Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Daniel Dennett strikes back ...

... with An Open Letter to H. Allen Orr. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A good many of Dennett's questions seem answered in Peter Williams's Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?

Far from wanting to warn anyone against 'even opening a book like this,'[59] I recommend that believers and non-believers alike apply their 'native intelligence'[60] to reading The God Delusion. However, I suggest doing so with help from a list of logical fallacies. Readers can then enjoy a stimulating game of 'I Spy'. In particular, look out for examples of: self-contradiction, begging the question[61], attacking a straw man[62], data picking[63], wishful thinking[64], appeal to ridicule[65] and various ad hominim attacks[66] from simple name-calling[67] to 'poisoning the well.'[68] Blowing away houses made from philosophical straw is a praiseworthy endeavour; but Dawkins' frequent substitution of straw houses for the real thing means that his critique of religion has more puff than bite.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Frank,

    Materialistic arguments for God come from the challenge to believers to find a hook in the world where God must be--or have been before. Thus: the First Cause arguments; arguments that show impossibilities of us being here through time or space in the first place; what makes consciousness (Dennett doesn't know)?; and so forth.

    There is then a problem with someone coming in, and looking for chinks in the pro-God arguments, for the purpose of then saying at the end: Therefore, there is no God. They have accomplished nothing. The best anyone can do with these arguments, whether atheist or believer, is to find errors in thinking.

    But with Dennett, we have a further issue, the issue of retracing arguments for his purposes, and that is where the fun goes out of it, all the positive musing that went into it. There's far too much arrogance in his position. At least it appears from this letter that he makes the brash assumption that there is a God delusion, and then begs anyone to move him from his stubbornness.

    I suspect that he would be the fighter who loses, but will always tell the story of how he won. I think of that Monty Python routine wherein the knight kept challenging the superior knight, even after his limbs had been severed in the fight.

    He throws a wild punch here:

    ". . . .We are accustomed to physicists presuming that since their science is more "basic" than biology, they have a deeper perspective from which to sort out the remaining perplexities, but sometimes the perspective of biology can actually clarify what has been murky and ill-motivated in the physicists' discussions."

    Some of Science's greatest leaps into that which will always be unknown, come from physics. As opposed to throwing the physicists out of the arguments, which would be quite convenient for Dennet's mundanity, the biologists (he would have in his camp) would, rather, need to contend with the physicists' findings and speculations.

    I await Orr's response. This is almost like a blog war between these two. The rest of us covered this material. You, for instance Frank, are well-equipped to find Dennett a shreader for his papers. Thus the detailed argument comes, as you have cited.

    Yours,
    Rus

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  2. "I suspect that he would be the fighter who loses, but will always tell the story of how he won."
    Perfect, Rus. Perfect.
    I didn't review Dennett's last book, Breaking the Spell, because while reading it in the office I found it necessary to look up what his academic discipline is. I gather he is a philosopher. I would never have guessed from his scattershot form of discourse. I wonder if he offers any examples of biology clarifying murky physics. Like you, I'm looking forward to Orr's response.

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