Further Ruseana
More Michael Ruse, I promised you. Very well then. I never forget a promise. There is
this review of Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain from December 2003. I remember being rude about it at the time, though I can’t find the N&C I was rude in. I remember because my colleague was tiresome enough to disagree with something I said, and to say that Ruse had a point in one of the places I disagreed with him. Well I ask you – that can’t be right. Anyway, Ruse does say some odd things in this review.
But how then does Dawkins respond to the obvious retort of the religious, who have always stressed mystery? Some of the fundamental problems of philosophy are no closer to being solved today than they were at the time of the Greeks: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is this something not something else? What is mind, and are we unique? Perhaps one agrees that traditional religions—Christianity specifically—do not offer the full answers. But what is to stop a nonbeliever like myself from saying that the Christians are asking important questions and that they are right to have a little humility before the unknown?
Uh – yeah, this particular ‘one’ does agree that traditional religions don’t offer full answers. Actually I don’t think religions offer answers at all, not even partial ones. I don’t think the things they offer are answers. Because they’re not based on serious inquiry or investigation or hard thought, they’re based on revelation and a sacred book. ‘The Christians’ aren’t asking important questions, they’re making important assertions that are made up – that’s not the same thing. Of course there are Christians who ask important questions, but Christianity itself doesn’t. That’s not in its job description. It’s way too flattering to pretend otherwise. And what is this crap about humility? What is humble about making up the answers and then pretending they have some kind of weight? That’s not my idea of humility.
Then there is an old N&C on a different Ruse article. In which he said something that really got up my nose. (Something similar to the above comment, really. Yet he’s an atheist. What is it with all these atheists who fall all over themselves to misdescribe religion and give it way more credit than it deserves?)
People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions. There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs — and stays within these boundaries.
Sigh. Sure, religion aims, anybody can aim, but – oh never mind. You know what I’m going to say. Here is the article where Ruse said that and more. It’s basically about the compatibility of religion and ‘Darwinism’.
For refreshment, there is Jonathan Miller’s letter to the Guardian on Dylan Evans’ article. (I’m not the only one who was rude about it! Such a relief.)
I can’t speak for my friend Richard Dawkins, but I have no reason to believe that he naively regards science as substitute for religion (Letters, May 5). But instead of visualising it, as Dylan Evans does, as no more than “a means to an end”, Dawkins, like me, visualises the scientific worldview as an increasingly reliable representation of the way things are, and that as such it constitutes an end in itself…Even now I am disconcerted by the fact my intuitive disbelief merits a label, pejorative or otherwise. In fact if it weren’t for the intrusive indignation of those who do believe, it’s unlikely that I’d give the issue a second thought. But this doesn’t mean, as Evans insists, that people such as Dawkins and myself are crudely indifferent to the themes and concerns which religion and art express so differently, or that his supposedly more enlightened atheism puts ours to shame.
Of course it doesn’t. And it’s absurd to think otherwise.
Even if they are asking questions, that’s just the first step. Next you have to think about the answers; then you have to decide if you need to ask different questions.
Galileo asked good questions, but they weren’t obvious and they didn’t just magically appear in his mind. Generations of scholastic philosophers had labored over the problems in Aristotle and they produced some speculative philosophical solutions, but they never thought that actual experiments would be any help. Galileo had the learning, the imagination, the attitude, and the skill to test some of those speculations. The rest is history.
But, you know, history always looks easier in hindsight. Every high school physics student knows more about physics than Newton did on the day he died. IMO that’s one of the reasons people don’t respect science—the textbooks make the right answers seem so obvious now. “Jeez, dude, they were so stupid back then, they actually thought the world was flat and they were afraid to fall off the edge.”
I think a lot of the hostility to Dawkins comes from the fact that he refuses to fight on the same rarefied philosophical/aesthetic plane that a lot of his critics want to engage him on. He takes the fight to the streets – or perhaps that should be the pews. When the basic tenets of religious belief are stated in plain English – “An all-powerful god created the universe, but it all went wrong, so he had to send his son, who was sort of the same person but not really, to die for a day and a half …” – they sound pretty silly. And no amount of appeals to beauty, transcendence or convoluted medieval reasoning changes that. The kind of religious practice Ruse and Evans seems to think place seems a very long way from the church services I used to go to for the first 17 years of my life. Each week one of the parishioners would read a list of prayers, sort of a petition to God, and the search for meaning and purpose never ranked very high. Instead God (or Mary or a saint or two) was asked to keep an eye on the sick of the parish; to make it rain (always a concern in rural Australia) and to prevent world leaders from blowing the planet up (in those wacky pre-glasnost days). You could argue that modern medicine could provide actual help to the ill; that the problems of drought could be lessened with slightly less ruinous environmental practices; and Carl Sagan’s terrifying report on nuclear winter did more to pull fingers back from the big red button. But then that nasty Science would be straying into the domain of faith, wouldn’t it?
Tragically, George Galloway has beaten Labour’s Oona King in the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency. This is a very bad thing.
“And no amount of appeals to beauty, transcendence or convoluted medieval reasoning changes that.”
Just so. Ruse and Evans (and Philip Blond and others of the type) seem to be talking about religion as it is imagined in the heads of people like them, while Dawkins is talking about religion as it is in the real world. Dawkins has it right, pretty obviously (though not obviously to Rusevans). Real world religion does harm; imaginary religion doesn’t even exist except in the dreamworld of apologists. And to get to that imaginary religion, they have to fall all over themselves giving it the benefit of every doubt. Why do that? Why not talk about it as it really is instead?
Stephen Jay Gould, there’s another. He talked about religion as if it were Idealreligion, rather than talking about it as it exists and operates. Very odd, all these atheists doing so much work for the theists, and shouting at other atheists for not joining in. Very odd indeed.
And yeah, terrible about Galloway.
“Just so. Ruse and Evans (and Philip Blond and others of the type) seem to be talking about religion as it is imagined in the heads of people like them, while Dawkins is talking about religion as it is in the real world. Dawkins has it right….”
At one time, I also agreed with Ruse and Gould and people like them, and found Dawkins a bit strident for my tastes. But for the last few years, I’ve wondered how I ever could have convinced myself that the Ruse/Gould model of religion was anything like the religion practiced by most believers. Didn’t I pay attention to the wishful thinking, the logical howlers, the superstitions and the moral arrogance that were found across the religious spectrum? Of course I did, which is why I became an atheist a long time ago. So why all the conciliatory thinking?
I think that Gould, Ruse, and the younger version of myself might be motivated by a desire to show theists that we non-believers are really not all such bad folks. We want to get along, to put them at ease. And that’s odd for any number of reasons. It’s odd because we’re tacitly endorsing the popular stereotype of atheists as elitist, unfeeling boors when we try to distance ourselves from those who speak out strongly against religion. It’s odd because that, in turn, assumes that critcism of religion is necessarily boorish, elistist or unwarranted. Most of all, it’s odd because believers rarely concern themselves with putting us at ease, and because there are questions of truth at stake that have nothing to do with who is at ease and who isn’t.
Phil
“It’s odd because we’re tacitly endorsing the popular stereotype of atheists as elitist, unfeeling boors when we try to distance ourselves from those who speak out strongly against religion.”
I know, I know, that’s just it. I understand the impulse (sort of) – if only, I suppose, because religion is the one thing that can somewhat console people for the death of people they love. That’s the one ace it has up its sleeve. Not based on anything, of course, but the point is that it works if you believe it. So there is this impulse. But exactly as you say, what that does is just go on giving atheism a bad name. That’s why I’m so noisy and adamant. I think we have to be now; it’s the only way I can see to resist this flood that’s going in the other direction.
Apropos Phil’s comment, I can only speculate that many people out there today must be where I once was, i.e. neither believing, nor ever having believed, but still unable to shake the feeling that to refer openly to religion’s complete lack of legitimacy (as opposed to all the other bad things that are obvious about it) would somehow place me beyond the pale. And it took the examples of people writing and speaking as forthrightly as Dawkins, as well as personal acquaintances who had the age and experience to have overcome such needless reticence, to make me see that what OB called “noisy and adamant” is the only way to go. If the courage to point at the emperor’s new clothes and cackle loudly, hysterically and unapologetically (not with the innocence of the child in the original story) is something that can be passed on to others, it must be.