For those curious about Dawkins’ documentary, “Root of All Evil?”, you can find a short excerpt of the segment with Ted Haggard online. Haggard is extraordinarily creepy—keep some Pepto-Bismol handy if you watch it.
(via Leiter Reports)
You may have heard that Michael Ruse has been caught out of school, sharing a private spat between himself and Daniel Dennett with the William Dembski. This isn’t too terribly surprising—Ruse’s reputation has been spiralling downwards rather rapidly, what with all his sucking up to the Intelligent Design crowd in recent years, and I’m half-expecting any day now to hear that he’s become a creationist. In his waning years he’ll be able to replace the legitimate respect of scientists, which he’s been working hard to flush down the sewer, with the fawning and lucrative love of creationists.
I’ve never been much of a fan of Dennett, and I don’t think I even own a copy of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea any more. While I disagree vigorously with many of his ideas about evolution, I think he comes off better in this exchange than Ruse, who spends a lot of time whining about those damned mean atheists.
Jason hits exactly the right note in responding to that, I think.
Now, I happen to share Dennett’s and Dawkins’ contemptuos attitude towards Christianity, but that’s not the part I want to comment on. Rather, I want to challenge this idea that the atheism of Dawkins and Dennett hurts the cause of promoting quality science education.
This assertion is frequently made but it is never backed up with anything. Is it really true that the strident atheism of people like Dennett and Dawkins negatively influences the way people look at evolution? If that’s true, it certainly paints a bleak picture of many religious people. If I argued that I would be symapthetic to evolution, except that I see people like Ken Miller, John Haught and Simon Conway Morris drawing theistic conclusions from it, I don’t think Ruse would show me much respect. After all, evolution should sink or swim on the basis of the relevant evidence. If that evidence is strong, it should not matter what Dawkins or Dennett (or Haught or Miller or Morris) thinks.
Arguing that strident atheism hurts the cause is remarkably condescending towards religious people. It’s saying that they are too emotional to understand and think seriously about the evidence. It’s saying that those people can’t be expected to provide an honest assessment of the evidence because mean old Richard Dawkins made a snide remark about their religious views.
When I encounter people like Ken Miller or Simon Conway Morris I say simply that they are right about the science but wrong about the metaphysical stuff. Why can’t religious people be expected to have the same reaction towards Dawkins and Dennett?
Bravo. Ruse is echoing a common tendency, the habit of trying to hide away the atheists on the side of evolution—it’s also represented by that common adjective, “strident”. You can’t be a plain-spoken advocate for common sense and the avoidance of absurd superstitions, no matter how hallowed by time and tradition, without getting called “strident”, “dogmatic”, and “fundamentalist” over and over again, as well as being told, in more or less these words, to sit down and shut up and quit scaring away the rubes…while every scientist who makes room in his head for a little credulity towards ancient myths is treated as a special gift to the cause of reason. It’s extraordinarily irritating. Can we get a little consistency, please?
We need more atheists speaking out—that’s how we’re going to get people used to the fact that we exist. The fact that we are content to work with the religious, while many of the religious will not reciprocate that tolerance and even some of our fellow scientists want to hide us away, is a good example of who is holding the moral high ground here, and Ruse’s condemnation is yet another reason why I don’t hold much respect for the guy.
You wouldn’t believe how much hate mail I got from posting a little link to Mel Gibson’s Passion with a different soundtrack…but maybe Chris Clarke can take some of the heat now.
Atheists will not be mocked, and I expect much fury in response to this disrespectful joke.
You can tell when a dogmatic theist has to review a book by an unapologetic atheist: there’s a lot of indignant spluttering, and soon the poor fellow is looking for an excuse to dismiss the whole exercise, so that he doesn’t have to actually think about the issues. That’s the case with Leon Wieseltier’s review of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell—it’s kind of like watching a beached fish gasp and flounder, yet at the same time he apparently believes he’s the one with the gaff hook and club.
It’s full of self-important declarations that reduce to incoherence, such as this one:
You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett’s natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason.
One moment he’s telling us that just tracing the origins of an idea is insufficient to disprove it (sadly for Mr Wieseltier’s argument, there is no sign that Dennett disagrees), the next he’s telling us that the origin of Dennett’s reason is “creaturely” and “animalized”, and therefore of a lesser or invalid kind. I had no idea we could categorize reason by the nature of its source (I’d like to know what varieties of reason he proposes: “creaturely”, “human”, “divine”? Is there also a “vegetable reason”?), but even if we could, by his initial premise, it wouldn’t matter: he needs to address its content, not carp against it because it is the product of natural selection rather than revelation.
Then there’s this rather bewildering build-up. Wieseltier carefully builds a case that he has caught Dennett in an internal contradiction, an idea he pounces on with a kind of petty triumphal glee…but all it shows is that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Like many biological reductionists, Dennett is sure that he is not a biological reductionist. But the charge is proved as early as the fourth page of his book. Watch closely. “Like other animals,” the confused passage begins, “we have built-in desires to reproduce and to do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this goal.” No confusion there, and no offense. It is incontrovertible that we are animals. The sentence continues: “But we also have creeds, and the ability to transcend our genetic imperatives.” A sterling observation, and the beginning of humanism. And then more, in the same fine antideterministic vein: “This fact does make us different.”
Then suddenly there is this: “But it is itself a biological fact, visible to natural science, and something that requires an explanation from natural science.” As the ancient rabbis used to say, have your ears heard what your mouth has spoken? Dennett does not see that he has taken his humanism back. Why is our independence from biology a fact of biology? And if it is a fact of biology, then we are not independent of biology. If our creeds are an expression of our animality, if they require an explanation from natural science, then we have not transcended our genetic imperatives. The human difference, in Dennett’s telling, is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind—a doctrine that may quite plausibly be called biological reductionism.
To declare that we are not limited by our genetic imperatives does not in any way contradict the statement that we are material, biological beings with behaviors that can be explained scientifically, without recourse to the supernatural or any other kind of immaterial vitalism. Opposing simplistic genetic reductionism—which, by the way, is good to see from Dennett, because he has a bit of a reputation for being far too narrowly reductionist in his views—is not the same as denying a natural, biological basis for behavior. When Wieseltier tries to insist that genetic determinism is the same as biology, he’s just flaunting his own ignorance.
The whole review reads this poorly, and I suppose I could take it on paragraph by paragraph…but nah. Brian Leiter has already torpedoed it, so even this much seems like excess. The New York Times really needs to do a better job of finding qualified reviewers—it seems in this case they just found a guy anxious to posture against the ungodly, with no competence to actually judge the book.
I used to live in Utah, I’ve read parts of the Book of Mormon, and I’ve always been baffled about how such a cockamamie story that is contradicted by all of the evidence could possibly be so popular. Facts don’t matter to a religion, of course, and the LDS Church has its own answer: it’s a conspiracy by scientists to attack their True Version of History.
Officially, the Mormon Church says that nothing in the Mormon scriptures is incompatible with DNA evidence, and that the genetic studies are being twisted to attack the church.
Uh, I think that whole business of Native Americans being descended from the lost tribe of Israel is pretty much blown away by the genetic evidence.
Just a suggestion: don’t browse weblogs when you’re trying to perk yourself up with a little cheery good news.
<sigh>
P.S. As you’ll see in the comments, the sources for those last statistics aren’t just wobbly, they’re downright dishonest. Never mind.
Chris Clarke brought this strangely twisted article to my attention. It starts out just fine, pointing out that the Intelligent Design assault on science is based on nothing but incredulity, and has the sweeping goal of destroying naturalism—not just one theory in biology, but the whole scientific shebang. The author is against all that, which is good…thanks, Cynthia, we appreciate your support. Now if only she’d just ended it there at the two-thirds mark.
The last third is peculiar. She seems to be less interested in strong science than in strengthening religion, and the reason she’s arguing against ID is purely on the Augustinian principle that backing foolish statements about the natural world makes the religious look foolish.
A more effective way to bolster religious belief than attacking Darwin is to remember that religion addresses questions that are completely beyond the range of science. The meaning of life, the nature of good conduct, the nature of the human soul: Science is not set up to deal with any of these.
Is religion?
Science isn’t set up to deal with the Great Ju-Ju, the lares and penates, or Atlantean spirit-guides, either—because they don’t exist. The religious are free to invent non-existent phenomena all they want, but saying that science doesn’t deal in imaginary nonsense isn’t exactly a flaw.
As for the nature of good conduct, we don’t need religion to support that idea, and I see no reason why non-supernatural processes require metaphysical rationalizations.
This is why religion remains so potent — and, I think, so positive — a force in modern America. It alone provides answers to the hardest questions we all face. In a health crisis, we want help from a doctor who practices medicine in a completely rational and scientific manner. But our prayers that this medicine helps go to a supernatural being, not to the doctor.
Urk. That casual equation of medicine with prayer is simply creepy. In a health crisis, we need help from a doctor; prayer is superfluous and useless. Religion remains potent because so many refuse to acknowledge its impotence.
The essay is about to hit bottom. The author decides to compare Darwin to that other fellow who shares a birthday with him, and starts praising Lincoln’s spirituality.
Lincoln could never have accomplished the great tasks before him, nor inspired others to stay the course through so many defeats, disappointment and death, without recourse to ideas imbued with the deepest spirituality. Whether he declared that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom” or called on his fellow Northerners to press on to victory “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” he clearly saw the unique wisdom and power embodied in the great truths of religion — wisdom certainly different from scientific wisdom, but equally certainly, just as valuable.
This, most of us would agree, is religion at its best: providing spiritual comfort, psychological strength, moral direction and righteous inspiration.
In this realm, evolution — wonderful job that it does in explaining the natural world — cannot compete with religion. In its own “ballpark,” religion, as Lincoln knew, wins every time. It’s only when it strays into the other guy’s stadium that it sets itself up for inevitable loss and disappointment.
Uh-oh. Somebody needs to look up the actual beliefs of Lincoln, rather than just making them up as she goes along.
Lincoln was a deist and freethinker. He paid token deference to religion because he was well aware that he could not win office as a man who rejected Christianity. That puts that last paragraph in a different light: he knew that religion’s “ballpark” was bigotry and intolerance, and that he had to avoid challenging it.
It’s the 21st century. I think it’s about time we started challenging.
This has got to be a spoof site, but then I would have had to think Rapture Ready was a joke, too. Anyway, when the Rapture comes and you are ascended into heaven, you need to make sure your beloved pets are cared for, so the JesusPets service is recruiting non-Christians to take care of pets during the Tribulation or whatever.
It’s a bit bizarre. One thing they have to make sure of is that the godless atheist isn’t signing up just so he can get his hands on Mr Tinkles to rape and eat, so we have to sign a promise that we aren’t just scheming to ravish everyone’s abandoned pets.
Make hard CA$H from home while the world is in flames!
Are you an animal lover; and also an atheist, agnostic, jew, muslim, or other non-Christian? If so, you might qualify for the JesusPets Partner Program!
JesusPets will pay YOU to take care of dogs, cats, and other pets. To qualify, you must agree with this statement:
The JesusPets Partner Program Statement
- I love animals, and am willing to care for pets after the Christian Rapture.
- I am not, and never have been a born-again Christian.
- I believe it is immoral to have sex with animals, and have no desire to do so.
- I believe it is immoral to consume common domesticated pets (note: this includes goldfish!), and have no desire to do so.
If you agree with, then please contact JesusPets to join our international community of JesusPets Partners!
Hmmm. If I were a cat-raper, I don’t think I’d be too troubled about breaking an electronic pledge.
