"Blind" faith vs. faith

Attacking intellectual blindness rather than faith

This cartoon posted by Cameron Reilly in his blog is on the classic theme of faith vs. science.

I appreciate jokes of this sort, although I also think they sort of miss the point. They are funny more because they play on our fear of religious fanatacism and our stereotypes of faith than because they really hit home.

I think it’s more the “blind” in blind faith that we find problematic … rather than the “faith”part. Great things as well as terrible ones are accomplished by monomaniacs with a mission driven by faith. If someone shares your own faith, you find it admirable. If they don't, it is scary, and often for good reason. We use "faith" to good effect in all areas of life. It also aligns us and sometimes kills people massively when leveraged for politics.

Attacking “faith” as such sometimes makes us sound as if we lack hope, optimism, and belief in anything in general, and for many of us who admire science, the rest of those things aren’t true.
Origin of Species is still considered a classic of science writing and theorizing because it drew observations from broad patterns of data in many fields to support its conclusions, fairly considered conflicting evidence, and suggested implications of the ideas and ways to test them. Its role in the cultural shifting of “faith” was a secondary result.

The works of "scientific" creationism are still equally great examples of quite the opposite process, selectively picking data to support its conclusions, selectively quoting authorities, and creating explanations that while they explain a lot in some sense can’t ever be tested.

We all have a tendency to see things in terms of what we already believe. We all make good use of “faith” in at least some form.

The important difference, I think, is that the ideals of inquiry teach us to make mistakes and learn from them, while a tolerance for uncertainty allows us to see our ideas as theories.
When we say that people are going overboard with “blind faith” I think what we intend to mean is that they completely reject the ideals of inquiry, which is what makes it blind. It’s the blind part and not the faith part that makes the cartoon hit home. If “design” or “creation” were really a hypothesis rather than a mythic story, it would at least potentially have a scientific form. To the degree that it has such a form, it has accumulated an enormous amount of disconfirming evidence.

That’s not an attack on faith, it’s an attack on blindness.

If we attack faith as such, it should be for its political and social abuses rather than because we ignore the value of "faith" in some form in daily life.

Review of Fiorina book on culture war rhetoric

Fiorina: Culture War rhetoric arises from an ideologically polarized political class

Since I think it is relevant to the politics of the ID issue that I've been discussing today, I am copying the text of my Amazon review of Morris Fiorina's book on culture war in American to here. For example, Bill Dembski (an Intelligent Design author) frequently states that culture war is important to us and demands that ID be made a political issue. Fiorina's argument would make his motivation seem rather hollow and parochial.

Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (Great Questions in Politics Series) by Morris P. FiorinaEdition: Paperback
Price: $14.00

Political class is polarized, but the rest of us can think!, November 16, 2004

This is a very brief and tightly argued book of enormous relevance to us in 2004. It makes the following remarkable points:

(1) On close inspection of individual opinions, the vast majority of the electorate in the U.S. are *moderate*, not radically polarized into liberals and conservatives. That is, most of us are, as we would like to believe, capable of thinking independently for ourselves rather than strictly along party ideological lines.

We are a _closely_divided_ nation, as reflected in the very close recent elections, however we are NOT a _*deeply*_divided_ nation. That is, we are not really a nation of two distinct warring camps and a couple of swing states as the media sometimes present it for dramatic purposes. Fiorina sugests that we are actually something close to an ambivalent nation which divides itself in poltitical matters because we have no choice when presented with highly divided options.

(2) The American public has *not* become dramatically polarized even over such hot topics as abortion. Rather, relatively small differences among us have been magnified by the rhetoric used to present the issues to us.

(3) The political choices we have are determined by a distinct class of politicians, party activists, and interest group leaders, who *have* become increasingly polarized over moral and religious ideology as well as economic ideology.

(4) A large part of the polarization of the political class has been the result of the realignment of the South, such that republicans aligned aggressive foreign policy with hostility to the welfare state, and democrats aligned antiwar sentiment with support of those at risk. This is represented particular well by the "gender gap" which widened at the same time this realignment or tuning of the ideologies of the parties was taking place.

Fiorina suggests that when Bill Clinton once said early in his presidency that he was Pro-Choice, but against abortion, most Americans knew what he meant, that most of us, liberal or conservative, do not want to legislate morality for others, even though we have a clear sense of what is right and wrong. Fiorina also points out for example that most 80% of us believe that abortion should be legal under some conditions (even if wrong), and illegal under others. The extremes at each end which promote unconditional rights for unborn babies or for mothers are roughly the 10% tail at either side of a normal curve.

Finally, he also provides data showing that the averaged opinions of self-identified liberals and conservatives regarding abortion differ only regarding under what specific conditions they think abortion should be legal, not the legality of abortion in general.

The result is that the supposed "culture war" is really a war between increasingly ideologically polarized political parties and their activists who arent really even aware of each others reasoning, with most of us in the middle getting hit by friendly fire from both sides, but being forced to choose between them.

The bottom line for Fiorina's argument here is that we are a nation currently creating unneccessary internal conflicts and indulging in "culture war" polarized issues like gay marriage or unconditional rights of various kinds that are really of concern to a relatively small and unrepresentative number of us. They are sold to us by political parties and the media because of their drama rather than their relative importance. It's hard for me to look at the political ads for either of the current candidates in 2004 without nodding agreement on this.

Our political system provides us with ideological extremism on both sides, and seems to have no desire or ability to change itself, whereas most of us caught in it would usually prefer pragmatic and non-ideological solutions to issues that address larger numbers of us.

I read this at the same time at Juergensmeyer's book "Terror in the Mind of God," and it is chilling how much the "culture war" among the political elites comes to resemble the "cosmic war" of good and evil that Juergensmeyer theorizes leads to real violence under some conditions.

If Fiorina is right, we may not really have a (popular) culture war at all, but we could create one if it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as we come to accept it uncritically. If Fiornia had a solution for this centrally important problem, this book would merit 6 or 7 stars. However, just by pointing it out so clearly, it merits the highest rating I can give it.

Please read this important and timely book.

Intelligent Design and The Meaning of Creation and Evolution

Intelligent Design: The Meaning of Creation and Evolution

We care very much about what other people believe and what sort of communities they participate in. It matters to us somewhat whether other people believe in fairies or demons or astrology. It matters to us much more what communities they belong to and the threat posed by well-organized opposing groups. That's why most scientists and educators are only bemused and vaguely threatened by horoscopes, but deeply concerned about intelligent design.

Intelligent design is the intellectual leading edge of a broader grassroots movement opposed to modern secularism in education in science. The core argument is that what most of us think of as deity ("intelligent designer") has been arbitrarily and wrongly rejected by the traditions of science, and as a result we have been subjected to an empty materialistic science that doesn't really explain what it is widely assumed to explain: particularly the diversity of life on earth.

The issue is very heated and takes place primarily over the battleground of education. Politicians are proposing legislation which forces schools to teach that evolutionary biology is relatively discredited as science compared to other sciences, and that intelligent design is on equal scientific grounds.

It is true that many of the ID proponents avoid saying that they are talking about deity when they talk about "intelligence." They sometimes say that "intelligence" could be an advanced extraterrestrial or a process in nature of some kind. Let's be clear on one very important point. Any such intelligence that could do what the ID proponents hypothesize about (create life and worlds through an act of planning without any evident means) would be indistinguishable from what we commonly call a god (whether it is the God imagined by Jews, Christians, and Muslims or not). Just as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, any sufficiently advanced alien creator would be indistinguishable from God. We are indeed talking about "Creator" as well as "designer" when we discuss intelligent design.

That's why the prolific ID author Phillip Johnson argues against naturalism in science, and why ID theorist William Dembski argues that his "design inference" is "a bridge between science and theology." It is also why the word Creator is capitalized in many of the intelligent design legislations that are being proposed. And of course this is one of the big reasons why many people feel so threatened about intelligent design.

We have a long tradition in U.S. politics of keeping anything that resembles anyone's religion out of public matters, in order to avoid having big religious groups dominate minority religious groups. We also have a long tradition in modern science of rejecting the idea that natural phenomena should be explained in terms of planning. This rejection of teleological thinking in science is the intellectual issue at the forefront of the ID movement. They want to reverse it, to discredit the idea that adaptation is a sufficient explanation for form and function, and have natural phenomena explained presumably in terms of processes of Creation or "design" that is explicitly planned in some sense.

It isn't clear that the two underlying stories at stake, evolution and creation, are neccessarily as incompatible as our "culture war" politics and some of our intellectual traditions have often made them. The evolutionary story is about the appearance of form and function through natural processes over time and the creation story is about the meaningful emergence of new things. Evolution can certainly produce creation, or even Creation, and many theologians argue that way. Creation could also produce evolution, as the deists and some others have sometimes argued. Creation and evolution have existed in parallel for centuries, with evolution being taught as science and creation taught as religion.

Intelligent design is notably different from these views. The people involved in ID do not want to reconcile the evolution and creation stories, they consider the evolution story something to debunk, primarily because of its rejection of the possibility of what they see as an obvious fact, the intelligent design of life's diversity.

ID is clearly not theistic evolutionism. ID is explicitly opposed to something that is central to the evolutionary story. It is most specifically opposed to materialism, the view that matter is fundamental and that life consists of properties of matter. The evolutionary story in science is naturalistic, or relies explicitly on natural processes. Since the scientific tradition considers spirit or "intelligence" in some sense a property of nature rather than an independent substance or process, it does not allow for a separate "intelligence" to have planned and carried out a plan of creation.

Of course, there are various clever ways to try to reconcile the existence of a deity with an unplanned but meaningful evolutionary process, especially if we downplay the planning aspect and focus on the emergence of novel form and function. ID is a strategy of conflict, however, not one of reconcilliation. It is part of the so-called "culture war." When William Dembski says that his concept of Design Inference "bridges science and theology" his idea is surely not to find a place for God to hide in quantum physics. His focus is to show that adaptation cannot explain the diversity of life, that we must accept in science the existence of the sort of designer that (presumably by coincidence) many people already accept in their personal beliefs.

Dembski is part of a far larger intellectual community that considers it undesireable to deliberately and systematically keep God and secular education apart. He is a leading intellectual edge of an anti-secularist movement to oppose the separation of church and state and the sanctioning of state religion.

It isn't just change in species over time, or common origins that ID proponents oppose, although they are often disposed against those things. What unites ID as an intellectual community and is implicit in their very concept of "intelligence" is the fundamental distinction we tend to make between spirit and matter. You simply cannot be an ID proponent and yet agree that spirit is just some higher level property of matter. Spirit, or "intelligence" must be prior to and separate from matter in order to believe that it can be causally responsible for planning and creating physical things.

That's why evolutionary biology is a theory of "design," yet not a theory of "intelligent design." Naturalistic evolutionary theory is an explanation of the origin of form and function, but it does not allow for any sort of planning to have taken place. Why? Because of the tradition of materialism. Intelligence, in a materialistic theory, must be a result of matter, but a cause of it. The hypothetical design process in naturalistic evolution would have to reside within nature itself as some sort of algorithm, such as the one described by Dan Dennett in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," or as a "telic process" of some sort, as in process theology.

So now it is more obvious what distinguishes intelligent design from Darwinian design, and why the issue matters to people. Darwinian design (apparently) starts with a lifeless universe of matter and tries to find some way of explaining how things that are important to us have arisen from that lifeless matter by means of algorithmic processes in nature. Intelligent design starts with spirit (the traditional theological term for "intelligence") and explains everything in terms of planned design. It's not hard to see why the ID story is compelling to those who are not heavily committed to the secular thinking traditions.

The challenge left to those of us who understand the great explanatory power and deep scientific and philosophical importance of the evolutionary story to offer an equally compelling vision. The very soul of the secular scientific tradition of the past several centuries is at stake if education is being altered at the grassroots level to discredit evolutionary biology, since it is the central explanatory schema in all of biological science. Our greatest obstacle is that the creation story is far more emotionally compelling than the evolution story during periods like this when there is great anxiety among us. Creation in religion offers a common vision of a knowing, caring God as opposed to the promise of an ever-changing world. Evolution in science offers real scientific insight into our natural origins, but always in the form of hypotheses. Fear leads us to choose certainties rather than hypotheses, to judge and act rather than to reflect and think.
What is at stake is the ability of our descendents to reflect and think and benefit from scientific insights into life.

It matters to us whether other people believe that we are not all the children of the same Creator. It should also matter to us whether we have the tools to understand the natural world. Intelligent design is a compelling story that offers us a non-secular alternative to science that is devoid of explanatory power. Knowing that there is an intelligent designer responsible for the world would not help us understand the natural world any better. Our commitment to evolutionary biology is as essential for our education as our commitment to physics, chemistry, mathematics, reading, and history.

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For those in doubt that it is the redefinition of science, essentially a cultural attack on science, that is at stake, the following makes the point clear. The Michigan Bill would force educators to teach that basic facts of natural history accepted by most educated people for centures regardless of their religion are essentially "unproven," that the species do not change over time but appear out of nowhere as in the literal story of Creation in scripture. If there is any doubt of the relationship of "intelligent design" and anti-secularism, this should

While talking about "intelligent design" as a supposedly alternate scientific theory to the theories of natural selection and common origins, the various state legislations regarding the subject generally capitalize the word Creator, as in Michigan House Bill #4946 introduced by Republican Ken Bradstreet. Along with the matching Senate Bill 5005, it proposes to modify the school code (1976 PA 451), by adding section 10:

a) In the science standards, all references to "evolution" and "how species change through time" shall be modified to indicate that this is an unproven theory by adding the phrase "All students will explain the competing theories of evolution and natural selection based on random mutation and the theory that life is the result of the purposeful, intelligent design of a Creator."
(b) In the science standards for middle and high school, all references to "evolution" and "natural selection" shall be modified to indicate that these are unproven theories by adding the phrase "Describe how life may be the result of the purposeful, intelligent design of a Creator."
(c) In the science standards for middle and high school, all references to "evolution" and "natural selection" shall be modified to indicate that these are unproven theories by adding the phrase "Explain the competing theories of evolution and natural selection based on random mutation and the theory that life is the result of the purposeful, intelligent design of a Creator."

Seeking common discourse between secularists and conservatives

In order to communicate things of importance between different groups of people with different traditions of reasoning, you must find some means of building a common discourse.

My own proposal for this is to identify the background conceptual models and lineage of each tradition to see how each is rational and then find ways to compare them in different contexts with mutually agreed objective standards. That's based pretty much on the principles of integrative negotiation plus the principle of tradition-bound reasoning.

For example, God is "ultimately implausible" mostly in the tradition that began with the 18th c French philosophers, peaked with Voltaire, and represents largely their reaction to the religious wars and consequently blaming "organized religion." But we are also a product of Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment, Aristotelian and Aquinan reasoning and so on, and several other traditions that are less dogmatic in their atheism and in their certainty that God, social order, and morality are completely dissociable. By not respecting the fact that God is perfectly rational within some traditions of reasoning, we miss the point and refuse to engage the argument fairly.

Also, by not recognizing that a number of different traditions of reasoning are alive and well in jurisprudence, politics, religion, and even within science, we miss the chance to figure out what they are really arguing about.

I think the valuable thing about *secularism* as manifested most dramatically in the Deists of Locke's tradition was not the implausibility it rendered to the supernatural, but the fact that it promoted a form of increasingly universal discourse by focusing on things that were least specific to particular other traditions. The liberal university tradition of modern times is a deliberately self-reflective discourse where we make every effort to make it as universal as possible. However, we have also found that it can only be taken so far. The extremes of poststructuralist gibberish are a logical result of trying to take rationalist discourse so far skeptically that we discount every possible totalizing system or grand narrative, and we end up with implicit stories ones that are worse than the ones being deconstructed. Atheism is one of the artifacts of the Enlightenment tradition off slightly to the side of scientific traditions.

With increasingly universal discourse comes the possibility of the rule of law, and so on. But only when there is an underlying social order supporting it. That was Burke's insight, and also Toqueville's, I think.

American conservatives often take Burke and Toqueville to the point where they see secularism as a kind of totalizing system equivalent with militant atheism. That's an error. There are many more religious secularists than atheist secularists. Religious secularists are people who implicitly recognize the tendency of competing totalizing systems to dominate discourse and so want to "keep religion out of the public square." They are largely motivated by the recognition that big religions tend to suppress little ones, which is why the most active secularists historically have been small active Protestant churches and Jews. They have the most to lose by having a state religion, as much as the atheists do.

Religious conservatives see secularism itself as a form of competing religion to theirs, partly because they miss the point that it is a more universal discourse, but also because they correctly observe that discourse that becomes too universallized also loses much of its social function and its overall coherence, unless it also becomes a totalizing system like that of religions. Thus Atheism becomes a quasi-religion because it cannot be coherent and serve the solidarity of a group of intellectuals without a narrative akin to that of religion.