Harold Henderson had an interesting blog entry last month discussing some critical reactions to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, particularly Thomas Nagel’s (available in full, and well worth reading, here):
The key question is whence came design in nature. Dawkins says God's no explanation, because then you have to explain God. But on this field Nagel is a pro and Dawkins is an amateur: "All explanations come to an end somewhere," explains Nagel, since Dawkins evidently didn't do the reading. "On either view [Dawkins's secularism or the God hypothesis], the ultimate explanation is not itself explained.
The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics." Having laid out the rules of the match, Nagel finds that the God hypothesis loses round one, since "the theory of evolution through heritable variation and natural selection" explains how intricate designs such as the eye can come about naturally, and hence these designs no longer provide evidence for the God hypothesis.
But round two is still being fought out, because the evolutionary process is undergirded by DNA. And since DNA itself can't have evolved, where did it come from? "At this point the origin of life remains, in light of what is known about the huge size, the extreme specificity, and the exquisite functional precision of the genetic material, a mystery -- an event that could not have occurred by chance and to which no significant probability can be assigned on the basis of what we know of the laws of physics and chemistry."
Of course that could change, and likely will if we can keep the theocrats at bay and dispassionate biological research going. (BTW, Nagel isn't buying Dawkins's idea that everything can be reduced to physics in any case. No matter what anyone says, your own experience of being aware isn't the same thing as neurons firing in the brain. Some things are just . . . different.)[Emphasis Henderson’s]
I don’t question evolution, but I do think claiming that it proves the non-existence of God is pure hubris, and a little obtuse besides. Whether or not one must read Genesis literally to validate the entire text and meaning of the Bible is a theological question, not a scientific one. (Of course, attempting to have the teaching of “Intelligent Design” replace the teaching of evolution in high school science classes is obtuse in the equal and opposite way.)
It’s been borne in on me lately, though, that Dawkins et al are talking about a lot more than defending the quality of science education in our nation’s public schools. This entry at GetReligion discusses a recent report of a conference of scientists on the subject of science and religion, and points to a number of scientists making rather exorbitant claims about what the replacement of religion itself with science can do for you and me. According to the New York Times:
Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.
Apparently this is not an exaggeration of the kinds of claims made for the awesome power of science at the conference:
By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.
Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
Although there was some pushback from more skeptical types too:
By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”
“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”
His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”
The interesting thing is, they really are pretty much mirror images, and not just because they are “extremists.” What strikes me the most about the scientists’ comments here (apart from the breathtaking historical ignorance, about Western intellectual history in general and the bloody 20th Century in particular), is how much they seem to attribute some kind of power or force to religion itself, independent of human agency. Whereas, as a long-time atheist*, I had thought we all understood that religion is merely a human project, invented by and for humans, to fulfill human ends. This means that it may not say anything very true about the world per se, but by definition it says a very great deal about us. It strikes me as fundamentally superstitious to think that religion is doing things to us (as opposed to us doing things with religion); and it’s remarkable that the anti-religious scientists quoted above not only seem to want to attribute agency to religion itself, but to identify it as the source of human evil as well.
Now that is superstition! Because if there IS no devil, then religion can’t BE the devil. We’re just stuck with ourselves all over again, and blaming religion is just more special pleading on behalf of a benighted if self-regarding species.
The application of science to the human (the part that's "just different" from physics) has what you might charitably call a checkered past. I'm thinking of Marxism, Freudianism, social Darwinism, etc. Whenever I read anything about Richard Dawkins lately I think about the work of Pascal Boyer, a psychologist who has been exploring the possible cognitive causes of religious modes of thought in humans, and this Wired article about a specific type of cognitive malfunction that seems to be common in math and science types. I think it might be that “scientifically” designed societies and social policies tend to be relentlessly anti-human in practice because actively suppressing the religious impulse, or whatever aspect of the human gives rise to and supports it, slips some crucial gears, gears we’re always supposed to be hitting. Our cognitive capacities evolved the way they did for some reason or other, no? So again I think a little humility is called for, perhaps especially by people who don’t understand or share the religious impulse that most people seem to have.
*Admittedly going a bit wobbly of late, but leave that aside for now.
Edited to add: Some friends of mine have gently pointed out that scientists actually do have a pretty workable theory of how DNA came to be, which makes me feel a bit silly for reposting the Nagel link that uncritically. However, I don't think it affects his underlying point. Nagel was positing DNA (implausibly, it turns out) as the point at which we are forced to acknowledge that God might have intervened, but it needn't be. There is still the flummoxing question of why the natural world exists at all in the first place.
