Tag: New Yorker

The New Yorker tries its hand at accommodationism

November 14, 2014 • 1:22 pm

I find myself deluged with accommodationist articles today, so we’ll have one more post after this, and then, if you’re good boys and girls, we can have some cute animals.

Nobody expects the New Yorker to come down on religion. And indeed, although there are pieces that in effect express the nonbelief of their authors (see here, for instance), there’s always some lip-service paid to faith, or some atheism-dissing (in my case, my love of cats and Motown songs was characterized as “irrational love,” entirely similar to that seen in religion).  On some fine day, maybe I’ll open my New Yorker to find a take-no-prisoners piece on the perfidies of faith. But that day will come when, say, we have an atheist President in the U.S.

At any rate, the New Yorker has patted itself on the back for defending science in a new piece (free online) by Michael Specter, “Pope Francis and the GOP’s bad science.” (For non-Americans, the “GOP” stands for the “Grand Old Party,” i.e., Republicans.) The author’s credential are these:

Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, and has written frequently about AIDS, T.B., and malaria in the developing world, as well as about agricultural biotechnology, avian influenza, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, and synthetic biology.

And his message is that the Pope, religious though he is, is infinitely more accepting of science than those climate- and evolution-denialist Republican politicians who dominate science policy in Congress:

It’s a shame that there is no provision in the Constitution of the United States that would permit Pope Francis to serve as the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

. . . That’s too bad, because the Pope believes that science, rational thought, and data all play powerful and positive roles in human life. The senators seem as if they do not. Last month, Francis made a lot of news when, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he said, essentially, that the Catholic Church had no problem with evolution or with the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe. “When we read the account of Creation in Genesis, we risk imagining that God was a magician, complete with an all-powerful magic wand. But that was not so. … Evolution in nature does not conflict with the notion of Creation,’’ Francis said.

. . . Still, this Pope made a point of talking about evolution—and to do so at a time when the men and women we have chosen to represent us in Washington often equate support for Darwinism with eternal damnation.

Specter goes on to decry, correctly, that the House Science & Technology committee is peopled with representatives who call anthropogenic climate change a hoax, and don’t accept evolution.  He also claims, and he’s probably right again, that Americans used to elect politicians who didn’t make their names by attacking settled science. He uses Bobby Jindal as an example of how times have changed:

Jindal, who was a Rhodes scholar and before that received an honors degree in biology from Brown University, was recently asked at a public forum if he believed in evolution. “The reality is I was not an evolutionary biologist,” he responded, as if study in that one field was required to address the issue. He then went on to say that local school systems should decide “how they teach science” in their classrooms.

No, they shouldn’t get to decide what qualifies as legitimate science, as even the Pope seems to understand. In his speech at the Pontifical Academy, he said that, at least since the creation of the universe, we have all followed a logical, scientifically defined path—not a path determined by parish priests, reactionary American senators, or local school systems.

“I am happy to express my profound esteem and my warm encouragement to carry forward scientific progress,’’ the Pope said.  It would be nice if we could elect political leaders capable of that kind of thought. But, in this country, that might take a miracle.

Where Specter goes wrong is claiming that the Pope is down with evolution, and therefore is down with science, and therefore would be a good person to head a congressional committee.  And that’s just wrong.

True, Francis has expressed sentiments saying that evolution did happen, and for that liberals have fallen all over themselves extolling the Pontiff’s scientific acumen. “What a great move forward for accepting evolution!”, they cry.

The problem is, as I pointed out in The New Republic, what Francis said has been church policy all along. Move along folks: Francis said nothing new. The Catholic Church has accepted the process of evolution, in a limited way, since Pope Pius XII. But there are several caveats to this:

1. Humans are an exception to naturalistic evolution, as God instilled souls into us somewhere in the hominin lineage. That is not, as Specter maintains, the church’s position that, “at least since the creation of the universe, we have all followed a logical, scientifically defined path.” Since when have souls been a pit stop on the scientifically defined path of evolution?

2. The church still maintains that Adam and Eve were the historic and sole ancestors of all modern humans.

There is no evidence for claim #1: it’s what Anthony Grayling calls an “arbitrary superfluity,” added to a scientific theory to satisfy the emotional needs of Catholics.  And #2 just flies in the face of evoution per se, for we know from population genetics that at no point in the last million years did the human population sink below about 12,500 individuals, much less to two (or eight, if you take Noah, his wife, and his sons). That’s settled Church doctrine, and is explicit. There’s no metaphor in the Church’s insistence on the historicity of Adam and Eve. The policy below is from Humani Generis, written in 1950 and still representing Catholic dogma:

Screen Shot 2014-11-14 at 12.19.48 PM

Not much wiggle room there, eh? You can’t metaphorize it, either, as it says that it’s wrong to think that Adam either wasn’t our historical father or that he “represented a certain number of first parents” (the tactic that metaphorizers often take).

So, really, souls and two historical ancestors of modern Homo sapiens? Not to mention Francis’s belief in Satan, demonic possession, and guardian angels. Oh, and there’s that “original sin.” What, exactly is that?

Is Francis a man we want to hold up as a model of scientific belief to oppose to Republicans? I don’t think so. He’s infested with all the metaphysical superstitions of Catholicism, and really said nothing new. The view that he’s breathing a love of science into Catholicism is based solely on wishful thinking. And when you hear someone like Specter put the Pope on a pedestal of science, without mentioning his other beliefs I’ve mentioned, you know you’re dealing with someone who is trying to osculate religion, and who has not done his homework about what the Vatican really thinks about evolution.

It would be nice if The New Yorker were as honest about the Church’s beliefs as is The New Republic. 

h/t: Stephen Q. Muth, Butter’s staff ~

The New Yorker takes a swipe at everyone

August 27, 2009 • 7:13 am

This week’s New Yorker has a piece by James Wood — “God in the Quad” — that considers the “new atheists” and several books by their critics, most prominently Terry Eagleton. (You’ll need a New Yorker subscription to access more than the summary.)  Both sides take a drubbing here, though I have to say that Eagleton (who is quasi-religious) and the faitheists get the worst of it.

Wood goes after the atheists because:

a.  Their own beliefs are “religious”:

.  . resurgent atheism [is] marked by its own kind of Biblical literalism, hostility to faith in a personal God, a deep belief in scientific rationality and progress, and, typically, a committed liberal politics.

How this constitutes “religion” is beyond me. Certainly the “new atheists” don’t have an unquestioned certainty in their ideas, nor a belief in some supernatural force.

b.  They offer “an inadequate account of the varieties of religious experience” and address forms of faith that are not universal:

For the new atheists, as for many contemporary American Christians, faith is assumed to be blind — an irrational closing of the eyes to evidence and reason, a leap of faith into an infinite idiocy.  The new atheists do not speak to the millions of people whose form of religion is far from the embodied certainties of contemporary literalism, and who aren’t inclined to submit to the mad mullahs and the fanatical ministers.

Yes, but they do speak to the billions of people who believe in a personal god who engages with the world.

c. They are dogmatic:

What is most repellent about the new atheism is its intolerant certainty; it is always noon in Dawkins’s world, and the sun of science and liberal positivism is shining brassily, casting no shadow.

Well, what are some examples of the “intolerant certainty”? (Wood gives none.) And what, exactly, is so bad about it being noon and sunny and all? More often atheists are accused of having a bleak world view, of demolishing religion but replacing it with nothing positive.  Well, at least Wood gets our humanism right, though he apparently sees it as a failing.

Although these are serious charges, Wood fails to provide any examples of the dogmatism and intolerance of the new atheists, or of the “inadequacies” of their discussion of faith.  His arguments against us, then, are merely assertions, unsupported with evidence.

In contrast, Wood provides many quotes from theologians and believers like Eagleton, hanging them with their own words. Indeed, his critique of this side is far more trenchant.  The believers (and their running-dog faitheists) are accused of:

a. Ignoring the fact that the faith of many religious people hinges critically on the truth of religious claims. Religion isn’t just a philosophical exercise.

Of course, the truth claims of religious beliefs are precisely what the new atheists so loudly dispute.  If all Eagleton can now say to them is that their lives are the “poorer” for not responding to a moving “political and historical” allegory, he is just being finely sentimental. He might as well have written a book about Anton Chekhov or Walter Benjamin.

b. Claiming that, despite dismissing the need for evidence, they somehow know the nature of God:

[Eagleton says} God “hates burn offerings and acts of smug self-righteousness, is the enemy of idols, fetishes, and graven images of all kinds — gods, churches, ritual sacrifice, the Stars and Stripes.” Well, how convenient. Quite apart from the awkward fact that the God of the Hebrew Bible clearly enjoys the right kind of burn offerings (after the Flood, Noah’s smelled particularly agreeable to Him), one wonders how Eagleton can possibly know that his spectral and not-of-this-world God is also an unneurotic aesthete who may regret His creation, and dislikes the Stars and Stripes.

c.  Espousing a faith so rarefied that hardly anybody else shares it. (This is something I’ve been harping on for ages.)

It is no good for Eagleton to turn on [John] Rawls and say, in effect, “But I don’t mean your kind of belief in God, or even your kind of God; I mean something much more sophisticated and ethereal. There is really no such thing as what you call ‘the supremacy of the divine will,’ because God doesn’t ‘exist’ as an entity in the world.” Theologians and priests are always changing the game in this way.  They accuse atheists of wanting to murder an overliteral God, while they themselves keep alive a rarefied God whom no one, other than them, actually believes in.

YAY! Win!

But what does Wood see as the solution to a debate whose antipodes are both inadequate?  Simply this:

What is needed is neither the overweening rationalist atheism of a Dawkins nor the rarefied religious belief of an Eagleton but a theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief.

In other words, we need to express sadness that there is no God. That will make the atheists acceptable to the believers (NOT!).  In this synthesis, Wood sees the atheists being less afraid “to credit the immense allure of religious tradition,” but who among us has ever done that? On the contrary, most atheists freely admit that religions and their traditions have considerable allure.  But admitting that is not the same as saying that religious beliefs are facts.  And on that point the gulf is unbridgeable.  That is why Wood’s solution, like that of Steve Gould’s NOMA, fails miserably.