Debased Coynage

I had a lot to say about Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus Fact in my First Things review of the book, but much more could be said.  The reason is not that there is so much of interest in Coyne’s book, but rather because there is so little.  I was not being rhetorical when I said in my review that it might be the worst book yet published in the New Atheist genre.  It really is that awful, and goes wrong so thoroughly and so frequently that it would take a much longer review than I had space for fully to catalog its foibles.  An especially egregious example is Coyne’s treatment of Alvin Plantinga’s “evolutionary argument against naturalism” (or EAAN).

Keep in mind that I have myself been critical of Plantinga’s argument.  To be sure, I think that the general style of argument of which Plantinga’s is an instance -- what Victor Reppert calls the “argument from reason,” and which has been defended in different versions by thinkers as diverse as C. S. Lewis and Karl Popper -- is very good, and very important.  But I am not a fan of Plantinga’s way of stating it.  His emphasis on the weighing of probabilities is completely irrelevant to the main point of an “argument from reason,” and muddies the waters.  He conflates teleology and design in a way no Aristotelian or Thomist would.  And the argument is not as directly relevant to defending theism (as opposed to critiquing naturalism, which is a different issue) as Plantinga implies.  (See my discussion of the EAAN in a post from a few years ago and in my First Things review of Plantinga’s book Where the Conflict Really Lies.) 

All the same, Coyne’s criticisms are cringe-makingly incompetent.  Plantinga argues that natural selection will favor adaptive behavior whether or not it stems from true beliefs, so that evolution cannot by itself account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties.  (Again, see the articles linked to for more detailed discussion of Plantinga’s argument.)  One problem with Coyne’s discussion is that he characterizes the EAAN as a “god of the gaps” argument (Faith versus Fact, p. 178).  But it is not that at all.  It would be a “god of the gaps” argument if Plantinga were claiming that some purely naturalistic process might in principle account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties, but that it is more probable that God created them.  But that is not his argument.  His argument is precisely that a purely naturalistic process cannot even in principle account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties.  (True, Plantinga speaks of probabilities, but he is not saying that it is merely probable that naturalism cannot account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties.  Rather, he is saying that naturalistic processes cannot in principle by themselves give any of our beliefs more than a fifty-fifty chance of being true.) 

Whether or not one agrees that Plantinga has really shown this, Coyne doesn’t even understand the nature of Plantinga’s reasoning.  Like other philosophically unsophisticated New Atheist types, he seems to think that every anti-atheist argument simply must be a lame “god of the gaps” argument, and thus reads that style of reasoning into Plantinga.

Second, Coyne claims that Plantinga’s position is that “humans could never have true beliefs about anything without God’s intervention” (p. 177, emphasis in the original).  But that is not what Plantinga says.  He never denies that we might have some true beliefs if naturalism were true.  Indeed, he doesn’t deny that we might have many true beliefs, maybe even mostly true beliefs, if naturalism were true.  What he says is rather that if naturalism is true, then we cannot have any reason to believe that our beliefs are true.  They may or may not be true, but we could never be justified in thinking that they are.  He isn’t saying: “Naturalism entails that all our beliefs are false.”  Rather, he is saying: “Naturalism entails that we cannot know whether any of our beliefs are true.”  The reason is that neither their truth nor their falsity would be relevant to the behavior associated with them, and it is the behavior alone which (Plantinga argues) natural selection can mold.

Third, Coyne thinks it a serious criticism to point out that even if the EAAN works, it wouldn’t establish “Plantinga’s Christian God as opposed to any other god” (p. 179).  This is a silly objection for two reasons.  First, it is an attack upon a straw man, since Plantinga does not claim that the EAAN establishes Christianity, specifically.  Second, if the EAAN works and thereby establishes the existence of some god or other, that would be sufficient to refute Coyne’s atheism.  It would be quite ridiculous for an atheist to say: “Sure, you’ve shown that a deity exists, but how does that refute atheism?  You haven’t proven that Jesus is divine, that the Bible is inspired, etc!”

Fourth, for some bizarre reason, Coyne seems to think that the EAAN is related to Calvin’s notion of a sensus divinitatis or innate awareness of God (pp. 178f.).  He quotes a line about the sensus divinitatis from a passage from Plantinga that has nothing to do with the EAAN, runs it together with material that is concerned with the EAAN, and presents Plantinga’s argument as if it were fundamentally concerned to show that our cognitive faculties can be reliable only if Calvin’s sensus divinitatis thesis is correct.  This is either embarrassingly dishonest or (more charitably) embarrassingly incompetent.  Either way, it is a travesty of Plantinga’s position.  Imagine someone first quoting a few lines from a speech on health care given by President Obama, then quoting a line or two from an Obama speech on gun control, and then claiming on the basis of this textual “evidence” that one of the central components of Obamacare is gun control.  That’s about the level of scholarship Coyne exhibits.

Fifth, Coyne spills a lot of ink arguing that many of our beliefs are false and that there are certain errors to which we are constitutionally prone -- “probably,” Coyne says, because of the way we evolved (pp. 179-80).  How this is supposed to be a problem for the EAAN, I have no idea.  For one thing, Plantinga would take the considerations cited by Coyne to be confirming evidence that naturalism cannot account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties.  But even Coyne insists (as he would have to if he is going to trust his own cognitive faculties) that they are at the end of the day “fairly reliable” (emphasis added).  For another thing, Plantinga never claims in the first place (contrary to the impression Coyne gives) that we are not prone to errors.  His point is precisely rather that naturalism cannot even account for the fact that our cognitive faculties are at least “fairly reliable.”  Plantinga isn’t saying: “Naturalism cannot account for our cognitive faculties’ being perfectly reliable.”  He is saying: “Naturalism cannot account for our cognitive faculties’ being reliable at all.”

Sixth, in attempting to defend the claim that natural selection can account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties, Coyne cites a number of tendencies we exhibit that are adaptive (pp. 181-2).  The trouble, though, is that his examples have nothing at all to do with our beliefs as opposed to our behavior; indeed, Coyne himself admits that some of what he describes are “not beliefs, really, but adaptive behaviors.”  But this misses the entire point of Plantinga’s argument, which is precisely that there is nothing for which natural selection can account that goes beyond our behavior.  The behavior will be either adaptive or maladaptive whatever beliefs happen to be associated with it, so that natural selection can only ever operate on the former and not the latter.  Hence while Coyne goes on to suggest that because the former are adaptive, the latter must be too, he has given no reason whatsoever to think so, but merely ignored, rather than answered, Plantinga’s argument, the whole point of which is to show that such an inference is a non sequitur. 

So, those are six major problems just with Coyne’s brief treatment of a single argument.  Another example of Coyne’s laughable standards of scholarship is his method of repeatedly citing the Oxford English Dictionary whenever he needs to define some key term (“religion,” “supernatural,” etc.).  The absurdity of this procedure can be seen by imagining someone writing a book on chemistry (say) and relying on OED or some other dictionary of everyday usage in order to define the key terms.  Hence suppose that he defines a chemical element as “a part or aspect of something abstract, especially one that is essential or characteristic”; that he defines a bond as a “physical restraint used to hold someone or something prisoner, especially ropes or chains”; and so forth.  Obviously this would be a ridiculous procedure, since such terms have a technical meaning in chemistry that corresponds only loosely at best to the ordinary usage captured in the usual dictionary definitions.  Now, philosophy and theology too use many terms in technical senses that do not closely correspond to ordinary usage.  Hence it is no less absurd to write on those subjects while relying on a dictionary of ordinary usage for one’s characterization of the key ideas of those fields.  But that is exactly what Coyne does.

Then there is Coyne’s account of scientific method.  He writes:

Science comprises an exquisitely refined set of tools designed to find out what is real and to prevent confirmation bias. Science prizes doubt and iconoclasm, rejects absolute authority, and relies on testing one’s ideas with experiments and observations of nature.  Its sine qua non is evidence -- evidence that can be inspected and adjudicated by any trained and rational observer.  And it depends largely on falsification.  Nearly every scientific truth comes with an implicit rider: “Evidence X would show this to be wrong.” (p. 65)

Even the most militantly atheist philosopher of science would regard this as laughably naïve and dated.  You’d never know from Coyne’s circa-1955 Children’s Encyclopedia conception of science that Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Feyerabend’s Against Method, etc. had ever been written.  You don’t need to be a relativist or anti-realist about science (and I certainly am not) to know that things are much more complicated than the long-exploded myth of the Dispassionate Men in White Lab Coats would have it.

In other ways too, Coyne’s knowledge of the philosophy of science is staggering in its nonexistence.  His glib appeal to “laws of nature” manifests little awareness of how philosophically problematic the notion is, and zero awareness of the debate over the issue that has been conducted in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science.  (Readers interested in finding out what the debate is about can’t do better than to start with Stephen Mumford’s Laws in Nature.) 

Coyne asserts in passing that laws are “simply observed regularities that hold in our universe” (p. 158) -- completely oblivious to the problem that this sort of account of laws threatens to strip them of the explanatory power that he needs for them to have if they are to count as even a prima facie alternative to theism.  (Suppose there is a regular correlation in nature between phenomenon A and phenomenon B and you ask for an explanation of it.  If laws just are observed regularities, then to say that it is a “law” that A is correlated with B is in no way to explain the correlation, but merely to re-label it.)  Moreover, on one page Coyne acknowledges that “the laws of physics… needs [sic] explanation” (p. 158) , but then, on the very next page, after arguing that all laws can be taken down to some level of “fundamental laws,” suddenly dismisses the claim that those fundamental laws need any explanation.  How this can be anything other than the fallacy of special pleading, he does not tell us.

Note that what Coyne is doing here is exactly what he, like other New Atheists, falsely accuses First Cause arguments of doing.  Their stock accusation is that First Cause arguments rest on the premise that “everything has a cause,” but then suddenly make an arbitrary exception when it comes to God.  As I have shown many times, that is nothing more than an urban legend.  No philosopher has ever given such an argument or made such an arbitrary exception.  But Coyne, like so many other New Atheists, is taking a position that commits an exactly parallel fallacy.  They are saying that all natural laws require an explanation in terms of more fundamental laws, but suddenly make an arbitrary exception when they get to whatever the most fundamental laws of physics turn out to be.

(In response to those who would appeal to God in order to explain the fundamental laws, Coyne trots out, as if on cue… wait for it… the usual amateur atheist retort “where did that God come from?” (p. 159) -- the point-missing stupidity of which Coyne has had personally explained to him many times now, most recently here.)

I could very easily go on -- Coyne’s writings are the gift-to-bloggers that keeps giving -- but bouncing rubble gets boring after a while.  We have, many times now -- e.g. here, here, here, here, and here -- seen how preternaturally bad Coyne’s musings on philosophy and religion can be when he wings it for the blog post du jour.  It turns out that he’s not one whit better when he’s got space, time, and a cash incentive to produce something more serious at book-length.  If Darwin’s Origin of Species was One Long Argument, Faith versus Fact is essentially One Long Dashed-Off Blog Post.  It adds absolutely nothing to the New Atheist literature except a further 311 pages.