[This is a guest-post by Michael Kremer.--ES]
Brian Leiter comments in typical acerbic style on an excerpt in the Guardian from Daniel Dennett’s latest book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, titled “Daniel Dennett’s Seven Tools for Thinking:” “A curious list; not clear Dennett has always honored all of them!”
What Leiter doesn’t notice, though, is that Dennett violates one of his principles in explaining another! Dennett's last tool is “beware of deepities.” He explains a deepity as
“a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That’s a deepity.”
Dennett then offers two examples. The first is the claim that “love is just a word.” The second, he says, is not “quite so easily analyzed:” “Richard Dawkins recently alerted me to a fine deepity by Rowan Williams, the then archbishop of Canterbury, who described his faith as ‘a silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark’.” Dennett concludes “I leave the analysis of this as an exercise for you.”
On the first reading it is manifestly false that faith can be described as Williams is said to describe it – the silent waiting on truth in the presence of the question mark does not involve propositional belief of any kind; on the second reading it is true, but trivially so, that such a silent waiting on truth exhibits a kind of general attitude of trust, of putting one’s faith in things. But the first reading, if true, would be earthshakingly important – it would mean that merely to silently wait on the truth would involve sharing propositional belief in such things as a creator god or even, say, the trinity or the incarnation. And there would be the suggestion that anyone who “waits on the truth” is implicitly a believer. Hence the “deepity.” Something like this, as far, as I can see, would be what Dennett had in mind. (If I have failed at the exercise, let the reader do better.)
However, there is a difficulty with the whole claim that Williams is guilty of passing off such a deepity here. The difficulty is that Williams has never (as far as I can tell) offered any such description of “his faith.” A google search for this description turns up a lot of references to Richard Dawkins and to Daniel Dennett. The source for this story (found by me by searching for “breathing in the presence of the question mark”) appears to be the following interview. The closest thing there to the formulation that Dennett takes from Dawkins occurs in this interchange (ABC is Williams, JH the interviewer):
“ABC: No, I hear you. I could say the basic question, the challenge if you like to you is, can you believe that you John Humphrys are the object of an unconditional eternal love which values you in such a way that your contribution as you to the world is uniquely precious to the one who made it?
JH: No I can’t because I don’t believe that there is one who made it, so I’m stuck
ABC: Does it help at all to give the time not just to talking to God but to the silent waiting on the truth, which for some people is the beginning of this? I mean pure sort of sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark, because ...
JH: Presence of what? You’ve got to remove the question mark.
ABC: Well I can remove it for you theoretically, I can’t remove it for you personally. For me, the presence of an eternal personal love. But thinking of people I’ve known who’ve found their way to faith, sometimes it’s been in the context of that silence in the presence of and the question mark very, very gradually, very gradually eroding, as something of love comes through.” (my emphases)
But here it is clear that Williams is not “describing his faith.” He is describing a state of skeptical non-faith, and suggesting a way in which people in this state, people like the interviewer who lack faith, sometimes come to develop faith. He is, in short, describing a spiritual exercise.
Maybe Dennett would say there is still a deepity here. But to me, the example just doesn’t work when it is put in context. There isn’t an equivocation here which makes this either false but earth-shattering-if-true, or true but trivial, depending on how you read it. My efforts to understand what Dennett attributed to Williams as a deepity (above) depended on seeing Williams as offering precisely a supposed description of his faith – the equivocation I could find would have been on the word “faith.”
In naively accepting Dawkins’s false quotation of Williams’s words, without bothering to check what Williams actually said or the context in which it occurred, Dennett himself violated another of his own principles, namely “respect your opponent.”*
*I grant that it is very difficult to prove a negative, and so it is conceivable -- though just barely -- that in some other context, Williams did describe his faith in the words Dennett attributes to him. But I checked Dennett’s book, and he doesn’t seem to give a reference.
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