The great cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett passed away this year. And shortly after, Cameron Bertuzzi interviewed a Christian apologist, Bob Stewart, on his channel Capturing Christianity, regarding “Daniel Dennett’s Philosophical Legacy,” titling the show “Wrong in Creative Ways.” In which they almost never discuss Daniel Dennett’s philosophical legacy, or ever show that he was wrong about anything. Regardless, I was hired to publish my thoughts on their discussion, and fact-check it wherever necessary. Which is natural, as I have long been aligned with Dennett in his published ideas. In fact of all the popularly-called Four Horsemen, he was the one I’ve most agreed with and found most productive philosophically (Hitchens would rate number two for me, though perhaps more for being a fellow hard-drinking carouser who didn’t pull punches).

I have Huxleyed Dennett’s positions on free will (Dennett vs. Harris on Free Will) and consciousness (What Does It Mean to Call Consciousness an Illusion?) and the evolution of religion (I often refer people to Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon). And I am well versed in what he has argued on those subjects. Which Christians tend to find uncomfortable. Hence the Capturing Christianity apologetical retrospective. So I will assess what they say, except when I can’t. For example, at one point Bob Stewart claims Daniel Dennett disagreed with Bertrand Russell on something to do with science (in minute two), but what he goes on to describe as Dennett’s position does not differ from Russell’s, so I have no idea what Stewart meant to be the disagreement here and thus I have nothing to fact-check or critique (compare the more careful analysis of Karima Karppinen in To What Extent was Bertrand Russell the Predecessor of Daniel Dennett?).

This assessment will be long, so for convenience I will provide a linked Table of Contents:

• The Baggage Fallacy of Eliminativism
• Interaction One: Alvin Plantinga and Cognitive Evolution
• Digression on William Lane Craig and the KCA
• Interaction Two: Dawkins and Dennett on Death
• Digression on Dennett’s Theory of Consciousness
• An Example of Dennett’s Model at Work
• Lessons?
• Conclusion

And so we’re off…

The Baggage Fallacy of Eliminativism

Right out of the gate (in minute 1) Bertuzzi tries to baggage-fallacy Dennett as an “eliminativist.” To his credit, Stewart pushes back on that and denies it, throwing the label instead onto the Churchlands, sensibly since they all but invented it. But the position is too commonly misunderstood anyway, especially by Christians. I personally consider the term a terrible idea because it does not accurately describe even what self-declared eliminativists themselves, like the Churchlands, actually argue.

Even the neutral Stanford Encyclopedia’s description is misleading:

Modern versions of eliminative materialism claim that our common-sense understanding of psychological states and processes is deeply mistaken and that some or all of our ordinary notions of mental states will have no home, at any level of analysis, in a sophisticated and accurate account of the mind. In other words, it is the view that certain common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist. 

— William Ramsey (2019)

But this is a bad analysis. It isn’t as bad coming from its author, William Ramsey, who is only reacting to how eliminativists talk; it is bad coming from eliminativists themselves. Because they don’t actually do any of the things they say. Rather than completely eliminating any concept (like propositions, beliefs, or consciousness) “at any level of analysis,” they actually just replace them with something else—which is a level of analysis.

There is no contemporary eliminativist who eliminates anything. The Churchlands, for example, simply redefine “proposition” as a hypothetical model (an imaginable system of relationships, which is even physically detectable in the brain) and “belief” as the neurometrical confidence one can have that that model is correct and corresponds to reality in some way (which has also been physiologically confirmed). But these are simply the correct analytical definitions of these words. And these things do actually exist (and eliminativists even admit they do). Consequently, “eliminativism” is just an awful choice of vocabulary, rather like “defund the police” which no originator of the term actually meant as it sounds. Christians and other philosophers bad at their job just run with the false impression the word created and scoff at the idea that you can deny propositions, beliefs, and consciousness exist. But since no eliminativist has ever actually argued that, it’s a straw man.

For example, see Murat Aydede’s astute analysis of the only eliminativism Dennett ever explicitly ascribed to: pain eliminativism:

One way to respond to Dennett’s challenge … is to say that if the common-sense conception of pain did indeed require [the assumptions Dennet identifies], then it was simply wrong. So strictly speaking nothing corresponds to the ordinary notion of pain. But given that pain experiences are almost always unpleasant (in fact, always unpleasant in non-pathological cases), we can easily replace the faulty conception with a new one which is close enough not to cause alarm by its being empty. … Alternatively, one can argue against Dennett that [the things he claims] are not really part of the common sense concept of pain [anyway]. 

In other words, as even Dennett would agree if asked, he is not in fact denying pain exists. He is denying the common conceptions of pain—or even just what he thinks those common conceptions are. He still affirms the existence of the experience of pain. And in his later work, expanding similar ideas to the entirety of the phenomenology of consciousness, he dropped all use of the term “eliminativism” and reverted to more accurate descriptions of what he is arguing. This is well explained by Brian Tomasik, with direct quotes from Dennett like “I’m not saying that consciousness doesn’t exist. I’m just saying it isn’t what you think it is.” Which Dennett meant for all phenomenology. He would thus agree with the entailed statement, “I’m not saying that pain doesn’t exist. I’m just saying it isn’t what you think it is.”

But instead of correctly analyzing the position (as Tomasik does), Christian apologists tend to latch onto the word “eliminativism” to straw-man everything Dennett argues (or indeed even the Churchlands). This is a form of baggage fallacy, whereby one links someone to some concept, then saddles them with all the “baggage” that is supposed to come with that concept, and then critiques the baggage instead of the actual position they take (see my discussion of this fallacy in Proving History, pp. 34–37). Generally Christians never actually understand the eliminativist position anyway. For an example, see how Victor Reppert completely screws up his take on what the Churchlands actually argue regarding the concepts of “truth,” “belief,” and “propositions” (in my recent summary and my original analysis with quotes and citations). In no case do they deny any of these things exist. They simply redefine them (indeed, correctly). They are just doing what Dennett does: saying it isn’t what you think it is. And backing that up with scientific evidence confirming their account of what it actually is.

Nevertheless, although denying the label “eliminativist” to Dennett, when Stewart gets to trying to describe Dennett’s actual position on consciousness (toward the end of minute 3) he straw-mans it in just the same way, claiming that Dennett argued consciousness is not phenomenal at all, that “it’s just information, it’s just data.” But that isn’t what Dennett argued. For what he actually argued, see my discussion in What Does It Mean to Call Consciousness an Illusion? But in short, Dennett’s position is that phenomenology is simply what it is like to process data—and in a certain way, since not all data processing will produce that (see my discussion of this point in The Mind Is a Process Not an Object: On Not Understanding Mind-Brain Physicalism).

A better description of Dennett’s theory is given by Allin Cottrell in “Sniffing the Camembert: On the Conceivability of Zombies.” There, he demonstrates that it is simply not even logically possible to have the detailed integrated sensory perceptions we do without phenomenology (i.e., “qualia” or anything “it is like” to be perceiving such complex information). Hence consciousness is not “just” data. That would only describe the information in the brain of an unconscious person. The difference between an unconscious person and a conscious one is that the latter is processing data. The complexity of the integrated output then entails (and thus fully explains, without remainder) a complexity of integrated experience (see my discussions of the Zombie Problem and Mary’s Room as examples, and my related discussion of Holm Tetens, Dinesh D’Souza, and the Crazy Idea of the Mind Radio).

In a sense Stewart is here committing what I call the modo hoc fallacy (Sense and Goodness without God, index), claiming something “just is” something else—and then complaining that what he (not his opponent) has just reduced it to fails to explain all the evidence. This is like a fallacy of division, whereby one assumes that what is true of the parts (atoms are microscopic) is true of the whole (aircraft carriers are microscopic), only here the fallacy is being deployed specifically to straw-man what someone actually said. When Dennett reduces consciousness to data processing, he is not reducing it to “just” data (because you have to include the “processing” part), nor does his reduction warrant a fallacy of division. That consciousness reduces to electrochemical events in a maze of neurons does not mean consciousness just is electrochemical events in a maze of neurons, any more than an aircraft carrier just “is” an atom, or even just a pile of atoms: it is very specifically a particular arrangement of atoms, and all its particular properties arise from that arrangement and their interactions, not the atoms by themselves.

An atom cannot land medical helicopters loaded with patients, or level a city with guided missiles, nor can any random pile of atoms do that; but an aircraft carrier can. By analogy, neurons by themselves cannot produce consciousness; but a particular arrangement of neurons can. But not just the static arrangement of them; they have to causally interact. Like an aircraft carrier, the events produced require an ongoing causal interaction of the components, and what we call the phenomenology or qualia of experience is an inalienable outcome of that causal interaction. A brain just sitting there will not be conscious; it has to be doing something to be conscious, just as an aircraft carrier just sitting there can’t level a city, but an ongoing causal interaction of its crew and components can. Hence what it is like to perceive anything will reduce to a specific causal system interacting in a specific way; one system, and you get a color, another system, and you get a scent, and so on.

The evidence actually extensively supports this causal explanation. And it does this in several converging ways, as I outline in Sense and Goodness without God (III.6.6, pp. 150–54). We have isolated specific qualia to specific physical components of the brain, and can stimulate, suppress, or even permanently remove the qualia by a corresponding effect on the physical component. And the fact that electrical and chemical interference initiates, suppresses, or alters all corresponding phenomenology confirms this, as does comparative anatomy: the perceptual capabilities of animals corresponds to the presence or absence of the corresponding physical machinery; and there is no evidence of any “additional” machinery in us that translates this into a phenomenology, so we have every reason to expect animals experience the same phenomenology that their brain anatomy allows.

But I’ve already covered this in The Crazy Idea of the Mind Radio. Mind-brain physicalism, even something like the Dennett theory of consciousness, is thoroughly backed by scientific evidence and explains a vast array of strange facts that no other theory of consciousness can account for (examples below). This cannot be vanished away by straw-manning Dennett’s theory as “it’s just data.” That is just Christian apologetics, not a sincere engagement with his theory or the relevant facts. So when Stewart accuses Dennett’s theory of consciousness of being “a fairly ridiculous view” (4:15) he is actually describing a bogus fiction that Stewart invented, and not the actual theory he is supposed to be evaluating. Which is typical of apologetics. And as the video proceeds, it only gets worse.

Interaction One: Alvin Plantinga and Cognitive Evolution

The interview then breaks down into a kind of clips show, where Bertuzzi shows a clip of Daniel Dennett saying something or engaging someone in debate, and Stewart comments. I’ll now follow that organization as far as it goes. There are only two clips, and most of the video is a disorganized series of digressions and not much direct discussion of the actual content or context of those clips. But I’ll try to stick to their chosen format anyway. The first clip is of Dennett’s engagement with Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga is one of history’s worst philosophers. Not as bad as C.S. Lewis or Ayn Rand, but in their league. He’s really, really terrible at philosophy. He sucks at science. He sucks at analysis. And he’s often lazy and disingenuous.

For some examples, see:

• Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience.
• On Andrew Moon’s Defense of Circular Arguments.
• Epistemological End Game
• My series on Plantinga’s ‘Two Dozen or So’ Arguments for God.
• The RationalWiki entry on Plantinga.
• Jerry Coyne’s Alvin Plantinga: Sophisticated Theologian?
• And James Sterba’s treatment in Is a Good God Logically Impossible?

Unlike Lewis or Rand, Plantinga knows how to write with the appearance of philosophical sophistication, complete with fancy jargon and properly formatted footnotes. But what he actually says is always bollocks—and easily exposed as such by anyone not tricked by his mimicry of legitimate philosophical discourse. To be fair, most philosophers are posers and most philosophy is garbage, but the field’s low standards only enable frauds like Plantinga, giving them ample cover to “look like” they are doing real philosophy—a point I’ve discussed before in Bayesian Analysis of the Barkasi-Sant’Anna Defense of Naive Memory Realism, The Blondé-Jansen Argument from Consciousness, and Is Philosophy Stupid?. But don’t mistake me here for saying all philosophy is like this; there is an abundance of brilliant philosophers and philosophy (a point I also make in Is Philosophy Stupid?; and you can find me citing countless examples across my writings over the past decades, and ever here). But there has been no academic standard winnowing this wheat from the chaff. Discriminating readers have to do that themselves. It’s as if all astronomy journals regularly published astrology papers, making no distinction, and you had to figure out on your own which papers were the bogus ones. That’s academic philosophy.

In the interview, Bertuzzi reveals that he thinks Plantinga is the greatest Christian philosopher of our era. Which goes a long way toward explaining why Bertuzzi is still a Christian. This is what he falls for. And indeed I think Bertuzzi is easily duped by his peers, due to embracing a poor methodology that never leads him to question what he is told. For example, here he takes a clip out of context from what was a much longer discussion, and he doesn’t let Dennett speak. Yet it really seems as if Bertuzzi thinks there is no other part of the original recording in which Dennett actually replies to Plantinga. Bertuzzi literally thinks this clip is it. Which means he allowed his manipulative Christian peers to snow him into a false belief about the actual criticisms of his faith. If he had been armed with a methodological rule of “don’t believe that; always check first,” he would never have fallen for this, and would not still be basing his Christianity on such false beliefs as this.

Because everything changes when you actually get to hear what Dennett said in response to Plantinga’s rambling on for ten minutes. When you check the actual back-and-forth you find that Dennett never said any of the things Plantinga claimed, and Plantinga never addressed any of the things he actually did say. Dennett did not “mistakenly” take Plantinga as arguing “against evolution.” He correctly understood Plantinga as arguing that evolution by itself would not likely produce truth-tracking perceptual systems (that is the “Premise 1” that you hear them go on about in the clip Bertuzzi included); and Dennett refuted that claim with science: “everything in cognitive science and in evolutionary biology suggests strongly that that’s exactly what has happened, that evolution has created these things where there is a deep causal relation between truth and [belief] states,” and therefore does in fact select for truth-tracking, refuting Plantinga’s first premise (none of this audio is in Bertuzzi’s clip, by the way; nor anything else I shall quote below).

Earlier Dennett had also corrected Plantinga’s false claim about what Patricia Churchland said about this. She did not say what Plantinga claimed, that evolution does not select for truth-tracking. She said perceptual systems were not perfectly designed for truth-tracking and explained (correctly) why. In other words, she is explaining something Plantinga’s alternative actually cannot explain: why our perceptual systems are unreliable at all. Evolution explains this, indeed by the very fact Churchland offers: that it is not primarily selecting truth-tracking but only indirectly doing so. The result is imperfect. And that is exactly what we observe: our perceptual systems are a horrid travesty of bad design. This refutes Plantinga’s entire argument (that God had to design our faculties, even if through “guided” evolution). Our faculties demonstrably were not intelligently designed. Churchland’s theory of evolved faculties therefore makes the evidence far more probable—far, far more probable. But Plantinga ignores this (her actual argument) and invents and credits to her an argument she never made (that evolution never selects for truth-tracking) and builds his argument on that fabricated premise.

All Dennett does is point this out. And Dennett is right. The science amply proves that naturally selected faculties should be imperfectly truth-tracking. And we observe exactly that. Everything that makes us better than that (like formal logics and maths, the scientific method, and critical thinking) was invented by humans. Evolutionary theory therefore does not have to explain those. It only has to explain how we received faculties capable of inventing them. And it does. I cover all this in meticulous detail in my article The Argument from Reason (and I expose Plantinga’s really awful reasoning on this, as well as his catastrophic scientific ignorance, in Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience).

Indeed, in that discussion Dennett destroyed Plantinga’s whole dishonest approach with a smart analogy:

It is quite possible for evolution to design [truth-tracking] systems, and the line that Alvin has taken is a little bit like saying “I don’t see any reasons why evolution explains that wings work so well for flying.” Well, wings are for surviving. That doesn’t say anything about flying. But of course the only way that wings help you as an adaptation is by flying, really well. That’s what wings are for. And what cognitive systems are for is getting it right.

This exposes Plantinga’s entire schtick. He is like someone who quote-mines Patricia Churchland saying “flying is not the foremost purpose for which wings are selected,” and then concludes “natural evolution therefore cannot have selected for wings.” Dennett is correcting Plantinga’s entire ignorant and disingenuous folly here by pointing out (a) that is not what she meant and (b) what she did mean is what Dennett is now saying: that it is owing to its utility for survival that a flying organ is selected; and therefore it is owing to its utility for survival that truth-approximating faculties are selected. In other words, Dennet is saying Plantinga’s entire first premise is factually false—not merely unproven, but extensively disproven. Plantinga never responds to this, Dennett’s actual argument. Because that is how the con called “Christian apologetics” works. It is never sincerely interested in what it is actually supposed to rebut. It is only interested in fabricating the illusion of having rebutted it. Like Donald Trump, Plantinga just boldly lies about what was and wasn’t said, with an air of confidence meant to gaslight you into thinking that’s what actually was and wasn’t said, and then declares how “disappointed” he is that Dennett never responded to him. This is bearing false witness. It’s manipulative. It’s gross.

I should also note that Bertuzzi is incorrect in almost everything he says about this meeting that he mined his clip from. Dennet did extensively interact with Plantinga’s argument (he did not merely “mention” its first premise), and you can see that in the original recording. And contrary to Bertuzzi claiming otherwise, (a) this was specifically a proposal-response meeting, in which Dennett was intended to be the respondent and (b) these kinds of setups are actually common in philosophical societies like the APA (in fact that very conference was full of them). And (c) raucous audience reactions are not uncommon at them, particularly when the audience has been packed with fans by prearrangement of the speaker. This is a commonplace tactic of Christian apologists. It’s why my debate with William Lane Craig, for example, was populated almost entirely by Christians bussed in from faraway places, and not just locals (like, say, students of the actual college where that debate was held). They need a friendly audience. I should also point out that it is also strange to select this clip, when the debate it is from resulted in a book perfecting their respective positions: Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? I suggest that is a more important source to be discussing than this on-the-fly meeting years before.

I should also note that many Christian “reactions” to the original exchange (as you’ll see even under the remastered audio I used above as the linked recording) kept claiming it was inappropriate of Dennett to argue against religion generally rather than the hyper-specific argument Plantinga presented. But it’s the other way around: Plantinga himself labeled his presentation “Religion and Science: Where the Real Conflict Lies.” That is in the frickin program. That is the topic Dennett was asked to respond to, and correctly responded to. And indeed he did adequately address Plantinga’s specific argument and commented on its bizarre failure to establish what was actually the pre-agreed topic, which Plantinga’s strange argument also completely fails at doing. So I see a lot of Christian “memory distortion” over what was even supposed to happen at this meeting, much less actually did. And I suspect Bertuzzi’s own recollection of it has been poisoned by this false framing. Indeed, he literally appears to believe Dennett never says anything more than the one sentence preserved on the clip he used. That is how far misled Bertuzzi has been by his own Christian peers.

And case in point: Bob Stewart corrects none of these errors. I cannot know if that makes Stewart a liar, or if he himself had never listened to that exchange or read the resulting book, and is simply following Bertuzzi’s false framing of what it contained. But he is on this show purporting to be a colleague of Dennett’s and an expert on Dennett’s work. So that would be, shall we say, odd. And he is a professional philosopher—so he knows how these meetings actually work and often go. Maybe he regarded those remarks by Bertuzzi too trivial to correct. But he should have corrected his more substantive errors—regarding what actually happened in that exchange and what Dennett actually said at it; or at least subsequently said, since Dennett coordinated with Plantinga a whole edited book that refined their presentations, something Stewart never even mentions, much less addresses. This is how Christianity builds and spreads false narratives to hide what has actually happened. It is a truth distortion machine, in which Bertuzzi is here being exploited as an unwitting cog. Also a common result. Christians rarely know how victimized and exploited they are by their own leaders, peers, and society.

Not only does Stewart drop that ball, he also makes the false claim that Dennett “didn’t really do very much” in the philosophy of religion (11:28). False. Dennett wrote entire books on the subject and delivered several papers and lectures. There is a reason he was asked by the APA to interact with Plantinga on the philosophy of religion, and why they published together an academic monograph on the subject—with Oxford University Press no less. So, rather than actually articulate and thus answer Dennett’s actual reply to Plantinga, Stewart preserves the false impression that he never made one, and was not even competent to. Which is ad hominem, because that claim isn’t true, and poisoning the well, because the claim isn’t even relevant. “His argument is wrong because he is incompetent” is literally a non sequitur. You still have to address the argument—which is the very point Bertuzzi was making that Stewart was replying to, though only because Bertuzzi has been deceived into thinking Dennett didn’t do that. These fallacies aim to emotionally manipulate audience belief, rather than allow them to hear what the argument even is that Stewart is supposed to be rebutting here instead. Which is, again, a standard tactic of Christian apologetics.

It’s especially galling for Stewart to do this because his own reasoning actually undermines Plantinga, who was presenting a paper on evolutionary science with absolutely no relevant credentials or publications in evolutionary science. So if “incompetence” matters here, it is Plantinga who is in trouble. Dennett has quals in philosophy of religion. Plantinga does not have quals in evosci. More importantly, I have proved with facts that Plantinga was catastrophically incompetent in that field. Whereas Stewart presents no evidence that Dennett was incompetent in any aspect of the philosophy of religion—much less as would affect anything Dennett said in response to Plantinga’s presentation which was on evosci. Stewart instead outright lies about Dennett, literally claiming he “doesn’t typically engage in making arguments, defeating arguments, critiquing arguments, that sort of thing.” That very meeting disproves the charge. As does the resulting book. And several other books, articles, and lectures (remember Dennett’s debate with Sam Harris?).

Stewart also bears false witness when he claims Dennett “just presumes” naturalism. Dennett always argued naturalism was a conclusion established by the results of the sciences; he never just “presumed” it. For example, see I’ve Been Thinking (esp. ch. 5), and his framework in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Breaking the Spell. Dennett’s position has always been that naturalism is more fruitful and successful as an explanatory framework, whereas religious worldviews never present any credible or viable explanatory theories, and in fact consistently underperform as such, usually readily contradicted and thus falsified by the evidence. He even makes this point in Science and Religion, his joint publication with Plantinga: naturalism performs better as an explanation of all data; and all religious attempts to make this fact go away are ignorant or fallacious.

Digression on William Lane Craig and the KCA

Having completely ignored Dennett’s actual refutation of Plantinga, and completely misrepresented everything Dennett has ever said on the subject, and maligned his competence without any justifying evidence, Stewart tries to manipulate the audience with another skewed narrative (in minute 13): that once when Craig presented the Kalam Cosmological Argument, Daniel Dennett praised him, indicated he had never heard that argument before, and had nothing to say in reply. Um. Sorry. We have the frickin audio. Dennett was being sarcastic. He clearly had heard it before (he even references having heard Craig present it before) and says what impresses him is Craig’s command of rhetoric, not the argument. And Dennett does rebut the argument: he says the premises rest on untested human intuitions, not scientific evidence or even scientific argument; and that cosmological questions cannot be solved by such intuitions because we have already empirically established physics and cosmology to be mind-bogglingly counter-intuitive. He’s right.

Dennett then says he cannot formally refute it right there at the mic, on the fly (“impromptu”), because he would need to analyze the dozens of convoluted statements presented to thoughtfully formulate that. Stewart disingenuously complains that “it’s just two premises,” but in fact it was forty minutes of convoluted rhetoric in defense of those premises; plus the KCA actually implicates four premises, because you have to get from “the universe had a cause” to “that cause was nonphysical”, and then from there to “the nonphysical cause was God,” which is a lot more fog to handwave through. But never mind. Dennett did not mean he could not rebut the KCA (he just did: the premises are unproven, the methodology backing them is unreliable, and there is no confirmatory scientific evidence). He only meant he could not locate on the fly a formal contradiction within the convoluted forty minute presentation he just heard. What he offers instead are some places where he is worried the argument goes awry, but for lack of time, he says he will only cover one: the hidden “premise four” of all KCA arguments, where a mysterious handwave leaps from a “timeless, changeless, abstract, immaterial” cause to “God,” or indeed an intelligence of any kind—rather than a mindless, ultra-simple causal principle (see, for example, my discussion of this problem in A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument).

Dennett brings his opening point home here by pointing out that Craig dismissed such alternatives on the notion that abstract principles can’t cause things—but that is precisely the question being begged. If an abstract immaterial God can cause things, how can we say other abstract immaterial things can’t? How do we purport to know that? And Dennett is right. Craig is trading on an assumption without evidence. And to be clear, Dennett was not conceding that fourth premise—he was merely exploring a problem faced by that premise, and simply granted the premise for the sake of argument. He had already finished explaining why all the premises of the KCA are dubious, the fourth premise included. And he already made clear he could continue on pointing out defects in every point Craig defended; he only picked this one for time, and to illustrate the general principle that would undermine them all—which tied right back into his opening, making his rebuttal quite elegant.

Dennett also smartly points out that Craig ought to seek critique of his KCA from the very cosmological scientists he tries to cite in support of it (whom Dennett points out are colleagues of his), because Craig, like Dennett himself, is not actually a qualified expert in the subject. There is a reason Craig tries to avoid doing that: because he knows it won’t go well (just see Physicists & Philosophers Debunk the Kalam Cosmological Argument and Physicists and Philosophers Strike Back; and, lest we forget, Craig got trounced by Sean Carroll on this, the only cosmological scientist he ever actually tried debating this with). Dennett then closes by pointing out that Craig has no coherent theory of how personal causation can exist without material causation (a problem formally pointed out by philosopher Evan Fales in his academic study Divine Intervention), thus rendering dubious Craig’s claim that those are the only two kinds of causation available. Dennett explains here that Craig failed to formally demonstrate there were not other kinds; and he failed to formally demonstrate that personal causes can even exist as a kind apart from material causes.

That is all quite a lot of objections to the KCA, all well informed, all astute, and none ever answered by Craig to this day (he just gainsays all critiques; he never actually rebuts any). Yet Stewart tells Bertuzzi that Dennett voiced no objections at all and was stunned into veritable silence by it instead, thereby demonstrating Dennett is “incompetent.” The abject dishonesty, indeed ruthless slander, of Stewart’s response to Bertuzzi here should shock anyone of conscience. But this is how Christian apologetics works. And Bertuzzi is duped by it with ease. Which all leads me to doubt the accuracy of the personal stories about Dennett that Stewart goes on to present (like how supposedly, at a dinner Stewart gave, Dennett had never heard of the basic Christian gospel and was stunned by it, spanning minutes 20–24; I have more to say about that below). Once you establish you’re not a reliable narrator, I can no longer trust your narratives.

Interaction Two: Dawkins and Dennett on Death

They next turn to a clip of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett conversing on the subject of death and dying (around minute 27), on Dawkins’ show The Poetry of Reality. That episode, using previously recorded material, dropped right after Dennett’s death (In Memoriam: Dan Dennett on Mortality, Life, and Existence). In that, Dennett discusses secular life after death (in the memories of people, in the surviving work that lives on) after briefly remarking that the idea of living forever in heaven doesn’t comfort him; but he doesn’t go into what he meant by that (it doesn’t comfort him because it’s unlikely; or because he wouldn’t want to endure that even were it an option?).

The Christians of course complain that without their God death sucks in various ways, but one hardly need respond to that (“That would suck; therefore it’s not true” is not a cogent argument for anything). So this segment just turns into illogical evangelizing (also known as “grifting”), manipulating the heartstrings of human grief and fear. We already know that’s an affective fallacy and thus ineffectual to all but the irrational. It’s particularly humorous to see what is usually the “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd trying to argue that facts do care about your feelings (“therefore join our oppressive cult,” as if we didn’t know You Might Be Worshiping the Antichrist and Christianity Is a Conspiracy Theory and Religious Belief Is Always Bad). In any event, I already covered this subject in Justin Brierley and the Meaning of Life (and addressed the underlying fallacy in Pascal’s Wager and the Ad Baculum Fallacy). I needn’t elaborate here.

This part of the interview never really gets to any coherent or pertinent point. So I’ll just respond to their meandering irrelevant digressions in chronological order:

First (starting in minute 31) they try to bring in the argument of Yujin Nagasawa (arriving in book form later this year) that atheists’ optimism about the opportunities that being alive affords is unwarranted due to All the Bad Things. But that has already been refuted by Guy Kahane. Besides every point Kahane makes, Nagasawa’s argument also suffers similar problems to Antinatalism: it completely botches the metrics of net personal good and risk-opportunity calculation. Neither millions of years of murderous evolution nor pre-modern cholera nor the Holocaust revert your own positive life opportunities to zero. And regardless, those things are actually worse if God exists, because then there’s a callous, terrifying, and invincible villain to worry about, and you might get trapped in his totalitarian society for all eternity, a fate worse than Zardoz. At least without God we can rest assured no one was responsible—or those who are will eventually rest in peace, along with all their victims. No one doubts it would be handy to have a real God. But if we did, we’d not be in this predicament. So that hope is moot.

They then reveal a recourse to black-and-white fallacies, exhibiting the trait of ambiguity intolerance, which correlates significantly with religious faith (especially conservative faith), and thus is likely causal: this personality trait partly explains why they are so easily seduced by extreme binary models of the world like Christianity. We see this when Bertuzzi reacts with confusion (in minute 34) at how Dennett could admit to both optimistic and pessimistic metrics. Bertuzzi then tries to explain this by saying Dennett is switching stances or contradicting himself. It never occurs to him that neither is the case: reality is an admixture of good and bad, and therefore acknowledging both does not require contradiction, nor indicates a change of stance from optimistic or pessimistic. Overall optimism or pessimism is a measure of net outcome, not of the complete absence of good or bad outcomes. One can sum up all the good and bad and measure it in terms of degree of material impact upon any given present person (their actual life opportunity), and if that person concludes the net is positive, they are an optimist. And if this checks out on objective measures, they are rationally justified in being optimists. But that requires accepting mixed, nuanced, and complex positions, which literally hurts the brains of the ambiguity intolerant.

This explains why Bertuzzi and Stewart think people in Bangladesh must live insufferably miserable lives (in minute 33). They don’t. Even though that’s one of the least happy places on Earth right now (and trends that way historically), the average metric is still positive. It does not approach zero but lies several points above (indeed close to global average); hence more than three of every four Bangladeshis report being “quite happy” or “very happy.” And the causes of even their average rating being relatively low are removable—with effort and help, which is precisely the existence of opportunity that warrants optimism (and warrants facilitating it rather than getting in their way of effecting it). The options are thus not “total misery” or “life of privilege.” There is a lot in between that is still good; and that’s far more widely available than they think. Life actually is a net good. And if you care about the many who aren’t accessing that or could have more of it, the only correct response is to help them up—not believe in Jesus. That will do exactly nothing for them.

Stewart also uses this as an occasion to complain about Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell seeing religion as a naturally caused phenomenon (and thus not a supernaturally caused one), remarking that “just because you can study something scientifically as a phenomenon doesn’t mean that there is no referent behind the phenomenon” (35:52). But this misses the entire argument of that book: Dennett’s point precisely is that because every aspect of religion has well-documented natural causes, and is best explained that way, it is unlikely that there is any other “referent behind the phenomenon.” In other words, the findings of science on the evolution of religion argue against any religion being true (I formalize this argument in my Bayesian Counter-Apologetics; and Loftus explores its significance in The Outsider Test for Faith). Stewart ignores the argument, misstates Dennett’s thesis, and only addresses the misstated thesis, not the actual one. Standard apologetics.

Stewart then makes the usual apologetical claim (in minute 36) that you have to intensely study the Bible and the historical apologetics of Christianity before rejecting it. But you don’t. Any more than you have to do a deep study of astrology or the theory of Atlantis before rejecting them. Because abundant competent professionals have already done that and the results are in. The burden has thus shifted onto the likes of Stewart. And he can’t meet it. He has nothing new. Just the same old disingenuous and fallacious apologetics that have been debunked a hundred times from Sunday. For the average person, apart from self-defense against lies and manipulation, there is no reason even to care about the Bible or Christian apologetics anymore—no more than Stewart cares about the Quran or Bhagavad Gita and their apologetics.

Bertuzzi then gets confused, jumping on Dawkins’ remarking on his existence being improbable, and concluding that Dawkins doesn’t realize this proves God (near the end of minute 37). But that wasn’t the improbability Dawkins was referring to. Their own clip shows him saying there are billions of other possible people who could have been born in his place; which allows the probability of someone being in his place to be high (in fact, as near to 100% as makes all odds). He is thus not talking about the improbability of there being life in the universe or it evolving into a civilization somewhere with philosophers chatting on a porch. He means his specific genome, and his specific contingent life history. This is just as improbable on Bertuzzi’s theism (think of all the infinite other people God could have replaced Bertuzzi with, and all the infinite other ways Bertuzzi’s life could have turned out), so that does not differentially argue for or against theism.

As to the argument Bertuzzi then impertinently makes here (in minute 38), that the probability of all known evidence is higher on theism than on naturalism: the reverse is the case. As has been exemplified several times in this video already, Christian belief is always based on leaving evidence out that, when you put it back in, reverses every argument for Christianity into an argument against it. Christianity is a delusion. And as such, it can only survive for as long as you can maintain a false understanding of reality. You have to avoid, deny, or keep out of mind all the evidence against your delusion, and you need a complex system of apologetics to maintain that false understanding of reality every time reality bumps against it. It’s not just that Christianity is a false belief; it depends on a whole system of carefully curated false beliefs about mundane reality, including all of science and history, as well.

We see this right away as Bertuzzi gets wrong Dawkins’ challenge to theism as lacking an explanation for God: Dawkins is only pointing out an explanatory defect of theism as a hypothesis; he never says that “disproves” God, but that it undermines its probability. On this point see The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism and Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them and A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument. In the end, the absence of any good explanation for why there would be any God, much less their weird specific God, ruins any effectiveness that that theory could have had as an explanation. Far simpler things are more probable. So we should be considering them instead, just as we do in every other domain of knowledge. “Plane crashed; therefore God did it” is always illogical, no matter what you substitute for “Plane crashed.” Explaining an improbable thing by positing an even more improbable thing is going in the wrong explanatory direction.

Bertuzzi also missteps when he mistakes Dawkins suggesting that atheists giving thanks to nature by studying and comprehending it is better than just thanking God, as an argument that atheism is better than theism (across minutes 45–46). But what Dawkins meant was more like what the pagan theist Galen said: that believers who merely thank God for things are not doing Him anywhere near the appropriate honor compared to believers who endeavor to study and thus know and comprehend the means God employs to produce what is to be thanked for. In other words, Galen honored (his Stoic-Aristotelian) God by understanding nature, his God’s creation (see my discussion in chapter four of The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire). Dawkins means the same thing: that endeavoring to understand and thus know the processes by which the things we are grateful for came about is a greater form of gratitude than just idly giving thanks for it.

I suspect, if he had been asked, that Dawkins would include Galen in that sentiment. So I don’t think Dawkins was simply ragging on theism here, but noting a greater means of showing gratitude that even theists could show. Many theists use “God” as an excuse not to bother understanding anything (“God did it; and that’s that”). But that does not entail theists have to do that. They could adopt the very same stance Dawkins is recommending, and thus instead honor God through coming to know his creation, rather than dismissing any need to (as was the conventional position of Christianity across its first thousand years, as I document in chapter five of The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire). Bertuzzi thus missed a valuable lesson in what Dawkins was saying, and he missed it because he has been approaching everything Dawkins says without either charity or effort to understand it. Yet, ironically, that is exactly the behavior Dawkins was criticizing.

This same kind of bungling misunderstanding then immediately strikes Stewart, who (near the end of minute 46) mistakes Dawkins’ statement that “our being here is no accident” (in minute 44) as contradicting Dawkins everywhere else saying that our being here is an accident. But that isn’t what Dawkins meant. He said “it’s no accident that we are surrounded by an entire ecosystem: we couldn’t exist without it.” In other words, Dawkins wasn’t talking about the accidents of biogenesis or evolution; he was talking about the natural inevitability of any intelligent life-form being surrounded by an ancient ecosystem that evolved ahead of them—and that we can stand in awe of this fact; which is true. So, like Bertuzzi, Stewart has primed himself to look for any apologetical gotcha angle in everything Dawkins says, resulting in getting completely wrong everything Dawkins says. To quote the great poet Taylor Swift, “You need to calm down.”

It’s also funny to see Stewart claiming (in minute 47) that “all they have” is evolution and “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” when, actually, that is what Stewart is doing: God is his hammer, the universal solution and explanation of everything, through an endless parade of convenient armchair just-so stories. Whereas Dawkins and Dennett don’t “just” have evolution, but the entirety of the sciences; their toolbox is huge, not limited to just one thing, and they aren’t developing just-so stories but actively avoiding them by insisting that all explanations be proved with reliable evidence-based reasoning. Perhaps you can say “reliable evidence-based reasoning” is their hammer. But then, on that analogy, everything is a nail—a.k.a. an empirical question of fact. Stewart is then the one trying to drive nails without a hammer. There is a reason that doesn’t work.

Bertuzzi then tries to throw in the Argument from Desire (just at minute 48), which I already demonstrated is an affective fallacy in Justin Brierley and the Meaning of Life. That we can cognitively imagine and desire better or ideal states, or states of affairs, is a natural and expected product of evolution by natural selection. It in no way entails there is an ideal state to be achieved. The argument is thus a standard non sequitur, one that is, again, scientifically illiterate. It completely fails to account for any of the psychology of why we desire things at all, or its evolutionary background. “I can imagine and desire a better-built hut” is no different from “I can imagine and desire living longer and without pain.” Neither evinces God behind anything—just adaptive reasoning, driving us to look for and eventually build better outcomes. It doesn’t mean “perfect huts” or “painless immortality” already exist, or ever will. That in no way follows.

But that this is the kind of bad reasoning that has convinced Stewart and Bertuzzi to be a Christian is why they are a Christian; and why, generally, anyone is. The rest of us check the science. And thus we discover that a propensity for gratitude is an explicable evolved trait adaptive for social animals, which can erroneously lead to animism (the mistaken assumption that inanimate objects have minds and thus intentions)—in the same way that agency overdetection does, as Dennett explains in Breaking the Spell. So a desire to place gratitude no more proves God exists than that it proves that trees are sentient, or that our junker car kept working when we needed it to because we asked it to and it cares about us. To think otherwise is to think poorly, and in ignorance of all that humanity has learned. We need to step out of the middle ages and embrace modern advances in knowledge and critical reasoning. Christianity is a primitive superstition, surviving only on a bedrock of an obsolete medievalism, merely dressed up in modernist language.

Eventually Bertuzzi gets to thinking (in minute 53) that there might be a contradiction in Dennett saying (in minute 52) that his “sense of exaltation” at how awesome the universe is “is, if anything, I think stronger in me because of my atheism than it would be if I were a believer,” because, “I see the universe itself as a thing, which is not quite what Anselm said, [that] God was a being greater than which nothing can be conceived, but certainly I can’t think of anything greater than the universe.” Bertuzzi essentially asks, which is it: there is “a being greater than which nothing can be conceived,” or there is not? But that is, again, not what Dennett said. He was contradicting Anselm, not himself, by saying that the universe, not God, is that thing (if anything is). Stewart sort of corrects Bertuzzi on this, although he doesn’t quite get right what Dennett was saying either.

That issue is nerfed by a failure of anyone to explain what their metric for “greater” is (I cannot even deduce what Dennett’s metric was), and they could have pursued some fruitful exploration there, but they drop the matter and move on. They don’t even describe Anselm’s argument or do anything else with this bit. Even when Bertuzzi almost gets back there (in minute 56–57), he conflates “greatness” with “value,” which isn’t what Anselm or Dennett meant. And yet by any metric (including Bertuzzi’s), I can already imagine a greater God than theirs. Just picture a God identical to theirs in every way except one: my God replaced every verse in the Bible approving and even commanding slavery with a verse disapproving and outlawing it. Since that is clearly a more valuable God to have, who is greater by every meaningful measure (value, wisdom, power, you name it), I actually can conceive of a God greater than theirs. Which actually disproves Anselm outright: empirically, we have already confirmed that the greatest conceivable God does not exist.

Nevertheless, Stewart instead wanted to move on to the Argument from Understandability, that the very understandability of the universe proves God (toward the end of minute 54). But I’ve already refuted that before (see All Godless Universes Are Mathematical and The Argument from Reason). Contrary to Stewart, this observation isn’t improbable without God. We can actually expect every universe to be as understandable as ours—which isn’t as understandable as Stewart’s argument requires, belying an equivocation fallacy in the meaning of that word between how Dawkins employs it and how Stewart does. But for all the details on that, see my previous discussions.

Back to the present video, you may have noticed by now that none of their digressions bring up what Dennett (much less any other atheist) has written or would have thought on any of the subjects they do raise. Despite that being the very thing they are supposed to be doing. For example, they never discuss what Dennett would himself likely say about these arguments (like the Argument from Understandability or the Argument from Desire), which means they not only don’t know (and thus don’t have any good grasp of Dennett’s thinking) but aren’t even interested in exploring, asking, or finding out what that is. Bertuzzi almost never asks Stewart, the supposed expert on this, any such questions; and Stewart never brings any up. Indeed there are only three exceptions across the entire video. And the first happens here (in minute 57) when Bertuzzi asks Stewart why Dennett might think their God was not greater than Dennett’s universe. To which Stewart offers no answer, making no effort to really understand Dennett’s point of view, much less articulate it to Bertuzzi.

This is another reason they are Christians: they have rejected The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking, and instead continuously avoid any steel-man understanding of why anyone disagrees with them. If they had bothered to have any atheist on this show, dollars to doughnuts they’d point out lots of reasons why their God is not even great (indeed, possibly exactly the same reason I just gave above), much less greater than an awesome universe that has a far greater excuse for all its malignancies: that it was unconscious at the time; and if it weren’t, I’m sure it would have the grace at least to apologize for the inconvenience. But as it is, this godless universe has managed to do everything their God is supposed to have done—without even being awake at the time. One thing unmistakably greater than a Caitlin Clark winning a basketball game is a Caitlin Clark winning an actual basketball game in her sleep. The same reasoning makes this godless universe greater than any God you could credit for it. Their God looks like a bungling no-show by comparison.

Digression on Dennett’s Theory of Consciousness

That’s all they have on the Dawkins clip. They never got into any substantive discussion of Dennett’s views on life or death (so if you want that, you should read Dennett’s chapter on it in A Better Life). They just used that clip to spin out random apologetics mostly unrelated to the question. They move on (starting in minute 59) to discussing Dennett’s positions in the theory of mind. Bertuzzi admirably here almost steers the interview where it should go, by mentioning the possibility of exploring how Dennett’s findings in theory of mind might inform the subjects they just discussed—the second of those only three examples I mentioned of an actual expressed interest in what Dennett actually thought about things and why. But then Bertuzzi, and Stewart, immediately drop that line and instead just discuss Dennett’s positions in the theory of mind, never connecting those back to understand better what Dennett may have been thinking in the clip they just fisked.

Worse, they don’t even really do that. Stewart touches on “consciousness as an illusion” and juxtaposes Dennett’s position (which is based on scientific findings) with Thomas Nagel’s (which isn’t). But Stewart’s description of Dennett’s position is completely inaccurate and uninformed—indeed, essentially vacuous, reflecting what I found early on (above). It is basically useless. You simply won’t learn anything about Dennett’s theory of consciousness from this video. You’ll do better with the articles I linked up top. Stewart rambles on uselessly like this for several minutes, but since he never gets to actually describing what Dennett’s theory actually is, much less the evidence and arguments on which it’s based, there is nothing to respond to here.

Eventually Stewart meanders into the unrelated subject of “God of the Gaps” arguments generally, and then completely botches the entire subject of epistemology. Stewart says he has written papers on this (though I wasn’t able to find any; please post them in comments if you do), but here I will only address the errors exhibited in this video (starting around minute 1:06). Because whether he fixes or avoids these mistakes in his publications won’t matter to a viewer who never reads them. Stewart argues that we use “gap” arguments “all the time” in science; but what he means are Arguments from Silence, not God of the Gaps arguments. By equivocating on what that phrase means, Stewart pretends that strong arguments from silence (when absence of evidence is evidence of absence: I analyze when and why that is indeed the case in Proving History, index, “Argument from Silence”) are just like God of the Gaps arguments. But they are not. God of the Gaps arguments are not Arguments from Silence, they are Arguments from Ignorance. Which is a fallacy.

To illustrate the difference: Stewart uses the example of William Rowe’s Argument from Evil, mischaracterizing it as arguing that simply because Rowe can’t think of a reason God allows egregious evils, that therefore this is evidence against God. That isn’t how Rowe formulates the argument. Rowe argues that if we define God a certain way (which Stewart cannot escape), then it is a hypothesis that predicts certain observable evidence (a good person will evince their presence by taking good actions), and that evidence is not found, which falsifies that hypothesis. This cannot be gotten around by “inventing” excuses for God that you have no evidence are true. Science requires evidence. Whereas God of the Gaps arguments are arguments that deny any need for evidence: you get to fill any gap in knowledge with your Mary Sue (usually by some Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy), without having any evidence at all that that filler is true and actually exists. This violates logic. Rowe’s argument does not. In fact, it is responses to Rowe’s argument that do (by filling his noted gap with made-up stuff).

On the Argument from Evil, see Is a Good God Logically Impossible? and Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed. But Stewart tries to push his apologetics onto consciousness (in minute 1:08), claiming that “consciousness is something that we are not figuring out, and a lot of atheists have realized this, and so they go to these desperate lengths” to say consciousness “is not what everybody has always thought it was.” This is another false witness. Stewart clearly either has never read anything Dennett wrote on this subject, or is deliberately lying to Bertuzzi’s audience about it. Anyone who has read Dennett on this subject will know that he actually presents a vast array of bizarre observations relating to consciousness and then proposes a model that explains (predicts) all that evidence (and, at the same time, doesn’t predict anything we don’t see). He is thus not adopting his theory “in desperation.” He is adopting it on strong scientific grounds: folk beliefs about consciousness have been empirically proved false by all the cognitive sciences; therefore they cannot be true. Dennett then formulates a hypothesis that performs extremely well in explaining all that weird evidence.

This is precisely the thing Christians never do: they never propose a theory that predicts the weird evidence of consciousness; they simply Mary Sue their way to a Texas Sharpshooter fallacy by contriving a Just So story that makes even less sense, has even less evidence, and doesn’t actually explain anything (“Well, God just wanted that way. So there.”). See Holm Tetens, Dinesh D’Souza, and the Crazy Idea of the Mind Radio and Bayesian Analysis of the Barkasi-Sant’Anna Defense of Naive Memory Realism for examples of why this approach doesn’t work—and also for examples of how they are actually ignoring all the evidence that has lead the likes of Dennett to his basic theoretical framework of what they call “illusionism.” You cannot handwave this away like Stewart does. And you certainly cannot remain respectable and do this on a show where you are supposed to be faithfully representing what Dennett actually proposes and the evidence and arguments he rests it on.

Stewart even misrepresents panpsychism—a proposal contrary to Dennett’s that Stewart seems to be disturbed by, because he mentions it unusually a lot. I agree panpsychism is implausible, but even I don’t straw-man it with schoolyard taunts like “how much consciousness does a rock have??” Stewart is such an incompetent philosopher he can’t even think to check Stack Exchange or the Stanford Encyclopedia before babbling such ignorant remarks. Dude. Maybe actually find out first what panpsychists actually say about the consciousness of rocks before purporting to rebut it. Pro-tip: it’s almost exactly the same thing Stewart thinks about the consciousness of rocks—that they don’t have all that much to remark upon. Hell, even the pop magazine Philosophy Now correctly observes that “panpsychism isn’t the claim that inanimate matter has thoughts or perceptions in the way that our brains enable us to have thoughts or perceptions—just that it’s conscious,” and “this consciousness might be unimaginably simple and feeble compared with the consciousness of complex organisms.” The flaw in panpsychism is not that its proponents believe rocks think or feel pain or whatever Stewart incorrectly thinks (they don’t believe that), but that they are proposing a grounding phenomenon for which they have no evidence and that they cannot model in any fruitful way, so it makes no testable predictions. Hence it’s simply a bad explanation—for pretty much exactly the same reason God is (see The God Impossible and The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism).

By contrast, Dennett’s theory requires proposing no new entities; it can be fruitfully modeled; and it does make testable predictions. Dennett fills all his many books on consciousness with examples. There are more than even he explored (see, for example, Wikipedia’s summary of Attention Schema Theory, and the expansions on his thesis by Susan Blackmore and Patricia Churchland). His model predicts when certain forms of consciousness should be present and absent (i.e. what structures and processes generally have to exist for each kind or component of consciousness), that it will be highly confabulatory (most of your conscious field of awareness is fictional, due to your brain taking computational shortcuts to model it), that it can cross-type (e.g. his theory explains all observed forms of synesthesia), and the ways it can be fooled or made to give erroneous reports. For example, Libet-style experiments confirm that conscious experience—hence consciousness—is a computed model after-the-fact of what the brain, as a complex computer, has already decided to believe or do.

That is essentially Dennett’s “multiple drafts” model—which does not, as Dennett has pointed out, disprove free will, but does prove that his model of consciousness, or something substantially like it, is true (and, incidentally, that panpsychism is false). For example, his theory better explains the precise observations of blindsight—exactly how it does and does not function, what it can and can’t do, and under what conditions—which is not something theists have ever achieved. There are various ways to give his theory greater specificity, and indeed, most theories explored now in actual science are derivative of his in some way. For example, quantum cognition and Bayesian cognition models rely on the same fundamental assumptions, and all the leading theories today have evolved into different versions of Dennett’s core insights.

Dennett’s theory is itself an evolution of a view dating back to Aristotle (see Why A Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism Is Probably True vs. Thomism: The Bogus Science), which is more correctly called functionalism, not (as Stewart seems repeatedly to imply) computationalism. Although to be fair here, the terminology can be confusing. The difference between functionalism and computationalism is not the presence or absence of computation, but how consciousness emerges from computation: in functionalism, it is the process of computing, not merely an output of computing, that gives rise to sensation; which is why sensation can only exist over a span of time and not as a static instantiation. Thus, a printed computer readout cannot be conscious; but the process of generating it could be. It just so happens that this elegantly solves many proposed confusions in philosophy—again, from the Zombie Problem to Mary’s Room and even the Chinese Room. Which is a big green flag.

Dennett was also interested in natural explanations of aesthetics and ethics, and how they tie back into his theory of consciousness (as explored by Patricia Churchland, for example, in such books as Conscience and Braintrust), yet Stewart ignores this and simply proclaims (in minute 1:09) that “things like Aesthetics and ethics, and these sorts of things, can’t be explained scientifically and will never be explained scientifically.” That is already known to be false for aesthetics (it has been extensively explained scientifically, and indeed is now a massively successful subfield of cognitive science: see my summary in Musical Aesthetics, which is already ten years old—the science of aesthetics has advanced considerably even since then, e.g. from Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience and The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art to The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Aesthetics and Just in Time: Temporality, Aesthetic Experience, and Cognitive Neuroscience) and it is certainly going to be false for morality (see The Real Basis of a Moral World and my peer-reviewed chapter “Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them)” in The End of Christianity). Dennett himself argued that values like “good” and “bad” have an objective basis without God (contrary to what Stewart claims in minute 1:21). How does Stewart not know this? Why does he not discuss it? Dennett devoted several chapters to this in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Maybe we could hear some honest discussion of that? Why not? Why not discuss some key clips from Dennett’s debate on the source of moral values with Keith Ward? How did this not come up?

Returning to their attempt to recover some respectability for God of the Gaps reasoning, Bertuzzi and Stewart both fail at the concept of prior probability (around minute 1:10), claiming that “if we can’t think of” a natural explanation of some event then we are warranted in concluding God did it, which is a double fallacy: even if it were a valid inference, it would be to some supernatural explanation, not specifically their God (or any—there are lots of possibilities besides, and usually better ones from a global explanatory perspective, since miracle claims span all religions); but it is also not valid, because there is always an available natural explanation (see Christianity Is a Conspiracy Theory and The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius), and the priors always favor it (see Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them). Which is why you need specific evidence for the contrary; and there never is any. This should not be the case if God existed. Which is why this proves he doesn’t. We should have confirmed supernatural explanations by now (see Defining the Supernatural); indeed, they should be obvious (see Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed). Instead everything has went the other way (see Daniel Bonevac’s Bayesian Argument for Miracles). This includes resurrection apologetics (contrary to Stewart’s claims in minute 1:11: see Resurrection: Faith or Fact?) and fine-tuning apologetics (contrary to Bertuzzi’s claims in minute 1:12: see Why the Fine Tuning Argument Proves God Does Not Exist and A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument).

At this point (in minute 1:13), Bertuzzi capably pulls the conversation back to what they were supposed to be discussing—Dennett’s theory of consciousness—giving us the third and last attempt by Bertuzzi to actually get Stewart to tell him something useful about what Dennett actually thought, with his query, “Give me, like, really, one of his best arguments for that conclusion.” Stewart cannot think of one. So he lies, claiming Dennett “doesn’t make an argument for it.” He instead claims all Dennett has are Just So stories (but never gives us an example of one). Then Bertuzzi chimes in asking if this is why Stewart says (as per the title of the video) that Dennett was wrong in “creative” ways, and Stewart says yes. Then Stewart winges on, accusing Dennett of never making arguments, without ever getting around to answering Bertuzzi’s question or even giving an actual example of the claims Stewart was making about Dennett.

I suspect this is because Stewart realized he’d just been caught not knowing what he’s talking about. So he suddenly changes the subject to memetics (in minute 1:15). Which has nothing to do with Dennett’s theory of consciousness. Memes are a property of cultures. As such they do replicate across brains, and thus implicate psychology, but they are not a component of the explanation of consciousness. In fact, in an imaginary Chalmers-style zombie world, where people and cultures exist but no one is conscious (no qualia exist to explain), memes would still exist, and would still operate exactly as the science of memetics predicts. So I cannot understand why Stewart switched topics to this, other than that it was just something he likes to complain about and had to jump to somewhere to get away from having been cornered.

And yet, even then, Stewart burns clock (in minute 1:16) complaining about how the word was coined (if you are confused by his garbled account of that, Merriam-Webster will help you), even though that has nothing to do with the subject’s merit, nor anything to do with Dennett (Dawkins coined the word). Then Stewart just calls it a “silly idea” and an “ad hoc solution” (in minute 1:17) but never explains why it is silly or what he thinks it is supposed to be a solution to, or how it can be ad hoc when it is extensively based on evidence and empirical studies (it is now a standard component of modern computer science, for example). You can literally watch the expansion of memetics as a science in the literature from 2001 (Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science) to 2021 (Memetics and Evolutionary Economics). It is in fact simply a refinement into a mathematically and computationally measurable form of a well-established science that is now over a hundred years old: cultural evolution, a subfield of cultural anthropology.

It is typical of Christians to call well-established scientific facts “silly,” and also typical of them to give no reasons why anyone should think that. Cultural anthropology is an ideological threat to all culture-based delusions like Christianity. So, obviously, it must go away. Therefore it has to be misrepresented, slandered, belittled, and thereby kept from the masses. Here we see this happening in real time. Meanwhile, over the last twenty years there are too many scientific papers in the field of memetics for me to count. It is clearly not “silly.” But, um, we were supposed to be talking about Dennett’s legacy, and his theory of consciousness. So…

An Example of Dennett’s Model at Work

I’ll wrap this by doing what Bob Stewart didn’t: give you an example of “one of his best arguments” for Dennett’s model of consciousness (and there are easily dozens if not hundreds across Dennett’s work). It starts with the empirical fact that most of our visual field is fake—our brain “invents” it, out of convenience, to save computational time and resources. Dennett gave the example of how our brains register objects (like nicknacks, furniture, wallpaper, even people) at the periphery of our vision, which you will find explained by him in detail (with experimental examples) in his 1992 paper “Filling in Versus Finding Out.” Most people think the brain is receiving photons from each object and using them to build the visual field with that data every second; but it isn’t. It often fudges and guesses instead, and thus “reports” to you what all that stuff looks like, but after some initial sampling it stops using outside information and just reproduces what it guesses is there. It has since been confirmed experimentally that this is indeed what the brain is doing; the effect is now called Inattentional Blindness and is an extensive field of empirical study.

There are many other examples of fictional perception. But just for an easy example, look at this image.

Guess what. The blue and green spirals are the same color. Your eyes are receiving photons of exactly the same frequency from them. Yet your brain is computationally guessing (and thus “inventing” your perception) that they are nevertheless green and blue (in fact they are all green). Don’t believe me? Below is a cut from that image, which I made just now, clipping one piece and moving it to merge with another and zooming in, so you can look closely and see the transition. Put your eyes close enough, and you’ll see: it’s all green. There is no blue. The blue is a fiction that your brain is inventing.

Dennett’s theory is sometimes called “illusionism,” which is the idea that qualia (like, here, the greenness of green, the blueness of blue, what it is like to experience these colors) simply are what it is to compute a perception. These colors don’t “exist” in any material or even immaterial sense, but solely as the computation, the process, as seen from within (being the process). So there is nothing more “to explain.” Because this already explains everything. It explains why you experience a sensation of a blue spiral when there isn’t one. It explains why you see anything at all. It’s all down to computation as a process. Nothing more.

“But why?” is to ask the next level question. We just don’t have the data yet to answer that. But the data we do have indicate that it will have something to do with what is different about the arrangement of the circuit for colors as opposed to, say, sounds, and of the circuit for the color green as opposed to the circuit for the color blue. And that any experience will only exist when the circuit is run, not when it just sits there, static and unactivated. And that only the circuit itself can experience it (you have to be the circuit; otherwise you literally “aren’t there,” and thus can’t see it). We can empirically predict from this that any animal—or even computer or extraterrestrial—that replicates the same circuit, will experience the same sensation (the exact same color, for example). Because it can’t not. This was Cottrell’s point in “Sniffing the Camembert.”

There is a huge amount of diverse and converging evidence to this same conclusion. For example, the time delay between receiving the data (electrical signals from cone cells in the eyes to the brain circuit responsible for generating the color experience) and perceiving the result proves that that result is a computation (it has to activate a circuit, and it takes time to run). Likewise, if you damage the circuit, it can’t run, and you no longer experience it running (as in Cerebral Achromatopsia and Selective Dyschromatopsia); or if you wire the circuit to something else, you experience color when you shouldn’t, such as in response to shapes, sounds, or other phenomena (Synesthesia). But the example of fabricatory vision is even more on point, as that demonstrates perception is literally an illusion (there is no blue spiral; and you missed the gorilla).

As Dennett explains:

Suppose you walk into a room and notice that the wallpaper is a regular array of hundreds of identical sailboats, or—let’s pay homage to Andy—portraits of Marilyn Monroe. We know that you don’t foveate, and don’t have to foveate, each of the identical images in order to see the wallpaper as hundreds of identical images of Marilyn Monroe. Your foveal vision identifies one or a few of these and somehow your visual system just generalizes—arrives at the conclusion that the rest is “more of the same.” We know that the images of Marilyn that never get examined by foveal vision cannot be identified by parafoveal vision—it simply lacks the resolution to distinguish Marilyn from various Marilyn-shaped blobs. Nevertheless, what you see is not wallpaper of Marilyn in the middle surrounded by various indistinct Marilyn-shaped blobs; what you see is wallpaper composed of hundreds of identical Marilyns.

Now it is a virtual certainty that nowhere in the brain is there a representation of the wall that has high-resolution bit-maps that reproduce, xerox-wise, the high-resolution image of Marilyn that you have foveated. The brain certainly would not go to the trouble of doing that filling in! Having identified a single Marilyn, and having received no information to the effect that the other blobs are not Marilyns, it jumps to the conclusion that the rest are Marilyns, and labels the whole region “more Marilyns” without any further rendering of Marilyn at all. Of course it does not seem that way to you. It seems to you as if you are actually seeing hundreds of identical Marilyns. And in one sense you are: there are, as I said, hundreds of identical Marilyns out there on the wall, and you’re seeing them. What is not the case, however, is that there are hundreds of identical Marilyns represented in your brain. Your brain just represents that there are hundreds of identical Marilyns.

Which has been confirmed by experimental studies that run things like this experiment, such as putting the equivalent of non-Marilyns in the mix, and presto, we still see Marilyns there even when there aren’t, just as you “still see” blue where in fact there is only green. This is indeed the result in many inattentional blindness tests (see, for example, “Attentional Capture and Inattentional Blindness” or “I Thought I Saw Zorro: An Inattentional Blindness Study” or any of thousands of other studies). It also works across all domains of mental experience (from smells and sounds to thoughts and feelings, e.g. see “The Relationship between Inattentional Insensitivity of Visual, Tactile, and Olfactory Stimuli” and “Priming (psychology)”).

All of this proves: (1) perception is a computational invention (a.k.a. an illusion); but (2) it is still a messy computational attempt at modeling a real environment (so, usually, its invention, the “illusion,” at least tracks reality to some extent; that is, in fact, what it is for, and hence what it evolved to do—albeit imperfectly, as I discussed earlier); and (3) it doesn’t work like a pixelated computer screen (there is no grid in the brain with hundreds of Marilyns being rendered), but as a conceptual experience-field (you compute the concept of there being hundreds of Marilyns on a wall, and thus it feels like that is what you have done; and what it is like to feel that is exactly how we experience it: we “see” hundreds of Marilyns, because we couldn’t compute that and not experience the computation, given that we are that computation). This extends even into thoughts and beliefs, where we have well-documented illusionism in the form of confabulation and delusion; and of course, hallucination.

Dennett’s theory explains and indeed predicts all of these weird results, and it does so without positing any new entities—just what has already been observationally confirmed. That makes it a good explanation. And it offers fruitful goals for future research, such as identifying what the map is between physical circuit arrangement and its associated qualia, which can then inform us as to why different qualia experiences have the distinct qualities they do—for example, why a scent circuit feels different from a color circuit, or a blue circuit from a red one. And attempts to get around his theory with counter-examples always fail—in fact, they end up confirming his theory (again, see the examples of the Zombie Problem and Mary’s Room and the Chinese Room).

But you won’t get any of this from Stewart. He clearly has no clue what Dennett’s theory even is, or what arguments and evidence he has presented for it.

Lessons?

Bertuzzi wraps up the show by asking Stewart the open-ended question: “Is there anything that you would like to mention that we haven’t really talked about?” (in minute 1:17). Stewart decides to suggest there are some “lessons” to be learned somehow from all they’ve discussed…and the irony of them is literally painful.

Stewart really only offers “one” lesson (in minute 1:18), which “is that we have preconceived notions about who the atheists are, and atheists have preconceived notions about who the Christians are, and we need to talk to each other, and we need to be open to learning from one one another,” precisely what they both failed to do in this show. No atheist was brought on the show (least of all anyone familiar with Dennett’s work); and Stewart exhibited no knowledge of anything Dennett actually thought or argued (so he evidently never really listened to him, either). And in consequence, they never learned anything about Dennett’s views. Instead they substituted a bunch of slanderous falsehoods, the very “preconceived notions” that Stewart pretends to deride here.

This is about as Freudian as one can get. So all of Stewart’s pride over dialoguing with atheists (across minute 1:19) is just sad: he clearly never actually listens to them; yet pats himself on the back for supposedly doing so. Dialoguing with atheists is for him just a box to tick, performative rather than substantive. It is not an actual learning objective. This is ironically revealed by his telling Bertuzzi that such dialogue doesn’t require you to challenge or doubt your faith—as if that was a good thing. To the contrary, it gives away the game: thou shalt not doubt or challenge your faith. A sincere inquirer would say that, um, yeah, it does require you to challenge your beliefs, and it might indeed cause you to doubt some. That should in fact be the only reason to do it. It’s why I still listen to Christians and give them a shot: I want to know if there is anything I missed, any error I’ve made; I want to know if I’m wrong. As an expert, that’s my job. Literally. I’m paid to do this. Then I report my findings to the public so they won’t have to replicate my work (at least not as extensively). Which is the role and purpose of all knowledge experts, in all fields. And our central goal is always the same: we want to know if we’re wrong. But Stewart essentially said he doesn’t want to know that, and neither should Bertuzzi.

This is the most fundamental difference between people who still buy Christianity, and those who don’t. Hence they go on about how dialoging with atheists should be in aim of converting them, not actually understanding them (approaching and into minute 1:20). Stewart thinks atheists are atheists because of a “distorted and blown out of proportion evaluation of Darwin,” but he clearly doesn’t understand even the rudiments of evolutionary theory, much less the vast array of facts confirming it, and indeed verifying its vast explanatory power; but he also doesn’t understand that atheists are atheists for vastly more reasons than that. Stewart has completely failed to understand atheists. And he shows no signs of knowing that he has failed at that, or even caring whether he has.

This “reality distortion field” even infects the naive Bertuzzi, who is sadly trusting Stewart to be informing him honestly about Dennett, to the point (in minute 1:20) that Bertuzzi uses as an example the “fact” that, at the dinner Stewart invented a narrative about (which I discussed earlier), Dennett “wasn’t really expecting to interact with someone who’s a devoted Christian, and his interaction, I think, the way that you described it, seems like you kind of changed his perspective on the situation, and maybe even opened his mind up a little bit to what Christianity actually teaches.” But that was all fake. Bertuzzi was actually duped by Stewart’s false narrative about his interactions with Dennett into thinking Dennett had never before heard the Christian gospel, had no experience with personal dialogue with Christians, and was stunned and even moved by the opportunity, to the point that it even “changed his perspective” and “maybe even opened his mind up” to it.

Funny how Stewart never got to mentioning that Dennett was a founder of The Clergy Project in 2010, which began with Dennett’s extensive personal study of Christian ministers published in 2006 (a year before the “story” that Stewart tells about Dennett is supposed to have happened, which, at 18:05, he said was 2007), or that Dennett had been a fully-churched Christian. He grew up going to Christian summer camps and his local “Sunday school,” “sang in choirs and learnt all the hymns, memorised the books of the Bible and all that stuff.” Dennett says he even cultivated an “intense adolescent curiosity about religion” that, to his mother’s consternation, drove him to explore different sects than he was raised in (which was Congregationalism; see a typical example of what they teach, from a church near to Dennett’s at the time). By telling Bertuzzi a lie, by manipulating him into thinking Christians just need to talk to atheists to convert them using an example that cannot possibly have honestly represented Dennett’s knowledge or reactions concerning the Christian message, Bertuzzi has been pushed even deeper into the Christian muck of a completely false understanding of the world. And that’s all at Stewart’s slithery hands.

And that’s it. The rest of the video (from minute 1:22 on) is just some discussion of Stewart describing and plugging his books (one of which I’m looking forward to: a Blackwell Companion to Christian Apologetics, which might finally contain a “best case” summary that I have seen a dearth of lately).

Conclusion

If Christians actually bothered to understand what they sneered at, misrepresented, hid, or ignored, they would no longer be Christians—as proved by the fact that this is how every ex-Christian in history has escaped it (and how every lifelong atheist has avoided being captured by that delusion in the first place). This video is rife with examples of this very phenomenon: time and again, Bertuzzi reveals how his grasp of reality has been manipulated and distorted by his peers (and even by his guest) so that he has no correct grasp of reality. His faith is built on lies. Lies about what Dennett said in his exchange with Plantinga. Lies about what Dennett’s theory of consciousness is and on what it was based. Lies about what atheists actually argue and think. Lies about his own religion and its intellectual and empirical inadequacies.

At no point in this video was Bertuzzi told anything true or correct about Dennett’s intellectual legacy and his thoughts on any subject. Yet we can tell if he had, it would be a severe blow to his faith; he would have to struggle to find an escape from the consequences of the actual facts of reality that are being kept hidden from him by all this distortion, omission, and rhetoric. I have no doubt he’d find an escape—delusion is exceedingly hard to escape, because it comes pre-packaged with defenses against ever being found out (what I call “trap beliefs” in A Vital Primer on Media Literacy, with more examples in An Anatomy of Contemporary Right-Wing Delusions). These include evasion (simply ignoring or walking away from a trigger to cognitive dissonance, and forgetting it and never revisiting it; hence, out of sight, out of mind), confabulation (inventing unevidenced, and often convoluted and irrational, excuses to “dismiss” all uncomfortable or problematic evidence, and assigning those defense-beliefs total confidence without any evidence they are true, thereby essentially inventing thousands of new minutiae to have “faith” in), and fallacy-mongering (dismissing the consequences of disturbing evidence by some illogical maneuver of reasoning).

It is, indeed, only by such devices that the truth of what Dennett thought, said, and taught can be avoided and the Christian religion kept safe from contact with reality.