This past Monday (3/2/09) I attended a public talk by Dan Dennett. Overall, I thought Dennett’s talk was pretty good. It was a public lecture and it was to be expected that it would be a bit superficial. It was, and that is fine. But, at one point, Dennett made the claim that both Thomas Nagel and Jerry Fodor were creationists. I almost threw up on myself. Okay, not really but I was extremely aggravated for two reasons.
The first is that in the audience were many undergraduates with secular views and some of them are very radical in their secularism. Dennett’s calling Nagel and Fodor creationists might cause many of those undergraduates never to read or take seriously anything said by those philosophers. I know when I was an Ayn Randian Objectivist, I dismissed everything Kantian simply because Rand often referred to Kantianism as hokey metaphysics and the like. This was a terrible mistake. I’ve since learned a lot about Kant (in fact, I think Rand’s ethical views are Kantian in some ways) and realize that he had a lot more to offer me than Rand. While I ended up growing out of my objectivist phase(or, rather, forcefully argued out of it by a kind philosopher…thanks Ron!), there are plenty of Randians who I see dismissing Kant out of hand because they are committed Randians.
Dennett’s classifying Nagel and Fodor is likely to have a similar effect. No matter what you think of Nagel and Fodor, you’ll probably readily admit that if they have arguments in favor of creationism, these are likely to be well formulated, interesting, and to avoid the standard fallacies that other creationists such as Behe and Dembski commit. For that alone, it would be worth reading Nagel and Fodor. It would be a shame if people started dismissing Nagel and Fodor out of hand because they took them to be crackpots on the basis of Dennett’s talk. Especially since it might also lead such students to dismiss other of Fodor’s and Nagel’s views (e.g. in psychology or ethics respectively) out of hand even though they are perfectly good views. This might not have been Dennett’s intention, but I think it a likely result of his comments.
More importantly, it is absolutely unfair to call either of these two a creationist. I’m less familiar with Fodor’s most recent arguments than with Nagel’s but he has recently been arguing that natural selection, our best current theory of the mechanism of evolution, cannot adequately explain the variation found on our planet. He doesn’t say that the variation is the result of intelligent design. He isn’t even committed to saying that the mechanism of evolution isn’t naturalistic. He just has doubts about natural selection. Of course, I think Fodor is wrong but that is neither here nor there. He hardly seems to me to be a creationist.
A similar problem arises when we consider the claim that Nagel is a creationist. Nagel has been crucified for his piece (“Public Education and Intelligent Design)” in Philosophy and Public Affairs. Nagel argues that the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision that intelligent design theory cannot not be taught in schools was wrong and that intelligent design is, in fact, scientific and so may, constitutionally, be taught in schools.
I’m not a lawyer so I’m not sure what the grounds are for banning something from being taught in public schools. I know that whatever is taught can’t violate the separation of church and state clause but that is the extent of my constitutional knowledge with respect to the case at hand. I do think there are good reasons not to teach ID in high school (I don’t know if there are any that would justify a constitutional ban on teaching ID), but I do know that your view on this legal matter doesn’t commit you to a particular position with respect to the truth of ID, just as your position on the legality of abortion is logically consistent with a variety of views about abortion (e.g. you might consistently hold that all abortions are immoral but that abortions should be legal).
I’m also not exactly in a position to say that intelligent design is or is not science. You might think that since I claim to be a philosopher of science (or at least a philosopher of science in training), I’d be willing to pass judgment on this matter. Unfortunately, philosophers have had a tough time saying what exactly makes something science or non-science. Philosophers will be familiar with this “demarcation problem.”
While it is true that many scientists will tell you that there is a clear demarcation criterion for classifying a given theory as scientific or not (falsifiability), and that this criterion was appealed to in Kitzmiller v. Dover, this is just a sign that scientists (and judges) haven’t been paying enough attention to philosophers of science (which is all well and good until they start making heavy use of a demarcation criterion). It would be an understatement to claim that the demarcation problem is not settled. It would not be an overstatement to claim that falsifiability is an absolute failure as a solution to the demarcation problem.
Given that the demarcation problem is not solved, it hardly seems unreasonable for someone to claim that ID is not non-science. Instead, we might say with Kitcher (Abusing Science) that creationism (or ID) is bad science or dead science and appeal to this as a reason for not teaching it in schools.
Nagel thinks that even if ID is bad science, that wouldn’t be grounds for not teaching it (or at least that it wouldn’t be grounds for ruling that teaching ID is unconstitutional). As I said, I’m not a lawyer and as far as I know, Dennett isn’t either. What I do know is that endorsing the view that Nagel does (that there is no justification for a constitutional ban on the teaching of ID) is not the same as endorsing creationism, which is, I take it, a necessary condition for being a creationist!
While Nagel, I think, gets some things wrong, nowhere in the paper does he say that he thinks a supernatural cause intervened to bring about certain evolutionary outcomes (as you would expect given that he is an atheist). In light of this, it hardly seems fair to label him a creationist.
9 Comments
To add to this.
If I’m not mistaken, the term “creationism” is often taken to denote something even stronger than the thesis that life is at least in part the responsibility of an intelligent designer. It is often used to denote a particular view about the Book of Genesis – namely that it is literally true (e.g., the earth was literally created by the God of Abrahamic theism is 7 days, and that things came into being in the order in which they appear in Genesis)
I wasn’t at the talk, so perhaps he made it clear that he didn’t mean that latter view by “creationism”. However, if he did not make it clear how he was using the term, then he could have led some people in that audience to believe that Nagel and Fodor are Genesiac Literalists.
Hey Andy,
Good point. He didn’t make the distinction between young earth creationism, neo-creationism, and intelligent design (of course, Nagel does). He just lumped them all together under something like the heading “views that deny a naturalistic explanation of all biological phenomena.”
If Dennett’s is claiming that anyone who suggests that the theory of evolution may be incomplete or that alternative accounts (ID) should also be taught in schools alongside it (as part of religious studies perhaps?) is a creationist, then it’s clearly fallacious. In a way, this kind of “you’re either for us or you’re against us” thinking only helps to make the creationist’s case for them by whipping up the sort of anti-scientific zeal upon which such views seem to thrive.
In any case, I’m not sure that Dennett himself is held in sufficiently high esteem for his allegations against Fodor and Nagel to put students off reading those philosophers (although perhaps this is more the case amongst undergraduates than amongst the profession as a whole). Not that I have anything against Dennett, you understand. I just don’t see how he can justify his claims using the arguments you mentioned.
John,
I haven’t actually read Fodor’s argument myself, but based on what I’ve heard other people say about it, I think that Fodor’s critique is that the theory of natural selection is either (a) trivially true or (b) false.
I’m not sure how he goes about trying to establish this, but I think we can all agree that a theory is not a successful explanation if it has the property of being either trivially true or false.
The most recent Philosopher’s Carnival had a post on this, which I haven’t had a chance to read yet. You can find it here: http://modernmaterialism.blogspot.com/2009/02/darwin-was-wrong.html.
Hey Keith,
I do think Dennett, like Dawkins, has adopted this kind of mentality. There might be pragmatic reasons for doing so but as you say, the reasoning is fallacious.
Also, while I agree that in the profession people will not take the criticisms of Nagel and Dennett seriously, amongst undergraduates, Dennett is far more influential. He is heavily associated with Dawkins as a leader of an atheistic movement and is held in very high esteem. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about a new atheistic movement but I wish it had different leaders (and better arguments).
Hey Eric,
Thanks for the link. I think that is probably exactly what Fodor thinks. I haven’t read the new stuff either but I take it that it is rather similar to some of his views about current pscyhological theory.
Dennett is full of shite. (That’s a technical term.) Fodor’s critique of natural selection has nothing to do with anything remotely worth the name “Creationism.” It’s a variation (unconvincing, I think, but that’s a different point) on the old idea that natural selection doesn’t provide explanations. But Dennett’s generally good-natured theophobia is tedious, alas, and in this case is getting in the way of a perfectly good issue: what, exactly, is wrong with Fodor’s arguments? (I’m less familiar with Nagel’s, but John is surely right: the demarcation problem is far from solved.)
Allen,
Thanks for the comments. That is exactly my take on the Fodor stuff from what I’ve heard.
There is a lot of rubbish being spit out by otherwise respectable philosophers of science because of the theophobia you mention.
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