>>>As I said back when I was on blogspot, religion is boring, religious stupidity especially so. Yet it’s so common that it’s hard to ignore. Thus, I’ve decided that in this re-launch, I will not merely discuss stupidity, but try to carefully categorize it, working out categories and creating linked collections of posts noting instances of the same sort of stupidity. Here’s my first entry.<<<

Via John W. Loftus and The Prosblogion, I’ve come across a debate between famed Christian apologist William Lane Craig and and philosopher Louise Antony, editor of /Philosophers Without Gods/. Topic: whether morality requires God. My reaction to the early parts of the debate was mild dissatisfaction; Antony didn’t say everything she could have said against Craig, though his arguments were do bad that it was hard to know what she should have responded to and what she should have dismissed as unsubstantiated assertion.

Two things stand out. The first is a blatant quote mine of Steven Pinker. Quote mining, of course, is using a selective quote to create a false impression of what someone believes, often making it look like they said the opposite of what they actually said. The specific trick Craig used is one that’s been pulled on Richard Dawkins regarding the Cambrian explosion: quote them asking a question, and then announce that there is no answer to the question, when in fact the original writer immediately answered his own question.

Here’s what Craig said, circa the 58 minute mark:

Here’s what Steven Pinker, who is a psychologist at Harvard University, in an article in January this year, has written the following. He says: “The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup, and have no objective counterpart in the world. The tastiness of fruit and the foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and the prettiness of flowers, are feature of our common nervous system. And if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem, or were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe that it is any more real? And if it is just a collective hallucination how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong, for everyone rather than just distasteful to us.” Pinker has no solution to this problem and therefore adopts a non-objectivist view of morality.

Craig doesn’t say where the article appeared or what it was called, but once I had transcribed it it was findable by Google search: “The Moral Instinct” in the 13 January 2008 edition of /New York Times Magazine/. The quote is accurate. However, Pinker doesn’t say there is no answer to his question, rather that it can be found in “the prevalence of nonzero-sum games” and “rationality itself.” Craig may not like the idea that rationality itself provides the grounds of morality, but it’s false that Pinker just didn’t answer his own question. Pinker sprinkles his article with rejections of the idea that morality is debunked by science, and finishes by saying “Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend.” It’s also worth noting that Pinker didn’t reject the theistic answer to his question because he’s an atheist, but because he thinks the answer fails on other grounds, making him a dubious authority for Craig to appeal to.

Craig also works hard to set up a false dilemma between theism and hyper-strict-materialism. Just listen to the first ten minutes or so of the mp3, you’ll get an earful. And the problem with this is as simple as it comes: atheism is the view that God does not exist. Not the view that determinism is true, or that the mind is wholly material, or that moral realism is false, or that abstract objects do not exist, or any other position on a hundred issues unrelated to God. And heck, strictly speaking it doesn’t even matter how atheism is defined, because it seems the debate was framed in terms of God and morality, not atheism. So long as “God” doesn’t just mean “moral truths,” Craig has no case.

Things like the definition of “atheism” are philosophy 101. And Craig often comes across as a fairly smart guy who knows his stuff. Thus, while this is a series on stupid things people say, I’ll go out on a limb here and say Craig himself isn’t stupid. He knows what he’s doing. And that makes him just contemptible.

EDIT: Craig also quotes a passage from the end of “God’s Utility Function”, a chapter in Richard Dawkins’ /River Out Of Eden/, saying there is no design, purpose, good or evil in the universe. Read in context, it’s not clear Dawkins was commenting on morality at all, rather than just the forces that have shaped life on Earth, and assuming he was commenting on morality runs against the pro-morality currents in /The God Delusion/. Does anyone, though, know of anywhere where he’s explicitly resolved the issue of what he meant there?