Wieseltier on Dennett, Leiter on Wieseltier, and, now, Eberle on Leiter

Rick Garnett called our attention to Leon Wieseltier's very critical review, in the Sunday New York Times, of Daniel Dennett's new book.  Rick's post is here.  Wieseltier's review is here, 

Wieseltier's review prompted Brian Leiter to  post some very critical comments on  Wieseltier's review.  Take a look at what Leiter has to say (here).

Now, here's what philosopher Chris Eberle has to say about Leiter's comments:

Wieseltier is a terrific writer and a superb polemicist. He might not have all of his philosophical ps and qs together, but his rhetoric is powerful. And since Dennett is, according to Leiter, pursuing a "rhetorical and psychological" concern to determine "how to get people to give up on religion," a concern he pursues by appealing to a historical narrative that seems to be an exercise in rank speculation, it's hard to see why Leiter would be so terribly upset by Wieseltier's taking up the rhetorical cudgel for the opposite side.

With respect to substantive matters, I don't really think that Leiter does much more than show that Wieseltier isn't a professional philosopher. What's more interesting is what Leiter doesn't show, or even mention. He's correct, I think, that facts about the causal origins of a belief can be relevant to the epistemic status of that belief (though not to it's truth). That's a pretty standard point in contemporary epistemology: if my belief that p is generated by an unreliable belief-forming mechanism (wish-fulfilment, for example), then it's not the case that I know that p. (Knowledge requires reliability, and reliability is partly causal.) Hence, if my belief that God exists is exclusively (mostly?) a result of wish-fulfillment, then I do not know that God exists. God might exist, but I don't know that.

The question is what sort of relevance that general reliabilist point has to religious belief. Apparently, Dennett thinks it has great relevance. But it can be used to discredit claims to religious knowledge only if the story Dennett tells about the history of religious belief, and about its current grounds, is both true and provides reason to believe that religious belief is formed unreliably. If Dennett's narrative isn't actually true, then Leiter's repeated reference to the epistemic relevance of the etiology of belief is itself irrelevant. And Dennett seems to think that Dennett's narrative is speculative... When you cut through all the posturing, and the trivial corrections about minor interpretive points, it's hard to see that Leiter himself has good reason to endorse Dennett's argument.

Interestingly (to me), Wieseltier's criticism of Dennett's scientism seems to appeal to something like the very reliabilist intuition about knowledge about which Letier thinks Wieseltier's ignorant. For Wieseltier appeals to an argument, articulated by C.S Lewis a while ago and rehabilited in whiz-bang, hyper-analytic form by Al Plantinga just yesterday, according to which we lack reason to trust our basic cognitive faculties if Dennett is correct about human evolution. ("If reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection?) I'm inexpert here, but I think that both Lewis and Plantinga articulate this general argument in terms Leiter would very much appreciate: random mutations and natural selection is just not a reliable way to shape truth-acquiring cognitive faculties, and so we have a standing reason to deny that our cognitive faculties are reliable, and so knowledge-producing. Two can play the!
  game Leiter want to play.

Well, there's more, I suppose, but I've said a bit. Those are my reactions. Oh, and one other: if Wieseltier accurately conveys the sensibility that animates Dennett's project (about secularists being 'brights' and morally superior and all that), then he's provided yet another example of the kind of secular dogmatist that makes me just as skeptical about the good will and moral sensibility of some secularists as many secularists are of religious folks like me.
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