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”.

The hit job is in a paper in Public Understanding of Science by David Johnson, Elaine Ecklund and two other authors (reference and abstract below; paper behind a paywall but judicious inquiry can yield you a pdf). The summary is in a publicity blurb at Rice University, and the study is also summarized by a piece in The Independent. I’ll look at the original paper (ask and ye shall receive).

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):

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:

1. The authors don’t consider the obvious: that those UK scientists who disliked Dawkins were more likely to bring up his name unprompted.
2. Religious scientists despise Dawkins for having written The God Delusion, and so would be likely to denigrate him.
3. 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.
4. 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”.
5. 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:

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.:

(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!)

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:

_________

Johnson, D. R., E. H. Ecklund, D. Di, and R. W. Matthews. 2016. Responding to Richard: Celebrity and (mis)representation of science. Public Understanding of Science, early publication. DOI: 10.1177/0963662516673501.