Clayton’s Emergings

In the aftermath of today’s debate with Dan Dennett, I find myself asking not “Who won?” but “What were we debating about? What was really at stake in this discussion?”

In one sense, it’s enough that it happened. I don’t know of any place on the web where you can see Dan in dialogue with a moderate, reflective, religious person. But that’s only step one. The harder question is how to interpret what happened.

Dennett supporters are already posting on the web to say what they thought it was about. One points out that I do not share the assumptions of most analytic philosophers, and hence fail to pass the test for analytic orthodoxy. Both in the debate and in Mind and Emergence (chap. 4), for example, I use the work of analytic philosophers in ways different from what they intended. But surely that isn’t what was at stake in today’s discussion. Other bloggers may question whether I made any errors in describing evolutionary theory; perhaps they’re arguing that, if I did, that proves that evolution and theism are incompatible. But, again, surely that was not the real topic of the debate.

John Cobb comments, “[Dennett’s] view that worldviews have no practical importance expresses a provincialism that is really inexcusable. Surely comparative cultural studies are not wholly absent from the contemporary university.” That comment comes closer.

What was at stake today was not whether theism and atheism are finally identical; surely that much is beyond dispute. Instead, what most divided Dennett and me was the question whether in the end worldviews make any difference. Dan is prepared to call religion “benign” — which means: not outright malignant — when it supports values that he endorses. (His friend Richard Dawkins would not give as much ground.) Beyond that, however, religion is of little interest to him. For religious believers like me, by contrast, religious belief is never reducible to the moral convictions it supports or the behaviors it produces. It functions as a entire world- and life-view, permeating all that I do, affecting how I see, interpret, and evaluate everything I encounter. It’s that truth that I sought to communicate this afternoon.

Dan Dennett and I will probably never agree on whether it’s probable that God exists. But I hope that those who view today’s debate online will ask themselves why it matters that we were defending different understandings of what ultimately exists. If we can’t even agree on the significant difference between the two speakers, and how that difference is revealed in our different ways of approaching a whole host of philosophical questions, we won’t begin to be able to evaluate the competing arguments for our different positions.

Watch the debate online here.

So it’s official: Dan Dennett has agreed to do a debate when he’s at Claremont this coming Tuesday, February 16, from 2-3pm. It will take place in Albrecht Auditorium, at 10th St. and Dartmouth Ave. on the campus of Claremont Graduate University. Should be a good audience…

I saw a student flyer that began “Okay, so a New Atheist and a Christian Theologian walk into a bar…”

This will be an open-ended conversation. The flyer says simply “Science, Philosophy, Theism.” Here’s a face-to-face meeting of a Christian philosopher and theologian, one who endorses evolution and works extensively on science-religion isses, with the leading philosopher among the New Atheists — one who proudly describes himself as “one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.” We’ll take on the question: is there any real (argumentative) common ground between our two positions?

What do you think will happen? Will we really connect as philosophers? Will we even be able to formulate arguments that the other can respond to? Or will it just be two ships passing in the night, shooting rhetorical salvos in each other’s direction as they steam in their different directions? In his post on Richard Dawkins’ website, Dan responded to my talk on theology and evolution at the Cambridge Darwin Festival by simply concluding, “in short Clayton is an atheist who won’t admit it.” When we meet this week in Claremont, will we get any further in exploring forms of theism that are not anti-philosophical and anti-scientific?

If all goes well, we will be able to post the videotape of the meeting, so that you can decide for yourself what actually happened … and what is its significance. Place your bets in advance, though: what do you expect?

– Philip

Dan Dennett is disappointed that theists in general, and theologians in particular, don’t take science seriously. They are more interested in immunization strategies. They retreat into faith assertions, deny (or don’t understand) evolution, and show little interest in philosophical arguments.  Presumably Dan will be making some of these claims when he speaks at Scripps, one of the Claremont Colleges, on February 16^th.

In the spirit of empirical feedback, it would be great to put some of these claims to the test. So I suggest that Dan join me in a brief, one-hour debate on some of these themes while he’s here on campus. Albrecht Auditorium is available, and Claremont Graduate University is ready to make special arrangements for live online streaming of the discussion, so that it can be available to everyone.

There’s a little history behind this call, which you can find here and here. When we were both at the big Darwin Festival at the University of Cambridge in early July 2009, Dan came to listen to my paper on Darwin and theology. Afterwards he publicly expressed his disappointment that such a topic would be on the agenda at the Darwin Fest. Later in the same session I invited Dan to enter into a public discussion with me on some of the broader philosophical and theological questions raised by biology today, even listing some of the topics where (in my view) productive discussion is possible. Dan chose not to enter into that debate. But he did post a blog on Richard Dawkins’ website a few days later, complaining about the session and claiming that “neither speaker had anything to offer.”

Since the debate that Dan calls for is one that I’m eager to join him in, shouldn’t we take a few minutes when he’s on campus here in Claremont to let it happen?

To make this invitation to dialogue more warm and friendly, Iet me close with a personal invitation to Dan: