Ruse says Eugenie Scott called him “dumb”
The ubiquitous Michael Ruse has yet another post explaining about non-overlappings and the new atheists and atheism is religion. (Jerry Coyne has already explained what’s wrong with Ruse’s explaining.)
Ruse says another word for NOMA, favored by “those who work on the interface between science and religion,” is independence. He says it’s the position of the NCSE and also of him.
It is also my position, as I argued in a recent book…Basically, I argue that science is inherently metaphorical, that today’s science has at its core the metaphor of a machine, that metaphors rule certain questions out of court—not wrong, just not asked—and that it is legitimate for religious people to try to provide answers. Religious answers not scientific answers, about ultimate origins and purposes, about morality, and perhaps also about consciousness.
Science is not “inherently metaphorical” in any way that makes a real difference to anything. It’s not “metaphors” that make certain questions seem too meaningless to address. Of course it’s “legitimate” for religious people to try to provide answers, but that’s not the issue; the issue is whether the answers are any good or not.
Gould was not a believer and neither am I. We both think that you can be an agnostic or atheist—I like the term skeptic. We recognize that of course science and religion can conflict. That was why we were in Arkansas. But our argument—my argument, let me speak for myself—is that much that conflicts with science is not traditional religion…
That part just illustrates why Ruse is so irritating. He’s so lazy. He lazily uses the present tense about Gould and he lazily goes on talking about the two of them for no apparent reason, and then he suddenly decides to stop doing that, but instead of going back and re-writing, he just tells us to let him stop. What a buffoon! And that kind of thing is characteristic – slovenly uncorrected off-the-top-of-his-head notes treated as a finished article.
As so often happens with these sorts of things, those closest to each other are often the greatest enemies. Freud called it the “narcissism of small differences.”…In the case of people like me, those who endorse the independence option, our fellow nonbelievers are scornful to an extent equaled only by their comments about Pope Benedict. We are labeled “accommodationists” or “appeasers,” and reviled.
Dude – mirror.
He goes on to repeat his old claim that a conflict view of religion and science could get science in public schools in trouble with the current Supreme Court, a claim which seems very strained to me, although he’s right that with this court…well who knows.
When someone cites Freud as an authority they’ve already lost the argument.
Reading the accomodationists almost diminishes my anger toward postmodernists. At least when dealing with postmodernists there’s no question of whether truth is worth anything at all. I mean, being told science is just another worldview can be infuriating, but at least you get to call their own views “just another worldview”. Try that with religionists.
It seems Ruse wants to create controversy simply to flog his book. I think he seriously needs to rewrite his article, which is a confusing mess.
What Ruse seriously needs to do is just to stfu! And anyone reading his dreck must be able to see that paying money to read what he has to say will be money wasted. Was this man ever other than dumb? Since I’ve become aware of him in the last two or three years he has said nothing, to my knowledge, worth attending to. How does he get people to publish it?
Yes I’ve been wondering that too. Why do the Huffington Post and the CHE publish his shoutings?
I think he used to be somewhat…respected. Or something. I think he hasn’t always been as bad as this; put it that way.
He wrote some good books early on. I used to be a bit of a fan of Ruse.
One of the comments on that Blog was this:
“Is it just me who thinks so, or is there something rather unseemly about Chronicle bloggers plugging their own books?”
I think that explains it all. As to whether Eugenie Scott called his ideas (wait! these are “ideas” – ????) dumb as opposed to calling Ruse himself dumb, well just how many angels can sit on the head of a pin(head)?
Perhaps he is in that seventh age of man – Glooskap knows, I’m getting close myself!
I suppose I can reiterate my usual position on the matter:
1) Science’s epistemology is better than any revealed religion’s, because science is aimed at accurately and parsimoniously explaining reality, while religion can provide an equally succinct and unjustified explanation of any facts. (“God told me.” “God did it.” “It was reveeeaaallled in a viiiisssiooon.”) Science also allows us to share objectively verifiable knowledge, which is obviously not true of faith.
2) Religion and science are in conflict, not on a necessary philosophical level (because one can always use some overarching philosophical framework like NOMA to smush the two into the same worldview), but on a practical/social level; enough people believe things about God or the soul that can be disproven by science, that the religious aspects of their worldview are highly incompatible with science. At least, this is true of the US, where about half of Christians believe in creationism and many others believe in other counter-scientific beliefs.
3) Religion is, to the best of our understanding, useless for understanding the world anyway, even if it was perfectly and completely in tune with science, and there’s good reason to think that it causes far more harm than benefit. Showing that science is compatible with religion is as undesirable as showing that science is compatible with racism (and as vacuous, given that ideologies tend to be sufficiently flexible that they can be made to accommodate any facts).
Metaphors are pretty important. Kuhn originally meant the word “paradigm” to refer to analogies and metaphors that dominate a scientific practice at a given time, and Kuhn was a smart guy.
Still, I have a hard time understanding how anyone can justify saying that modern science sees everything as a machine. For various reasons, the mechanistic worldview had been abandoned by the 20th century. The analogy of the clock and the strings of billiard balls now had to give way to new analogies and images, like the double-helix and the electron cloud (and now, strings and/or multiple dimensions). If I were to speculate recklessly, I would say that modern science is dominated by Small Metaphors that describe particular interesting processes (double-helix, electron cloud), while the Big Metaphors have been put to one side (like the clock or the billiard balls).
There is one sense in which some of the modern sciences are like machines, though. Some modern scientific institutions, like big agrobusiness, are like well-oiled machines. They plow forward breathlessly, tone deaf to the moral and human concerns of mere mortals. (Though in that case, perhaps the metaphor of Godliness is more fitting than the metaphor of the Machine.)
Took me awhile to understand Michael Ruse. St. Stephen on offense.
I know I don’t post here much, but I do come here every so often, and I thought this might be of interest to the community.
In April 2009 I attended CFI’s World Congress in Washington DC. Ruse was on a panel discussion about science and religion. I’d never heard of Ruse before, but now I’ll never forget him. His opening statement was about how teaching evolution in classrooms is unconstitutional because, according to Richard Dawkins, evolution leads to atheism, and that would be the government preferring atheism over religion.
Really. Eddie Tabash explained to him very patiently, over and over, why he was wrong. But Ruse was having none of it. The entire room was in disbelief, me included. No one could comprehend how someone could make such an argument. I’ve had a bad taste in my mouth about Ruse ever since.
And that’s my Michael Ruse story.
Ruse:
I’ve written this elsewhere, but I don’t think these differences are so small. Ruse suggests that they are by using “nonbelievers” as his umbrella term—he’s a nonbeliever, and so are some of his critics, therefore the differences are “small.” Nonsense. Take another look at that “science is metaphorical” passage. Note what he later implies about the relationship between science-n-religion. Does Ruse mean to suggest that his views on the subject are only negligibly different from those of us nonbelievers who disagree? Mooney and Giberson have each, in so many words, made the same Freudian accusation, and I think it’s entirely misplaced. (The embedded implication, by the way, is that their critics are childish and petty, that there’s no “real” beef to speak of.) I wish these people would at least admit that these are significant philosophical differences. Not small, not trivial.
This burns me up too [my emphasis]:
Is it always legitimate for religious people to “provide” such answers? This depends on what the question is, and how the answer was arrived at. Take “What is the purpose of human life?” Sure, I think it’s legitimate for religion to take a stab at that, provided it does so in an intellectually honest way that doesn’t ask people to believe in myths and woo. (No major religion fits that bill as of yet.) Attempting to answer such questions is a good thing. Such attempts are at the heart of philosophy. It’s the way religion answers the questions—the opportunistic, cynical, superstitious, and non-critical thinking way—that is illegitimate.
Thanks Michael. I’m reminded of this old thread: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/the-club-of-friendly-inhibitionists/
For my part, I doubt that Ruse actually believes that teaching evolution is unconstitutional. I think his intention is to make a reductio out of Dawkins’s view. He wants to show the need for a sharp distinction between philosophical and methodological naturalism, and hence for NOMA.
Unlike Scott and various others, I do think Ruse’s question is a mini-puzzle for people who believe that philosophical and methodological naturalism are tied at the hip.
The thing is, Ruse’s puzzle only works if you think that naturalistic claims are on religious turf just because naturalistic claims strongly support atheistic conclusions. But actually, naturalistic claims aren’t on religious turf. That’s because when you say that “naturalism strongly supports atheism”, you’re not committed to saying that “naturalism is identical in meaning to atheism” — since Spinoza was a naturalist theist.
Ruse’s article is appallingly bad for a professional philosopher, especially when he says, “The first amendment of the U.S. Constitution separates science and religion. (Don’t get into arguments about wording. That is how it has been interpreted.)” To claim that the wording of the US Constitution is not worth arguing about is just pathetic, really, and ignores 2+ centuries of legal argument.
Clearly it’s his way of forestalling any criticism of the error of his statement. The Constitution doesn’t say anything about science, and although it was clearly written with the intention of separating church and state, the specific wording only prohibits the state establishing a religion. Which is why the US government can give large grants and tax breaks to religious organisations. But you know, rather than grapple with the issue, Ruse feels free to make crap up and then pre-emptively dismiss anyone who disagrees with his statement as just playing word games.
I was even more astonished by Ruse’s transparent attempt to bask in the light of Stephen Jay Gould’s reputation, which is I imagine the only reason he brought up appearing for the plaintiff in McLean v. Arkansas in 1981.
Strange how Ruse forgot to mention his appearance as an expert witness *for* the ID movement in the much more recent (2005) Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board, giving testimony that he must surely know would have been actively opposed by Gould.[Error; struck out at CL’s request. ob]I forgot to add that the constitutional separation of church and science which Ruse appears to have hallucinated did not stop US Congress from blocking funding for embryonic stem cell research in public universities.
Actually, I think I understand at last. It’s performance art. That’s why he’s called Ruse.
I had to do a bit of research on Ruse, especially a lecture that he did here:
http://fora.tv/2009/02/17/Michael_Ruse_on_Darwinism
Which I find exposes his line of thinking rather well. It seems that he’s become possessed by the work of Thomas Kuhn, and this may explain his weird views on natural science. Since I haven’t read Kuhn, I can’t tell for sure whether Ruse is a follower or a misinterpreter. Kuhn is apparently a major person within the philosophy of science, although to me, his ideas sound more like Marxism.
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“I am not a Kuhnian” ~ Thomas Kuhn
At the time the old IIDB was excised by the Secular Web (so they could move away from all that raucous celebrating atheism and concentrate on pushing the scholarly works of Ruse and his ilk), I did wonder if they hadn’t maybe got confused as to which bit was the tumour and which bit the viable entity.
The more I read the “scholarly” atheist the more certain I am that their cottage industry of atheist apologetics is nothing worth preserving (and in the case of the accomodationists, the tumour has proven cancerous).
Thanks, Michael – your Michael Ruse story is a great one! You know the whole sordid story about Ruse picking an email fight with Dan Dennett and then sending the whole thing, without Dennett’s permission, to William Dembski, telling him to feel free to publish it online? Which of course Dembski did?
Chris Lawson – Ruse testified for the defense at Dover? Are you sure? I don’t think that’s right. Could you be thinking of Steve Fuller? He is quite like Ruse, as a matter of fact – brazenly nasty to people he dislikes and glibly pomo about science.
What’s the IIDB-Secular Web story? I don’t know this.
Ophelia, I am going to have to retract my statement. Ruse did not appear in Kitzmiller. His work was referred to in Behe’s testimony but he did not appear himself. Ruse also apparently wrote an opinion article praising the judge’s decision, so I’m afraid I have to retract my statement and eat humble pie. Would you mind amending my post (not deleting, I think it’s important to acknowledge one’s mistakes) with, say, a strikethrough and a correction?
Sure Chris. I think the same thing, which is why I strike through my own mistakes! There have been several of those lately. :- )
To back up what I said about Steve Fuller, what I had chiefly in mind was his obituary note on Norm Levitt.
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/swfuller/entry/norman_levitt_rip/
After reading that thread, I concluded that Steve Fuller is a nasty piece of work with no integrity. What a strange breed these postmodernists/Kuhnians/Marxists are.
Thomas Kuhn is worth reading, especially his book about the Copernican Revolution. If you read him, there is little that is controversial and certainly nothing to support the “all knowledge is socially constructed” view. Kuhn wrote an opinion article not long before his death in which he criticised the extreme postmodern view of science and defended his work against the misinterpretations that had been applied to it. Kuhn trained as a physicist before writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; he was not abandoning physics when he wrote the book, he was just pointing out that science does not progress in a smooth, linear fashion but in huge leaps when a major new theory comes along. I don’t agree with everything Kuhn wrote, but he’s far from the post-structuralist guru he’s been painted as.
Yup. There’s a bit in John Horgan’s book The End of Science – I think – where Gould says he knew Kuhn and Kuhn didn’t mean whatever glib simplification Horgan had just claimed he had.
Egbert@3: “I think he seriously needs to rewrite his article, which is a confusing mess.” I don’t think it’ll help. It’s the argument that’s a confusing mess, and no amount of editing and rewriting is going to disguise that fact.
Re: IIDB/Secular web.
A while ago there was a mass meltdown on the Internet Infidels Discussion Boards, mostly due to the actions of the board. Bannings, firings, members, mods and admins quitting en-masse, lots of hurt feeling (often with good cause IMHO) and claims of personal and political betrayal, i.e. netdrama of the highest order.
This all took place against a longstanding but increasing sense that the people in charge were enforcing a double standard against outspoken atheists; whereby we had to “play nice” while theists and agnostics were free to post pretty much anything. An example would be that we might be permitted to dispute the literalness of the Adam & Eve by raising the fact that modern genetics casts doubt on there ever being a human population of two, but pointing out that the bit with a talking snake is just cretinously stupid was right out.
Anyway, when the meltdown happened, there was a claim (which I heard repeated more than once) that the board’s intention had been to ditch that disreputable rabble who kept on mistaking the place for an atheist discussion forum, so that they could concentrate on churning out nicey-nice bits of serious and scholarly religious criticism from the atheistic point of view.
Basically it was getting hard to market straight faced articles on the flaws in baraminology while you have the peanut gallery loudly shouting “It’s all a load of foetid dingo’s kidneys!” in the background.
I’m not sure what the deal is with Ruse. I’ve read a number of his books and he impresses me as a solid Darwin scholar and careful reflective philosopher most of the time. Of course that doesn’t make him right all the time, but his problem seems to me that he can’t get along with people who think similarly to him, I agree with the “mirror” comment in response to his “narcissism of small differences.” I don’t hold him in the same disdain as most of the folks here seem to, but I do wonder what the heck he is thinking when he makes these wacky proclamations sometimes.
As for Kuhn, I’d like to offer some limited defense of him as a scholar as well, this time regarding the history of science. He (correctly I think) pointed out that some grand organizing ideas didn’t quite die off until their proponents did, which is quite different from poststructuralist radicalism. His ideas got mutated over the line I think because some commentators mistakenly took Kuhn for a philosopher rather than historian of science and assumed he was telling us that there is no rational basis for new paradigms taking over. At best he puzzled over that question unsuccessfully, rather than taking the “postmodernist” position of denial of rational change. I think his bemusement at being called a postmodernist, when he was for the most part a serious historian, is part of why he is quoted as having said that he was “not a Kuhnian.” Just my impression.