Dodgy Ruse
Michael Ruse is another. Funny, strange, puzzling; something like that. There’s this interview in Salon – which means you have to page through an irritating pictorial (therefore slow to load) ad to read it, which is why I hardly ever link to Salon, but there it is in case you want to read the whole thing. It’s about his latest book and the usual subject – ‘evolutionism’ is religion blah blah.
But he thinks evolutionists must purge themselves of reflexive anti-religious fervor, and acknowledge at least the potential validity of the classic Augustinian position that science and theology can never directly contradict one another, since science can only consider nature and God, by definition, is outside nature. Without this consciousness, Ruse suggests, evolutionism is in fact a secular religion, a church without Christ. And if that’s what it is, what is it doing in biology class?
Okay – science and theology can never directly contradict one another, since science can only consider nature and God, by definition, is outside nature. Fine – but then what is theology, exactly? The study of something that can’t be studied? Inquiry into something that can’t be inquired into? Research in a subject that is incapable of being researched? An ology that has no ology? It has to be. Because if ‘God’ is by definition outside of nature, then we (who are well and truly inside nature) don’t and can’t – by definition – know anything or find out anything about it. Obviously. So then what is the upshot of this position that science and theology can never directly contradict one another? Surely it’s just that one is a field of inquiry and the other is…an empty postulate. A gesturing at something that – by definition, remember – is outside nature and therefore completely inaccessible and unknowable. Well, fine – I’ll buy that. God is outside nature therefore nobody (since all the anybodies we know are part of nature, not outside it) knows anything at all about it and therefore there is nothing whatever to say about it. So why talk about it at all?
But of course that’s not what people mean by God, is it. People mean something they do claim to know a lot about. Well, you can’t do both, as Kingsley Amis so wisely though belatedly said. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say God is outside nature just long enough to shut up the pesky scientists, and then go blithely back to talking bollocks about God when the scientists have gone back to their petri dishes and statistics.
I’m all in favor of social prescriptions, and I’m not knocking anybody for being an atheist…But I want to see what grounds you have for saying that, and whether or not your positions follow from one another. If they do, maybe you should ask yourself, “Am I not being a hypocrite in teaching evolutionary biology in American schools?” Given the fact that it’s clearly illegal. You’re not allowed to teach religion in biology class. I can’t understand why I can’t get through people’s thick skulls on this one. If in fact Darwinian evolutionary theory implies atheism, then you ought not to be teaching it in schools! It’s not good enough to say, “Well, I’m a National Socialist. But the fact that that meant a lot of Jews were hauled off to Auschwitz, that’s not my worry!” It bloody is! If your theory leads to 6 million Jews being made into soap, not only is there something deeply troubling about your theory, but you’ve got a moral obligation to face up to its implications. If this theory leads to atheism, then it’s got religious implications.
I beg your pardon? Thinking evolutionary biology hasn’t turned up any sweet little god-things curled up inside acorns or flying around bottle-brush trees is analogous to making Jews into soap? Is that the best analogy he could think of? Is that a good analogy? Is that even a coherent analogy?
Plus there’s the peculiar argument that if evolutionary theory implies atheism then teaching evolutionary theory is teaching religion. Eh? What he means seems to be something like ‘evolutionary theory does not need or draw on the God hypothesis to explain it therefore it is religion’ – which makes no sense. Besides which, since God is – by definition, remember – outside nature, God can’t have any role to play in evolutionary theory, because that would be dragging something outside nature into something inside nature, thus immediately making it part of nature, therefore no longer God. So…Ruse seems to be claiming that you can’t teach anything except theology in US public schools. If you’re not allowed to teach anything that doesn’t use ‘God’ to explain it – because that is atheism, which is religion, which is not allowed in public schools – then you can teach only theology. Which, we have already found, on Ruse’s own terms, means teaching nothing.
I must be missing something. Ruse isn’t silly. But this whole argument looks to me like just pure having it both ways. Making God transcendent as long as that’s convenient, and then making it part of nature when that is. But it has to be one or the other. It’s either outside nature or inside it, it can’t be both.
‘If this theory leads to atheism, then it’s got religious implications.’
Ruse himself is evidence that it does not. It may lead to questioning narrow-minded religiosity, but that’s not quite the same thing.
By Ruse’s logic, astronomy would surely be a religion, I’m sure that at some point Gallileo was told ‘If this theory leads to atheism, then it’s got religious implications.’
Just so. By Ruse’s logic, everything is religion. Either it doesn’t use god as an explanation, in which case it’s religion, or it does, in which case it’s religion. Heads I win tails you lose.
“An ology that has no ology.”
What an excellent characterisation, and much more succinct than the one I’ve used hitherto – the study of the unknowable by those who don’t know it.
The Father incomprehensible,
the Son incomprehensible,
and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.
Athanasian Creed
That’s why theologians
claim to know so much about it.
Echoing Chapman Cohen
_
“… the study of the unknowable by those who don’t know it.”
I don’t know, Dave. This is pretty good in itself. :)
Evolution leads to atheism only if you do as Daniel Dennet suggests, and “take it straight.” Follow it all the way down, and go no further than needed. But technically all the sciences could be used that way. No need for God in cosmology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, etc. Are they, too, to be considered “atheist theories?”
Not usually, because most people do not follow science “all the way down.” Our culture has built up a strong presumption that doing so is actually the sign of a shallow, silly person who fails to appreciate transcendential Truth and Beauty. At some juncture, you’re supposed to pick an arbitrary stopping point on the edge of the world and proclaim, solemnly, that beyond this space here be magic.This makes you Deep and shows appreciation.
I suspect Ruse is miffed that people like Dennet and Dawkins publically argue that science theories ought to be followed all the way down as a matter of coherency, consistency, personal integrity and — yes — depth and appreciation. Although they are using evolution, it could just as well be any science theory at all. It’s just that at the moment evolution manages to touch the public panic button more easily than physics or neurology.
“Our culture has built up a strong presumption that doing so is actually the sign of a shallow, silly person who fails to appreciate transcendential Truth and Beauty. At some juncture, you’re supposed to pick an arbitrary stopping point on the edge of the world and proclaim, solemnly, that beyond this space here be magic.This makes you Deep and shows appreciation.”
Ain’t it the truth. That’s what might be called the Dylan Evans fallacy, which I, erm, strongly criticised a few months ago. This bit from ‘Night Waves’ for example –
“Science is wrong in our culture or has become unhinged in it seems to me two ways. First of all in contemporary culture science has converted its harmonic with truth into an absolutism, into a kind of quasi-fundamentalism. Such that it claims to be the sole exhaustive universal model of truth. Secondly, in doing so, it has drained all other accounts, all broader or richer accounts of truth of any value. The absolutization of science has resulted in the relativisation of morality, ethics, aesthetics, anything else you’d care to name.”
Yeah, science drains everything. Right.
I keep telling you guys: Without Sky Daddy, anything goes. Except, of course, beauty, subtlety, goodness, a meaningful life, and basic human decency. Sky Daddy holds the patent on those things.
Yes, the bit about the thick skulls irritated me a good deal too. Oh, hell, the whole thing irritated me a good deal. Ruse has been saying strange things for a long time, but this interview is the strangest thing I’ve seen yet.
Well, I haven’t read Ruse at length, but I liked what he had to say in this interview so I’ll step up to the plate.
I’d say a crucial part of Ruse’s argument is that it’s *people like Dawkins* who in their zeal insist that no scientist (i.e. no one worth taking seriously at all) can be anything but atheist. I think Ruse would *like* to uncouple atheism from evolution.
The Nazi analogy is perhaps unfortunate (as Nazi analogies usually are –too inflammatory). Ruse is saying, ideas have pragmatic implications, and sometimes even “baggage.” Dawkins certainly has baggage.