Feser's double standards

Ed Feser is a name I've come across in the past, and out of curiosity I googled and found his blog. A post that mentioned "New Atheism" was catnip to me, and I could not but help wondering how a known polemicist like him would calmly deal with it.

In that post he links to a review of a book called Faith versus Fact by Jerry Coyne. As book reviews go it's little more than a hasty smear job. We know from the start that some readers of such books aren't saying in their minds "okay, convince me" but actively looking for things to complain about. I'm sure Feser has had atheists read his books like that too. A whole gaggle of cognitive biases are protecting us from questioning deeply held beliefs.

It's a case of dramatic irony that Feser titles his review "An Omnibus of Fallacies". I'm sure he means the book, not his own review of it.

Example 1.

When churchmen refuse to abandon some doctrine, Coyne tells us that this shows that religion is dogmatic and unwilling to adjust itself to modern knowledge. When churchmen do abandon some doctrine, Coyne tells us that this shows that religion is unfalsifiable and desperate to adjust itself to modern knowledge. It seems Coyne also missed that lecture in logic class about the fallacy of special pleading.

No, Feser that's called a dilemma, not special pleading. And it's not a dilemma for Coyne, it's one for you. Religions are slow to adjust to modern knowledge. For centuries, geocentricism was believed - the cosmology in the Bible is a flat earth snow globe, stars were in the solid sky above earth and even the god of the Bible has that view - and when more and greater knowledge of how the cosmos was actually arranged there was some cognitive dissonance that took some time to reconcile. It undermined the religions that had "known" geocentricism was true because of what unreliable holy texts said. What is true, and even how we know what is true, became a live issue. Eventually the cognitive dissonance was resolved by reducing the importance of geocentricism to religion. Oh the churchmen may have rearranged their thoughts to their satisfaction, but outsiders have every right to call them out on that change in doctrine and ask why it doesn't falsify the religion. That's the dilemma. This is Sagan's "dragon in my garage" all over. We know, empirically, the visible institution that calls itself the Roman Catholic Church is neither unified, nor holy, nor demonstrably apostolic in it's doctrines. Yet no amount of disunity, of evil, of doctrinal accretions unknown in the first 1000 years of it's history counts against the magnificent Roman Catholic Church as one, holy, and apostolic. That's what unfalsifiable looks like. If your religion is true, then you can't have it both ways. Either dogmatically cling to geocentricism and flat earth nonsense and Noah's ark and die on that hill for that belief, or adjust to modern knowledge and accept that it falsifies your religion. Feser and believers like him want us to respect religion even as it vacillates in the face of actual empirical evidence, which at no point can call into question the impervious idealized religion he holds.    

Example 2.

... Nor is “religion” the only term Coyne uses in a tendentious way. The question-begging definition is perhaps his favorite debating trick. He characterizes “faith” as “belief without—or in the face of—evidence” and repeatedly uses the term as if this is what it generally means in religious contexts. Naturally, he has no trouble showing that faith so understood is irrational. But this simply is not how faith is understood historically in Christian theology. For example, for scholastic theologians, faith is assent to something that has been revealed by God. And how do we know that God exists and really has revealed it? Those are claims for which, the theologian agrees, evidence needs to be given.

That's half a dozen fallacies. Feser is equivocating. So instead of saying as Coyne does that "faith is believing something [without evidence]", now faith is "assent to something [revealed by God]" -- those bracketed clauses are equivalent. Lets not kid ourselves, "revealed by God" is a faith claim for which there is probably no evidence. And if we take him at his word, presumably Feser doesn't give religiously assent to anything he can't prove was revealed by God. He must believe very little.

So Feser might say faith is assent to dogmas like the Immaculate Conception, but believing the content of that proposition does nothing to address the epistemological question of how-do-you-know-it's-true? Any grain of intellectual honesty should be enough for him to admit there are many things, many of these supposed divine revelations, that he takes on faith - no more than an ipse dixit table thump from Rome. Which is of course ironic when he recoils at being painted with that brush by Coyne. "No!", says Feser. "Of course we agree we need evidence for what we believe! That is not in dispute!" Really? How far may I prod your beliefs before you run out of evidence and all you have is hearsay? This is exactly Coyne's point. As a Catholic, Feser must perforce believe in just the manner Coyne says.

This type of thinking is what chips away at the faith of rational, critical thinking people who observe quietly from a distance. Seeing theologians, and ministers, and bishops, and religious philosophers lack any self-awareness, seeing them defend the faith with double standards and lack of clarity.