Observations

Things that I like:
For my final exam in introduction to philosophy last fall, a student wrote on her blue book exam under Instructor: “The Best One”

Churches I will Not Attend (Okay, it's true that I avoid all churches, but really. . .)

Free Will Baptist Megachurch:

Wednesday Night Word Explosion

I don’t know what a Word Explosion is, but I try to avoid explosions of any kind.

Eternal Word Ministries:
The sermons at this place are interminable.

Strip mall church:

Advertisement: Practice Resurrection!

I was under the impression one only got one shot at this. I would prefer to put it off as long as possible.

Name Nazi:
It sometimes bothers me that Dwyane Wade’s name is misspelled. Am I the only one who notices this? Of course, in a way, the idea that one’s name could be misspelled is absurd. Names are purely conventional; any string of symbols that one’s society agrees to treat as referring directly to that person count as the name for that person. There are limits, however to what you can get away with.

Still, I sometimes have doubts about wisdom of some names (I say as the parent of a child with a decidedly unusual name). I recently saw a woman with her children in a Burger King play area. The boy was named “Massiah”. Obviously, you can name your children anything you want, but they are the ones who have to live with it. And isn’t "Massiah" a little optimistic? It would certainly put a lot of pressure on the kid. Maybe it would be kinder to go with “Superman” or "Samuel L. Jackson".

Overheard conversations:
I saw a woman on the train the other day who told her four-year old daughter, “Shut up. You just talk too much.” When another woman gave her an indulgent, rather than scandalized, smile, the mother expounded at length, in detail, for the rest of the trip about how the child never stopped talking, and how she got her loquacity from her grandmother, how she asked questions with obvious answers and was otherwise unbearably talkative. I thought, “Lady, she did not get it from her grandmother.”

Is religion natural? Is science unnatural?

You and I, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, even the late Christopher Hitchens, are all religious. So you should all stop complaining about religion and trying to change people’s religious beliefs. It’s just not possible to eradicate religion, so we might as well accept whatever crazy stuff they want to believe.

Bob McCauley [Update: McCauley is this guy who blogs here.) argues that science is a fragile flower in need of precisely the right conditions in order to survive, but religion is a durable and universal part of human experience. Thus, science is no threat to religion; religion will continue whether science conflicts with it or not, and if there really is a conflict between science and religion, science will be the inevitable loser. More than that, every single person is religious; religion is part of everyone’s character whether they like it or not. Perhaps in some instances it might seem that science undermines a particular religion to some degree in some sufficiently advanced country, but in the long run, religion will survive, indeed thrive, in one form or another while science will undoubtedly disappear into the mists of time.

McCauley reasons that science involves a counterintuitive set of processes and products. The content, or product, of scientific theories is counterintuitive. Quantum physics, cosmology, microbiology, biology all involve exotic entities (from the perspective of ordinary experience) acting in complex and unexpected ways. [I’ll see if I can find a video of this. Just ask people where the mass of a tree comes from. Even people who ‘understand’ photosynthesis are unlikely to answer, “From the carbon dioxide I the air.” It is intuitively difficult to conceive of air as providing the enormous mass of a tree.] Religion involves no such counterintuitive entities: the content of religion is magical people who control events by mystical means but who are essentially like us in psychology. In other words, the key concept of religion is the agent-cause, the person or intelligent agent as a cause of events that otherwise are not explained (and, hell, really many of them that are explained in non-agent terms). You might think that religions appeal to mysterious invisible, intangible, sky-beings who operate in untestable ways with minds that are infinitely powerful, infinitely complex, and thus incomprehensible to mortals, but this is not the case. All these trappings of contemporary religion are not really religious at all but belong to theology, a highly intellectualized explanatory endeavor more akin to science or abstract fields such as mathematics or logic, than to religion. Theology, of course, could disappear, and this would have no bearing on religion whatsoever. In short, the product of the scientific method, the content of science, is counterintuitive and hard to grasp, and so cannot be considered an enduring part of human belief.

Religion, on the other hand, is simply the tendency to believe in anthropomorphic causes for events. I got the job; there must be an agent behind my good luck, a being who worked behind the scenes to get me the job. Mary got cancer; there must be someone acting to give her cancer. That’s religion, and that’s really (almost) all that religion is.

However, the product is not the main part of McCauley’s argument. The main issue for him is the process of science, not its content. “The scientific method” is not an easy or intuitive process for people to grasp and follow. (Let’s assume there is a single, albeit complex, method of science.) Ordinary people, and even trained scientists, have difficulty following the strictures of the scientific method: blind, or double-blind, experiments, mathematical models for inferring correlations, clear distinctions between correlation and causation, etc. These and other aspects of science are difficult to grasp and follow, and even trained scientists are prone to abandon them in ordinary life.

Science further requires a complex set of social relations and institutions such as publication and peer review. Religion, on the other hand, depends only on processes that are quite ‘natural’, even innate—if you believe in innateness. Religion has two main essential features: explaining events in terms of agents (intelligent beings) as causes (noted above) and treating certain items, areas, or events, as “sacred” or ”contaminated” (or treating ourselves as contaminants of the sacred). McCauley equates religion with this subset of largely erroneous reasoning tendencies and processes. Since people inevitably reason poorly in these ways, religion can never disappear.

Similarly, as it turns out, my toddler (and possibly my dog) is religious since he is prone to the same errors. Taking this poor reasoning as partly constitutive of religion does not mean that this is all there is to religion. It might be that these two features are universal to all religions, but there is more required for something to count as religion. Alas, McCauley does not offer any further definienda for religion. This failure conveniently leaves him lots of leeway to argue that religion must be natural since he considers only attributes that are shown to be ‘natural’ (what McCauley calls “maturationally natural”) by cognitive psychology.

I hope it’s obvious at this point what’s wrong with this reasoning. He’s defined science narrowly, to include only the highly sophisticated social institution of science as it is practiced in the modern world, but he’s defined religion very generally so that virtually any supernatural thinking qualifies as religion. Obviously if science were defined equally generally, as, for example, a systematic method of learning about the world by means of observation and experiment, then it would be impossible to find anyone who did not have some cognitive capacity for it and tendency to use it. My toddler certainly experiments with the world and tries to understand it, often inferring unobservable mechanisms. And there are lots of experiments in developmental psychology that show children using such inference patterns. Certainly not everyone would do science well, but it’s also obvious that not everyone does religion well either. (Hey, look at the Scientologists!) Similarly, there is a narrow definition of religion that requires it to have the kind of sophisticated social apparatus that we find in contemporary Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. These types of religion clearly include counterintuitive doctrines and concepts far removed from common experience. The Catholic doctrines of transubstantiation and the triune God are highly counterintuitive. Even the processes of religion in the contemporary world can be unnatural. Do we need priests in cassocks to interpret the will of God for us? Why must these priests be sexually abstinent men? So, contemporary organized religion is just as unnatural and contingent as contemporary science (unless misogyny is intrinsic to religion); and simple science is just as unavoidable and intrinsic to human nature as is simple religion. My toddler has the same supernaturalist tendencies as religious believers, but my toddler also experiments with complex machines to try to discover their inner workings.

McCauley’s argument is an equivocation. The only thing that makes it appear plausible is the reliance on different standards or scopes for the two concepts. Religion and science are both contingent and unnatural when viewed one way (narrowly, if you will), and they are both necessary and natural when viewed another way (broadly, generally, or simply).

So, if this was obvious to me, wasn’t it also obvious to McCauley?

Ironically, McCauley identified confirmation bias as an error people commit that makes them poor scientists. He noted that people are often quite good at finding rationalizations that allow them to maintain failed theories even in the face of overwhelming counterevidence. Perhaps McCauley might do well to diagnose himself.

McCauley attempts to avoid my objection by labeling the sophisticated and unnatural activity that appears to relate to religion theology. So, there is little unnatural about religion since religion is defined as that activity that psychologists have discovered to be natural, and any unnatural aspect of religion (as we would ordinarily understand the term) is theology. Obviously, then theology could disappear without religion disappearing. Theology appears to be a set of doctrines, beliefs, rules of inference involving religion, but it does not appear to involve the practices of religion (such as the priesthood or gender discrimination). I suppose McCauley could add some other term for narrowly defined practices of a particular religion, and argue that these practices are not essential to religion either. Should we dispute McCauley’s rather arbitrary distinction between the theology (and theological processes involving, say, confession or the priesthood)? It’s probably not worth it; McCauley can define his terms in whatever way he wants as long as we can explain them in ordinary terms that anyone can understand. So, here’s how to state McCauley’s claims in those ordinary terms:

There are supernaturalist tendencies in human reasoning that tend to persist even when people are aware that this reasoning is fallacious. Similarly, humans have difficulty in applying good scientific reasoning; instead, they often rely on or apply poor scientific reasoning. Of course, humans are capable of good scientific reasoning on their own, but they are more effective if they have complex social institutions that allow for critique and debate.

Given these facts, it is also entirely possible that people can reason well enough together that they will not be taken in by supernaturalist reasoning. McCauley doesn’t exactly emphasize the last point, but it’s implicit in his discussion of science since science succeeds despite our tendency towards error.

Take that, Dawkins! Religion 1, Science 0.

My friend who brought in McCauley for the lecture explains that Dawkins and Dennett think that the demise of religion is inevitable and that McCauley is merely providing a dose of realism. I cannot speak for Dawkins/Dennett, or the rest of the Four Horsemen of the Theopocalypse. So, this claim may be true or it may not. Still, I have two questions. (1) What do we do about religion if some important aspect of it is difficult to eradicate from human psychology? And (2) are societies in which religion has a strong grip more successful (in the sense that they are more likely to survive, spread their belief systems) than those that are less religious? Will the religious or non-religious societies compete more effectively?

To the first question: If we believe, as McCauley does, that religion is essentially irrational, then we ought to do everything possible to limit its power and influence, to educate people sufficiently so that they cease to be religious, and implement social policies that will make it more likely that religions will slowly fade away. Clearly these things can be done, and they would not require mistreatment of the religious or religions. We need only cease to give religion special treatment in order for it to lose at least some of its power. The most effective thing to do would be to stop giving special support for religion. For example, religions are given a prominent role in all sorts of social circumstances that their actual contribution to society does not merit. We could stop giving invocations at public events as a way of reducing religion’s influence. We could stop giving religions special treatment in funding for their activities. For example, drop all the federal government’s ‘faith-based initiatives’ and make social spending based on evidence, not faith. We could work harder to educate our children in science and limit the role of religion in schools. We can improve our social support for the poor and disadvantaged in order to limit the need for social services religions provide. We could make it easier for people to live without religion. We do not need just to imagine doing these things either because most European nations already do them, and those nations fare better on basically any measure of social welfare or happiness than America does.

To the second question: I do not know whether religious or non-religious societies will thrive in a kind of evolutionary free-for-all, but I know that public policies based on religion and religious thinking cause tremendous problems for our society. America is, I think, dropping from the ranks of the developed world. And it’s fairly clear that the benighted policies of our conservative leaders, supported by their religious followers, have led to this trend. The authoritarian-follower personality of the conservative movement in America, dominated by religious believers, has enabled the looting of the government by the wealthy and the gradual decay of our infrastructure and our important social institutions (such as public education). Societies that are free of religion do better in promoting the welfare of their citizens and fit better in a community of nations. I do not know if this means they will continue to exist longer or spread their values more effectively than will more religious nations (such as America or Saudi Arabia), but it is devoutly to be hoped that they will, and it seems a worthwhile goal to work towards achieving that end.

There are successful nations with majority atheist populations. There are organizations of scientists who inculcate good reasoning into scientists at young ages, and they are capable of leaving behind most of their errors and superstition. There are millions of atheists worldwide. All of these people may be prone to errors of reasoning, but these millions appear to have avoided or corrected this reasoning in adherence to ‘the’ scientific method and/or in rejecting religion. So, the relative naturalness of superstition is not sufficient evidence that superstition cannot be overcome or replaced with more careful reasoning.

McCauley reasons that religion is, at bottom, a kind of fallacious or erroneous reasoning, so he cannot reasonably object to the attempts by the new atheists to limit, even eradicate, its influence. Perhaps it will be harder to do this than some think, but if you really think that religion is basically superstition and cognitive error, then you really cannot accept religion with equanimity. If superstition can be fought at all, which it clearly can be, then our goal, whether it is easy or difficult, should be to fight it. I can only hope that McCauley’s overall purpose is to warn atheists away from false optimism, but, if so, that was not the tenor of his talk. I cannot help feeling that McCauley's argument is really a counsel to despair, that we should accept that people cannot change this aspect of their psychology. To me, even if he is correct about these kinds of cognitive errors being universal, if religion really is rooted in fallacious reasoning, then this fact should provide more motivation to oppose it.

Why Jerry Coyne is Wrong (about Ethics)

Every few days I find something on the internet to blog about. I start typing, and then I get busy and give up on it. I will try to do better with today’s entry: Why Jerry Coyne is Wrong (about Ethics). Catchy, huh?

So, I like the stuff Coyne posts, and mostly I agree with it. I wish that I were in a position that I could make my colleagues take some responsibility for their friendly, no-strings-attached, totally-not-supporting-right-wing-crazies, and they-never-tell-me-what-to-conclude-even-though-strangely-all-the-many-opinions-I-have-that-directly-contradict-everything-they-believe-never-see-print Templeton money. Thus, I say with respect, Coyne is here totally wrong about objectivity and truth in non-scientific contexts.

Let’s begin.
Coyne is respectfully disagreeing about scientism, the view that science is the only way to acquire objective knowledge of external reality. His friend Eric McDonald disagrees and argues for the existence of objectivity or truth in other areas besides science.
Coyne writes about McDonald's post (forgive the long quotation, but I want to be fair),

His post, “On the strangely beguiling notion of scientism,” takes the stand that there are indeed ways to apprehend objective truth beyond the purview of science, and that those who claim otherwise are guilty of scientism.
We still disagree about this. I’m sorry to say that Eric’s piece, like nearly all pieces on scientism, fails to make a case for (or even give more than one example of) “truth” apprehended by other than scientific means—and I’m defining “science” as the combination of empirical observation, reason, and (usually) replicated observation and prediction that investigates what exists in the universe.
I’ll be brief here, as I’ve posted a lot on this topic lately, but I want to discuss what Eric sees as “objective knowledge” that goes beyond science.
It’s “moral knowledge”:

And though Jerry Coyne (this is one of the small number of areas where he and I differ significantly in our approach to things) may dismiss ideas concerning value as matters of opinion, it is very doubtful that girls in Afghanistan, who have acid thrown in their faces or see their schools being destroyed, share that view. It is not just a matter of opinion that their right to learn should be recognized and honoured; how we establish what can justly be considered objective moral understanding is something worthwhile considering.

. . .
Now I agree, of course, that throwing acid in the face of Afghan schoolgirls for trying to learn is wrong. But it is not an “objective” moral wrong—that is, you cannot deduce it from mere observation, not without adding some reasons why you think it’s wrong. And those reasons are based on opinions. In this case, the “opinion” is that it’s wrong to hurt anyone for trying to go to school. In other words, Eric claims that moral dicta are objective ones, on the par with the “knowledge” of science.
But such dicta are not “truths,” but “guides for living”. And some people, like the odious Taliban who perpetuate these crimes, do disagree. How do you prove, objectively, that they’re wrong? You need to bring in other subjective criteria.

The problem with “objective” moral truths is much clearer in less clear-cut cases. Is it objectively true that abortion is wrong, or that a moral society must give everyone health care? You can’t ascertain these “truths” by observation; you deduce them from some general principles of right and wrong that are, at bottom, opinion. (Of course, some opinions are more well-founded than others, and that’s what philosophy is good for.)

What precisely is Coyne’s position and reasoning? As far as I can tell, he agrees that certain actions (throwing acid in an Afghan girl’s face for going to school) and people (the Taliban) are morally wrong, but that his agreement or disagreement with McDonald is only a matter of their sharing certain subjective attitudes towards those actions and individuals. What reasons does Coyne offer for his opinion about morality?

Some people (e.g. the Taliban) disagree about the morality of these actions.
Therefore, there is no fact about the morality of these actions.

This is a strange argument coming from a leading voice in the debate with creationists. Clearly those odious individuals disagree about science, but we would not conclude that there is no objective truth in science but only opinion. Clearly, there is more going on. The second point:

“How do you prove, objectively, that they’re wrong?”

So, it is not the mere fact of disagreement that troubles Coyne, it is that he can find no common ground that one could use to prove to the satisfaction of the Taliban that their actions are wrong.

Still, I don’t think this helps much since Coyne himself has shown how difficult it is to find common ground with the creationists in order to convince them that they are wrong. We need not convince the Taliban that they are wrong, just as we need not convince the creationists that they are wrong, in order for there to be objective facts for them to be wrong about.

Coyne’s appeal to problem cases is a red herring. If one were to judge the objectivity of science only by appeal to its most problematic cases (e.g. string theory), one would similarly come to the conclusion that science also is not objective. The fact that there are cases in which we do not have answers is irrelevant as well since every living discipline has problem cases about which more research is needed.

Thus, what we need is a set of procedures or a method that can be used to show objectively that one is right. That is, we need something akin to the scientific method which relies not on the intuitive judgments or subjective opinions of the arguer in order to establish the claims. For example, we would not like to be caught in a debate on the ethics of torture only to have each side bellow at the other that their opinions are right and the other side’s are obviously wrong, as judged by some direct perception or intuition. In science, that independent arbiter is experiment, double-blinded and peer-reviewed, to show that the conclusion does not depend on anything purely internal to an agent.

Indeed, this is a challenge of moral epistemology, to find such an independently verifiable means of testing ethical claims. However, now Coyne has changed the subject from one of the reality or objectivity of ethical claims to our knowledge of those ethical claims. We may lack a clear method for adjudicating disputes about ethics, but it in no way follows that there is no objectivity or truth about ethics. We do not know, for example, whether there is intelligent extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the universe (Let’s hope so because “there’s bugger all down here on earth.”), but it does not follow from this lack of knowledge that there is no fact about the existence of such life. The fact that we do not know, that we may never be in a position to know, does not prove that there is no objectivity or truth.

Still, Coyne says, we need a method. The difference, he would no doubt claim, is that while we do not now know the answer to this question about extraterrestrial life, we do know how we could go about looking for it, and we would know what sorts of things would count as evidence for or against its existence. So, the scientist is apparently one up on the ethicist in having some idea what those methods are, but this is still irrelevant because the existence of standards for verifying or falsifying claims tells us nothing about reality. Epistemology and metaphysics, knowledge and reality, are distinct, and we cannot conclude from our inability (perhaps even a permanent inability) to formulate objective standards for knowing morality that there is no objective moral reality at all. The “How do you know?” question is a good one to ask, but it tells us nothing about the existence of objective reality.

But perhaps we can see what some methods in philosophy and ethics might be. Before that, one more quotation:

In other words, Eric is committing here the very sin he decried (as I recall) in Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape: he is saying that there are scientifically establishable truths about ethics. And if that’s true, then let Eric tell us what those truths are—without first defining, based on his taste, what is “moral” and “immoral.” Let him give us a list of all the behaviors he considers objectively immoral.

I don’t know McDonald’s critique of Harris, but I included this to be funny. Please tell us, Dr. Coyne what are all the scientifically establishable truths about science? If there are such truths, Coyne should be able to “give us a list of all” of the ones he considers to be true and all those he considers to be false. Allow me to reiterate, we do not need to know what the truths are in order to know that there are truths. If we did, then science (indeed investigation of any kind) would be pointless. Are there objective truths to discover about the world? We don’t know until we can first say what they are, but, having stated them, we now find ourselves with no need to attempt to discover them.

Wait, sorry. I think what Coyne was trying to say was that McDonald should be able to state in principle what sorts of claims are “scientifically establishable” in ethics. Obviously, if these claims were scientifically establishable, they would not be non-scientific claims, as McDonald says they are, so Coyne appears to be demanding that McDonald explain which non-scientifically establishable claims are scientifically establishable. I have rarely seen a question so begged.

Still, I cannot help feeling dirty, what with the quoting and all, so I will get back to the epistemic issue. Perhaps Coyne would be happy enough with moral skepticism. He might be better off saying that there are objective truths in ethics but no one is ever in a position to say what they are given the lack of intersubjective standards of verification. A reminder:

You can’t ascertain these “truths” by observation; you deduce them from some general principles of right and wrong that are, at bottom, opinion. (Of course, some opinions are more well-founded than others, and that’s what philosophy is good for.)

Should we be skeptical? It depends on what you mean by 'skeptical', of course. At any rate, we need not think that no ethical claim is any better justified than any other. We need not be extreme or Pyrrhonic skeptics. For example, as Coyne notes, philosophy is good for establishing ‘opinions’ as better founded than others. We should, of course, always be cautious and recognize the potential for fallibility in our method. And here’s where we get to the methods of philosophy and ethics. We use reason and argument based on some general principles, perhaps, but often these are based on intuitive judgments of individual cases.

Isn’t this just more subjectivity and opinion? No. How do we know that modus ponens is a valid form of argument? Modus ponens is the following argument form: If p, then q; p; therefore q. This argument form guarantees that true premises will result in a true conclusion, and our judgment of this is not based merely on popular opinion. It is based not on popularity, but on careful consideration of the concept of the conditional.

Psychologists have studied conditional reasoning using the Wason selection task and have shown that undergraduates are more likely to view the fallacy of affirming the consequent as valid than they are to view the valid argument form of modus tollens as valid. Affirming the consequent goes like this: If p then q; q; therefore p. Something like 70% of subjects apparently (given the structure of the selection task) believe that this is valid. Yet we can see that it is not. Here is a parallel argument. If you are driving legally, you must be 16 or older (in America without a learner’s permit etc.). Suppose you are 16 or older. Does it follow that you are driving legally? Obviously not, you might not have a driver’s license; you might be drunk; you might not be wearing your prescription eyewear.

On the other hand, modus tollens (considered by fewer than 10% of the subjects to be valid) is valid. Modus tollens goes like this: If p, then q; not q; therefore not-p. And we can see that this is valid by considering that the conditional indicates a necessary condition (that is, a condition without which the antecedent would not occur). So, using our previous example, we know that being 16 or older is a necessary condition for driving legally. It follows from this that if you are driving legally, you must be 16 or older. Now, consider what happens when the necessary condition is not met. In that case, the possible fact it is necessary for, the driving legally, cannot obtain. In short, supposing you are not over 16, you cannot drive legally.

This reasoning is not difficult to follow; it is familiar to everyone. I do not know how to characterize it. Is it deduction from general principles? Well, there clearly are general principles involved, but the role of the examples is essential in getting people to recognize those principles. In any event, it is not just opinion. Should I use all caps? If Coyne wants to tell us that these principles are just opinions, then he must be willing to agree that other people might have different opinions about basic logic, and so there is no possibility of arguing with, reasoning about, anything at all.

Moreover, consider what Coyne is claiming here. Ethics is merely a matter of opinion. What is the basis of this view? Is it also just opinion? If so, it is not my opinion, so I am perfectly within my rights to reject it. Is it society’s opinion? Not likely. We have consistent public opinions that rely on belief in objective moral fact. We don’t just outlaw murder because we do not prefer it; we outlaw murder because we think it is wrong (because of harm [another moral concept] to innocents [still yet another moral concept] etc.). So, it is not society’s opinion that ethics is mere opinion. Perhaps it is the opinion of the community of experts treated as knowledgeable (!) about such matters? If so, again ethics is not considered mere opinion; if one polls philosophers and ethicists one will find they believe ethics to be objective. So, if Coyne is correct that ethics is a matter of opinion, he must provide some argument for that conclusion that is based on something other than his own opinion.

But still, perhaps we can establish that science is the best way of discovering the truth about reality. If so, everything else would be second-rate. Such an argument would not show that ethics does not traffic in objectivity and truth, but it would puncture the ethicist’s pretensions. Actually, probably not. Most ethicists and philosophers are well aware, better than anyone else, of the limits of their methods. Still, can we establish that science is the best way of discovering objective truth about reality?

Coyne is aware of this argument since he quotes McDonald making exactly this point:

I want to differ with Eric on one other point: his claim that there’s no way to show a priori that science provides truth about reality. (Well, I agree with him in principle, but think it’s completely irrelevant as a criticism of science.):

[There follow quotations from various philosophers noting that the superiority of the scientific method is not itself a scientific question.]

Eric should be careful here, because he’s beginning to tread the road paved by people like Alvin Plantinga—theologians who try to drag science down to the level of faith because science can’t justify logically that it can finds truth.
My answer to this claim is this: “so fricking what?” While philosophers draw their pay by arguing interminably about such stuff (and achieving nothing by so doing), science goes ahead and accomplishes things: we find out what causes disease and then find cures; we put people on the Moon; we build computers and lasers. In other words, by assuming that there are external truths that are apprehended by science, we accomplish what we want to do, including alleviating suffering that no faith-healing could ever relieve. The tuberculosis bacterium is not an illusion. I don’t give a rat’s patootie for the philosophers who tell us that we can’t justify science’s ability to find truth by a priori lucubration. Let them squabble while science moves on. The success of science justifies its assumption of objective truths and its program for apprehending them.

Ahoy, mateys, it’s the dangerous and elusive (well, not really) slippery slope. If we think that science is not capable of justifying itself, then we will soon be like Alvin Plantinga denying evolution, rejecting science, and whatnot; it will be dogs and cats living together, the end of the world. But, as to his substantive answer, “so fricking what?” The what is that one cannot justify science (or induction, in Hume’s terms) in scientific terms on pain of circularity. We could appeal to the success of science on pragmatic grounds (and I would as well), but the point is that this appeal is itself not a kind of scientific knowledge. If it were, the justification would be circular and hence not really a justification at all. The point is that apologists for science must rely on some reason other than science to justify use of science. No one (except the aforementioned Plantingeans) wants to take your science away. At least no one around here does. I have no dispute with this pragmatic justification of science; I am as big a fan as you will find of science and the scientific method. This is not to say that we should not do science, or that science is not effective. But that’s not the issue. The point is, again, that even those who advocate for the superiority of science must base that argument on some non-scientific reasoning. That reasoning is, in this case, reasonable, but it is also absolutely essential if one is to justify science. Thus, there must, if science is to be trusted, be objective truth and knowledge of non-scientific matters (here, the epistemology of science).

One more attempt: Anyone who uses reason and argument to critique philosophy and philosophical method must, in the end, just be engaging in more philosophy. That’s not an attempt to reject science. Neither is it an apology for religion or superstition. It’s a simple recognition of the need for reason and argument that is not purely scientific or observational.

Let’s consider one last possibility. Coyne analogizes morality to religion, and, God forbid, I wouldn’t want to do that. Still, there might be an objection that the intuitive judgments about ethics differ from intuitive judgments about philosophy (and these self-referential arguments about morality and science) and logic. There are, of course, many poor arguments in ethics, just as there are poor papers in science journals, but at bottom there are principles of ethics that seem no less certain than the principles we rely on in these arguments for objective philosophical truth (such as, for example, the pragmatic argument for the value of science).

One such principle is the principle of equality: We should treat everyone in the same way provided there is no relevant difference between them.

I know that Coyne would love this example since it makes use of vague language and requires interpretation to apply. What is it to treat people the same way? Should I give everyone in the universe a size extra large Santa sweatshirt because I am buying one for my brother for Christmas [sorry, dude]? Clearly not. The ‘relevance’ clause also involves considerable potential for abuse. Are African-Americans or women relevantly different from white men so that I am justified in refusing to hire them? Presumably not. However, the vagueness and interpretation are necessary for the statement to have the status of truth. One should resist the temptation to critique the equality principle on the grounds of vagueness or interpretability because such a critique would be implicitly accepting the principle and only disagreeing about its application. There are not likely to be universally correct moral claims such as “Do not kill”. Correct principles will have to be abstract and general, such as the equality principle, in order for them to be true. Does 1 + 1 = 2? Obviously, but if you take one water droplet and add it to another water droplet, you don’t have two water droplets, you just have one bigger water droplet. Does this silly example show that our fundamental mathematical understanding is incorrect? No, we just have to recognize the limits of application of universally true principles. Readers are free to come up with counterexamples to the equality principle, but I would bet that all of them are questions of application, not questions of the truth of the claim.

So, in the end, philosophy is unavoidable no matter how we try. ("Oh, Lord, how I did try!") And ethics is as reliable a part of philosophy as any other (or approximately so). It’s not anti-scientific to believe this, and it’s not superstitious or religious either. There are, as they say, more things [objective truths, that is] in heaven and earth, [Dr. Coyne], than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I apologize if I have run on at too great a length, but for one brief afternoon I have time to do what I want. So, here it is. I hope that it was at least worth the effort.