Jason Rosenhouse said he’d publish a report on his Evolution Blog about my talk last night at Politics and Prose in Washington, D. C. His report will surely be more objective than mine, but I thought I’d put up a few photographs of the event taken by reader Brian D. Engler, and a few thoughts.
Politics and Prose is a very famous independent bookstore on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, and has lots of book events, many with well-known authors (Ralph Nader spoke the night before I did, and apparently people are still chewing him out for taking away Democratic votes!). It’s a lovely store and they set up chairs and a lectern (and book-signing table) in the rear of the store.
I talked for half an hour without slides, speaking for about 15 minutes about how the book came about, what I discovered in my adventures in reading theology, and then gave a brief precis of what the book was about. You can see the setup below, showing about 30-40% of the audience. I was gratified that so many people were interested in the topic. The bookstore moderators and workers were very gracious, and they know how to run an event (the woman in charge, whose name I’ve unfortunately forgotten, is sitting in the chair at the left background).
I was quite exercised at times, though I hope not strident. The audience seemed attentive, and was more of a “choir” than the audience at my talk at Chicago’s University Club. But they were by no means all in favor of what I said. In the Q&A, several people wanted to talk at length, not so much to ask questions as to reprove me for my thesis. The rabbi I mentioned earlier said that he could still be a rabbi and not teach anything supernatural, but that he taught instead about morality and meaning. He added that if I understood Judaism better I would understand how to find spiritual truth. I wasn’t clear what, exactly, he was trying to say, but rather than battle with him, I just said that if he could help people without invoking divine beings then that was fine with me. He added, though that he could also discern religious “truths” through faith alone. I asked him to name one. He couldn’t really, and perhaps I should have said that he wasn’t really a supernaturalist but a secular humanist. At any rate, his long tirade (not a question; I must learn to tell people to ask questions rather than bloviate at length) seemed aimed at telling me that if I were a better Jew, I would learn that faith could bring truth. I could have engaged him further, but there were people in line (many of them) with real questions, and so I ended that discussion.
One woman, a nurse, also wanted to speak at length without having a question. She said that she couldn’t go to work every day without having faith that she was helping people, and also that some people were sustained by faith in their time of need. Finally, she said that she knew that prayer and faith had cured several of her patients. My response (she was quite exercised) was that her “faith” was really “confidence based on experience in her own abilities and in medical care”; that yes, people’s faith could make them feel less anxious; but that studies had shown no value whatsoever in either faith healing or prayer in helping people get better. I told her to read about those studies in my book.
Several people seemed to conflate religious faith with other kinds of faith. One person asserted confidently that when he reads a science book, he has the same kind of faith in the scientist that he does when listening to a preacher or reading scripture. Ergo, he said science is based on faith. I told him that I discuss exactly this question in the book, and that the “faith” we have in popular science writers like Brian Greene, Richard Dawkins, Lisa Randall, Brian Cox, and so on is not the same as believers have in clerics: those scientists have attained renown because their work has been continually vetted by other scientists. It seems to be a common misconception that faith in what a scientist or doctor says is exactly the same kind of faith that believers have in their priest. The difference, of course, is that there is no way for the pronunciations of a cleric to be checked and verified reliably by other clerics. (Or, if they were, they’re likely to be repudiated: imagine an imam pronouncing on the validity of what the Pope says!). I wrote an article in Slate on this very issue (part of which appears in my book), and I hope people can think harder about the different meanings of the word “faith.”
Perhaps one of the most common criticisms of science by believers, then, is that, like religion, it is based on faith. I interpret this to mean, “You are as bad as we are.”
I enjoyed chatting with many people at the book signing (about half said “Maru” and asked for a cat drawn in, so I know I have lots of readers whom I haven’t met). Many were also nonbelievers (i.e., the “choir”), and thanked me for the book or my website. One guy brought a laminated picture of his cats (he once had eleven) and gave it to me, which was sweet; and a woman gave me a CD she made which, I believe, contains music or art based on the fossil record. I spoke to several people as well who were “closet” atheists, groping to find a way to become more public. I always tell them to take their time, that nobody will force them to declare their atheism. Several of them faced ostracism from friends and family if they declared their unbelief. I could see that they were very distressed about this, and I thanked Ceiling Cat that I never had to face that problem.
The book-signing:
Someone told me the other day that the work that we’re doing as secularists may not bear fruit for decades in America, and I think that’s right. We won’t see an America anything like Sweden in our lifetimes. Speaking with another reader after the signing, I told him that sometimes I felt like a workman on a Gothic cathedral—someone who knows that the edifice on which he’s working will never be completed in his lifetime, that he’ll never see the final splendor of Chartres or Notre Dame. That is a bit depressing, because we won’t be around to see a wholly secular America, and we certainly won’t see it from Heaven! But I am convinced that one day it (I mean the secular America, not Heaven) will come.
