Robert Wright’s faitheist manifesto

July 31, 2009 • 5:55 am

A couple of days ago I published a review in The New Republic of Robert Wright’s new book, The Evolution of God.  Although Wright claims that he doesn’t believe in God, the book was a very strange attempt to give people “evidence” for divinity in the world, with that divinity manifested as a “transcendent” force that pulls humanity towards ever-greater morality. (The increasing morality, which constituted the “evolution of God,” is, says Wright, a byproduct of increasing interaction between peoples, which required them to change their theologies in a manner that made them more inclusive.)

Wright’s effort was intended, I think, to give solace to people longing for affirmation of God’s existence (or its euphemism, what Wright slyly calls “a transcendent source of meaning”):  a way to let them know that there was still a divine purpose guiding the world, even if those vociferous and pesky atheists have attacked the notion of God as a bearded old man who answers prayers. I called The Evolution of God “chicken soup for the brain” — a way to show people who believe in God how they can still feel smart.

One of my friends, who saw Wright on television in conversation with Bill Moyers, allowed that Wright may have been affected by his Southern Baptist upbringing, so that, although he says he’s “not qualified” to pass judgment on God’s existence, the scent of faith still clings to him. Many faitheists have had a devoutly religious upbringing, and cannot bear to admit that what they wasted all those years on is complete bunko.

Today Wright has a bizarre essay in The New York Times online confirming that his upbringing produced his faitheistic belief that, whether or not God exists, religion is good for you.

Wright notes that despite rejecting his Baptist upbringing, he still is plagued by guilt and the longing for a sky-father to expiate it:

Which raises the question: If I no longer believe in a personal God, looking down and judging me, why do I still feel guilt over my wrongdoings and shortcomings? Why do I still want some father figure (a God, ideally, though a resurrected version of my dad would do) to pat me on the shoulder and tell me I’ve done O.K. and can now go play golf for a millennium or so? Is godlessness not, in fact, as some born-again atheists seem to promise, a path to happiness? And, anyway, where did this need for forgiveness and affirmation come from?

He suggest natural selection as one explanation, since it may have built the sense of conscience into the human psyche as a way of promoting harmonious societies.  Religion then came along to codify that conscience as an awareness of sin, but also as a way of giving absolution for that sin.  But this isn’t enough for Wright — he wants to think that, even if the traditional God doesn’t exist — the sin-and-absolution cycle is good:

But why, now that El Paso and Christianity are both in the rear view mirror, do I still feel that I could use a born-again experience? Why, if I don’t believe in heaven, do I still want something you could call salvation? . . . The sense I got back in El Paso was that salvation wasn’t just about taking the bath and believing in Christ. Sure, that was the technical pre-requisite for getting to heaven. But a thoroughgoing sense of salvation — a sense of being a truly good Christian — depended on, for example, pursuing a “calling,” finding the career path that allows you to do the most good for the world. . . Besides, it’s the sense of sin, the sense of human frailty, the deep Calvinist suspicion of yourself, that can keep the self-dramatization in check. Salvation, at the most abstract level, is the sense that you’re on the right side of the moral law, and the sense of sin is what keeps you not-quite-sure that you are.

There you have it.  Yes, you may be ridden with guilt about masturbating, having sex while unmarried, or not having gone to Mass, but it’s all good.  Religious belief helps us find meaningful jobs!  And religion keeps you moral!  What better statement of faitheism could there be?

Of course, there’s not the slightest evidence that the religious guilt/absolution cycle keeps us in line or makes us good. (Atheists also seem to have no trouble finding their “calling.”)  In fact, as I argue in my essay, there’s plenty of reasons to think the opposite — that those who reject God are just as moral as the faithful.  I’ve never seen any of the religion-defenders respond to this statement, though they continue to harp wearyingly on the need for faith as a wellspring of morality.

And, in the end, Wright can’t help claiming once again that religiously based morality is evidence for that “transcendent source of meaning,” his code language for “God.” (If you don’t think they’re equivalent, read how some reviewers interpreted the book.)

You can be an atheist and feel that there’s such a thing as right and wrong, and that you’ll try to align your life with this moral axis. In fact, I think you can make a sheerly intellectual, non-faith-based case that there is some such transcendent source of meaning, and even something you could call a moral order “out there.” I even think it’s fair to suspect that there’s a purpose unfolding on this planet, leaving aside the much tougher question of what’s behind the purpose.

But, for my money, there’s nothing quite like the idea that what’s behind that purpose is something that can approve or disapprove of you. It keeps you on your toes, and it keeps your life mattering, even when it’s only a feeling, and no longer a belief.

I ask Wright: if there’s nothing to justify “faith,” but if there’s still “transcendent meaning” out there, where does that “meaning” come from? Who’s running the show?

After I read The Evolution of God, I was puzzled at the attention it got from intellectuals like Bill Moyers, Andrew Sullivan, and now the New York Times.  His book is deeply confused; you don’t have to know much theology to see that his description of religion is tendentious at best; and his argument that the moral advance of society is evidence for God is simply wrong (there are plenty of alternative explanations for that advance).  But I am slowly realizing that faitheism runs deep, very deep.  Even atheist-intellectuals want to pat the faithful on the head: there’s a lot of mileage to be gained by attacking the “new atheists,” even if you share their feelings about God. It makes you look so nice, so friendly and inclusive. Indeed, some of the positive reviews of The Evolution of God have come from those who say that Wright’s arguments give believers “relief and intellectual ballast” against atheism.

I’m sorry, but if you’re an atheist it is simply condescending to tell people that their mistaken beliefs — beliefs with which you don’t agree — are just fine because, after all, even if you’re not going to heaven and God doesn’t hear your prayers, it’s good for you and society that you continue to hold these mistaken beliefs. It’s even more condescending — and cynical — for someone like Wright, who doesn’t accept God, to tell people that there’s “scientific evidence” for a “transcendent source of meaning” out there.  If that’s not God, what is it?

Finally, I’d like just one of these religion-coddlers to grapple honestly with the observation that, as the atheist bus slogan says,”You can be good without God.”**  Entire countries like Sweden and Denmark are atheistic and yet moral — indeed, more moral than the religion-ridden U.S.  These countries, and many like them, are not dysfunctional, despite the claim that we desperately need religion to shore up our society.  Don’t the smoothly-functioning societies of Sweden, France, and Denmark tell us that we don’t need religion?

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**Apropos of this, the Indiana atheists just won their case in federal court to have this “controversial” (though undeniably true) slogan put on Bloomington buses.

Summer reading from Nature

July 29, 2009 • 1:57 pm

The latest issue of Nature has a section on recommended summer reading/viewing; fourteen of us were asked to choose one book or DVD falling under the rubric of “relaxed, inspired holiday reading and viewing.”  My choice was, as I noted earlier, the novel Life of Pi, for which I give a very short precis.  Other contributors include Carl Zimmer (recommendation: Newton and the Counterfeiter), Eugenie Scott (The Rough Guide to Evolution), and Neil Shubin (Microcosm).  All the books are nonfiction save Life of Pi and two DVD episodes of House, chosen by Felice Frankel.  (I must say that I’ve never been a House fan; the guy is unlikeable and the plot unrealistic, although I can see how it appeals to detective-story fans.)  And all of the nonfiction books are science-related except for David Poeppel’s choice, Bertrand Russell’s essay In Praise of Idleness.  Predictably, someone chose Darwin’s Origin: it’s certainly inspired but I don’t know if I’d call it “relaxed.”

Among the choices, I’ve read only Carl Zimmer’s Microcosm and John McPhee’s The Control of Nature, both of which are good reads (I’m a huge fan of the earlier McPhee), and of course Darwin.  Weigh in here with opinions about any of these, or with your own recommendations for summer reading.

I’ve just finished Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, which I read because it was one of the two other science-related books on Newsweek’s list of “50 books for our times.”  It’s pretty good — a description of the history of plant breeding using four examples: the apple, the potato, the tulip, and marijuana.  Lots of fascinating history here, recounted in stylish prose, but a bit marred by the author’s tendency to find cosmic overtones in everything and to show how plant breeding is a case of human-plant coevolution. (It isn’t really, as humans haven’t evolved much, at least genetically, as we’ve selected plants.)  It’s interesting, though, to contemplate that human desires have been hard-wired into the DNA of domestic plants and animals, although sometimes these desires reflect capitalism (as in the horrid Red Delicious apple) rather than taste.  Pollan’s speculation on why people like marijuana makes for splendid reading; it’s the best “scientific” description I’ve yet seen about how your mental processes are affected by dope.

Here’s Pollan lecturing at Berkeley on marijuana:

New York Times readers write in on Collins

July 29, 2009 • 6:00 am

Today’s New York Times contains a spate of letters about Sam Harris’s op-ed criticizing Francis Collins’s appointment as NIH director.  As expected, most of the letters are critical of Harris, including the first one by Kenneth Miller at Brown University.  Miller says this:

Dr. Collins’s sin, despite credentials Mr. Harris calls “impeccable,” is that he is a Christian. Mr. Harris is not alone in holding this view.

This isn’t exactly true.  Harris was concerned about Collins not because he’s a Christian, but because he’s a publicly vociferous evangelical Christian who has made statements that blur the lines between science and faith.  Also, as Harris notes, Collins has made public proclamations that, if taken seriously, violate a program of empirical, naturalistic research:

Francis Collins is an accomplished scientist and a man who is sincere in his beliefs. And that is precisely what makes me so uncomfortable about his nomination. Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible?

I ask these questions again:

1.  If Collins were as vociferous an atheist as he is a Christian, and went around proclaiming that the “empirical facts” are evidence for atheism (which indeed they are!), and gave lectures comprised of half science, half justification for atheism, and wrote books about how atheism and science were compatible, would he have a snowball’s chance in hell of being approved as NIH director? (And would religious people write in to support the nomination in the name of freedom of religion/atheism?)

2. If Collins went around espousing a faith in Xenu and his space minions, lecturing about how humans were plagued by infestation with alien souls and how they could be cured by diagnosis with a fancy machine and expensive deprogramming — that is, if he were a Scientologist who was publicly vociferous, rather than keeping his faith to himself — would he have a snowball’s chance in hell of being approved as NIH director?  How about if he were a publicly vociferous Wiccan?

Francis Collins pollutes science with religion

July 27, 2009 • 6:15 am

In today’s New York Times you’ll find Sam Harris’s op-ed piece on Francis Collins’s appointment as director of the National Institutes of Health, explaining why he thinks Collins is a bad choice.  When I read a preliminary draft of the piece, I was struck by the list of five slides taken from Collins’s lecture, and so I went to YouTube to watch it. (The link is below.)  The slides are taken from a Berkeley lecture in which Collins aims to break down the walls between science and spirituality, areas that he says should not be “walled off” from one another.

After watching this talk (it’s about an hour long, starting at 6:00 and ending at 1:13:00, with the beginning and end occupied by introductions and questions, respectively), I am more certain than ever that Collins really does pollute his science with his faith. By speaking with the authority of a scientist, by discussing science at length, and above all by describing in the same talk the evidence for evolution and the “evidence” for God, acting as if they are of similar epistemic significance, he is confusing his audiences about the nature of evidence and the nature of science. (See his comment at 51:30 that “My role here is to tell you what I as a scientist and a believer have learned about science and what I have learned about my belief in the context of that and vice versa.”) It’s a disquieting performance, even more distressing because Collins is an affable and genial speaker, conveying his snake oil is with a dose of sugar.  And it’s scary (but not incomprehensible) to see how a smart man has managed to convince himself of a set of superstitions that are completely unsupported by evidence.

Before I dissect his arguments, let me give Collins credit for one thing: he isn’t a straight-up wackaloon creationist.  He recognizes that intelligent design is not science, and gives some arguments against it. He doesn’t do nearly as good a job as Kenneth Miller, but at least he tries, and that’s good. But then he undercuts the whole business by proclaiming that the evidence points to the hand of God on the tiller.

If you want to avoid having to watch the whole megillah, scroll forward until about 27 minutes in, when Collins starts laying out the “questions” that science cannot answer, e.g., What happens after I die? Is there a god?. Of course the implication is that faith can answer them, but he’s wrong.  How can faith tell us what happens after we die?  Do our bodies get taken to heaven? If so, do we show up with our bodies at the age at which we died, or as an infant, or as something in between?  If we’re cremated, do we appear before St. Peter as a cinder?  How can we tell for sure that we’re not going to be boiled in molten sulfur for eternity?

The whole tenor of Collins’s argument is that his acceptance of God is based on empirical evidence. In this sense he puts it on the same plane as his science, and this is the pollution that has always troubled me.  (Look at Collins’s five slides, highlighted by Sam Harris, and see if they don’t look like flat assertions about reality.) Collins begins laying out the “evidence” for God at 28:39.  It is, briefly, this:

1.  There is something instead of nothing.

How does that prove there is a God? Physics tell us that something can indeed come from “nothing” (that is, the absence of matter).  The origin of the universe is of course a problem that physicists are still working on.

2.  Mathematics is “unreasonably effective”.

Well, how ineffective would it have to be before it didn’t point to God?  Didn’t Gödel show that it wasn’t perfect anyway?

3.  The Universe was put together by a mathematical mind.

How does he know this?  Why do regularities in the Universe testify to the existence of a celestial being? After all, isn’t the suspension of regularities — that is, miracles — also taken as evidence for God? You can’t have it both ways.

4.  The physical constants seem to have “precisely chosen values” that enable the existence and evolution of complexity.

Note the word “chosen”, which assumes what the argument is trying to prove. There are, of course, numerous scientific theories for why the values are as they are (and they don’t appear so “precise,” anyway).  This work is in its early stages, and so Colllins is advancing a God-of-the-gaps argument — a form of argument that he pretends to abjure (see below).  Since we don’t understand why the “constants” of physics are as they are, says Collins, their “precision” must constitute evidence for God.  Note Collins’s assertion that scientific hypotheses like multiverses require more faith than do religious explanations

Too, there are already good scientific explanations for “fine tuning,” including Lee Smolin’s hypothesis that new universes are constantly coming into being (the “multiverse” theory), and those whose physical constants allow them to last a long time will eventually, though a process analogous to natural selection, enrich the population of universes with those having “tuned” constants.  This is not a “desperation” or a “faith” move, as Collins implies; rather, as Sean Carroll has pointed out, multiverses are a natural prediction of some classes of physics theories.

5. The Big Bang shows that the Universe had a beginning.  Therefore it must have had a creator; that creator would have to have been supernatural, and “that sounds like God.”

So much for all the physicists who are trying to figure out how the universe could have arisen through natural causes.  Give up, folks — Collins says that he knows the answer!

6.  The existence of a “moral law” (which Collins defines as the universal observance by humans of codes of right and wrong) can be understood only by the existence of a creator.

This is the most bizarre of all his arguments, and the one which most strenuously evades both science and reason.  The existence of human morals can be understood as a result of either evolution, evolved rationality, or both.  One common explanation involves the evolution of reciprocal altruism in small communities of hunter-gatherers.  Another, advanced by Peter Singer and others, invokes rationality itself — recognizing that nobody has a moral claim to be special — and the extension of that in interdigitating societies.  There are perfectly good non-God reasons for individuals and societies to adopt and adhere to moral codes.  Collins pretends that these reasons don’t exist.  Indeed, he cites the existence of “extreme altruism,” as demonstrated by Oskar Schindler’s saving Jews at risk to his own life, as evidence that altruism isn’t evolved.  This shows no such thing.  Some people choose to adopt children, a manifestly nonadaptive act, but that doesn’t show that the drive to be parents didn’t evolve.

The most inane and disingenuous part of Collins’s argument is his claim that without religion, the concepts of good and evil are meaningless. (Collins’s slide 5 in Harris’s piece: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution,  then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”)  That’s palpable nonsense.  Good and evil are defined with respect to their effects and the intents of their perpetrators, not by adherence to some religious code.  It is beyond my ken how a smart guy like Collins can make a claim like this, even going so far as to argue that “strong atheists”  like Richard Dawkins have to accept and live their lives within a world in which good and evil are meaningless ideas.

There are, of course, also statements made without evidence, including this one:  “God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the Moral Law), with free will, and with an immortal soul”  And this (slide 4): “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God.” How does he know? What’s the evidence? Isn’t the distinction between the science slides and the faith slides being blurred here?

Look at it this way:  suppose Collins gave a talk sketching the evidence for evolution, and then went on to say how “evidence” points to the past existence of a space alien ruler named Xenu, who kidnapped some of his people, preserved them in antifreeze, and transported them to Earth, where they were stored in volcanoes. The souls later escaped and are now wandering around, clinging to humans, and this is what causes all the trouble of the world.  Only by detecting this soul-infestation with a fancy instrument, and subsequent deprogramming, Collins might say, can we root out these disembodied vestigial souls and find happiness.

If Collins said this, you might well think he’s a wack-job, too ridden with crazy ideas to hold down an important government job.  But of course the beliefs I described constitute the theology of Scientology, and are no different in kind from the beliefs of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or of any other faith.  The reason why it’s ok for Collins to profess evangelical Christianity is because Christianity is a superstition that is common and socially sanctioned.

The great irony of this talk is the contrast between Collins’s entirely reasonable dismissal of intelligent design as being based on God-of-the-gaps arguments, and his credulous acceptance of those same arguments when it comes to matters like morality, multiverses, and the so-called fine-tuning of physical constants. At one point he avers that scientists should not invoke supernatural causes if natural causes will do, but then abandons this stand when it comes to physics.  Shouldn’t we give physicists a few decades to figure out why the “constants” are as they are, just as we gave biochemists some time to figure out how the flagellum evolved? Apparently not.  Collins has decided that science will always be impotent before certain problems, whose continued existence must therefore prove God.

This kind of evasion and use of double standards is of course de rigueur for religious scientists who insist on publicly harmonizing their faith with science.

If Collins continues to go around giving talks like this as head of the NIH, I will no longer give him the benefit of the doubt.  He is polluting science with faith — and hurting public understanding of science — by pretending that empirical evidence points to the existence of God.

OTHERS WEIGH IN:  See P. Z. Myers’ take on Pharyngula (and a new one here) and Russell Blackford’s post on Metamagician and the Hellfire Club. Newsweek weighs in here.

Review of “The Link,” a book about a fossil primate

July 26, 2009 • 1:28 pm

On the Barnes and Noble website you can find my review of Colin Tudge’s new book, The Link — a book about the discovery and meaning of “Ida,” the fossil primate whose scientific name is Darwinius masillae.   Ida was the subject of numerous blog commentaries after her unveiling in May, most of them taking issue with the authors’ and publicists’ claim that the fossil gave information critical in understanding human (or primate!) evolution.  (See here, here, and here, for instance.)

The book is pretty lame, and I have it on good authority that Tudge wrote it in about two months to meet the May deadline for the big NYC unveiling, after other authors had refused the offer to write it.  The rush job shows.  In my opinion, The Link is neither worth buying nor reading, though the fossil is certainly worth seeing because it is so complete, preserving outlines of the fur and even the stomach contents. (You can see it for free on “The Link” website.)

From the review:

. . .The buzz around Ida may in fact mark a watershed moment in science reporting: the merging of science journalism and tabloid journalism. On the whole, there isn’t much difference between Ida’s press releases and the National Enquirer, with Ida playing the role of Paris Hilton: an attractive specimen that adds little to our culture. To a scientist, statements like this — made by one of Ida’s discoverers — grate like fingernails on a blackboard: “When we publish our results it will be like an asteroid hitting the Earth.” But in the end, it’s not so much the hype and the absence of scientific gravitas around Ida that bothers me, it’s the irresponsibility of trying to gull the public into accepting a scientific conclusion that wasn’t properly vetted by scientists. This end run around the scientific community is the kind of thing that creationists do. Fortunately, real science has won out — for now. When Chris Beard, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, was asked to assess Ida, he remarked dryly, “This fossil has been hailed as the eighth wonder of the world. Frankly, I’ve got ten more in my basement.”

Fig01_m3

Fig. 1.  Ida (Darwinius masillae). Photo courtesy of the PLoS paper describing her.