Krista Tippett, the Martha Stewart of Spirituality, must be influencing her National Public Radio (NPR) colleagues, because they seem abnormally soft on religion. Rarely on that station do I hear anything critical of religion, or anything about atheism at all. So now we have someone who seems to be an atheist, Alva Noë (a professor of philosophy at Berkeley), who has written a completely clueless piece at the NPR blog Cosmos & Culture called “Why atheists need Captain Kirk.”

Noë’s thesis is based on the idea that Spock was robotic, emotionless, and, well, just not well rounded; and that many atheists and scientists—he conflates the two, though about 30% of scientists are religious—are just like the Big-Eared One.  We need to be more like Captain Kirk, who, I guess, was a warm, emotional human being. However, Ben Goren, who called my attention to this execrable piece, claims that “Spock himself was the most emotional character in the original Star Trek.” I wouldn’t know, as I am one of the few Americans who never saw a single episode of the series (science fiction isn’t my thing). But I do know that Nöe’s thesis stinks like rotten fish.

Here’s what Noë says. First, he argues that scientists are human, with human traits. But, it seems, we have only the bad human traits because we do stuff like make atomic bombs:

Scientists, and cultural defenders of science, like to think of themselves as free of prejudice and superstition, as moved by reason alone and a clear-eyed commitment to fact and the scientific method. They reject religion as an irrational and ungrounded burden of tradition. They see religion the way Europeans (and some Americans) see Americans. As somehow backward.

To which one might reply: Science is all those things. Between holocausts!

Scientists supported Hitler the same as anyone else. Their scientists and engineers made missiles and gas chambers. Ours made atomic bombs.

So we have prejudice and superstitions, like everyone else. But we seem to be lacking the other stuff—the good stuff that makes us human as well. We’re Spockian! (Worse: we’re not emotionless, but our only emotions are evil!):

I’m pro-science, but I’m against what I’ll call “Spock-ism,” after the character from the TV show Star Trek. I reject the idea that science is logical, purely rational, that it is detached and value-free, and that it is, for all these reasons, morally superior.

Spock-ism gives us a false picture of science. It gives us a false picture of humankind’s situation. We are not disinterested knowers. The natural world is not a puzzle. [JAC: It isn’t???? Why are there scientists, then?]

Part of what Spock-ism gets wrong is that science isn’t one thing. There’s no Science Party or Scientific Worldview. Nor is there one scientific method, advertising to the contrary notwithstanding.

This is scientism (i.e., prejudice against scientists) on stilts.  In truth, science itself is logical and rational and is the only way to find truth. Scientists aren’t purely rational or logical. Nevertheless, we’re good enough to find truth, for we’re constantly policing each other and can’t make stupid or false claims lest other catch us out.

And yes, there is no “scientific method” per se, but there are methods that are scientific, including the use of reason, the making of hypotheses, the appeal to evidence, and replication. Those methods have enabled us to find zillions of truths about our cosmos, whereas religion, with its “revelatory method,” hasn’t come up with a single verifiable fact about the Universe, much less the Divine.

All Noë is doing here is trying to diss science.  He mentions atomic bombs, but what about antibiotics, GPS technology, the Green Revolution, golden rice, the age of the Earth and Universe, and evolution—the many things found out by whatever “nonscientific method” we use? Why does he leave those out, but mention gas chambers and atomic bombs? Could he have some animus against science? I think so.

There’s more nonsense:

Spockians like to pretend that science has proved that there is no God, or that fundamental reality consists only of matter. But both of these claims are untrue. The first is untrue because science doesn’t concern itself with God one way or they other. As for the second: Science has no more proved that only matter is real than it has proved that there is no such thing as love, humor, sunsets or knuckleballs.

This is remarkably obtuse for a philosophy professor. No we can’t prove there’s no God, because science can’t prove anything absolutely. But we haven’t seen any signs of a god, and shouldn’t we have by now–especially if God wants us to know Him! (Ask Francis Collins or the Templeton Foundation, by the way, if science doesn’t concern itself with God: Collins thinks the “Moral Law” is evidence for God, while Templeton directs its $70 million/year budget towards finding evidence in science for the divine.) Science has been the greatest God-killer in history, and it’s because science doesn’t need God to find out things. In that sense we do have something to say about God, just like we have something to say about the Loch Ness Monster.

And about “only matter being real,” well, it depends on what you mean by “reality.” My thoughts are real to me, and though they’re the product of matter, they aren’t material in themselves.  Mathematics isn’t made of matter, but it’s real in some sense.  What we adhere to is not that matter is the only reality, but that everything in the cosmos obeys the laws of nature. That’s called “naturalism.”

The meat of Noë’s piece, however, is the claim that atheists and scientists (again conflated) are not fully human. Remember that he faulted us earlier for being human, what with the building of gas chambers and all:

Spockians give science a bad name. If you think of science as being in the business of figuring out how atoms spinning noiselessly in the void give rise to the illusion that there are such things as love, humor, sunsets and knuckleballs, then it isn’t surprising that people might come to think that the inner life of a scientist would be barren.

I suspect this is what is at stake when people find it hard to believe that atheists have active spiritual lives — or that they might experience wonder or awe. It isn’t the non-belief in God that makes atheism seem puzzling. It’s the active adherence to the Spockian worldview. For the Spockian worldview is the denial of meaning and value.

In this context, it is no answer to critics of atheism to say that, as a matter of fact, atheists feel awe in the face of nature, that you don’t need God for wonder.

For in a Spockian universe there is no such thing as nature, there is just material process, particles and fields, in the void. Nor, for the Spockian, is there any such thing as wonder, not really; for what is an emotion, but a conjury of particles in the nervous system?

Well if people think that atheists or scientists don’t experience wonder or awe, or even a form of nonreligious spirituality for many, then they don’t know atheists or scientists. Has Noë read Dawkins’s The Magic of Reality? We are just like everyone else, except that we have a different job (a great one!) and we’re a lot less religious than most. I’ve been around scientists all my life, and I don’t recognize Noë’s stereotype in my colleagues. We like to read, go to museums and movies, and eat and drink good stuff. Most scientists have hobbies. Scientists, in fact, know a lot more about the arts and humanities than humanities and arts people know about science.  Really, what kind of clueless person could characterize us like this? It’s a stereotype based on either ignorance or prejudice, and it’s not true.

Noë’s other accusation, which should by now have gone the way of the Edsel, is that atheists and scientists have no way to derive value, meaning or morality in their lives. The fact that these traits are, in fact, abundantly present in largely atheistic countries like Sweden and Denmark should have told Noë that he’s barking up the wrong tree. Granted, he says that religious people don’t have great ways for getting meaning and value, but at least they have ways. (Note, too, that he says “we” when referring to nonbelievers, leading me to think that he’s an atheist):

The religionist, it should be noted, is not much better off. God doesn’t explain meaning or value any better than the laws of physics. But in one respect, the religionist may have an advantage: Atheists, in so far as they are followers of Spock, have an explanatory burden that religionists don’t carry — that of explaining how you get meaning and value out of particles, or alternatively, that of explaining why meaning and value are an illusion.

This guy is a professor of philosophy, and yet he claims that there is no good secular way to find meaning and value in one’s life? Has he not read the ancient Greeks, or his fellow philosophers through Hume, Kant, Spinoza and up to Singer and Grayling? Does he ever get out at all, even in his own profession? And yet he has the temerity to lecture us, his fellow atheists, to take off our pointy ears and become more like Captain Kirk—to become more like religious people:

The big challenge for atheism is not God; it is that of providing an alternative to Spock-ism. We need an account of our place in the world that leaves room for value.

What we need, then, is a Kirkian understanding of science and its place in our lives. The world, for Captain Kirk and his ontological followers, is a field of play, and science is a form of action.

If i were talking to friends, at this point I would hurl a stream of invective, including some not-so-nice epithets about Professor Noë. But this is a family-friendly site, so I’ll just close by saying that the good Professor is bigoted against atheists and scientists, even if he’s one of us.  The prejudice that we’re cold and inhuman, lacking meaning and value, is a stereotype that isn’t supported by the facts.  The biggest mystery is why anybody would let Noë write this kind of stuff on a website sponsored by a supposedly thoughtful organization. And if he got paid one cent for writing this, that’s way too much.