Against easy atheism

Atheism is much in the air these days, with new books by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and a secondary wave of reviews and criticism, including Thomas Nagel in TNR, Marilyne Robinson in Harpers, Terry Eagleton in the LRB, and Jim Holt in the NYT, and Gary Wolf in Wired. These responses are mostly not from a standpoint of religious faith, rather, insofar as they are critical it's because of Dawkins' deliberately crude argumentation tactics. I find myself fence-straddling in this conversation -- on the one hand, I'm a sciencey guy and am alarmed at the rising political power of religious nfundamentalists. On the other hand, I don't think dismissing a large chunk of human culture and experience as simply a "delusion" is wise, from both the abstract philosophical standpoint and as a political tactic. So I find myself in sympathy with Dawkin's critics.

Dawkins engages in inverse cherry-picking (there should be a word for that) when it comes to religion, cataloging its many sins and failures but mostly ignoring whatever positive contributions it makes to human life. Robinson points out that science is not without sin itself and that if you are going to compare the two it must be done fairly:

The nineteenth-century abolitionist, feminist, essayist, and ordained minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson made the always timely point that, in comparing religions, great care must be taken to consider the best elements of one with the best of the other, and the worst with the worst, to avoid the usual practice of comparing, let us say, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie with the Golden Rule. The same principle might be applied in the comparison of religion and science. To set the declared hopes of one against the real-world record of the other is clearly not useful, no matter which of them is flattered by the comparison. What is religion? It is described by Dawkins as a virtually universal feature of human culture. But there is, commingled with it, indisputably and perhaps universally, doubt, hypocrisy, and charlatanism. Dawkins, for his part, considers religion wholly delusional, and he condemns the best of it for enabling all the worst of it. Yet if religion is to be blamed for the fraud done in its name, 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? If by “science” is meant authentic science, then “religion” must mean authentic religion, granting the difficulties in arriving at these definitions.

Dawkins fails to recognize that religion is not primarily about belief. Religion is about community, ritual, and emotional comfort, which is why people are so attached to it. The facticity of religious belief system is a secondary matter, and that's why attacks like Dawkins just seem misplaced. Dawkins takes religion as merely a bad form of science, a theory of nature which happens to be untrue. This misses the point completely, and it misses the point in the same way that religious fundamentalists seem to miss the point of their own faiths. Dumb religion breeds dumb criticism of religion. He's picking on the weakest form of religion, practiced by the weak-minded. It's not very interesting.

It's also ineffectual. The spiritual side of human nature isn't going to respond well to reason and argument. By deliberately promoting war between fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist atheism, and lumping in religious moderates with the former, Dawkins may stir controversy but is unlikely to change any minds. Religion won't go away. Atheists don't have the numbers to win a straight-out political war, so it just seems like better tactics to promote weak forms of religion that do not conflict with science, rather than lump moderates with fundamentalists.

So, while no religious believer, I'm not a fan of the sort of fundamentalist atheism espoused by Dawkins, Harris, and PZ Myers. I'm find it much more interesting to search for some way to reconcile spiritual concepts with with science. It's more challenging and risks being ridiculous, but something compels me to think about this nonsense (see here and here for previous attempts).

God-bothering

Warning: long post about religion.

I've had a long-standing interest in the wars between science and religion. I'm not sure why, it's doesn't really seem like a very fruitful debate, producing more heat than light. Nonetheless it pulls me in; I keep trying to rearrange my own thoughts about it in the hopes that a brilliant essay will emerge, but they remain confused. This being a blog I feel free to burble on about it anyway.

I'm on the side of science of course, if one must pick sides, but unlike some of the more rabidly atheistic people involved in this debate I am more interested in finding someway to reconcile the spiritual with scientific reality, rather than bash it over its immaterial head. I'm for reconciliation, peacemaking, and trying to find a stance that is fully consistent with science, yet gives some authentic space for people's relgious and spiritual experience. The hardcore anti-religious, village atheist sort of stance just doesn't appeal to me any more. I've started sniping in the comments over at Pharyngula in the hope of getting in some good fights.

Here's another entry point: Leon Wieseltier trashes Daniel Dennett's new book, Breaking the Spell in the NYT BR. The blogosphere has joined battle as well with most of my favorite scientific and political blogs lining up to take bashes at Wieseltier for bad arguments (poor understanding of Hume, misreading Dennett, using personal attacks, and just being a jerk -- "a digraceful and disrespectful hack job"). I mostly agree, but I have got some mysterious desire to find some value in LW's words, so I thought I'd try to tease out why.

Intellectual conflict is still conflict, and as such seems even more grounded in evolution than religion. So from a lofty perspective I see the whole thing as a war between science-apes and religion-apes, with constant border skirmishes. Science has reason on its side, but even this heavy weaponry doesn't seem to produce a victory over the other side. Steven Jay Gould proposed a sort of peace treaty, his idea of NOMA (Non-overlapping Magisteria), which would separate the two sides with a sort of intellectual border fence, but that proposal hasn't get very far. Neither side is willing to yield ownership of the foundations of truth.

I'm a science-ape by nature and training, but I can no longer join enthusiastically with the hardcore warriors for the science side like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers. They tend to portray the other side as merely stupid and deluded. There's no shortage of stupidity for them to attack, but religion seems to be more than that, and needs to be understood more sympathetically. Dennett seems to at least be somewhat sympathetic to the thought processes of the other side, at least willing to explore them. He's holding out the olive branch of understanding, and acknowledging that religion might (indeed, given his evolutionary stance, must) have beneficial effects, even if its beliefs are not true. On the other hand, he wants to "break the spell", so he's clearly not a neutral observer. From what I gather (I haven't read the book yet, just excerpts), his book is sort of a handshake with a joy buzzer in it. I have read the book that a lot of his ideas seem to come from, Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer, which I thought was brilliant. I have no quarrel with the general attempt to find biological or other roots of religious thought, but I'm not sure if that really undermines it.

Wieseltier, on the other hand, is mostly just sniping. His intellectual schtick seems to taking up the mantle of the prophets, and making grand moral pronouncements rather than reasoned arguments. That sounds more negative than I meant -- I'm in favor of grand moral pronouncements! Where would our discourse be without them? Look at Martin Luther King, for an example of the best of this genre in the modern era. Still, LW's supercilious tone has pissed off many readers -- he may not really be up to bearing the mantle.

So to be contrarian, despite my and the blogosphere's generally negative view of Wieseltier, I'm going to try to extract the stuff from his review that I find worthwhile:

It will be plain that Dennett's approach to religion is contrived to evade religion's substance.

I like that, it's direct -- religion has a substance, and it's not to be explained away by functionalist explations. Whether it's fair to Dennett I don't know.

Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.

This is a mostly-bogus argument (and an old one), but there's a kernel there that I like. The human ability to reason has certainly evolved, but reason itself lies, in some sense, beyond material evolution. For much the same reasons that we hope if we meet an alien intelligence, we can communicate with them, sharing (the in classic SF motif) the Pythagorean theorem, and other modes of reasoning. Reason, we hope, is universal even if the hardware it runs on is biological.

So LW is wrong to think that evolution "destroys" the power of reason, but right to invoke reason's independence.

(I'm not sure Dennett would disagree with my restatement of LW's argument, so perhaps this is another misplaced attack).

To connect the dots here, God may best be understood as something like the Pythagorean theorem -- not a material thing, but an inescapable conclusion of certain mental processes. And if it's inescapable, then we shouldn't be trying to escape it (as the materialist fundamentalist athiest does) but rather figuring out how to reconcile it with the rest of our mental state, including the advancing knowledge of science.

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.

Here may lie the crux of the biscuit. Dennet, LW, and I all agree for the first paragraph. Then LW diverges. I'm with Dennett (again!), at least 95%. Creeds are a natural fact (biological or otherwise) and thus capable of being studied and hopefully explained by science. The nature of the link between levels (biological to cognitive) is the proper subject of science and of Dennett's brand of philosophy, whether you label it "reductionism" or not. Finding such links oughtn't diminish the value of higher levels, spirituality included.

Still, the idea that there is something in creeds, or in reason, that "transcends" biology is interesting. There's no doubt in my mind that our thinking starts in biology, but it may finish somewhere else.

the excesses of naturalism cannot live without the excesses of supernaturalism. Dennett actually prefers folk religion to intellectual religion, because it is nearer to the instinctual mire that enchants him. The move "away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts," or the increasing philosophical sophistication of religion over the centuries, he views only as "strategic belief-maintenance." He cannot conceive of a thoughtful believer...Like many of the fundamentalists whom he despises, he is a literalist in matters of religion.

LW's point here is one I like, a bit. The materialists who battle religion tend to battle with the crudest forms of fundamentalism (ie, young-earth creationism). But there are more thoughtful forms of religious belief, or so I'm told. I'd like to see science engage with those. Of course, LW is positioned as a leading religious intellectual, and if this review is an example of his thought then maybe there isn't that much to engage with. Still, I somehow have this hope that there are intelligent spirtitually-oriented intellectuals out there who can engage fruitfully with science. Anyone there?

But why must we read literally in the realm of religion, when in so many other realms of human expression we read metaphorically, allegorically, symbolically, figuratively, analogically?

This is LW's closing sally at Dennett, but I doubt Dennet would disagree with the sentiment. No scientist, not the most hardcore materiealist, would object to religion as a metaphor or allegory. The problem is that both the religionists and scientists insist on hewing to fundamentalist literal interpretation of what religion means, creating a battle over a narrowly conceived factual reality. But if both sides back down from their respective crude fundamentalisms, maybe there will be room in the human memepool for both systems of thought to coexist.

Well, as an exercise this didn't really find that much of value in LW's review, but it did give me a chance to get some semi-cracked ideas out of my brain, and into yours.

Update: I see I've addressed this topic before, although I'd forgotten about it. I really have to get a blog with tags or categories or something, which would help impose some order on the randomness.

Update 2: Sifu Tweety at The Poor Man was animated by the same spirits I was:

For the past few weeks I’ve been composing in my head an e-mail to PZ Myers on the subject of religion.

Yes, all us moderates would like to witness to the villiage atheists and get them to mellow out a little bit. It probably just annoys them.

Four years after

Four years after 9/11. I don't have much to say, but the NYT has a good article by Mark Danner, Taking Stock of the Forever War

Quote:

"We have taken a ball of quicksilver," says the counterinsurgency specialist John Arquilla, "and hit it with a hammer."

And it's a good opportunity to point to the almost creepily apposite Auden poem that everybody knows by now. As they say, read the whole thing, but these lines resonate to the point of shaking the building apart.

The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief :
We must suffer them all again.

...

All I have is a voice
To undo the unfolded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky :
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone ;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police ;
We must love one another or die.

Blame game

Belle Waring dishes out the blame rather fairly.

Coordination is a big mystery to me. Corporations and other entities seem grossly inefficient, from what I've seen, and it's amaziing that the work of an industrial society gets done at all. We take it for granted most of the time that all these huge agglomerations of people will succeed in providing each other with food and cell phones and roads and such. The machine staggers, takes wrong turns, screws people over, but it seems to work for some definition of work.

Until it doesn't.

Put aside questions of individual incompetence as described in the linked posting. What were the organizational failures? Read this article in the NYT. Instead of action, we see bureaucrats sitting around in meetings trying to figure out who is responsible for what, who should be in control, what the rules are, who is supposd to communicate with whom. This is extremely typical behavior for dysfunctional and semi-functional organizations.

As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.

Then there is the almost comic:

"I need everything you have got," Ms. Blanco said she told Mr. Bush last Monday, after the storm hit.

In an interview, she acknowledged that she did not specify what sorts of soldiers. "Nobody told me that I had to request that," Ms. Blanco said. "I thought that I had requested everything they had. We were living in a war zone by then."

So, essentially the army was held up because the governor failed to fill out the right form, nobody told her what form to fill out, and for some reason she couldn't establish communication to figure out what needed to be done. People dying because of red tape.

So, let the heads roll as Belle suggests, it will make people feel better. But the real culprit is the extremely dysfunctional system of bureaucratic organization, laced with toxic politics.