Moving the Semantic Goalposts - some theological sleight-of-hand with words

 
(apologies for mixed metaphors) This is a chapter from my book Believing Bullshit:How Not To get Sucked Into An Intellectual Black Hole. It may be of use to anyone teaching religious language at A Level (RS or Philosophy).

Moving the goalposts

The expression “moving the goalposts” refers to a certain disreputable strategy in an argument. Suppose I claim Fred has never been to Brazil. It’s pointed out to me that Fred went to Brazil on his honeymoon. My claim has been shown to be false, but rather than admit this I just switch claims: “Well, he’s never been to Brazil on business.” I have just moved the goalposts. The analogy is with football. It looks like someone’s going to score a goal, but suddenly, at the last moment, the goalposts are moved and the ball misses the target.

We’re all familiar with this sort of strategy. I focus here on a certain kind of example. It involves shifting ones meaning. I call it Moving The Semantic Goalposts.

Moving The Semantic Goalposts has been developed into something like an art form in certain theological circles, where it is capable of producing a kind of Intellectual Black Hole. In truth, comparatively few religious people engage in this sort of tactic, certainly not in the systematic fashion described here. Many rightly condemn it.

Let’s start with an example, which I call effing the ineffable.

"Why Study Philosophy?" Day, June 28th Manchester - I'm speaking

'Why study Philosophy?' day

Title: Why Study Philosophy
Date: June 28th, 2013, 10.15am-4.00pm (followed by optional campus tour)
For: Year 12 students from schools and colleges
To Book: Please click enter your details in the booking form - please note if you are teacher bringing a group of students please complete the bottom section in addition to your details.
This event is completely free to any students wanting to find out more about this fascinating subject. Through a series of interactive talks and workshops, participants will gain hands-on experience of this fascinating area, and there will be plenty of opportunities during the day to put your questions to university teachers of philosophy, students, and even a best-selling philosophy author.
Speakers will include:

• Sean Crawford
• Angie Hobbs
• Stephen Law

So why indeed study Philosophy?
What makes our actions right or wrong? Is it OK to torture one innocent person in order to save the lives of a thousand others? Does God exist? How can we know anything about the world around us? Is my mind just my brain? Should we trust doctors more than homeopaths? What is truth? Is democracy better than dictatorship? Is it rational to fear death? What is time? If you find these kinds of questions interesting, then come along to Why Study Philosophy? and find out more! The event is aimed at year 11 students, whether they are considering studying at Manchester or elsewhere, and whether or not they are studying or have any prior knowledge of philosophy. You can come to philosophy with any academic background: you just need curiosity and an open mind. Philosophy asks – and tries to answer – the kinds of deep and puzzling questions that other subjects don’t answer. So if you’re interested in truth, beauty, right and wrong, justice, the nature of science, how language works, the meaning and value of life, the existence of God, the difference between rational and irrational beliefs … then philosophy is for you.
Developing key skills
When studying for a degree in philosophy, students don’t simply learn about philosophical questions and how philosophers have attempted to answer them. Instead, the focus is on doing philosophy for oneself: thinking through the questions, analysing and criticising existing answers, and trying to think of new answers – and indeed new questions. Students learn how to argue carefully and persuasively, without ignoring other people’s views for no good reason and without relying on the kind of rhetoric we find in the media and in politics. Throughout the day, visiting students will see how philosophy creates graduates with highly developed language and communication skills and exceptional critical and analytical skills. Most importantly, it creates people who can think carefully and creatively for themselves.
Frequently asked questions:

• Q: Can students book on as individuals and attend the day on their own? A: Yes, you can – all we ask is that you make sure your school/college is comfortable with missing any lectures you’re due to complete on that day
• Q: Can teachers book large groups on in one go? A: Yes, you can, but you will be limited to booking on a maximum of 15 students.
• Q: Will there be refreshments? A: Yes, there will. We will be providing some drinks in the morning, a light lunch, and coffee and cake in the afternoon.
• Q: I still want to know more before booking on who do I talk to? A: Please email emma.britain@manchester.ac.uk for more information, or call 0161 275 8924.
• Q: How do I book onto the day? A: Please complete the booking form via the link above.

This event has been organised in collaboration with the British Philosophical Association and with support from the Higher Education Academy

Source here.

Playing drumkit with Heavy Dexters this Friday, Ashmolean Museum

Centre for Inquiry UK event yesterday: Scientism: Can Science Solve Every Mystery?

An event I organized for CFI. A good, educational time was had by all. Here's Christian Peter S. Williams (left) with atheist Peter Atkins. Videos to follow.

We don't have an impartial, truth-seeking BBC. We've got a toothless, neutral BBC

Consider: "Profligate Labour, unlike the financially responsible Tories, amassed a huge debt prior to the financial crisis, which is the major cause of our current economic problems."

This thought is everywhere. Tory and Lib Dem spokespeople drop it into their every other conversation on radio and TV. It's been repeated in the Press, on the internet, etc. to the point where it's become a factoid - something everyone just "knows" to be true.

However, Labour reduced the national debt by 22%. It inherited a debt of 42% of GDP from the Tories in 1997. By the start of the banking crisis it had got the debt down to 35%. Here's a Conservative commentator, Ramesh Patel, confirming this. Patel concludes, "The deficit myth is the grossest lie ever enforced upon the people and it has been sold by exploiting people's economic illiteracy".

Also remember that David Cameron pledged to match Labour's spending plans (so much for "profligate Labour, responsible Tories").

Now, this "profligate Labour, responsible Tories" debt myth, if that is what it is, is politically enormously consequential. It's an election changer. It's also providing much of the justification for the heaviest assault on the welfare state since its creation.

If this is indeed a myth, shouldn't a state-funded national broadcasting corporation have a duty to explode it?  Don't they have a duty to educate and inform the public, to "speak truth unto Nation", ensuring that, particularly when it comes to myths that are likely to be election-deciders, politicians and journalists don't get to pull the wool over the public's eyes?

Yet, as far as I can see, rarely, if ever, do the BBC challenge this myth, certainly not in any sort of sustained and determined way.

But perhaps that is the stance that a properly impartial, unbiased BBC should take? It shouldn't be taking sides, right?

Actually, neutrality - not taking sides - is not the same thing as impartiality - providing an unbiased and objective investigation and assessment.

A politically neutral broadcaster will simply provide a forum in which opposing voices are given equal airtime. A politically impartial broadcaster with a commitment to revealing the truth is something quite different. An impartial investigative broadcaster has teeth and may robustly criticise a view. A neutral broadcaster is toothless.

The BBC's failure to challenge the debt myth effectively, given its scale and importance in shaping the political landscape and election results, may demonstrate neutrality, but it does not demonstrate an impartial commitment to exposing the truth and educating and informing the public.

A BBC committed to  revealing impartially the truth on key issues, in a country in which public opinion is heavily influenced by a largely right-wing press, will inevitably have to spend more of its time countering right-wing myths and fibs than left-wing myths and fibs. This will undoubtedly provoke accusations of left-wing bias. But actually, it's what any genuinely impartial broadcaster with a commitment to revealing the truth would do.

However, I fear we don't have a courageous, impartial, truth-seeking BBC. We've got a toothless, neutral BBC instead.

Can Science Solve Every Mystery? - this Saturday June 8th - see some of you there I hope...

Running Order:

11.00-11.40 Peter S Williams
11.40-12.20 Peter Atkins
12.20-1.00 David Papineau
1.00-1.30 lunch
1.30-2.30 panel discussion with Williams, Atkins and Papineau

Centre for Inquiry UK and Conway Hall present

Can science solve every mystery? A scientist, a philosopher and a Christian discuss.

Peter Atkins, David Papineau, Peter S. Williams

Can science answer every question? Should scientists show a little humility and acknowledge there are questions that only religion can answer? Are science and religion “non-overlapping magisteria”, as the scientist Stephen Jay Gould claimed, or is science capable of showing that religion is false, as Richard Dawkins believes? And what, exactly, do philosophers do?

Presented and chaired by Stephen Law (Philosophy, Heythrop and Provost of CFI UK).

Saturday June 8th, 2013

Conway Hall

25 Red Lion Square

Holborn

London

WC1R 4RL

£7 (£4 students) Free to friends of CFI UK. Book here or pay on door.

10.30am registration. 11am-2.30pm

Speakers

Professor Peter Atkins (Univ. of Oxford). Chemist, atheist and author of many books including Galileo’s Finger and Four Laws That Drive the Universe:

“Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny.”

“Sitting around thinking about the world … [that] is philosophy. And we know where that leads to in understanding. My argument is - nowhere.”

Peter S. Williams (Damaris Trust). Philosopher and leading British Christian apologist. Author of C.S. Lewis vs the New Atheists and A Faithful Guide to Philosophy:

“The existence of scientific laws is inexplicable unless we move beyond science into the realm of metaphysics, postulating a God who intends those laws for a reason.”

Professor David Papineau (KCL). One of Britain’s leading philosophers and humanists and author of Philosophical Devices:

“Philosophical problems are characterized by a special kind of difficulty, a difficulty which means that they cannot be solved, as scientific problems normally are, simply by the uncovering of further empirical evidence. Rather they require some conceptual unravelling, a careful unpicking of implicit ideas, often culminating in the rejection of assumptions we didn't realize we had.”

"Atheists reject Christianity not because it is unreasonable, but because they don’t want it, or theism more generally, to be true"

Here is one of four answers regularly offered by Christians (and others) for the failure of atheists to recognize the reasonableness of Christian belief (the other three, as well as a continuation of this one, will be blogged later). Edward Feser gets special mention:

(i) Atheists reject Christianity not because it is unreasonable, but because they don’t want it, or theism more generally, to be true.

Those attempting to explain atheist non-belief as a product of wishful thinking sometimes quote atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, who in his book The Last Word, says:

It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and naturally, hope there is no God. I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.[i]

But is this the view of most atheists? Surely the Christian message is one of hope. It provides numerous attractive reassurances, especially about death and justice. In particular, it promises that we can be reunited with our dead loved ones beyond the grave, that we and they can live in joy forever, and that people will ultimately get their just deserts. These are appealing beliefs for most of us.

Indeed, that Christianity is not, as a rule, the sort of thing people want to be true is fairly obviously contradicted by the manner in which Christians tend to promote it. They often place at least as much emphasis on how wonderful it would be if Christianity were true as on any intellectual case that might be made in its support.

Wishful-thinking-based explanations for the failure of individuals to appreciate the reasonableness of Christian belief also run into trouble with those tortured individuals who struggle valiantly to keep their faith but lose it nonetheless. Their rejection of Christianity does not appear to be motivated by wishful thinking. Quite the opposite.

Atheists don’t want to believe in eternal damnation

Interview I gave after my talk at West Midlands Faiths Forum last September (conference on the riots)

Reposting for Heythrop students - stats on philosophy graduates (and religion too)

If you are wondering what kind of degree programme is likely to boost your general smarts, consider these figures.


Go here. This is one of several graphs from the above article. Based on GRE test performance (Graduate Record Examination) of graduate programme applicants. Quantitative (math) skills on the vertical axis, verbal skills on the horizontal (other graphs include the third component - "analytical writing", at which philosophers also excel, dramatically outperforming all others).

Philosophy graduates are pretty damn smart, the various figures suggest, compared to graduates with other degrees, including most - perhaps even all - sciences (though were they smarter to begin with, or did their degree programme make them smarter, compared to other degrees?). Check the article. Here's the original table of GRE scores of US students completing a variety of degrees.

Notice religion also does very well.

This data suggests (but falls a long way short of establishing) that if we want to produce graduates with general, across-the-board smarts, physics and philosophy are disciplines to encourage [and possibly also that accountancy and business administration should be discouraged (this confirms all my prejudices, I am pleased to say!)].

Note some very weird stats on this graph, such as business administration's woeful performance, doing less well than even "art and performance" on quantitative skills and verbal skills (which is staggering). And accountancy grads less good on quantitative skills than philosophy grads (!) and the worst performers of all on verbal skills. Both business and accountancy are also weak on the analytic writing component.

Of course, as the new business-friendly, market-led Tory vision of degree provision kicks in, we'll probably see philosophy departments up and down the country closing and business administration degrees expanding. Brilliant.

P.S. Just added a second graph comparing analytical writing and verbal. Check out e.g business administration. And where's philosophy?

Correction to Believing Bullshit, chpt 2.

Here's an endnote I am adding to a chapter I am contributing to the upcoming Handbook on Humanism (edited by AC Grayling and Andrew Copson [Wiley Blackwell publisher]). I now realize I got something wrong in chapter 2 of my book Believing Bullshit, so might as well set the record straight publicly. Here's the endnote of the chapter I am now writing for the new book [n.b. YEC = Young Earth Creationism]:

Elsewhere I have said that because Ken Ham’s theory makes no predictions – takes no risks – regarding the fossil record, so it cannot be confirmed by the fossil record. See “But It Fits!” in my Believing Bullshit (Amherst NY: Prometheus Press, 2011). I now realize I did not get this quite right. Were we to start excavating fossils that were clearly stamped “Made by God in 4,004 BC”, etc., that might indeed confirm – even strongly confirm – YEC, despite the fact that YEC does not predict such a discovery. True, such a discovery may not be probable given YEC, but, given the discovery is nevertheless considerably more probable on YEC than otherwise, it would still confirm YEC to a significant degree. 

So here's what I should have said in Believing Bullshit (from the new chapter):