Sympathy for the mighty
Michael Ruse bending over backward and kissing his own ass in his effort to be Nice to religious believers again. The pope says in his Easter sermon that humans can’t be “a chance of nature.” Ruse Understands.
Now let me try to be understanding here. I realize where the Pope is coming from. As a Christian, humans cannot be just a chance occurrence.
No kidding; we all understand that much; it’s obvious. But never mind that – what I want to know is, why does Ruse try to be understanding there? Why is he so keen to understand the pope when he never ever says “Now let me try to be understanding here. I realize where the new atheists are coming from”?
Why is he so eager to give the pope the benefit of the doubt? Does he think the pope is a sad lonely isolated figure who gets no support? Why is he so prompt to suck up to existing established power and privilege and at the same time so intensely hostile to people challenging that power and privilege?
I wonder.
H/t Jerry Coyne.
I think you’ve answered your own question. Ruse and the other accommodationists are sucking up to power and privilege, and that explains most/all of their actions and attitudes. They suck up because the people they suck up to are the ones with the power and privilege and invite them to all the cool parties and publish their crap books. These are the folks who, if atheism becomes a majority view, will simply start sucking up to the Gnus and bashing the minority theists.
There are no convictions behind their views, just self-serving sucking up to whoever is most popular. When the wind shifts, so will they.
“But never mind that – what I want to know is, why does Ruse try to be understanding there?”
I saw Ruse as, in effect, saying that even if we bend over backwards to try to understand what the Pope means, he (the Pope) still comes across as an ignorant idiot.
I still think he’s angling for a Templeton prize.
Um, I think Ruse was just be rhetorical about ‘understanding.’ As in, ‘I understand why you are saying that, even if I don’t agree with you.’ How is that ‘sucking up to established power’? It’s not really fair, is it, to quote one sentence from an entire essay out of context like that?
The reason Ruse would want to try to ‘understand’ the position of the Pope, as opposed, say, to your position, is that something in the neighborhood of 1 billion people listen to what the Pope says, whereas ‘new atheists’ are a group of people who more-or-less already agree with him about the main issue (that evolution is real, etc.). Perhaps a little sense of proportion might be helpful here…?
@sailor1031
Hmmm… Templeton or the Koch brothers. One right-wing anti-reality source or another, does it matter as long as the checks clear?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-ruse/a-scientific-defense-of-t_b_523416.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/koch-brothers-florida-maddow-msnbc-video-2011-5
I’m with hallucigenia on this one about the rhetorical nature of Ruse’s “understanding”. Certainly when I say, “Now let me try to be understanding here,” what I mean is, “Now, let me attempt to be generous to your bizarre, wrongheaded, harebrained pile of vile nonsense — despite the great difficulty of extending myself in such a way — because I am just that damned good-natured, oh yes I am.”
This little snippet interests me: “At least, some solution needs to be found by Christians. Otherwise, the New Atheists are right, and science and religion cannot be reconciled.” I’ll remember that if I see Ruse coming out against Overton Window strategies. We are very useful to Ruse when he’s addressing Christians, and I would prefer him to keep that in mind.
@hallucigenia #4
That might be tenable if Ruse had not already hopped on the bandwagon saying that New Atheists are as bad for the United States as the Tea Party. Moreover the stated point of his article is to offer religion a way out of being incompatible with science: “Otherwise, the New Atheists are right, and science and religion cannot be reconciled.” (Missing the whole point of the nature of the incompatibility)
My only question is how bad do we need to be to get Ruse’s understanding–as bad as the Church has been for Africa and abused children, or worse still?
Ah but that’s you, Cam – that’s you reculer-ing pour mieux sauter.
hallu – ordinarily, yes, but the fact remains that Ruse never does say that kind of thing to/about new atheists. He has a double standard. I don’t agree with your justification for his reasons for doing so. New atheists may agree with him about the main issue, but he doesn’t agree with new atheists, about anything.
You’d have a point if this were a one-off, but Ruse has written piece after piece after piece sneering at new atheists. I troll his tone.
Oops, I crossed with Moewicus. What s/he said.
Could it be something fundamentally wrong with people’s sense of empathy? To be empathetic to the wrong people perhaps? There is a name for it, it’s called Stockholm Syndrome. I suppose this explains why slaves in the past were generally reluctant to rise up and beat their masters. Because they grow comfortable, and actually start to believe that their masters have their own well-being at heart.
It’s a survival strategy, a bit like prison rules. Even in prisons, prisoners have their own rules and regulations forcing down fellow prisoners who fall out of line.
Ruse is warning theists that if they don’t do a little fancy footwork about the grounds for acceptance of evolution it will become embarrassingly obvious that gnus are right about incompatibilty. It’s certainly a striking admission. But his advice will do no good. Theists can’t fix the problem except by becoming Spinozan/Einsteinian quasi-Deists. First, they won’t, and second, the game is over if they do.
Let’s take a really big drag of whatever we’re smoking, and imagine that the Pope is listening to Ruse, and actually adopts his strategy. Catholic doctrine becomes:
An all-powerful God, capable of creating universes wanted humans to appear.
The only way this all-powerful God could think of to get humans to appear was to create universes at random over trillions of years until we showed up.
God is really, really stupid.
I made that last bit up, but it’s not much of a deduction really. It’s like me announcing that I’m going to hold open-house parties every night from now on until Angelina Jolie rocks in.
If Ruse thinks this is the way to save the Catholic faith, then he must be smoking something even stronger than we are.
“A tangled ball of string is more complex than one that is neatly bound, but it is hardly on the route to intelligence.”
He not smoking….he on FIRE!
“I have suggested that, since we have appeared, we could appear.”
STOP…too much unfathomable theological complexity here. But he the daddy. Even a little restrained this time, no?
The thing I find most curious is that apparently Mr. Ruse thinks that telling Catholics that they should fix their theology because it contradicts, well, actual verifiable knowledge and all that, is less offensive than whatever he thinks the Gnus have been doing.
Ophelia,
You know I love your work, and you should know that I am not a fan of Ruse, but on this occasion I think you’ve misstated the case. Ruse is only buttering up by claiming an “understanding” on the way to showing that *even with that understanding*, the Pope has painted himself into a scientific and theological corner and one of his likely successors (Schoenborn) is going to be even worse. Here are some quotes that give a better feel for what Ruse was saying:
“To put direction into evolution is to be a supporter of the non-scientific theory of Intelligent Design.”
“…[A]s things stand at the moment, there is a flat-out contradiction between the claims of modern biological science and the theology of the Roman Catholic Church.”
“…[T]he Pope, for all of his vaulted theological expertise, is either ignoring this fact or is glossing over it, probably because he has made the decision that, when push comes to shove, theology trumps science.”
“I am saying that ‘as things stand at the moment’ there is a clash and that the Pope is not helping.”
“At least, some solution needs to be found by Christians. Otherwise, the New Atheists are right, and science and religion cannot be reconciled.”
I still agree with you, Ophelia, that Ruse has been surprisingly non-confrontational in his approach to the Catholic Church here, in stark contrast to the language he often uses to describe New Atheists, but this particular article is saying that the Catholic Church is dead wrong, the problem is in their theology and not in science, and if they can’t find a genuine philosophical rapprochement between their theology and the evidence, then the New Atheists will be vindicated.
I suspect, reading between the lines, that Ruse has finally started to figure out what was wrong with his attacks on New Atheism and is slowly shifting ground while trying not to draw too much attention to it. You’ll notice, for instance, that he actually describes Dawkins and his views reasonably accurately and without the usual hyperbolic scorn and on the same level as others like Conway Morris. (Or maybe he is trying to establish credentials as being even-handed in order to avert future criticism from gnus.)
There’s still plenty to criticise in the piece: for instance claiming that Darwin was “absolutely adamant” that “mutations simply don’t have direction” when Darwin had no idea about mutations and had identified his ignorance of the mechanism of inheritance as one of the major flaws in his theory. Fortunately for Darwin, the hole in his theory was plugged by Mendel. But Ruse’s description shows a large gap in his own knowledge of the history of the theory of evolution. Still, minor ahistorical blemishes in an article otherwise very supportive of the standard gnu atheist arguments is a big step forward for Ruse. (Not that I have come to trust his judgement on the basis of one article.)
Doesn’t it look kinda funny for atheist Ruse to be advising the Pope on how to trick people into believing Catholic theology accepts evolution? I mean, he isn’t telling the Pope to accept evolution, is he? He knows it’s not necessary, he’s an accommodationist! So what people believe creates no conflicts pretty much regardless. So why does he want the Pope to tidy up his act when he also proclaims that no tidying up is needed?
I think the answer is that it’s slowly but surely dawning on Ruse that he has lost his shirt on a very bad bet. He wagered that if atheists were really really nice to their theist buddies, everyone could meet in the middle around a few vapid inoffensive slogans that would allow all parties to believe what they want. But he misjudged both atheists and theists. Atheists do not want to compromise away what they think is true for fellowship’s sake, and absolutists will not negotiate over absolutes. But my question is, why didn’t Ruse appreciate this before?
He’s not very good at writing, either.
Humans are a Christian? And it’s “vaunted” not “vaulted”.
Does anyone have any idea what he meant in his concluding sentence?
I find the whole piece purposefully lacking in clarity. In acknowledging the scientific consensus that there is no direction to biological evolution, Ruse writes
as if, perhaps, something has been missed. It should be a fairly simple matter to point out that any sort of theism contradicts our understanding of nature, but Ruse seems to contend that this must not be simple.
Well, of course he can’t give the new atheists the benefit of the doubt. He’s a careless thinker and an even more careless writer. As for Ruse’s speech, he’s downright sloppy. But it would be too much of a contradiction, even for Ruse, to go back on what he’s said about the new atheists already. Even he can spot that contradiction!
Ken,
I interpret the last sentence as meaning that the New Atheists are right that theistic evolutionism of the usual sorts is not compatible with science, so if theologians want their theology to be science-compatible, they have to back way up and hide God in some smaller gaps—and since the science is clearly right, essentially all extant religion is wrong.
He’s agreeing with the gnus that the NCSE is full of pseudoscientific shit when it says the Catholic Church accepts the scientific theory of evolution, or that Frank Collins isn’t batshit crazy, scientifically speaking, or that Ken Miller’s Catholic evolutionism is scientifically respectable. They’re all religious cranks who distort the science.
He’s saying that the gnus are right that the sort of religion that 99+ percent of religious people believe is contradicted by established science. Beyond than that, he’s saying as a philosopher of science that religious scientists are almost all wrong, too—they may say they have science-compatible versions of their popular religions, but they don’t, and must try harder to fit God into much tinier gaps.
In particular, an interventionist God doesn’t work, scientifically, not even a fine-tuning God who sets the initial parameters and lets things play out without any further intervention, much less one who sticks his fingers into the evolutionary process, and still less one who incarnates and dies for our sins.
Michael Ruse is admitting that the gnus have been right all along about all popular religion, and about all extant “science-compatible” apologetics by religious scientists, and about almost all “sophisticated theology” to boot. (Arguably what’s left is not even wrong.)
Cool! To a first and second and third approximation, WE WUZ RITE! Even the arch-accommodationist philosopher of science Michael Ruse says so!
Of course, to avoid saying that we were entirely right all along, he has to come up with an escape route—a gap that God could still fit into, which religious theologians and scientists have missed, along with apparently everybody else except Michael Ruse.
But narrow is the way—Ruse’s way is really, really narrow—and strait is the gate. For 99.9 percent of religious people, including religious scientists, religion is about as likely to pass that way as a camel through the eye of the needle, and it’s not clear that what can pass is really religion.
I’d argue that it’s clearly not religion at all, if you understand what religion is actually about. People don’t believe in religion because there’s a logical possibility that a noninterventionist “God” might have accidentally created us. When they talk about God, and especially when they worship God, they’re not talking about a merely powerful alien that might have created our universe, and inadvertently us. They believe in religion because they think that they or someone else has actually witnessed or encountered or sensed God or gods or ghosts or whatever, by incarnation or divine revelation or supernatural ESP, and that the entity or entities in question are supernatural. (Generally it’s assumed that somebody can sense something about some supernatural entity, somehow, and be guided by it, in some way. If not, you can’t build a religion around it.)
Nobody really believes in blind faith—everybody who believes in faith thinks it’s based on a sort of evidence that’s different from scientific evidence—something like supernatural ESP that souls have, at least. It’s a way of knowing, not a way of making random guesses about mere logical possibilities.
If religious people come to understand and agree with Michael Ruse, they’ll generally become atheists, like him; they will have lost the very beliefs that make religion meaningful to them, and make it believable, and make it religion.
There is apparently no way to God except through Michael Ruse, and nobody really wants to go that way. Not even Ruse.
Don’t count him out yet. I think doG has moved and now resides in the extra seven sub-particular dimensions postulated by M-theory.
Ah, another thing Author and I have in common: a dislike of dangling clauses.
Urrghh.
What Joe said in comment #1.
Ernie Keller asked, “why didn’t Ruse appreciate this before?”
Maybe this highlights a distinction between philosophy (knowing systems of thought) versus psychology (knowing how people think).
Maybe he’s seen the error of his ways after my powerful rebuttal of certain of his views over on the ABC site. I doubt it, but I must check on why he never did respond …