A Consumer's Guide to the Foundations of Reality

After reading about the crazyist approach to metaphysics, I was inspired to make a survey of various things that I have heard proposed as the true underpinnings of reality; the One True X that Underlies Everything Else; the bottom layer of the cosmic architectural stack. I suspect this question is even more impenetrable to common sense than is metaphysics of mind. Not really much of a surprise; this is why we have religion and poetry and art, which seem to do a much better job on such things than philosophy. But that doesn't stop people from trying to approach the big questions with a more prosaic frame of mind, so here's a list of candidates, with my own personally biased annotations. I'm throwing together philosophically serious metaphysics with New Age hoohah and other miscellany, because it seems appropriate – the former kinds don't really seem any sillier than the latter once you discount the cultural packaging they come in.

Matter

Materialism, "atoms and the void". Materialism doesn't seem that crazy to me, but possibly my common sense has been warped by decades of hanging out in the vicinity of artificial intelligence labs. For most people, picturing the universe (and more to the point, themselves) as complicated machines is crazy, because there's nobody home.

Feel like I should mention Thales and the other presocratics for proposing not just that the world was made of matter, but a specific kind (water, in his case). This may have been one of the earliest times that the metaphysical question arose, and that someone tried to posit a generalized single stuff making up the plenitude of different stuffs found in the world. So we can forgive him for making a crude guess, but maybe not for opening up this unanswerable and unprofitable line of thinking in the first place.

Ideas

Idealism is another philosophical classic, the dual of materialism, it never made much of an impression on me. Pretty crazy – Samuel Johnson famously demonstrated that by kicking a rock. Still it dominated European philosophy for a long time and is not dead.

[David Chapman, whose work you should read if you like this sort of thing, would call idealism simply wrong. My own point of view – and maybe it just means I am not taking these questions as seriously as he does – is that weird-ass philosophical ideas, like weird-ass religious ideas, cannot be "wrong" or "right". They convey world views, and the best you can do with them is get a feeling of "yes, I can with a bit of straining envision what it is like to see the world in this way". It's possible that some of these worldviews may be more or less helpful or harmful to your well-being, but that is to some extent independent from whether they are interesting.]

Language

"In the beginning was the word". We can't escape language, it is everywhere we look because we bring it with us:

Elements of what we call language penetrate [so] deeply into what we call reality that the very project of representing ourselves as being mappers of something language-independent is fatally compromised from the start.

– Hilary Putnam, quoted approvingly by Richard Rorty

Given that, it's easy to see it as somehow foundational.

Narrative

The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.

– Muriel Rukeyser, The Speed of Darkness

Mathematical Structure

This one (articulated by Max Tegmark) may be my current favorite, as it takes my innate tropism towards abstraction and formal elegance to an ultimate conclusiona. But it also seems somewhat static and dead, as do many other scientifically-minded forms of metaphysics that de-temporalize time.

Computation

The theory that the universe is a cellular automata and physics is computation. Pretty crazy when it was invented (by Edward Fredkin I think), it soon become a staple of hard SF and transhumanoid economists, and by now is almost taken for granted in certain circles. These theories always lead, of course, to the suspicion that the particular computation under consideration is not really a bottom layer at all, but instead our universe is a simulation running on a vast computer in some larger (more fundamental) universe. Does this stack of virtual machines bottom out somewhere? If not, see "recursivity", if it does, well, then that is the true foundation.

Music

A somewhat-occult tradition going from Pythagoras and Robert Fludd, through Harry Smith, to various new agers.

Pythagoras conceived the universe to be an immense monochord, with its single string connected at its upper end to absolute spirit and at its lower end to absolute matter–in other words, a cord stretched between heaven and earth.

I'll say this about music; it has the unique capability of serving mathematical pattern formation/seeking, gut-level emotion, and the spiritual, whatever that is. That doesn't mean it constitutes reality, but as it transcends a whole bunch of everyday categories that seems to locate it somewhere beyond.

Distinction

From G. Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form, which derives boolean logic and the entire universe from the simple act of imagining a distinction. The most compact and elegant foundation I've encountered, although it's not clear what can be built on it – efforts to ground more traditional mathematics on it have faltered as far as I know, and it remains a fringe work.

Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself…This is indeed amazing…But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever sees is only partially itself…In this condition it will always partially elude itself.

A similar idea also apparently appears in Deleuze but I've never been able to make much sense of him

Will

"The world is the will to power -- and nothing besides!". – Nietzche

"According to all this we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing...” will, the fundamental world-stuff, expressing itself as nature indirectly and indistinctly as through Platonic Ideas, but immediately and subtlely in music as will-in-itself." – Schopenhauer (note the link to music also)

I wish I had time to study these thinkers in more depth, because I think I suffer from exposure to the cartoon versions (Nietzche became a cartoon version of himeself, confounding the issue even more). But I have experienced the feeling that a will to exist lies in the core of everything. See the next entry:

Life

Vitalism, Hylozoism, the life force! I don't quite grasp how it works as a metaphysics but architect Christopher Alexander has published a beautiful four-volume demonstration of the living universe, so I bow to him:

I state this by means of the following hypothesis: What we call “life” is a general condition which exists to some degree or other in every part of space: brick, stone, grass river, painting, building, daffodil, human being, forest, city. And further: The key to this idea is that every part of space— every connected region of space, small or large—has some degree of life, and that this degree of life is well-defined, objectively existing and measurable. 

I believe that this is true; not just a nice way of talking. As I try to explain it, quietly for all its grandeur, and try to make the artist's experience real, I hope that you, with me, will also catch a glimpse of a modified picture of the universe. 

God

A popular favorite. The kind of crazyism that is so baked into culture that it stops being crazy and just becomes boring. Nonetheless, seems to work for a lot of people.

The Absolute

Seems tautological, in that it says that there is a bottom layer to reality and gives it a name, without being able to say anything sensible about it. And it's also just "God" with all the anthropomorphism stripped out, but I'm starting to suspect that anthropomorphism is the only redeeming feature of religion. A very 19th-century idea, but I don't suppose you can properly appreciate what the 20th century was all about without understanding what it was rebelling against.

The Tao

Serves about the same role as "the Absolute", but in a less ponderous, more poetical form, a little more apophatic, able to acknowledge the absurdity of trying to grasp the infinite with finite teools. "I call it Tao, but that is not its name".

Pattern

A favorite of somewhat new-agey yet scientific thinkers like Gregory Bateson or Christopher Alexander (see Life). Appealingly abstract. Patterns of what, though? Perhaps that question is missing the point.

Process

This is way too vague for me, but I realize I know nothing of Whitehead. From skimming Wikipedia, I guess that the innovation of this metaphysics was to dethrone the eternalist point of view in favor of something that can incoporpate change. Sounds like a good idea.

Me

Well, I'm the only fixed point in the swirling chaos (from my own perspective). Perhaps I invented it all! Leads to solipsism and madness and hence ultimately boring.

Humans, or Intelligence, or Consciousness

The anthropic principle, the collective form of Me.

Self-interest, evolution, conatus

Metaphysics for economists and evolutionist. What is real is what persists, what persists is what can act in its own interest. Somewhat similar to will, I suppose, although without the sturm-und-drang.

Love

A metaphysics based on love seems too gloppy to support the violent universe we live in. And the word has become weighed down with tacky usage. But let me just acknowledge the genuine religious emotions that can come along with this idea and leave it at that.

Recursivity

It's turtles all the way down. Which is close to saying that there is no bottom layer, which will be the subject of a later post.

Status

My own invention, sort of, when I realized that much of the argument over which of the above concepts is the One True Foundation of Reality can be reduced to status-competition games among different social groups. Eg, if materialism is true, scientists get more respect; but if some form of religion wins this competition then theologians and philosophers get more respect. This is most evident today in the sputtering and fruitless debate between "new atheists" and their opponents. In other words, the real underlying force and substance behind everything is status-seeking (see "self-interest" above, but this is on a somewhat more meta level). The question of ontological priority is really a question of social priority, and status thus becomes more fundamental than any of the tools used to achieve it.

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Naturally many of these overlap. After all, insofar as any of them are even a little bit true, they must be different descriptions or aspects of the same thing. Gather enough of them and some common dimensions seem to emerge (eg, human-centric vs not, static vs energetic/dynamic, knowable vs. unknowable, poetical vs formal, reductionist vs holist).

[ [ Next installment: the cure for metaphysics ] ]

Crazyism

The most sensible philosophy paper I've read in awhile is about crazyism -- roughly, the idea that any seriously worked-out metaphysics of mind must violate some tenet of common-sense and thus appear "crazy". Or in other words, our minds are not capable of understanding their own fundamental nature. This is The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind by Eric Schwitzgebel.

Schwitzgebel argues by going through an elaborate and exhaustive taxonomy of Philosophy of Mind theories -- materialism, dualism, idealism, etc, showing that each in some way is both bizarre, ie it violates common sense in some way -- and dubious -- ie, it is not compelling enough to be accepted as true despite its oddity. The combination of these two qualities equals crazy in his terminology. The second clause about dubiosity is there to distinguish metaphysical craziness from scientific theories that, while bizarre enough, have evidence or something else compelling behind them. Eg, quantum mechanics is merely bizarre, because its strangeness can be supported by demonstration and experiment, while the many-worlds interpretation of qm is full-on crazy.

For instance, Schwitzgebel tries to demonstrate that a consistent materialism must grant consciousness to collective entities:

It would be bizarre to suppose that the United States has a stream of conscious experience distinct from the conscious experiences of the people who compose it...Yet it’s unclear by what materialist standard the United States lacks consciousness. Nations, it would seem, represent and self-represent. They respond (semi-) intelligently and self- protectively, in a coordinated way, to opportunities and threats. They gather, store, and manipulate information. They show skillful attunement to environmental inputs in warring and spying on each other. Their subparts (people and subgroups of people) are massively informationally interconnected and mutually dependent, including in incredibly fancy self-regulating feedback loops. These are the kinds of capacities and structures that materialists typically regard as the heart of mentality.

Crazyism is inevitable, he says, because of the manifest inadequacy of common sense in dealing with metaphysics. "Something bizarre must be true about the mind, but which bizarre propositions are the true ones, we are in no good position to know." Crazyism is apparently an extension and partial one-upping of mysterianism, the idea that some phenomena (consciousness) are simply inexplicable due to the limitations of our minds. Mysterians are mostly naturalists, while Schwitzgebel is willing to entertain stranger ideas, and indeed believes one has to.

Common sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. Contradictions thus inevitably flow from it, and no coherent metaphysical system can respect it all. Although ordinary common sense serves us fairly well in practical maneuvers throughthe social and physical world, common sense has proven an unreliable guide in cosmology and probability theory and microphysics and neuroscience and macroeconomics and evolutionary biology and structural engineering and medicine and topology. If metaphysics more closely resembles items in the second class than in the first, as it seems to, we might excusably doubt the dependability of common sense as a guide to metaphysics.

After living with this idea for awhile, the more sense it makes to me. The contrary position, that the universe is knowable by common sense down to its foundations, seems simplistic, arrogant, and counter to experience. And Schwitzgebel, in his clever attempts to apply reason at the point where reason breaks down, seems almost Godelian.

[Schwitzgebel has a blog, The Splintered Mind]

What cannot be said

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen.
What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

-- Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The idea of apophatic theology has gotten some play in blogs recently, mostly due to a book by Karen Armstrong defending the idea, and some leading uncompromising atheist scientist flamers have attacked her. I'm not sure I see why. Apophaticism by design does not make any positive statements about God or anything else, thus it cannot conflict with science. You'd think that would satisfy the militants, but no, they will not rest until anything even vaguely smacking of religion is razed to the ground.

Not me! I have a mystical streak and a contrarian streak, so this form of enlightenment through negation appeals to me. I see Jerry Coyne is having a contest to name those atheists who like me are less than thoroughly hardcore. I think I like "placatheist" the best of his candidates so far.

One good argument for apophatic theology is to look at what happens when douchebags and pinheads think they have a line on God and "the Absolute". Apparently He's not only American, but a wingnut Republican as well. I think the wingers have (in embryonic form) something of a new religion, in which the saints are the founding fathers and Ronald Reagan, and Sarah Palin is playing Joan of Arc. In keeping with the apophatic approach I am not very comfortable giving attributes to God and I can be pretty sure that he doesn't pick sides in US electoral contests, nor does he have some special affinity for people born in North America.

The obnoxiousness of the noisy religious right is a large part of what drives intelligent people to atheism, but I think it's a tactical error. There is generally a hidden metaphysical core at the heart of most political belief systems, and the left needs to be more explicit about it. There is a vague correspondence between the apophatic demand for silence about metaphysics and the liberal walling-off of religious arguments from the public sphere. But it's not clear that apophatic religion can compete with the more primitive forms as a political organizing tool.

If you can't say anything about that-which-we-usually-call-God but probably deserves a more mystagogic name like "the One" or "the Absolute", what can you do with it? Contemplate it silently I suppose. Keep it in mind as a reality underlying the visible world. Or, you can just deny that the concept has any meaning or utility at all as the hardcore atheists do, but that is boring and philistine. Or you can make meta-level statements about your inability to say anything about it itself. This is what Wittgenstein and others do. A great deal end up being said about that of which we cannot speak.

I'm in the business of effing the ineffable.
-- Alan Watts

Why I, like others, am compelled to issue words on this topic which demands silence, I cannot say. Call it a nagging dissatisfaction with the standard stories. Neither the materialist nor the standard religious pictures of the world make much sense to me, so I'm trying to construct my own. The loudmouths for God or for atheism strike me as team players, which I am not. Universal skepticism is more my thing. Even the existence of an apophatic tradition makes me suspicious; I wouldn't want to accidentally be part of a movement.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
-- Samuel Beckett

Links to the tradition:

• Maimonides advocated an apophatic approach.
• Apophatic theology and neoplatonism.
• Apophasis as a literary genre

A map of mathematics

This paper Is “the theory of everything” merely the ultimate ensemble theory? by Max Tegmark is extremely interesting in many respects, but aside from its way-out metaphysics, I really appreciated this diagram showing common mathematical structures and their relationships. When I actually was trying to do math years ago, this is something I wished for and occasionally tried to construct myself.

Alas, I've mostly forgotten most of my math (and I've never really been able to grasp modern physics) but this table lets me fantasize about picking it up again -- at least I would be able to figure out where to start, what bit depends on which other bit, and where it all ultimately leads. Although apparently category theory is really where it's at in physics (or was 10 years ago) and that doesn't even appear in the diagram.

The only postulate in this theory is that all structures that exist mathematically exist also physically, by which we mean that in those complex enough to contain self-aware substructures (SASs), these SASs will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically “real” world.

Taking Deepak Chopra Seriously (no, seriously!)

Deepak Chopra has been making an ass of himself attacking Richard Dawkins in a lengthy series of blog posts. He's been roundly mocked by various sciencebloggers, many of whom have given up in disgust.

For some contrarian reason I feel like coming to the guy's defense. Why on earth? Despite the fact that he probably pulls down $5M a year and has a staff managing his blog for him, I feel sorry for him. He's clearly the underdog in a battle of wits, being beaten up by the bullies of science.

I wish I remembered where I heard of this trick: there is an intellectual practice which is the opposite of argument -- it involves listening to someone who seems to have a profoundly diverging viewpoint, and instead of arguing against them, tentatively assume that what they are saying is "true" and try to figure out what it could be true of. Can we apply this technique to Chopr?. Instead of flaming him -- is there any way to make any sense of what he's saying?

Where he violates NOMA by attacking science he is generally foolish. So toss out all the nonsense about evolution being a random process, and DNA decaying by entropy, or anything else that actually impinges on material reality.

What's left? There are some stale philosophical points, expressed poorly. His shtick on yellow flowers is just the problem of qualia. But it does point to a real problem in naturalistic metaphysics -- it's based on objectivity, the world as seen from the outside, and does not treat subjective experience very well. Despite efforts of cognitive science and philosophers to ground consciousness in the material functioning of the brain, something seems to get left out.

That something can be glossed over as epiphenomenal, or (if you are someone like Chopra) used as a lever to try and overthrow materialism entirely and postulate a metaphysics where consciousness is somehow prior to the material world. In other words, it's philosophical idealism.

Elsewhere he writes:

Science knows about objective reality, the mask of matter that our five senses detects.

intelligence is innate in nature. It gives rise to consciousness in myriad forms. The brain--and DNA--are agents of this underlying intelligence. They embody it, give it flesh and physical experience, carry out its activity mechanically, and so forth. The materialistic worldview rejects such assumptions categorically, but in doing so, it turns life into a random chemical reaction, which will never suffice.

So he is an idealist who believes that consciousness is foundationally prior to matter, and permeates space somehow. OK. That at least is a coherent philosophical position, with a long lineage. It's seems wrong to me, and vacuous, but it at least makes a certain kind of sense.

More:

The universe is a complex machine whose workings are steadily being demystified by science. Any other way of viewing the world is superstitious and reactionary....What is so strange about this argument is that Dawkins himself is totally reactionary. His defense of a material universe revealing its secrets ignores the total overthrow of materialism in modern physics. There is no world of solid objects; space-time itself depends upon shaping forces beyond both space and time.

He actually has a point here. Don't take "shaping forces" too literally -- it is the case that modern physics has a worldview that views the universe as something close to pure mathematics, with the solid material world as somehow emergent from the mathematical structure. Of course, this does nothing to the truth claims of sciences that work with the more mundane plumbing-level world (like biology). But it does mean we should take common-sensical materialism with at least a grain of salt.

The problem is that none of the weirdness of modern physics can be used to prove anything about God, as most physicists will tell you.

More Chopra:

God, on the other hand, is merely inferred. He's an invisible supposition, and who needs one when we have fossils? The flaw here is subtle, for Dawkins is imagining God in advance and then claiming that what he imagines has little chance of existing. That's perfectly true, but why should God be what Dawkins imagines--a superhuman Creator making life the way a watchmaker makes a watch? Let's say God is closer to being a field of consciousness that pervades the universe.

OK, so God isn't an anthropomorphic person, but some impersonal "field". That's a little bit interesting, but of course Dawkins in his book says he has no problem with an impersonal God that is identical with the laws of nature (the God of Einstein and Spinoza). This isn't quite what Chopra is putting forward -- there's that word "consciousness" confusing things -- but it's close.

Let's say that this field keeps creating new forms within itself. These forms swirl and mix with each other, finding more combinations and complexities as time unfolds. Such a God couldn't be imagined because a field is infinite, and there's nowhere it isn't. Thus trying to talk about God is like a fish trying to talk about wetness. A fish is immersed in wetness; it has nothing to compare water to, and the same is true of consciousness. We are conscious and intelligent, and it does no good to talk about the probability of not being conscious and intelligent.

Woo. Let's say this. OK, the universe certainly is full of mixing and swirling forms. Fair enough. Call the totality of these forms "God". OK, why not? And such a God couldn't be imagined. Fine, I'm still with him here, barely. But then why has Chopra just made six long blog posts that purport to imagine the unimaginable? Does he have superfish powers that let him see the water?

I must say though, this is the point where Chopra's thinking starts to appeal to my own kind of woo. There is something about the universe that makes it structured, orderly, comprehensible and livable, and this "something" seems to elude ordinary science. Thinkers much deeper than Chopra have suggested that space itself is "alive" in some way -- I'm thinking of architect Christopher Alexander, who has published a maddening and fascinating 4-volume treatment of this idea, The Nature of Order. I should be reviewing that, that is the kind of woo that actually might be worth something.

Oh well, onwards with the current project. Here's a cheap rhetorical trick Chopra uses:

For thousands of years human beings have been obsessed by beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself. God stands for the perfection of both, and even if you think truth and beauty (along with love, justice, forgiveness, compassion, and other divine qualities) can never be perfect, to say that they are fantasies makes no sense.

Chopra lumps together a bunch of stuff that seem to him to be somehow above or beyond the material world. He says it's a "straw man to set God up as the delusion" -- not sure what that means, I suspect he is misusing the term "straw man". In fact, it's his concept of materialism that is the straw man -- his materialism is inherently blind, cold, random, and meaningless, so all his good stuff has to come from somewhere else.

Let's look at that list: beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. What a mixed bag! They all involve subjective experience, but what doesn't? Denying the existence of God does not imply the existence of art. Biology has quite a bit to say about altruism and social relationships as objective facts. Argh.

You know, I give up. There may be nuggets of truth in all this, but I feel like a street sparrow trying to peck seeds from a steaming pile of horse manure.

This was a failed experiment. Damn. Sorry I wasted my time (and yours).

Scientism, Naturalism, and Ismism.

So the proprietor of Secondhand Smoke has discovered the Center for Inquiry and accused it of the sin of scientism. This refers to the practice of science exceeding its proper bounds of rational empirical inquiry and straying into the areas of metaphysics and ethics.

My reaction to this was, why not embrace the term? There needs to be some name for all this activity that is not itself science but is based on science -- the active promotion of reason, secularism, crusading against nonsense, trying to figure out how science changes ethics and morality, scientists writing popular books on the meaning of it all, bioethics questions like what constitutes a person...scientism didn't sound too bad as a term. The Center for Inquiry was new to me but it seems linked to (and similar in style to) the output of other earnestly secular groups. Which is to say, they are keeping a flame of reason burning but organized religion doesn't really have too much to worry about in terms of charismatic competition.

The next day I discovered a bracing new term -- naturalism. This movement, which is based in Boston, seems to be an attempt to construct a materialist philosophy with a postive slant (as opposed to atheism, which is defined by what it is against). They have some very interesting positions on what a strongly materialist view implies. For instance, compassion -- if every human behavior has material causes then you can't judge anybody very harshly:

The causal view: From a naturalistic perspective, there are no causally privileged agents, nothing that causes without being caused in turn. Human beings act the way they do because of the various influences that shape them, whether these be biological or social, genetic or environmental....

Responsibility and morality: From a naturalistic perspective, behavior arises out of the interaction between individuals and their environment, not from a freely willing self that produces behavior independently of causal connections (see above). Therefore individuals don’t bear ultimate originative responsibility for their actions, in the sense of being their first cause....

The source of value: Because naturalism doubts the existence of ultimate purposes either inherent in nature or imposed by a creator, values derive from human desires and preferences, not supernatural absolutes. To the extent that there is a shared human nature, values are common across cultures and thus objective, but to the extent cultures differ, so might values. Although values do not have a supernatural foundation, we cannot escape having them, since they constitute us as motivated creatures.

And this page on death looks pretty interesting as well.

All well and good. I was particularly excited to learn from a review on their site that Gary Drescher, a very smart guy who I know from back in the day at MIT, has published a new book, Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics, which looks like a thorough investigation of metaphysical naturalism from a physicalist and computationalist perspective. I'll have to read this, BUT -- my intuition is that none of these secular belief systems are going to do much to displace religion.

Why? Religion and naturalism are competing for roughly the same ecological niche in the human meme system -- that is, a foundational explanation for existence. But they emphasize very different areas. Religion provides answers in areas (morality, the soul, the afterlife, ultimate purpose) that are evolved to match the needs of the human psyche. Naturalism tries to address these but requires a good deal of intellectual effort and as such is only going to appeal to a small minority of people. Religion is natural, science is not.

My own tactic may be labelled anti-ismism: give up on the quest/desire for a single foundation system of understanding. Accept religion as an alternative way of knowing and find ways to interpret it that don't conflict with science. Seems right to me, but then I miss out on all the bitter fights between theists and atheists, and now even more bitter ones between hardcore and softcore atheists. Isn't anyone going to stand up for fanatical anti-fanaticism?

More pussyfooting

I don't know why I am so obsessed with trying to stake out a militantly moderate position in the atheism wars. It seems both easier and more fun to just skewer the godly (shooting Jesus fish in a barrel). I guess I like a challenge.
Here's a excellent comment by john c. halasz in yet another huge Dawkins thread. The first part just makes the fairly commonplace points:

1) Dawkins' tendentious style mirrors in some ways the chauvinism and narrow-mindedness of his opponents. Militant atheism has some of the same flaws as militant religion.

2) Science, which is about the natural world, should leave itself out of metaphysics.

But this is worth quoting (emphasis added):

Contemporary right-wing Christian fundamentalism is not just some sudden and inexplicable outburst of irrationality and ignorance, whatever its historical antecedents, but rather a deliberately crafted and manipulated phalangist movement. Attacking religious belief per se, rather than the distortions and instrumentalizations of its normative contents, which are less about the cognitive understanding of the natural world than the social ordering of ethical relations with respect to collective fate, not only badly misses the point interpretively, but serves to re-enforce what it ostensibly opposes, precisely by blocking off any communicative understanding and deliberation, any search for, broadly speaking, rational common ground.

Yeah. It's not that Dawkins is wrong but that he's fighting the wrong war. Reducing all religion to fundamentalism and attacking its belief system misidentifies the enemy. The enemy should not be religious beliefs, which are too deep rooted to eliminate and not really addressable by rational argument anyway. The enemy is the (mis)use of religion in service of a right-wing political agenda.

Even religious conservatives (see David Kuo's recent book) are starting to feel uncomfortable with their alliance with the Bushite authoritarians. So why not try to persuade then and others in the muddled middle to support the hallowed wall of separation?

We militant moderates need a name. hopefully better than "brights". I propose "NOMAds" after Stephen Jay Gould's acronym for Non-overlapping Magisteria. OK, that won't win any marketing awards either.

Thoughts from Kansas makes similar points, here and here.