It’s one of the interesting (and annoying) things about scientists these days—well, to be precise, about the high-profile ones who write heavily-publicized books attacking Christianity—that they refuse to hear of anyone without a Ph.D. in science writing anything at all bearing in any way on science, and treat anyone who tries with utter contempt, but don’t hesitate to wade into the fields of the humanities, of which they know nothing at all, with the serene assurance that since they’re scientists, they must be experts here, too. Watching the likes of Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg dress up as philosophers, theologians and historians would be hysterically funny were it not so embarrassingly cringe-inducing, at least for those who actually know something about practicing the disciplines of philosophy, theology and history; it’s amateur hour to the nth power, rather as if someone stepped out of America’s Funniest Home Videos and into the finals of American Idol. Watching the noted philosopher Alvin Plantinga dismantle Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, however, is a very different experience, one in which Dawkins’ work plays the role of carrot to Plantinga’s Cuisinart; for his part, Weinberg’s smug, self-satisfied theory of historical development doesn’t fare much better against Barton Swaim.
I’ll concede, it would be unreasonable to expect these folks to stop trying to refute Christianity; but I would appreciate it if they would at least set aside their disciplinary arrogance and treat the humanities with the same academic respect they demand for the sciences.
Edit: as noted in the comments, including Daniel Dennett with Dawkins and Weinberg was inappropriate in more than one respect; he has therefore been removed. Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa. That said, I would still appreciate it if he would “treat the humanities with the same academic respect [he] demands for the sciences,” even if he’s formally a philosopher himself, as he treats even his own ostensible discipline with public disdain.
“Watching the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Steven Weinberg dress up as philosophers, theologians and historians would be hysterically funny were it not so embarrassingly cringe-inducing, at least for those who actually know something about practicing the disciplines of philosophy, theology and history…”
Hmmm, you know so much about philosophy but you don’t know that Dennett is a philosophy professor, not a scientist. And I dare say he is no less noted than Plantinga.
David
You are correct, sir, and thank you for catching my error; that’s what I get for not thinking carefully enough. Dennett shows the same sort of arrogance for a similar reason, which is why I casually dropped him in there (even though he wasn’t the subject of either of the links I was pointing to; mentioning him was purely associative and not actually justified), but he’s properly a philosopher of science, not a scientist, and was even a student of W. V. Quine, who of course is a figure of tremendous importance in modern analytic philosophy.
That said, he is a philosopher of science, and there are three things to note about his approach in that regard. First, he clearly values his informal education with various prominent scientists more than his formal education (to the point of describing himself as an autodidact, which sounds pretty dismissive of the Ph.D. he earned under Gilbert Ryle). Second, this is a man who deliberately refuses to play by the rules of his ostensible discipline, and has explained his reasons for so doing in dismissive and insulting terms. Third, in line with that, he seems to proceed from the essential assumption that philosophy may only be properly understood as a subset of scientific naturalism/materialism.
The result of this is that, while formally educated as a philosopher and focused on the ongoing development of a philosophy of mind (surely a worthy philosophical project), Dennett effectively operates more as a scientist than as a philosopher, as something of an alien in his own formal discipline; which is why it’s easy to lump him in with the likes of Dawkins and Weinberg even when he technically doesn’t belong there. Laziness on my part to do so, to be sure, but not without justification.
As for comparing Dennett to Plantinga, it depends on your basis. In terms of name recognition, Dennett’s probably well ahead, due to books like Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Breaking the Spell, which are the sort of books that get essays in the NYRB. As a professional philosopher, however, he is far less important to the discipline than Plantinga; to this point, anyway, his entire contribution to philosophy taken together wouldn’t measure up in importance to Plantinga’s concept of warrant. Plantinga’s work in epistemology, I would venture to say, will continue to matter in philosophy long after Dennett is a footnote to the discipline (unless, of course, Dennett does something to change that, which he still has time to do).
All of which is to say, while I shouldn’t have been so offhandedly dismissive of Dennett as a philosopher proper, my dismissal wasn’t borne out of ignorance; and while, in venturing into theology and other fields of which he knows little or nothing, he does so formally as a philosopher, I would still say that he does so out of much the same mindset as the likes of Dawkins and Weinberg (to wit, that naturalistic science is the only proper ground of truth and expertise), and thus still is guilty of the same fundamental charge of presumption.
Grr . . . typos. I of course meant “born,” not “borne” . . .