Why can’t these guys stay on topic? Or read?

Jerry Coyne comments on my recent Public Discourse article about Lawrence Krauss.  Well, sort of.  Readers of that article will recall that it focused very specifically on Krauss’s argument to the effect that science is inherently atheistic, insofar as scientists need make no reference to God in explaining this or that phenomenon.  I pointed out several things that are wrong with this argument.  I did not argue for God’s existence.  To be sure, I did point out that Krauss misunderstands how First Cause arguments for God’s existence are supposed to work, but the point of the article was not to develop or defend such an argument.  I have done that many times elsewhere.  Much less was my article concerned to defend any specifically Catholic theological doctrine, or opposition to abortion, or any conservative political position.  Again, the point of the essay was merely to show what is wrong with a specific argument of Krauss’s.  An intelligent response to what I wrote would focus on that.

Coyne, however, is all over the place.  He devotes his first paragraph to informing his readers about the Witherspoon Institute -- which hosts Public Discourse -- and the “right-wing” political views with which it is associated.  How is this relevant to evaluating the cogency of the arguments presented in my article?  It is, of course, in no way relevant.  So why does Coyne bring it up?  Could it be to prompt his (mostly left-wing) readers automatically to discount anything I have to say before even hearing it?  Nah, couldn’t be.  That would be a blatant logical fallacy of poisoning the well.  And Coyne is, after all, a New Atheist, and “therefore” a devotee of Logic, Science, Evidence, and all things Rational. 

Then there is the title of his blog post.  Coyne summarizes my response to Krauss as follows: “Feser to Krauss: Shut up because of the Uncaused Cause.”  That implies that the reason I gave for saying that Krauss should stop mouthing off about philosophy and theology is that the cosmological argument for an Uncaused Cause is a successful argument and thus refutes atheism.  Hence (it is insinuated) if I have failed to show in my article that that argument really does succeed, then I have also failed to show that Krauss should stop mouthing off about these subjects.

But of course, that’s not what I said.  The reason Krauss should stop mouthing off, I said, is that he has repeatedly shown -- not just in the view of theologians, but even in the view of some people otherwise sympathetic to his position -- that he has a very poor understanding of the philosophical and theological ideas he routinely criticizes.  Indeed, I noted that Coyne himself has said that the arguments in Krauss’s New Atheist book are of poor quality.  Now, Krauss’s arguments would be of poor quality whether or not any version of the argument for an Uncaused Cause succeeds.  And it is that consistently poor quality of his arguments that justifies his critics in saying that he ought to stop mouthing off about philosophy and theology until such time as he actually learns something about those subjects.  Again, whether any First Cause argument succeeds is not what I was trying to establish in my article, and is simply irrelevant to the issues I actually was addressing in the article.

Next, Coyne claims that Krauss gives a good reason why scientists should (as Krauss claimed in the New Yorker piece I was responding to) be “militant atheists.”  The reason is that science is incompatible with “authoritarianism,” with “suppression of open questioning,” or with treating any ideas as “sacred” or “beyond question.”  But the trouble with this “argument” is that it is an obvious non sequitur.  The proposition that we should not treat any idea as beyond questioning does not entail the proposition that there is no God, nor even the proposition that it is doubtful that there is a God.  Indeed, it entails nothing one way or the other about God’s existence at all.  And thus it does not give any support to atheism, militant or otherwise.  The most it shows is that we shouldn’t be dogmatic about any argument for theism, but instead should always be open to hearing criticism of such arguments -- and I certainly agree with that, even though I am not an atheist.  It also shows, though, that we shouldn’t be dogmatic about any argument for atheism either, but should always be willing to hear out criticisms of those arguments too.

Indeed, if anything it is Krauss’s “militancy” which should trouble Coyne if he is really serious about not treating any idea as sacred or beyond question.  How can someone be “militant” about atheism without exhibiting exactly the sort of dogmatism Coyne claims he rejects?  Indeed, since Coyne himself has admitted that Krauss has given bad arguments for atheism, shouldn’t he also admit that Krauss is the last person to be recommending “militancy”? 

Coyne does finally say a little about the actual arguments I gave in my Public Discourse article, but unfortunately the quality of his reply doesn’t improve.  Recall that, in my piece, I had said that the main traditional arguments for God’s existence don’t begin with facts of the sort that fall within the domain investigated by science.  Rather, they begin with facts of a more fundamental kind -- facts about what any possible science must itself presuppose (such as facts about the nature of causality as such, facts about what it is to be a law of nature in the first place, the fact that there exists anything contingent at all -- including whatever the fundamental physical laws turn out to be -- and so forth).  Coyne replies:

But if in fact one construes science broadly, as a combination of reason, empirical study, and verification, yes, existence of God should show up in “scientific” inquiry.  Since it doesn’t, religionists use the word “reason” to encompass a brew of dogma, scripture, and personal revelation.

There are two problems with this.  First, I have myself, of course, never defined “reason” in a way that “encompass[es] a brew of dogma, scripture, and personal revelation.”  Neither does Aristotle, Plotinus, Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas, Scotus, Leibniz, Clarke, or any other philosopher who thinks that the existence of God can be rationally demonstrated.  This is merely a straw man entirely of Coyne’s own invention, as anyone who actually knows something about the history of philosophical theology is aware.

Second, Coyne defines “science” so broadly that the arguments of writers of the kind I just cited would in fact count as “scientific” even by Coyne’s criteria, even though they would not be arguments of physics, chemistry, biology, or the like, but instead arguments of a sort that appeal to deeper features of reality than any of those specific sciences do. 

Consider, to take just one example, the Aristotelian argument for an Unmoved Mover.  It begins with the fact of change, which we know via experience -- and is thus “empirical” and “verifiable” -- and argues that we cannot coherently deny that at least some sorts of change really do occur, without at the same time denying the reality of experience itself (where experience is the precondition of the observation and experiment upon which empirical science rests).  The argument proceeds from there to reason to conclusions about the preconditions of there being change of any sort at all.  For instance, it argues that change could not occur without there being a distinction in reality between a thing’s actualities and its potentialities.  It argues that a potentiality can only be actualized by something already actual.  It argues that something’s being actualized at any moment presupposes something actualizing it at that moment, and that the specific sort of regress of causes that this generates cannot in principle proceed to infinity.  And so forth.

Note that I am not actually giving the argument here, because for one thing, like any argument about such a fundamental aspect of reality, it is not the sort of thing that could be summarized in a couple of paragraphs in a blog post.  And for another thing, I’ve stated and defended the argument at length several times in other places, such as in my book Aquinas.  The point for present purposes is just that since Coyne defines “science” as broadly as he does, this argument would count as “scientific” given his criteria.  Hence even if he wanted to reject the argument, he could not do so on the grounds that it is “unscientific.”  He’d have to find some other grounds for doing so.  And the same thing is true of the arguments of writers like Aquinas, Leibniz, and others of the sort I’ve mentioned.

That, however, would require Coyne seriously to study these arguments and find out what they actually say -- rather than glibly dismissing them a priori on the grounds that they are allegedly “unscientific.”  And that is something Coyne has consistently refused to do.  To be sure, longtime readers will recall that, in the course of an earlier exchange I had with him, Coyne declared that he would make the effort to study the arguments of Aquinas.  However, over four years later, he has still not followed this up with any announcement about what he learned.  And that he never bothered actually to do what he said he would do is obvious from the fact that when he does comment on what Aquinas and Thomists like myself think, he succeeds in showing only that -- like Krauss -- he has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.  For example, in this latest post of his he says:

To Feser, the existence of the natural world is itself evidence for God, for he keeps insisting that that world had to have a beginning, and if that beginning was the Big Bang, or even if the Big Bang had a natural origin and there are universes that spawn other universes, well, those, too must have a causal chain that, in the end terminates in God.

But as anyone who’s ever actually bothered to read what I’ve written on this subject knows, in fact I have not argued that the “world had to have a beginning” at the “Big Bang” or at any other point.  And neither Aquinas, nor Leibniz, nor any of the other philosophers whose arguments I have endorsed make that claim either when arguing for a divine First Cause.  Whether the universe had a temporal beginning is completely irrelevant to arguments like Aquinas’s Five Ways, Leibniz’s cosmological argument, Neo-Platonic arguments, or any of the other arguments I favor.  Aquinas explicitly denies -- at the length of a short book -- that this is something a good argument for a First Cause should focus on.  And it is a point that I’ve repeatedly emphasized myself.  I’ve pointed this out, oh, maybe about 1,234 times.  It’s about as well known a fact about my views as any.  Saying that “Feser… keeps insisting that that world had to have a beginning” is like saying “Coyne keeps insisting that New Atheists ought to treat theology with greater respect.”  It’s about as incompetent a summary of an opponent’s position as can be imagined. 

The same refusal to do one’s homework is manifest in some of Coyne’s other remarks.  For example, he writes:

[T]heists like Feser face their own Ultimate Questions: Why is there a God rather than no God? How did God come into being, and what was He doing before he created Something out of Nothing? To answer those, some people might point to scripture or revelation, but that’s unsatisfying, for different scriptures and different revelations say different things. In the end, Feser must resort to the same answer physicists give. When told by rationalists that we need to understand where God Himself came from, Feser would have to respond, “No we don’t. He was just There.” What I don’t understand is how God can just be there, but the universe and its antecedents, or the laws of physics, cannot just be there.

Coyne writes as if I have never addressed such questions, when in fact, and as anyone who is actually familiar with my work knows well, I have addressed them many times and at length.  First, the answers to these questions have nothing to do with “scripture or revelation,” but rather with philosophical argument.  Second, anyone who’s actually bothered to make even a cursory investigation of the relevant arguments would know the answers to Coyne’s other questions.  For example, Leibnizian cosmological arguments claim that things that require a cause require one because they are contingent, and thus could in principle have been otherwise, and in particular could have been non-existent.  But that which exists in an absolutely necessary or non-contingent way not only need not have a cause but could not have had one, precisely because it could not have been otherwise.  Its explanation lies in its own nature rather than in something else.  Aristotelian arguments hold that things that require a cause require one because they have potentialities that need to be actualized if they are to exist at all.  But that which is purely actual or devoid of potentiality not only need not have a cause but could not have had one, precisely because it lacks any potentiality that could be actualized.  Its explanation lies in its own nature as something that is always “already” actual.  Neo-Platonic arguments hold that things that require a cause require one because they are composite or made up of parts of some sort, so that those parts must be combined in order for the thing to exist.  But that which is absolutely simple or non-composite not only need not have a cause but could not have had one, precisely because it has no parts that could be combined in the first place.  And so forth.

The reason why God can be “just there” while a material universe governed by the basic laws of physics cannot, then, is that the former is absolutely necessary while the latter is contingent, that the former is purely actual while the latter is a mixture of actual and potential, that the former is absolutely simple or non-composite while the latter is composed of parts, and so on. 

Of course, someone might want to raise various objections against such arguments, but to think  that Coyne’s questions are serious objections is like thinking that the question “How could one biological species give rise to another biological species?” is a devastating objection to Darwinism.  For of course, the whole point of Darwinism is to show how that question can be answered, so that to raise this question is to miss the whole point rather than to pose a challenge to Darwinism.   But in the same way, the whole point of arguments like those put forward by Leibnizians, Aristotelians, Neo-Platonists, Thomists, and others is precisely to answer questions like the ones Coyne raises, so that to raise such questions is merely to miss the whole point rather than to pose a challenge to those theistic arguments.

Coyne’s other objections are equally feeble.  He asks:

Where from these regularities can one derive a Beneficent Person without Substance—one who not only loves us all, but demands worship under threat of immolation, and opposes abortion as well?

One problem with this is that Coyne simply assumes that arguments for a First Cause fail to explain why such a cause would have to have the various divine attributes, such as omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and all the rest.  And that is simply false.  All the writers I’ve alluded to give arguments that claim to show that such a cause must have various attributes like these, and I have given such arguments myself in many places.  (Again, see my book Aquinas, for example.)  Coyne offers no reply at all to such arguments, because he is so extremely ignorant of the ideas he is dismissing that he is unaware that the arguments even exist.  Second, what on earth do abortion, eternal damnation, etc. have to do with the question of whether a First Cause argument works?  Suppose someone proves that there is a First Cause who is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, etc. but does not prove that this First Cause sends anyone to hell or commands us not to have abortions.  How exactly would this fail to constitute a refutation of atheism?  Atheism, after all, is not merely the thesis that there is no God who damns people eternally or forbids abortion.  Atheism is the thesis that there is no God at all.  So, to prove that there exists a God of some sort suffices to disprove atheism, even if it does not suffice to prove the truth of some particular religion.

Furthermore, it is quite ridiculous to pretend that any argument for the existence of God has, all by itself, to prove absolutely everything that some particular religion has to say.  That’s like saying that we shouldn’t accept Darwinian arguments unless they somehow establish the truth of (say) quantum mechanics.  Why on earth should anyone suppose that Darwinian arguments should prove that, since they are not even concerned in the first place with the phenomena addressed by quantum theory?  And in the same way, why on earth should anyone suppose that a successful First Cause argument should tell us something about abortion, when that isn’t the sort of issue a First Cause argument is addressing in the first place?  (And of course, opponents of abortion, and defenders of the claim that there is such a thing as eternal damnation, have other arguments for these claims.  They aren’t trying to do everything when giving a First Cause argument, but are merely addressing one specific issue, namely the existence of God.)

Coyne misses the point yet again when, in response to my claim that arguments for God’s existence begin with what science assumes, he writes: “As far as ‘laws governing the world,’ well, that’s a result of science, not an assumption.”  Well, yes, the claim that the laws of quantum mechanics (say) govern the world is a result of science, not an assumption.  But I wasn’t denying that.  The point is rather that when we ask questions like “Why is the world governed by any laws at all rather than no laws?” or “What exactly is it for something to be a law of nature?  Is a law of nature a mere regularity?  Is it something like a Platonic Form, in which physical things participate?  Is it a shorthand description of the way a physical object will operate given its essence?” -- when we ask questions like that, we are asking philosophical or metaphysical questions rather than scientific questions.  And those, rather than scientific questions, are the sorts of questions that the main traditional arguments for God’s existence start with. 

Finally there is Coyne’s remark that:

For a response to the “Uncaused Cause” argument, and the outmoded notion of Aristotelian causality in modern physics, I refer you to the writings of Sean Carroll… and Carroll’s debate with Feser here.

What can one say to that?  Well, first, since whether “Aristotelian causality” really is “outmoded” is, of course, precisely part of what is at issue between Coyne and me, this remark simply begs the question.  (And I have written a whole book showing not only that the Aristotelian analysis of causality is not outmoded, but that many contemporary thinkers with no theological or Thomistic axe to grind are returning to it.)  Second, I replied to Carroll’s (very poor) arguments in a post over a year ago.  Third, I was quite surprised to hear that I had once debated Carroll, since to my knowledge I never have.  But if you click on the link Coyne himself provides, you’ll see that it wasn’t me that Carroll debated, but rather William Lane Craig.

So, not only does Coyne not bother to read books and articles of his opponents before commenting on them, it seems he doesn’t even bother to read web pages before linking to and summarizing them.

But hey, don’t let any of the overwhelming evidence of his actual record as a critic of theology lead you to conclude that Coyne is not in fact very Rational, Evidence-Based, etc.  He’s a New Atheist, after all, so he simply must be all those wonderful things.  Take it on faith! 

[For some previous journeys in the Coyne Clown Car, see “The pointlessness of Jerry Coyne” and “Jerry-built atheism.”]