My quick read of Fish's essay leads me to believe that I do not disagree with a word of his essay.
I can say this much: Stanley Fish does not think that the case for the non-existence of God or the irrationality of religious faith has yet been made by the likes of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christoper Hitchens. (I think one might add to this list: Daniel Dennett, the late Carl Sagan, and the late Stephen Jay Gould. These are men whose faith in the non-existence of God and the irrationality of religious belief knows no bounds.)
Of course, the relationship between evidence and religious faith is not really a new question. For example, the emergence of modern probability theory was accompanied and spurred by rival arguments about the probative value of the miracles reported in the Bible. (Even if the debates now seem curious, it should be noticed that from the standpoint of the problem of uncertain inference, some interesting points were made during these debates.)
In the closing paragraph of his essay Fish states:
Despite what some commentators assumed, I [Stanley Fish] am not taking a position on the issues raised by the three books; readers of this and the previous column have learned nothing about my own religious views, or even if I have any.Fish is a thoroughly liberal fellow -- in the good old-fashioned sense of the word "liberal."
2 comments:
Hi Peter,
for an alternative take on Fish, see Massimo Pigliucci's blog entries, e.g.
Nonsense and non sequitur in Stanley Fish, part deux
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2007/06/nonsense-and-non-sequitur-in-stanley.html
The central error of many modern advocates of the thesis that religious faith is irrational is to confuse the proposition that material things cause everything and the proposition that someday it will be shown that all existence is merely material. (The advocates of this irrationality-of-religious-belief thesis are also typically ignorant of the complexity and variety of religious attitudes toward matters such as the existence of evil and the question of immortality.)
In an age in which quantum theory reigns and esoterica such as string theory and multiverses are seriously hypothesized by serious scientists, it is in any event less clear that advanced folk must assume everything is "material" -- or, in any event, the meaning of such a proposition is thoroughly murky. (The more fashionable thesis among today's cosmologists and scientifically-inclined epistemologists is that "information" lies at the heart of all existence. Imagine that! Does science show that in the beginning was the Word?)
I forbear from getting embroiled in the question of free will and determinism. But perhaps it is sufficient to note that the rise of the idea of uncertainty in modern science, while it does not refute determinism, does make the meaning of the no-free-will hypothesis considerably more murky. And if one believes that the soul-body division is not correct and it one thinks (as many AI people do) of logics embedded in different types of material, then the question of "free will" perhaps becomes not the question of the independence of the soul from the body, but the question of the possibility of spontaneous activity by logic-grounded natural organisms -- and the answer to the question of such spontaneous action is possible is much less clear than the false question of whether disembodied and non-material "souls" can act independently of the "material bodies" that such disembodied entities may be thought to inhabit.
I think some prominent devout atheists such as Dennett attribute altogether too much stupidity to people who have some kind of religious belief. Religious people -- like atheists -- vary widely: some are stupid, some are not; and some religious folk think in nuanced ways, while some religious folk and some non-religious folk do not.
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