Category Archives: Other problems

Problems other than specific logical fallacies–poor explanations, things that are false, and so forth.

Inexplicable, Thomas Friedman

Go suck a lemon

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Perhaps by way of an apology, Tom Friedman writes:

Is the surge in Iraq working? That is the question that Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker will answer for us next month. I, alas, am not interested in their opinions.

It is not because I don�t hold both men in very high regard. I do. But I�m still not interested in their opinions. I�m only interested in yours. Yes, you � the person reading this column. You know more than you think.

You see, I have a simple view about both Arab-Israeli peace-making and Iraqi surge-making, and it goes like this: Any Arab-Israeli peace overture that requires a Middle East expert to explain to you is not worth considering. It�s going nowhere.

Here (again) is something even you–the people who read Tom Friedman's column–can understand:

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"

You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?

Well, Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

Now that makes perfect sense. I don't need a Middle East expert to explain that to me. (h/t atrios for the transcript).

Academics, Straw Man, Things that are false

Culpa istorum

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**Quick update below I've noticed several mea-culpae about Iraq floating around lately. We talked about one of them (Ignatieff) the other day. Being wrong about such a thing as monumental as war ought probably to carry serious consequences for the credibility of the person who was wrong. In light of that obvious but completely ignored imperative, it's entertaining to watch the ones who were wrong explain themselves:

We might test judgment by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

So Ignatieff was wrong, but some of those who were right were right for the wrong reasons (so he claims). We might then say that they're wrong too. Because after all it's just as bad to have a true belief which is unjustified as it is to have a unjustified false belief (like Ignatieff had). Any mature person can see that Ignatieff has picked on the college socialist again–a slogan chanting and capitalistically challenged representative of the anti war left. Everyone ought to know by this point–especially a former Harvard Professor of political science–that such a lefty exists in Rush Limbaugh's mind. Pointing out that someone might have had stupid reasons for being right doesn't have anything to do with your stupid reasons for being wrong. Now to his stupid reasons:

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq's fissured sectarian history. What they didn�t do was take wishes for reality. They didn't suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn't suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn't suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn't believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.

First off, I think a good number had some knowledge of Iraq's "fissured sectarian history." It was no secret to experts in Middle East history. But the more perplexing thing (aside from its self-serving comparisons) about this mea culpa is that it puts the entire matter in terms of gambling about an uncertain future–where no one could possibly predict the outcome. And this is just the point that Ignatieff and others fail to get. A person with even a casual knowledge of the history of the region (say the recent war between Iraq and Iran) could have predicted the outcome of this war with a good deal of precision. It's not a question, as Ignatieff frames it, of being unduly critical of the motives of the administration (which one always should be in any case), it's rather a more straightforward matter of good judgment. And so this underscores the shallowness of Ignatieff's thinking about matters of life and death (which is what it was to think about invading Iraq in case that wasn't obvious). The experts he trusts don't have any knowledge of the very public and relevant facts about the history of Iraq (and the entire region). So it's not only a case of taking wishes for reality. It's simpler than that.

**Update: Here's Crooked Timber, always a worthwhile read. I'd be interested in seeing more apologiae pro errore meo if anyone knows where to find them.

Academics, Things that are false

Errare

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Books ought to be written about how otherwise smart looking people got Iraq wrong. But not by them. Too many people who were wrong about Iraq have only profited from it. Some of them (Bill Kristol, O’Hanlon and Pollack, the Kagans, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Republicans) continue in their error; others have had a change of heart, but have not had their credibility questioned (Friedman, Beinart, Yglesias, Josh Marshall, Ivo Daadler). Many of them were not just factually wrong, but morally wrong to have been so absolutely callous and shallow with the awful and uncontrollable violence of war.

Another person who got the war wrong (but who has since come to repent) is Michael Ignatieff (formerly of Harvard University). In a New York Times Sunday magazine article he explains why he got it wrong. One reason has to do with academia:

>The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

>Having left an academic post at Harvard in 2005 and returned home to Canada to enter political life, I keep revisiting the Iraq debacle, trying to understand exactly how the judgments I now have to make in the political arena need to improve on the ones I used to offer from the sidelines. I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes.

>The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

Funny thing about that “condemnation”: it hasn’t convinced Ignatieff or any of the commentators who got it wrong to exclude themselves from continuing to comment. Ignatieff doesn’t even think it excludes him from running for office (in Canada). It’s a big deal to get something like that wrong (I think at least). For many (even or especially on the left), getting it wrong has been a kind ticket for pundit advancement.

That’s probably because of what Berlin said. But Berlin would probably be better understood to be talking about the endless yapfest of American punditry. For apparently it doesn’t matter whether what anyone says is true. So long as its interesting.

Op-Eds and other opinions, Things that are false

Count them in

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This would be true, perhaps, if you, as so many do, leave Iraqis out of your calculation:

>More young men are killed each day on the streets of America than on the worst days of carnage and loss in Iraq. There is a war at home raging every day, filling our trauma centers with so many wounded children that it sometimes makes Baghdad seem like a quiet city in Iowa.

Remember, the Iraqis are people too.

Update**

Every day in Philadelphia:

>BAGHDAD, Aug 5 (Reuters) – Iraqi police said on Sunday they had found 60 decomposed bodies dumped in thick grass in Baquba, north of Baghdad.

>There was no indication of how the 60 people had been killed, police said. Baquba is the capital of volatile Diyala province, where thousands of extra U.S. and Iraqi soldiers have been sent to stem growing violence.

Academics, General discussion, Plain Bad Arguments

Partisans

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One almost never sees any op-ed of any kind anywhere respond to criticism. For some reason unknown to me, the Post’s Outlook section features another article by Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

In the first article, she argued that partisanship is separating our nation into separate parties. Here are the two parties: on the one hand, you have the virulent Rovians of the Bush administration–dedicated to party at almost any cost–on the other you have some bloggers, some guy who wrote an op-ed, and maybe some think-tankers. These people–these bloggers (and some anonymous commenters nutpicked from bloggers’ sites) on the left are the proper partisan complement to Bolton, Rove and Cheney. Notice a problem anyone? Well. Many did. And so they criticized her for such a silly comparison. It should be government figure versus government figure (or if not available, then national party leader). But it’s Dick Cheney versus op-ed guy.

Aside from that, Slaughter advances the idea that people are devoted to “the characteristic of being devoted to a view” rather than to a view. It might be more proper to say that people hold views in a more entrenched fashion–they’re less willing to compromise and so forth, because their views have grown so incompatible. That way the problem remains where it should be, with the content of peoples’ views (not with the way they hold them). Bipartisanship, for its own sake, is a silly goal. And even Slaughter knows this:

>I was not condemning passionate criticism of the Bush administration on issues like supporting torture, the conduct of the war in Iraq, or illegal wiretapping. On the contrary, I share it. In my new book, “The Idea That Is America,” I call for a critical patriotism that is honest about our failings and insists on holding our government and ourselves to the values we proclaim as a nation. If we are going to pledge allegiance to “liberty and justice for all,” it is incumbent on all of us to stand up and denounce what is currently being done in our name at Guantanamo and at various secret CIA prisons.

She’s “partisan” about these things. But that’s what people are partisan about–CIA prisons, preemptive war, and so forth:

>This reaction should not be partisan. It should be, and is beginning to be, the reaction of decent people across the political spectrum who are standing up not for their party but for their country.

After all, one party thinks those things–preemptive war, and so on–are good things. That’s their party’s position. Objecting to it–as Slaughter does–is bound to be “partisan.”

category mistake, Kathleen Parker, Things that are false

Skepticism

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**Revised 10:03 AM

People often confuse a kind of knee-jerk skepticism for “critical thinking.” But it’s one thing to be cautious about facts incongruent with other well known facts, it’s another just to disbelieve all facts of a certain type (those that come out of the mouths, of, I don’t know, the liberal media). It’s yet another thing to reject those “questionable” facts a priori–that is, on purely logical grounds.

So when the New Republic ran a series of blog posts by a certain “Scott Thomas” from Iraq, many–mostly right wing bloggers and such–disbelieved them, a priori. These blog posts told of American soldiers defacing corpses, killing animals, (and treating Iraqis in a generally shameful manner). Scott Thomas (whose real name is, get this, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp), writes (courtesy of Hullabaloo):

>I saw her nearly every time I went to dinner in the chow hall at my base in Iraq. She wore an unrecognizable tan uniform, so I couldn’t really tell whether she was a soldier or a civilian contractor. The thing that stood out about her, though, wasn’t her strange uniform but the fact that nearly half her face was severely scarred. Or, rather, it had more or less melted, along with all the hair on that side of her head. She was always alone, and I never saw her talk to anyone. Members of my platoon had seen her before but had never really acknowledged her. Then, on one especially crowded day in the chow hall, she sat down next to us.

>We were already halfway through our meals when she arrived. After a minute or two of eating in silence, one of my friends stabbed his spoon violently into his pile of mashed potatoes and left it there.
“Man, I can’t eat like this,” he said.
“Like what?” I said. “Chow hall food getting to you?”
“No–with that fucking freak behind us!” he exclaimed, loud enough for not only her to hear us, but everyone at the surrounding tables. I looked over at the woman, and she was intently staring into each forkful of food before it entered her half-melted mouth.
“Are you kidding? I think she’s fucking hot!” I blurted out.
“What?” said my friend, half-smiling.
“Yeah man,” I continued. “I love chicks that have been intimate–with IEDs. It really turns me on–melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses … .”
“You’re crazy, man!” my friend said, doubling over with laughter. I took it as my cue to continue.
“In fact, I was thinking of getting some girls together and doing a photo shoot. Maybe for a calendar? IED Babes.’ We could have them pose in thongs and bikinis on top of the hoods of their blown-up vehicles.”
My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing. The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall, her half-finished tray of food nearly falling to the ground.

And so on. It gets far worse. Kathleen Parker, conservative pundit, thinks these stories are dubious:

>The conservative Weekly Standard began questioning the reports last week. Bloggers have joined in challenging the anecdotes, as have military personnel who have served in Iraq and, in some cases, have eaten in the same chow hall mentioned.

>Thomas’ version of events in Iraq is looking less and less credible and smacks of the “occult hand.” The occult hand was an inside joke several years ago among a group of journalists who conspired to see how often they could slip the phrase — “It was as if an occult hand had …” — into their copy. This went on for years to the great merriment of a few in the know.

>Looking back, it’s hard to imagine how a phrase as purple as an occult hand could have enjoyed such long play within the tribe of professional skeptics known as journalists. Similarly, one wonders how Thomas’ reports have appeared in the magazine without his editors saying, “Hey, wait just a minute.”

>The New Republic editors say they’re investigating the reports, but refuse to reveal the author’s identity. There’s always a chance, of course, that these stories have some truth to them.

There’s a chance they’re completely true, she ought to say. Parker’s skepticism is based on the authority of conservative bloggers and the Weekly Standard–two sources about which one would have justifiable skepticism. The more basic problem regards the nature of Scott Thomas’s claims.

They are pretty straightforward factual claims. That is to say, they are claims that events x took place at time y. They’re true if they happened, false if they didn’t. So questions regarding their veracity ought to regard whether the author is (a) a real person; (b) really in Iraq in the Army; and (c) really witnessed those events. The New Republic can vouch for all three. And it did. Why not take their word for it–they supported the invasion of Iraq.

Wondering about the types of claims being made, in isolation from the basic conditions of their truth (without waiting for confirmation from the New Republic), is a pretty silly kind of skepticism. It’s silly not only because it turned out to be wrong, but because it was wrong for the most obvious of reasons–the stories turned out to be true. Of course even Parker ought to know this. She continues:

>Stranger, and far worse, things have happened in war. But people who have served in Iraq have raised enough questions about these particular anecdotes that one is justified in questioning whether they are true.

>As just one example, it is unlikely that a Bradley would be driven through concrete barriers just for fun, according an e-mail from a member of the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, made up of officers who are lawyers providing legal services to soldiers. He explained that people aren’t alone out there. Other vehicles, non-commissioned officers and officers would be around and Iraqis would have made a claim for repairs, resulting in an investigation.

>In other words, either plenty of people would know about it — or it didn’t happen.

Again, Parker’s skepticism is of the very general variety–she considers emails from people who weren’t there as sufficient countervailing evidence. Effective general skepticism might include such claims as the Bradley vehicle cannot do the actions described or there were no soldiers at the place described. In the absence of such evidence (and in light of the fact that soldiers–US soldiers even–have been known to do some pretty awful things in war (and get away with it), there is every reason to suspect that such tales could be true (unless they’re impossible). Remember Abu Ghraib anyone? This doesn’t mean one shouldn’t be skeptical. One should. But one ought to be skeptical regarding pseudonymous claims because they’re pseudonymous, not because they don’t “seem plausible” (even though, of course, they are).

The context of all of this, of course, is Parker’s insistence that people who believe things other than she does are insufficiently skeptical:

>It may be that The New Republic editors and others who believed Thomas’ journal entries without skepticism are infected with “Nifong Syndrome” — the mind virus that causes otherwise intelligent people to embrace likely falsehoods because they validate a preconceived belief.

>Mike Nifong, the North Carolina prosecutor in the alleged Duke University lacrosse team rape case, was able to convince a credulous community of residents, academics and especially journalists that the three falsely accused white men had raped a black stripper despite compelling evidence to the contrary.

>Why? Because the lies supported their own truths. In the case of Duke, that “truth” was that privileged white athletes are racist pigs who of course would rape a black woman given half a chance and a bottle o’ beer.

>In the case of Scott Thomas, the “truth” that American soldiers are woman-hating, dog-killing, grave-robbing monsters confirms what many among the anti-war left believe about the military, despite their protestations that they “support the troops.”

>We tend to believe what we want to believe, in other words.

I think she means “you” (she obviously doesn’t believe such pleasing tales). But then again, maybe she does.

Things that are false, Unqualified Authority

Real customers, not actors

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Sometimes it’s important to point out things that are false. Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon portray themselves as “vocal critics” of the administration on Iraq. As a result, their credibility on Iraq increases–if the “vocal critics” say the surge is going well, then it must be. Well, Glenn Greenwald does everyone a favor and points out just how false the “vocal critic” or “critic” appellation is for O’Hanlon (in particular).

The important thing about Greenwald’s work, of course, is that it undermines the premise of Pollack and O’Hanlon’s argument. They have just returned from Iraq, stuffed with anecdotes about energized troop morale for the brilliant leadership of General Petraeus:

>Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Having established their credible skepticism, they launch into an anecdotal and impressionistic assessment of events on the ground:

>After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Really–“the moral of our troops” is second only to the heat?

>Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

>Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.

>In Ramadi, for example, we talked with an outstanding Marine captain whose company was living in harmony in a complex with a (largely Sunni) Iraqi police company and a (largely Shiite) Iraqi Army unit. He and his men had built an Arab-style living room, where he met with the local Sunni sheiks — all formerly allies of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups — who were now competing to secure his friendship.

In Baghdad’s Ghazaliya neighborhood, which has seen some of the worst sectarian combat, we walked a street slowly coming back to life with stores and shoppers. The Sunni residents were unhappy with the nearby police checkpoint, where Shiite officers reportedly abused them, but they seemed genuinely happy with the American soldiers and a mostly Kurdish Iraqi Army company patrolling the street. The local Sunni militia even had agreed to confine itself to its compound once the Americans and Iraqi units arrived.

And so on. Juan Cole pointed out the hollowness of the “shopping evidence”: people shop even in wartime. But the rest of the piece continues in the same vein: anecdotal observations of an optimism reminiscent of administration press releases whose credible authority rests entirely on the deeply misleading (or just plain false) claim of skepticism at the beginning of the piece.

Argument Analysis, Bad Explanations, David Brooks

Or Tolstoy is right

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David Brooks writes:

>Many will doubt this, but Bush is a smart and compelling presence in person, and only the whispering voice of Leo Tolstoy holds one back.

>Tolstoy had a very different theory of history. Tolstoy believed great leaders are puffed-up popinjays. They think their public decisions shape history, but really it is the everyday experiences of millions of people which organically and chaotically shape the destiny of nations — from the bottom up.

>According to this view, societies are infinitely complex. They can’t be understood or directed by a group of politicians in the White House or the Green Zone. Societies move and breathe on their own, through the jostling of mentalities and habits. Politics is a thin crust on the surface of culture. Political leaders can only play a tiny role in transforming a people, especially when the integral fabric of society has dissolved.

>If Bush’s theory of history is correct, the right security plan can lead to safety, the right political compromises to stability. But if Tolstoy is right, then the future of Iraq is beyond the reach of global summits, political benchmarks and the understanding of any chief executive.

Again, not so much a false dichotomy as false dichotomizing: considering only two very different possibilities as exhaustive without the further claim that one is evidently false or ridiculous.

Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea

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A few weeks ago the Chicago Tribune ran a story entitled, “What is a Hate Crime?” The story was so bad the public editor condemned it and expressed bafflement that such an experienced reporter could have written it. Aside from the fact that the story didn’t bother to address the legal meaning of the term hate crime, it was premised on the complaints of a Charlie Daniels (yes, that one), a couple of right wing bloggers (known for hyping the false), and various white supremacist groups. They complained that a horrific abduction and murder in the Nashville, Tennessee area should qualify as a hate crime because it was committed by people of a different race from the victim. The story furthered their complaint, pointing out statistics on crimes where the victim is of a different race than the perpetrator.

Ignoring the objections of the public editor, today the Tribune posts an unsigned editorial about the upcoming vote on hate crimes legislation. They write:

>The Tribune carried an interesting story recently about a particularly heinous double murder in Knoxville, Tenn. The two young victims, who were kidnapped, raped and killed, were white. The three men and a woman who stand charged with the crime are black.

>The story posed some difficult questions about how this country deals with crimes that have a racial overtone — when someone of one race kills someone of another race. And it asked the question: What is a hate crime?

>The definitions in federal law and various state laws differ, but generally a hate crime is considered to be any crime that is motivated by bias based on race, religion or other factors. Hate crime laws permit tougher punishment based on the motivation and broader social impact of the offense.

>So did the Knoxville case qualify? “There is absolutely no proof of a hate crime,” said John Gill, a special counsel to the Knox County prosecutor. “It was a terrible crime, a horrendous crime, but race was not a motive.”

>Yet Mary Newsom, the mother of one of the victims, told a Tribune reporter: “If this wasn’t a hate crime, then I don’t know how you would define a hate crime.”

However horrible the criminal act, its horror does not make it a hate crime–pointing that out, as the Tribune ought to know from reading their own public editor (or their mail for that matter) is irrelevant. In addition to this, the editorial makes the two common objections to hate crime legislation–both of them silly in my estimation.

The first, hate crimes legislation is unnecessary:

>But why expand the use of a federal hate crime law?

>Not only are crimes of violence already punishable under state laws, most states also have their own hate crimes statutes. The vast majority of street crime has always been handled by state and local authorities, and nothing suggests they are abdicating that responsibility. It’s telling that only a tiny percentage of existing hate crimes leads to federal indictments.

>The Senate version is called “The Matthew Shepard Act,” after a gay man beaten to death in 1998 in Wyoming. But that case fails to prove the need for an expanded law. His two assailants were not charged with a hate crime, since the state had no such law. They were, however, convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

The rarity of the crime has nothing to do with whether or not it should be illegal. Aside from this, the Matthew Shepard case is not exemplary. Not all hate crimes are murders, so sentencing in those cases might not be adequate (in that they wouldn’t involve maximum penalties).

The second objection rests on a sophomoric skepticism about judging mental state:

>Hate crime laws may be justified when the crime has a broad societal impact. A brick through the window of the first black family on a block is more than a prank. But hate crime laws raise concerns when they punish criminals differently not because of what they do, but because of what they think. In the view of Northwestern University law professor Martin Redish, it’s the equivalent of tacking on extra punishment if a crime is meant to promote the cause of communism. Beat a man because he looks rich, or because he’s got a Republican bumper sticker on his car, and there’s no hate crime. Beat him because you think he’s Jewish, or Cuban, or (under this bill) gay, and there is.

This is a bit of a twist on the old argument. But it’s worth pointing out that people get punished for what they think all of the time. It’s almost as if the “guilty mental state,” the mens rea, were the cornerstone of criminal law. So pointing out that you’re punishing someone for what they think doesn’t amount to much. Besides, juries are asked to make all sorts of judgments about knowledge, intent, volition, character, honesty, depravity and much much more (especially when it comes to sentencing).

The twist in this argument, however, consists in its muddying the waters about which groups qualify for protection from hatred–the rich aren’t included, but neither are Civil War reenactors, NASCAR fans, or Trekkies. Perhaps they could petition the government for inclusion.

***Vacation for a week starting tomorrow. Enjoy the archives.

category mistake, Equivocation, Stanley Fish

They’re bound to mess up

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In his second commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge, Boethius argues that those who ignore the science of disputation are going to make mistakes (Patrologia Latina 64, 73A). He should have also pointed out that those ignorant of scientific disputations will likewise never learn the "incorrupt truth of reality." I think Stanley Fish falls somewhere in the middle: he's both ignorant of logic and science. He writes:

Dawkins voices distress at an imagined opponent who 'can't see' the evidence or 'refuses to look at it because it contradicts his holy book,' but he has his own holy book of whose truth he has been persuaded, and it is within its light that he proceeds and looks forward in hope (his word) to a future stage of enlightenment he does not now experience but of which he is fully confident. Both in the vocabulary they share 'hope,' 'belief,' 'undoubtedly,' 'there will come a time' and the reasoning they engage in, Harris and Dawkins perfectly exemplify the definition of faith found in Hebrews 11, 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.'

The evidence for the theory of evolution, my science oriented friends tell me, is vast and testable. On the basis of this vast and testable theory, Dawkins makes judgments (perhaps erroneous ones–remember children, this is science, people are bound to make mistakes, that's the point) about things and events that fall within the purview of the theory, such as the behavior of biological creatures–i.e., living things, like human beings. He claims that as we learn more about the brain–that thing with which we think, and whose wisdom is impaired with chemical substances found in booze–we will probably come to account for more and more human behavior. Confidence or rather faith in such progress is one reason why the study of neurology continues to be funded. One problem with Fish's claim is that he sophistically equivocates on the words "believe," "hope," and so forth. The fact that believers and science types both "believe," "hope" and "have faith" in other words, tells you nothing about what they believe and how they believe, but a lot about the multivalent nature of words. All cognizant beings stand in some kind of relation to the objects of their judgments–but that doesn't mean the objects of these judgments are all the same.