Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In this YouTube video put up two days ago, comedian Ricky Gervais discusses nonbelief with Stephen Colbert. While it’s not clear how much of Colbert’s shtick, and his critique of atheism, really represents his own views and how much comes from questions that he thinks might interest his audience, I suspect that Colbert, a liberal Catholic, really does mean some of the questions he asks. To wit:
Why is there something instead of nothing? Why does the Universe exist? Is there a prime mover?
How can you be convinced of your atheism? Isn’t atheism just a matter of faith? We’re just atheists because people told us to be, right?
Colbert’s strong desire to direct his “gratitude for existence” towards something or someone—an entity Colbert calls “God”.
But at least he’s respectful of Gervais’s views, and Gervais handles the questions very well, especially the one on “faith” in atheism. I have to say that I’m getting a bit weary of the “I-believe-in-one-god-less-than-you-do,” but it is a penetrating argument, and perhaps hasn’t spread as far as it should.
Hemant Mehta (“the Friendly Atheist”) is all over atheist news like white on rice (or, as they say, “like ugly on a frog”), so I usually avoid posting on the same things he does. But in this case I’ll make an exception. As Hemant notes in a post from Monday, Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s candidate to be Attorney General, has some weird (or should I say “mainstream”) views on atheists. In an earlier post, Hemant noted that Sessions, during his confirmation hearings, had this exchange with Democratic Senator Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (Hemant’s emphasis):
WHITEHOUSE: Does a secular attorney have anything to fear from an Attorney General Sessions in the Department of Justice?
SESSIONS: Well, no… and I use that word in the 90,000-foot level. A little concern I have that we as a nation, I believe, are reaching a level in which truth is not sufficiently respected, that the very idea of truth is not believed to be real, and that all of life is just a matter of your perspective and my perspective, which I think is contrary to the American heritage…
We are not a theocracy. Nobody should be required to believe anything. I share Thomas Jefferson’s words on the memorial over here: I swear eternal hostility over any domination of the mind of man. And I think we should respect people’s views and not demand any kind of religious test for holding office.
WHITEHOUSE: And a secular person has just as good a claim to understanding the truth as a person who is religious, correct?
SESSIONS: Well… I’m not sure. [Long silence]… We’re gonna treat anybody with different views fairly and objectively.
That’s clearly ridiculous, since if anything secular people, not adhering to unevidenced superstitions, surely have a better claim to understanding the truth than do religionists.
As a student of history, no doubt Senator Sessions also knows that secular regimes, lacking any belief in laws beyond those they manufacture, alter, and violate at will, were responsible for the deaths of no less than 100 million people in the Twentieth Century alone.
That’s more than all religious wars from all previous centuries combined.
That is because atheism unquestionably exacerbates the evil in our nature. And if Christianity doesn’t make you good—strictly speaking, from a theological perspective, none of us are—it makes you better than you might otherwise be.
I am reminded of novelist Evelyn Waugh’s famous quip, made in response to someone drawing attention to his all-too-obvious faults: “Without supernatural aid, I would hardly be a human being.”
All of this is at the heart of the Senator’s remarks: If one does not believe in a Lawgiver, how can we be sure he will acknowledge any law at all?The point isn’t that the secularly-minded cannot be morally outstanding people; the point is that there is no logically compelling reason to be anything other than entirely selfish.
I mean, if there is no God to judge you in the next life for your actions in this one, why not do preciously as you want to do?
Americans should be comforted by the knowledge that the man who might become the highest law enforcement officer in the country believes that some laws are absolute and inviolable no matter what the cultural zeitgeist of the moment is; because sometimes the zeitgeist says slavery is OK and Jews should go to concentration camps.
Comforted? We should be scared that the highest law official of the country might want us to answer to laws from the Great Lawgiver in the Sky rather than from our own legislatures. (By the way, I do believe in a Lawgiver. It’s called Congress.) God’s laws, may, for instance, differ from secular law on issue about abortion, about gays, about censorship, and so on.
Further, anyone who claims that Nazism was an atheist regime, for instance, doesn’t know what they are talking about. And really, wasn’t it a Christian view that demonized the Jews in Europe, leading to the death of six million of them? It’s extremely bizarre to blame secularism for the Holocaust, to say the least.
Finally, if you’re moral for religious reasons, that’s not logic compelling you to be moral. It’s fear—or rather, a misguided notion that if you don’t obey God, you’re going to fry. If that’s not a selfish reason, I don’t know what is.
Taunton continues.
. . . The Cultural Left’s romance with secularism is naïve at best, malicious at worst. History demonstrates where that worldview all too often leads.
The moral and intellectual sensibilities of the West are still running off of the accumulated capital of a rich Judeo-Christian heritage.
But watch out. When the fumes in that tank are spent, tyranny cannot be far away.
As T.S. Eliot rightly observed, “If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes.”
My response: Scandinavia. Christianity has largely gone there, but, last time I looked, there was still plenty of culture. Now of course Taunton could argue, as religionists love to do, that even the morality in nonbelieving countries is a vestigial remnant of Christianity, but I don’t believe it. Denmark has been largely without religion for several generations, and yet the morality remains. And does Taunton really think that only Christianity, as opposed to other faiths, is a guarantor of morality?
Taunton’s motivations for his odious book are clear: he hates secularism, couldn’t abide the fact that Hitchens was facing death without wavering in his atheism, and therefore made up a story to support Taunton’s preconceptions—and perhaps to make a quick buck on the side. The man is odious.
In the past few months I’ve given two talks—one for the American Humanists and the other for the Freedom From Religion Foundation—on the relationship between atheism, humanism, and social good. I started both talks by asking the audience to raise their hands if they considered themselves humanists. Every hand went up. I then asked how many of those with their hands up also considered themselves atheists. I watched carefully, and not a hand went down. That makes sense: after all, humanists believe that we are in charge of our own and others’ welfare, and nearly everyone arrives at that view after rejecting gods. To me, then, it doesn’t make sense to seriously discuss humanism without at least mentioning its origins, and that involves rejecting any kind of theism.
Still, there are those who praise humanism but can’t resist the opportunity to have a whack at atheism. And that brings us to today’s article.
If you read “The evangelical scion who stopped believing,” an article about an “atheist preacher” in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, you might be a bit puzzled at some of the gratuitous atheist-bashing. After all, it’s about Bart Campolo, a 53-year-old former preacher who became an atheist after a bicycle accident, and who has taken up a new life as a humanist chaplain and head of the Secular Student Alliance at the University of Southern California (USC). Yet the article is larded with snark—the usual cracks about atheism, not missing a few swipes at Richard Dawkins.
The explanation is that the author is Mark Oppenheimer, whom we’ve encountered before in posts about Larry Alex Taunton’s book claiming that Christopher Hitchens was flirting with Christianity at the end of his life. It turns out that Oppenheimer hasn’t missed a chance to go after New Atheism, writing a piece in BuzzFeed about the rampant misogyny afflicting the atheist “movement.” And so, when you read about Campolo’s life, and how he lost his faith and wound up as the USC humanist chaplain—a position in which he seems to be doing a lot of good—you also have to see Oppenheimer’s gratuitous take on atheism. A few snippets (my emphasis):
In the United States, since World War II, atheist activism has been located mainly in local skeptics’ clubs, whose members also gravitated toward science fiction and other walks of geek life. [JAC: !!] The clubs developed a culture of conferences: hotel-ballroom events with lots of men attending mostly-male panels, followed by book signings.
Over the last 30 years or so, these conferences have grown in tandem with the rise of the Christian right and megachurch evangelicalism, as atheists sought comfort in a parallel world. Best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens drew huge crowds at these “cons.” In their books, lectures and television appearances, these atheists preach an uncompromising scientism, exalt Darwin and barely conceal a sentiment that believers deserve mockery or, if one is feeling generous, pity.
To this day, atheist gatherings remain overwhelmingly male, and public perception of the movement has been tainted by a steady drip of misogynistic episodes: harassment of female attendees at the conventions; online trolling of those who have spoken out against the sexism; and the notorious tweets of Dawkins, the British biologist whose 2006 book, “The God Delusion,” has become the bible of many young atheists. (One example, from 2014: “Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knife point is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”)
And this:
The energy now is not with the controversial author-celebrities but with start-up groups, many on college campuses, that have more gender balance and less strident rhetoric and are eager to do better than thumb their noses at believers. Crucially, these nonbelievers identify as humanist rather than atheist. That is, they’ve sided with a more welcoming version of nonbelief, focused on the joy and potential inherent in being human rather than on gainsaying others’ convictions. Their project is to talk about leading a good life without God.
Well pardon me, but I’m not aware of any Big Name Atheists who spend all their time simply going after religion—and really, do they all imply that believers deserve mockery and pity?—without also suggesting ways of living life without God. Hitchens, for instance, gave his moving final talk in Houston about not relying on scripture or authority, but learning to think for oneself. Sam Harris wrote a book on morality without God (yes, his latter-day utilitarianism has met with some pushback), Dan Dennett has never, to my knowledge, said that religion should be mocked or its adherents pitied, and even The God Delusion has a positive message about how one can be moral and fulfilled without relying on a God. While the main message of these books was indeed a rejection of theism, there is always a positive side about the advantages living a life without gods.
As for the “rampant misogyny” in atheism, I haven’t seen it. Yes, of course some male atheists are sexists, as are some males in any organization, but having gone to many meetings, scientific and otherwise, I simply can’t find myself able to label atheism as rotten with misogyny. Indeed, I see more positive attitudes about equality of women at atheist meetings than at other types of gatherings.
What Oppenheimer has done here, and which he didn’t have to do, is to undercut the philosophical basis of humanism by making gratuitous slurs against some well known atheists, and painting our gatherings as instantiations of rape culture. As for “exalting Darwin,” well, wasn’t it Darwin who struck a death blow at religion by showing that phenomena once explainable only by God had a purely naturalistic basis? The “scientism” accusation, of course, is just a canard.
I won’t go on, as this kind of atheist-bashing doesn’t deserve much consideration. It’s worth nothing, however, how it slips insidiously into articles where it doesn’t belong.
I used to write a lot of reviews for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), but I do that no longer. But as far as I’m aware, the TLS is turning into an organ of religious-osculation, with piece after piece making nice to faith. Now I may be wrong, as I don’t subscribe and have to depend on what people send me (surely a biased sample), or what is free online. But what is free online now is pretty dire: an article by Rupert Shortt called “How Christianity invented modernity.” (Note: it’s free this week only.) Shortt is in fact the religion editor of the TLS, so one can get an idea of what their attitude is to religious books—OSCULATION OF FAITH. Shortt is a Christian whose written a book called , Christianophobia: A Faith under Attack, and, as this interview shows, is clearly afflicted with a Christian persecution complex . He’s also written a book about the former Archbishop of Canterbury: Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop, and a theological book called God is No Thing: a Coherent Christianity, which appears to be a polemic against New Atheism.
In this piece Shortt reviews two books: The Evolution of the West: How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values, by Nick Spencer, and Sceptical Christianity: Exploring Credible Belief, by Robert Reiss. The two things you discover on plowing your way through this review is 1. It’s not really a review, but a sermon, setting out Shortt’s views on Christianity and his opprobrium towards nonbelievers (at the end Shortt lapses into full Jonathan Edwards mode) and 2. for a literary editor, Shortt can’t write very well. You’ll see that from the excerpts. I’ll give a few from different areas (indented, with emphases mine), so you can see how his “sophisticated” views consist, as with Sophisticated Theologians™, of academic prose veiling a simple will to believe.
New Atheism: In shortt, he doesn’t like New Atheism because it gives us no purchase for morality. Further, Shortt raises the usual canard that New Atheists criticize only a strawman: a simplified version of Christianity.
First, is secularism really robust enough to carry the freight once shouldered by the Church in Europe? Ask politicians or NGOs about the functional aspect of human rights, say, and you’re likely to get an assured answer. Ask about the source of those rights, or about deeper questions of truth and purpose, and the replies are coy. Second and more significantly, is Moran’s apparent assumption that we are simply dancing a minuet around the void actually true? Armchair philosophers – many of them far less acute than James or Moran – regularly announce that the centre cannot hold. As Terry Eagleton among others has emphasized, such people can purchase their unbelief on the cheap, usually by setting up a straw man version of religion no thoughtful believer could accept, before felling it with a single puff. To counter that things do not fall apart may take courage, or insight of another sort – or maybe just the innocence of a child.
. . .A forward glance – this time taking account not just of postmodern discontents, but also of the formidable forces arrayed on Murdoch’s side of the argument – might reference the work of Charles Taylor or Alasdair MacIntyre in the English-speaking world. Murdoch’s spiritual leanings were idiosyncratic. She accepted tags such as Platonist and Christian Buddhist. But MacIntyre and Taylor, standing at different points on the Catholic spectrum, have set out with greater clarity a revised humanism based on the creative agency of human beings over and against reductive and instrumental patterns of thinking. Their work rests on a potentially far-reaching awareness: that if we are not self-created, we are answerable to a truth we don’t make.
First of all, what does he mean by “answerable to a truth”? Morality is not an objective truth, at least not in my view. Our ethics are devised to conform to our preferences, informed by empirical observation. Throughout the article, Shortt is distressed that there’s no basis for morality without God, and Christianity in particular. The response to this is to show that atheists are at least as moral as religionists, which seems to be the case. If that weren’t true, most of Northern Europe would be a den of perfidy and criminality.
Social contributions of Christianity
Liberalism’s theological pedigree has been forcefully set out by Christopher Insole in The Politics of Human Frailty (2004). He also points to elements of secular thinking in areas like law that a Christian can own and celebrate, for instance John Rawls’s emphasis on the importance of reciprocity, the withholding of coercive power, and the difficulty of making moral judgements given the tangled nature of experience. Here we get a glimpse of Christianity’s protean character. Theology has spawned many schools of thought, both complementary and competing, including secularism itself.
Is that a contribution of religion, or a reaction against religion? I think the latter. Shortt has some chutzpah to give credit to theology for secularism! But don’t forget justice!:
. . . (Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae contains a far more detailed treatise on justice than anything Aristotle provided. It addresses a host of topics including homicide, unjust enrichment, injuries against the person, slander, fraud and professional misconduct.)
Yes, and he also believed in divine punishment, consigning sinners to hell, which is a form of ‘justice’ founded on wish-thinking and social control. I’ll let those more learned than I comment on the nonreligious social contributions of St. Thomas Aquinas. But wait! Shortt gives Christianity credit for almost everything!
In brief, it is no accident that developments including the rule of law, the market economy, democracy and the welfare state have flourished most strongly in traditionally Christian societies. Within the past few generations, the UN Declaration of Human Rights emerged mainly from the hands of Catholics and Protestants working in tandem, while faith-based conviction has mobilized millions of people to oppose authoritarian regimes, inaugurate democratic transitions, and relieve suffering on a grand scale.
What he means is not “traditionally Christian societies”—for much of Western Europe is not Christian now, but is still capitalistic and all that other stuff—but “the West”. And of course Marxism and Nazism, as well as nuclear weapons, also arose in traditionally Christian societies. Further, democracy arose in ancient Greece, not to my knowledge a Christian society.
If Christianity gets all the credit for stuff that arose in the West, then it must take the blame as well. And faith-based conviction has also motivated millions of people to construct and obey authoritarian regimes, and to inflict suffering on a grand scale. (I refer to the Catholicism Shortt lauds.) What galls me most, though, is that Shortt gives Christianity credit for science:
The scientific contributions of Christianity
What is true of social developments applies in large measure to science. Taylor’s A Secular Age (TLS, February 1, 2008) is among the most important works of revisionist scholarship to have overturned religion-versus-science clichés. For all the obduracy of certain theologians and church leaders, modern science did not arise in opposition to religion; on the contrary, it grew in a godly crucible. Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz and countless other pioneers were nothing if not serious Christians. The secularist turn only arose later. In establishing his thesis, Spencer supplies bite-sized introductions to the work of contemporary figures including Stephen Gaukroger, Peter Harrison and David Bentley Hart.
My guess is that from the 19th century on, scientists were, by and large, far more atheistic than the general public, a finding clearly documented in modern society. Once again Shortt gives to Christianity everything that arose in the West. The notion that all of these men wouldn’t have made their discoveries if they weren’t religious is dubious, with perhaps the exception of Newton. Note that neither Gaukroger, Harrison, nor Hart are scientists: they are theologians, philosophers, and historians (none is all of these).
Finally, Shortt might be asked, “Well, even if Christianity made those contributions, is it true? Or doesn’t that matter?” It surely does matter, for if the truth claims of Christianity be false, then there’s no reason to prize Christian morality above secular morality—or the morality of any other faith. And Shortt lays out the reasons we should believe in God (clearly the Christian God). For the life of me it all sounds like pure gibberish, but of the academic species:
You cannot (to posit a crazy thought experiment) add up everything in the universe, reach a total of n, then conclude that the final total is n + 1 because you’re also a theist. God belongs to no genus; divinity and humanity are too different to be opposites. By definition, then, no physical analogy will describe our putative creator adequately. We are migrating off the semantic map. But light is among the more helpful. The light in which we see is not one of the objects seen, because we apprehend light only inasmuch as it is reflected off opaque objects. From a monotheistic standpoint, it is the same with the divine light. The light which is God, writes the philosopher Denys Turner, we can see only in the creatures that reflect it. “Therefore . . . when we turn our minds away from the visible objects of creation to God, . . . the source of their visibility, it is as if we see nothing. The world shines with the divine light. But the light which causes it to shine is itself like a profound darkness.”
In other words, we know God exists because humans are godly and the world evinces divinity. But those aren’t the humans and the world I know.
Shortt also recycles the “first cause” argument, though he pretends it’s something else:
Given the hostility of many believers – let alone atheists – to the philosophy of religion, it is important to be clear about what theistic arguments amount to. They do not “prove” the existence of God. Apart from anything, a deity established on the Procrustean bed of human reason would be a small thing by comparison with the Creator who immeasurably surpasses our imaginings. To those who accept any of them, arguments such as Aquinas’s frequently misinterpreted Five Ways establish a more modest premiss: that theism is a valid inference of metaphysical reasoning, because contingent existence is not its own cause. There is no such thing as pure potentiality; even a quantum vacuum is not nothing. It is an entity within a structured cosmos. That God defies definition should neither surprise nor trouble enquirers. Reason infers the existence of causes from the existence of effects, without always being able to specify the nature of the causes from the nature of the effects. Perceiving God’s presence is a far cry from knowing what God is.
That’s just the old argument of “everything had a beginning, and the Beginning of the Beginning must have been God.” But that begs the question, because God is defined as not having a contingent existence. Finally, there’s always that good old “leap of faith”: you accept God’s existence simply because you want to. Here Shortt tricks that notion out a bit, but it’s still wish-thinking:
None of this, then, is to downgrade the importance of a leap of faith, better termed a leap of the imagination. Many take a lead from figures including Luther and Pascal here. Pascal thought that God can be expected to appear openly to those who truly search, but to remain hidden from those who do not seek. His work points to the importance of the motivational heart and will, rather than just the mind or the emotions. This path in turn connects with the gospel summons to newness of life.
Well, I’ve looked for God, and I haven’t found him. Why does He hide himself from me? Is it possible that a “seeker” is someone who is predisposed to find God? More tautology afoot.
I am weary of theology, and swore I wouldn’t discuss it much after I wrote Faith Versus Fact. Theology is pablum for intellectuals, an unworthy enterprise on a par with learned discourse about fairies. As Dan Barker quipped, it’s a subject without an object. So I’ll end with an excerpt from the end of the review. Here Shortt puts on his dog collar and steps into the pulipit (he’s not just summarizing a book’s thesis). It’s embarrassing, and I weep for the TLS of old:
Over and again, Jesus indicates that the question of how people relate to him will govern how they relate to the God he called Father. In effect, he is re-embodying and radicalizing God’s call to Israel at the dawn of the biblical drama. The message of the early Church is that a new phase of history has been ushered in by the cross and resurrection. God is not to be seen as a monad, but as a pattern of loving relationship (the awareness refracted in language by the doctrine of the Trinity). God invites humanity to share in this mutual exchange of love – that is, to partake in the divine life – as daughters and sons by adoption. The Church is the community on earth representing a “new creation”. It is both a human society with a sometimes woeful history, and a divine society called to implement God’s will for universal reconciliation.
There is much else that Reiss might have conveyed more vigorously. For example, that although the Scriptures as a whole are humanly written and developed history riddled with ambiguities and dead ends and fresh starts, they nevertheless form powerfully challenging calls to humanity to grow and reform itself. Or that because of the conviction that God’s world helps make itself at every level, the believer can fit into one picture evolution and its costliness, and the Christian redemptive answer to human and natural evil. Or that, in the words of the Dominican theologian Cornelius Ernst, God is not only the background and the presupposition of human experience; “he is the foreground, the personally accessible sense in human terms of the human search for the absolute beginning and the absolute end”
That last bit is, as far as I can see, meaningless. Readers are welcome to torture themselves trying to interpret it. And with that I’ll end.
As you can see from the many posts I’ve written about Rice University sociologist Elaine Ecklund, she’s made a career out of showing that scientists are far more religious—or friendly to religion—than commonly assumed. But her methodology is often suspect, so that her data are cooked or twisted to meet her agenda: to show comity between science and faith. I hardly need to mention that behind this perverse and misguided agenda stands the swollen coffers of the Templeton organization, which has funded Ecklund’s “research” for years.
And now we have the most bizarre publication of all from the Ecklund/Templeton Enterprise, a paper consisting solely of statements by scientists who, by and large, don’t like the way Richard Dawkins popularizes science. It’s just a hit job on Dawkins, and the bizarre thing is that it’s a byproduct of a survey of scientists not on Dawkins himself, but on their religiosity and attitude toward science and religion. Ecklund’s team took the scientists who mentioned Dawkins, and showed that most of them didn’t like his style. From that she managed to squeeze out an entire publication! She and her coauthors conclude that the opinion of UK scientists is that Dawkins “misrepresents science” and that British scientists “reject his approach to public engagement”.
As part of a study of “the social context of science” in Italy, India, France, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the UK and the US, Johnson et al. interviewed 609 biologists and physicists, 137 of them in the UK. Of these, 48 mentioned Richard Dawkins, 35 without prompting and another 13 when asked about “influences on their perception of the science-faith interface.” (23 scientists outside the UK also mentioned him but “had relatively little to say about him”, so the conclusions are limited to UK scientists).
The Big Result: of the 48 scientists who brought up Dawkins, 10 were favorable to his science popularization and his view of the incompatibility of science and religion.
BUT 38 of them (80%) had bad stuff to say about Richard as a “celebrity scientist”. These critics were both religious (15) and nonreligious (23). When you read their comments, though, most of them seem ticked off by Richard’s comments on religion, his “stridency”, and his atheist “fundamentalism”. Here are all the quotes given in the paper by Dawkins’s detractors (each is a separate comment):
Some people like Richard Dawkins … He’s a fundamental atheist. He feels compelled to take the evidence way beyond that which other scientists would regard as possible … I want [students] to develop [science] in their own lives. And I think it’s necessary to understand what science does address directly.
You can understand someone like Richard Dawkins being particularly hacked off by it and retaliating, but … people on both sides … [are] overly dogmatic … [and go] beyond perhaps what the state of the agenda is. The agenda of the scientist is to ask how, but it’s not because I want to prove that God doesn’t exist.
He’s much too strong about the way he denies religion … As a scientist you’ve got to be very open, and I’m open to people’s belief in religion … I don’t think we’re in a position to deny anything unless it’s something which is within the scope of science to deny … I think as a scientist you should be open to it … It doesn’t end up encroaching for me because I think there’s quite a space between the two.
I mean I haven’t read any of his recent books … The impression I get from the newspaper reports … I just kind of feel that … he’s kind of trying to be sort of a perfect, rational person somewhere but you know he’s … kind of portraying that that’s how scientists kind of think, that’s what scientists say and so on and that kind of does … create the wrong impression.
Well, he has gone on a crusade, basically … I think that it’s an easy target, and I think that he’s rather insensitive and hectoring … [A]lthough there is a lot of truth behind what he says … he does it in a way that I think is deliberately designed to alienate religious people.
He picked quite an easy target I would say … If you say they have these extreme atheists and extreme radical religious persons, when they meet they will not be able to talk, they won’t be able to understand … But if you talk beliefs to people which are next to each other, probably they have more in common there … [T]hey will be able to talk even though they have slightly different beliefs.
I think you have to be very careful about stripping away people’s beliefs without offering anything in return…If I talked to people, I talk to them [about] how I view things and how I understand things and I will ask questions of them…But just sort of shouting at people, “You’re wrong and stupid” is not very productive.
If you’re talking to somebody who is indoctrinated and has a hundred percent belief in their belief system, then you’re getting absolutely nowhere by saying [God doesn’t exist] … [To] break them down, by far the easiest way is to actually study what their faith is.
There are other snippets as well, for example someone calling Dawkins “Mr. Anti-God Europe” and others calling him “extremely arrogant” and “overly aggressive.”
Note that in none of these quotes does someone say that Dawkins “misrepresents science”—one of the major conclusions of the study that appears in the abstract and conclusion. Rather, the common theme of the comments is that Dawkins is too strident in denying religion, is on a crusade, is attacking peoples’ beliefs without replacing them, and is ineffective in dispelling religious belief. As is typical of Ecklund’s approach, she simply distorts what she finds in the service of her agenda (and that of Templeton). Given the data, the center does not hold.
Again, here’s the abstract, which is not qualified:
The “misrepresentation of science” trope is repeated throughout this paper, but is not at all supported by the quotes themselves. Indeed, where are the quotes showing how Dawkins distorts evolutionary biology—his primary scientific subject? People could have said that his gene-centered approach misrepresents the opinion of evolutionary geneticists (it doesn’t), but nobody said anything close to that. No, it’s all about religion. You could, I suppose, say that Dawkins misrepresents science by saying that it’s in opposition to religion, but you don’t find that, either. Instead, you find comments about his style, his stridency, etc. Where, oh where, is the “misrepresentation of science?” Nowhere. It’s in Ecklund’s mind and agenda.
The only comments that come close to a “misrepresentation of science” are these. First:
He’s much too strong about the way he denies religion … As a scientist you’ve got to be very open, and I’m open to people’s belief in religion … I don’t think we’re in a position to deny anything unless it’s something which is within the scope of science to deny … I think as a scientist you should be open to it … It doesn’t end up encroaching for me because I think there’s quite a space between the two.
But that’s bizarre. Should we be open to the possibility of Santa Claus or fairies? And, in fact, Dawkins doesn’t absolutely deny the existence of God: he says that, based on the absence of evidence when there should be evidence, he puts himself as either a 6 or a 6.9 on the 7-point “spectrum of theistic probability,” where 0 represents a strong theist (“I know there is a God”) and 7 represents a strong atheist (“I know there is no God”). So his position is that he finds very little evidence for God, but leaves open the possibility. That is not complete denial of God, and of course not a “denial of religion”—whatever that means.
and this:
You can understand someone like Richard Dawkins being particularly hacked off by it and retaliating, but … people on both sides … [are] overly dogmatic … [and go] beyond perhaps what the state of the agenda is. The agenda of the scientist is to ask how, but it’s not because I want to prove that God doesn’t exist.
That’s a bit confusing, yet Johnson et al say that this quote instantiates “the public impression that scientists practice organized dogmatism.”
Johnson et al.’s conclusions are also suspect for several reasons:
The authors don’t consider the obvious: that those UK scientists who disliked Dawkins were more likely to bring up his name unprompted.
Religious scientists despise Dawkins for having written The God Delusion, and so would be likely to denigrate him.
As with Carl Sagan, many scientists are jealous of Dawkins’s popular success, and so would have a motivation to criticize him besides his supposed misrepresentation of science.
Most scientists don’t like criticism of religion because it “rocks the boat”—even if they themselves are atheists. I’ve experienced this with Faith Versus Fact, which accrued many of the same criticisms although nobody I know of has said that I’ve “misrepresented science”.
Johnson et al. ignore the many laypeople who have been converted to both evolution AND atheism by Dawkins’s efforts. You can see examples of those in the old “Converts Corner” website that was once part of the Dawkins Foundation site. Note that there are 159 pages of testimony on this site! We see that many people have been convinced by Dawkins’ messages about both religion and evolution, and, as I often say in my talks, there’s a salubrious synergy between these areas, so that people who get converted to accepting evolution often give up their faith, and those who lose their faith often subsequently accept evolution. In contrast, there is no person I’ve ever seen who has said, “You know, I’d accept evolution if only Dawkins stopped banging on about atheism.”
As senior author of this paper and of many other papers on science and religion, Elaine Ecklund has proven herself an execrable scholar, constantly distorting her findings in the service of her agenda, which just happens to be one that attracts Templeton money like dung attracts scarabid beetles. This “paper” is not scholarship, but a simple hit piece on Dawkins, and the conclusions—that British scientists think Dawkins misrepresents science—are worthless in view of the paper’s methods. It may well be that most British scientists don’t like Dawkins, or think he’s too hard on religion, but that isn’t shown in the paper either, for this is not a random sample of scientists. It’s a summary of what people said who brought up Dawkins without asking. Here’s one more distorting quote from the paper (my emphasis), with a next-to-last sentence that’s nothing other than a gratuitous slur:
To be clear, none of the scientists we interviewed questioned Dawkins’ identity or integrity as a scientist. The critique is aimed at his representation of science to the public. What makes this critique so ironic is the fact that Dawkins held a pre-eminent endowed chair in public understanding of science at Oxford from 1995 until 2008. It is also noteworthy that many of his critics are, like Dawkins, atheists.
What are her (and possibly her team’s) motivations and conclusions? To show that Dawkins is disturbing the Force Field of comity between science and religion. Here are two quotes from Johnson et al.:
To be sure, diverse publics are intelligent enough to make their own judgments about science and scientists, but for those who are interested in a more nuanced perspective than can be offered by specific celebrity scientists, dialogue and social exchange between scientists and non-scientist publics could be a valuable mechanism for change. Implicit in these narratives of understanding the public and foster- ing dialogue is a view that even in a socially contentious debate, scientists can promote public understanding of science by focusing on areas where scientists and skeptical groups can agree.
(Always run for the hills when you hear the word “more nuanced” in a discussion of science and religion. They’ll always be uttered by the religionists!)
Although the empirical context is scientists’ perceptions of Dawkins, Dawkins is simply an analytic case through which the role of the celebrity scientist in socially contentious debates can be analyzed. This study is important because it is the first of its kind to empirically assess whether scientists perceive celebrity scientists as ideal representatives of science. The study of Dawkins’ role in debates about the relationship between science and religion in the United Kingdom, his home nation, is an interesting case as well; while he argues that there is an intrinsic conflict between science and religion, many scientists—even most nonreligious scientists—do not perceive a conflict between being religious and being a scientist in the abstract sense (Ecklund, 2010; Ecklund et al., 2016; Ecklund and Park, 2009). Analyzing how scientists perceive Dawkins thus represents an important case from which recommendations can be made for improving dialogue in debates related to conflict between science and social values.
There’s no mystery about what’s going on here. Ecklund’s agenda is not a secret: her constant theme, reinforced by collecting data and then twisting it in any way she can to support her agenda (and get her Templeton grant renewed), is that science and religion are compatible, and that scientists are far more spiritual and religious than most people think. Just search for her name on this site and you’ll find many critiques of the work of her and her colleagues. I find the whole enterprise reprehensible: a caricature of what sociology should be. But of course, follow the money, in this case in the acknowledgments of the paper:
Data collection for this study was funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation; Elaine Howard Ecklund, PI; and Kirstin R.W. Matthews and Steven W. Lewis, Co-PIs (grant no. 0033/AB14).
I know that I’m insulting the author of this piece, Sam Kriss, in my title, but his whole article in The Baffler, “Village atheists, village idiots“, is just so crazily misguided that I can’t help but turn his invective back on him. As far as I knew, The Baffler was a respectable literary journal, often sold in bookstores, but this one article has put me off it forever. What editors could possibly approve such an odiferous hunk of tripe?
I don’t know Sam Kriss, though his website says he’s a writer living in the UK. One thing’s for sure, though: he deeply, deeply hates “new” atheists, although he has no problem with “old” atheists. Below in bold I’ve put the major points he makes in his screed (excerpts from the piece have quotation marks around them):
All New atheists are idiots. Have a gander at this:
“Something has gone badly wrong with our atheists. All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter neofascism. Superstar astrophysicist and pop-science impresario Neil deGrasse Tyson is catatonic, mumbling in a packed cinema that the lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space, that a spider that big would collapse under its own weight, that everything you see is just images on a screen and none of it is real. Islam-baiting philosopher Sam Harris is paranoid, his flailing hands gesticulating murderously at the spectral Saracen hordes. Free-thinking biologist PZ Myers is psychotic, screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon. And the late Christopher Hitchens, blinded by his fug of rhetoric, fell headlong into the Euphrates.
Critics have pointed out this clutch of appalling polemic and intellectual failings on a case-by-case basis, as if they all sprang from a randomized array of personal idiosyncrasies. But while one eccentric atheist might be explicable, for all of the world’s self-appointed smartest people to be so utterly deranged suggests some kind of pattern. We need, urgently, a complete theory of what it is about atheism that drives its most prominent high priests mad.”
What we learn from this is that Mr. Kriss likes to use pejorative language, but it’s hyperbolic and, worse, just plain wrong. Dawkins a lunatic? Tyson catatonic? Harris paranoid? Hitchens falling into the Euphrates? (What does that mean, anyway?) One could use the same language about famous theists, but we refrain from that kind of ad hominem stuff.
New atheists are idiots because they spend all their time repeating truths universally acknowledged. Kriss uses a long story from Kierkegaard about a man in a lunatic asylum who escaped and, realizing that he had to pass for sane lest he be re-incarcerated, he decides to affirm his sanity by repeating an undeniable truth over and over again—that the Earth is round. But that, of course, sends him right back to the hospital. This, says Kriss, is the equivalent of what New Atheists do: repeating boring truths over and over again, and appearing like lunatics by so doing. The tedious truths we are said to repeat are that God doesn’t exist, humans have no soul, and that evolution occurs. (Kriss also criticizes Tyson for making a rap video refuting a flat-earther, thus becoming just like the madman in Kierkegaard’s story). As Kriss says:
“In the time of Kierkegaard and Marx and Parallax, there was still some resistance to the deadness of mere facts; now it’s all melted away. Kierkegaard’s villagers saw someone maniacally repeating that the world is round and correctly sent him back to the asylum. We watched Tyson doing exactly the same thing, and instead of hiding him away from society where nobody would have to hear such pointless nonsense, thousands cheer him on for fighting for truth and objectivity against the forces of backwardness. We do the same when Richard Dawkins valiantly fights for the theory of evolution against the last hopeless stragglers of the creationist movement, with their dinky fiberglass dinosaurs munching leaves in a museum-piece Garden of Eden. We do it when Sam Harris prises deep into the human brain and announces that there’s no little vacuole there containing a soul.”
The truth is way less important, and far more boring, than lovely fictions. This is unbelievable for any rational person to say, but Kriss says it. Referring to creationism, a flat earth, and the human soul, we hear this (my emphasis):
“All these falsehoods are beautiful, tiny, glittering reminders that the world can be something other than simply what it is; we should nurture them and let them grow. Instead, they’re crushed, mercilessly, in the name of a blind, stupid, pointless truth. But who’s more wrong—the person who droningly insists, jerking like an automaton, that the world is round, has always been round, and will always be round? Or the one who knows that this earth is not a given, and that we can imagine a whole weary planet into new and different shapes?”
When I read the part in bold, I thought that Kriss must be writing satire. Clearly, the person who insists on truth, even if he’s “jerking like an automaton” (a bad attempt to imitate the prose of Tom Wolfe) is less wrong! And what is this crap about “imagining a whole weary planet into the shape of a pancake”? Or that the earth “is not a given”? This is so bizarre that it’s beyond the bounds of even postmodern craziness.
Finally, and I’ve already wasted too much time on Kriss, he says this:
Atheists are no different from believers because each group touts the beauty of the Universe. Yes, you heard it right: Kriss sees people like Dawkins—who says that there is still Magic in Reality, and that understanding doesn’t turn us into cold robots who don’t appreciate beauty—as identical to believers who say the beauty of Earth is God’s doing. Kriss doesn’t like this because he thinks that the world is often ugly and people often unhappy. But that insistence misses the point, which is that naturalism doesn’t erode away our emotions to nothing. Have a look at this nonsense:
“The real cleavage, in other words, isn’t between those who believe in God and those who don’t, but between those who want to change the world and those who just want to repeat it. Watch one of those interminable debates between an atheist and a believer—anything involving Bill Nye is best, but they’re all on YouTube, endless stultifying hours of two people babbling Aristotelian at each other and convincing nobody—and you’ll notice something strange. Both of them will, inevitably, enter into some orgasmic rhapsody about how beautiful the universe is. The theist, gazing upward to his heavens, will chant awestruck odes to the majesty of God’s creation, His churning nebulae, His shining tapestry of suns, all the wonders built from His cosmic perversion.
Meanwhile, the atheist, glancing down at his own miraculous hands, will say something similarly soppy about mountains and rainbows and how incredible it is that all this came about by a happy accident of chance. When they encounter a poetic-humanist critique of cold scientific rationality, the atheists will often argue a similar line: Keats was wrong, science did not unweave the rainbow; the natural world is all the more beautiful if you know how it works. (Dawkins even published a book in 2011 called The Magic of Reality.) This accordance ought to be very worrying. What it shows is that, for all their fiercely expectorated differences, these two people are actually on the same side.
It’s sometimes charged that fundamentalist atheism has become just another intolerant religion; here, at least, religion as it’s actually practiced is only a minor species of atheism. What if you don’t think the universe is beautiful? What if you wake up every morning in a tiny brick cell slotted into a lifeless city under a gray and miserable sky, and you think that the whole thing, as it stands, is utterly wretched? For most of history, religions have tended to hold the natural world in various forms of contempt: it’s cursed by sin, it’s the Devil’s playground, it’s Dunya or Māyā. God, the great theologian Karl Barth wrote, is a ‘No’ to the world.”
Here Kriss is criticizing atheists for a brand-new reason: he sees the world as horrible and atheists misguided because atheists have “so thoroughly trained themselves out of believing in Hell that they can’t see the real one right in front of them.”
Jebus. Yes, the world isn’t great for many people, but one reason it’s getting better is because secularism and reason are replacing religion and superstition. It’s better to promote that incremental change than stand around, as Kriss does, and kvetch about how crappy everything is.
Why did The Baffler publish such a worthless pieces of pablum? I have no idea, but shame on them, and of course on Kriss as well!
Ray Comfort’s last movie, “Evolution vs God” (you can see the whole 38-minute movie here), was execrable: Comfort ran around asking people whether they ever saw evolution in “real time,” and if they didn’t he said, “Aha, evolution doesn’t work!”. The trick, of course, that these people, who weren’t scientists, had to give some “observable” evidence, and stuff like fossils or the evolution of insecticide resistance were ruled out tout court. He wanted observations of changes “between kinds”, with “kinds” not defined, as it never is. (See my critique here.)
Now the old goddy has a new film, “The Atheist Delusion”, that opens on Friday. Here’s the trailer:
Over at The Friendly Atheist, Hemant conducted an email interview with Comfort about the movie, which isn’t that enlightening because Comfort refuses to say what that “irrefutable evidence” is that makes atheists squirm and question their nonbelief. The only time they even discuss it is this:
FA: Conservative columnist Matt Barber wrote of this film that, “you managed, in about an hour, to make the case, beyond any reasonable doubt, for the Creator God.” How is it possible that you did that when so many Christian apologists before you have failed?
RC: I wouldn’t say that they failed. They perhaps just didn’t frame it using the Socratic Method. But the question I ask in the movie isn’t a magic bullet. I hope this doesn’t sound offensive, but it only works with those who are both humble and open to reason. I’m sure the movie will be thoroughly trashed by most in the atheist community, but I believe those who want to know the truth will hit it head-on.
I’m curious what this magic bullet really is, but I ain’t gonna pay good money to see the movie. Comfort does note that the movie will be free on YouTube at the end of September. I suspect we’ll all just wait for it. However, one commenter at Hemant’s site says this:
. . . as seen in this meme Ray claims he has one “scientific” question that will destroy atheism. That question is about the existence of DNA. Just marketing hype for his Christian followers. They are the true target of his videos and books. He makes his money from them.
One note: Comfort admits that he was “very embarrassed” by the infamous banana video in which Comfort touts the (domesticated) banana as evidence for God’s handiwork. (He called the banana “the atheist’s nightmare!)
