Aren’t these anti-New Atheism pieces getting tiresome? They have three characteristics: 1. The author is an atheist or agnostic; 2. The author takes New Atheists to task for presenting a caricature of religion and not engaging with religion’s “best” arguments (i.e., academic obscurantism that uses big words), and 3. They call out New Atheists for the horrible crime of scientism.
These features are all on view in Mark O’Connell’s new review in Slate of The Science Delusion by Curtis White, a book that has skyrocketed to position 41,418 on Amazon since it was released on May 28. You know what’s coming when you see the title of O’ Connell’s review: “The case against reason” (subtitle: “Curtis White argues that science isn’t the only way of looking at the world”).
O’Connell is peeved that Richard Dawkins was recently named the world’s “top thinker”, and approves of White’s mission to demolish such unwarranted approbation:
One person who may well have been rolling his eyes pretty hard at the news of Dawkins’ apotheosis as Capo di Tutti Public Intellectuals is Curtis White, whose new book The Science Delusion is a series of targeted takedowns of key figures in this cultural hegemony of science.
Cultural hegemony?
At any rate: I haven’t read White’s book, and O’Connell does note some problems with it, but the reviewer demonstrates all three requisites of The New Atheist Takedown (O’Connell’s quotes are indented):
1. Hey, I’m a nonbeliever, too, but a more sophisticated one who
2. Knows that religion is much more complicated, subtle, and nuanced than New Atheists think:
White is a nonbeliever, but like a lot of nonbelievers—me included—he’s frustrated with the so-called New Atheism’s refusal to engage with anything but the narrowest and most reductive understanding of religious experience, and its insistence on the scientific method as the only legitimate approach to truth.
Sometimes I wonder if people like O’Connell have really read the purveyors of obscurantist religious bullpucky: people like Karen Armstrong, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, or even Tanya Luhrmann. Their “nonreductive understanding” is either an attempt to evade spelling out what they really believe, or a wordy justification for garden-variety religion. And O’Connell also neglects that fact that most religious people aren’t theologians, do not read theology, and have a pretty straightforward (and “reductive,” whatever that means) set of beliefs. Jesus existed, was divine, and was crucified to save us from sin; Mohamed was the prophet and his words are not metaphorical; Joseph Smith revealed the visit of Jesus to North America and you can baptize your ancestors post mortem; you can get “clear” by investing thousands of dollars in analysis with the e-meter, and so on. I venture to say that at least 90% of the world’s religious believers fall into the class that Dawkins criticizes. Why on earth do critics like O’Connell always equate “religion” with “theology”?
3. And oh, that dreaded scientism is everywhere. Why can’t New Atheists see that there are Other Ways of Knowing?
There’s certainly a very real need to march on that citadel, because the idea that there can be only one kind of truth has to be deeply damaging to the intellectual development of a culture. You don’t have to devalue empiricism to believe that there are kinds of understanding that can’t be accessed in a controlled, peer-reviewed experiment. The problem, obviously, isn’t science; it’s the arrogance with which many scientists, and popularizers of science, dismiss the value of other ways of thinking about questions of meaning, about the world and our place in it.
[Jonah] Lehrer, say, wants us to believe that, because neurologists can demonstrate how Observable Phenomenon X was happening in Part Y of Bob Dylan’s brain when he wrote “Like a Rolling Stone,” science can therefore “explain” the human capacity for creativity or imagination. This is like saying that the song itself is best appreciated by putting it on your stereo and then mapping the sound waves it creates. It doesn’t really tell us anything useful, or usefully true. But this is the kind of truth in which scientism, and the culture that accommodates it, puts most stock.
Ummm. . . I don’t think so. As always in these discussions of scientism, there’s a palpable refusal to be honest about what scientists believe. Really, who among us, and by “us” I mean “scientists,” thinks that Bob Dylan is best appreciated by mapping the sound waves it creates? (This is stupid anyway: one would have to understand the effect of those sound waves on the brain.) And who are those arrogant scientists? Why aren’t they ever named?
Now one day science may be able to understand music’s effect on us by seeing how it affects our neurons, but that day is a long way off; and even then the effects will have to be understood as interacting with the experiences (also coded in the neurons) of different individuals. But for the nonce we scientists—or at least many of us—appreciate art, music, and literature simply for the pleasure they give us, and don’t devalue them because we don’t understand where that pleasure comes from. “Scientism” is a straw position.
At the end you finally understand where O’Connell is coming from. He’s butthurt because he works in the humanities, which he sees being taken over by the hideous spectre of—science:
I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life in the academic study of English literature and, for me, there is no more painful—and painfully obvious—proof of the intellectual hegemony of science than how the disciplines of the humanities have been forced to adopt a language of empiricism in order to talk about their own value. If you want to do a Ph.D. on, say, the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, you will need to be able to talk about what you’re doing as though it were a kind of science. What you’re doing is “research,” and that research has to be pursued through the use of some or other “methodology.” In order to get funding for that research, you’ll need to establish how it will advance the existing body of knowledge on Bishop’s poetry, and how it will “impact” upon the wider public sphere. The study of the humanities, in other words, very often has to present itself as a kind of minor subsidiary of science.
This is my first reaction that that analysis:
Really, is it the fault of scientists that increasing rigor, and an insistence on giving evidence for what you claim, is creeping into the humanities and social sciences—which, by the way, contain the word “science”? The putting of scare quotes around “methodology” gives the game away. Much better, thinks O’Connell, that English scholars don’t have to establish their points with empirical evidence. Damn that evidence; full jouer ahead!
Granted, much in literary analysis and criticism is purely subjective, but to the extent that reason and evidence can be brought to bear, that’s all to the good. The mire in which postmodernism immersed English studies is a good example of what happens when a discipline tries to free itself from reason and evidence. And, at any rate, scientists are hardly to blame for the increasing “science-iness” of the humanities. We’re too busy working in our labs to police those disciplines. The insistence on rigor is of their own making.
And—don’t you know it—in his peroration O’Connell winds up dragging religion into the picture as another way of knowing, even though he’s a nonbeliever.
Scientism is essentially the belief, the faith, that all problems and questions are potentially soluble by empirical investigation (and that if they’re not, they’re somehow not real questions, not real problems). But there are large areas of human experience for which science has no convincing or compelling means of accounting. I am, I suppose, more or less an atheist, but when I read the Book of Genesis, I find that there is something profoundly true about the picture of human nature in those verses—a picture of our perversity and self-alienation that neuroscience, for instance, has no way of getting at or talking about. Schopenhauer, Freud, and Heidegger all give us comparable forms of truth—truths that aren’t verifiable or measurable in the same way as those of science, but that are no less valuable. The most important truths are often untranslatable into the language of fact.
In the end it always comes down to enabling or coddling religion. O’Connell needs to apply Petroleum Jerry to his wounded posterior.
