[FULL DISCLOSURE: Herman L. Mays, Jr. recently published a somewhat ruthless review of my book Counterargument for God, which may lead some readers to conclude this particular article has been written to gain some measure of revenge. However, after reading the rather vitriolic exchanges between academic/intellectual types such as Bart Ehrman and Richard Carrier, I’m convinced that hostile rhetoric is now a perfectly acceptable form of criticism. Therefore, I won’t be mincing my words, either.]
Professor Herman L. Mays, Jr. teaches at Marshall University, and he’s probably a very nice guy (Anybody who can make me laugh out loud can’t be all bad in my book). And when I read the following sentence his review of my book, I literally burst out laughing:
To say Leonard’s book should be taken with a grain of salt gives undue credit to the power of salt to ease the swallowing of the foulest of meals.
I have to admit, that’s a pretty clever zinger. Could his rhetoric be exaggerated? That’s not for me to say. Because my brain often works in strange and unconventional ways, when I read his little quip my mind wandered back in time to revisit an old installment of the comic strip Bloom County, in which Opus the Penguin wrote a scathing review of the movie Benji Saves the Universe. He described the movie as achieving “new levels of badness” — could I be as equally untalented a writer?
Given his perspective as an academic who earns his paycheck teaching evolutionary biology, it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that Professor Mays took exception to my criticisms of Darwin’s theory as the best explanation for the origin of new species. However, when he claimed that virtually anything offered on Amazon for $2.99 was a better use of one’s hard-earned money (and knowing that Professor Mays received a free copy) I had to wonder if his penchant for hyperbole overruled his good judgment, and if he was aware of the quality of the competition in Kindle books offered for that same price.
I find it extremely difficult to believe his claim that my book (which won an award) worse than such literary classics as Hillary Clinton: What America Lost by not Electing Hillary Clinton, or the incomparable (and equally incomprehensible) Donald Trump Versus the Were-Yeti.
Alas, that question is moot and must be left for future readers to decide.
It should be noted that for a man who forcefully argues using his position of “authority” as an academic, Professor Mays becomes squeamish and remarkably evasive when asked a rather straightforward question: was he an atheist?
After all, our acquaintance was initially made after he posted several disparaging comments either about creationism or people (like me) who believe in a supernatural creator God. Therefore my question seemed reasonable to ask, and I didn’t expect it would be difficult to answer. But this was the verbatim response from Professor Mays: “I’m not an atheist because I don’t not believe in a god.”
Typically the use of a double negative is considered weak grammar unless the author has intentionally used litotes to imply a suggestive double entendre or to understate an opinion. For example, using the phrase “he isn’t a complete idiot” as a description of Professor Mays could be taken as a sly innuendo suggesting that he is actually an exceptionally clever man, or it might be interpreted to mean he’s at least a slight improvement over a boorish imbecile.
How does one resolve a triple negative? There is no known convention in the English language advising how someone should parse and interpret such a convoluted mess of a reply.
“I’m not an atheist” seemed clear enough, but when combined with “I don’t not believe in a god” a possibly clear and coherent answer to a direct question turns into muddled nonsense. “I don’t not believe in a god” and “I believe in God” clearly do not convey the same meaning. “I’m not an atheist because I believe in God” would be a clear and coherent statement that makes perfect sense. “I’m not an atheist because I don’t not believe in a god” is simply gibberish.
Two lefts don’t make a right, but three do.
But that somewhat egregious abuse of the English language may be excused given the context — surely Professor Mays takes greater care when writing for publication than he does for his personal correspondence. In fairness, we should examine some of his published material. This paper titled “Speaking Out Against Climate Change Denial in West Virginia” by Professor Mays, found in Reports from the National Center for Science Education, begins with this rather audacious claim: “The scientific consensus on climate change is clear. Global temperature is rising and the emission of greenhouse gases from human activities is the primary cause.”
Oh, really?
Now of course it’s just my opinion, but I think it’s rather brazen for Professor Mays to lecture others with feigned authority on the subject of climate change, especially considering the fact he doesn’t study climate science, and his primary source seems to be a book by a couple of historians on climate change, or possibly even the movie of the same name. An inconvenient truth, perhaps?
With his opening statement, Professor Mays sounded a lot more like Bill Nye, the sciency guy than an academic writing for publication in a professional journal. Bill Nye is an entertainer who likes to frequently portray himself as an academic and some sort of scientific authority, with considerable success in the mainstream media. Nye often pontificates his opinions on subjects that he knows little or practically nothing about, which includes climate science, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. For whatever reason, a bow tie and a lab coat appear to give Nye an air of credibility. At least Herman Mays, Jr. really does hold a PhD…it just doesn’t have anything to do with climate science.
Bill Nye loves to cite statistics, and he often talks about “scientific consensus” that greenhouse gases caused by human activity are causing irreparable harm to our environment. However, as Dr. Roy Spencer (a bona fide expert on climate science) testified before Congress, that particular statistic actually refers to the percentage of people who believe human activity has an impact on our environment, not the number of experts who claim that we all must install solar panels, erect a windmill, and drive a Prius, or else the seas will rise, we’ll have droughts and famines, and the world will end.
Tomorrow, or next Tuesday at the very latest.
Unlike the recommendations of Professor Mays in his review of my book, I’m going to strongly recommend that everyone read this execrable opinion piece of dogmatic climate alarmism, because it is illustrative of the most significant problem faced by modern academia: they no longer understand the purpose of their job.
Professor Mays seems to have forgotten it is his job to teach young and impressionable minds how to learn, not necessarily what to learn. Academics like Professor Mays don’t even realize the harm they are doing to humanity as a whole, when they attempt to suppress critical thinking and espouse blind indoctrination. If you want me to believe something, all you need to do is convince me. At least when Professor Mays rhetorically poses the question, “Could the consensus on climate change be wrong?” he was honest enough to admit the answer is “yes.”
Unfortunately, Professor Mays seems to be relatively certain that he’s right and you’re wrong, assuming you disagree with something he believes. He uses adversarial language and demonizes his opposition in this theoretically civil and “intellectual” debate: he calls them climate deniers. Advocates of governmental action to do something about climate change are said to all have equally valid, probably even altruistic reasons for their legitimate concern.
But those opposed are climate deniers who allegedly do so for some nefarious and ambiguous political or economic motives. One sentence in particular effectively sums up the discouraging bias against intellectual debate that exists in the mind of Professor Mays: “I view the strategy of climate change denial in the same light as the denial of the scientific consensus on evolution. Both are assaults on reason.”
There is no possibility for open dialog to have even a prayer of success if one party in the conversation starts with the assumption that anyone who disagrees with him must be unreasonable. And the irony that Professor Mays appears to base much of his understanding of climate science on the work of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, co-authors of the book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming is delicious: his most frequently cited authorities on climate science are not scientists. They are a couple of science historians. Yet Professor Mays lambasted my book in his review for using direct quotes excerpted from “popular” texts such as The Greatest Show on Earth: the evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins, or Why Evolution is True by biologist Jerry Coyne, rather than some snooty academic publication like Reports From the Center for Science Education.
Though he lists a few academic papers among his sources, Professor Mays didn’t seem to be quoting from their work, but he made quite a few references to Oreskes and Conway. Occasionally Professor Mays stumbles over the truth, as when he wrote, “Political and economic interests are exerting an influence on the that has little to do with the actual science.”
Professor Mays might protest my summary of Merchants of Doubt with only two short sentences: “Big oil bad. Environmentalism good” but it is an accurate assessment. If Professor Mays was called before Congress to contradict the testimony of Dr. Spencer, I can imagine that it would go a lot like the exchange between Senator Ted Cruz and the president of the Sierra Club.
Science is never settled, and anyone who prefers agreement to evidence isn’t qualified to be considered an authority. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, but they are not entitled to silence the opinions of others. And if someone who thinks he knows it all can’t or won’t engage in civil conversation, perhaps they should consider remaining quiet themselves.
One thing at a time.
First, admittedly “I don’t not believe in a god” is a muddled statement but I don’t accept that one’s beliefs about god are simple matters that lend themselves to equally simple declarative statements. Atheists do not believe in a god. I’m not an atheist. However, I don’t believe in a personal god either, just like Spinoza and Einstein didn’t believe in a personal god. I frankly don’t know for sure what it means to say I believe in God as the nature of god I believe is ultimately unknowable. However, I have no problem with those who do believe in a personal god as an article of religious faith. I have great respect for people’s religious beliefs. Let’s just say I don’t believe in the sort of god that John Leonard would believe in but that doesn’t equate to being dogmatic about any possibility of god. Now, regardless of whether I believe in god or don’t believe in god or may express my beliefs clearly or not, the science has nothing to do with anyone’s beliefs in god, a personal god or not. I have had conversations about the science of evolution with professionals for over a quarter of a century and never has people’s religious views about god been relevant to those conversations. Atheists, Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and people of many other faiths or none at all may all sit down and agree on the science of evolution and they do so every day.
In attempts to defend his book Leonard is creating a false equivalency. He claims that his book, a book devoid of reference to the primary literature, is no worse than my own paper appearing in the Reports of the National Center for Science Education. A few points on that, first, this paper was invited review on my take on the controversy surrounding the adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards in the state of West Virginia so if he has some question on my credibility in this matter he may question the editors of the Reports of the National Center for Science Education. Around the same time as the publication of this paper I was invited to discuss climate change education at a regional conference on the topic.
Second, while not a climate scientist per se climate science permeates many fields of study. My colleagues and I have indeed looked at the effects of past climate change on biological populations (see McKay et al. 2010 Recent range-wide demographic expansion in a Taiwan endemic montane bird, Steere’s Liocichla (Liocichla steerii)
BMC Evolutionary Biology 10(71) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2848157/) and we have other papers suing similar approaches to understanding the influence of past climate on population history.
Third, virtually anyone trained in how scientific scholarship works has the ability to assess the science. In general scientists are trained to assess an argument on the basis of the available literature and it doesn’t take much knowledge of climate science to recognize that there indeed is a strong consensus with regards to climate change. Leonard’s book relies exclusively on his layman’s reading of popular science books and includes not one single reference to the primary literature. My review in the Reports of the National Center for Science Education references both popular books AND references to the peer reviewed literature including journals such as Science, Environmental Research Letters, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, as well as reports from scientific institutions such as NASA, the interagency US Global Change Research Program, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and international body under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Programme. There is nothing wrong with citing Dawkins or Coyne’s popular books in his work but these are apparently the only sorts of works Leonard is either willing or capable of referencing and nothing he has written makes any reference to the primary scientific literature. This is not the case for any of my own published works.
I am a scientist and a science educator. I have spent my education and professional career in a scholarly examination of nature and with that comes an emphasis on using the original primary literature to build an argument. It’s a skill that students have to learn and for people in other professions these skills do not often come easy. In our exchanges Leonard has described the original scientific literature as boring and he has demonstrated no desire to read it let alone understand it. This is an anti-intellectual position of a science denialist. Look, I have no issue whatsoever with people’s heartfelt religious beliefs. I have great respect for people of faith. However, religious beliefs are not the basis for conclusions in science. If someone’s religion precludes them from believing in evolution then I am perfectly fine with that but those beliefs are not substitutes for cogent, scientific arguments built on the basis of the available evidence. I’m sure Leonard is a perfectly nice person but he has demonstrated no credibility on matters of science.
Wish I had more time to read and ponder, but couple of points based on a quick skim:
1) Saying “I don’t disbelieve” is a very distinct, subtle, grammatically correct :), and very clear position from either “I Believe” or “I Disbelieve,” or even “I doubt”. As I’ve discussed with John before, the current scientific evidence seems to pretty convincingly exclude the vast majority of Gods posited by humans (including most denominations that claim to be “Christian”), but not all of them, so I would argue that saying “I don’t disbelieve” is a valid shorthand way of saying “I’m not ready to say there is no God but I just don’t see any evidence for one” (this is, I think, subtly different from most traditional presentations of agnosticism).
2) I am a climate scientist, and I wish people would STOP convolving the science with their politics and/or religion (which are sadly in many ways the same thing these days). Dr. Hays is absolutely right about one point that is lost on many if not most of those who argue this subject in ignorance (which is just about everybody, “pro” and “con”): the evidence for climate change cuts across many fields, not just atmospheric science, but oceanography, biology, and geology. In my role as an external peer reviewer for IPCC in AR4, it was fascinating to review works in biology supporting the other safer and less gooey fields (normally I avoid biology since the subjects of the field generally bite, sting, stink, or cause rashes) .
3) The most distressing thing to me is how personal and confrontational these discussions have become. Each “side” dismisses the intentions and motives of the other, assigning only the most base reasons for their positions (the “if you don’t agree with me you must be evil or stupid” argument). I’ve met John in person, spent several hours discussing science, climate, and evolution. I like him – he is a “nice guy,” and is smart and even reasonable in his own way. The problem is that John doesn’t think like a scientist, even though his computer science training has leads him to believe he does, and is unbelievably frustrating in that respect. That’s not an insult – very few people work within confines of the scientific method, and, it has to be said, an awful lot of scientists don’t think like scientists when it comes to political or religious discussions, and make assertions in the name of science that are not supported by it.
As humans we have a hard time separating our beliefs – what we want to be true – from what the data tells us is true, and cherry pick data to support our views (something John is quite good at) rather than looking at the totality of the data and constructing a worldview that is as consistent with the data as possible. Science is a largely negative process – it’s not science if you can’t construct a test wherein the proposition (the “hypothesis) can’t be falsified. It’s a tough mistress.
Rather than resorting to ad hominum attacks and caricatures of those we disagree with, I would hope that there is some way have these discussions in a way that doesn’t degenerate in to food fights. As the evening gatha said in Zen Buddhist temples says, “Let me respectfully remind you, the questions of life and death are of supreme importance; time passes swiftly by, and opportunity is lost …”
As always, it’s good to hear from you, my friend. I knew you would find some of what I wrote problematic; that is nothing new.
However, we do agree, whether you knew it or not, on one important point: I don’t think like a scientist. I would not dispute that…I do, of course, appreciate and apply the scientific method to the best of my ability to the given problem (the existential one) but I cannot think in a mindset where everything I see I should not believe until I can replicate what I am quite sure I, and others saw or experienced. I have no problems with the idea that I should remain skeptical, up to a point, but when someone writes that I should not trust my own eyes and senses, and that someone else should tell me what to believe that I saw with my own eyes, I will take exception to their suggestion.
In his book “The God Delusion” Dawkins talks about some crowd of people at a place called Fatima in an alleged event known as “The Miracle of the Sun” which he summarily dismisses as a mass hallucination because “we know” that the sun did not, in fact, crash into the earth on October 13, 1917, because we would not exist if it had.
As per our long (thank you again for your time and hospitality) and sometimes rambling conversation (totally my fault; I’m ADD, I’m sure, but not medicated) I’ve decided that the only reasonable way to describe my position on that alleged phenomenon is that of agnosticism, which you recommended, and is a much less wordy and confusing than saying “I’m not a disbeliever because I don’t believe that Fatima didn’t happen.”
I’m a theist because I believe that Jesus was the crucified Son of God and rose from the dead, if for no other reason than to justify my interest in NDEs and ADEs. Because I wasn’t there and can’t prove it with knowledge because I believe, I don’t “know”, I also call myself an agnostic.
I wasn’t there. If I had been, I would naturally consider my observations to be tantamount to empirical evidence collected via scientific method, and gnostic, not agnostic.
Chuck says this, “I like him – he is a “nice guy,” and is smart and even reasonable in his own way. The problem is that John doesn’t think like a scientist, even though his computer science training has leads him to believe he does, and is unbelievably frustrating in that respect. That’s not an insult – very few people work within confines of the scientific method, and, it has to be said, an awful lot of scientists don’t think like scientists when it comes to political or religious discussions, and make assertions in the name of science that are not supported by it.”
I agree completely. I have no reason to doubt that John is nothing short of a nice guy but being a nice guy doesn’t give you credibility in a scientific discussion. My position is a relatively simple one. It is irresponsible to erode public confidence in science. Science has served us very well as a society and science is built on the collective work of individual scientists. Credibility matters. Expertise matters, or at least they should matter. Everyone’s ideas do not exist on an equal playing field. These are not ad hominum attacks but just reality.
I think scientists can have religious and political opinions and should be as free to express those opinions as any one else, however, I also agree that often some scientists may inappropriately apply their scientific expertise where it may not belong. Science tells us that climate is changing because of human activity but science dictates no particular course of action in response. These are socio-political decisions built from our values. Science can tell us what likely outcomes of one course of action will be relative to another but science may not dictate one action over another. Likewise science has nothing to say as to whether or not there is a God. However, if your conception of God is inextricably tied to very specific predictions about nature (such as with regards to common ancestry or the age of the earth) then science may address the support for those predictions. The most robust conceptions of God however are not contingent on beliefs about nature.