A few days ago the world witnessed a rare and precious event: a dispute on the Internet. In this case, it was brought about by a Bloggingheads episode of Science Saturday featuring historian of science Ronald Numbers and philosopher Paul Nelson. The controversy stemmed from the fact that Nelson is a Young-Earth Creationist — someone who believes that the Earth was created by God a few thousand years ago. You can read opinions about the dialogue from PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, or for a different point of view Nelson himself.
I was one of the people who found the dialogue extremely inappropriate (especially for “Science Saturday”), and as someone who is a fan of Bloggingheads I sent a few emails back and forth with the powers that be, who are generally very reasonable people. I think they understand why scientists would not be happy with such a dialogue, and I suspect it’s not going to happen again.
But it’s worth laying out the precise source of my own unhappiness — I’ll let other scientists speak for themselves. One potential source of discomfort is the natural reluctance to give credibility to creationists, and I think that’s a legitimate concern. There is a long-running conversation within the scientific community about whether it’s better to publicly debate people who are skeptical about evolution and crush them with superior logic and evidence, or to try to cut off their oxygen by refusing to meet them on neutral ground. I don’t have strong opinions about which is the better strategy, although I suspect the answer depends on the precise circumstances being contemplated.
Rather, my concern was not for the credibility of Paul Nelson, but for the credibility of Bloggingheads TV. I’m fairly sure that no one within the BH.tv hierarchy is a secret creationist, trying to score some public respect for one of their own. The idea, instead, was to engage in a dialogue with someone who held radically non-mainstream views, in order to get a better understanding of how they think.
That sounds like a noble goal, but I think that in this case it’s misguided. Engaging with radically different views is, all else being equal, a good thing. But sometimes all else isn’t equal. In particular, I think it’s important to distinguish between different views that are somehow respectable, and different views that are simply crazy. My problem with the BH.tv dialogue was not that they were lending their credibility to someone who didn’t deserve it; it was that they were damaging their own credibility by featuring a discussant who nobody should be taking seriously. There is plenty of room for debate between basically sensible people who can argue in good faith, yet hold extremely different views on contentious subjects. There is no need to pollute the waters by engaging with people who simply shouldn’t be taken seriously at all. Paul Nelson may be a very nice person, but his views about evolution and cosmology are simply crackpot, and don’t belong in any Science Saturday discussion.
This thought has led me to introduce what I hope is a helpful graphical device, which I call the Grid of Disputation. It’s just a reminder that, when it comes to other people’s views on controversial issues, they should be classified within a two-dimensional parameter space, not just on a single line of “agree/disagree.” The other dimension is the all-important “sensible/crazy” axis.
There’s no question that there is a place for mockery in the world of discourse; sometimes we want to engage with crackpots just to make fun of them, or to boggle at their wrongness. But for me, that should be a small component of one’s overall rhetorical portfolio. If you want to play a constructive role in an ongoing cultural conversation, the sizable majority of your disputational effort should be spent engaging with the best people out there with whom you disagree — confronting the strongest possible arguments against your own view, and doing so with a respectful and sincere attitude.
This strategy is not universally accepted. One of the least pleasant aspects of the atheist/skeptical community is the widespread delight in picking out the very stupidest examples of what they disagree with, holding them up for sustained ridicule, and then patting themselves on the back for how rational they all are. It’s not the only thing that happens, but it happens an awful lot, and the joy that people get out of it can become a bit tiresome.
So I disagree a bit with Richard Dawkins, when he makes this suggestion:
I have from time to time expressed sympathy for the accommodationist tendency so ably criticized here by Jerry Coyne. I have occasionally worried that – just maybe – Eugenie Scott and the appeasers might have a point, a purely political point but one, nevertheless, that we should carefully consider. I have lately found myself moving away from that sympathy.
I suspect that most of our regular readers here would agree that ridicule, of a humorous nature, is likely to be more effective than the sort of snuggling-up and head-patting that Jerry is attacking. I lately started to think that we need to go further: go beyond humorous ridicule, sharpen our barbs to a point where they really hurt.
Michael Shermer, Michael Ruse, Eugenie Scott and others are probably right that contemptuous ridicule is not an expedient way to change the minds of those who are deeply religious. But I think we should probably abandon the irremediably religious precisely because that is what they are – irremediable. I am more interested in the fence-sitters who haven’t really considered the question very long or very carefully. And I think that they are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt…
I emphatically don’t mean we should use foul-mouthed rants. Nor should we raise our voices and shout at them: let’s have no D’Souzereignty here. Instead, what we need is sarcastic, cutting wit. A good model might be Peter Medawar, who would never dream of shouting, but instead quietly wielded the rapier. …
Maybe I’m wrong. I’m only thinking aloud, among friends. Is it gloves off time? Or should we continue to go along with the appeasers and be all nice and cuddly, like Eugenie and the National Academy?
Let me first note how … reasonable Dawkins is being here. He’s saying “well, I’ve been thinking about it, and maybe we should do X rather than Y — what do you folks think?” Not quite consistent with the militant fire-breathing one might expect from hearing other people talk about Dawkins, rather than listening to Dawkins himself.
Nevertheless, I don’t agree with the suggestion. There is an empirical question, of course: if the goal is actually to change people’s minds, is that accomplished more effectively by sweetly reasoning with them, or by ridiculing their incorrect beliefs? I don’t think the answer is especially clear, but very few people actually offer empirical evidence one way or the other. Instead, they loudly proclaim that the mode to which they are personally temperamentally suited — calm discussion vs. derisive mockery — is the one that is clearly the best. So I will just go along with that fine tradition.
My own goal is not really changing people’s minds; it’s understanding the world, getting things right, and having productive conversations. My real concern in the engagement/mockery debate is that people who should be academic/scholarly/intellectual are letting themselves be seduced by the cheap thrills of making fun of people. Sure, there is a place for well-placed barbs and lampooning of fatuousness — but there are also people who are good at that. I’d rather leave the majority of that work to George Carlin and Ricky Gervais and Penn & Teller, and have the people with Ph.D.’s concentrate on honest debate with the very best that the other side has to offer. I want to be disagreeing with Ken Miller or Garry Wills and St. Augustine, not with Paul Nelson and Ann Coulter and Hugh Ross.
Dawkins and friends have done the world an enormous service — they’ve made atheism part of the accepted cultural landscape, as a reasonable perspective whose supporters must be acknowledged. Now it’s time to take a step beyond “We’re here, we’re godless, get used to it” and start making the positive case for atheists as sensible, friendly, happy people. And that case isn’t made most effectively by zooming in on the lower left corner of the Grid of Disputation; it’s made by engaging with the lower right corner, and having the better arguments.
@#10 & #14: I don’t think that ‘crazy’ vs ‘sensible’ is as relativist as you’re suggesting. A poor critical thinker is far different from a dogmatist or a denialist.
Excellent, excellent article, Sean. Exceedingly well thought out and well written. Thank you.
Crazies can be EASILY distinguished from sensible people, not from their beliefs, but from “how they arrive at their beliefs”. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with evolution or creation…what matters is the reasoning behind your position on these issues. Most creationists who believe the earth is a few thousand years old are “crazy”…not because of their particular belief, but because they have absolutely zero rational behind it…it’s “blind faith” which is inherently crazy…to believe in something as *specific* as the earth being six thousand years old, for absolutely no reason other than blind faith is CRAZY!
So, you cannot hide behind this “crazy is in the eye of the beholder” nonsense. Crazies and crackpots can be EASILY identified based on their reasoning and logic.
Damn, I am surrounded by Embarrassing Allies.
… and have the people with Ph.D.’s concentrate on honest debate with the very best that the other side has to offer. I want to be disagreeing with Ken Miller …
Are those really the best opponents that we can find? A guy who won’t shy from blatantly misrepresenting someone he disagrees with? Isn’t there someone you can respect from top to bottom?
“There is an empirical question, of course: if the goal is actually to change people’s minds, is that accomplished more effectively by sweetly reasoning with them, or by ridiculing their incorrect beliefs?”
Two questions: Who is trying to convince? Whom should be convinced?
Forget convincing the True Believers. The worthwhile targets are the uninformed and
unsure. Scientists should usually present the evidence calmly and coolly. However,
I think in many cases people with other professions (who might be scientists as well) such
as comedians might score better.
Just yesterday I was watching a German comedian (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Ho%C3%ABcker). Part of his act is debunking
pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. On whether there are more births during
a full moon: Scientist XYZ disproved this by a very sound statistical scientific method:
a tally sheet. Got a lot of laughs, and made it obvious to everyone that this is a claim
which anyone with access to the (generally easily available) data can check. Probably
convinced more people then and there than more scholarly analyses. On homeopathy:
If such dilute solutions can really have such effects, I wonder how many false-positive
pregnancy tests in Ireland are the result of someone in Brazil pissing into the ocean.
On the idea that the moon landings were faked: I can just see the photographer in the
studio: I’ve got the spacecraft, I’ve got the flag, I’ve got the astronauts. Damn it, I left
that backdrop with the stars in the boot of my car. Not worth the trouble to go and get it.
If this is the type of barbed repartee Dawkins is thinking of then yes, I think it is probably
quite effective convincing casual listeners (i.e. not True Believers): it will reach many
more people and packs the proof in the punchline. Humour is a powerful weapon and I
think it is much more difficult for people to claim that he isn’t right than to debate a
scholarly article which not many people understand.
Perhaps you could clarify, from reading your final sentence i arrive at the conclusion that what you desire are winning arguments with intelligent “Supreme Being-ers”. Why? Atheism is a belief system. Science and its conclusions about the age of the earth are entirely separate discussion points from God vs. Nogod.
David (#17), I think you misunderstand my point. I am not saying that all ideas and opinions are equally valid or valuable in terms of their truth value. What I am saying is that, as human beings, every person has some reason for believing what they do, and that it accomplishes nothing to merely declare them “crazy” and leave it at that. This is tantamount to saying they’re a little less human than we are, simply because we don’t understand them. On the other hand, philosophies like liberal democracy are founded on the notion that all human beings are capable of rational thought (otherwise, why trust the masses with a vote?). Is Sean suggesting that some people don’t have the right to participate in the processes of civil society because of their “craziness,”or what I think he really means, their stupidity? I guess I just believe in a kind of “natural selection” of ideas. Truth and reality will prevail, withstanding most blindness and irrationality. It is not so fragile that we have to waste our energy on censorship and control.
Sean – I’m surprised you haven’t yet noticed that you’ve got the X axis reversed. Surely “Crazy” should be going off to the right….
I challenge anyone to sit through all seven parts of this Dawkins interview without wishing for a bit of ridicule. How would you deal with this kind of situation? I note that the interviewee has considerable political influence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4mLGmPMvls
Ali wrote
I doubt that “truth and reality” have much to do with the selective pressures on ideas. And withstanding blindness and irrationality is more than a little chancy in a developed Western country in which something like half of the population that depends on science for its level of life rejects the core theoretical structures of biology, physics, and geology.
I think it is fragile; that it is not at all inconceivable that blindness and irrationality could overtake truth and rationality. Science and rationality are alien ways of thinking to most people. We who comment on science blogs are a tiny subset of the larger population and are far from representative of it. I have spent a good deal of time (see here: http://tinyurl.com/kmzx7a) in the company of religious fundamentalists lately, and their views on science, on public health (e.g., contraception), and on behavioral control in society not only have no basis in fact, they are contradicted by incontrovertible facts. Were only their private behavior at stake I wouldn’t mind, but they do their damndest to incorporate their counter-factual beliefs into public policy. That deserves the strongest possible resistance.
That said, I don’t think the false dichotomy that offers “censorship and control” as the only alternative is helpful. Declining to participate in legitimizing irrationality is not censorship; it’s self-preservation.
There are ideas in broad circulation and widely believed in the U.S. and elsewhere that are loony enough to deserve little but derision. Hearing an Arizona state legislator matter of factly refer to a 6,000 year-old earth (http://tinyurl.com/lmogjr) in the context of a discussion of the desirability of environmental controls on uranium mining deserves nothing but pure ridicule.
Sorry for the Tinyurls; for some reason HTML code was not appropriately linking to them.
But with George Carlin gone, who better to take his place than Sean Carroll?
@Ali [10] “In short: your whole post assumes that people are either Sensible or Crazy, as though the world could be so easily divided into such a simplistic duality.”
That’s exactly the problem that besets creationists – They insist that the Bible must be literally correct in every particular, or else by their reasoning it must logically be completely worthless.
Stupidity and/or poor education largely accounts for this childishly simple outlook; but I think it is also in many cases a character defect based on insecurity.
g: The tension is entirely Dawkins’, as far as I can tell. This claim to having considered something other than the most base contempt, only to find that approach lacking the desired impact, speaks volumes, if you ask me. The honed wit with which he dishes it out is certainly of high stylistic merit, but scornful derision is still the message, and the desired impact clearly is as much to injure as to influence. Why even bother with the pretense of consideration if you’re of the sort who can dismiss the “irredeemable” with such public ease? And must he broadcast it so relentlessly? I don’t feel helped, quite frankly.
Hi Everyone,
I just wanted to point out this excellent book, relating to the topic of this post. I especially encourage Sean to read it.
http://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Delusions-Christian-Revolution-Fashionable/dp/0300111908/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249487708&sr=1-1
I think one has to proceed on two tracks:
1. A fairly small proportion of people are ever going to understand any scientific theory even if they endorse it. I’ve spent a fair amount of time asking supporters of evolution to describe what it is they support, for example, and find that they aren’t a lot better informed than the average religiously motivated skeptic. That doesn’t mean that their pro-science stance isn’t valuable from a political point of view, however. That’s why I’ve gotten somewhat more comfortable with making fun of religious fundamentalists. It won’t really educate anybody, but it may make people feel like hicks if they support I.D. in schools. If we can’t spread truth, we can at least promote a benign form of error.
2. While only a minority is ever going to have any genuine understanding of scientific topics, that minority can certainly be made large so that it includes a greater number of nonscientists. You hear a lot about doing a better job of teaching evolution in high schools, but I’d like to see more attention paid to biological education at the college level.
My approach to dialog of any nature is to treat others as you would want them to treat you.
I actually watched the Dawkins interview posted by Jer in 34. It is easy to advocate calm discussion with such people in theory, but the reality is not so simple. I felt profound respect for Dawkins for actually spending such a long time debating her in such an unperturbed, measured manner. I wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes before losing my cool in the face of such irrationality, and I am a person with an unaggressive temperament who hates vociferous debate. Do I think anything was accomplished in calm rational debate with this person? None whatsoever. Rational thinking is foreign to some people. I think it is often a failure of the education system rather than lack of intelligence or “craziness”.
Hi Sean —
As a model, your space of disputation has a troubling aspect: it violates parity under some relativistic transformations. If I move from my position (at the “true origin,” obviously) to the perspective of a “crazy person” somewhere to the left of the diagram, the direction of the sensible/crazy axis flips.
I would also suggest that the figure fails to do justice to the shear weight of craziness in the World, which should be reflected in the areas of each coloured region in an appropriately Bayesian manner: there are surely almost infinitely many crazy possibilities, but remarkably few sensible ones.
“There is an empirical question, of course: if the goal is actually to change people’s minds, is that accomplished more effectively by sweetly reasoning with them, or by ridiculing their incorrect beliefs?”
This is a false dichotomy.
There are many other methods. My favorite is to give people the scientific tools they need to understand things they are interested in, with the understanding that the particular tools I gave them will lead them to the correct interpretation of hard-to-accept scientific axioms. How long it takes them to do such an application is not a concern of mine; I’m a patient man.
However, the argument over which KIND of confrontation is best ignores the reality of non-confrontational forms of education.
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Not sure that a PhD certifies an individual to enter into the reason of debate in regards to most topics, or at least most things philosophical and having little to do with “facts” or empirical statements. I am quite certain that an individual like George Carlin would have been much better in debating one of the “best” on the side of Creationism because he had an incredible ability to develop solid arguments with strong reasoning and what not. More often than not, a PhD will probably just throw around a few references to studies, quote a few numbers, and pretend that this substitutes for a strong (or even moderate) argument. So when it comes to forming arguments dealing with more practical issues in regards to daily life, no degree at all is necessary and while having a degree may help to provide evidence or even the tools for forming good, strong arguments, the relatively little piece of paper saying PhD or whatever is certainly no substitute for being able to reason well. I think this is painfully obvious in a number of your posts and as well as in various “arguments” made by people like Richard Dawkins. Once you folks wander off the highly specialized road of physics or evolutionary biology, your arguments become incredibly weak because little do you realize that you are not really forming arguments at all but simply arranging a series of points together to give it the appearance of a well formed argument, a bad habit that is no doubt picked up from how modern science is practiced.
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Ali (#32) – Yes, indeed; it does appear I misunderstood you; thank you very much for clarifying your position! 🙂
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