Reasons
As we’ve seen, Chris Mooney remarked a couple of days ago that “The fact is, journalism (and dialogue) about science and religion are pretty difficult to oppose.”
Actually they’re not. There are reasons for opposing some general enterprise of treating science and religion as necessarily connected, and there are reasons for opposing much of the product of that enterprise, too. There are also reasons for doing the opposite.
One reason for opposing the product, frankly, is that it tends to be a boring vacuous waffly waste of time. Witness the detailed blow-by-blow account by Tom Paine’s Ghost of the World Science Festival session “Faith and Science” for instance.
Check it out. It’s mostly harmless, it’s pleasant enough, but it’s at best drearily familiar, and weightless, and futile. Enterprises in squaring the circle usually are, I would guess. They don’t have anything really substantive to say, so they just discuss, in a circling inconclusive “what am I doing here” way. Mooney is probably right that there’s not much need to oppose that kind of talk with any energy (its implied messages are another matter), but it does look like a waste of time and effort.
Mooney himself felt somewhat the same way about the theology parts of his Templeton fellowship.
To be sure, we hear a fair amount about theological thought here–and I have my difficulties with theology as a field, simply because of my personal identity if nothing else. Being an atheist, it is pretty hard to relate to a theological perspective on something like, say, the meaning of the doctrine of creation. Why would something like that speak to me, resonate for me, or even make sense to me?
Why indeed – but it’s not primarily a matter of personal identity. He should have talked about the “if nothing else” part – the something else is the part that counts. Atheism is not just an identity; identity should come last rather than first. People are atheists for reasons. I assume even Mooney is an atheist for reasons, although he is careful not to mention them these days. That’s perhaps one of the most distasteful aspects of his anti-atheism: his reluctance to do more than say he is an atheist – rather as a non-observant Jew might say she is a Jew. It’s as if Mooney is a non-observant atheist.
But not all of us are. Lots of us really do have reasons for our atheism, and we think the reasons matter. Treating them as beside the point or unimportant seems odd to us. And the reasons we are atheists are the reasons we think science and religion don’t go together. We think they are different, for reasons, that matter.
It seems much like not engaging with creationists – it just makes them look legitimate.
BTW, Stephen Law has an interesting draft chapter up at his blog on the games the religious play to immunize themselves from criticism.
I tried to read the Tom Paine’s Ghost post, but the assertions made by the panelists were actually making me angry.
That’s not reasoning, that’s naked assertion. And it’s wrong. Science, first of all, doesn’t just deal with the composition of matter, but also with the behavior of matter and the metaphysical question of what it means to be “composed.” Most importantly, science can give things meaning and that should be as clear as the blue sky. The thermometer was invented hundreds of years before anyone knew how to interpret temperature. Thermodynamics gave us the meaning of temperature. (As to purpose, why assume there must be such a thing? I find most events in the world around me are more comprehensible if I don’t suppose there’s a purpose.)
This simply doesn’t follow from any valid logical theory. Monotheistic theology is not the ONLY worldview that suggests law-like order. The anthropic principle does just fine here — human beings are very intricate machines, and their brains are tuned for pattern recognition. Such a thing would simply NOT EXIST in a world that did not obey consistent laws. That’s my own justification; I have no doubt that other justifications for a comprehensible universe could be multiplied at will. It’s frankly insulting to assert that every naturalist alive today is suffering under this one philosophical misconception and that Paul Davies, alone among scholars, has put his finger on it.
So meaning requires religion, purpose requires religion, and even being a freaking atheist requires religion? Grrrr
In the political domain that’s being called “epistemic closure” (usually with reference to the Tea Party). I think that’s quite an appropriate term here as well.
That’s an equivocation on “meaning”, at least as it is being used by Ayala. He intends the term to reference the notion of “reason(s) for human existence”. And I think in that way he’s right that science doesn’t directly give us an answer — this is the basic Naturalistic Fallacy. I would just argue that religion doesn’t really answer such questions either (why should we obey some entity just because he/she/they/it created us?).
DanL, Davies was interviewed on the ‘Little Atoms’ podcast a couple of months back where he discussed this idea of his that science is dependent upon monotheism. My take on it was that he was arguing for historical contingency rather than necessity – in other words he thinks the science that is around today comes about due to the attitude of the Christian church in the late middle ages when they started to examine the laws of nature in order to better understand God.
I personally don’t buy his argument. Yes, the science we have today is closely associated with the involvement (some positive and some negative) of the church but I think there is plenty of evidence of inventions, discovery of laws of astronomy, engineering, mathematics etc that have been made independently in many different societies separate from the European Christian culture. This suggests that the scientific enterprise may be like agriculture or metallurgy, simply another technological innovation that is inevitable in developing human societies, if given enough time.
Get out of my head, Ophelia! I noticed this same thing from Chris and it irked me when I read it. His characterization of this issue as merely a matter of personal identity, which he treats as if it were just a fashion accessory. He literally seems to be saying he has no reasons for his atheism, it’s just a matter of temperament. I wonder if he believes this, or if he must continually force himself to try to believe it? I suppose he has to, because he “everyone will get along” project would be sunk if he admitted people actually have substantive, reasoned disagreements.
Tulse @ 3:
Basically, I don’t agree. I gave a try at explaining why, but it comes out to a rather nit-picky philosophical argument concerning intention and extention of words like “meaning” and “purpose” — and it’s probably a waste of time given that it was an extemporaneous verbal remark that Ayala would no doubt qualify in a debate. Regardless, to me, Ayala does not seem to say here “religion gives/provides/divulges the reason for human existence” — such a statement would presuppose such a reason and also imply that (since it isn’t “religions MAY give things meaning”) that religions should never disagree on this reason. That’s such an indefensible position, I feel like I’m giving Ayala the benefit of the doubt by NOT ascribing it to him.
The sense I get is that Ayala is actually pushing the meme that science is all about facts and that you need a worldview independent of science to interpret those facts. But that’s at least partially untrue; scientific theory IS the interpretation of scientific facts — part of science is interpretation. Ayala’s phrasing, as well as the context provided by his other remarks, is what makes me think this. “Science deals with the composition of matter,” is, to me, a preposterous reduction of what science is and does. Logically, it’s nearly empty — of course science deals with the composition of matter — but by leaving it hanging, Ayala seems (again, to me) to be suggesting that that’s all that science does. And that’s NOT all that science does. Whitewashing that fact is either philosophically naive or intellectually dishonest, I’ll let Ayala take his pick.
Also, I don’t see the connection to the naturalistic fallacy. The naturalistic fallacy, as I understand it, is an attempt to ground values in facts — to argue that something is good because it is natural. That is not the case here. Not to say that there isn’t a connection, but I certainly don’t see it. I’m also not sure why it’s fallacious at all to suppose that science COULD, in principle, provide the reason for human existence. If it was indeed a cosmic accident, then science is more likely to provide that reason than any sort of teleological account (which, pretty much by definition, would never suggest that the reason was an accident at all).
Sigmund @ 4:
Pointing out the influence of natural theology on the history of science if fair game, and if that’s what Davies had SAID, I wouldn’t have any problem with it. But that’s not what he said, and I don’t think it’s really what he means. After all, if the connection between natural theology and science is contingent, then it may not be necessary. And his point seems to me that natural theology is a necessary precondition for “the scientific worldview” (as if there were only one).
Sorry, Josh! But it’s so nice in your head – this green velvet Victorian sofa is just my kind of thing.
It’s something I’ve been wanting to ask Mooney for at least a year, actually, because he always does refer to his atheism that way (at least he does every time I see him refer to it). I’ve kept wanting to ask him – “Don’t you have reasons for thinking there’s no god? You’re not just an atheist at random are you?”
He talks as if believers are (as believers) just as reasonable as atheists, if not more so. Well why is he an atheist then?
Well yes, that’s rather the problem, isn’t it? Science deals with the physical reasons why the volcano erupted in Iceland — and religion deal with the purpose and meaning behind it doing so.
What was the volcano supposed to tell us? Have we not prayed enough? Have we failed to properly appreciate the spiritual interconnecedness of the planet? Did we forget to sacrifice a goat, or allow gay people to marry? Maybe the eruption was a statement about the advisability of war: pro — or con. Or maybe it was a challenge, a problem which was lovingly designed to help us become better people, by giving us an opportunity to deal with adversity. Everything happens for a reason, after all — and there aren’t just physical reasons, are there? Religion gives things purpose and meaning.
And then we discern these purposes and meanings by playing Calvinball, using intuition and subjective validation. Nothing can go wrong, there.
I think “Faith and Science” is on a collision course with reality. Want to make your religion meaningless? Make it too reasonable. Make it support itself through the kinds of reasoning and evidence an atheist can understand, and massage its special revelations into being metaphors, reworking it all till it finally makes sense. All that’s left, is faith in faith.
And the ability to bash the new atheists, who don’t get the meaning and purpose behind everything.
Dan L., it seems to me that talk of “purpose” and “meaning” by believers almost always refers to human purpose and human meaning, and not to philosophical notions of intension and extension. So I don’t see Ayala’s comments as all that unusual for a believer, or the interpretation I offered as all that unlikely. (That doesn’t make him right, of course — far from it.)
Sastra, at some point I am going to use that ‘religion=Calvinball’ analogy. I promise to footnote you, though. :-)
I think what people usually mean when they say “religion gives things purpose and meaning” is that many people think religion gives things purpose and meaning and thus for them it is more or less true that religion does that.
I cannot read any of Ayala’s accomodationist writings without it setting off alarms in my mind that I think are due to my Irish catholic upbringing. His argumentative style is particularly Jesuitical – (or in modern parlance, Clintonesque) and one needs to be one ones toes in order to see what he is exactly stating as his own view rather than a neutral statement of the view of a religion. Frequently he mixes these two views up within the same paragraph or even sentence and I get the impression that this is done for a purpose.
As for the meaning of life?
I can answer this in two ways. First the evolutionary answer – we are one twig of the evolutionary brush and so there is no reason to conclude that the meaning of the life of humans is different than the meaning of the life of other twigs – such as rabbits or sycamores.
What is the meaning of the life of a rabbit or a sycamore? Well their purpose seems to be to make more rabbits and more sycamores in order to survive. The same seems to be the case with every other species we find. Why should humans be different?
The other answer is to the question of the meaning of ‘life’ itself, I see no reason why we shouldn’t treat it as a straightforward chemical process in which the production of higher order chemical structures is offset by an increase in the entropy of the environment – something that Schrödinger was suggesting in the early 1940s.
Sigmund, I think you’re brushing up against the naturalistic fallacy — rabbits and sycamores don’t have a “purpose” any more than mountains and stars do. Being the products of evolution doesn’t give them “purpose”, at least not in any broad sense (and certainly not in the sense that Ayala or other religious believers mean). And we certainly don’t want to base human “purpose” on whatever accidents of evolution have produced us — that way lies really bad sociobiology.
Could it be they mean they find meaning in religion, even though they say religion gives meaning? The religious people I’ve known tend to confuse the one with the other, sometimes purposefully. They refuse to say they find meaning in it rather than it provides the meaning, because they believe that meaning is inherently a part of it. If they admitted to simply finding meaning, they’d have to admit they don’t totally buy it – and we all know they’d never do that.
Michael, well that’s what I think – they mean they find the meaning. They construct it. Of course, as you say, they don’t want to come right out and say that (though some do).
Ophelia, it’s just that blurring of distinctions that characterizes these discussions repeatedly. What is meant by “purpose”, or “NOMA” or “god”? Are they just beliefs or independent of belief? You have to cease equivocating about these concepts to have a real discussion. What do the terms believers use mean? If they won’t or can’t say the discussion is vacuous.
I think, from memory, that Unscientific America he has a couple of lines hidden in a footnote or somewhere about why he’s an atheist. If so, that’s awfully strident of him. I think it was too many religions to think that any one of them is actually true, or something like that. I’ll see if I can work out where my copy went when I shifted house. It’s probably on the popular science shelves somewhere …
One of the odd things about that book, as I recall, was that the footnotes were more interesting than the main text. It’s usually supposed to be the other way around.
As for the Templeton Foundation gig, I wonder what he expected. I assumed it would be mainly about such stuff. What’s more, I’d actually find this fascinating. I love exploring arcane thought systems. I’d enjoy those lectures, just as I’d enjoy similar lectures offering interpretations of Greek or Norse mythology or the various schools of classical Hinduism. Come to think of it, a couple of months, or however long it is, being paid to attend lectures on arcane thought systems sounds great. Maybe I should apply.
And finally, isn’t he supposed to be a journalist? He wrote: “Being an atheist, it is pretty hard to relate to a theological perspective on something like, say, the meaning of the doctrine of creation.” That isn’t even grammatical! Or if it is, it doesn’t mean what he thinks it means.
It would make sense, but mean something different, in this context: “The single intelligent creature found on the planet Snarg is an atheist. Being an atheist, it is pretty hard to relate to a theological perspective on something like, say, the meaning of the doctrine of creation.”
But I assume he actually meant something like: “Since I am an atheist, I find it pretty hard to relate to a theological perspective on something like, say, the meaning of the doctrine of creation.”
Mind you, I left a out the word “in” in my first sentence and probably made other typos. Typos can be forgiven. Poorly constructed syntax not so much.
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Ophelia, those members of liberal-leaning religion have an easier time admitting they construct their meaning. But those people are infuriating for other reasons.
Must agree with ernie, too – although it occurs to me equivocation is one of the loopholes they use to “win” arguments. Moving the goalpost etc.
“Mind you, I left a [sic] out the word ‘in’ in my first sentence and probably made other typos.” lol@ ME
Entirely true though about the difference between typos and bad syntax!
Journalists aren’t famous for the perfection of their syntax, at least not in this part of the globe. The clumsy writing was not the least of the problems with Unscientific Murka.
The good news is that they are all, indeed, atheists, Ayala included. The bad depressing news is that they think they can do something with religion. Fifty years ago, mainstream Christianity and Judaism was filled with people like this, encouraged by 20th century theology to expect that the world’s religions will, one day soon, evolve beyond theism. Today, those people are mostly dead, but their spirit survives in certain intellectual quarters.
It is an embarrassingly naïve expectation, which I confess once embracing. Religion’s product is shelter from the absurd, and its market is those seeking same. Remove the supernatural, the hope that immaterial meaning is somehow more than immaterial, and you might as well fold up the tent. Theism will never be acknowledged as inessential.
Russell Blackford wrote:
Is that a bad reason to be an atheist? Because it’s at least partly why I reject religion.
Really, it’d be a very good indicator of there being one god if the religions of all the different ethnic groups around the world had identical (or at least near-identical) aspects to their belief systems without ever having had contact with each other. That the only common factor is the existence of religion itself is much more indicative of the human tendency for magical thinking than it is of a ‘one true god’.
Don’t, however, look at this as a defence of any other aspect of Mooney’s nonsense. He’s made his sloppy, faitheist bed and now he has to lie in it.
I didn’t say it was a bad reason to be an atheist. I just said that it was the sort of thing I think he tucked away in (I think) a footnote, since everyone seemed to be asking. (I still haven’t got around to checking, though.)
As I say in my essay in 50 Voices of Disbelief, it was something like this that made me first become an atheist when I was a small child – or really just the idea that Christianity will go the same way as the Greek and Norse religions did. One day it will be looked upon as our era’s mythology.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be confrontational; it was more that I was wondering if that was considered, in a philsophical sense, fairly low on the hierarchy of ‘valid’ reasons for unbelief. I guess on its own it’s not that profound, but when combined with the lack of evidence for any specific god – i.e. no more success for prayers to Jesus than for prayers to Vishnu – it has more weight.
On the ‘Point of Inquiry’ podcast interview with Elaine Howard Ecklund Mooney made the point of differentiating second-generation atheists like himself, who are frequently more accomodationist or religion friendly, than the first generation atheists, such as Dawkins or Hitchens. If you read some of Mooneys older writings on atheism it doesn’t seem like his intellectual reasons provided were that different from the majority of the new atheists (indeed his writing of several years back is pretty indistinguishable from ‘standard’ assertive atheism.
I wonder whether this difference in upbringing and personal experience is critical. Most first generation atheists have had first hand negative experiences of the effects of religion (guilt over ‘sin’, worries about hell, etc) that have not been present in the lives of many second generation atheists like Mooney. This lack of a personal experience of the destructive effects of even ‘milder’ religions like catholicism perhaps makes people like him less likely to see religion as a negative force.
The ‘religion provides purpose’ stuff is rubbish, as every fule here kno. Purpose of volcanoes? Er, when YHWH was twiddling the dials on Its universe-creating machine, It selected ‘planets with molten cores’ because that would generate pretty mountains, at the necessary cost of occasionally roasting or drowning millions of sentient creatures (to say nothing of innocent sycamores). It’s only the best of all possible words, you see.
I wonder how many of the religious know how utterly gruesome their life is, as declared by Ratzinger’s outfit, and signed up to by Ayala? You don’t get to be happy until after you’re dead.
-from the most terrifying document I know, the Catechism of the Roman ‘catholic’ (provided you’re a celibate male) church, paragraph, I kid you not, 1721.
When in a discussion with a religious person I find it far more profitable to explain, not what my own views are, but to put in plain language what their religion teaches and entails.
A classic example is the problem of heaven and hell. Those religions that teach of judgment after death and the sorting of the saved and the damned are faced with a dilemma in regards memory. Virtually nobody is going to have all their friends and family members be so righteous that they will ALL be saved and sent to heaven. One or more of these will reject the true way of their God and end up on the path to Hell so that, despite reaching heaven yourself, someone you love, a parent, child, brother, sister or friend, will end up in Hell. The problem is how is it really going to be heaven for you knowing a person you love is currently being tortured for all eternity? Wouldn’t simply knowing that also be hellish for you? The best answer to this dilemma I have heard from a religious person is that going to heaven is like formatting a hard drive – all our memories will be cleared and so we wont remember anything from our life. I hardly need explain why this isn’t an ideal solution.
Its interesting, however, seeing religious people try to justify it as their minds are forced to confront the issue.
Sigmund, the other solution to the issue of loved ones in Hell was provided by the Puritan Jonathan Edwards: “The sight of hell’s torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever”. So apparently Heaven makes you into an insensitive bastard.
Ophelia asked:
I recall reading an article by him in which he states he was not raised in a religious family, and that his parents were atheists themselves. I suspect Mooney might identify himself as an atheist in the way that people who have been raised in a religious household often identify as religious despite not putting much thought into the matter.
I get the distinct impression these days that Mooney does not like being an atheist, and would be far happier with some kind of religious belief but cannot get over the hurdle of having to dispense with the need for evidence.
Aw, that’s sad…a cradle atheist who can’t find the way out.
:- )
I think there may be something in what Sigmund is saying. Mooney and Kirschenbaum just don’t seem to “get” religion. To be fair, they are not the only ones – I often think that some of the people on “our” side also don’t really have an intuitive feel for it and end up with a lot of strange emphases and conjectures (don’t expect examples; this is just an impression after having read literally thousands of comments on blogs, etc., in recent years). Some time spent actually struggling with a specific religion in your own mind – painful though it is – does actually help.
There’s a level at which M & K, for example, simply don’t know what they’re talking about. They have no feel for the evils of religion, and even their sense of what it offers its adherents seems to come from some anthropological viewpoint – or as if they’re always parrotting stuff they don’t really find meaningful – rather than any understanding of what it feels like from the inside. Actually, this latest post is a case in point: he says that, as an atheist, he couldn’t “relate” to a whole lot of stuff. You’d think it would be sufficient to use his imagination, as we all do when, for example, we read the poetry of Hopkins or Donne (the religious stuff, not “The Flea” for example) or Eliot … but apparently not.
Yes. There was an interesting discussion about that on Nigel Warburton’s blog, a year or so ago – how different is the aesthetic experience of various kinds of religious art for believers and non-believers. The example I offered was Rembrandt’s painting of Jesus’s appearance at Emmaus. I find it extremely moving. It’s very understated – Jesus is in silhouette, against a strong light, in an ordinary room at an inn or some such, and the disciples are in the light, reacting. He looks real – his beard looks real – and the effect is powerful. So…it can be done. And I love Donne’s religious poetry. Go figure.
Donne’s religious poetry is great, as are Eliot’s Quartet’s, especially Little Gidding. Religion makes great poetry, but bad metaphysics.
I’m not sure about that second generation thing, though my view is probably influenced by being English. My father is an atheist, but I wasn’t sent to atheist school and he never sat me down and said “have you heard the bad news?”. As we don’t have separation of church and state my education had plenty of christian content, and I come from a social background where atheism is not unusual but also not automatic. In other words there was no pressure either way, but exposure to a decent education had the consequence that atheist campaigners dream of. For most of my life I have been an “old atheist” and the phrase “I’m not religious myself but of course I have the utmost respect for people who believe…” fell readily from my lips. Now I’m more on the “new atheist” model because the last ten years feel to me as if there has been a resurgence of arationalism, theocratic special pleading, equivocating apologetic pseudo-argumentation, and general attempts to unravel the enlightenment project by people who really ought to know better that politeness in the face of it becomes harder and harder. I find myself in a world where the likes of John Milbank and Phillip Blond instead of being the jokes they deserve to be may actually influence the policy of the government of my country. When I was young public theists thought I was mistaken, and I was OK with that. Today public theists think I’m sub-human, and I’m not clear why I should be OK with that.
I wouldn’t agree that religion makes great poetry tout court – it depends on the poet! Not all poets are a Donne or a Wordsworth, just as not all painters are a Rembrandt.
Great summary, Ken.