How Ronald Numbers reports an incident
I’ve learned a bit about Ronald Numbers now, and what I’ve learned does not make me inclined to respect him.
I’m reading a little book from Yale University Press, The Religion and Science Debate: Why Does it Continue? (2009). Essays by Kenneth Miller and Alvin Plantinga among others – and by Ronald Numbers. His essay is called “Aggressors, Victims, and Peacemakers.” One of the peacemakers is, of all people, Michael Ruse. Michael Ruse! Ruse is notoriously belligerent and rude; he prides himself on it, he boasts of it, he preens himself on it. Numbers illustrates Ruse’s peacemaker qualities by telling us about an email exchange he had with Daniel Dennett – but he does so in a totally misleading way.
The exhange was initiated by Ruse, but Numbers doesn’t say that. What he does say implies the opposite.
Ruse fretted that Dawkins and Dennett were “making it very difficult for those of us who care about evolution to put forward a reasonable face to the reasonable portion [of the public] in the middle.” In an e-mail exchange subsequently made public, Dennett offered his fellow philosopher some pseudo-friendly advice…[pp 48-9]
That’s worse than misleading. There is no footnote for the Ruse quote, so one can’t tell when he said it or to whom. The email exchange was “subsequently made public” by Ruse, without Dennett’s permission, and his way of making it public was to send it to William Dembski. Most damning of all, Numbers makes it sound as if Dennett initiated the email exchange, but it was Ruse who did, and it was Ruse who was pseudo-friendly, not Dennett. Ruse wrote a pseudo-innocent little message to Dennett on a Sunday afternoon, a Sunday when the New York Times Book Review had just published a startlingly savage review of Breaking the Spell by Leon Wieseltier. Ruse’s “innocent” message was transparently a taunt. Dennett’s reply was not at all a bit of pseudo-friendly advice, it was a mild rebuke in reply to a typical Rusean provocation. But nobody reading Numbers’s account would have any idea of that. Numbers is a historian – and this is how careful he is.
In case there’s any doubt about Ruse’s sending the exchange to Dembski without permission: I asked both Ruse and Dennett, and both confirmed. Ruse wasn’t at all contrite; on the contrary, he was pleased with himself.
That’s a peacmaker?
As I was reading I was thinking that Ruse definately isn’t a peacemaker and the whole Dennett email episode came to my mind as just one instance of when has has shown that he is just the opposite . Little did I know that it was gonna be offered as an example of his supposed peacemaking abilities in the very next line.
After reading Charles Freeman’s review of James Hannam’s new book, reading Thomas Dixon’s brief introduction to the “field” of Science and Religion, and spending the last few days being harrangued by two impolite (one in particular) boosters of the new rhetoric which attempts to turn the conflict between science and religion into the complete opposite — sourcing science and scientific modes of thought at the heart of religion and theology — Numbers’ wildly dishonest — I think that’s a fair word — account of the Dennett-Ruse exchange comes as no surprise to me.
The whole thing is a whitewash of religion, a revisionist, programmatic attempt to resuscitate religion from terminal marginality. The truth seems to be that religion and science are essentially in conflict. Their fundamental presuppositions are in conflict. Science has produced knowledge about the world that religion tried to understand in theological terms, and there is no basis for theology. Science has threatened religious understanding of the world, human life, and the relationship between human life and the rest of life. It has undermined the credibility of religious texts. And now, through the scientific study of religion, it has begun to offer convincing explanations for the development of religious beliefs and their function in human life and society. It shows them to be entirely human creations, as they must be, in any event, since there are so many of them. There is no basis in supposed ‘religious’ experience for religious belief. Religion does not answer any of the Big Questions that we have, regarding the origin of the universe or the purpose of human life.
The only answers that we have are human ones. It is important to know this, and it is high time we gave up on the religious dream that some being or beings outside the human realm could provide the answers anyway, even if it turned out that such beings exist, which I do not think that it ever will. And, in any case, since our lives are short, and full of trouble, no matter how many joys we may know, and some know very few, and since our lives are soon over, for each one of us, as we pass through life, gods will never provide the answer, even if, in some distant future, someone should discover intelligent beings almost beyond the scope of human telling. For they cannot answer for our lives now, and when they are found, if they ever, they will be a human discovery. There is no room for peace between science and religion, for religion is the negation of science, even if, in some of its forms, it happened onto forms of thought out of which science could ultimately grow. Science itself is as different from religion as Newton’s physics was from his religious hobby horses. It’s long past the time when we should recognise this. It is said that religion provides comfort. This is something that I cannot understand. It never did for me. There were simply too many unanswered questions. They’re still unanswered. And if it requires to be protected by a vanguard of lies, religion clearly cannot answer them. Of course, people are welcome to turn to religion for comfort if it really helps, but they should stop trying to suggest that they are in possession of forms of knowledge. Religion is as weird and as irrelevant to real human concerns as astrology. This is something that the religious are simply going to have to learn. They are entitled to their strange beliefs, but they really should keep them to themselves. Talking of peace between science and religion is silly. Religion is simply irrelevant. The antics of people like Numbers and Ruse show just how irrelevant it really is.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa and Camus Dude, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: How Ronald Numbers reports an incident http://dlvr.it/8n80W […]
Perhaps a peacemaker using this sense of the word http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colt_Single_Action_Army
You are fighting a great and important fight,Ophelia. What you say about Ruse does not surprise me. The correlation between conservative Christianity and abusive behaviour on the Internet ,etc, is increasingly well documented and I hope someone does a fuller study of it- with examples! I work on the principle that if someone has to abuse me it is because,they are unable to provide any intellectual response to what I have written. I find it an excellent way, a) of having some fun statements by the abusers to show around my friends and family to their general hilarity b) to keep my blood pressure unraised.
The religious view is being fought not only with a vicious undercurrent of abuse but with shoddy scholarship. And so much is simply misleading. I have yet to reach Michael Ruse’s article in the Cambridge Companion on Science and Religion but meanwhile my eye was caught by the following in the essay by John Henry on ‘Religion and the Scientific Revolution;. “The unexpectedly high proportion of Protestant scientists in predominantly Catholic Europe can be in part be explained by various piecemeal factors. The widely known condemnation of Galileo in 1633 perhaps made it harder for Catholic thinkers to accept Copernicanism”.
I love the ‘piecemeal’ and the ‘perhaps’. I haven’t yet found Henry’s discussion of the Papal Index which banned, until 1835, any book which said that the heliocentric view was a fact and not a hypothesis. This might just have been a factor worth taking into account.
I am working on these themes in my ‘The Reawakening of the Western Mind’ which deals with the gradual dismantling of the political and ideological superstructure of theological thought in Europe. I hope I can count on you to buy a copy! (Still at synopsis stage.)
Keep up the fight against shoddy thinking and abusive behaviour!
And another example. In his essay in the Companion David Lindberg quotes from my Closing of the Western Mind a sentence which ends ‘ By the fifth century, not only has rational thought been suppressed, but there has been a substitution for it of mystery, magic and authority’. There is so much evidence for the rise of authority and the increase in magic and mystery at this time- much of it documented in Closing but even more so in my forthcoming book on relic cults. ( I show how rationalists, some of them Christians, tried to rubbish the credulity involved in relic cults but were wiped out by the likes of the ‘intellectual’ Jerome and the later Augustine (he decried the miraculous in his early works)and the enthusiasm of the masses.) Then there are widely respected studies such as Valerie Flint’s The Rise of Magic in Early Modern Europe, which I only came across recently, which documents ,with an enormous amount of supportive material, how the Church integrated pagan ‘magic’ into Christianity as one way of spreading itself. So I am more than happy to stand by my comment for the ‘fifth century’
Lindberg also provides another quote from one John William Draper of 1876, as already noted in this blog, which again only refers to the same period.
So what does Lindberg do? He writes: ‘A widespread myth that refuses to die, illustrated by these two quotations, maintains that consistent opposition of the Christian church to rational thought in general and the natural sciences in particular, throughout the patristic and medieval periods, retarded the development of a viable scientific tradition, thereby delaying the Scientific Revolution and the origins of modern science by more than a millennium’.
Just slow down there a bit,professor. You have two quotes, one from a book written in 1876, and one which refers only to ‘the fifth century’. If that is the sum total of what you can find to sustain the myth that Christianity delayed the Scientific Revolution by more than a millennium, it is not very convincing. And did you not see that I have a later chapter in Closing called’ Thomas Aquinas and the Restoration of Reason”?
I am again reminded of Karpman’s drama triangle, where two interlocutors ‘switch’ between three different modes: Victim, Persecuter and Rescuer. This is probably where Numbers steals the inspiration for his essay from. But the key thing to note within this drama triangle is that both interlocutors continually ‘switch’ between various modes as part of an irrational game.
And the reason why there appears to be so much drama between religion and science is that they are truly enemies, however, religion dresses itself up with the emperor’s cloths of being a friend to science and liberal society. Karpman’s drama triangle explains why atheist accommodationists have an irrational motivation as rescuers of religion and persecutors of fellow atheists, as they ‘switch’ from Rescuer to Persecutor.
Only between ‘friends’ (in other words academic fellowship) can an honest and rational dialogue form between different rational arguments. There can be no such honest and honourable debate between religion and reason, because religion is not rational, and can never be a friend to science, academia or civilisation.
This is why the next phase of religious war against science and reason is the soft academic target of history and its attempts at revising conflicts into complexities. It is yet another attack on science and academia itself, hence the drama and conflicts between honourable and honest academic pursuit and the dishonourable and dishonest behaviour of theologians and religious educators.
Now, this is what I find so hard to understand about all these programmatic attempts to show that, really, when you look closely at it, the church and science are intellectual cousins. To suggest, for example, that the condemnation Galileo does not show the church’s anti-science face, but rather its concern for purity of doctrine (or something equally lame), while at the same time ignoring the fact that Galileo’s works were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, and remained there until the nineteenth century, is sheer duplicity.
This is simple and straightforward enough, without trying to, as you say, Charles, revise “conflicts into complexities.” As Tim and Humphrey keep saying, it was all so much more complex than that. Well, of course, everything is complex. Even quite simple human actions can be massively complex if you try to account for all the influences coming to bear on individuals in decision making situations, but when you see something that is so clearly anti-science, and subversive of the freedom of thought necessary in order to carry out the scientific project, then, regardless of the complexities, that speaks volumes about the role the church played in the early years of the scientific awakening that was taking place in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. And since the church has continued to play this negative role straight through until today, it is hard to see how the revisionist attempt to show the church in a good light at the beginning of the process could possibly succeed.
A touchstone for the whole anti-science character of a religion must be that religion’s response to the critical study of religious texts. As Hector Avalos points out in The End of Biblical Studies, it is clear that, if the critical study of the Bible (the Qu’ran, or any other sacred text) is accepted, sacred text can no longer function as sacred text, because critical study inevitably relativises texts. You can’t both hold that a text is sacred, and yet that it shows all the marks of its human origins, with all the flaws and imperfections and inaccuracies that such an origin implies, for the question immediately becomes: What is being held to be sacred? At the end of critical study, what you are left with is a complex mass of theories about the development of the text, plus a maze of interpretations, and not in any clear sense a single text at all. And until religions are prepared to acknowledge this, and deal with the inevitable fallout in terms of the loss of authority, it is laughable to suggest that religion and science (critical study) are compatible.
While it is true, of course, that reason returned with Aquinas, Scotus and Occam (and Abelard before them), on the threshold of the Renaissance, they still, to a large degree, bound reason to the dogmatic requirements of the church. And this is still the modus operandi of the churches and other religions. Despite his rather flamboyant way of interpreting the Bible, for example, John Spong still takes the Bible as in some sense authoritative, since it is crucial to his programme that the Bible should be at the centre of it, and he still remembers with a kind of reverence the first Bible that he was given as a gift when he was a teen, white cover and all, and which, it seems, he still treasures and reveres.
Until churches (and other religious groups) are prepared to live with the consequences of critical study, the pretence that religion is compatible with science is simply a pose for public consumption. The level of prevarication needed in order to maintain that the Bible can in any sense speak the words of a god is so high that religious spokespersons must either be liars or deluded. The attempt of people like James Hannam to show that science and religion are in some sense intellectual twins and offer each other mutual suppport is apologetics of the most presumptuous sort. It cannot be said that the church is a supporter of science if it can be shown how the church still has to be dragged kicking and screaming into an acceptance of biblical criticism — a low kind of science, perhaps, but a convenient indicator of the church’s failure to accept and encourage the scientific project. Of course, by accepting biblical criticism the church would subvert itself. This shows how far apart science and religion really are.
I look forward to The Reawakening of the Western Mind, Charles!
Thanks,Ophelia. For some reason Templeton have turned me down for funding yet again and you can hardly say they are short of cash!
No, really? You astonish me!
Well I am submitting a new application with the title ‘The reawakening of the Western Mind, thanks to Christianity’. That should do the trick.
Or as an alternate title amenable to favorable Templeton adjudication, consider: “Chrisitanity, Nurturer of Science: A study of The Church’s systematic support of science in the face of secular resistance during the Dark Ages.”
A good try Locutus7 but the Templetonians don’t accept that there was ever a Dark Age. How could there be when Christians were so busy building watermills?
Fixable with scare quotes? during the “Dark Ages”?
Surely the years of Orthodox power over Europe was an age of Light? Sorry but couldn’t help myself, but theological rhetoric is so funny! I think someone should at least write a parody of theological writings. A good example is turning a weakness into a strength. Like the weakness of revelation for example, precisely because revelation is so weak is proof of God! See! It’s just too daft and funny to take seriously, perhaps theology should be recognised as genius comedy.
I’m going to go ahead and resist the moniker “Templetonians,” which makes them sound too noble. I propose “Temple-rubbers” or “Templedums.” (Which would make me an Anti-Temp-ite, I suppose.
Egbert:
In listening to sophisticated theologians, I have often felt as if I were witnessing some kind of Andy Kaufman-esque experimental comedy performance. In a sense, the most damning thing we can say about theology is that it’s pretty frickin’ close to being impossible to parody. Poe’s law, etc.
Well of course Ruse is a peacemaker! He’s unilaterally surrendering to the religious hierarchy and doing everything he can to assure that the atheist and scientific communities do as well, thus assuring peace!
Remember, the only people that need to be accommodated are the religious, and peace will only come when we stop fighting them.
I’m certainly looking forward to picking up a copy of Charles Freeman’s The Reawakening of the Western Mind.
The Closing of the Western Mind was an excellent book, and it’s hard, I imagine, to have ended that book on a dramatic upbeat note, since it is about the the CLOSING of the Western Mind, although Aquinas seems to mark a bit of an uptick at the end of the book.
If The Closing were The Lord of the Rings, you might say it ended with Merry and Pippin being kidnapped by the Orcs, Frodo and Sam trudging off to their doom in Morder, and Gandalf apparently dead.
The Reawakening, I imagine, will be where Merry and Pippen escape from the Orcs, Gandalf turns out to be alive after all, and Frodo destroys the ring. Yeehaa!!
I cannot sustain this analogy any longer without laughing my head off, but I am truly looking forward to the Reawakening of the Western Mind.
Keep up the good work, Charles.
My surprise in reading Lindberg’s Myth 1 in Galileo goes to Jail was that it read like an opinion piece rather than a scholarly article. It was as if the conclusion was forgone even before he wrote anything and that no matter what he wrote it would lead him to that very conclusion.
Thanks, Charles Sullivan. A long way to go to get this right. What is interesting is that the handmaiden thesis, the idea that the Church encouraged science by linking it to theology, gets turned on its head. If theology is the supreme discipline, as Augustine argued, then all learning must ultimately be subordinated to it. It is interesting to see how this was defended as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries especially in the idea, put forward by the churchmen, that philosophy could not be independent of theology. And to think that one finds the argument that without the Church there would be no philosophy.
Thanks for the support.
Charles, you would probably know this better than anyone, but did the church ever say go study nature and report back to us what God is like? If it were science-friendly, wouldn’t this be required?
Charles, I do something with keys and I suddenly lose my message. It seems to be peculiar with wordpress. I tried to say last night how much I appreciated your book The Closing of the Western Mind, and how much I look forward to your account of its reawakening, and it simply disappeared. It is increasingly frustrating to find the history of the relationship between science and religion marred by religious bias. Indeed, after reading Thomas Dixon, who claims to be a non-believer, this bias seems to affect even the non-religious.
The claim seems to be that, since historical periods (to the extent that we can periodise history) succeed each other temporally, every historical period makes the succeeding period posible, since for any period its intellectual roots will be found to exist in what precedes it. By this measure, Christianity was enabled by the pagan period which preceded it, and Christianity’s triumphs (such as they were) were, in some sense, really the triumph of classical philosophy and pagan religion. I’m not sure that Christians would agree with this, although clearly, Athens and Jerusalem were more closely related than Christian histories of the early Christian centuries are sometimes prepared to acknowledge. Indeed, the early Christians and the Jews before them accounted for Greek philosophy by claiming that the Greeks were influenced by the Jewish scriptures. However, it is plain that Plato (and the Platonist Jew, Philo), Plotinus, Stoic ethics — even the Cynics — etc.: without these influences Christianity would have been merely a marginal oriental sect. Yet it could scarcely be said that Christianity did not shape these traditions to its own purposes, purposes often in conflict with the source traditions.
It is, therefore, simplistic to suggest, as James Hannam seems to do, that there could be no substantive conflict between the church and, say, the science of Galileo, since science had its origins in the medieval period (whatever speaking about origins means in this context). The precise relationship between the Christianity of the late Middle Ages and the rebirth of reason and the growth of science in the 17th century still remains largely unaccounted for. If the Renaissance was not a complete departure from what preceded it, it was not an inevitable development of it either. I look forward to your own account of the relationship, because the important new ideas which shaped the secular tradition cannot simply be reduced, as Hannam, Bentley Hart, Alisdair MacIntyre, Numbers, Lindberg, and other Christian apologists seem to wish to do, simply to successive transformations of Christian ideas.
I have, by the way, taken your advice and have now received Jonathan Israel’s BIG BOOK, and it is truly a big book! He begins, helpfully, with a discussion of how ideas are related to social context — but I have only begun, and have no settled view of the issues involved yet — and it occurs to me that perhaps Hannam should have given more attention to this question, since to deal with the relationship between Galileo and the church merely as a contest of ideas, which neglects the social context, and the very nasty sanctions that the church was able to deploy against persons whose ideas conflicted (even tangentially) with its dogmatic commitment to Bible and Magisterium, is seriously to misrepresent the social context in which Galileo was working, just as Numbers has misrepresented the micro-context of an exchange of emails.
Thanks for all these ideas. Will respond when I am home- out and about in London theatreland!
Lucky!
Very!
Ahh theatre!
(It was great – my beloved god-daughter playing the female lead in Tenessee Williams’ little known ‘A Two-Character Play’).
I have always been a history enthusiast and when I was seventeen ( 1964!) my school encouraged me to enter a national essay competition ( I didn’t win!). I was given access to two leather-bound volumes in a private library of original pamphlets from the English Civil War (1642-9) to work on. They were jumbled together, a pro-Charles I tract would be next to a republican one justifying his execution. What they all had in common was that whatever point of view they held they all had biblical texts to support them. I learnt that you can find texts from the Bible to support anything you like. Whether the writers had been driven to the political views they had by the texts they had selected from the Bible, or whether ( and this seems much more likely) they found texts to support political positions they had already taken, was not easy to work out. Still it was a wonderful education to have had ( and I still have my essay!) because it showed one can never talk of something as coherent as ‘Christianity’ – it was always fragmented despite the best efforts of churches to impose some form of order.
So when I write anything to do with the history of Christianity, I always ask myself, how did they IMAGINE God at this time , or how did this individual IMAGINE God. There are quite dramatic differences not only from generation to generation but within generations and one of the arguments I have against Christian apologists is that they often treat Christianity as it is was some kind of consistent force in history when clearly it has not been. The marginalised Christianity of the third century was replaced within decades by a Christianity housed in vast churches and claiming to support the battles of the Roman empire. (Jesus is ‘the leader of the legions’ as Ambrose of Milan put it, with a creative interpretation of the gospels that is truly remarkable.) The idea that Christianity is privileged over other forms of beliefs and should be given the support of the state starts here as, I hope my own work has demonstrated.
One should always take the Christians who support evolution with a pinch of salt when they claim that Christianity supports science. If figures for the numbers of Christians who support creationism in the US are right the best they can say is. “I belong to the minority sect of Christianity that supports evolution’.
I am sorry, Michael, I have been in and out all day.The field of working from the evidence outwards is that of natural theology. I can’t say I have ever got into it but it had an new airing in the thesis that because everything had to be exactly right for life on this planet, God must have set the computer programme so that everything was in place for this perfect world to start. The problem seems to have been that some viruses have got into the system along the way so that the programme took some billions of years to produce life, a lot of this was wiped out in meteorite impacts, earthquakes, etc, and humans aren’t that perfect at the end of it. There are theologians who explain that rather than a virus getting into the software,this was the plan all along and it is all the problem of humans not behaving better. I am sorry I often find it difficult to follow theological arguments so don’t press me on this one.
Eric. Yes, I am afraid Israel is an enormous tome. Where I have found him interesting is that he has lots of examples of how the state backed theological power into the eighteenth century I don’t think I had realised just how powerful was the opposition to the idea that philosophy should be independent of theology.
None of our debates here have quite shown that the Galileo affair was just one part of a systematic reassertion of Church authority. If you want a symbol of it ,it is the vast finished St.Peter’s with, on the front, a text,not from the gospels, but with the name of the Borghese pope who completed it! High Trevor -Roper in an essay, ‘Religion, the Reformation and Social Change’ from c. 1961, (which I have referred to in another post) makes the point that the Church originally acquiesced in humanism which is why the fifteenth century saw a flourishing of so much in Italy but then drew back with Erasmus. Erasmus was a great scholar, a reformer and remained in the Church at the Reformation. The moment when the Church condemned every one of his works in the Index of 1559 was the moment when the Church turned back to obscurantism- it basically missed the chance to move ahead. (Hannam actually blames Erasmus for causing the Reformation, a view which I did not know had been held by anyone since about 1600).
In my Relics book I have shown how the Church reasserted the power of miracles and shrines in the sixteenth century, and leaving aside Galileo, this was as important a moment in the generally frosty approach to science because you can’t really have science alongside a God who subverts the natural order through miracles and who can be swayed through the intercession of the saints. I get very annoyed with those apologists who try and isolate the Galileo affair, it must be seen in terms of a much more widespread turning back to medieval thought and a powerful repression of rational thought. Remember Ignatius Loyola’s notorious dictum that he would believe black is white ( or was it the other way round?) if the Church told him to. All this, says Trevor-Roper, explains why Italy was at the forefront of new thought in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century and stagnant from the end of the sixteenth century on.
Don’t let them isolate the Galileo affair and never let them mention it without stressing that ANY writer (Copernicus, Kepler, etc.) who claimed that the heliocentricism was a fact rather than a hypothesis was put on the Index until 1835.