Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

Browsing the New York Times website, I ran across the blog of Stanley Fish. Fish, if you’ve never heard of him (lucky you), is an academic star. He is an English professor specializing in deconstruction. In other words, he is not interested in truth; he is only interested in being right by proving that nothing is true.

The blog posts which caught my eye were a series describing Fish’s analysis of three recent books on atheism. Those of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchen. Sparing you the arguments, Fish concludes in his first post, The Three Atheists, that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchen are not contributing anything new. Unfortunately, he does not come to this conclusion by examining the what the books say, but only by applying some of the key principles of the books to religious arguments that he knows have already been made within the context of religion and then assuming he knows how the authors would respond. This is a neat trick that allows him to suggest that there is nothing new in the books without actually engaging in the arguments the books make.

In his second piece, Atheism and Evidence, Fish attempts to demonstrate that science has no grounds for examining religion, nor does religion have grounds for examining science. He performs this trick by blurring the lines between faith and reason; suggesting that both science and religion are based in faith and noting that religion also strives to sustain itself through reason.

In drawing that conclusion, Fish touches on a subject that has been of long standing interest to me: the phenomenon of morality. Harris and Dawkins both believe that morality is derived from natural selection – there is a genetic basis for our moral codes of conduct. To ridicule this idea that science can stand alone and that morality does not require religion, Fish notes that Harris and Dawkins believe:

It’s just a matter of time before so-called moral phenomena will be brought within the scientific ambit: “There will probably come a time,” Harris declares, “when we achieve a detailed understanding of human happiness, and of ethical judgments themselves, at the level of the brain.” And a bit later, “There is every reason to believe that sustained inquiry in the moral sphere will force convergence of our various belief systems in the way that it has in every other science.”

What gives Harris his confidence? Why does he have “every reason to believe” (a nice turn of phrase)? What are his reasons? What is his evidence?…

Note that Fish pulls a cute rhetorical trick here. He ignores the arguments about morality and genetics. Ignores the fact that there are detailed theories allowing one to predict the extent to which we extend our morality to others in our community. He ignores that these theories also predict non-human altruistic behaviors, which religious theories of morality can not. No, he turns away from behavioral discussions of morality and instead focuses on the area where there are still unknowns: how are these high-level genetic imperatives implemented in the structure of the brain. Where religion says to do good because God says to, and Dawkins says that we do good because our genes (though not necessarily ourselves) are likely to prosper, Fish demands that we tell him how doing good excites certain neurons in the brain to encourage doing good.

Finally, Fish discusses objections raised in his first piece: that scientific theories are falsifiable whereas religions faith is constructed so as not to be.  Fish states that systems can only be falsified within the context of the belief system in which they operate.  So long as any object under discussion is internally self-consistent, it can not be falsified.  Fish goes on to flesh out this argument in his third post.

In Is Religion Man-Made?,  Fish describes how God is defined in the context of religion.  Noting that God exceeds human understanding and is therefore not a subject for examination.  Moreover, says Fish, within the context of religion, God is all-encompassing of creation and how can we examine something of which we are part?  It seems to be a hobby of humanity to construct such internally consistent theories which can not be tested.  Bishop Berkely constructed one regarding the non-existence of matter which no one believed to be true, but could not dispute the internal logic.  Samuel Johnson, kicking a large stone, noted, “I refute it thus.”

Johnson is essentially asserting that while such theories are impossible to disprove, the ultimate judge of their reality is their tangible existence.  It is all well and good to assert a pretty piece of logic as indisputable and therefore true, but that does not make it real.  Reality is the physical universe in which we inhabit.  God may exist as a philosophical construct because the logic of its existence is internally consistent, but that does not mean that there is such a being in reality.  Of course, religions do assert that there is such a being in reality.  Most that assert a God, with the exception of the Deists, believe that it plays an active role in the universe, i.e., God can alter the physical.  Now Fish may think (or assert – I actually doubt that Fish believes any of this) that the existence of God cannot be tested because he is not tangible or because we exist within God, but that’s just silly.  Anything which can affect reality can be tested.  For example, there have been numerous studies that demonstrate that double-blind studies of prayer show no improvement in sick patients.  Cases of healing occur with roughly the same frequency of spontaneous remission.  In short, if miracles reflected in a change in reality are the proof of God, then they fall short.  That is not to say that a belief in God may not change people.  That is not to say that praying will not help you to come to grips with tragedy; only that you would be hard pressed to attribute these to a real, tangible God as opposed to an abstract, conceptual God.

Coming back around to the start of this post, I suppose that I should really just learn not to read deconstructionists.  On the other hand, I did comply with the burden placed on me from the title of Fish’s blog, I did “Think Again”  – I just happened to think that Fish is full of it.  🙂