Monday, March 1, 2010

Openmindedness Test

Andrew Brown asks:

Name three people, preferably contemporaries, whom you honestly believe are smarter, better educated, and more honest than you are, but who disagree with you about God. So atheists must name believers, and vice versa.


My first two choices are easy: Herb Gintis and Tyler Cowen. I had to think a bit for a third by I have a good choice: David Sloan Wilson.

They are objectively better educated. They all have PhD's but I am just a college-educated blogger. They are definitely smarter. How about honesty? I think Tyler scores very high. He freely admits that atheists do not take the argument from fine-tuning seriously enough (even though he ultimately rejects it) and admits that simulation argument is a problem for atheists who believe that they have a more common-sense understanding of the universe. See his bloggingheadz with Robert Wright here (the last three are the most relevant).

Herb Gintis used to be dogmatic, but now that he has shed his Marxism he is very openminded and centrist. He finds various arguments for the existence of God plausible, but AFAIK, does not ultimately accept them.

I have a soft spot for D.S. Wilson for two reasons. First, I never really understood multilevel selection until reading some of his work. Second, unlike many atheists who are evolutionary biologists, he thinks that Christianity has overall been a positive force for the development of Western Civilization (he thinks the New Athests are dogmatists).

One final point. There are some Christian philosophers who are frighteningly intelligent, like Alexander Pruss. Overall I think that many Christian philosophers have reached epistemic equality with the best secular philosophers. But it is a relatively small niche group. So I'm more forgiving of atheists who can't name three Christians than I am of Christians who can't name three atheists.

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