustrating moral and metaphysical teachings.

Traditional apologetics has started with metaphysical arguments for God’s existence, then argued from the action of God in the world to the truth of the Church’s teachings as revealed by God and finally justified the ethics of love by appealing to these teachings. I reverse this order, putting first the ethics of love as a teaching that directly captivates our moral sensibility, then taking the history and metaphysics as helpful elucidations of the ethics.

So, Catholic teaching has been a powerful force for good, except on the subject of sex and marriage where they have mostly gotten it wrong (and have thereby contributed greatly to human misery, I would add). He’s agnostic about “theistic metaphysics.” He thinks the Bible’s stories are not true as history, but teach moral lessons that he finds congenial. And he uses his own views about ethics as the guide to how he understands the Bible, in direct contravention of the usual approach. This, recall, in what was meant to be a defense of Catholicism.

As for, “…but see it as a superb intellectual construction that provides a fruitful context for understanding how our religious and moral experiences are tied to the ethics of love,” I can’t even imagine what that means.

Gutting has anticipated my objection:

Of course, I can already hear the obvious objection: “What you believe isn’t Catholicism — it is a diluted concoction that might satisfy ultra-liberal Protestants or Unitarians, but is nothing like the robust tonic of orthodox Catholic doctrine. It’s not surprising that so paltry a ‘faith’ doesn’t conflict with the Enlightenment view of religion.” My answer is that Catholicism too has reconciled itself to the Enlightenment view of religion.

Reconciled itself to the Enlightenment view of religion? Seriously? I think at this point it is fair to say that Gutting is not defending actual Catholicism as presented by Rome, but rather a fantastical, made-up version of Catholicism he finds more congenial. I had no idea that the Church was so tolerant and accepting of those who dissent from their teachings. How does Gutting defend this remarkable idea?

First, the Church now explicitly acknowledges the right of an individual’s conscience in religious matters: No one may “be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters” (“Catechism of the Catholic Church,” citing a decree from the Second Vatican Council). The official view still maintains that a conscience that rejects the hierarchy’s formal teaching is objectively in error. But it acknowledges that subjectively individuals not only may but should act on their sincere beliefs.

So you may follow your conscience, but if your conscience leads you away from Church teachings then you are wrong and that is it. Moreover, I would add that if you fail to meet their most recent definition of what constitutes a Christian, then you will burn in Hell for all eternity. That is not the Enlightenment view of religion.

Second, the Church, in practice, hardly ever excludes from its community those who identity themselves as Catholics but reinterpret central teachings (and perhaps reject less central ones). The “faithful” who attend Mass, receive the sacraments, send their children to Catholic schools and sometimes even teach theology include many who hold views similar to mine. Church leaders have in effect agreed that the right to follow one’s conscience includes the right of dissident Catholics to remain members of the Church. They implicitly recognize the absurdity of the claim that a dissident who has been raised and educated in the Catholic Church and has maintained, with the Church’s implicit consent, a lifetime involvement in its life is not “really” a Catholic.

I’m delighted that the Church “hardly ever” excludes those who defy their teachings (though they certainly reserve the right to do so at their whim). I do seem to remember the Church threatening to withhold the sacraments from Catholic politicians who dissent from their teachings, so forgive me if I’m less impressed than Gutting by their open-mindedness.

Gutting goes on for a few more paragraphs, but I think we have seen enough. In the end, I have no idea what it is, exactly, that Gutting wants me to find intellectually reasonable about Catholicism. He mostly rejects all of the parts that people find offensive; such as the claims of exclusive authority, the ludicrous teachings on sex and marriage, claims of having unique insights regarding the truth about humanity. What’s left seems like little more than a vague fondness for the Bible, some appreciation for the work of Catholic philosophers, and the after-effects of many years of Catholic schooling. There’s actually very little in his essay that could not have been written by a secular humanist. I fear we shall have to look elsewhere for a proper defense of Roman Catholicism.

During one of their Brighton rendezvouses, after a round of oysters and a second bottle of champagne, Tom Haley asks Serena Frome the question every mathematician longs for her lover to utter:

I want you to tell me something…something interesting, no, counterintuitive, paradoxical. You owe me a good maths story.

Frome (“rhymes with plume”), a twenty-something blonde blessed with the looks of Scarlett Johansson might be the last person one would expect capable of satisfying Haley’s request. But readers of Booker-winning author Ian McEwan’s latest novel Sweet Tooth, a Cold War-era romance of multiple deception (semi-autobiographical, some have argued), should get use to mistrusting first readings. Even her newest lover Haley, a short story author and scholar of Spenser, doesn’t yet know her full story. When this conversation takes place Haley believes he is dating his liaison to the Cultural Foundation that is paying him to write the next great English novel. McEwan’s heroine is actually an agent for MI5 who is sent to lure Haley into a cultural war against communism (a la Encounter) as part of the project fittingly named Sweet Tooth. Though a fresh recruit, the service has decided that Frome’s beauty and steady diet of two to three paperbacks a week makes her ideal for the job.

What counterintuitive, paradoxical maths problem does Haley come up with? Why, The Monty Hall Problem, of course. You should read the rest of the article I linked to, if only to admire their impeccable choice of authorities.

I do love a good counterintuitive math problem. Tell people that

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Here’s a little teaser for you. Would you rather receive $4000 for your first year of work, with an $800 raise every year, or $2000 for your first six months of work, with a $200 raise every six months? Don’t think too hard! Give me your first, knee-jerk reaction.

The first one sure sounds more appealing, but a quick calculation will show that you will do better with the second.

How about this classic? Imagine that you wrap a belt around the Earth at the equator, so that the belt hugs the earth tightly. You then cut the belt, straighten it out, and then extend its length by one mile. The lengthened belt is then wrapped around the Earth again, so that the distance between the belt and the ground is uniform. The problem is to estimate how high above the ground the belt will be. Will you be able to slip a pencil under it? Your arm? Could you crawl under it? Walk under it? That sort of thing.

Well, let’s see. The radius of the Earth is roughly 4000 miles. Since the circumference of a circle is given by the formula

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Actually, it gets better. If you look at that calculation carefully, I think you’ll find that the radius of the earth was not actually relevant. Repeat the calculation with some variable, r say, to represent the original radius, and the conclusion will be exactly the same. The new radius will be a sixth of a mile longer than the old radius.

I think that’s cool!

The first is Mohan Matthen’s review of Thomas Nagel’s book in The Philosopher’s Magazine. I refer you to it partly because it’s an interesting essay in its own right, but also because he seizes on precisely the Nagel quote that caught my attention in this post. Matthen writes:

This is perhaps the moment to come back to the strange pronouncement to which I earlier alluded. Nagel writes, “With regard to evolution, the process of natural selection cannot account for the actual history without an adequate supply of viable mutations, and I believe it remains an open question whether this could have been provided in geological time merely as a result of chemical accident, without the operation of some other factors determining and restricting the forms of genetic variation. It is no longer legitimate simply to imagine a sequence of gradually evolving phenotypes, as if their appearance through mutations in the DNA were unproblematic – as Richard Dawkins does for the evolution of the eye.” (Versions of this claim are repeated at many points in the book.)

Now, this is a scientific challenge to the viability of Darwinian explanation, not just a reflection on its explanatory completeness. The sufficiency of genetic variation to drive natural selection has been a central theme since R A Fisher’s great book, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Nagel, a philosopher, tells us there’s not enough. Big result! But it’s completely unsupported by argument. Nagel says that he would “like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to neo-Darwinism … It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection”. This is just irresponsible. It is simply wrong to adjudicate the probability of mutations by an “untutored reaction of incredulity”. Probability assessments notoriously run counter to common sense. If you think you have a scientifically viable argument, give it, or leave it to scientists to deal with this kind of problem!

That’s pretty close to what I said!

Also interesting is this article by Stephen Cave over at e-Skeptic. He is addressing the question of the soul:

The evidence of science, when brought together with an ancient argument, provides a very powerful case against the existence of a soul that can carry forward your essence once your body fails. The case runs like this: with modern brain-imaging technology, we can now see how specific, localized brain injuries damage or even destroy aspects of a person’s mental life. These are the sorts of dysfunctions that Oliver Sacks brought to the world in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.4 The man of the title story was a lucid, intelligent music teacher, who had lost the ability to recognize faces and other familiar objects due to damage to his visual cortex.

Since then, countless examples of such dysfunction have been documented—to the point that every part of the mind can now be seen to fail when some part of the brain fails. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has studied many such cases.5 He records a stroke victim, for example, who had lost any capacity for emotion; patients who lost all creativity following brain surgery; and others who lost the ability to make decisions. One man with a brain tumor lost what we might call his moral character, becoming irresponsible and disregarding of social norms. I saw something similar in my own father, who also had a brain tumor: it caused profound changes in his personality and capacities before it eventually killed him.

The crux of the challenge then is this: those who believe they have a soul that survives bodily death typically believe that this soul will enable them, like Nathalie in the story above, to see, think, feel, love, reason and do many other things fitting for a happy afterlife. But if we each have a soul that enables us to see, think and feel after the total destruction of the body, why, in the cases of dysfunction documented by neuroscientists, do these souls not enable us to see, think and feel when only a small portion of the brain is destroyed?

That looks like a good argument to me. What do you think? There’s more to Cave’s article than what I’ve quoted, so go read the whole thing!

These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”

Stirring stuff. There are many other quotable parts as well. I liked this:

The sheer number and variety of experiments carried out in the twentieth century—and with, if anything, a renewed intensity in the twenty-first—exceeds summary. Reasoning, language, neurology, the science of emotions—every chamber where “consciousness” is thought to hide has been probed. Birds and chimps and dolphins have been made to look at themselves in mirrors—to observe whether, on the basis of what they see, they groom or preen (a measure, if somewhat arbitrary, of self-awareness). Dolphins have been found to grieve. Primates have learned symbolic or sign languages and then been interrogated with them. Their answers show thinking but have proved stubbornly open to interpretation on the issue of “consciousness,” with critics warning, as always, about the dangers of anthropomorphism, animal-rights bias, etc.

Regardless, though, of whether they can talk to us, we’ve learned more and more about the complex ways in which they talk to each other. Entomologists mastered the dance code of the bees and spoke it to them, using a tiny bee-puppet. (For the bees it may have been as if the puppet had a strange accent). In more recent years the numerous calls that elephants make to one another across 150-mile distances have been recorded and decoded. Evidently the individual animals can tell each other apart. So there are conversations of some kind taking place. Zoologists have observed elephants having, for instance, a “departure conversation” at a watering hole, rustling their great heads together in a “rumbling,” communicating about the decision to leave; the water is no good here, we should move on. Who knows what they’re saying. Ludwig Wittgenstein said that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand it. It may, as it turns out, be truer to say that we wouldn’t understand it very well.

If we put aside the self-awareness standard—and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy, proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote something wise in his notebooks, to the effect of: only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to)—it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency of all this scientific work, of its results, has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed. This was made boldly clear when the “Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness” pointed out that those “neurological substrates” necessary for consciousness (whatever “consciousness” is) belong to “all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses.” The animal kingdom is symphonic with mental activity, and of its millions of wavelengths, we’re born able to understand the minutest sliver. The least we can do is have a proper respect for our ignorance.

The whole article is well worth reading.

The question of animal consciousness relates to two questions of interest to this blog. The first has to do with whether or not the mind is purely the result of the highly complex interactions of the stuff within our heads. The sorts of things on which Sullivan is reporting are part of the reason I think the materialists are on the right track. For all the argle-bargle out there about how consciousness is some ineffable quality that humans have but animals don’t, the actual science of the subject does not point in that direction. Rather, it sure looks like consciousness is purely a matter of degree. The more material stuff you have in your head (relative to your body size), the more consciousness you have. I keep wondering, if there is something more going on than material interactions in the head, then at what point did that immaterial aspect enter into the evolutionary process?

I couple these findings with others. We know that everything we consider specific to who we are, whether our perceptions or personality or sense of morality or anything else, is intimately tied to the physical stuff of the brain. Damage the right part of the brain, and all of those things can be effected or destroyed. Does that not suggest that even the seemingly immaterial parts of our personality are nonetheless the result of material interactions? I know you can summon forth theories for denying this conclusion, but to me they seem like attempts to deny the obvious.

Science might have discovered something different. It might have turned out that while brain damage could knock out our ability to see or to engage in certain sorts of mental activities, there was nonetheless some aspect of “me”-ness that nonetheless always seemed to survive. Perhaps our sense of morality, or our personalities, always seemed to survive brain damage. That would suggest that our personalities have a fundamentally immaterial component to them. But that does not seem to be the case.

This is also why I’m generally unimpressed with purely philosophical arguments against this conclusion. If the empirical evidence points strongly in one direction, then any armchair argument in the opposite direction is immediately suspect. Inevitably your argument is going to include a premise about what material processes can and cannot do, and that’s the point where you are intruding on science’s domain. I especially liked this statement, from Sullivan’s article:

The whole “animal consciousness” problem remained more or less static for the next two hundred years. Which is to say, it remained philosophical, and retained more or less the contours of the dispute as it had existed among Descartes and his contemporaries, one side arguing that animals did not possess reason or the capacity for meaningful self-awareness, the other countering that we really have no idea what they think, and given that they often seem to undergo states equivalent to our own, why shouldn’t we assume that they do? After all, absence of proof isn’t proof of absence. But it isn’t proof of presence, either, and that’s what science wants.

Finally, it is also why I am insistent that people proposing immaterial theories provide some specifics about how their theories work. I don’t know how purely material interactions lead to consciousness, and it seems as counterintuitive to me as it does to everyone else. The only thing the idea has going for it is that the science points strongly towards its truth. But if materialism is mysterious, then show me how immaterialism is less so. And if your reply is that rather than using immaterialism as an hypothesis for explaining the mind, the point is merely to show that the mind just is immaterial, then I would refer you back to my remark about the direction in which the science is going.

Changing the subject, I would think that the recent findings about animal consciousness are also relevant to discussions of the problem of natural evil. The problem of evil is already a serious problem for theology, but natural evil seems to pose a particular challenge. The free will defense, which is the main argument for addressing the bad things people do to each other, has no application here. One common response is to argue that the horrors of nature are just necessary consequences of designing a natural world for us to inhabit. I find that argument dubious, but that’s not the issue right now.

Rather, I want instead to address a different argument raised by Christian apologist William Lane Craig. In several venues, here, for example he has argued that animals don’t suffer like we do, because they lack the awareness that they are in pain. They can experience mental states of pain, but for some reason this does not count as actual suffering. This argument received some bloggy attention recently, here and here for instance.

Even taking Craig’s claims at face value, I don’t see how they defuse the problem of natural evil. Having mental states of pain seems sufficient to create a problem for theism. More to the point, however, is that the sort of research on which Sullivan reports makes it seem very unlikely that Craig is correct on the science. It is becoming clear that animals are capable of far greater sophistication than we ever previously imagined. Any attempt to draw fundamental distinctions between humans and animals seem doomed to fail. I see no basis for thinking that animals cannot have awareness that they are in pain.

So go read the rest of Sullivan’s article, and let me know what you think!

This all makes me very happy. I do make an effort to put myself in the shoes of those with views different from my own, but on the subject of same sex marriage I find it impossible to do so. The views of those hostile to gay marriage strike me as so morally bankrupt that I find it impossible to see it from their perspective. The sheer human misery they have caused is hard to forgive, especially considering that their position is backed up with nothing more than a lot of dubious religious arguments.

So you can imagine how much I enjoyed Jonathan Chait’s brief obituary for the anti-gay rights movement. He focuses specifically on Maggie Gallagher, perhaps the most prominent anti gay marriage advocate. Chait writes:

In 2004, the campaign to prevent gay marriage was in its heyday. The Bush administration had seeded an initiative banning gay marriage in Ohio to mobilize activists and peel off traditionalist Democratic voters. Democrats nationally were running for cover, and even Howard Dean’s pro-civil-unions stance appeared risky.

Now the movement is in a state of total collapse, with every day seeming to bring new converts to the gay-marriage cause and the opposition losing all of its courage. There is no more telling sign of the opposition’s surrender than the public demoralization of Maggie Gallagher, the leading anti-gay-marriage activist and writer.

The essay is not very long, and well worth reading in full. Go have a look!

Just so we’re clear, his calculations are not tricks. He really is doing what it looks like he’s doing. The only portion of the video that could be described as a trick is the part where he determines the missing digit of a seven-digit number after the audience member tells him the other six. That’s based on an elementary principle in number theory, which I’m sure some commenter will enjoy explaining.

If I were to express things more melodramatically, I would say that the problem is that textbooks seldom tell a story. They have no plot, no characters. And they should! Good mathematical writing is marked by a progression from the initial statement of a problem, through the rising action of our initial, fumbling attempts to solve it, reaching its climax with the solution itself, and then proceeding to its denouement in the form of a proper, rigorous proof. The best part is that the story never really ends, since the solution to one problem leads inevitably to new problems.

Over time, however, I have come to the sad realization that many of my colleagues do not share my view. A piece of mathematical writing with two consecutive sentences of exposition will be derided by many as too wordy. Books that are nothing but a sequence of dense, unmotivated definitions followed by equally unmotivated theorems are praised for being concise. It has happened many times that I have heard people gush about textbooks I would be embarrassed to use to level off a table.

Occasionally, though, I grow uncertain. Maybe I’m the crazy one, and those deathly-dull, jargon-filled, notation-fests are actually on the right track. That is, after all, how most mathematicians write. Who am I to argue?

Every once in a while, though, I come across a book that really does it right! I have just finished reading one such book. It is called Measurement, by Paul Lockhart. It is quite simply the best math book I have read in quite some time. Anyone thinking about writing a math textbook should be required to read it.

It is possible that I am a little biased. Lockhart was a post-doc at Brown when I was an undergraduate there in the early nineties. I had two courses with him, one in linear algebra, the other in complex analysis. He had a big influence on me, especially during my periodical crises of confidence about my future in mathematics. I often tell my students that math is easy, it’s math classes that are hard. Sometimes I would feel beaten down by the drudgery of my courses and start wondering if maybe I should pursue something else. Professor Lockhart played a big role in getting me over that. I mostly remember him as the funniest, but also the most lucid, math teacher I have ever had.

I am happy to report that he writes the way he teaches. The book has two main sections. The first deals with certain topics from Euclidean geometry, while the second discusses calculus. I found myself learning many new things, and looking at some old things in a new way. More than that, though, what impressed me was the naturalness of the discussion. Take the section on calculus, for example. At no point does he say anything like, “We shall now define the notion of the limit of a function at a point…” Not at all. Instead he describes a certain problem: How should we think about the motion of a particle through space? Then, with some clear thinking and a sequence of natural questions, he develops all of the standard ideas presented in the calculus sequence. In around 200 pages, he starts from scratch and gets to some fairly sophisticated ideas in multi-variable calculus. It all seems so natural and inevitable and interesting, and not at all like the tedious, symbol-laden, thousand-pagers we inflict on freshman math majors.

Here’s an example of something I had not really thought about before. Lockhart is contrasting the approach toward calculating areas taken by the ancient Greeks with the more modern approach we employ in calculus. The Greeks tended to use the “method of exhaustion,” in which irregular areas are broken up into a large number of more regularly shaped regions. The modern approach is to perturb the area a bit, and then to solve the differential equation that results from measuring how it changes. Lockhart writes:

I love the contrast between the ancient and modern approaches to geometric measurement. The classical Greek idea is to hold your measurement down and chop it into pieces; the seventeenth-century method is to let it run free and watch how it changes. There is something slightly perverse (or at least ironic) about how much easier it is to deal with an infinite family of varying measurements than with a single static one.

I know quite a bit about Greek geometry, and also quite a bit about calculus, but I had never thought about it that way. Very cool.

Anyway, if you have any interest in mathematics at all you should procure a copy of this book immediately. It is brilliant. Be warned, though, that I don’t mean to say the book always makes for light reading. Math, even when explained with perfect lucidity, is still challenging.

Here’s a short video of Lockhart discussing his book. I hope he writes a dozen sequels. Enjoy!

EvolutionBlog’s Jason Rosenhouse tells us in a recent post that he hasn’t read philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. And it seems obvious enough from his remarks that he also hasn’t read the commentary of any of the professional philosophers and theologians who have written about Nagel sympathetically — such as my own series of posts on Nagel and his critics, or Bill Vallicella’s, or Alvin Plantinga’s review of Nagel, or Alva Noë’s, or John Haldane’s, or William Carroll’s, or J. P. Moreland’s. What he has read is a critical review of Nagel’s book written by a non-philosopher, and a couple of sympathetic journalistic pieces about Nagel and some of his defenders. And on that basis he concludes that “Nagel needs better defenders.”

This is like failing to read serious, detailed defenses of Darwinism like Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, or Kitcher’s Abusing Science — and then, on the sole basis of what some non-biologist has said in criticism of Darwinism, together with a journalistic article summarizing the views of some Darwinians, concluding that “Darwinism needs better defenders.”

This is typical of Feser’s level of pettiness. We’ll see more of it as we go along. My post was mostly about criticizing two specific responses to Nagel’s book that appeared in especially prominent venues: one in The New Republic, the other in a cover story for The Weekly Standard. Since those are both very well read publications, I felt the articles they published merited a reply.

A far better analogy for what I was doing would be to read books on atheism by Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, decide they are not very good but important because of their prominence, and then criticize them under a title such as, “Atheism Needs Better Defenders.” Would anyone consider that title unreasonable? Would anyone see in it an implication that there were no other people out there defending atheism? Of course not.

But never mind Nagel’s defenders. Not having read Mind and Cosmos doesn’t stop Rosenhouse from criticizing it too. He writes:

[H]ere is part of a quote from Nagel, as presented by [reviewer H. Allen] Orr:

I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life. It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples.

From what I understand, the level of argument in the book never gets much beyond this. But these sentences are absurd. On what possible basis does Nagel decide that it is “prima facie” highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents?

End quote.

In a moment we’ll see Feser’s reply. I recommend sitting down before you read it, because it’s stunningly stupid. First, though, we should note that Feser chose a strange place to cut off my quote. It’s standard etiquette to at least provide the whole paragraph in which a statement appears. If he had, his readers would have seen this:

From what I understand, the level of argument in the book never gets much beyond this. But these sentences are absurd. On what possible basis does Nagel decide that it is “prima facie” highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents? What natural causes can do over the course of billions of years is not the sort of thing about which we can reasonably claim to have intuitions. The only way to decide if it is plausible or not is to do the hard scientific work, precisely as biologists have been doing for the past century and a half. Moreover, the theory is supported by a good deal more than a few examples. Rather, it is supported by a mountain of confirmed predictions and retrodictions, along with numerous experimental successes.

Plainly, I had two objections to what Nagel wrote. The first was his use of the term “prima facie.” To say that something is “prima facie highly implausible” is precisely to say that you don’t need a book-length argument to explain why it’s implausible. It says that the burden of proof lies with those who would deny that it is implausible. That’s what I was describing as absurd. There is nothing nontrivial about human evolution that can reasonably be described as obvious prima facie.

My second objection was to Nagel’s caricature of the evidence for evolution. It is, yes, absurd to say that evolution is just a schema for an explanation, coupled with a few examples.

So I think my objections are clear enough. Now let’s savor Feser’s response:

Now Rosenhouse says that “from what [he] understand[s], the level of argument in the book never gets much beyond this.” But Nagel isn’t giving any argument in the passage in question in the first place; he’s just telling the reader, in the book’s Introduction, what he will argue for in the book. (That’s what book Introductions are for.) Nor does Nagel simply assert in the book that the materialist neo-Darwinian account of the world is prima facie implausible, full stop. He holds that it is implausible as an explanation of certain specific aspects of the world, such as consciousness, rationality, and moral value; and he gives reasons for thinking it cannot account for these phenomena. Nor does Nagel claim that the materialist neo-Darwinian account of the world is false merely because it seems prima facie implausible as an explanation of these phenomena. He isn’t using the claim about what is prima facie implausible as a premise. He isn’t saying: “It’s prima facie implausible, therefore it is wrong.” Rather, he’s saying: “It’s wrong for these independent reasons that I will spell out in the book; and it turns out that these independent reasons vindicate the judgment of common sense about what is prima facie plausible.” What are these independent reasons? What is the “possible basis” Rosenhouse demands to know? Well, you need to, you know, actually read the book to find out, which is why Nagel wrote it. Awful luck for guys like Rosenhouse, who apparently thinks you should be able to say everything in a single short paragraph in the Introduction to a book, but there it is. (Emphasis Added).

Do you see the problem? To assert that something is true “prima facie” is to assert it full stop. It is to say that the facts speak so clearly in favor of the conclusion in question that it is the skeptics who are immediately on the defensive. And that was precisely what I was challenging. The claim that human beings are the result of a series of physical accidents coupled with natural selection is not prima facie implausible. Nor is it prima facie plausible. It is not prima facie anything, because we have no intuition about or experience with anything related to the grand sprawl of natural history. It is simply not the kind of thing to which you can reasonably apply the notion of common sense.

The rest of Feser’s tantrum has no connection to anything I wrote. I neither said nor implied that the assertion in question was the entirety of Nagel’s argument. I neither said nor implied that he dismisses Neo-Darwinism because it is prima facie implausible, or that he uses it as a premise in his argument, or that he does not go on to give more detailed arguments to support the things he believes. Feser just made up all of that.

And I certainly never suggested that I did not have to read the book to fully understand its argument. In fact I specifically said this:

I have not read Nagel’s book, so I don’t have a strong opinion about it. Based on what I’ve read about it, however, I suspect I wouldn’t like it.

Feser didn’t quote that part, for obvious reasons, since then he would not have been able to pretend that I was simply dismissing the book or judging it based on one paragraph. In responding to the Nagel quote I presented, I said specifically, “[T]hese sentences are absurd.” Indeed they are, and nothing Feser wrote makes the paragraph I quoted seem reasonable. Notice that I did not say, “Since these sentences constitute the entirety of Nagel’s argument, and since there is absolutely nothing in the remainder of the book that needs to be addressed in any way at all, I feel absolutely confident now in placing this book directly into the garbage.”

Then I sealed the deal by writing, “So I’m not optimistic that I will like Nagel’s book once I’ve had the chance to read it, but that is not the subject of this post. Instead, I wish to address the response from some of Nagel’s defenders.” I even concluded my post by saying that I’m not necessarily against Nagel’s suggestion that there are teleological laws of matter, though for now I find such ideas vague and unhelpful.

Gives rather a different impression from Feser’s screeching, doesn’t it? A reasonable paraphrase of what I wrote is, “Many people whose opinion I respect say it’s a bad book, and here’s a specific paragraph from the book that makes clearly dubious assertions, and this makes me suspect that I will not like the book when I read it, but for now I don’t have a strong opinion.” An unreasonable paraphrase is, “He’s arrogantly dismissing a book based on one paragraph!! He doesn’t know what a book’s introduction is for!!! He puts all sorts of crazy words into Nagel’s mouth!!!!”

We now move on to other things. In my original post I presented a long quotation from Ferguson, the beginning of which said this:

In a dazzling six-part tour de force rebutting Nagel’s critics, the philosopher Edward Feser provided a good analogy to describe the basic materialist error—the attempt to stretch materialism from a working assumption into a comprehensive explanation of the world. Feser suggests a parody of materialist reasoning: “1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has. 2. Therefore we have good reason to think that metal detectors can reveal to us everything that can be revealed” about metallic objects.

It is clear from this that, in Ferguson’s telling, Feser was addressing materialists generally. I objected to this, describing it as a caricature of materialist argumentation. Here’s Feser’s reply:

For starters, what Rosenhouse dismisses as a “caricature of materialist thinking” was not directed at materialists in general in the first place, but rather at a certain specific line of argument put forward by Nagel critics Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg — as Rosenhouse would have known had he bothered to read the post of mine that Ferguson was citing.

Well, if I made a mistake here it was in assuming that Ferguson presented Feser accurately. I’m glad to hear that Feser wants no part of Ferguson’s version of his argument, and I look forward to reading the indignant letter to the editor he will no doubt fire off to The Weekly Standard.

As it happens, though, it hardly matters. Feser’s little metal detector analogy fares no better against Leiter and Weisberg than it does against materialists in general. Leiter and Weisberg’s review is available here. The excerpt that triggered Feser’s analogy is this:

Naturalists… defend their view by appealing to the extraordinary fruitfulness of past scientific work, including work growing out of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. So what should we make of the actual work in biology that supports the “materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature” that Nagel thinks “is almost certainly false”? Defending such a sweeping claim might seem to require a detailed engagement with the relevant science, yet in a striking admission early on, Nagel reveals that his book “is just the opinion of a layman who reads widely in the literature that explains contemporary science to the nonspecialist.” And a recurring objection to what he learned from his layman’s reading of popular science writing is that much science “flies in the face of common sense,” that it is inconsistent with “evident facts about ourselves,” that it “require[s] us to deny the obvious,” and so on…

[S]urely we have some reason for thinking, some four centuries after the start of the scientific revolution, that Aristotle was on the wrong track and that we are not, or at least not yet. Our reasons for thinking this are obvious and uncontroversial: mechanistic explanations and an abandonment of supernatural causality proved enormously fruitful in expanding our ability to predict and control the world around us. The fruits of the scientific revolution, though at odds with common sense, allow us to send probes to Mars and to understand why washing our hands prevents the spread of disease. We may, of course, be wrong in having abandoned teleology and the supernatural as our primary tools for understanding and explaining the natural world, but the fact that “common sense” conflicts with a layman’s reading of popular science writing is not a good reason for thinking so…

That sounds pretty measured and reasonable to me. Not so to Feser:

Third, it also merely begs the question to suggest that the “fruitfulness” of “mechanistic” explanations in other domains — where fruitfulness involves the ability to “predict and control” natural phenomena — gives us reason to think that such explanations might be given of the phenomena at issue in Nagel’s book (consciousness, intentionality, etc.). For one thing, Nagel has, as I have said, given reason elsewhere to think that such explanations cannot succeed. For another, Leiter and Weisberg are here committing a fallacy similar to the one which, as we saw in an earlier post, Alex Rosenberg commits in his book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. In particular, they are essentially arguing as follows:

1. The predictive power and technological applications of [post-Galilean, post-Cartesian, mechanistic] science are unparalleled by those of any other purported source of knowledge.

2. Therefore we have good reason to think that [post-Galilean, post-Cartesian, mechanistic] science can explain everything that there is to explain.

And that sort of argument is no better than this one:

1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has.

2. Therefore we have good reason to think that metal detectors can reveal to us everything that there is to be revealed.

In fact, of course, metal detectors are as successful as they are in finding coins, lost keys, etc. precisely because they focus only on those specific aspects of coins, keys, and the like which might be detected via their methods (i.e. the metallic nature of these objects) and ignore everything else (the shape, color, etc. of the objects). And the methods of post-Galilean, post-Cartesian, mechanistic science are as successful as they are in predicting and controlling natural phenomena precisely because they focus only on those aspects of nature susceptible of strict prediction and control (especially those aspects which might be modeled mathematically) and ignore everything else (e.g. any irreducibly qualitative or non-quantifiable features that might exist in nature, such as teleological features, the phenomenal feel of heat and cold, the phenomenal look of colors, and so forth). But just as metal detectors are inevitably going to fail to capture non-metallic phenomena, so too are the methods of post-Galilean, post-Cartesian, mechanistic science inevitably going to fail to capture any aspects of nature not susceptible of prediction and control, nor capable of being captured via the mathematical techniques that make prediction and control possible.

It is tautological to say that if there are aspects of reality that are not amenable to scientific investigation, then scientific investigation will not reveal them. That, however, is nonresponsive to Leiter and Weisberg’s point. As I see it, Leiter and Weisberg were making an argument about the burden of proof. When a particular point of view has been proven wrong in case after case; the centrality of teleology and the supernatural in our understanding of the natural world, for example; the burden shifts to the people defending that point of view. A better analogy than Feser’s metal detector would be to the boy who cried wolf. Every time previously that the boy had cried wolf there was no wolf. So the people concluded that when he cried wolf this time there also was no wolf. Does anyone think the people’s reasoning was utterly fallacious? Were they wrong to think that the boy’s consistent track record of lying gave them a good reason for thinking he was lying this time?

Of course, in the story, there really was a wolf at the end. That’s why Leiter and Weisberg are very measured in their conclusions. They say only that the extraordinary, consistent success of mechanistic explanations give us some reason for thinking that they will continue to be successful, and then go on to state clearly that this conclusion could well be wrong. By contrast, it is Nagel and his defenders who make the most audacious, confident pronouncements about what they have shown, and then never back them up with anything more than dubious armchair argument. Nagel was the one who subtitled his book, “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.” Leiter and Weisberg are simply saying that in light of the enormous past success of Nagel’s foil, he will need a mighty good argument to meet his burden. Casual invocations of common sense and popularizations of science do not cut it.

Nor does it help to argue that Nagel was doing philosophy, and therefore does not need anything more than a rudimentary (indeed, if he even needs that much) understanding of science. Surely it is obvious that philosophical argument alone cannot possibly get you to dramatic conclusions about what matter can and cannot do. Arguments for the nonphysicality of the brain typically take the general form: The brain can do X; Physical processes cannot account for X; Therefore there is a nonphysical component to the brain. Can you spot the premise about which science has rather a lot to say?

At most, philosophy can explore the consequences of certain assumptions about what matter can and cannot do. The trouble is that science is constantly changing our view of what matter is. The “material” out of which the world is made looks very different today than it did a century ago. It wasn’t that long ago that atoms were thought to be solid balls. Today they are vastly more complicated, to the point where even physicists have trouble wrapping their heads around what they do. Nowadays it is common to speak of the universe as having emerged from a quantum foam. Is quantum foam material? I don’t know.

It is not materialists who are being arrogant and dogmatic in this discussion. We’re just saying we should stick with what works until someone comes up with something better, or at least comes up with a very good reason for abandoning what we’ve been doing. If you want arrogance and dogmatism you have to look to the Feser’s and Nagel’s of the world. They’re the ones claiming, on the basis of some asinine armchair cogitation, that they have refuted an enormously successful scientific paradigm.

Actually, Feser makes one more claim. In response to Ferguson, I wrote in part:

Almost all of that is wrong, starting with Feser’s caricature of materialist thinking. What materialists actually say is that if you are going to hypothesize into existence something immaterial, it is on you to provide evidence for your hypothesis. Of course it’s possible that there are immaterial entities that influence matter in ways that are undetectable by science, but can you do anything more that just assert their possible existence? Given some phenomenon you assert to be incomprehensible under materialism, can you show how it becomes comprehensible under immaterialism? Ferguson tells us that science just ignores “everything else” beyond the material aspects of reality, but the very point at issue is whether there is anything else to ignore.

It seems like all the immaterialists ever do is make assertions! Ferguson concedes that his feelings are intimately bound up with his bouncing neurons. Then he just asserts that reductive materialism cannot account for his feelings. But why not? And if it’s not just bouncing neurons, then what else is it? After all, saying that emotions and senses of obligation are ultimately produced by complexly organized matter in no way suggests they aren’t real.

Feser replies:

For another thing, the suggestion that the difference between materialists and their critics is that the former give arguments and the latter merely make assertions is, well, simply too preposterous for words, and cannot possibly have been made by someone who both (a) has a shred of intellectual honesty, and (b) knows what the hell he is talking about. Say what you will about books like John Foster’s The Immaterial Self, W. D. Hart’s The Engines of the Soul, David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind, William Hasker’s The Emergent Self, Robert Koons’ and George Bealer’s The Waning of Materialism, or Richard Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul, to name only the first few things that happen to pop into my mind — not to mention my own books, articles, and blog posts — they are absolutely brimming with arguments. You may or may not agree with those arguments, but they are there.

With this we come full circle, since Feser is just being petty again. More precisely, he is pretending not to understand the use of exaggeration to make a point. Absolutely no reasonable person could have read my exasperated statement that, “It seems that all the immaterialists do is make assertions!” and thought that I intended it as a measured and considered summary of the state of the academic literature. Obviously I was just expressing my frustration with Ferguson’s relentless, unsupported assertions; frustrations I have often had with writing in this area. I think that’s perfectly clear from what follows my statement, though Feser strangely declined to quote that part.

For the record, I am perfectly aware that people like Feser make arguments for what they profess, and I’m sure I speak for everyone in saying that I am terribly impressed by all the books he has read.

But even if you take my statement literally, how on earth do you get anything like the view that Feser attributes to me? How does saying that immaterialists just make assertions imply anything at all about what materialists are doing? Where on earth did he come up with the idea that I was holding forth on the difference between materialists and immaterialists, and locating that difference in their relative fondness for arguments over assertions? Feser simply invented all of that; such views are not even remotely suggested by anything that I wrote, no matter how much you twist them.

Well, that’s it. The stupidity continues in the comments to Feser’s post, but this has definitely gone on long enough.