More Quibbling Arguments
The Trivium model of classical education recognizes that there are three stages to a person’s mental development, each of which represents the growth of the various faculties of the intellect: first, the Grammar stage, characterized by curiosity and credulity, found in young children. Around the middle school years young men and women shift into the second stage, the Logic stage, characterized by a new-found interest in precise, methodical thought and argument. Finally the mind matures in the Rhetoric stage, wherein the intellect develops the ability to look beyond the facts of the Grammar stage and the arithmetical precision of the Logic stage to find deeper, subtler connections and meanings in reality.
Scientific thought bears most often on the first two of these stages — wonder and curiosity coming from the Grammar stage, and method from the Logic stage. Individuals, of course, will develop beyond these into intellectual maturity, but the culture of science itself unfortunately tends to get stuck in the first two stages. The ill-tempered and anti-social scientist who is more comfortable with numbers than people, and who despises art, poetry, and philosophy, is an example of the mind that has not progressed into the rhetoric stage. These individuals – however scientifically brilliant – have not tapped into the deeper questions of meaning and virtue that come with maturity. Hence their contentment with the cold and meaningless reality offered by a materialistic philosophy. Their minds operate almost completely within the spheres of logic, without tapping the deeper wells outside. Dorothy Sayers, in her famous essay on classical education (read here), notes that this logic stage is characterized by
“contradicting, answering back, liking to ‘catch people out’ (especially one’s elders); and by the propounding of conundrums. Its nuisance value is extremely high.”
Anyone acquainted with an eighth-grader will agree (my apologies to eighth-graders of above average temperament). This logic stage is a crucially important part of intellectual development – but it is meant to be used to progress to maturity, not to be an ending point.
What I call the “adolescent” arguments against religion offered by some atheists are examples of arguments from this logic stage. Continued…
These are the arguments that reject the subtlety, mystery, and nuance of more mature human thought and seize on minor points in an effort to browbeat opponents with inane quibbles. There are, as I have said, intelligent arguments for atheism. These arguments come from folks who are usually equipped with well-developed rhetorical minds. But it is the adolescent arguments that seem to get the most airplay and repeat (see Religulous, for example.) Even leading science journals like Nature give these silly arguments a soapbox in pieces like this (subscription required.) Anthropologist and psychologist Pascal Boyer gives us this perfect example of a logic-stage, adolescent argument against religion:
When [believers] are told a story in which a god attends to several problems at once, they find the concept quite plausible, as gods are generally described as having unlimited cognitive powers. Recalling the story a moment later, most people say that the god attended to one situation before turning his attention to the next. People also implicitly expect their gods’ minds to work much like human minds, displaying the same processes of perception, memory, reasoning and motivation. Such expectations are not conscious, and are often at odds with their explicit beliefs.
By pointing out that people use anthropomorphized language and ideas to describe something they admit is ultimately incomprehensible, Boyer seems to think he is undermining religious belief. But this is merely an example of the kind of attempt to “catch out” others without really understanding the issue at stake. A more mature understanding wouldn’t get caught up by the fact the people use convention when discussing profound ideas. Scientists frequently use this same kind of anthropomorphizing technique: for example, how often do scientists say that atoms “want” eight valence electrons, or say that systems “want” to be at the lowest possible energy state? I’ve had students protest this language because “atoms aren’t alive.” Yes, but we convey ideas about unfamiliar concepts by translating them into familiar language. We don’t have to use a detailed discussion of the latest theories of quantum mechanics every time we’re trying to teach how atoms gain and lose electrons. Neither must we repeat the entire Summa Theologica on the nature of God when we are discussing Him. To fail to recognize this is the sign of the “contradicting, catching-out” spirit of the adolescent logic stage, and not of the mind that can see past trivialities in an effort to discover the truth.
Denyse O’Leary gives further discussion here.
