The amiable and temperate Jason Rosenhouse has cut way back on posting on his Evolutionblog, which is a great pity as he always had thoughtful and substantive things to say. Perhaps he’s tired or writing or is occupied with other things, and I can understand that; but I’d like to see him to post a bit more often than he does. I haven’t put up a “blogroll”—a list of other websites that I read regularly—but mine would include Jason’s site.
He was, however, back yesterday with a post about Michael Ruse’s fairly new book, Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know, issued in January by Oxford University Press. I haven’t read it—indeed, I didn’t even know it existed—but I find Ruse’s writings so eccentric (and sometimes splenetic, especially when dissing atheists, of which he is one), that I doubt I’ll read it. I’ll just point you to a few excerpts from Jason’s review of the book.
Uncharacteristically, Jason makes some pretty strong statements. (In fact, he didn’t even finish the book, giving up after thirty pages. So take this with a grain of salt, and, if you’ve read the whole book, do weigh in in the comments below. Jason:
I’ve started reading Michael Ruse’s book Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University Press earlier this year. Ruse is a philosopher at Florida State University, but he has turned himself into something of a crackpot over the last ten years. He’s edited two books with ID proponent Bill Dembski, has picked foolish fights with his colleagues, and has engaged in laughably over-the-top rhetoric towards the New Atheists. Most memorably, he once said in an interview: “And this is why I think the New Atheists are a disaster, a danger to the wellbeing of America comparable to the Tea Party.” In a later interview he confirmed that he meant this literally, and was not just exaggerating to make a point. I would think that such a statement simply places you outside the bounds of honest discussion. The Tea Party has taken over Congress and has a real shot at picking the next President, while the New Atheists have published a few books no one is forced to read and maintain a few websites no one is forced to visit. The former development seems like a bigger danger to the wellbeing of America than the latter.
He highlights invidious comparison by Ruse, one involving a perennial favorite of accommodationists, l’affaire Galileo:
I’m only thirty pages in, but I’m not optimistic that it’s going to get any better. Here’s what [Ruse] says about Galileo:
That Galileo ran into problems with the church because he endorsed Copernicus’s heliocentric (sun-centered) worldview does show that there were significant tensions. But the clash was never quite what later anti-religious zealots made it out to be. It occurred a hundred years after Copernicus, during the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholics were firmly shutting the stable door after the fleeing of the Protestants. It should never have happened, but students of the episode all stress that much of the problem was brought on Galileo by himself. To say he was tactless is a bit like saying Hitler had a thing about the Jews. He set out to rub the authorities the wrong way, and having been parodied as a near-moron in Galileo’s writing–writings in the vernacular so everyone could read them–it is hardly surprising that the pope reacted badly and strongly. (p. 20)
That’s pretty vile.
I’m sure Ruse intended his Hitler analogy to be funny, but it’s an obscene comparison. Hitler’s thing about the Jews was that they were evil and deserved to be genocided. Galileo just thought the Pope was wrong on a question of astronomy and made fun of him in a book. The equivalency is lost on me.
I find it touchstone for accommodationism when reading how someone deals with the persecution of Galileo. To me it largely instantiates the refusal of the Church to accept scientific findings that contravened scripture. Yes, it was a bit more complicated than that, what with Galileo making fun of the Pope and all, but those who claim that the “nuanced view” shows that this was certainly not a case of religion opposing science seem to me dead wrong. Apparently Jason feels the same way:
The fact is that the Galileo story is exactly what Ruse’s “anti-religious zealots” say it is. It so perfectly expresses the conflict between science and religion that the most hard-core atheist could not have scripted it better. Galileo got into trouble not just because he advocated heliocentrism, but because he argued that scientific questions should be answered by science and not by scripture. That was anathema to The Church. Church authorities spent years lecturing Galileo on precisely what he was and was not allowed to say. They exercised near-total thought control over acceptable opinion at that time. What does Ruse think a conflict between science and religion looks like?
Of course, the revisionists in the “science and religion” industry tell it differently. They have concocted a story in which the Catholic Church positively loved science, with Galileo being a weird, easily ignored, aberration. But this is just nonsense. The Church did encourage certain systematic investigations into nature, because such investigations could further religious ends, but that is a far cry from saying they were supportive of science. Their attitude was that revelation as understood by the Church authorities was supreme, and that science existed only to service the needs of religion. Indeed, that is still their view, and it is one they would enforce today were they suddenly returned to the sort of power they had in the Middle Ages. And if that happened, would Ruse or his fellow apologists really be inclined to defend them against the charge of being anti-science?
I’ve relegated Ruse’s book to the status of bathroom reading. I’m still morbidly curious about what he has to say, but I doubt if the book is going to get any better.
Well, depending on how often Jason uses the loo, we may get further reports.
I wrote a book with the exact same title but I was told it was too short to publish. Here it is.
Atheism: What Everyone Needs To Know
By Matt.
Atheism is not a belief but a lack of belief. It does not refer to anything that you believe, only to one particular thing that you do not believe.
The end.
Generally atheists believe that there is insufficient reason to believe in the existence of a deity.
Saying that atheists merely lack a belief is sophistry, IMO.
I suppose that someone who has never heard of the concept of a deity might fall into the category of “lacking a belief”, but I suspect there are very few that could fall into that category.
But if you “lack belief” then surely you would not also “believe that there is *sufficient* reason to believe in the existence of a deity”, and thus your statement is entailed.
I’m not sure that I parse your statement correctly. 🙂
Someone lacking belief certainly does not believe that there is sufficient reason to believe, but that doesn’t mean that they believe there is insufficient reason to believe either. They would have to choose option “c”, which is “I have no opinion.”
“Generally atheists believe that there is insufficient reason to believe in the existence of a deity.” – Scott Draper (see above)
A-theist(s) lack of theist(s) as in minus or without. Most believers in some religion may not support any others in their belief system. And Atheists just ex out the remainder as superfluous and useless to understanding reality as we perceive it. Any additions to it must be shown to exist in some fashion and answer a question which is lacking in substance. Wishing doesn’t count. Believing without any proof is a mistake.
Some may go to philosophy, but that is a different area and must not be confused with science or observations.
“Generally atheists believe that there is insufficient reason to believe in the existence of a deity.”
Nope. There may be evidence for the existence of a deity out there somewhere, I just haven’t heard of it. My lack of belief is based on not having been presented with sufficient evidence to form such a belief, not on my belief that no such evidence exists. It would be ridiculous of me to believe that no evidence for a deity exists, because i have no evidence with which to form such a belief. All I can do is display my lack of belief in deities due to a lack of evidence presented to me thus far.
I have many beliefs, but atheism isn’t one of them. Atheism only describes my lack of belief in the posit that God exists.
You’re totally missing the point.
What point? That atheism is a belief? It’s not. The word atheist is self defining. It literally means “not a theist” and that’s all it means. It does not address why you are not a theist, just that you are not one. In no way does it define a positive belief in anything. You are projecting.
As I attempted to explain above, Atheism is just that there are no deities, no “supernatural” just natural and it all fits together well without such entities posited. Having invisible attached to it is not logical without a foundation. You could call us Naturalists and deities etc. are so called supernaturalism that do not fit in any way. Dark Matter and Dark energy have been found to exist. But not much else so far. It explains why so little apparent matter can produce stellar phenomena without the needed matter to do so. See? I hope I wasn’t too subtle here.
We see a whole without it, you see a whole wiht it yet it doesn’t fit anywhere. The whole remains despite you additions of things not in evidence. See?
Scott you can call us Minus One. We are the final minus in your inventory of things believed. You are down to one unfounded deity, then minus one there are none. The only reason we think about is we are surrounded in over whelming numbers of those who accept with little question those invisible figments.
Disagree: An atheist can be a supernaturalist.
/@
Must you make a declarative statement without any back up? Please do that next time so I don’t have to waste my time responding to you. In fact the next time you do it I will not if it is just a “I disagree” statement only.
I’m glad I no longer define myself as “atheist” but as experimenter (so no magic). =D
I prefer to call myself ‘god free’. The word ‘atheism’ has sadly become too heavily thumbed by people defining it in a way that reflects only their views. ‘Atheism’ needs to become a ‘big tent’ definition or split (schism!) into at least half a dozen different words.
I would be completely in sympathy if Rosenhouse gave up after 30 pages. I’ve been in that situation where you feel a sense of duty to consider alternative opinions out of a sense of fairness. But then you get past a handful of absurdities and can only anticipate more of the same. At which point, I’m just wasting my time. Life’s to damn short.
Just so long as such opinions are dressed down as they should since opinions are useless here.
I’m not sure what you mean by “opinions are useless here”.
Simple opinions are useless without facts backing them. You should know that.
Yes, I agree then. Somebody has to read the whole thing and deal with it. But I am not the one best qualified. I let my fatigue and disgust get the better of me.
It was Galileo FIRST and NOT Copernicus who discovered moons orbiting other planets (Jupiter), that Venus had phases like the moon, mountains on the moon, and that supernova were far more distant than supposed.
As such, Galileo disproved the Aristotelian belief in the immutability of the heavens
This is even more disturbing to medieval cosmology and physics than the heliocentric theory of the solar/no-longer-terran system.
And it is stronger empirical proof that medieval physics is wrong.
Copernicus mostly discovered that the heliocentric system is a better fit for data that had been around for thousands of years. Galileo had NEW data!!
It’s about religion and science, not politics.
“heliocentric system is a better fit”
Actually a worse fit, since it assumed circular orbits. Its appeal was mainly aesthetic.
The aesthetic of a deity created Clock Work cosmos.
Ruse’s casting of the Galileo story also implicitly endorses the Church’s authority to censor.
This is the most grotesque thing about such reframing of the episode… the notion that if they had persecuted him for something other than science, religous doctrine, or criticizing the pope, then that would be of course be no evidence whatsoever of the church’s hostility to science. One gasps to imagine such “reasoning” that takes an organizations hostility to all independent thought as not hostile to any specific kind of independent thought like science.
I’ve also heard people make the same chilling criticism of Giordano Bruno’s status as an intellectual martyr. Oh, he didn’t have his tongue cut out and get burned at the stake for science, silly. He wasn’t a scientist at all. No, he got his tongue cut out and was burned at the stake because he was a heretic! Totally different! See… there is no conflict between the church and religion. No persecution of scientists. The church only persecuted various heretics. And the church give them every chance to recant before it burned them alive, so, in a way, they executed/persecuted themselves.
Disagree the Te Party has a real shot at picking the next President. Democrats and Independents will stop that.
J had a brief email exhange with Ruse and found his ability or desire to discuss nonexistent.
As for stopping after thirty pages, I recall trying to read Dyanetics and stopped after seven. No need for self-flaggelasion.
I really liked this book about Galileo:
http://www.amazon.com/Galileo-Watcher-Skies-David-Wootton/dp/0300197292/
This is an excellent biography, and one that shows how heretical Galileo was.
I really want to like Ruse because the first book I read on the science vs religion conflict was “But is it Science?”, which focused on the 1981 McLean court case in Arkansas, in which Ruse played a prominent role on the side of the angels.
You’re talking about the “old ruse.” As Jason says, Ruse has turned into a crackpot, or simulacrum of one. It seems to have started for Ruse with a political statement — American atheists shouldn’t go public because they swim in a Christian sea, and we need Christian allies for such matters as doing science. But Ruse seems to have gone far past that point in his choice of fights and of allies.
Ruse seems to have drunk from accomidation too long. Now he is fearful that they will take over and put us for death. We do have that risk more so now than when “The Handmaid’s Tale” came out. Started me on a long term, since 1990, study of the dangerous and extreme Dominionists and their kin who do want to remake the US into some kind of Bible republic. Where the death penalty is freely and often invoked to remove those who would disagree with them. A real danger here.
It’s been sport for New Atheists to pick on Ruse for quite a while now. I’ve been hesitant to join in because, although I think he has been way off in his assessment of the New Atheists, he seemed otherwise genial and sensible in other areas.
But recently I listened to a podcast which had Ruse as a guest “debating” a theist on “Can atheists have meaning without God.”
I was pretty much appalled. Pretty much every criticism of Ruse being an accommodationist softy on theism was born out.
He just bent over backwards in every way not to offend or strongly challenge the sensitivities of the theist host or his opponent, and in debating it was like watching a fighter replacing boxing gloves with gigantic pillows. He continually made concessions to the theist position that were unjustified, and offered the weakest counters I’ve ever heard. Even if he liked the company of his theist opponents and wish to remain civil, fine, but I kept thinking “you are supposed to be a Philosopher with decades of training. How in the world can you keep letting the obvious fallacies thrown out by the other side just slide by like that, with so little resistance?”
I found it disheartening to see Ruse essentially verify the criticisms of his new atheist opponents.
(Which isn’t to say, hopefully, that he hasn’t done some good work before).
Rosenhouse is another one who enjoys taking pokes at the thin-skinned no-dogs-go-to-heaven Feser and his Thomist deepities.
The EN_GB interpretation of this is probably different to the EN_US (or EN_CA, but I doubt EN_AU) interpretation.
What did that Churchillian guy say about “five countries separated by a common language?”
Ah, but which way do you hang it?
Clockwise when viewed from above.
Now there is a line to delete from the CV, if ever there was one. I’ve had to deal with Dembski adherents, and therefore had to read some of his stuff. Thank CC that my memory has filterd most of it out – it wasn’t worth the effort. It’s worse than getting old dog shit off your favourite shoes when you trace the foul stench in the shoe closet.
Where were we? Oh yes,
I for one am well known to the local police for prowling the churchyards on Sunday morning, Tasering (&tm;) passing “innocent theists” (as if one could possibly be “innocent”, given the list of things they’ve got to do RIGHT), chaining them into chairs with “Clockwork Orange”-like eyelid openers, and forcing them to read WEIT. I’m on my 3rd written warning from the courts, and there might even be an official record next time that I’m caught. CC, praise GABA for making memories unreliable!
Some of us try to “do it rite”!
The Holy See missed a point – they could have had Galileo broken on the rack (he had been “shown the instruments”, IIRC. And they probably hadn’t been washed since the last use.) and THEN dragged to the stake tied to a chair after all his joints had been dislocated (OK, the ones in the ends of the fingers are difficult, but boy do they make your eyes water when you see the results! Great for the front row!) and then burned him to death. Slowly. Either Ruse has no imagination, no knowledge of history and anatomy, or most likey he is faking someone with such ignorance …
True enough. Anyone here using the Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian one? But in the longer view … that hasn’t been a terribly successful strategy, has it?
It’s printed on thick, absorbent paper, which your fingers don’t go through? Well, that’s an improvement on most Bibles. (Note for B& on the BuyBull semen catalogue : absorbent but strong paper!)
Personally I think Ruse is so predictable that I can confidently say the new book will be more “Atheist but…” from an atheist butthead. There are some things that are just not worth reading and if Jason doesn’t make it far into a book which he genuinely wished to appraise, I doubt I would have the stamina to make it past the cover. The title alone screams “this is insipid!”.
I guess Rosenhouse’s diagnosis of Ruse as crackpot will stick. Ruse acts pretty daft now. The more rational use of Ruse’s books would then be to save on paper.
I wonder what Diana MacPherson thinks is the correct way to hang Ruse’s ‘Atheism: What No One Needs to Know’? Front cover out or in!?
Let me begin with a negative and end with a positive.
First the negative; “but students of the episode all stress that much of the problem was brought on Galileo by himself.,” Ruse uses the word “all” which is demonstratively not true (should I call it a lie?) if you research the historical record of the period. That statement, in and of itself, is enough for me to disregard anything else he might write.
On the positive side; I think it is great that Jason Rosenhouse is re-engaging.
Ruse has had a subjectivist streak (for one thing) for a long time – part of _Taking Darwin Seriously_ is like that, and he first released that in 1986. And that’s a shame in that work, since it is otherwise interesting. Earlier still he seems to have been even more reasonable – his stuff on human sociobiology from the 1970s was balanced and fair, IMO. So are we seeing the end of a very long trend?
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As for the “Galileo was a jerk” idea. Sure, ok. But since when does being jerk justify being threatened with torture and put under house arrest?
” . . . students of the episode all stress that much of the problem was brought on Galileo by himself . . . he was tactless . . . set out to rub the authorities the wrong way . . . [the pope]having been parodied as a near-moron . . . .
”
Really? As in a servant (slave?) refusing to submit to the presumptuous authority (and lash?) of another human primate?
9-10 years ago I saw a video online of a conference, the participants of which including Ruse. During the back-and-forth segment he referred to another participant as “this a**h#le over here . . . .” I did not hear the gentleman say anything to cause a reasonable person to spout such an endearing sentiment. Of course that leads one to wonder whether Ruse is reasonable. Has he become a kindred spirit to the F-bomb-throwing Yale snowflake? Maybe Ruse could have shown Galileo a thing or two about being obstreperous and rude.
🔭