Ascientific Atheism?

Posted on October 22, 2006 in Agnosticism Spirituality and Being

Atheists seem quite upset that the latest work of their self-proclaimed chaplain, Richard Dawkins, has not ended theism for all time and brought the whole of humanity into their new world areligion. Sad to say that more than a few theologians have fought back, largely on the premise that they aren’t going to accept criticism from a scientist when that scientist attempts to foist ascientific arguments upon them and doesn’t take the time to understand their arguments.

I don’t normally spend a lot of time on the God issue because as an agnostic, I don’t think the effort is much worth my time. I side with the Buddha on this one, namely that discussions of the firsts and lasts of things don’t really serve us in the immediate life. Still, I enjoyed Marilyn Robinson’s hacking of Dawkins (whose humane learning, she says, is “capacious enough to include some deeply minor poetry”) in the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine (November 2006) and shall present it in a probably addled summary of it here:

• Dawkins, she notes, “implicitly defines science as a clear-eyed quest for truth, chaste as an algorithm, while religion is atavistic, mad, and mired in crime.” In other words, he gets to claim all the good stuff. He deserves to be thought of as a liberator. Or so he thinks.
• The God Delusion fills a tired old formula which has been ploughed before by journalistic catastrophists and believers in the Final Days. “Like so much of the contemporary clamor, it is out to name and denounce the great Satan, which is in this case religion.” Of course, Dawkins never poses any questions about the faux pas and ills of science. It’s all Religion. Bad bad bad.
• Nice quote: Granting for the purposes of argument that Dawkins is correct in the view that the majority of great scientists are atheists, we may then exclude religion from among the factors that recruit them to this somber work. We are left with nationalism, steady employment, good pay, the chance to do research that is lavishly funded and by definition, cutting edge — familiar motives of a kind fully capable of disarming moral doubt. In any case, the crankiest iman, the oliest televangelist can, at his worst, only urge circumstances a degree or two farther toward the use of these exotic war technologies that are always ready, always waiting. If it is fair to speak globally of religion, it is also fair to speak globally of science.” Of course, Robinson ably notes, speaking globally of either doesn’t amount to a truthful picture. This is a hard point for the Dawkinsites to digest.
• Dawkins runs around having it all his way. He upbraids Christians for spreading the lie that Jews were Christ-killers. He upbraids Jews for never breeding outside their own clan. He doesn’t check the research which shows that both Jews and Gentiles have, historically, intermixed. Robinson notes: “While it is true that persecution of the Jews has a very long history in Europe, it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale — Jewishness was not religious or cultural but genetic. Therefore no appeal could be made against the brute fact of a Jewish grandparent.” Of course, Dawkins and his followers would be quick to denounce this kind of thinking as “unscientific”.
• Like it or not, the Final Solution came out of science. “[E]ugenics is science as sure as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point.” [My thought: Dawkins seems to claim that science can never be in error, in which case, why all the arguments and testing of hypotheses over the centuries? Religion has its versions of this, too.] Science got away with the eugenics thinking of the 20th century because Science had prestige — which was not unlike the mileau in which the Spanish Inquisition arose. Robinson declares that both eugenics and the Inquisition stand as bad implementations of their respective spheres.

But it’s religion! The Dawkinists cry. Yes, Robinson admits, religion set the historic precedent. But consider the case of Edgar de Mortara, an Italian Jewish child who was kidnapped from his parents by Italian clerics because he’d been secretly baptized by a maid. In the 19th century, he was considered a cultural problem: in the 20th, the whole family would have been exterminated.

• Of course, the Nazis and their eugenics were an aberration. Robinson coughs and observes, correctly: “I would reply, first, that neither the Nazis nor the Germans had any monopoly on these theories, which were influential throughout the Western world, and, second, that the research on human subjects carried out by those holding such assumptions was good enough science to appear in medical texts for a good half a century.” Ooops. Got to declare a lot of aberrations to get out of this one. Or simply act as if they did not exist, which is the classic Dawkinist ploy.
• Robinson declares, however, that science should not be singled out as “exceptionally inclined to do harm, though its capacity for doing harm is by now unequaled. It is only to note that science, too, is implicated in this bleak human proclivity, and is one major instrument of it.” [Emphasis mine.]
• Higgison’s Test: When comparing religions or science and religion, you must always compare the best each has to offer to the best and the worst to the worst. “If religion is to be blamed for the fraud done in itsname, then what of science? Is it to be blamed for the Piltdown Hoax, for the long-credited deceptions having to do with cloning in South Korea?” [My thought: We are often told that science itself uncovered the Piltdown Hoax, which is absolutely true. Likewise, critics of the Catholic Church should note that from the time and era of the Spanish Inquisition, none of the inquisitors was sainted, but some of its victims were. Fair is fair and nothing is as simple as a meme.]
• Definition of science: “The astonishingly fruitful human venture into understanding the world and the universe….Science thus defined does not claim to understand gravity, light, or time. This is a very short list of its mystifications, its inquiries, all of which are beautiful to ponder. These three are sufficient to persuade me that conclusions about the ultimate nature of things are, to say the least, premature, and that to suggest otherwise is unscientific. The finer-grained the image of reality physicists achieve, the more alien it appears to every known strategy of comprehension.” [Remarks like this demonstrate why the agnostic position resembles more closely modern theology than atheism: it is perfectly happy with uncertainty. Note, however, that religiousists are perfectly happy making declarations about final causes themselves. This is where I step out of the picture.]
• Dawkins seems remarkably uninformed about developments in physics. Robinson reminds people that according to contemporary theory, space and time originated at the same time. Where Dawkins works inside an old framework, he does not make allowance for something beyond space and time. Hence theologians can happily argue that God exists outside of space and time and need not conform to their laws at all. [This is the point where I roll my eyes and step out of the whole argument. I hear the sweet tap-tap of angels dancing on heads of pins and the atheists are playing heavy metal to the theists’ chamber orchestra. Why waste your time on this kind of stuff?] A lot of stuff summarized here. Let the glass bead game players fiddle with this to their hearts’ content.
• There’s a nice long section on how Dawkins does not know his Bible. “Love thy neighbor” meant literally thy neighbor or so Dawkins believes. Robinson quotes Leviticus 19:33-34 and Luke 19:18 which define quite broadly who your neighbor is. He don’t have to look like you, talk like you, or worship like you.
• Dawkins pulls the “in that time” defense for Thomas Huxley. Huxley, it turns out, was dissing the Fourteenth Amendment and the notion of racial equality. Robinson nicely shows that Huxley had plenty of people telling him that he was wrong, but alas they were religious. And therefore not in the vanguard. (I am moving fast through the article at this point. Please read it.) Huxley’s thinking, unfortunately, was adopted as the scientific standard which permitted the morality of Jim Crow segregation. [In fairness, again, Science undid Science’s error. Franz Boas, who was trained in physics, set forth strict standards for marking differences between the races. In the final analysis, he found that they just weren’t significant when it came to matters such as intelligence.]
• Authoritarianism, which is too often is what Science has produced in its social gospel for the past 200 years according to Robinson, rears up in a rather comic passage where Dawkins decrees the Amish to be a danger to our healthy society! He suggests that the raising of their children be assigned to fitter people! [Like the ones whose engineering knowhow created the guns that killed all the little girls a few weeks ago?] Robinson suggests that a meme pool, like a gene pool, is fittest where there is diversity. “Would not the attempt to narrow it only repeat the worst errors of eugenic at the cultural and intellectual level? When the Zeitgeist turns Gorgon, the impulses toward culturall and biological eugenics have proved to be one and the same. It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance have so often called themselves reason and science.” [Finis.]

While I find Robinson’s arguments compelling, they cannot be my own. [Watch for atheists trying to make them so then give them a D for effort. Like zealots of many kind, they can be so damned LAZY when it comes to doing their homework. Before answering here, they should at least read Robinson’s article.] As an agnostic, I applaud them where they uphold the principle (not Heisenberg’s) of Uncertainty, and wary of them when they advance a theist certainty. Still, I think the arguing that is done here is better informed than that of Dawkins and his supporters who evidentally slept during their breadth of studies requirements.