Theologian John Haught refuses to release video of science/religion debate

[Silent3]

From Jerry Coyne's blog, http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/theologian-john-haught-refuses-to-release-video-of-our-debate/:

On October 12 at the University of Kentucky, I debated Catholic theologian John Haught from Georgetown University on the topic of “Are science and religion compatible?” It was a lively debate, and I believe I got the better of the man (see my post-debate report here). Haught didn’t seem to have prepared for the debate, merely rolling out his tired old trope of a “layered” universe, with the layer of God and Jesus underlying the reality of the cosmos, life, and evolution...

The debate, including half an hour of audience questions, was videotaped. Both John and I had given our permission in advance for the taping. I looked forward to the release of the tape because, of course, I wanted a wider audience for my views than just the people in the audience in Lexington...

Well, you’re not going to see that tape—ever. After agreeing to be taped, Haught decided that he didn’t want the video released.

This, of course, makes me want to see the video all the more.

Haught is not some fundamentalist wacko. In fact, in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, he testified for the prosecution against the teaching of "Intelligent Design" in public schools. It seems that Haught is one of those people who profess an erudite, intellectualized version of religion, blissfully unaware or unconcerned with how far removed their own views are from the common practice of religion.

I don't feel motivated enough at this point to seek out any of Haught's books to read them (Coyne says about the debate, "I prepared pretty thoroughly, reading half a dozen of Haught’s books (you need read only one: they’re all the same)..."), but I strongly suspect that he'd be a favorite of some of our religious intellectuals here in R/T, with the kind of "faith" that lives in some vacillating space somewhere between, "You can't prove I'm wrong!" and nearly admitting with a wink and a nod that their beliefs are little more a story they like to inhabit as a matter of personal taste to lend some sort of mythological structure to their lives.

[trotsky]

1. Why doesn't Haught support the free flow of information?

Rec'd to zero - evidently at least one person on DU shares Haught's position.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Keep up - Haught relents

The good news is that John Haught has apparently relented, or so I think. He wrote me an email yesterday saying he would okay the release of the video if I posted his three-page “explanation” on this site. He also asked me to apologize publicly for distorting the facts (he claimed that I said he’d given his permission to post the debate, a claim that’s completely false), for bringing down opprobrium on The University of Kentucky and Dr. Robert Rabel, and for the damage that my approach has done to the notion of free and open debate.

Needless to say, I won’t apologize for those things. I stated the facts accurately, and if those facts angered people and made them want to do something about this censorship, then that’s all well and good. Although I don’t consider myself responsible for any vitriol associated with those attacks, I do regret whatever intemperate behavior resulted from my post, and ask readers, for the sake of civility, to stick to the issue at hand: the censorship of a video, the reasons for such censorship, and the issue of science versus faith.

Nor will I give Haught a long post to “explain” himself. That is not my habit, since this website belongs to me. But I do think it’s fair to allow him to explain his actions, which, he claims, were not motivated by cowardice or by having “lost” the debate. Haught has in fact put his explanation in a long comment on the previous thread, which you can find here (it’s comment #122 for those with cellphones). It seems to be involved with my attack on Catholicism.

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/under-pressure-from-blogosphere-haught-explains-and-relents/

[trotsky]

3. So in the end, Haught is just a tone troll.

"I can't put up any kind of reasonable response to the points you make, so I'm going to tsk-tsk you for the way you expressed them, and that will hopefully cause everyone to forget I got my ass handed to me."

[struggle4progress]

4. Since this comes from the website Coyne started for his book "Why Evolution is True," perhaps

it is naturally regarded as having a publicist agenda, that is, as intended simply to promote the book

Right off, I suppose I should say that I have not read that book of Coyne's -- and probably never will, the major reason being that I am already persuaded that evolutionary theory is "true": it seems to me something of a golden key for biological understanding, providing an extraordinarily successful systematic scheme for unifying an enormous range of biological observations from the biochemical to the paleontological. On the other hand, though it is far outside of my expertise, I might sometime look through his book on Speciation since the topic is interesting and important, and since I might expect detailed scientific ideas there

Next, I'll say that if I had ever heard of Haught, I had forgotten it -- so I had to look him up to try to learn about his views. It seems to me Haught understands completely why some people think "the Darwinian understanding of evolution has made the idea of God completely superfluous, and hence unbelievable" (as discussed in his pdf conference prospectus). Haught's notion is that

... The conversation between science and religion has allowed us to be able to formulate more clearly than before just what science is all about, and just what theology is all about. Before we did that—for example, before Galileo—“truth” was often a homogeneous mixture of common sense, theology and church authority, and natural philosophy; it was a smudge. But after the conversation between science and religion got going, especially after Galileo, what happened eventually was that we got to see more clearly what science is about and what kind of information it gives us, what it leaves out, and so forth. And the same with theology. We came to realize, for example, that theology can no longer moonlight by giving us scientific information. One of the most important developments in modern religious history—people tend to forget about this—was expressed by a rather conservative Pope, Leo XIII. In his 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus he instructed Catholics not to look for scientific information in the Scriptures. The biblical scholar Raymond Brown once commented that this simple instruction spared several generations of Catholics some of the anguish that non-Catholics have experienced in trying to reconcile Genesis with modern science. Of course, Galileo himself had already said virtually the same thing ...
print interview

You can get a more extensive look at Haught's pov from this video interview

Based on this, and on reading Coyne's comments in the OP, I would guess: that the points of dispute between Coyne and Haught are metaphysical, rather than scientific; that Haught correctly understands that such metaphysical disputes are outside the realm of science and cannot play any role in science; and that Coyne does not really understand much of what Haught says, so is reduced to accusing Haught of intellectual dishonesty. Of course, I do not think Coyne would be obliged to agree with Haught, if he actually understood what Haught was saying -- I just think there's no evidence Coyne understood what was being said

[Jim__]

5. Thanks for the link to that video.

After watching that, I'm not sure what he and Coyne would have to debate. He doesn't appear to have any quarrel with contemporary science.

[Silent3]

7. I'd suspect their quarrel involves the "other ways of knowing"...

...or "other kinds of truth" stuff that people like Haught are fond of, with Coyne (if I may for a moment assume, not yet being able to see the actual debate, that Coyne would have a roughly similar opinion as my own) not being so willing to accommodate the idea that religion represents any sort of complementary system of truth or knowledge, and that even when religion tries to steer clear of direct confrontation with scientific knowledge (by, for instance, acknowledging evolution as a fact, but hinting at divine intervention to steer the course of evolution, or ascribing to a divine hand the creation of the type of universe in which evolution can occur) it only does so by using making poor excuses for not being able to meet scientific standards of evidence, or by muddying and watering down the meanings of words like "knowledge" and "truth" to achieve its goals.

Then there's also the matter that typical religious believers aren't amateur theologians, and what religion means to them is a barely considered epistemological mess of culturally inherited half-baked ideas which doesn't square with science at all, even if people like Haught think their dizzying apologetics take them above the fray to some higher ground of enlightenment.

[struggle4progress]

8. I think that's correct: Haught has no quarrel with contemporary science.

Haught's quarrel, so far as I can make it out, is with the idea that we can derive overarching metaphysical conclusions from the practice of science

I consider that substantially correct and (to illustrate by example) would imagine a person who at one time was interested in boron hydride chemistry and at another time was interested in the status of Cantor's continuum hypothesis: the chemistry of the boron hydrides is deduced from experimental work, rather than from a sequence of definitions and theorems, whereas the continuum hypothesis is explored without experimental work, using only definitions and theorems; it means one thing to say "boron hydrides exist" and to discuss their properties; it means something completely different to say "uncountable cardinals exist" and to discuss their properties; a mathematician might be forgiven for lack of interest in boron hydrides but should not be complimented for denying their "existence" (even though hardly anyone encounters boron hydrides in daily life), and similarly a chemist might be forgiven for lack of interest in uncountable cardinals but should not be complimented for denying their "existence" (even though hardly anyone encounters uncountable cardinals in daily life). A person, sometimes interested in boron hydride chemistry and other times in the status of Cantor's continuum hypothesis, would presumably think that different modes of reasoning might be useful in different ways, even if they might appear to involve different metaphysical stances -- from which I conclude there is no good advantage in becoming a metaphysical ideologue

[trotsky]

6. Why then Haught should have been happy to release the video with no prodding whatsoever.

I mean, if their disagreement was merely "metaphysical," and Coyne was simply too stupid to understand what Haught was saying (as you imply), then why the reluctance to release the video?

[struggle4progress]

9. Haught seems to think Coyne misrepresents Haught's views, and Coyne's post

seems to support that:

From the link in the OP: "... I accused him at dinner of adducing a God-of-the-gaps argument ..."

But I have already quoted Haught above as saying "... theology can no longer moonlight by giving us scientific information ..." and in the video I linked he explicitly says he does not believe in a God-of-the-gaps

The possibility, that Coyne simply misunderstands Haught, simply does not appear to enter Coyne's mind; instead, Coyne says: "... I think he was being intellectually disingenuous ..."

Haught seems to have made a substantial effort over the years to explain his own thinking, and Coyne nevertheless attributes to Haught views that Haught explicitly disavows, then says he does not understand Haught's responses -- and so concludes Haught is a liar. Why should Haught cooperate with that?

[trotsky]

11. So why didn't Haught want to release the video?

You continue to attack and smear Coyne, but you won't address the central issue here.

[struggle4progress]

13. John Haught's Open Letter to Jerry Coyne

pdf: http://www.uky.edu/OtherOrgs/GainesCenter/Letter%20To%20Jerry%20Coyne.pdf
post on Coyne's blog: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/theologian-john-haught-refuses-to-release-video-of-our-debate/#comment-149084

[trotsky]

14. Yes, we've reviewed that.

So why didn't Haught want to release the video?

[Boojatta]

10. You made a number of interesting comments in the OP.

I'd like to begin with just this one comment:

It seems that Haught is one of those people who profess an erudite, intellectualized version of religion, blissfully unaware or unconcerned with how far removed their own views are from the common practice of religion.

In your opinion, in an ideal world, would people who profess an erudite, intellectualized version of religion be trying to attract large numbers of followers to their views and their way of practicing religion?

[Silent3]

12. Here's the Coyne/Haught religion/science debate video

I've put it in it's own thread, so please reply there.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=214x313910

I haven't watched in myself yet. It will be interesting to see how much my speculations about the debate and Haught hold up.