Jerry Coyne and I have been debating (on the Internet) several issues as of late. These debates tend to center on philosophical issues — the merits of materialism, the existence of free will, the existence of God, and the like. Coyne’s basic understanding of philosophy and theology, let alone the actual positions he takes, leave a lot to be desired, in my view.

Coyne’s response to criticisms of his philosophical and theological naïveté is to complain about “sophisticated theology,” in which he mocks classical philosophy and theology as pretentious jargon without meaningful substance. He posts a cartoon titled sophisticated medicine that shows a medical professor lecturing to students about Hippocratic medical therapies rephrased in modern terminology. His implication is that we should jettison traditional philosophy because it is irrelevant to modern science.

He gets the analogy wrong. Medicine is an empirical natural science and its relation to ancient medicine is mostly historical. Philosophy is a quite different discipline that depends critically on logic and on metaphysics. Unlike medicine, logic and metaphysics don’t have an expiration date. A better analogy to the importance of classical philosophy to modern thought would be a mathematics professor lecturing about geometry. Modern geometry depends critically on ancient geometry. The Pythagorean theorem remains central to plane geometry, and most of modern geometry is Euclidean. A professor who lectured on geometry and ignored Euclidean geometry would be committing educational malpractice.

A commentator who opines on nature or free will or God’s existence and who is ignorant of classical philosophy is committing intellectual malpractice. Everyone has a metaphysical perspective. Metaphysics is the predicate for thought. The question is: Does a person understand his own metaphysical perspective, and is it coherent and logical metaphysics? Metaphysics is an ancient discipline, and most of the basic theories date to the classical Greeks. Coyne’s materialist perspective is a dumbed-down version of Democritus and Epicurus (and the Roman Lucretius).

The scandal is that Coyne doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and he boasts of his ignorance. In this sense he is an archetypal New Atheist.

Photo: Expiration date, by Mattes (own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.