Transcendental Science
Good. After Michael Ruse it’s a relief to read Dawkins on the same general subject.
You can’t statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you’re still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that’s because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.
And it’s no good pretending otherwise, is it, especially if you simply can’t possibly believe that otherwise. It’s ridiculous to expect it. And then, it’s not as if religion is uniformly and reliably beneficent, or even harmless. That’s worth keeping in mind too, when people get indignant with atheists who actually have the bad taste and lack of tact to say they are atheists. There’s that little matter of the Vatican and condoms, just for instance…
A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent.
Sometimes quietly violent, but nonetheless violent for that. The Vatican doesn’t go into Africa and Latin American with machine guns blazing, but it might as well. It abuses its ridiculous undeserved power, to order people to kill themselves and their relatives for no good reason; it causes the deaths of millions by that abuse of power; that’s pretty violent.
And you see the same problem of the inability of reasoned argument to adjudicate between incompatible beliefs in the case of religious hatred of homosexuality – or sodomy, as I heard some charm-boy call it on C-Span the other day. They can’t for the life of them come up with a good reason for it – but so what? They don’t need to. They are convinced that their invented god hates it, and that’s all they need. Reasoned argument doesn’t come into it. Secularists are always at a disadvantage in that situation, because the believers just brush off the reasoned arguments; they throw up what they ‘know’ as if it were a magic shield – and for them it is.
“Unweaving the Rainbow” specifically attacks the idea that a materialist, mechanist, naturalistic worldview makes life seem meaningless. Quite the contrary, the scientific worldview is a poetic worldview, it is almost a transcendental worldview. We are amazingly privileged to be born at all and to be granted a few decades — before we die forever — in which we can understand, appreciate and enjoy the universe. And those of us fortunate enough to be living today are even more privileged than those of earlier times. We have the benefit of those earlier centuries of scientific exploration. Through no talent of our own, we have the privilege of knowing far more than past centuries. Aristotle would be blown away by what any schoolchild could tell him today. That’s the kind of privileged century in which we live. That’s what gives my life meaning. And the fact that my life is finite, and that it’s the only life I’ve got, makes me all the more eager to get up each morning and set about the business of understanding more about the world into which I am so privileged to have been born.
Testify, brother. You rock.
I am a huge Dawkins fan, mainly because of his directness. Yes he is smug, but the dude is flat out awesome.
If God does exist I suspect he appreciates Dawkins candor and his ability to speak his mind.
Me too. Have been for years.
He’s a fan of B&W you know! Or perhaps you don’t. But he is. Said when we started, we could mark him down as an enthusiastic supporter.
[waves tiny flag with butterfly on it]
What a nice follow-up to the depressing piece on Ruse. I particularly appreciate Dawkins’ drawing attention to the sense of wonder and gratefulness for being alive that the scientific attitude is capable of evoking. One statement I do think somewhat exaggerated, though: “Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle.” It seems to me that humans (even religiously deluded ones) always have to use some little amount of reasoning (giving an account, weighing evidence) in everyday coping with their environment. The problem is maybe not so much a matter of having reason drummed out of them as an unwillingness to apply it widely enough. Thus arises the problem of certain subjects, such as God or values, being considered off-limits to rational inquiry, or using rational inquiry in those areas only to test a set of beliefs for internal coherence, while that set of beliefs remains irrational as a whole. The major problem is that religion gives people an emotional satisfaction they do not want to lose.
I know, I love that sense of wonder thing. It’s also in Unweaving the Rainbow, as he mentioned. That’s a terrific book. (I think I have it in ‘Favourites’ in ‘In the Library’…)
Also agree about the slight exaggeration. Notice I didn’t quote that bit! I don’t think it’s true that all reasoned argument is drummed out of all who are trained in religion from infancy.
On the other hand, I also think he has part of a point, and one that gets overlooked a lot. I think religious belief can and often does do real cognitive harm. I don’t see how it could help it, really. If you allow yourself to believe implausible things in one area, why not in others? In short I don’t think religion is, on the whole, a good training for rational thought in general. (Which is similar to your point about what is off-limits to rational inquiry.)
“…the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.” No, s/he’s not, not in the relevant sense of a beaver building a dam. The statistical argument is itself basically correct, but it’s doubtful that the belief of most religious adherents hinges on regularities and probabilities, on accounts of causality, or on the “argument from design”, which is a weak teleological argument. Presumably, their religious beliefs mostly concern the disposition of human freedom and the sense of purposiveness. Now, of course, there are plenty of secular avenues for addressing the sense of purposiveness and criticisms of conceptions of purpose are to the point: that is actually the ground on which the real issues of religious belief and unbelief are joined, and wherein resistances to evolutionary reasoning and its purposes are encountered. Defusing misunderstandings on those matters would be what is actually helpful and effective in gaining acceptance for the legitimacy of evolutionary research. (And, of course, one of the prime criticisms one wants to make of ID’ers is the political purpose that they are actually pursuing, in place of the purpose of pursuing scientific expanatory understanding. On the other hand, one needn’t worry, at least in any moral/intellectual sense, about fundamentalists, because they are idiots. The notion that “Genesis” must be read “literally”, as if reading can and must be literal,- a notion for people who read with their lips,- results in treating it as a causal mythology. In other words, they don’t actually ever read “Genesis”, that is, deal with the interpretive puzzles it presents. But they can precisely be criticized on religious grounds, as substituting an idolatry of the “literal” text, for purposes of authoritarian-dogmatic self-enclosure, for a religious tradition based on the religious criticism of idolatry, and the ethical-spiritual challenges that represents.) But naturalism, since Newton, has always presented a stumbling-block on questions of human freedom and purposiveness. Naturalism does not address such concerns, because it is not designed to, and, by and large, lacks the resources to do so. If one is going to engage in the criticism of religion, one should frankly acknowledge that “fact” and acknowledge the concerns or perplexities of your interlocutors, rather than pretending that naturalism gives you the “final” low-down on human delusionality.
“Quite the contrary, the scientific worldview is a poetic worldview…”- No, it’s not. Science is not in the business of synthesizing and presenting “worldviews”. (That is something that hostile religious opponents of scientific rationality just don’t “get”.) Whatever orientation in the world the explanatory paradigms of its specialized research offers, (which one would think is not inconsiderable), it is left to the public freedom of men and women to incorporate in their personal and collective projects and private (normative) beliefs. Dawkins’ polemics, based on an overgeneralization of a rather narrow and crude empiricism, itself a particular cultural inheritance, rather overshoot the mark, since it’s really a matter of defending the freedom and legitimacy of scientific research against dogmatic interferences and rendering its explanatory knowledge understandable in a public context, rather than dictating what projects human beings can or can not entertain. If the understanding of science is not based on understanding the limits of its understanding, (which is not entirely captured by the notion of its empirical fallibility), then much of its real value can be lost to needless and heedless polemics. (Another look at Steve Fuller and his proposal of “consensus conferences” as a kind of public jury process for the interface between scientific research and public purposes might be more worthwhile than polemical posing.) At any rate, it’s perhaps a pity that Dawkins has no actual competence in philosophy, but just thinks he does.
As to the title of your link on the news page: I would think people brought up in faith can be very well persuaded by evidence! Plenty of atheists with a religious education around. Though one case I know of was not so much persuaded by evidence as by the spectacle of a tongue-speaking and demon-exorcizing session.
I’d probably disagree with Dawkins on his presenting of religion as an “infection”, or on emphazising the follow-the-leader aspect of religion. It seems to me that the latter is a feature of particularly relatively recent, normative religions such as Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The Greek head God was basically a small-brained stud with a perpetual testosterone overdose. Not much of a leader figure. Religions started out as a way of explaining what’s happening, e.g. thunder happens because Thor is riding his horse around the cloudscape.
This said, Unweaving the Rainbow is in my top list particularly because of its delicious takedown of New Age, Astrology and the like. Besides, it seemed to me the division-of-labour between science and religion proposed by Gould and Ruse is basically an excuse to stop the argument.
Despite being infected myself, I think Dawkins comparison of religion to infection is very, very apt. The mechanism of ‘social proof’ (sensu Cialdini, I believe because everyone like me does) is quite viruslike, in that
– transmission is by social contact, especially sexual and intrafamily,
– transmission in the absence of control can be exponential,
– the key difference of ‘infected/not infected’ is binary,
– the symptoms manifest at varying degrees of seriousness and in a time-related function.
Dawkins rocks! When ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ came out he became a favourite author for me, and seeing creationists around I came to appreciate how seriously bad their denial is.