Pharyngula

Wow. I wish I could stroke my own ego like that.

Posted by: dbpitt | March 7, 2006 5:03 PM

hrm. you're not insane if you talk to yourself, but you are insane if you answer back.

Posted by: GrrlScientist | March 7, 2006 5:27 PM

Am I missing something? It says "The interviewer is a Jewish agnostic living in Paris."

Posted by: Rosie | March 7, 2006 6:04 PM

Berlinksi currently resides in Paris, to the best of my knowledge. His background is jewish; he gives his present religious position as agnostic.

Posted by: Chris Ho-Stuart | March 7, 2006 6:16 PM

In Berlinski's case the blindness, though metaphorical, has already taken place.

Posted by: idlemind | March 7, 2006 6:25 PM

I wonder if "Part Two" might feature a further "debate" with a "Professor Zed."

I kinda hope it does, but he'll regret it if he tries...

Posted by: rrt | March 7, 2006 6:41 PM

"Dawkins is that depressingly familiar figure – the intellectual fanatic. What is it that he has said? “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that)”. Substitute ‘Allah’ for ‘evolution,’ and these words might have been uttered by some fanatical Mullah just itching to get busy with a little head-chopping."

Right. Fact theories and faith theories have the same epistomological value.

But wait, it gets better...

"But why should we take seriously religious beliefs that are lacking in evidence?

DB: We shouldn’t."

No, we shouldn't. So why did you just say that they where as good as evidential theories?

I find it hard to believe this guy is a philosopher.

Posted by: Torbjorn Larsson | March 7, 2006 7:36 PM

I can't believe he is a science writer or mathematician either.

"Where science has a method, it is trivial – look carefully, cut the cards, weigh the evidence, don’t let yourself be fooled, do an experiment if you can."

His description of scientific method is pitiful. Where are the theory building, where are the predictions, where are the validations/falsifications?

"Nonetheless we are in some sense able to grasp the number by a faculty of our minds. Mathematical intuition is utterly mysterious. So for that matter is the fact that mathematical objects such as a Lie Group or a differentiable manifold have the power to interact with elementary particles or accelerating forces."

And this is just bizarre. Lie groups seldom spells with a large G. And does he believe for real that mathematical theoretical objects interact with nature instead of modelling it, or is he merely a very bad author?

Posted by: Torbjorn Larsson | March 7, 2006 8:02 PM

Actually, Torbjorn, I beg to differ with you on Berlinski's description of the scientific method:

"Where science has a method, it is trivial – look carefully, cut the cards, weigh the evidence, don’t let yourself be fooled, do an experiment if you can."

As a definition it's sorta cheezy. But I agree with Berlinski: the scientific method IS trivial. It's banal. It's ordinary. It's part of everybody's fucking everyday life. It is used in "kennel management," as Berlinski says, and it's used to find food and water by human beings -- and some animals -- every fucking day. Even the fundies -- hypocrites that they are -- use the scientific method every minute of their goddamn deluded lives.

And that is why fundies and shitheads like Berlinski are so goddamn vile. They insist that they have some sort of civil right, simply by virtue of their ability to voice an "opinion," to have their "opinion" or "belief" on the history of the earth and the things that have lived on it to be treated with respect.

Horseshit, baby.

The evolution of life on earth isn't a fact because science is "special" and really really smart people have cleverly exploited this "special" tool to come to a counterintuitive conclusion that is being foisted on rubes everywhere.

Evolution is a fact and reasonable people know it to be so because it is trivially obvious based on readily available mountains of evidence.

Sure, we can go back 150 years and put ourselves in Darwin's place and maybe it's not so trivial.

But for the love of Ploink Ploink it's fucking trivial in 2006. It's beyond fucking trivial.

And that's why Berlinski and his fundie fellow travellers are either deluded morons or bottom-feeding liars.

Posted by: Great White Wonder | March 7, 2006 8:16 PM

And, I forgot, the most important is perhaps that a theory typically predicts completely different new types of observations to do, which greatly increases knowledge and speed of learning.

Posted by: Torbjorn Larsson | March 7, 2006 8:37 PM

Torbjorn

But science didn't really get off ground before people understood to predict and verify. If you don't do that, your theories are mostly "common sense" descriptions of what you have already observed.

Huh? My theory is that the freshest water in my office continues to come from the little faucet in the kitchen and not from my penis.

Call it "common sense" if you want. I call it the Theory of My Urine Doesn't Taste that Great.

This is the so-called "scientific method" at work and YES it is trivial. It is essential for survival unless you want to live as a yogi up in the Himalayas in which case all you need to remember is to sit still like an idiot and wait for someone to bring you food.

If fundies and ID peddlers were consistent, they would spend more time sampling each others piss because HEY the Bible doesn't preach against that and someday that urine might just taste like honey and it might just cure every form of cancer alive.

Teach the fucking controversy. That is how inane this Berlisnki dillwad really is.

Posted by: Great White Wonder | March 7, 2006 9:27 PM

From Zeno's transcript of Berlinski's 2 hour puke on Firing Line:

BERLINSKI: Could I ask you to give us your best estimate of the number of changes required to take a dog-like mammal to a sea-going whale?

Just out of curiosity, did the Great Mathematician Berlinski have an answer to this question?

I wonder if Mr. Physics Luvvah could tell us how many "changes" are required to turn a room with him in it into a room with only his stale farts in it -- "in theory" of course (we know Berlinski has way too much class to break wind).

Posted by: Great White Wonder | March 7, 2006 9:41 PM

Unfortunately, some of Berlinski's meaningful (but generally wrong) statements could have come from Ruse's complaints about "Darwinism". As if every controversial scientific concept doesn't have its fanatic defenders and fanatic foes. Has there ever been a reason to categorically distinguish between the concepts espoused by fairly unknowing fanatical proponents and the same concept which is knowingly defended by those who do not wish for pseudoscience to take over? Attitude and psychology make up much of the difference, while scientific theory remains largely unchanged by the fanatics.

And btw, why is it that scientific journals from time to time write editorials pointing out that evolution is still being opposed by the ignorant, like DB? Most scientists do not care overmuch about the political controversy, rather they're doing the science. It doesn't mean that they don't care at all about assaults on science, but they're rather busily doing science, including evolutionary science.

Of course most of the "interview" is nothing other than ad hominems. It appears that he doesn't know much about fallacies, for one having degrees in philosophy. For myself, I wouldn't especially defend Dawkins on religion, rather I agree with Ruse's complaint that neither Dennett nor Dawkins actually bother to engage properly with religion--not even in order to oppose religion with greater intellectual ammunition. Even so, both Dennett and Dawkins know rather more about religion than Berlinski evidences knowledge of science.

Like your average IDist (though he claims not to be one), Berlinski makes analogies without seeming to comprehend how to produce useful analogies, and without recognizing the need to truly back up their analogical claims with meaningful evidence whenever their analogies are used for more than merely illustrative purposes. So of course "Darwinism is like Marxism", without a whiff of evidence to show that it is.

The real fact of the matter is that Marxism is decidedly unlike "Darwinism", both in origins and in its understanding of how evidence is used (to be fair, Marx did some good economic and historical (essentially scientific) analyses, however the dialectical stuff was nothing other than Romanticism--primarily out of Feuerbach and Hegel). Indeed, Darwin avoided the use of the term "evolution", at least in his first book, in order to remain rhetorically separate from Romantic notions of the "rolling out" (evolution) of the cosmos and being.

Anyone who knows the history of philosophy with any competence recognizes the vast differences between German Romantic "science" (such as Hegelian philosophy claimed to be) and the British Empiricism which informed Darwin's work. I suppose that a British subject might indeed be capable of pulling off a Romantic philosophy of origins (there were the English Romantic poets, after all), but one would have to actually do the work (like no more than a handful of anti-evolutionists would even attempt) to demonstrate that he did something of that kind, if one expected to be taken seriously.

I realize that I have been arguing above against his cavils against "Darwinism" as if "Darwinism" and "Darwin's theory" are the same thing, however that is because they sensibly are. Knowledge and fanaticism vary among pro-evolutionist folk, but for the most part we are discussing exactly the same thing.

Notwithstanding my remarks separating Marxism and "Darwinism", I also do not think that Marxism is so very useless or essentially religionistic as Berlinski's prejudiceses insist. While I am clearly no fan of dialectic, from Plato on to Marx, Karl's non-empirically based philosophical framework led to productive observations and intellectual developments which unashamedly exist today within political theory and historical understanding. Clearly many Marxists were embarrassing believers in Marx's teachings, yet I am not sure that they were any more wrong than their fanatical capitalist counterparts. What remains the really embarrassing fact, however is that Berlinski pretends that his analogy of Marxism and "Darwinism" are equivalent, based upon no sound data (very little fake data, even) whatsoever.

Now I'm going to comment on some specific things written by DB:

?Can you say a little bit more by what you mean by an ideological system?...

DB: Marxism is an ideological system, or was, and Darwinism is like Marxism. Darwinism, I must stress, the sibilant distinguishing the man from his message.

Yes, yes, so you say. From my own philosophical viewpoint (continental, with emphasis on Nietzsche) there is nothing that categorically distinguishes ideology from scientific theory. Both are constructions, neither is "true", and both may provoke (in context) varying degrees of psychological commitment. Scientific theories merely are what can be agreed upon by people who wish for perception to lead "inter-subjective scientific assent", rather than allowing a priori assent to guide mode and selectivity of perception.

So this fact, or "fact" (and I really think it is the better way of understanding these matters), means that from the perspective of a scholastic or some other sort of uninformed philosopher, there is no difference between ideology and scientific theory--since there is no "categorical difference" (for instance, in the Kantian sense of "category") between the two, while there remains a huge difference in the prevention of overwhelming prejudgement between sheer ideology and scientific theory. Epistemics differ hugely between evolutionary theory and Marx's dialectical pronouncements.

Thus Berlinski equivocates, not only by pretending that there is a categorical difference between "Darwinism" and "Darwin's theory", but also by utilizing the fact that by many philosophical accounts there is no categorical difference between scientific theory and ideology (so it appears to me, at least). Therefore, in his mind people defending science can be lumped together with people who defend anti-science. And yet it is extremely apparent to us on the science side that "Darwinism" is not a "worldview" for any but a small number of weird little believers in scientism. And even for them there is no reasonable call to action by Darwinism, beyond defending science and the particular aspect of science sometimes called "evolutionary biology".

By itself, Darwin's theory of random variation and natural selection would simply be a hopelessly premature 19th century thought experiment, vastly less important than Clerk Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field, which was completed at roughly the same time.

It's absurd to claim that one or the other theory is "more important". And if Darwin's theory was "hopelessly premature", why do its main elements remain current today, though somewhat changed to fit new data? Why has Darwin's ideas been so productive, iow?

But like confined quarks (or any number of quacks), Darwin's theory never appears by itself in contemporary thought ...

Another bald assertion, though it happens to be largely true, no thanks to DB. Darwin's theory is unavoidably understood by science in relation to further data, and other mechanisms of evolution which he did not mention.

Yes DB, we are contextual thinkers. If you were also you would not write such silly nonsense as you do.

? Let me interrupt you. Can you be a little clearer on the difference, as you see it, between Darwin's theory and Darwinism? ?

DB: It is a matter of attitude and sentiment, Look, for thousands of intellectuals, becoming a Marxist was an experience of disturbing intensity. The decision having been made, the world became simpler, brighter, cleaner, clearer.

And for many intellectuals it did not, one reason why Marxism has rarely been mistaken for a scientific theory by anyone who understood the philosophy of science. In fact Popper formalized the falsification criterion (which I do not think does real justice to the complexities of scientific thought, while still being a good rule of thumb) in order to distinguish between ideologies like Marxism and supposed scientific theories like "Freudianism", from demonstrably scientific notions.

Scientific theories, like Maxwell's, generally lead to a clearer view of the world to those who understand them. The great thing is that ideas like evolutionary theory and electromagnetic theory continue to clarify the world even as Freudianism and Marxism fall out of fashion.

A number of contemporary intellectuals react in the same way when it comes to the Old Boy, Darwin, I mean.

And you swoon over Maxwell's theories over their exquisite mathematization, as if precision mathematics were what made one idea better than another. You need to get out more, DB.

Having renounced Freud and all his wiles, the literary critic Frederick Crews ? a man of some taste and sophistication ? has recently reported seeing in random variations and natural selection the same light he once saw in castration anxiety or penis envy. He has accordingly immersed himself in the emollient of his own enthusiasm. Every now and then he contributes an essay to The New York Review of Books revealing that his ignorance of any conceivable scientific issue has not been an impediment to his satisfaction.

Too bad you know this instead of what journals discuss regarding evolution.

Another example? I've got hundreds. Daniel Dennett has in Darwin's Dangerous Idea written about natural selection as the single greatest idea in human intellectual history. Anyone reading Dennett understands, of course, that his acquaintance with great ideas has been remarkably fastidious. Mais, je divague ?

I agree there. Natural selection is one of many excellent theories, and not one to be placed above theories of physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

In the case of both Crews and Dennett, it's that God-awful eagerness to explain everything that is the give-away. The eagerness is entirely academic or even literary.

Whatever. Read the scientists for once.

But, you know, what sociologists call prole-drift is present even in a world without proles. Look at Christopher Hitchens, very bright, very able. Just recently he felt compelled to release his views on evolution to a public not known eagerly to be waiting for them. What does he have to say? Pretty much that he doesn't know anything about art but he knows what he likes. The truth of the matter, however, is that he pretty much likes what he knows, and what he knows is what he has heard smart scientists say. Were smart scientists to say that a form of yeast is intermediate between the great apes and human beings, Hitchens would, no doubt, conceive an increased respect for yeast. But that's a journalist for you: all zeal and no content. No, no, not you, of course. You're not like the others.

Again the focus is upon non-scientists. It is a shame that many have been more eager for Hitchens' views on evolution than your average competent scientist's opinion, but there you are, that's the only reason you have an audience, DB. For what it's worth, Hitchens does well to defer to the experts where he is not well-educated.

? Thank you, I'm sure. I am still not sure what you are getting at when you refer to Darwinism as an ideological system? Many biologists such as Paul Gross simply reject the term altogether ?

DB: Yes, I know. The term ? Darwinism, I mean, has been a long standing banana peel for poor Gross. No matter how often he swears not to slip, he can inevitably be spotted straddling that banana and about to slip-up all over again. Ah, there he goes ? vawhoomp. I have a service that lets me know every time Gross topples.

Again a mere literary quibble serves for Berlinski's "analysis". "Darwinism" clearly has become less useful scientifically as dolts and ignoramuses continues to use the construction containing "-ism" to suggest that a scientific theory is in fact an ideology. The non-categorical difference between the two is obvious to scientists and even to many non-scientits, but clearly not to all philosophers.

But enough about Gross. Let?s get back to me.

Why? Is it because you don't know how to competently deal with issues, and must always resort to the ad hominem fallacy?

It?s not that easy to say what Darwinism amounts to,

That's because you're insisting that "Darwinism" is an ideology, and not a crucial guiding theory of biological science.

but then again, it was never easy to say what Marxism amounted to either.

No, it isn't all that hard to say what Marxism amounted to, though it takes considerable time. It does not reduce down to the triteness that DB demands of science and of philosophy.

If you look at Marxists journals from the 1930s, the party line shifted all the time, so much so that in the 1940s, Stalin had to sit down and write an account of the principles of socialism.

Right, Stalin the philosopher was responding to a need to explicate Marxism. I wonder why poor ol' Oppenheimer resorted to reading Lenin instead of Stalin's wise sayings.

The truth is, and competent philosophers know this, Marxism has several defining elements, notably the dialectics and the concept that societies all undergo nearly the same sort of evolutionary developments. Romantic notions of what humans "really are" pervade Marx's writings, and their failure to model humanity at all well are one of the greatest failings of Marxism.

Many French philosophers held onto a fairly unwavering Marxist core, even as they attempted to correlate it with the non-Marxist world we live in. It is the latter that shifted and changed, mainly because Marxism is really bad psychology, for the most part. It doesn't mean that DB's faulty accounts of both Marxism and of science would not be rightly criticized as bourgeois claptrap by most knowledgeable Marxists.

It reads very much like a high-school textbook in biology, a very sophisticated high-school textbook, of course. The real mark of an ideological system is its presumptuousness. There is nothing it cannot explain by means of a few trite ideas. Why is romantic love a sign of bourgeois decadence, Comrade? Because, Comrade, it represents a form of false consciousness. In Darwinism, natural selection has displaced such old standbys as false consciousness or the class struggle, Comrade. You don't mind if I call you Comrade? It's the least I can do ?.

Why yes, enduring science has replaced faulty ideological beliefs in many formerly Marxist minds (partly thanks to Nietzsche's recognition of power as being more important than economics per se). And meaningful sociology and anthropology are being used by former Marxists as well. DB wants simply to smear "Darwinism" as some kind of ideological replacement of Marxism, and refuses to even attempt a legitimization of his assertions.

? But ?

DB: Take the short essay in a most recent issue of The London Review by Thomas Jones, one of the review's editors, no dope, by the way. 'Since we use our brains to make up stories, and to make sense of the stories of others,' Jones says, it is hard to disagree with the idea that the capacity for storytelling is the result of evolution.

I actually have little patience for Jones's statement. In the barest sense it is surely true enough, yet there is probably at least as much reason to suppose that story-telling is a development out of one of the things we do best with words, gossip. Which is a kind of story-telling, no doubt....

As usual, though, DB quote-mines non-scientists.

And here's something Stephen Pinker said, it's even better ...

But look, someone like Jones is simply stating the obvious, like everything else, literature must be understood in evolutionary terms. What other terms are there?

Again I have some sympathy with DB's criticism. To be sure, the basics of human behavior do relate to evolutionarily selected drives and perceptions, yet the blanket statement written above (which I know may be shorn of crucial context--but I do not now know this to be so, so will treat it as I see it) is so far from recognizing the important cultural forms through which evolutionary drives are expressed that it seems to me to have little content altogether. Sure, note the evolutionary perspective where this stands as a basic drive or need, but always within the context of culture, environment, and the peculiarities of each individual.

DB: Why must literature be understood in any terms beyond the literary?

DB sounds like Derrida here, which doesn't surprise me. Of course the reason to understand literature in terms beyond the literary is because literature comes from human experience and relates to it as well. Literature does not write itself, no matter how many times Derrida and DB imply that it did.

Just recently someone named David Barash, an evolutionary psychologist, it goes without saying, published a book together with his wife called Madame Bovary's Ovaries. Her ovaries? Look, set aside the appalling vulgarity of the book and its title, its almost unfathomable literary and intellectual crudeness. To talk about Madame Bovary's ovaries is a little like looking at one of Rembrandt's late self-portraits of his face and wondering whether the man suffered from bunions. What we know of the man is right there on the canvass. Nothing else. To imagine that somehow there is a real woman to be found in Flaubert's nacreous masterpiece is to regard art

Hardly matters what Barash says, of course.

I'm not surprised that nuance and causation are lost upon DB's view of art, even if the "bunion stuff" is typically reductionistic to the extreme. We do not simply see "a man" when we view Rembrandt's portrait, we see a man who is quite deliberately portrayed as having aged and likely to have suffered, possibly even from bunions as well as from other causes.

On another matter, it's apparently not DB's problem how the brain arose. Implicit in this is his dismissal of scientific investigation, plus any concept of the fact that better people do know that how the brain arose is "their problem". It is simply for DB to cavil and carp about literary conceptions of Darwinism, and not to deal with science, competent philosophy of science, and the proper use of correlation and evidence that not only science uses. Let ignorance reign is DB's credo, and let the ad hominems rain down upon anyone who seeks and finds something better.

Well, it keeps the money coming from the DI. Nearly anything with the potential to destroy knowledge in our society is their weapon, and what is more, incompetence and ad hominems serve to protect DB from any doubts about his own capacities to rule on that which he does not understand. This is what we learned to expect from unthinking Marxists, btw, which suggests that the real analogy with unthinking Marxism can be found in ID and other anti-evolutionist spinners.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm

Posted by: Glen Davidson | March 7, 2006 9:59 PM

There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time.

No, they're not. What they ARE capable of grasping is empirical evidence regarding the outcomes of problems in symbolic logic -- and they do the grasping with cognitive systems that are entirely within space and time.

Posted by: Caledonian | March 7, 2006 11:58 PM

"Well, it keeps the money coming from the DI. Nearly anything with the potential to destroy knowledge in our society is their weapon, and what is more, incompetence and ad hominems serve to protect DB from any doubts about his own capacities to rule on that which he does not understand. This is what we learned to expect from unthinking Marxists, btw, which suggests that the real analogy with unthinking Marxism can be found in ID and other anti-evolutionist spinners."

The DI is sort-of a neocon spinoff, and the neocons are basically disillusioned Marxists.

I personally think we're seeing a totally new intellectual phenomenon here with the neocons and some of their fundamentalist allies. They certainly are not conservatives in the classical sense.

The most fascinating specimens (Dembski, Irving Kristol, Karl Rove, etc.) in this milieu have a really bizarre cognitive style especially in relation to matters of religion and epistemology. I finally came up with a basic framework for them after reading one of Dembski's rants about political strategy and religious apologetics. I now call them "Nietzchean fundamentalists."

These guys don't really believe in God in the sense that a true mystic does. They do not believe that "there is a truth and a reality, and the ultimate nature of it is God." Rather, they believe that nothing is true or real and therefore God and Christianity are true.

Huh? you might ask. That's a jarring, bizarre, surreal part. "Nothing is true, so I am right." "Nothing is true, so Jesus is Lord."

It is true because of *will*. (To really get this, you have to *feel* it. When you read *will*, scream it... chant it... *feel* it! Will! Will! Will!) They use the term "faith," but if you look at their cognitive style it seems like they mean something closer to Nietzchean "will" than mystical faith. Faith to them is the "will to God," not the spiritual link to a personal God of the mystic.

I think we have a new creature here. These guys are not your father's religious fundamentalists.

Posted by: Adam Ierymenko | March 8, 2006 12:54 AM

DB: No, perhaps not. But to everyone else. Consider the latest Pew poll. �Two-thirds of Americans,� the New York Times reported, �say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools.� But even among those quite persuaded of Darwin�s theory, �18 percent said that evolution was �guided by a supreme being.�� Now these are astonishing figures.

David Berlinski, a mathematician and senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and a sharp critic of neo-Darwinism, also signed the statement of dissent. But in an e-mail message, Berlinski declared, "I have never endorsed intelligent design."

Posted by: wamba | March 8, 2006 8:19 AM

I Googled Jonathan Witt -- he's a Fellow at the Discovery Institute... Still, that's almost like Berlinski interviewing himself.

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=97&isFellow=true

Posted by: TikiHead | March 8, 2006 9:38 AM

No, it's Jonathan Wells that's the Moonie. At least he was. Don't know his current status.

Jonathan Witt appears to be a regular Christian, afaict. Presumably he lives in Seattle.

Posted by: Dave S. | March 8, 2006 10:09 AM

Makes a nice companion to your post about Fred Hutchison's back-patting.

Ah, creationists: 2 seconds to think of a half-assed idea, ten years of self-congratulations. Presumably this is what ID'ers mean by "peer review": who could possibly be more qualified to judge the work of these geniuses, but they themselves?

This really smacks of desperation. They're up against the wall, and they certainly have no evidence to thump, so what else to do but bluff and bluster?

Posted by: minimalist | March 8, 2006 10:47 AM

Ouch! An aggressive commentary, even though it wasn't meant to be one.

Anyway, to clarify, the importance with fact theories are that they are reliable in regards to observations, ie they predict many observations well, and then they don't, they often tell you so beforehand.

Posted by: Torbjorn Larsson | March 8, 2006 1:31 PM

lt.kizhe, IIRC, Kronecker. (About the integers.)

Posted by: Keith Douglas | March 8, 2006 3:31 PM

Just a little correction. I shouldn't have written "category mistake" below:

In fact I probably am crediting DB too much when I suggest that he made a category mistake in presupposing that both "Darwinism" and Marxism are simply ideologies, for I really doubt that he thought much before he labeled "Darwinism" an ideology (he appears to be doing little more than name-calling).

In the way that I view the world, it is indeed a kind of "category mistake" because he lumps both science and an ideology into a category which I do not recognize as being anything but conventional. However, that is not what is usually meant by "category mistake", which typically refers to an incorrect placement of things within categories (conventionally useful, but philosophically suspect), which in fact is not my claim. That he does not consider the crucial empirical differences between ideology and science is my complaint, while his "category mistake" is his presupposition of the philosophical meaningfulness of categories.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm

Posted by: Glen Davidson | March 8, 2006 4:32 PM

Adam I., interesting comment. I'm not sure I understand your idea of "Nietzschean fundamentalism." You say that "[t]hese guys don't really believe in God in the sense that a true mystic does. They do not believe that 'there is a truth and a reality, and the ultimate nature of it is God.' Rather, they believe that nothing is true or real and therefore God and Christianity are true." Can you say more? (Oh, and I'm not really concerned with what I think is an unfair attribution of nihilism/skepticism to Nietzsche in particular - the name isn't important.)

Or maybe I just want to know why you think Dembski is one of these people. I remember reading something by him (in "Unapologetic Apologetics"?) that made him sound like the most table-pounding ("precritical," for you Kantians out there) realist. Where does he say what you say he says?

Oh, and let's not go killing Plato, please. Yes, contemporary platonism is annoying, but Plato himself was a titan (and on some readings not a "platonist," in the superficial sense, at all). Anyway, who says we wouldn't have "platonism" if Plato had never existed? It's a perfectly natural mistake, and without the platonists of the past we wouldn't know the extent and nature of its consequences (which are not all bad in any case).

Posted by: Dave M | March 8, 2006 7:10 PM

Oh, and let's not go killing Plato, please. Yes, contemporary platonism is annoying, but Plato himself was a titan (and on some readings not a "platonist," in the superficial sense, at all). Anyway, who says we wouldn't have "platonism" if Plato had never existed? It's a perfectly natural mistake, and without the platonists of the past we wouldn't know the extent and nature of its consequences (which are not all bad in any case).

Plato certainly did not invent all of the elements of Platonism, and was known in his time for being something of a Pythagorean (says Aristotle). The Pythagorean observation of the correlation between acoustical harmonies and number seemed to have a profound effect on their thinking, presumably leading to their belief in number as the basis of reality. Plato was a late Pythagorean, and considered Form as well as Number to be the basis for reality.

To be sure, the third man problem arose during his lifetime, and unlike many who do not compromise, Plato discussed this and other problems of his own concept.

For this openness (it may have been more or less forced upon him, yet he dealt reasonably well with problems) I agree with the "don't kill Plato" notion. It's certainly not Plato's fault that DB seems not to have learned philosophy beyond Plato's metaphysics, when Plato himself discussed some of the problems. Also, the separation of number from observed reality in Plato's thought may have happened to assist in partially desacralizing and demystifying the world, since he saw number as coming from the outside.

In a sense this is our understanding today, with number "coming from outside" of the environment" in a way (from our heads--which are not truly outside of the environment, but which are nevertheless quantitatively and qualitatively different from the inanimate environment), and modeling the world.

I should add that I think "kill Plato" expresses exasperation with DB and others rather more than a comment aimed squarely at Plato.

I had thought of addressing Adam l's statements regardin