…and this is a 
Steve Fuller and Christian Exceptionalism
Category: Creationism
Posted on: September 5, 2006 9:03 AM, by PZ Myers
Poor Francis Collins: now his book has been panned in New Scientist…by Steve Fuller. That Steve Fuller, the pompous pseudo-post-modernist who testified for Intelligent Design creationism in Dover. His criticism has an interesting angle, though. Collins is just like Richard Dawkins. Who knew?
In trying to accommodate too many camps, Collins ends up mired in confusion. Ironically, rather like Richard Dawkins, he treats religions equally, thereby homogenising them. Collins promotes "theistic evolution", a philosophy sufficiently devoid of controversy, if not content, to be "espoused by many Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Christians, including Pope John Paul II". It amounts to a treaty with God, whereby science does the "how" and religion the "why" of reality.
Dawkins and Collins clearly need a lesson in social science. The idea that, say, Hinduism and Islam can be lumped together is left over from 19th-century attempts to understand how complex social relations survived long stretches of time without the modern nation state. Repeating this idea uncritically in 2006 when we know better is bizarre.
That's Fuller for you. Do you think neither Collins nor Dawkins can see the differences between Hinduism and Islam? Proposing theistic evolution (which I do not find at all interesting, and see as merely a weaker kind of anti-science) as a shared philosophical bridge that could reconcile different religions to science is not lumping them together.
However, that isn't actually Fuller's gripe, anyway. His problem isn't that these fellows lack a sufficiently nuanced appreciation of the diversity of religion…it's that they don't go far enough in giving mad props to Jesus as the BEST, the GREATEST, the COOLEST Messiah ever.
As is Collins's refusal to deal with Christianity's uniqueness in being both most inspirational and most resistant to science. On the one hand, Christians extended the Biblical entitlement of humanity to understand and exercise dominion over nature. On the other, they baulked at theories such as Darwinism that failed to put humans on top. The alleged war between science and religion has really been a fight over the soul of Christianity.
Remember, if you want to make Steve Fuller happy with your position, it has to be a full-on sectarian promotion of a very specific religious dogma, and it must be solidly Christian. Don't you go giving any credit to Buddhism, or he'll wag his finger at you.
For all their faults, intelligent-design theorists grasp this much better than Collins. Immanuel Kant argued that moral law is no more and no less than our private imitation of God's enforcement of physical law. Subsequently, as our understanding of nature changed, our relationship to each other changed too. So when intelligent-design theorists think of a Darwinist, they don't imagine a Collins, who sees evolutionary theory as a boon to medicine. Rather, they see an animal-rights protester who wonders, on good Darwinian but anti-Christian grounds, why human comfort has priority over animal suffering.
Fuller is a wonderful example of an Alien Mind, one that just doesn't seem to work in quite the same way as mine—it's as if an ant or a sea slug had acquired the level of intelligence needed to communicate its ideas, and we find a whole slew of fascinatingly skewed perspectives that we struggle to understand. So when I'm seen through the lens of the Discovery Institute, I'm a vegan PETA acolyte who wants to give mosquitos my privileges? I've always known their views to be a bit cracked, but that's more insane than I would have imagined. I hate to say it, but I think the gang at the DI are a little smarter than that (but not by much.)
Can somebody explain how this deranged cultist gets published in something like New Scientist? I really don't believe that sociologists and philosophers simply pull stories out of their asses, but that seems to be Fuller's usual approach.
Fuller S (2006) God and science: You just can't please everyone. New Scientist 2566:48.
Comments
Posted by: Joe | September 5, 2006 9:18 AM
Ugh I know. I was pretty pissed when I read that. It's my favorite magazine and I finally shelled out 80 bucks a year for it and that's the kind of article I get. The first issue I got had that atrocious piece about how science should not be used against religion because it has nothing to say about it. I immediately wondered if I had made a mistake. At least there are almost always more letters challenging those types of articles than defending them.
Posted by: JackGoff | September 5, 2006 9:21 AM
Seriously, how do nutjobs with religious bents get publised in a science journal, of all places? Oh wait, now I remember. Because science is being co-opted to validate religion more and more nowadays. Jeebus, this is bullshit.
Posted by: mark | September 5, 2006 9:29 AM
I have always known that my religion is the right one. Practitioners of all other relions need to be either assimilated or exterminated.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | September 5, 2006 9:44 AM
Fuller knows exactly what he's doing and he doesn't believe a word of the crap he writes. It's all about shocking the academic bourgeois so as to get Steve Fuller noticed. Making sesne is not even a minor consideration.
Posted by: Kleyau | September 5, 2006 9:47 AM
You meant that was a real article? I thought my NewScientist just got misprinted. Damn.
Posted by: zayzayem | September 5, 2006 9:49 AM
Damn science, only hates Christians.
Why can't they hate everyone, like Christians.
(I'm not serious, I mean Hindus hate ppl too)
Posted by: Bruce | September 5, 2006 9:53 AM
"Christianity's uniqueness in being...most resistant to science." This is what Christianity has to offer? We can stick our fingers deeper in our ears than any other religion; neener, neener.
Posted by: Corkscrew | September 5, 2006 10:06 AM
On reading that article, did anyone else et a strong urge to go out and buy Collins' book? After all, if Fuller is slating it, it must be good.
Posted by: Chris Stevenson | September 5, 2006 10:09 AM
JackGoff said: "Seriously, how do nutjobs with religious bents get publised in a science journal, of all places?"
New Scientist is not a science journal. It is a science *magazine*. The articles in it are science journalism, not scientific research. It isn't peer reviewed. Most of the articles and content is pretty good IMHO, and I'm sure we'll hear more on why this article was published.
Posted by: BlueIndependent | September 5, 2006 10:11 AM
Bruce is right, and that's the line I hooked onto too. Wow, thanks for the admission of ignorance, Mr. Fuller. At least we know you excel at being stupid. I'd love to see how this man "tears" down science so skillfully. He sounds like a smug ass.
But the stranger thing is that he seems to be treating his religious position with a sort of "survival of the fittest" mentality...as if other religions are old hat and tired and thrown away in some historical dust bin like the Dodo bird because Chrsitianity has been somehow deemed the best of all religions. I wager if he said this aloud in a room of his peers from other religions, he'd walk out with a black eye at the very least.
I've never read the guy before, and after reading this tripe, I certainly do not feel compelled to continue further.
Posted by: gengar | September 5, 2006 10:11 AM
Oddly, I had never considered the possibility that Fuller might be a Christian; I had put his attitude down to smug post-modern "only I can see that your flawed and biased perspective" ass-hattery rather than smug "I'm saved and I know the truth!" ass-hattery. You live and learn....
Posted by: JackGoff | September 5, 2006 10:29 AM
New Scientist is not a science journal.
Heh. My bad. I did mean "magazine", but I was too focused on how fucked up the article was to catch my mistake.
Posted by: Ritchie Annand | September 5, 2006 11:02 AM
I had to see it to believe it. That leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I really like New Scientist, generally.
Ironically, rather like he imagines Richard Dawkins to be, he treats his opponents equally, thereby homogenizing them. Fuller promotes "too-clever-by-half sociology professor views", a philosophy sufficiently devoid of truth, if not content, to be "snuck into a magazine, disguised as a legitimate article." It amounts to a treaty with the Discovery Institute, with opponents treated as "idiots" and intelligent design as the "truth".
Posted by: logopetria | September 5, 2006 11:09 AM
Shouldn't the 2nd and 3rd blockquotes have the Gumby background, like the 1st one?
Posted by: Kevin W. Parker | September 5, 2006 11:22 AM
New Scientist seems to enjoy being controversial - you have to take some of their content with a grain of salt because they'll publish fringe theories (and theorists) with the same degree of seriousness as they do mainstream ones.
Posted by: darukaru | September 5, 2006 11:23 AM
Co-opting postmodernism was the smartest thing the religious right ever did. Like the crew at Butterflies and Wheels point out in their lovely book Why Truth Matters, knocking down the ideals of reason, logic, and objectivity just leaves us a battle of rhetoric vs. rhetoric. And the religionists have nothing if not some awfully persuasive rhetoric.
Posted by: darukaru | September 5, 2006 11:28 AM
Actually, make that "manipulative", not "persuasive".
Posted by: Paul | September 5, 2006 11:31 AM
Christianity is unique, eh? I'm sure Mithras and Apollonius of Tyana must be gutted to hear that.
And I'm sure if Steve Fuller happened to have been brought up in India or Jordan, he wouldn't be saying that Hinduism or Islam are unique at all - no, sir. And it would be foolish to even suggest so.
Yes, bad Francis Collins for suggesting there might be anything to heathen cults. By the Law, a godly man would go and "make a ruin" of Bethesda for such promotion of false idols:
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/religious_tolerance/dt13_13-15.html
Posted by: Stanton | September 5, 2006 11:45 AM
I'm not sure what this Fuller twit is arguing about...
From what I can read, he's saying that science isn't scientific because science doesn't say that people are special because God and Jesus made people special because God and Jesus are special, and that everything else, especially all of the non-Christian religions, is just bland, if not wrong because they aren't like Christianity...
Um...
How does this make any sense to anyone?
Posted by: Keith Douglas | September 5, 2006 12:13 PM
gengar: I've suspected for a long time that insecurity about one's religious beliefs is at a root of many antirealist views in the "sciences of science" generally, but especially amongst pomos. But this is an impression, not the result of serious sociological research. (After all, just guessing that there is such a connection and pronouncing it settled is itself very pomo. :))
Posted by: Millimeter Wave | September 5, 2006 12:35 PM
I'm still trying to get my head around that third block quote.
He seems to be annoyed with Collins for disagreeing with him, but without conforming to his own stereotype of somebody who disagrees with him, thereby robbing him of the opportunity to respond with a boilerplate dismissal.
Posted by: Greg | September 5, 2006 12:36 PM
The problem is pseudoscience is propogated everywhere and are firmly entrenched. Interestingly, studies show that pseudoscientific beliefs remain in people even though they have completed a science education.
Posted by: Paul | September 5, 2006 12:56 PM
@Greg: Is this in reference to that paper delivered at the BA Festival of Science this week?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1864748,00.html
"The battle by scientists against "irrational" beliefs such as creationism is ultimately futile, a leading experimental psychologist said today.
The work of Bruce Hood, a professor at Bristol University, suggests that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force."
I'm very interested to see what PZ and others might make of this...(lights blue touch-paper; retreats to minimum safe distance) :)
Posted by: Great White Wonder | September 5, 2006 1:08 PM
Oddly, I had never considered the possibility that Fuller might be a Christian
Does he actually admit to being one? In a few other blogs where Fuller has revealed himself online and tried to defend his "tripe," he was asked about this and refused to answer (apparently his own religious beliefs are "irrelevant" to the "logic" behind the claim that Christianity is the Best Religion Ever(TM)).
Posted by: darukaru | September 5, 2006 1:11 PM
Speaking for myself: it's also very likely that war and murder are hardwired into the human brain, but you don't ever see anyone say that we should embrace them.
Posted by: lockean | September 5, 2006 1:45 PM
PK,
I don't know why Fuller was published but I think I know from whose metaphorical ass his ideas are pulled. I don't think he's a post modernist.
What he's saying basically is that he's interested in Immanuel Kant, and Collins and Dawkins aren't interested in Kant, so they're both missing the intellectual boat.
Kant invented the term 'Culture.' Which is directly or indirectly the basis of Fuller's 'Soul of Christianity' argument.
The (pre-Kantian) Enlightenment considered the political regime, or lack thereof, the most important influence on human behavior. In this view, we do what we do because of self-interested instincts and actual knowledge, both dependent on the politcal regime; beliefs are the excuses we make afterwards. Differences of custom, religion, language, economic systems, etc are mere curiosities, and art is made by artists not the Spirit of the People. So reforming the political regime (which meant attacking Christianity) is the most important thing. Reforming science and economics matters too, but politics matters most.
For Kant (inspired heavily by Rouseau) people don't live in political regimes, so much as they live in Cultures. What matters is the language, customs, and religion, not their laws and political order. Liberal democracies and dictatorships may rise and fall but Germans are still Germans and Poles are still Poles. Behavior is motivated by beliefs, not politically-ordered self-interest, so how many gods people believe in tells you how they view the world and therefore what they will do.
So, in Fuller's sub-Kantian view, debates over evolution can only be somehow about the soul or shape of Our Culture. Since Our Culture is, in Fuller's mind, synonymous with Christianity, the debate must somehow be about Christianity. He isn't sure how. But to Fuller the dislike of evolution must be Cultural.
Posted by: Fraser | September 5, 2006 1:50 PM
I notice the article also lumps together all animal rights supporters as people who believe human comfort is no more important than animal suffering. Speaking as an animal-rights supporter who doesn't believe that position, nonsense.
For that matter, there's no conflict between a moderate animal rights position and Christianity, unless you believe getting dominion over the beasts of the field means humans have a right to leave animals caged and sitting in their own feces, killed for personal amuseument or thrown into a pit to kill each other.
Posted by: Jim Harrison | September 5, 2006 2:06 PM
The lockean version of Kant certainly has the virtue of originality. It's so original that Kant himself could never have dreamed of it.
I'm reminded of the Monty Python bit where the T.V. scientist explains "the brain is like a fish. It breathes through its gills..."
For the record, Kant believed that philosophical truths and moral principles are utterly universal since they are grounded in reason alone. Cultural relativism is utterly alien to his thought.
Posted by: Tony Jackson | September 5, 2006 2:11 PM
"Can somebody explain how this deranged cultist gets published in something like New Scientist?"
Can somebody explain how this deranged cultist gets to run a department in a respectable UK university, supervise graduate students, act as an external assessor for tenure and promotion committees and review grants for the NSF?
http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/sshen/pdf/cv_fuller.pdf#search=%22%22steve%20fuller%22%20cv%22
Posted by: PaminBB | September 5, 2006 2:16 PM
"Christianity's uniqueness in being...most resistant to science"
Like others above, I was struck by this comment - mainly struck by how wrong it is. Christianity isn't resistant to science, but some christians sure are.
Posted by: Uber | September 5, 2006 2:18 PM
One true scotsman rides again. Of course it's resistant to science and reason.
Posted by: Great White Wonder | September 5, 2006 2:36 PM
Can somebody explain how this deranged cultist gets to run a department in a respectable UK university, supervise graduate students, act as an external assessor for tenure and promotion committees and review grants for the NSF?
Yes, I can: philosophy is mental masturbatory bullshit and nobody loves mental masturbatory bullshit more than a professional mental masturbatory bullshit lover, i.e., another professor of philosophy.
Posted by: Bob O'H | September 5, 2006 2:37 PM
I just want to defend the Editors of New Scientist. I think asking Fuller to review Collins' book was a stroke of genius. The review was always going to garner attention: Fuller could be relied upon to say something, um, interesting, and Collins would make an unusual target.
I don't think book reviews are meant to be authoritative, so they can be used to stir up some debate. On that score the editors have certainly succeeded.
Bob
Posted by: lockean | September 5, 2006 3:07 PM
Jim Harrison,
I did not say Kant didn't believe in universal truths. I was not trying to belittle Kant. I said he introduced the concept of Culture and I explained the implications of that concept and only that concept as it applied to Fulller.
If you can explain Kant and Culture better than I can, do it.
Posted by: Steve_C | September 5, 2006 3:11 PM
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/09/crazy_motherfuc.html
Penn gets most of it right. Little weird that he didn't think evolution "had" to be taught in high school.
Posted by: Tom Morris | September 5, 2006 3:15 PM
I met Fuller a month or so back when he gave a talk in London. He claims not to be a postmodernist, but also claims that teaching ID is great not because it's true but because it's useful for a variety of reasons. He cringed when I described Phillip Johnson's "theistic science" pap, but couldn't provide a better alternative.
Nice guy, but, as you say PZ, an "alien mind". He's agreed to exchange emails for my dissertation (philosophy of religion, covering ID).
Posted by: Jim Harrison | September 5, 2006 4:01 PM
Culture is hardly a central concept in Kant's philosophy. He didn't introduce the term into German, and in his writings, it mostly refers to personal cultivation (Bildung or paideia). Incidentally, Kant always spelled the word "Cultur" and never "Kultur"--it's a borrowing from the French. It is important to note that Kant never contrasted culture with civilization, a move characteristic of later cultural conservatives such as Oswald Spengler. For Kant, becoming cultured and becoming civilized are pretty much the same thing.
Maybe lockean is confusing Kant with Herder. Herder also used culture to refer to the development of capacities, but the was fascinated by the specific forms that this cultivation took in variously societies and famously asserted that they were all worthy of respect, "equally close to God."
Posted by: Steven Sullivan | September 5, 2006 4:11 PM
The subhead for the review at the New Scientist site reads:
'Denying the real conflict between religion and science is a sure formula for confusion, finds Steve Fuller'
Hey, I thought that was what *Dawkins* finds too!
Posted by: DAS | September 5, 2006 4:58 PM
Collins promotes "theistic evolution", a philosophy sufficiently devoid of controversy, if not content, to be "espoused by many Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Christians, including Pope John Paul II". It amounts to a treaty with God, whereby science does the "how" and religion the "why" of reality.
I know the atheists and even agnostics 'round these parts would disagree with me, but I don't get what exactly is wrong with this "treaty" -- sounds like a heckuva deal to me.
Dawkins and Collins clearly need a lesson in social science. The idea that, say, Hinduism and Islam can be lumped together is left over from 19th-century attempts to understand how complex social relations survived long stretches of time without the modern nation state.
ummm ... where is he really going with this? Is this a crypto-fascist argument? He's ostensibly saying that Collins and Dawkins are so 19th century, but I cannot help but wonder if he is inviting the reader to think that the idea of complex social relations surviving long stretches of time without some nationalistic uber-state is so 19th century ... i.e., that he's inviting the reader to think that powerful nationalistic states, i.e. fascist states, are necessary for long term social stability -- or am I reading too much into this?
Posted by: DAS | September 5, 2006 5:22 PM
Immanuel Kant argued that moral law is no more and no less than our private imitation of God's enforcement of physical law. Subsequently, as our understanding of nature changed, our relationship to each other changed too.
This part confused me until I read it a few times. I think I get the point Fuller is making -- the problem with evolution is that it causes us to reconsider social organization in ways that Fuller does not like. This is actually the ostensible reason why most of the ID crowd is so hung up on evolution, and their support of ID says something about them (they feel this need to distort science so it fits their own ends): what's interesting is that rather than hiding behind opposition to social Darwinism (which, if the ID crowd really opposed, how come they themselves tend to support rather "social Darwinist policies? Does evolution being taught in schools make them vote Republican?) or to libertinism (how an evolutionary view of nature necessarily leads to moral relativism, I don't get?), this guy is saying, essentially, that viewing mankind as part of nature has some moral implications that he doesn't like in terms of the environmental movement.
Actually, IMHO, he hits on something here: the reason people feel this need to oppose evolution is it does jibe rather nicely with certain social trends, i.e. the emergence from the Middle Ages. To me, ID strikes me very much as essentialism to evolution's nominalism ...
Posted by: goddogit | September 5, 2006 5:29 PM
Wait a bit. Sometime we'll find out he has a friend, or even a "friend", at New Scientist who is willing to bend the standards and pull some strings to get these (rather poorly written, as well as pompous-but-stupid) articles published.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | September 5, 2006 5:39 PM
Pomoism is inherently crypto-fascist. It systematically undermines all the intellectual resources needed to meaningfully oppose tyranny and injustice.
Posted by: Great White Wonder | September 5, 2006 5:46 PM
He claims not to be a postmodernist, but also claims that teaching ID is great not because it's true but because it's useful for a variety of reasons.
He seems to have Cornell professor (and "philosopher") Allen McNeill and Panda's Thumb contributor (and "philosopher") Pim van Meurs on board with him, in that regard.
http://degas.fdisk.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2524
Posted by: Great White Wonder | September 5, 2006 5:47 PM
The link again
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/08/our_innate_tend.html
Posted by: jpj | September 5, 2006 6:01 PM
I love this blog, really I do, but sometimes y'all make me crazy.
Fuller is hardly a "deranged cultist" and philosophy is hardly "mental masturbatory bullshit." You really think that? Then is should be ever so easy for you to publish some BS in a refereed philosophy journal. I dare ya.
C'mon people, Fuller founded a respected academic journal (SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY) and is the author something like a dozen books, many published by the top-of-the-line academic presses like U of Chicago.
I'm not writing the above paragraph as some sort of "Fuller is brilliant!" defense, but just as an explanation for why when y'all are trying to puzzle out why he is chair of a department and gets publilshed you should maybe read some of his published stuff for the answer instead of just a paragraph or two that PZ publishes here.
He is NOT a postmodernist and has published some very sharp criticism of what goes by that name. What he is is facile and writes too quickly for his own good. I've met him a couple times and thought he was a speed freak--he talks even faster than he writes and sometimes he should just shut up and listen for a while. He especially should have shut up in Dover where his behavior was just idiotic.
As for what appears here, I've read that second block quote a couple times and I'll be damned how it is a promotion of Christianity. All Fuller is saying is that Christianity is unique in that it has both promoted science (consider the natural theology tradition that gave birth to Darwin) and attempted to smother it (the creationist nutjobs we have today). How is that a promotion of Jesus?
Other religious traditions just haven't had these problems. Good studies on the comparative reception of Darwin's ideas have shown that it met no religious objections in non-Christian places like Japan. C'mon, do we really have a huge outcry from Buddists or Hindus to teaching Darwin?
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | September 5, 2006 6:32 PM
His (and your) history is as bad as his sociology and philosophy. You'll find exactly the same duality in the histories of both Hinduism (and yes, right this very moment you can find Hindu fundy creationists fulminating on the web- do a little Googling) and Islam.Posted by: El Christador | September 5, 2006 6:37 PM
something like New Scientist?
Most people I know consider New Scientist to be basically a supermarket tabloid, anyway. Not a serious news source.
Posted by: PZ Myers![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/nav-commenters.gif)
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September 5, 2006 6:43 PM
For the record, I think philosophy is an important discipline (man, I feel it's superfluous to even write that), and I agree that whatever Fuller is, it's not neatly encompassed with the term "post-modernist," which is why I call him a pseudo-post-modernist.
I do think that Fuller is an incompetent idiot, though. I've read his testimony in the Dover case and his attempted defense thereof afterwards -- he's totally out of it, incoherent and confused, and he gets everything wrong. If it's because his mouth races ahead of his mind, it doesn't matter: he's still saying some very stupid things. Get him some prozac and tell him to slow down.
I don't know if he's a Christian, but he's definitely preaching a kind of Christian exceptionalism...and again, it's hopeless. He wants to say the religion is super special because it both promotes and opposes science, but I've seen a dearth of the former and a bounty of the latter, and it's not as if other religions have any less mixed a record (Islam, for instance...now there's a religion with an amazingly contradictory history of conflicting ideas about science!)
Posted by: Coin | September 5, 2006 6:44 PM
You mean libertarianism, right? I think maybe if they supported libertinism we wouldn't have such a problem here :PSo in other words he's being judged based on his actual words, rather than his academic qualifications.
Goodness gracious.
Posted by: jpj | September 5, 2006 6:45 PM
The fact that a google search turns up Hindus and Muslims holding forth against Darwinism doesn't mean a great deal. I can google someone saying pretty much anything. Have their organized religious institutions taken a stand against Darwin on religious grounds? I don't think so, and I'll bet they were fairly recent if they have. Fuller's point is that religious objections to science, and Darwin in particular, have been distinctively Christian. Finding a few objections from other religious traditions obscures that basic point.
I think, if you read things like GLick's edited volume, THE COMPARATIVE RECEPTION OF DARWINISM and other studies that you won't find sustained critiques of Darwinism from major religous leaders apart from Christians, and that didn't really start in a serious way until the 1920s (getting a huge boost in the 1970s). And I wonder how many of these Hindu or Islamic critics are borrowing from Christian critics?
Posted by: goddogtired | September 5, 2006 6:48 PM
More outpourings of ignorance by usually intelligent people! How I LOVE post-modern philosophy, which allows me the chance to see my allies and friends resorting to characterizations that would make any YEC, if the subject was "Darwinism" or "evilution", proud.
The constant slimy mischaracterizations by the "scientific" on their fingerpainted representation of philosophy really allows me to regain my perspective, and regauge my respect for them when dealing with subjects they actually know something about.
Posted by: jpj | September 5, 2006 6:53 PM
C'mon coin, I explicitly wrote in my post that I WASN'T "judging him by his academic qualifications" alone. I wrote that he had written a great deal, that much of what he wrote is of high quality, and that he was capable of writing absolute crap as well.
Just trying to get folks here to judge him by his body of work rather than by a few paragraphs or his Dover testimony. I agree with PZ that his testimony is "incoherent and confused." I've seen him give academic presentation that were the same way. ANd then I've read his "Being There with Thomas Kuhn" which is one of the most important things written about Kuhn.
As to whether or not Christianity is "special" or not, to what extent is Fuller talking only about the American context? Because it clearly is the "special" religion here.
Posted by: Paul | September 5, 2006 7:03 PM
Special means predominant now?
Posted by: Coin | September 5, 2006 7:08 PM
Why? Certain political groups think it should be considered so. Some other people disagree.Posted by: Rex Max | September 5, 2006 7:21 PM
This is why I read Scientific American, its better edited and the contributors actually know their science
Posted by: Greco | September 5, 2006 7:26 PM
It would be pretty hard to find anything about the stance of "organized religious institutions" of Hinduism or Islam, for the quite simple reason that there is no such thing, unless you count madrasahs and the various groups of Hindu nationalism - and guess what, they don't like Darwin very much.
Posted by: Great White Wonder | September 5, 2006 7:35 PM
ANd then I've read his "Being There with Thomas Kuhn" which is one of the most important things written about Kuhn.
LOL! Yeah, Kuhn was real "important." To who?
Philosophers.
That's it.
Posted by: Scott Hatfield | September 5, 2006 8:15 PM
It seems to me that the benefit of philosophy is not authoritative, but diagnostic. That is, I don't go to philosophers of any stripe to evaluate scientific findings as such. Rather, I see the role of a philosopher as providing those of us who do science with a 'tool kit' which, properly applied, helps clarify the issues under discussion.
Thus, I strongly resist (for example) the ad hominem argument which attempts to say, in effect, that Darwin 'caused' the Holocaust not just because it is wrong-headed, but because it is non-scientific claim attempting to speak authoritatively about science itself. The very same tools which some deride in the hands of an uncritical 'philosopher' are of no small use in rejecting such a smear, and in pointing out the inconsistencies in Fuller's argument. I might add that when I've found the same tools directed at me, it forces me to reevaluate the strength of my own arguments. Sauce for the goose, and all that.
In that sense, Kuhn is important to scientists as well; not because his pronouncements on Galileo etc. are necessarily 'authoritative' (they aren't) but because he provides a useful concept for evaluating the practice of science, including our own practice. The notion of a 'paradigm shift' is not the be-all and end-all of science sociologically (did Kuhn himself ever claim otherwise?), but it's a nice thing to have in one's mental tool kit.
Scott
Posted by: Great White Wonder | September 5, 2006 8:24 PM
In that sense, Kuhn is important to scientists as well; not because his pronouncements on Galileo etc. are necessarily 'authoritative' (they aren't) but because he provides a useful concept for evaluating the practice of science, including our own practice.
*Yawn*. Except that Kuhn didn't "provide" anything of the sort to scientists. He just provided a way for philosophers to yak about science.
Scientists do things. Philosophers yak about people who do things. Philosophers are to scientists what film critics are to directors: utterly beside the point. That doesn't mean their words aren't sometimes interesting to read but the importance of philosophers to science can not be understated.
The notion of a 'paradigm shift' is not the be-all and end-all of science sociologically (did Kuhn himself ever claim otherwise?), but it's a nice thing to have in one's mental tool kit.
Sort of like a stick of gum is a nice thing to have in one's backpack, if one is lost in the mountains and starving to death. Of course, if one has a working compass, then the gum is irrelevant.
Posted by: A.Y. | September 5, 2006 9:10 PM
Fuller being a former contributor to the Social Text (home of the 96' Social Text affair) claims to not be post-modernist...
Right. That's completely believable.
Posted by: Millimeter Wave | September 5, 2006 9:22 PM
Perhaps this is just my own coloring, but I didn't interpret the "mental masturbatory bullshit" description as implying that philosophy is easy, or even wrong. Rather, I interpreted it as describing the gripe that scientists frequently have about philosophy: that it is seen as almost entirely self-referential.
Of course, that isn't to say that the sentiment is valid, only that your response to it doesn't really address the question. A better response would have been for you to list all of the instances where philosophy produces an output which is of value to anybody other than other philosophers.
Personally, I don't know of any, but I'm not a philosopher. Could somebody fill me in?
Posted by: RavenT | September 5, 2006 9:45 PM
Hmmm, this one is a maybe--there's no doubt of the value, but of whether it is actually an output of philosophy.
Symbolic modeling for the computer of biological objects relies on ontology, which is the specification of entities that exist, and the relationships among those entities. For example, Heart (human) has-part Left atrium of heart (human) (among others), where Heart (human) and Left atrium of heart (human) are entities, and has-part is a relationship. Principled modeling using ontologies is an important component underlying computer modeling of large quantities of biological data.
The reason I am not sure it is from philosophy anymore is that "ontology" in knowledge representation is far enough away from what philosophers mean by "ontology" (or so I am informed by Mr. Raven) that I don't know if it still counts as philosophy or not. Perhaps Keith has more insight on this question. But it is a possible answer to what you asked.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | September 5, 2006 9:58 PM
Wittgenstein knew exactly what a philosopher is for- to clear up the confusion created by other philosophers. Who am I to disagree? ;)
Posted by: Millimeter Wave | September 5, 2006 10:02 PM
Thanks for the example, RavenT.
Just from a quick search, though, I don't think the use of the word "ontology" is connected with its menaing in philosophy. I think it's just a case of an existing word being borrowed and repurposed.
Like I said, I'm not entirely sure, but it looks like the actual system of relationships originates in computer science rather than philosophy.
Posted by: miko | September 5, 2006 10:33 PM
Philosophy of science is only useless to scientists because of their utter ignorance of it. I'm a scientist, and I find philosophy of science (and history of science) not only interesting but actively informative. A lot of biologists I know are incredibly clumsy thinkers about ontology and epistemology, concepts that should be at the core of scientific reasoning.
You get absurd outcomes... look at how ridiculed Alain Prochiantz was for showing that homeodomain proteins could be secreted and signal between cells. People thought it couldn't be true because, after all, these are "transcription factors" not "secreted signaling molecules"--as if these are inherent and exclusive properties and not just empirical categories we made up. These are smart scientist who make reasoning mistakes like this constantly. And it doesn't just limit their own work. They are on grant and tenure committees, and their lack of any experience in reflecting on their own biases or the epistemological framework of science retards progress.
Another example... how the modern synthesis excluded developmental biology in favor of an essentially 1-1 mapping of genotype to phenotype. Even if Carroll, Kirschner & Gerhart, and West-Eberhard sell like Crichton, King, and Rowling it will not rid us of the public misconception of what genes are and what they do after decades of "gene action" and "genes for x" talk... from biologists! The people who resisted this weakness in the modern synthesis were those who understood the potential dangers of epistemological shortcuts like this.
In my opinion, anyone getting a higher degree in the natural sciences should have to be conversant with philosophy and history of science. It makes you think better.
Posted by: Millimeter Wave | September 5, 2006 11:21 PM
miko,
I think I just about follow your examples, but I'm not a biologist, so they do seem arcane to me.
In any case, I certainly agree with the importance you place on history of science. I've never personally been content to be simply be told that some scientific fact was true; I always want to know why it's considered to be true, and what assumptions were in place when that conclusion was arrived at. That is to say, I always want to know the history behind everything we take to be true, who deduced it, when and why. Absent that, it isn't possible to know when the assumptions have been broken and the conclusion should be considered to no longer hold. If I'm understanding correctly, that's fairly close to what you're getting at with your examples.
Again, I don't know if I'm following correctly, but what you refer to as epistemological philosophy sounds exactly like what I would call deductive reasoning coupled with an understanding of the assumptive foundations on which it is based.
Perhaps it's just my narrow outlook, but none of these things are those which I would have put into the bucket of philosophy. Perhaps that's why I'm missing it. I've always called it "Math"... but that might have something to do with my high school math teacher being a very rigorous logician who yelled at people for the vaguest hint of sloppy reasoning.
Posted by: Jonathan Badger | September 5, 2006 11:23 PM
Ontology in computer science is pretty much derived not from metaphysics but still from philosophy -- from philosophers like John Wilkins who (before moving to Australia and becoming a science blogger) was a 17th century Englishman who wrote An Essay Toward a Real Character -- describing an early artificial language of the a priori type. Wilkins created a classification (or ontology) f all concepts he could think of in order that his language could describe them.
Posted by: Gerard Harbison | September 5, 2006 11:26 PM
I am not at all ignorant of the philosophy of science. I have to say that I find the best of it is a catalog of obvious truisms, and the worst is not only misguided but (if taken seriously) positively harmful if used as a guide or model as to how to do science.
Posted by: Millimeter Wave | September 6, 2006 12:01 AM
Jonathan,
thanks for the context of the history of the term; I hadn't heard that before.
Maybe this is just me, but what I'm seeing is a question about exactly what we call "philosophy" and what we call "science". Of course, science has its historic origins as philosophy: Isaac Newton called himself a philosopher, and came up with a pretty good formulation of "science" which he labelled "experimental philosophy" (subject, naturally, to the translation from the original Latin).
Nonetheless, I'm not sure whether that matters: the question I have is what impact what we call "philosophy" today and what philosophers do today impacts science. I'm still not seeing that.
Like I said, though, maybe that's just my own definitional boundaries.
Posted by: Andrew McClure | September 6, 2006 12:13 AM
Okay, but what is this? Is it philosophy? Is it formal logic? Is it mathematics? Is it linguistics? Is it primitive computer science?"Philosophy" is a pretty flexible word and it's warped significantly with time. At the time Newton published, physics was considered "natural philosophy". Is Wilkins' study of ontologies really in the same class of things as what today we call "philosophy of science"?
And they share a label, but are the "philosophy of science"-s practiced by Popper, Kuhn and Fuller all really the same thing?
Posted by: jpj | September 6, 2006 12:14 AM
Wow. Just wow. Some of the statements made here dismissing the entire field of philosophy of science just boggle me. I suspect that many commentators who think philosophy is "useless" or just "self-referential" have done little or no reading of the field. Way back in 1973, Stephen Brush wrote an article in SCIENCE that history and philosophy of science had become so "dangerous" to the sciences that he posited that the the history of science should be rated X. Clearly some readers of this blog agree and have averted their eyes ever since.
On what basis could one possibly claim that the work of Thomas Kuhn has not been "important?" I don't mean "authoritative" I simply mean "important." To claim that he is not is to simply proclaim that you are ignorant and proud of it.
As for philosophy's "uselessness" let me offer a few examples of its use: Philip Kitcher wrote the best, most accessible eviscertion of creationism, ABUSING SCIENCE. No single work by a scientists is as effective at showing its errors, especially for undergraduates. He did a similar job on sociobiology but that book is a little less accessible.
In the 1982 case in Arkansas on creationism, philosopher Michael Ruse offered the most effective testimony against creationism--the judge's decision was clearly following the line of argument offered by Ruse.
And I invite all those who continue to insist that Fuller is a postmodernist clarify what they mean. What is a postmodernist? What are the basic tenants of postmodernism? How does Fuller's work fit the definition? Why does he insist he is not a postmodernist? Why does being on the editorial board of SOCIAL TEXT make one a postmodernist?
"Postmodernism" has become the all-purpose boogieman that scientists invoke to label and dismiss any and all work in science studies that they don't like. In fact, postmodernism has had very little influence in the professional philosophy of science and even less in the history of science. I would posit that those who keep invoking it here simply don't know what they are talking about.
Posted by: Millimeter Wave | September 6, 2006 12:23 AM
jpj,
appreciate the references to philosophers saying things that were important and impactful.
That still doesn't answer my question, though: what are the impactful things which philosophy as a discipline, as opposed to people who happened to be philosophers, has produced since the distinction was created between philosophy and science?
I'm not going to respond to you calling me ignorant while I'm genuinely asking the question and awaiting a reply...
Posted by: John Wilkins | September 6, 2006 12:32 AM
A couple of observations. Fuller seems to be motivated by the notion, popular in continental philosophy, of an Episteme (which I pronounce with a long final "e", being corrupted by studying Greek, but which is generally pronounced "e-pis-teem"). This is effectively the knowledge community of some group or tradition. What Fuller seems to do with this is suggest in Feyerabendian style that no episteme is privileged over any other, and so arguments from the authority of the episteme of science are fundamentally inegalitarian. Hence, he wants to play up the importance of competing epistemes, such as the religious ones, in order to bring science back down a notch or two.
His basic error, for it is an error, is to think that what is a sociological fact (that there are competing epistemes) is a normative one (that each episteme should be given equal privilege in a modern society). It's all, for him, a bout pwer relations. It's also the Naturalistic Fallacy in action - as Moore observed, no statement of a factual case gives any indication of what is morally right.
Science is privileged because it works much better than any other episteme, past or present. Fuller will deny this, of course, but only at the cost of rejecting the usual standards of success. For him, if homeopathy fails to work on the standards by which science is judged to have succeeded, then these standards must be adjudged to be part of the "science episteme" the way Kuhn argued that paradigms bring with them their standards of success. So, like paradigms, epistemes are incommensurable, and you can't say science actually does do better than the religious or homeopathic episteme. I think that's just false.
Second, my namesake, with whom I am in considerable disagreement, is part of the tradition of the Topoi, or Categories, of Aristotle. His ontology is based on the notion that there are only a set number (Ari had 10, but I don't know what the first JW had - I've got a copy of his Real Character about somewhere, but I can't be arsed looking it up) of basic categories in the universe, that set up something like the Tractarian "logical space" in which everything that is real is situated. So in Wilkins-1's system, to give the name is to uniquely identify what logical possibilities the named thing instantiates. You can see why this would be of interest to the Ontology Projectarians, who are basically trying to set up general database categories for specific fields. In my view, they are resurrecting Aristotelian logic for fields that are not very Aristotelian.
Posted by: Ichthyic | September 6, 2006 1:08 AM
Philip Kitcher wrote the best, most accessible eviscertion of creationism, ABUSING SCIENCE. No single work by a scientists is as effective at showing its errors, especially for un