BD: This reminds me a bit of the old joke [which as a philosophy major I feel entitled to recount] that in the math department, all you need is a piece of paper, a pencil, and a trash can. And in the philosophy department, you don't need the trash can. What are your thoughts on this in general?
RC: Well, on academic philosophy in general I have many biting criticisms, but nothing directly pertinent to your line of inquiry.
In academia, philosophy is almost dead. What passes for philosophy now is little more than a fancy system of games and puzzles. Even the few exceptions (Singer, Nussbaum, Haack) are mostly divorced from the original goal of philosophy, which was to bring a coherent worldview to the common man, based on facts and reason, that would tell us how to better live our lives and cope with the world as-it-is. But that requires building and defending systems of thought, not arguing isolated specialized problems in isolated specialized fields; it requires figuring out what actually counts as progress and then rolling up their collective sleeves and working on that progress, not just pontificating willy nilly and turning philosophy books and journals into what the rest of us call history of philosophy; and so on. There are no Humes or Ayers or Aristotles or even Ciceros or Senecas anymore. Singer, for example, has carved out a great reputation in ethics, but is rather feeble on metaphysics or epistemology and seems unconcerned to fully inform and build his ethics from a coherent system of all three. The idea of a coherent worldview, every part as well thought out as the rest, has become an alien concept. Philosophy as it was, is no more. And as far as most people are concerned, what philosophy is now, is all but useless to anyone, and even what's useful, is so dense and jargonized as to be unintelligible. That's why decreasing numbers even bother studying it. I wrote my book Sense and Goodness without God specifically in an effort to reverse that trend and get philosophy back on track doing what it's supposed to be doing. But professional philosophers just don't seem interested.
BD: Do you think that focusing on technique rather than history in philosophical training will help us to avoid drudging up these old arguments, or that without teaching the history we will be doomed to repeat the same mistakes endlessly?
RC: History of philosophy can save people time, but only if you actually use it that way. Yes, by learning the blind alleys, you can avoid them yourself. But this has a pernicious tendency in two unfortunate directions. On the one hand, many philosophers dismiss new ideas by immediately labeling them as something that was already refuted even when in fact the new ideas are relevantly different. I have a hell of a time trying to get philosophers to understand that I am both a mathematical realist and a mathematical nominalist, and not a mathematical Platonist in any sense of the term--they can't fathom the synthesis, because all they hear are the past-and-dead categories "mathematical realist," "mathematical nominalist," "mathematical Platonist" and they can't get their minds out of the ruts of the way these things were characterized and debated in the past. History of philosophy has made them worse philosophers, not better ones. On the other hand, many philosophers keep trying to think in the same ruts as past debates--we're still dividing ethical theories into Utilitarian, Kantian, and Virtue Ethics, even though that very division is antiquated and confining. In Sense and Goodness without God I demonstrate how a synthetic theory of morality can be derived that actually fulfills the claims of all three, and links it all to a scientifically testable theory of motivation. I appear to be the only one even thinking about doing that sort of thing. Everyone else can't think outside the box because they let the history of philosophy lock them in that box. Again, history of philosophy is making more bad philosophers than good ones.
History of philosophy also seems to be starting to replace actual philosophy outright. I recall once submitting a paper to a philosophy journal in which I had a valid deductive argument proving the conclusion from the given premises, and all the premises were factually unarguable. The paper was rejected simply because I didn't "address" (meaning: cite and pontificate on) a list of philosophers published on the same subject, even though the argument was demonstrated, regardless of what any other philosophers had written. The journal wanted me to do history of philosophy. Actual philosophy was apparently unpublishable in their view. Pick up any philosophy journal today and see the amount of citing and referencing and discussing of "other" philosophers that occupies their pages, in ratio to anything that actually gets done as far as making progress in human understanding, and you might become as alarmed as I am.
Philosophers shouldn't be acting like historians. They should let historians do that, just as scientists do. You don't see articles in science journals laden with elaborate discussions of the history of science before attempting to establish a finding. They just present their findings. If there are other current findings and theories on the books (not past refuted findings and theories, but still unrefuted ones), they will survey them and respond to them, even if that involves them in historical reporting. But they don't waste time on inessentials. They build on established and agreed findings and results. No botanist would say you have to read up on the history of all the mistakes and dead ends in 19th century botanical science to make progress in botany today. Philosophy should operate the same way. It just doesn't.
In that respect, philosophers today who revamp Anselm or Kalam are no different than creationists today who revamp Galen's irreducible complexity argument (yes, Galen formulated and defended it two thousand years before Behe did) and try to pass it off as science. Scientists don't fall for that crap. But philosophers do. Because unlike scientists, philosophers have no method and no concept of how to detect and measure progress, much less make any. Once at a dinner I stopped an editor of a philosophy journal and showed him that he had published an article with a glaringly obvious logical flaw, so obvious in fact it should have been embarrassing to his entire publication and certainly should never have passed any credible peer review. He actually responded by saying, "You actually expect philosophy journals to prevent the publication of fallacious arguments?" I was flabbergasted. Several of us at the same table answered in unison, "Uh, yes, we do." What the hell else is peer review for? Obviously, if that's academic philosophy, you shouldn't be surprised at the success of a Swinburne or a Plantinga. Even Aristotle would have had a field day with them. But modern philosophers don't seem to have any idea how to distinguish good philosophy from bad. All too often, as long as something looks impressive, and cites all the fashionable names, it gets published.
The Jesus Project:
BD: Could you comment on the Jesus Project and the potential impact it could have on Christendom?
RC: Here's a scoop: it's still uncertain, but it's possible the Jesus Project may be canceled due to lack of funding and administrative disagreements among its organizers. It won't be clear until the end of 2010. Its 2009 conference has already been postponed to 2010, and if that conference doesn't happen even in 2010, I expect it will be as good as dead. It's a shame, really, as it had a very sound and useful mission objective: to establish by what methods we would even answer the question "What can we know about the historical Jesus?" and then apply those methods to arrive at a consensus answer. All past quests for the historical Jesus skipped that essential step--of articulating what methods even work, and proving they do. They just applied untested methods willy nilly, without confirming they were even effective to begin with. That's why all past quests failed, and why we now have an endless plethora of "historical Jesuses," one for almost every scholar under the sun.
I've always found this a travesty, even outside this subject field. Historians need to take more seriously the technical apparatus of their methodology, exploring and shoring up its logical validity and soundness, and expanding their methodological repertoire from there. The matter has largely been neglected. It is neglected still--with some notable exceptions, which most historians aren't even aware of. I was hoping the Jesus Project would be a good vehicle for building and testing a basic methodological logic for history generally. The first conference proceedings from 2008, which will be published in 2010, will include my chapter on this very subject, using the starting point of Bayes' Theorem. I hoped to show how it can then be applied in future conferences. I may still be able to, if the Project stays afloat. But if not, I'll find a different venue for moving forward on that front.
As to what impact the Jesus Project could have? If successful, it would end up with an agreed set of methods by which one can test historical claims about Jesus, which would be logically unassailable, and thereby prove once and for all what we can claim to know, and what we can't claim to know. The result would be a much stronger divide between what dogmatists preach and what scholars teach. This is already happening, though. Books like The Bible Unearthed (for the Old Testament) and Jesus Interrupted (for the New Testament) are now popularizing what scholars have known for half a century now: that much of the Bible is unreliable, and many of its claims are unknowable or untrue, and most of what people are told about it is false. But a lack of definitive historical methodology leaves wiggle room. Hence a more definitive methodology would take that away. The result will be fewer and fewer Christians, and an increasing radicalization of the Christians that remain.
I predict the development will model what we've already seen on the creationism front: as the methodology and facts of evolution science have become increasingly refined and definitive, more and more Christians have abandoned biblical literalism, many have even left the faith altogether, while those that continue to resist have only been able to do so by insulating themselves more and more against facts and reason, getting increasingly paranoid and shrill--and, quite frankly, insane. Just look at Ken Ham's new Creationism Museum in Kentucky to see what I mean. Just as this has happened on the evolution front, so it will happen on the historical front. This has already started for the Old Testament. Literalism is on the decline, while literalists go increasingly off their rocker. The same will happen for the New Testament. The Jesus Project would play a part in furthering that development. Although I expect that development is inevitable eventually, with or without the Project.
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