Notes on the Courtier's Reply

In response to the Skeptic Zone here.

The Courtier's Reply is a term that has come to be used for the response to the
Courtier's Reply, and so you are right to say that it might be more proper to call it the Courtier's Reply Reply, but that gets awkward to say.


Here is the problem. Sure, I don't have to understand the difference between, let's say, Sunni and Shiite Islam if my disagreement with Islam has primarily to do with whether I believe that Allah, through the Angel Gabriel, dictated the Qu'ran to Muhammad in Arabic. Both Sunnis and Shiites agree on this, and the question of how the succession in the Caliphate should have gone is not relevant to the fundamental issue between myself and Muslims of either stripe.



On the other hand, if something is relevant to the reasons why one believes that Muhammad did receive this revelation, then I had better understand the reasons Muslims have for believing this I am going to seem pretty ignorant to my Muslim interlocutors. I need to know what their best reasons are. Or, I should at least show that I have tried to understand it. A person's time is limited, so I could reject Islam without this kind of information. But if I want to write The Muslim Delusion, then I need to know what the best Muslim scholars have to offer on why they think Islam is true. If I write a book that makes no attempt to understand this, then they have every right to complain that I am arguing from a position of ignorance, even if Islam is delusional.

When you do something like say that all forms of the Cosmological Argument fail to the "Who made God" question, there are some obvious ways that argument defenders have of responding to this, and you ought to know what those are and rebut them.

Now, I think there is further discussion which might develop the "Who made God" response to more sophisticated version of the Cosmological Arguments. For example, some people argue that if there was a time prior to the beginning of the universe, the causal principle should apply that whatever begins to exist must have a cause, but if there was no prior time, and time began at the Big Bang, then the causal principle should not be applied.  But a popular kind of response to arguments like Aquinas's and Craig's, sometimes given in intro philosophy classes, makes it seem as if they somehow didn't think to ask the question "Who made God," a question asked by most grade school children.

On the famous Trilemma argument, he gives a two paragraph rebuttal the completely ignores a wide range of arguments on both sides. John Beversluis wrote a chapter in his revised C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, which he considers to be an effective take-down of the argument, but in a footnote criticizes as too quick and too easy Hitchens's three-paragraph refutation. I'm sure he would say the same thing about Dawkins's two paragraphs.

Now Dawkins has a quadrilemma concerning those who believe in God, (or, as he puts it, don't believe in evolution) and that is that they are either ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked. But I think he think that theism is really a stupid position.

So, if Dawkins has reasons for rejecting theism in general, then, sure, he shouldn't be expected to know understand, for example, the filioque controversy about the procession of the Holy Spirit. But he should be expected to understand, or at least make an effort to understand the reasons why someone might think that the evidence for God is reasonably good, or that it can be justified as a properly basic belief.

Another example: Dawkins assumes that if believers just believe on tradition and pay no attention to evidence. Reading him, you would never guess that one of the most popular books on Christianity is Josh McDowell's book Evidence that Demands a Verdict, or that there is another book called Faith Founded on Fact. Now, these people may be all wrong, and it could be that they don't have good evidence, but a well-informed anti-apologist should be aware that there are Christians out there who think the evidence favors them.

Myers' presentation of the Courtier's reply appears stupid because he takes discussions that take place on the assumption that the emperor is clothed as a basis for answering the question of whether or not he is clothed, when in fact he appears naked. But if there are books offering reasons for thinking that the emperor is really clothed, then it is fair to expect someone defending the emperor's nudity to consider them.

I'm sure Dawkins is an intelligent person, but my complaint is that he projects and impression that he doesn't have to bother to understand his opponents in order to attack them. He has I believe an earned reputation for lucid explanations of Darwinian biology, but the lack of effort to understand the people he is criticizing, (and his excuses for making no such effort), means that if anyone is going to talk me out of my religious beliefs, it won't be him.