PZ posted a tremendous rant about me and Michael Ruse last week, which concluded with a heartfelt exhortation to both of us to “fuck off” (his emphasis). The cause was a piece I did on the grauniad site about Ruse’s visit to a creation museum in which he experienced, for a moment, “a Kuhnian flash” that it might all be true. Never mind that this was a momentary feeling. It was unmistakable evidence of heresy, or commerce with the devil God which demanded anathematisation and commination, which it duly got.
What follows is a rather long-winded argument that there is no need for me to respond that PZ can go fuck himself. Portions may later appear on the belief site, but at least here I can operate a consistent policy of banning bores and fools so there is some hope of an enjoyable conversation.
If the government of some hick state were to decide to teach children that Sweden has the highest suicide rate of anywhere in the world or that America fought alongside Britain throughout the second world war (as Tony Blair suggested in his speech to congress) that would be amazingly stupid, but it would not be unconstitutional. If a democratic majority wanted their children taught these things, there would be nothing for the dissenting minority to do but emigrate. They couldn’t claim that the constitution prohibits the teaching of falsehood in schools.
Religion, and by implication evolution, are different. There is a clear constitutional prohibition against the teaching of religion in public schools. That is what has time and time again saved the teaching of evolution, or some watered-down version thereof, in the states with significant fundamentalist populations. Creationism and ID were not thrown out of schools because they were false (though they are) but because they are religious doctrines.
I don’t think this point is open to debate. It’s a simple matter of reading the judgements in the Dover and Arkansas trials.
But if you look at the problem from the new atheist angle, this seems a rather sinister quibble because to them the difference between religion and falsehood is entirely trivial. They see the world divided into truth, reason and science on the one side, and superstition, error and falsehood on the other. Coyne, in particular, is completely explicit about this:
The real war is between rationalism and superstition. Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition1
Hence the attacks on believing scientists like Ken Miller. Their existence is obviously proof that a Darwinian can be a Christian, in the apparently trivial sense that there are distinguished Christian biologists. But if you were to ask Coyne, Dawkins, PZ, or the overwhelming majority of commentators on their site whether a Darwinian should be a Christian, the answer would be certainly not: an atheist Darwinian, or an atheist scientist in general, has more deeply and more sincerely embraced the scientific world view than any “faith-head” possibly could; no one who has truly internalised the scientific virtues could possibly be a religious believer.
I don’t want here to get into a discussion about whether this is true. Christianity at least does seem to require the acceptance of at least one miracle as the most important thing that ever happened in the universe and it’s certainly reasonable for a scientist to reject this. In any case, it’s all part of a much bigger myth, which does far more than science can to explain the world: that of the triumph of reason, truth, and so forth over ignorance, superstition and stupidity. Such myths are not dislodged by argument.
Already, I can hear the voices saying – not all in the tones of E. L. Wisty – “But where’s the evidence?” “How can a scientist believe in miracles?” and so on. But it is precisely at this point, which the new atheists consider their strongest and most unanswerable, that Ruse’s argument takes effect. Suppose we concede that the new atheists are right, and no true, honest scientist could be anything other than an atheist. If that is true, the teaching of science itself becomes unconstitutional. For it is every bit as illegal to promote atheism in American public schools as it is to promote religion. Again, there are recent judgements from the heart of the culture wars to make this entirely clear.
In particular, the footnote on page four of Judge Selna’s ruling in the recent case of a science teacher censured for calling creationism “superstitious nonsense” in class makes this clear. He says The Supreme Court has found that
the State may not establish a “religion of secularism” in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion.” School Dist. of Abington Tp., Pa. v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203, 225 (1963). This is simply another way of saying that the state may not affirmatively show hostility to religion.
That is the point that Ruse has been making, and one which PZ finds either incomprehensible or repulsive. None the less, it was Ruse, not PZ, who testified in both the big trials against creationism. It is a legal and political argument, not a philosophical one; and legally it seems to me fireproof. If Ruse can make it, so can creationists.
Politically, of course, it’s a very different matter. From an American point of view (and this whole argument only applies to American conditions) the last thirty or forty years, since Reagan or possibly even Carter, have seen a war conducted by right-wing Christians against everything decent and honourable in the country. And in that perspective, the complaint that the new atheists are too loud, too aggressive, too uppity, is worse than nonsense. To compromise with fundies is to compromise with Bush, with Limbaugh, with Oliver North, and it was accepting those evil bastards which got America into its present awful state.
To quote one commentator on Coyne’s site:
what did it get non-believers in return to be nice in that way? Nada. The theists became more arrogant and more vicious , not less. But we’re supposed to be nice to people who think atheists are immoral scum — who think they can say it with impunity, in any cultural medium? That has been the case for years now. … We’ve lost too much ground not to fight hard at this point. That GW Bush got elected (and why) was a wakeup call to stop being nice, stop being complacent. A huge portion of American society wants to turn back the clock to the Middle Ages (and that might be too progressive for them). They will not stop until they succeed. God’s work is never done, you know. Think about that. Really think about it.
I might think this is obnoxious and socially counter-productive but my opinion is irrelevant in two ways. I’m not an American, and anyway I know that the obnoxiousness is a great part of its political appeal. You need common enemies and a big mythical narrative to bind a social movement, as the new atheism wants to be, and you don’t get those by blethering on about kittens and cuddles
Nor could Ruse himself be accused of undervaluing the attractions of obnoxious and aggressive argument.
But that is not the point of his attacks on Coyne and anyone else who believes that science and religion are irreconcilable. Whether or not it is true or false to claim they are existentially opposed, and whether or not it is politically wise, the really important point is the legal effect, in the USA, if such an identification were ever made by the courts.
The American courts have rejected, quite rightly, the creationist claim that “secular humanism” constitutes a religion. Judge Selna, in the footnote I quoted earlier, does on to say:
The Ninth Circuit has found that “neither the Supreme Court, nor this circuit, has ever held that evolutionism or secular humanism are “religions” for Establishment Clause purposes.” Peloza v. Capistrano Unified School District, 37 F.3d 517, 521 (9th Cir. 1994).
But the American courts have never been asked to decide whether science is the negation of religion: in fact the defenders of evolution and of science teaching in schools have gone to great lengths to ensure that the question was not asked. The “accommodationists” whom Coyne so despises, have been brought out in all the court cases so far to say that that evolution and Christianity, science and religion, are perfectly compatible. If the courts were asked to decide not whether ID was a religious doctrine, but whether evolution was a necessarily atheist one, and if they decided that Jerry Coyne and PZ and Dawkins and all the rest are right, then science teaching would become unconstitutional in American public schools. PZ and Coyne and all their friends would, in short, have fucked themselves.
1 This is quoted approvingly in the God Delusion, and sourced to Playboy, which proves there is at least one scientist who reads it for the articles.
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Which goes to show, if show were needed, that PZ and co do not understand religion. I suspect they don’t want to understand religion, any more than a creationist really wants to understand evolution, although I wouldn’t like to say whether the motivations for voluntary incomprehension are necessarily similar on both sides.
But it seems to me that such determined and focussed atheism is also unscientific, even by its own lights. It is entirely in order to say that creationism, no matter how disguised, is religious in nature, and as Dover demonstrated it’s not particularly difficult to show this. But then get on with the science – and accept that science is no more going to disprove God than statistical mathematics is going to put casinos out of business.
I no longer read Pharyngula; it jumped the zebra fish some time ago. Once, it was about science. I like science. Now, it’s about anti-religion, in the same way that creationist websites are about anti-science, and I like religion too much to be able to tolerate its shrillness. I read Paleojudaica more often these days, and beliefs don’t enter into it.
R
“If the courts were asked to decide not whether ID was a religious doctrine, but whether evolution was a necessarily atheist one, and if they decided that Jerry Coyne and PZ and Dawkins and all the rest are right, then science teaching would become unconstitutional in American public schools.”
Coyne et al. wouldn’t testify that science is equivalent to atheism or naturalism since science is worldview neutral – it doesn’t make any a priori claims about what exists. It’s only a pretty reliable method of investigating the nature of reality, which may or may not include God. However, if you stick with science as your mode of investigation, and don’t dally with faith or revelation or intuition as reliable grounds for belief, then it’s likely you’ll be skeptical about the supernatural due to lack of evidence, and end up a naturalist. But of course no one, including science teachers, is forcing anyone to stick with science. Indeed most folks in the US, including Ken Miller and Francis Collins, dally with faith, and so end up with supernatural beliefs.
In any case, a principled secular humanism that’s held as a naturalistic worldview is on all fours with supernatural religion precisely because it is a worldview that makes ontological claims. It goes beyond science by saying we should stick with science in deciding what’s real, and what science gives us is nature. So it couldn’t be taught in public schools in the US on pain of violating the separation of worldview and state. But science itself has no such problem, even if those who stick with it often end up with naturalistic worldviews. More about the distinction between science and naturalism at http://www.naturalism.org/science.htm
There is a big difference between teaching children not to believe in god, and teaching children something that may lead them to realize that there may not be a god. The latter is not any sort of establishment of religion, even if the former might be.
It’s as if you agree with the new atheists that religion is a bad influence on society and cannot be reasoned with, but that you want to appease it, so it doesn’t hurt us, rather than try to actually do something about its excesses.
Brilliant writing! Made my day!
As the Physicist Lawrence Krauss correctly points out, science is neutral when it comes to religion. The notion of God or no God is simply irrelevant to science and hence a person can be a scientist or a proponent of science and still hold a particular faith (or no faith).
These new radical atheists are a disgrace to the public understanding of science. Where are those days of the legendary greats Carl Sagan and Steve Gould, where they taught science and not atheism? It’s a pity really.
Despite considering the point “really important”, you apparently do not understand the American legal system at all. An act becomes unconstitutional only when the Supreme Court actually so rules, despite how you yourself, or anyone else (including the members of the Supreme Court) believes they might rule in the future.
And it’s completely implausible that the Supreme Court would ever rule this way — if they can rule that “In God We Trust” isn’t a religious statement, they can rule that teach scientific truth does not violate the Establishment clause.
The current legal standard regarding Church-state separation is the Lemon test, which establishes the following criteria:
1. The government’s action must have a secular legislative purpose;
2. The government’s action must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion;
3. The government’s action must not result in an “excessive government entanglement” with religion.
(Note that the subsequent developments in Supreme Court Jurisprudence has had the effect of weakening, not strengthening, the Lemon Test.)
It would be unconstitutional to teach science only if the primary effect were to inhibit religion, but the primary effect of science is to understand truth about the world. The secondary effects are legally irrelevant.
Finally even if this assertion were true, then so what? The U.S. Constitution is not holy writ, and if the Supreme Court were to be so appalling stupid (even by the standards of American conservatism) as to prohibit the teaching of science under the Establishment Clause, then the Establishment Clause would have to be repealed.
Barefoot Bum: I was sort of almost with you until the last paragraph. Good luck with that campaign to repeal the first amendment. Frankly, I would also argue that any atheist who believes the US constitution isn’t holy writ doesn’t understand what holy writ is. I do know about the Lemon Test: how could I not? It was by application of the Lemon Test that James Corbett was found to have unconstituionally caled creationism “superstitious nonsense”.
H: I’m glad you enjoyed it, but I suspect that Sagan would be on the Coyne/PZ side in this. The Demon Haunted World is a pretty clear manifesto on that subject.
Mr X (may I call you Mr?) I don’ think you have understood my point at all. The point about the new atheists is that they believe that scientific understanding ought to lead to a position of disbelief. It’s not some kind of coincidental result, like saying that teaching people science may lead them to appreciate Chinese food. It’s rather more like teaching them the glories of Chinese civilisation and then asking whether they like Chinese food.
Tom: I just don’t think that Coyne, or PZ or their commentators believe that science is worldview neutral. They may pretend they do, for the purposes of some arguments. But if they really did they wouldn’t denounce Ken Miller and so on with the frequency and ferocity that they do. Those people are denounced as traitors to reason.
[edited] Coyne, for example, in his reply to this, says
So: Coyne thinks it is “almost inevitable [that] the promotion of any scientific truthmay have the ancillary effectwill have the effect of dispelling faith … science … is in absolute and irreconcilable conflict … with faith”. That’s more or less exactly what I have claimed he thinks. It is what the fundies fear about evolution. And if the courts were to agree, evolution would be fucked in American public schools.Since you don’t address here the validity of the anti-accommodationist arguments (“I don’t want here to get into a discussion about whether this is true”), your position appears to be that they should refrain from making their arguments–even if valid–for reasons of political expediency. In other words: “Shsh. You may be right, but keep quiet about it.”
RichardW (sigh). No. This is not an argument about political expediency: it is about the narrow legal question of what may be taught in American public schools.
As for the validity of accommodationist arguments – I am bored to fucking tears of the whole question. That includes both the philosophical Q of whether science and Christianity should be compatible; and the political question, which I take to be whether the culture wars are best fought by pushing back rudely against Jesus.
Barefoot Bum has hit the nail on the head: the Lemon Test means that even if Evolution led to (i.e. gave strong evidential support to) atheism it wouldn’t be unconstitutional to teach it because there’s a compelling secular purpose behind doing so. Even Scalia would agree with this (at least he should based on his previous arguments).
Let’s suppose your argument is true though: why are you only attacking the atheist writers? Why don’t you spend any time attacking writers like Francis Collins, Ken Miller, William Lane Craig and Keith Ward all of whom argue that science lends support to belief in God? If your legal argument is correct and they’re right in saying that scientific study ought to lead to theism then teaching science would be just as unconstitutional as it would be if it led to atheism. Despite this, you write sympathetically of the science->religion group (here for example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/apr/29/religion-christianity) while being consistently hostile to the science->atheism writers. If you’re correct about US law then you’re causing just as much damage to science education as Coyne and Dawkins.
Actually, the point that occurs to me is the converse of this discussion: that this whole thing makes it clear why creationists now call it creation science and are so assiduous in courting scientists and finding “money quotes” from scientists’ writings: if they can convince the public and the courts that ID is science rather than religious doctrine there can be no constitutional prohibition on teaching it in schools. That seems to me much more of a likely danger than that the courts will accept an argument that all of science teaching is an unconstitutional promotion of atheism.
wg
wendy: yes: that is why they call it science but it has been pretty thoroughly trashed by the courts.
lurker Thanks. That’s a twist I hadn’t thought of. I doubt, though, that I am quite as influential a figure in American debate as Coyne or Dawkins. Seriously, if what you are trying to do is to defend science education in America and even in this country, the accomodationists are working much more effectively against the enemies of science than the Coyne crowd. It is not the American Atheists or whatever they call themselves who are bringing lawsuits against Christian science teachers for claiming that evolution shows the glory of god. It is the fundies attacking supposedly atheist teachers. And Christian scientists are a fantastically useful, quite possibly invaluable, bulwark against them. So the answer to your question is that I write about what matters politically and socially. Keith Ward’s opinions don’t; whatever their intellectual merits.
Peter, I’m not going to take you seriously. If your analogy for a priest being a scientist is a priest being a rapist, your understandings of science, christianity and even rape are too twisted to argue with.
Larry Moran made the same point when he said that it would be laughable to say, “Some scientists are astrologers, therefore science and astrology are compatible.” Please don’t try to divert a perfectly straightforward point with your outrage about an imaginary insult.
I for one would like to see you address the question I asked before: Which beliefs a scientist might hold would compel you to think that his faith had tainted his scientific thinking? And then tell us how Miller’s and Collins’s etc. beliefs are different from that. That kind of thing would actually further a constructive dialogue, which I can only assume we’re all interested in.
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acb wrote: “And Christian scientists are a fantastically useful, quite possibly invaluable, bulwark against them. So the answer to your question is that I write about what matters politically and socially.” So in other words, it is about political expediency. It seems to me that your argument with Coyne, PZ, and the other “new atheists” is not so much about tactics but about goals. Your goal is simply to protect the teaching of Evolution in US public schools, while their goal is something very different: to challenge the claims made by religion and try to win people over to atheism or agnosticism, and atheists and agnostics over to the position that it’s good to challenge the claims of religion. There’s no reason to expect that the tactics that will best serve one goal will necessarily help the other.
You take issue with what the New Atheist camp is doing to promote atheism because you feel that it undermines what you are trying to do to protect the teaching of evolution, but his primary goal is not the same as yours. The New Atheist camp takes issue with what they describe as the “accommodationist” position taken by organizations dedicated to protecting the teaching of evolution because they feel it undermines their own goals. The problem is not your differences so much as your similarities: both sides feel that since you agree about so much, you should be allies in these fights. What both sides need to remember is that while your worldviews are essentially similar, your priorities are very different, and (in the short term at least) somewhat dissonant.
Andrew,
Shouldn’t “accommodationist-in-chief” be capitalized? I wonder if Coyne needs a copy-editor.
Peter,
This is a false analogy: “Some scientists are astrologers, therefore science and astrology are compatible.” What Larry should have said is “therefore science and belief in astrology are compatible. But then he would have exchanged mockery for a simple fact.
Anyone can practice methodological naturalism. Unless you have some evidence that Ken Miller or Freeman Dyson, or Fred Hoyle any other theistic scientist allows (or allowed) his (or her) religious beliefs to contaminate his scientific endeavors, your argument reduces to guilt by association.
Meanwhile, you have to account for why religious beliefs constitute such a privileged status among the many types of unempirical things people hold to be true. Like memes, for example.
Am I boring or a fool in your pantheon Andrew?
Meanwhile PZ has written a much better reply to your silliness.
I wonder what you and/or Michael Ruse might say about an obvious extension of this argument that linking evolution to atheism might make it unconstitutional to teach evolution in public schools: Many people, including many ex-theists, have found the argument from evil (especially as applied to monstrous evils like the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide) a convincing argument against theism. (To paraphrase Hume, is He unaware of evil? Then He is ignorant. Is He unable to prevent evil? Then He is impotent. Is He unwilling to prevent evil? Then He is not benevolent.) Would you or Ruse claim that making such arguments puts the history curriculum at risk, because any good inference linking such historical events to a theological conclusion makes teaching those historical events themselves (in the public schools) equivalent to establishment of religion? If not, can you explain the difference between the two cases to me?
Andrew: Yes, you may call me Mr. All my friends do 🙂
I understand that Coyne et al say that an understanding of evolution in particular, and of science in general, should lead one to atheism. But the “should” in this sentence is the “should” of logical consistency and rationality. They have never claimed that people who learn science should be told that they have to stop believing in god. Science is also incompatible with astrology, but there is no need to point that out explicitly when teaching astronomy. That’s a discussion that can happen in the public sphere outside of the classroom.
As has been pointed out in other comments, science and religion are compatible in the trivial sense that an individual can choose to accept both. That’s what’s relevant for this issue. We can teach children about evolution without telling them they have to disbelieve in god, because the science classroom is only about the science. What Coyne et al are pointing out is that these beliefs are in tension with each other in a PHILOSOPHICAL sense.
“I do know about the Lemon Test: how could I not? It was by application of the Lemon Test that James Corbett was found to have unconstituionally caled creationism “superstitious nonsense”.“
OK (and that was the question that led me over here), but we seem to understand it differently. Again, as BB points out, the prong most obviously dragged into play (as it seems to very non-expert layman me) would have to be 2 (1 would be pretty tough to deny, unlike in the Corbett case – however oddly decided – or Kitzmiller, if from the other end, and 3’s just seems very vague in this sort of case). It’s very, very hard to imagine folks putting forward a successful case that science education had the primary effect “of either advancing or inhibiting religion”, as long as the court didn’t have a majority of folks sympathetic to creationism. (And if Scalia did get (or already has) four compatriots on this subject, than it likely doesn’t matter what new atheists do or do not say, as any case likely to make it the SCOTUS will have enough wriggle room for them to ignore precedent and ruin good science education – they might appreciate the assist, perhaps, but it certainly wouldn’t be necessary.)
“The point about the new atheists is that they believe that scientific understanding ought to lead to a position of disbelief.“
Perhaps what’s going on here is semantic ambiguity combined with a version of the is/ought confusion? I don’t think the new atheists believe (at least primarily) that scientific understanding ought to lead (etc.) in the sense that I ought to balance my checkbook, but rather in the sense that a ball dropped off a tower on earth ought to fall to the ground – a natural consequence. An is, in other words, but not at all clearly an intended result – if they’re right, that’s just the way it goes, basically coincidentally (after all, the world could be otherwise, and science could be convincingly said to, just in the nature of things, inexorably lead to a position of at least possible belief (all dates stop at 4004BC, dinos and people and everything else found mixed together in the fossil record, genetics support an orchard rather than tree model, geology finds evidence of a massive and rapid worldwide flood, archaeology finds a very big boat on a certain mountain, linguistics support Babel story, etc., etc.), but that wouldn’t make teaching science unconstitutional under any reasonable reading, don’t you agree?
lurker: the analogy with history does not hold for two reasons. Firstly, the premise that all good historians are atheists is laughable, whereas the new atheists do believe that all good scientists are to a first approximation atheists (see the popularity of the stats about religious belief and membership in elite scientific bodies). Second, and more important, the fundies have their own interpretation of history, which seems to be entirely compatible with what is taught in American public schols (if anything is). So it is not a social reality that history and religion are understood to be in conflict; Selna says somewhere that judges must interpret on the basis of social realities, but I have a train to catch and can’t run down the quote.
Dan S I think you’re making a couple of assumptions which don’t hold. First, the model of religion implies that the paradigm case is a literal interpretation of genesis — which I entirely agree that science rules out — but then all Christian scientists would agree that, too. This doesn’t save them from the scorn of Coyne or PZ.
Secondly, I think it is absurd to talk as if we could be entirely free of a link between “is” and “ought”. Of course we ought to believe what is true. That’s the basic pre-scientific foundation for discovering it. You can construct different forms of “ought” and I don’t want here to argue that they are all moral. But there is a clear sense of obligation. Otherwise no one would have these arguments.
It is a grotesque misreading of Dawkins or Coyne to suppose that they do not think (1) that atheists are morally superior to religious believers (2) that atheism should spread and that this would increase both the moral and intellectual wealth of the world and (3) that science in general and evolutionary biology in particular conduce to (2).
It is in the context of that particular set of beliefs that the denial of creationism stops being purely scientific and becomes part of the promotion of atheism. And it is in that context that people do actually, as opposed to might theoretically, bring lawsuits.
sceptical scientist: I think you have it dead right. I would only quibble with your use of “expediency” if that implies that I am sacrificing some less important goal for a more important one. It’s not expediency. It’s a genuine difference of aim. I don’t think the spreading of atheism is important one way or another. I certainly wouldn’t join any organisation committed to it.
Andrew, you said, “It is a grotesque misreading of Dawkins or Coyne to suppose that they do not think (1) that atheists are morally superior to religious believers.” Could you back that claim up with one or two quotes?
And I would seriously be interested in your answers to my earlier questions, especially: Which beliefs a scientist might hold would compel you to think that his faith had tainted his scientific thinking? And then tell us how Miller’s and Collins’s etc. beliefs are different from that.
Peter, I’m not going to produce proof texts for the argument that Dawkins belives atheists are more moral than believers. The whole second half of the god delusion is an argument on those lines and if you can’t see that there’s no point in arguing with you.
Scientific thinking applies to the practice of science. The evidence of the last century is quite clear that outside the lab good scientists can hold quite monstrous beliefs, from the Stalinist Haldane to Wernher von Braun, and still produce solid scientific results.
Muscleguy, I think of you more as the guy at the back of the hall with a can of Tennants (sp?) in one hand beckoning to the lecturer with the other, and shouting “Outside, Jimmy! outside”
Peter,
You appear scandalized by Andrew’s suggestion that Myers, Coyne, or Dawkins consider atheists to be intellectually superior to theists like Collins or Miller, but this same assumption seems to be the default position underlying your question about faith “tainting” scientific thinking. Aren’t you playing both sides of this one?
Andrew,
But if people bring lawsuits against science educators for the reasons you mention, which might indeed happen, isn’t it patently obvious that those lawsuits will simply be thrown out? I mean, there’s absolutely nothing in First Amendment jurisprudence to give such a lawsuit a leg to stand on. Or are you maintaining that a real judge would take any of this seriously?
It’s hard to tell if you’re pursuing a wry joke here or if you’re actually sincere.
Andrew,
I’m not impressed with the distinctions you’re drawing here.
First, if indeed the argument from evil based in historical events is a good argument against theism, then any ‘good’ historian, i.e. one who understands not only the historical facts but their implications for certain religious beliefs, will be an atheist. Note that this is the precisely parallel to the new atheists’ reasons for saying that good scientists (scientists who consistently apply their epistemic standards and values, rather than suspend them selectively in particular areas) should be atheists.
Second, your claim that the religious groups fighting science education don’t have an issue with the history curriculum is both doubtful (good historical method is transparently incompatible with their ‘sola scriptura’ approach to evidence about the past) and ignores the fact that there are many historical ‘facts’ they find thoroughly inconvenient (as one very small example, consider the actual history of National Socialism contrasted with the ‘it’s Darwin’s fault’ nonsense promulgated by these groups). If, as you seem to be claiming, any conflict between curriculum and a ‘socially real’ religious point of view counts as an argument for the curriculum’s unconstitutionality, then the curriculum faces far wider legal trouble than you’re allowing here, and on grounds that you certainly can’t blame the new atheists for.
Further, even if the court actually decided to rule against science on such grounds, blaming the new atheists would be absurd. The real problem would (quite obviously) lie with the radical social conservatism of a court that found ‘equal protection rights’ to save George Bush’s election but somehow couldn’t find similar equal protection rights to require uniform practice across the country (and in different demographic regions) to protect voters’ right to have their votes accurately counted. Among other things, they would either have to use a test far more protective of religious belief than the Lemon test is, or they would have to endorse the creationist claim that scientists only accept evolution because it’s a way of defending atheism, that is, they would have to claim that ‘good’ scientists should actually reject evolution. (And if things go that far off the rails, of course, we’ll have to acknowledge that the U.S. has become a de facto theocracy.)
My problem, as a teacher of political science, rather than one of the natural sciences, is that after eight years of Bush, and six earlier years of a Republican Congress, the idea of a secular classroom has been seriously trashed in the US. I’m also puzzled. Certainly, PZ told Andrew to fuck off, but he and Andrew seem to be in agreement that the science classroom should be secular (as opposed to telling religious people that they are holding to foolish superititions). If that is so, what the fuck is this argument about?
“…what the fuck is this argument about?”
In the summer of 1917, the Russian provisional government faced an attempted coup by a group of Tsarist officers led by General Kornilov. Now there were those in the Bolshevik party who argued that they should make no distinction between the Kerensky government and the Kornilovists, on the grounds that both were enemies of the working class and aimed to destroy the revolutionaries.
Lenin, however, famously said, “If two men are trying to kill you, but one is using a revolver, while the other is feeding you small doses of arsenic, you must deal first with the man with the gun, and leave the poisoner till later.” Lenin prevailed; the Bolsheviks made common cause with Kerensky. And, in the popular uprising later in the year, he prevailed again, whereas if the intransigents had won the debate, Kerensky would still have fallen, but in all likelihood the Bolsheviks would have been extirpated. [None of this should be taken as saying that any outcome was ideal.]
This argument is about the fact that in the face of the Kornilov rising, Myers and his claque are the ultra leftists, and the “accommodationist” line corresponds to the position taken by Lenin.
Chris,
That’s an interesting bit of history, followed by an absurd parallel. Who are you suggesting PZ et al. should ally themselves with? Are you declaring Ruse a ‘Kerensky’, and if you are, do you mean it in the sense of the old, dismissive use of the name? What is the outcome we should expect if PZ et al. do ally themselves with Professor Ruse? Who would you see as parallel to Eugenie Scott? It just doesn’t add up in any helpful way.
More to the point, we need to ask what outcome should we aim at here, anyway? Presumably, one desirable outcome is good quality, secular science instruction in the schools. On this issue, I don’t see any real barriers between Ruse (or Andrew) and PZ, despite all the heat of this debate.
Another worthwhile goal might be a higher level of tolerance for those of us who forthrightly reject religion; surely Jefferson’s famous remark about ‘neither picking my pocket nor breaking my leg’ deserves some acknowledgement! But here there’s something very peculiar going on: as PZ points out, it’s more than passing strange when Professor Ruse visits an expensive, grotesque monument to lies and responds by attacking, not the liars and their propaganda, but instead a group of atheists who he somehow blames for…well, it’s hard to say what he blames them for, but he sure doesn’t like them.
Of course, blaming atheists for the rejection of evolution amongst American evangelicals is also utterly ahistorical. The association between evolution as a scientific theory and social Darwinism is much more important here: progressive evangelicals (Wm Jennings Bryan is a good example, but far from the first) didn’t distinguish the two; his opposition to evolution was largely due to this conflation. And of course, contemporary creationists continue to conflate evolution by natural selection with crude, ‘might makes right’ ethics.
On the other hand, the biblical literalism that most YECists espouse originated as a response to 19th century biblical criticism, which applied serious textual and archaeological evidence to study the historical development of modern Christianity. The point is, atheists really have nothing to do with the origins of either of these central tropes of creationism.
So Ruse’s complaint against the ‘new’ atheists must instead be about the contribution atheists make to creationism today. But even this complaint doesn’t withstand examination. After all, what we find, in figures ranging from Morris to Johnson and Dembski, is a direct inference from ‘naturalistic’ (i.e. secular) evolution to atheism. These people think Miller’s position is just as atheistic in its approach to science as PZ’s. That’s a whole lot of crazy, and you sure aren’t going to pacify it by hiding forthright atheists under the rug.
I heard you on the radio today (SR) and now, after having read a short intro of it, I feel I just must find your book.
Can’t resist publishing this link especially for you:
http://www.bokborsen.se/Clarke+Brian-bok-till-salu-3396104_1_1707.htm
I think we might have a copy of the trout book somewhere, the title sounds eerily familiar to me, and we do have some fishing gear lying around in a shed.
Nobody is suggesting hiding forthright atheists under rugs. All that is being suggested is that in the specific cause of defending the teaching of science in American public schools, treating scientists as the enemy, who share that one objective but who somehow also contrive to reconcile a commitment to scientific endeavour with religious belief in their private lives, is self defeating.
I am an atheist, at least functionally. In a calm environment I would be happy to discuss with such people why their position seems to me to be self contradictory. But, by your own account, this is not a calm environment. Therefore, it seems to me to be the height of folly to respond to public figures who might be your allies by quote mining their writing and setting them up for ridicule. Such an approach makes sense only if you believe that converting scientists away from theism is more immediately important than seeing to it that children are properly educated. Assuming you and Myers don’t actually think that, you’re machine-gunning yourselves in the foot every time you go off on one about this.
(I’m aware of the history of YEC in the United States; I’ve also read several powerful critiques of it by theologians, which, although I personally entirely reject their frame of reference, I would unhesitatingly use in arguing with YECs, because they precisely demolish their arguments on the ground they would choose.)
Wrong — the American courts have been asked that question, and “the defenders of evolution and of science teaching in schools” — as you call such people — have no control over whether the courts are asked that question. For example, that question was asked in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 529 F. Supp. 1255 (Eastern Dlst. Ark. 1982). Section V© of the McLean opinion says,
.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mclean-v-arkansas.html
Judge Overton is wrong here — even if evolution is a kind of religion or has strong religious implications, the establishment clause can still be satisfied by continuing to teach evolution but requiring that it be balanced or tempered by teaching criticisms or by making evolution-disclaimer statements. Unfortunately, for some time now there have been no active court cases that could be used for testing different legal theories about evolution education.
When Andrew said that it would be “a grotesque misreading of Dawkins or Coyne” to suppose that they didn’t think atheists morally superior to religious believers, I very simply asked him for just a little evidence:
Nothing unreasonable, just a quote or two to back up an extremely (one is tempted to say grotesquely) sweeping statement. Which should be easy to find, especially if the “whole second half” of TGD consists of nothing else. But then Chris weighed in and said:
Excuse me? I appear what? If you think that my asking for one or two quotes amounts to being “scandalized” then you obviously have no idea what that word means.
Actually, I think it’s at least possible that Dawkins for one believes atheists to be morally superior. But in anything I have read he always was at pains to stress just that religion has no superior claim to morality. That, of course, involves no default superiority of any competing idea. But maybe he said something somewhere else that might be construed as atheist supremacy. And if it exists, I’d like to know about it, as that would change my perception of him.
Sorry, that second blockquote — of the court opinion — did not come out right. I didn’t know that spaces are not allowed in blockquotes here (comment previews would be nice).
Chris,
It seems to me you have things turned around here– as I said above, Professor Ruse and Andrew’s subsequent ‘Grauniad’ piece turned a visit to Ken Ham’s creationist museum into an occasion to attack atheists and blame them (somehow) for the trouble they’re causing. But these atheists broadly agree with Ruse and Andrew about the science and about the importance of good science education. So why does a visit to the creationist museum trigger criticisms of atheists rather than criticisms of Mr. Ham? I think Professor Ruse has some explaining to do on this!
I don’t really want to waste time going down the ‘you started this’ road. The fact that PZ and others (including me, in my own small way) have criticized the theological ideas of figures like Ken Miller and Francis Collins doesn’t constitute quote mining, or an attempt to hold them up to ridicule. It’s just criticism (and fair criticism) of their attempts to justify religious beliefs (in the case of Collins, there’s little need to hold the ‘if ethics, then God’ argument up for ridicule: it wears its ridiculousness on its sleeve). If they want to believe, fine– but if they want to argue for those beliefs, they should expect critical replies from those who disagree. I don’t get the impression that Ken Miller is terribly thin-skinned about this, and I haven’t seen complaints from Francis Collins either (though I gather he’s still defending the same bad argument). So why do you think you or Professor Ruse should be thin-skinned on his behalf?
Further: do you actually have any examples of PZ or some other main figure quote mining Miller or Collins or anyone else, for that matter, on these issues? I’d suggest, given the treatment of Richard Dawkins and other ‘new’ atheists by figures like Terry Eagleton and Christopher Hedges, that raising the ‘quote mining’ charge against PZ here is getting things backwards: at the very least, Dawkins is more sinned against than sinner on that score.
Andrew, you said:
And why do you think that anyone should just take your word for it? Not even admitting for the possibility that you could be wrong sounds just a tad dogmatic to me, to be honest. So what you’re saying is, ‘If you don’t accept that I won’t give an argument for my claim, then I won’t argue with you.’ The point is that you didn’t argue in the first place.But why do the work yourself when you can make somebody else do it for you? Okay, I’ll bite.
Quite on the contrary. In Chapter Six, he outlines a case for the origin of morality. He says that it’s very likely to have been shaped by our evolutionary past, citing for main reasons to believe this: “genetic kinship … reciprocation … the Darwinian benefit of acquiring a reputation for generosity … and the … benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeable authentic advertising.” (pp. 219-220) So morality is a common human trait we all share and that, other things being equal, everybody is equally capable of.Then he goes on to say that he is
So he explicitly says that he at least isn’t advocating atheist moral superiority, but that he is concerned with showing that religion does not have any reasonable claim for the moral high ground.It is, in fact, your misreading that is grotesque, since it flies in the face not just of the spirit of what Dawkins writes but even the letters.
Peter Beattie,
I apologize if I underestimated the robustness of your temperament in being able to withstand a little hyperbole. You’re not scandalized, just curious in a purely rational and non-hysterical manner. I get that. But the point I was making was not about your emotional reaction to Andrew’s argument, but your intellectual reaction; namely: incredulity that Brown would infer from the neo-atheists’ writings that they felt that atheism was morally and intellectual superiority to theism (why else would you ask for evidence?). This you immediately followed up on with the question of why we should not assume that a religious outlook is intellectually (if not morally) inferior to a secular one.
If you believe it is a proper default position that religious scientists cannot embrace thier work as purely as secular ones, then why do you feel that PZ et al need defending from the same charge?
Chris Schoen said:
It’s not incredulity. As I said above, I think it’s at least possible that Dawkins for one believes atheists to be morally superior. But I’ve actually read what Dawkins and Coyne have written. And as far as I can tell, they’re just not saying what Andrew believes they are saying. So in case I missed something that can be construed differently from my interpretation, I’d like to be directed to a passage that supports Andrew’s interpretation. And yes, I’m curious about that. That’s why I went to the trouble to quote the relevant passage from TGD that shows that Andrew’s reading is anything but self-evidently correct. If that doesn’t put the ball in his court, he obviously doesn’t want to argue his case at all.
I don’t, actually. My follow-up was an attempt to get Andrew to specify to some extent his intended meaning of the word “compatibility”. In order to do that, I suggested that, in the interest of furthering a substantive debate about his views, he give an example of something that would violate such compatibility. Which so far he has ignored, I’m afraid.
I’ve been busy. But I’ve actually read what Dawkins and Coyne have written. And as far as I can tell, they’re just not saying what Andrew believes they are saying.
I think there is a degree of semantics here. For a start, I take it that being truthful and following the evidence are virtues which demonstrate the moral superiority of those who possess them over those who do not. And it is uncontroversial that Dawkins and Coyne believe that a truthful and humble scrutiny of the evidence for god must
leastlead anyone to their position. So to the extent that people like Collins and Miller do not follow them, this is evidence either of stupidity or of bad faith (which is a moral defect).But it goes further than that. Chapter six is not thematically part of the first half of the god delusion: the second half is all about the supposed moral evils of religion, including the farcical and disgusting discussion of Hitler and Stalin, and whose team they are on in this playground argument. No one could read that, believe it, and not suppose that abandoning religion makes people and societies more moral.
That he denies this earlier doesn’t actually show anything very much except that he is capable of self-contradiction and incoherent argument.
This discussion of Dawkins’, et al. views on the moral superiority of atheists has nothing to do with Andrew’s claims about U.S. constitutional law. Does anyone think that there is a real worry here, that science education might realistically be constitutionally compromised by the public statements of outspoken atheist scientists?
Yes. That is the nub of the question.
Andrew, the argument you make is a big stretch.
It’s just silly to assume that only stupidity or bad faith could explain a failure to understand and accept a sound argument whose premises you accept. Human thought processes are far more tangled and complex than that. In general, what we believe is not the output of a reasoning faculty responding to evidence in a rational way. It’s a product of training (here upbringing and reinforcement play a huge role) and where rationality of a more deliberate sort really does guide belief, this itself is a product of training and reflection. There is no reason to expect that everyone will automatically extend the standards and epistemic values they learn in the practice of science to their own religious convictions (in fact some very clever people have argued–think of James, and more recently, William Alston– that there is no reason that they should).
Unfortunately the looser standards required to defend the rationality of religion are so loose that (as others argue, and convincingly) they really come down to ‘anything goes’. Even so, giving this argument, even in great and subtle detail, will not convince many to change their minds: there will be many steps, and many points at which premises can be questioned (along with maneuvers that would allow any belief to qualify as rational go other skeptical maneuvers that allow any claim to be questioned: here, as Adolf Grunbaum has put it, we’re really ‘in the mud’, epistemically).
So the notion that you can hang a claim of ‘moral superiority’ on Dawkins by this argument doesn’t stand up to examination.
Your final maneuver doesn’t work either. In the second half of GD, Dawkins aims to undermine the widely accepted notion that religion is an unquestionable source of moral good (and atheism a source of evil). He’s not trying to give a balanced evaluation of all the moral effects of religious belief, which has obviously also motivated many people to undertake good works. He’s trying to undermine claims to special moral authority and moral superiority on the part of religion and religious institutions. This is not a ‘playground’ argument: the moral wonders of religion continue to be widely invoked against atheism and in defense of the importance of religious belief; they deserve a reply, and your main objection to Dawkin’s reply is outrage at his plain-spoken, aggressive argumentation. At least where I was trained, though, that’s fair ball.
By contrast, your cheap charge of ‘self-contradiction and incoherent argument’ needs a lot better support than you give it. When you insist on an interpretation that Dawkins explicitly rejects, of material that simply does not demand the interpretation you give it, you’re engaged in a rhetorical game that you’d howl about if Dawkins did the same to you.
Why are my comments still awaiting moderation?
Because I have been away from the computer, or at least from this site …
Taking things in order: once someone has posted here and been approved they are no longer held for moderation, so their comments can come through before those of people who are so held.
Secondly. Larry Fafarman: The claim that evolution constitutes a religion has been made and rejected by the court. But it is different from the claim that evolution necessarily entails atheism. And, unless you’re a lawyer, I am suspicious of all assertions that “Judge X is wrong”. Even then, there might be two opinions.
Bryson Brown: Thank you — really — for a long and thought-provoking argument. I don’t think we’re going to agree, though, becasue we are disagreeing, amongst other things, about Dawkins’ tone, and this is hard to establish an agreed position on. Perhaps I would find you more credible if I had never read anything else of his. I might find TGD more reasonable and moderate if I didn’t know that he used the term “faith-heads”; that he praises Sam Harris and PZ for their attitude to religion; that, when I asked him once why he so hated moderate religion, he replied “because I care about the truth”.
As for the accusation of self-contradiction and incoherent argument, this goes to the root of the question of whether he is trying to explain religion or explain it away. The scientific study of religion, in the light of evolutionary theory as well as other disciplines, is entirely admirable. I do all I can to publicise it. And the TGD does contain some chapters dealing with that research, though they are not as good as the corresponding ones in Dennett. But you can’t take that science seriously and hope, as Dawkins obviously does, for a future in which religion will wither away. That is just an apocalyptic fantasy, like the arrival of communism or indeed the belief that “we alone can rebel against our selfish genes”.
Dawkins has always been given to self-contradiction, right from the Selfish Gene. When it comes to biology, I am prepared to cut him a lot more slack than some critics, for what my opinion is worth. But the Darwin Wars was written on the assumption that his meaning was more important than what he said. And he is a good enough writer (a very good one) that this distinction can consistently be made. When it comes to his writings on religion, I am less charitable, because I know a great deal about the subject in a purely empirical way.
I don’t think that William James does come down to “anything goes”. This is partly because I revere him, I suppose; but also because it seems to me that he tests religious experience and arguments by their fruits. That is more of an assertion that we can’t in advance know what will go than a claim that anything goes.
So, while I take entirely your argument about the complexity and fallibility of our reasoning processes, you are assuming, too easily, that the standards and epistemic values of science could and should be the right tools for thinking about religion. Also, more generally, this raises the problem of what to do about the people who for one reason or another cannot acquire and interiorise the standards and epistemic values of science. And obviously they don’t do so by reading about science, assuming they can in fact read. Are they simply to be written off as outside moral or rational discourse? That’s a serious question, by the way, to which Aristotle would have had no hesitation in replying “yes”.
Starting with you last point, Andrew, I think almost everyone is capable of rational (including moral) discourse. The basic standards of scientific inquiry are really just a refinement and extension of the standards we apply to settle everyday descriptive claims: we learn to be reliable observers through training and upbringing; we learn that we are reliable observers by being able to make reports on our own that others independently endorse; we learn to reason about our surroundings, and we can support our patterns of reasoning by appeal to both agreement with others (spontaneous and often independent) and fit with our observational reports.
Where science runs into difficulty is not in changing any of these basic principles, but in how it is conveyed: popular negative tropes about sceicne (science/math is hard, that’s just for those white-coat types, who cares how X works, I just use it, etc.) reflect a broad cultural disinterest and intellectual laziness that is a major contributor to the persistence of creationism, global warming denial, HIV-AIDS denial etc. Sources of these attitudes are multiple, from social pressure on kids (only geeks and nerds care about that stuff) to weak incentives for gifted kids to become science/math teachers to the cultural divide and the fact that media commentators are typically on the arts & letters side of that divide (all too often defensively so).
Moving towards rational discourse on these topics is a big job– but it’s crucial, and it’s important not to be too pessimistic. Science can be very convincing to students when it’s presented well– I’ve actually shifted a few bright fundamentalist students towards theistic evolution over the years, in a course that examines the history of earth and life sciences from a philosophical perspective.
You’re right that we don’t know in advance what will work. But it’s also important to keep some real continuity with (and, in fact, to refine and extend) our standards for what ‘working’ consists in. The fruits of religious experience and arguments are pretty dubious, and certainly separable from their doctrinal contents. The central issue for me is not a matter of religion, but of the normative enterprise that we are engaged in, something inextricable from our self-understanding (even as scientists, we understand ourselves teleologically, i.e. as pursuing certain epistemic goals, when we reflect on why we do what we do).
Integrating this normative enterprise with our descriptive, scientific inquiries is not easy, but it can be grounded in some parallels: independent agreement counts for a lot here (I’m a bit Humean on this point), and there really is a large amount of overlap in the value systems of human cultures. But this needs to be combined with a generous dose of cosmpolitanism and tolerance. The contribution of religion here is especially dubious, since it so often serves to elevate small matters (recall Swift & big vs. little endians) to huge and damaging significance (here I’m also thinking of the pope’s recent absurd and tragic remarks on condoms making the spread of HIV/ STDs worse).
Religion, like any powerful, persistent social institution, draws on both positive and negative impulses in human beings to maintain its position and authority. The fact that the best religious people are primarily attracted to the positive elements is a very good thing, but it doesn’t make their goodness the fruit of their religion: causation here is a real tangle, and at best I would say their devotion to the most positive elements of their religious traditions may help to reinforce their positive impulses by grounding them in a tradition that they accord some authority to.
However, I see more of a contribution to the broadest human values which we’ve managed to advance in the last few hundred years (children mostly living to adulthood, decent sanitation and basic medical care, broad education, labour rights etc.) in the humanist, enlightenment tradition. (For contrast, just think how many conservative religious figures–and I don’t mean fundamentalists, but figures like Canada’s George Grant, a conservative Anglican, actively decry the ‘technological society’ that they see as undermining the authority of their religions: these people outright ignore the improvements in the basic human condition that we’ve achieved in the developed world).
We shouldn’t be optimistic about either the possibility or the consequences of eliminating religious belief. First of all, one of the central principles and key accomplishments of science is to arrive at a model of argument and hypothesis evaluation that allows for questions to be settled by persuasion rather than authority and force. Argument and reasoning are the only weapons I would ever deploy against religion (absent a direct physical attack on me or mine). And it’s clear that these will not dissuade many believers: the impulse to continue in the faith you were raised in, the tendency to see the world at large in terms of ‘doings’ rather than mere ‘happenings’, to interpret even natural events in teleological and even personal terms, are all very strong.
But it’s also worth noticing that persuasion does occasionally work despite all these impediments. Undermining the trivially circular and utterly untenable ‘sola scriptura’ view of faith and displaying how it is abused by the figures who climb to the top of the resulting authoritarian, patriarchal social structures is often successful despite the propaganda, authority and well-poisoning these figures employ.
Above all, challenging the right of the religious to impose their narrow views on the rest of us, wherever they intrude, is important. One way to do this is to criticize the authoritarian paradigm of religious epistemology (this goes at least for popular religion, and I would argue it goes in general) . In particular, I’d be very happy just to get the press to give up the automatic assumption that the Pope deserves strong initial credibility as an authority on ethical questions. Given the history of his institution and many of the people who remain influential in it, not to mention some of his own grossly irresponsible statements regarding sexuality in particular, we should try very hard to persuade the press to question him and other representatives of the church (on homophobia, birth control, misogyny etc.) just as they so often challenge people like Dawkins or Hitchens.