Wednesday, August 15, 2018

A Rant

I wish I could type out and go through the entire text of Terry Eagleton's Gifford Lecture because it is chock full of fascinating points, some of them not what the atheists who are probably scoffing at the first two passages I typed out would imagine.  The end of his lecture proper, after about minute 41 turns it around and points out that the new atheists would have probably never found enough ammo to start their Kultur Kampf (I was going to say jihad but thought better of it, not wanting to encourage the Muslim haters) against religion if religion hadn't given them so much of that. 

And that's only one of the many points.   Maybe someday I'll go back and go over the fascinating passage in which he points out how the modernistic, religiously neutered, replacement for religion, "culture" was not only a pathetically inadequate failure, unable to even fulfill the assigned role it was given but it proved as corruptible as the worst of religion.

I will go instead, not so much to what was said but the first audience question, certainly by one of the new atheists who went to the lecture so they could ask a question to embarrass the "faith-head".   If I said that Eagleton addressing Dawkins and the still, then, living Hitchens sounds a little quaint, the question sounds even more quaint and far more ironic than anything Eagleton said.

43:41  Stuart Ritchie, Psychology Department.  I hate to ask such a sublunary question, um, but do you actually  have any evidence for the existence of God because it seems to me that you can talk about how nice you think the emperor's clothes are and how fancy they are and all that but it doesn't really matter if the emperor isn't actually wearing any clothes at all.  Um, and in fact, you don't seem to be, I don't know who your talk is aimed at, 'cause you're not going to convince any atheist because you haven't provided any evidence for the existence of God and you're not going to convince any religious people because you've basically told them what they believe is not actually what, say, Christianity is.  So I'm not entirely sure where your lecture is aimed. 

I'll leave it to you to listen to Terry Eagleton's answer, this is mine.

I can't say, though perhaps I could find out if I sifted through his rabid commentators, if Stuart Ritchie was a devotee of P. Z. Myers anti-religious "Scienceblog"  Pharyngula because I take it he was invoking Myers' "Courtier's Reply" in his question.  Which was part of the common vocabulary of atheists at the turn of the last decade when this talk was given.  That would be ironic (as it seems quaint to me) in the highest sense of it because Myers' was supporting Dawkins' contention that his not knowing anything about the very literature of religion, theology, that he slammed was entirely proper because, as a scientist, he was above knowing the substance of what he was slamming in a best selling book sold on his authority as a scientist and intellectual.

[Update:  I forgot, Terry Eagleton was one of the reviewers of The God Delusion who pointed out that Dawkins' didn't bother to so much as learn what it was he was slamming in the book, which makes me suspect even more that's why the atheist psy-guy was laying for him.]

I wrote a piece pointing out that instead of being an evidenced base critique, the new atheism was taking the same position that Galileo's opponents took when they refused to so much as look through his telescope at the moons of Jupiter.  For the record, and contrary to the popular received myth and English topical painting, it wasn't the Cardinals at the Vatican who refused to look, it was the contemporary scientific establishment who taught Ptolemaic astronomy at universities who were Galileo's earliest and most persistent enemies.  Ironically, still, it was Galileo's supporters within the Catholic hierarchy who were his protectors when the dope provoked Pope Urban VIII by casting him as "Simplicius" in his The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.  Urban VIII (aka, ironically enough, "the last humanist pope) didn't know much about astronomy (unlike his predecessor, Paul III, to whom Copernicus dedicated his book on the topic) but he did know that a late renaissance-early baroque pope didn't have to tolerate being called names by an upstart sci-guy.

I think there is much irony that Urban VIII's attitude that due to to his position as a hierarch of the Catholic Church he could suppress knowledge so as to preserve his dignity is echoed in Richard Dawkins' and P.Z. Myers' claim of immunity from knowing what they're talking about, for they are scientists.

Stuart Ritchie's question is even more ironic coming from someone at a university Psychology department, psychology being the science that has been and still continues to be largely non-evidence based, the science which I used to believe had led biology and the life sciences seriously astray** through their shitty standards, phony research methodologies, etc, on the basis of what they claimed to study scientifically being totally hidden from the methods of real science which were unable to penetrate it even with inferential methods far more self-serving and unconfirmable than the speculations of much of traditional natural theology.   I looked at the University of Edinburgh website at what I assume is the same Stuart Ritchie's page and have had the time to look at one abstract of one of his studies.

Abstract
Recent reports suggest a causal relationship between education and IQ, which has implications for cognitive development and aging—education may improve cognitive reserve. In two longitudinal cohorts, we tested the association between education and lifetime cognitive change. We then tested whether education is linked to improved scores on processing-speed variables such as reaction time, which are associated with both IQ and longevity. Controlling for childhood IQ score, we found that education was positively associated with IQ at ages 79 (Sample 1) and 70 (Sample 2), and more strongly for participants with lower initial IQ scores. Education, however, showed no significant association with processing speed, measured at ages 83 and 70. Increased education may enhance important later life cognitive capacities, but does not appear to improve more fundamental aspects of cognitive processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Just my first question would be to ask Ritchie for evidence that "IQ" had any validity and for evidence that it measured what it purported to.  My other question would be what evidence he had that the "cognitive processing speed" had any real life relevance to anything if it didn't seem to even be related to the phenomenon of education and the "IQ" that was supposed to be a measure of intelligence.  If you can't relate any of those to real life phenomena (ignoring, for the moment, any evidence that any of what you were claiming was really real instead of merely asserted to be real), how do you know that any of it is real?   Something tells me that he was disappointed he couldn't make the correlation between IQ and "the speed of cognitive processing".  I strongly suspect he may have wanted to claim that education didn't change either.  But maybe that's my anti-Brit class system bias interfering with an "objective" view of it. Though I'd never claim my skepticism was science.  I'll admit to that bias coloring what I think but I doubt you'll easily find a psychologist who would admit theirs do, especially if they've got a professional interest in maintaining what they want it to.  I also doubt that any current method of measuring "cognitive speed" will stand a test of time.  It sounds like typical psych snake oil to me.

I have long thought it was supremely ironic how many of the professional and semi-pro scientistic atheists came from the world of academic psychology, claiming to uphold the standards of science and rationality when the history of their topic was as dodgy as any scientific or commercial fraud, replete with scandalous professional fees charged for complete and utter bull shit, psychotherapy, Rorschach testing, various other therapeutic snake-oil jobs, up to and including "expert testimony" that had gotten people executed on the scientifically (purportedly) reliable state-reimbursed predictions of duly authorized psych professionals with academic credentials who were later discredited.   It was one of America's foremost professional atheists "Skeptics" Ray Hyman who I asked that about, a man who was far more interested in suppressing inconvenient scientific research than he was an uninterested seeker of truth through scientific method.

Psychology is pseudo-science which constantly violates the alleged methodology of science, though it is science for the same reason all science is, because scientists call it that.   I'd rather hear an historical critic of religion, they're more likely to know what they're talking about.

**  Now I think that started with the adoption of the ultimate biological just-so story, natural selection.

Update:  Rereading this, about those "experts" who testified in court, predicting the probability of the defendants killing again, it was mighty convenient for them when the subjects of their speculation were murdered, removing the only possible testing of their scientific predictions for reliability.   Psychology in the courtroom is about as reliable as trial by ordeal or throwing someone in the water to see if they float.

3 comments:

  1. My 2 cents:

    Until he finally gets to the question of love (which I would have framed as the question of existence; do we imagine Love exists like the Yeti? Do we ever ask the Yeti-question of love?), Eagleton is trying to engage the subject in the language game of the audience.

    Which is the problem with such discussions, ultimately. Wittgenstein had a lot to say about that:

    "
    Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it."

    Wittgenstein there takes it out of the realm of scientific theory or even legal (or social) doctrine, and puts it in a different sphere. The professor who thought he had cleverly skewered Eagleton and believers, betrayed his ignorance of Scripture. Isaiah begs God to come down and prove He is God, as God did "in days of old." And the prophets were the not fortune tellers; they were telling Israel "what they believe is not actually what, say, [their religion] is."

    Honestly, if you're going to assume a position of superiority, you should have superior information to do it with.

    But the fundamental problem is that what Eagleton is talking about (as he acknowledges) is that what believers assume is not what non-believers assume, and that is why they talk past each other or, in W's terms, engage in language games. The understanding of Scripture, for one thing; the rejection of God as the ally of the rich and powerful (which the next critic went on to say was the action of "the Left" in the 20th century. Well, yes, but then St. Francis in the 14th century; or most of the saints; or many of the Reformers, or....Again, history is not so simple as to divide into a diptych, or even a triptych, of apparently contradictory scenes). As he concludes in the answer to the first question: do your reasons for love make me love your beloved?

    Is love, then, false, because it cannot be conveyed by reason, cannot be spread by debate? And of course, there's the ultimate argument that reason wins and is proven right by winning; except what is reasonable today is irrational tomorrow, and not everyone who loses the argument (say, Nazism) is thereby banished from the earth forever.

    So how is it reason is always and only the ultimate to which all, in time, will kneel?

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    Replies
    1. It's hard to get what he wanted to say in one relatively short lecture or even career. I like Rahner's idea of the horizon which is there but which is always receding as you approach it but always surrounding us though we can't reach it. Reason doesn't get you closer though it can tell you things about where you are, though it can't tell you everything.

      The question (it was more of a statement) just seems so banal and clueless. You could say the same thing about the claims of psychology, that they won't be accepted by people who don't choose to accept them and will be by those who do and ignored by those who don't care. I suppose it's the demand that we treat those with all of the privileges of membership like Ralphie expected when he got his decoder ring in the mail.

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    2. Yeah, I'm not critical of Eagleton's response so much as I am of the question. And looking at that setting and considering the audience, I suspect most of them come in with a frame of mind ready to reject what Eagleton says. Implicit in the question (which isn't a question, really, as you say) is the assumption all arguments must be persuasive. Why can't they be didactic, even investigatory? I've taught argument for years now, and one form of the art, the one favored by the fabled Greeks, is the argument for inquiry. The interlocutor doesn't want to inquire, merely wants his positions confirmed, either negatively or positively.

      Most atheists are no more thoughtful than that, which is one other reason they don't really propagate the way believers do. Christianity at least teaches against selfishness and ego; atheism, as practiced by its most recent adherents especially, teaches that each individual is a self-satisfied cosmos unto himself, preferably with little groups of followers in his (it's always a he, isn't it?) orbit.

      It clearly has something to do with decoder rings. Maybe the problem is the message they keep getting when they're finished decoding is just a dumb commercial.

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