Living With Darwin by Philip Kitcher

He also agrees with religious opponents of evolutionary theory that it is a genuine threat to a certain kind of religious belief. He calls this “providentialist” belief, on which “the universe was created by a Being who has a great design, a Being who cares for his creatures, who observes the fall of every sparrow and is especially concerned for humanity”.

I think that’s right, and it annoys me no end to read those who argue that there is no real conflict between science and religion (not, I think, because they truly believe it, but because it would be convenient if it were so). In this, fundamentalists understand the issues much more clearly than those arguing for peaceful co-existence.

Spiritual Christians abandon almost all the standard stories about the life of Jesus. They give up on the extraordinary birth, the miracles, the literal resurrection. What survive are the teachings, the precepts and parables, and the eventual journey to Jerusalem and the culminating moment of the Crucifixion…Spiritual Christians place the value of the stories of the scriptures not in their literal truth but in their deliverances for self-understanding, for improving ourselves and for shaping our attitudes and actions toward others.

But if you’re going to give up the providentialist version of Christianity, why bother with the rest of it? Can’t we can do better than a world view centered around a grisly torture and execution? One in which posits an inherent conflict between spirituality and ordinary human relations (whose original disciples abandoned their lives and families)? One with explicitly negative attitudes toward women and sex? (Paul’s writings fit nicely with the Wahhabi view of the world).

Science does not, and cannot, provide a compass or, for those of us who are not scientists or keen observers of science, a source of meaning.

why not? It seems to me that the motivating principle underlying the social sciences — like economics, sociology, anthropology and the like — is to provide a scientific basis for evaluating why some societies thrive and others fail.

Second, it seems to me that, again, all of us, me and Kitcher included, need crutches, often if not always.

But why rely on a particular sky father? If the teachings, precepts and parables (which essentially can be boiled down to empathy, self-sacrifice and obedience to the golden rule) are what is valuable, why the need to align with a group that needs to have those teachings come from Dad? Aren’t the principles valuable in themselves?

I’ve found virtually everything written by Kitcher to be of value and thus I’m not surprised of your (enthusiastic) endorsement here.

Seth,

I’m not sure what you’re criticizing: as seems clear above, ‘something like a religion’ could very well refer to a moral belief system, as Harry did not say all of us rely ‘on a religion,’ and thus did not conflate the two meanings. In any case, scholars of religion(s) have not consensually agreed on a definition of what religion is, and thus, after Wittgenstein, often speak of this or that/these or those characteristic(s) which make for religion(s), not all of which will necessarily be present within any one ‘religion’ (if this be imprecision, it’s of the sort we can live with).

Patrick – It *could*. It’s *possible*. But it’s UNCLEAR.

My problem is that it’s very amenable to being taken as a sophisticated version of the fallacious “Science is a way of thinking, Religion is a way of thinking, they’ve both ways of thinking, so Science is just like Religion, …” [and fill in the rest …]

I think to an extent he did fall prey to the conflation of meanings, as francis/#3 just pointed out. It’s a rather trivial statement that we need some sort of organizing principle in our lives. Terming this “something like a religion” opens up an argument two-step, where religion means something vague in one place, and “sky father” in another.

I’m not sure what you’re criticizing: as seems clear above, ‘something like a religion’ could very well refer to a moral belief system, as Harry did not say all of us rely ‘on a religion,’ and thus did not conflate the two meanings.

I don’t see what goal is being advanced by using the word ‘religion’ to refer to a moral belief system, except perhaps reinforcing the widespread but mistaken notion that ethics needs to be grounded in a supernaturalist foundation to have objective validity.

“Spiritualist” is a terrible word to use, given its historical association with occult fads centered around communication with the dead.

patrick: Then why use a phrasing that could very easily be taken that way, that is often taken that way, even if it’s not the authorial intent? That’s a poorly made argument.

My point is not to say it’s being simplistic, but rather that the problem is a sophisticated version of the simplistic fallacy I outlined above – subtle shifts in meaning of a contentious word making an argument problematic, and leading to either question-begging or triviality.

Here’s what I’m reading:

“The final chapter is a nuanced and rather wonderful account of why providentialist religion must be false, but why this fact should not inspire in atheists any kind of triumphalism or disrespect for religion. It is, in other words, opposed both to fundamentalist Christianity, and to the militantly secularist atheism propounded …”

Simple fallacy, that frankly tends to irritate many a*-*theistic (not necessarily atheistic) people:

“Science is a way of thinking, Religion is a way of thinking, they’re both ways of thinking, so Science is just like Religion, …” [and fill in the rest …]”

A major critical-thinking intellectual project is to separate moral meaning from “sky father”. The phrasing used in the long article above seems dedicated to confusing and conflating the two. Now, of course when it’s stated that bluntly, it’s clear. In such a discussion, nobody here is going to say they are the same. The problem is the lack of clarity being so confusing. Defining “providentialist” and “spiritualist” religion, then blurring religion as roughly moral meaning, seems to end up saying that anti-clerics shouldn’t be disrespectful of the sky-father since people all need moral meaning in their lives.

As a point of view, that has a long history. But it’s not exactly self-evident.

I’m curious to see what Kitcher’s argument is, though I’m sure I’ve seen some version of it before, or for that matter, have thought of some version of it myself, no doubt more crudely expressed.

Let’s see–there’s the argument that Darwinism is based on a two-step process, as Mayr puts it–random chance supplying the genetic variability upon which natural selection acts. The whole point of the theory is that it explains the apparent design and the incredible complexity in nature without relying on some intelligent designer supplying carefully crafted mutations, as Darwin’s pal the Christian biologist Asa Gray would have had it. Darwin wouldn’t buy it. And as Steve Gould liked to say, (though Conway Morris strongly disagrees), the end results are random and show no sign that if the whole process occurred again, that anything like humans would appear.

Then there’s all that cruelty in nature, which can’t be blamed on Adam’s fall as the fundies would have it. The earth had this 4.5 billion year history and the universe has been around for about 13 billion years and why would anyone think it that it was all in preparation for us?

Is that the argument? I’m trying to remember if those are the standard ones. There’s not much in this that’s going to upset what I’ll call the moderate Christians, the ones in-between those that Harry calls the liberals and the fundies and/or intelligent design types on the other side. We don’t claim to be able to prove the existence of a providential God–excuse me, the omnipotent skyperson, as the local lingo has it. But we’ve read the book of Job and not all of us expect the universe to be a cozy medieval one which is obviously designed for us.

Science tells us nothing about how to live our lives well. … Discerning the truth and falsehood about how to live well takes reason and wisdom.

or, in other words, it takes a scientific approach how to figure out how to live well.

The warm fuzzy spiritualist version of religion is by contrast mostly harmless.

But also pretty silly, and I really don’t see why one “shouldn’t” say so.

Darwin may not (quite) rule out “spiritualist” religion, but neurobiology does, and that conflict will only become more obvious in the near future as understanding of the brain continues to advance. The idea of some kind of “non-material” “substance” that thinks and feels (whether it be a “soul” or a deity) is really not at all compatible with science, I’m afraid. And I don’t see how even the fuzziest varieties of religion can do without some such notion.

Ok Seth — sorry for my irritation. We’re at cross purposes though. I don’t think I offer any reasons at all for refraining from ridiculing the beliefs of religious believers. I don’t do so (or I try not to) and I have what I think are good reasons, which I think I can explain (in another, really long post, which was originally part of this one till I figured that two really long ones was better than a monster one). The second half of this post is more addressed to religious believers than to non-believers.

I do think, though, that we should distinguish three aspects of religion (not 2). There are the doctrinal beliefs (God, Virgin birth, transubstantiation, literal truth of Genesis, etc). There’s the moral code. And there’s something a bit different from the moral code — the shared practices and traditions that change (as the other two do, to be honest) over time, participation in and reflection on which give people meaning. I think the moral code is simply disconnected from the rest (Kitcher rehearses the argument of the Euthophro which is obviously right and which, once you accept it, makes it impossible to see a god as the source of moral truth). But that is only part of “how to live” and of “finding meaning”; religious traditions and practices contribute to these in a complicated and important way. Anyway, I shall offer actual reasons in a later post, honest (I say that with some confidence since it is more or less written, though I’ll be watching what you say to see how I need to modify it…)

With respect, Seth, no matter how literally clear Harry could be, (some of) the people you’re worried about would happily find some way to misread and misuse and misquote what he says. You can’t save him from that fate with judicious editing. I think your comments are grounded in this concern for Harry, but do hint at blaming him for any misuses.

I do think, though, that we should distinguish three aspects of religion (not 2). There are the doctrinal beliefs (God, Virgin birth, transubstantiation, literal truth of Genesis, etc). There’s the moral code. And there’s something a bit different from the moral code—the shared practices and traditions that change (as the other two do, to be honest) over time, participation in and reflection on which give people meaning. I think the moral code is simply disconnected from the rest…But that is only part of “how to live” and of “finding meaning”; religious traditions and practices contribute to these in a complicated and important way.

I’ll be very interested to read your post, Harry. In my observation, the “shared traditions and practices” aspect you refer to do not just “contribute to [the moral code] in a complicated and important way”; they provide it with the context by which it can be recognized as a moral code in the first place. It is one thing to insist, as you do, that a moral code can exist apart from doctrinal religious claims; that’s perfectly true (though it is just as true that many believers, including most of my co-religionists, would probably–and ignorantly, in my view–insist otherwise). But it is another, and much different thing, to insist that such a moral code can be broadly identified and promulgated as normative apart from cultural and social presumptions and givens that generate collectively understood normative standards in the first place. (And that is not implying an absolute or even a necessarily moderate cultural relativism; even a completely critical approach to the reception of traditions and practices, such as Habermas’s or Voltaire’s, in which we stand apart from our presumptions and use science or whatever to determine what is moral for ourselves, still needs a continuity to stand apart from.)

I realize, Harry, that you are not insisting upon the latter point; I only bring it up to highlight my understanding of the role I see “shared traditions and practices” playing in, if not necessarily the initial generation of any given moral code, than its practical livability and long-term maintenance (including being passed along to subsequent generations). And if that understanding is correct–and admittedly, it may not be–then one would need to demonstrate that a culture of “shared traditions and practices,” this third element of one’s religion/crutch/source-of-comfort-and-meaning/whatever, can in fact survive without the support of some set of “doctrinal beliefs” actively affirming that there is a truth or power or reality within said practices. The evidence from mainline Christianity and Reform Judaism, in regards to this matter at least, is to say the least not wholly positive.

I thought this was a great post, and to “compass” I would add a set of ways of thinking and learning about the social world and our relations to other people. A kind of knowledge. That’s part of why it can’t be reduced to maxims.

This requires an ontic and epistemological difference between the questions sciences answer and ethical questions, and you get a number of replies from people who don’t recognize the distinction. To pick one, I can’t agree with Francis that

“the motivating principle underlying the social sciences—like economics, sociology, anthropology and the like—is to provide a scientific basis for evaluating why some societies thrive and others fail.”

Passing over the difficulties in operationalizing this question, I doubt you’d find much ethical content in an answer! Plenty of oppressive, violent groups lasted for centuries, grew, conquered others and so on. Currently the world’s richest and most powerful nation practices torture.

One of the advantages of the kinds of distinctions Harry makes is that science, natural or social, is freed up from having to tell us how to live. You can study an ecosystem or an historical period without having to read it as allegory for something else, though certainly study of human history provides ample material for ethical reflection.

To underline one point, Darwin is indeed only a stalking horse (a rather wonderful one), in the sense that creationists ewould have to hide all the evidence as well, which means outlawing geology, paleontolgy, molecular genetics astrophysics and so on. The evidence is there and far more compelling than the theory.
Beyond that, I rest content with my Santayana based theology which tells me that there is no God and Mary is His Mother Or as my Methodist pastor put it, he’s delighted so many aetheists coem to worship in his congregation

Spiritual religion offers comfort in harsh times, and helps believers to negotiate those aspects of their lives which are hard to control and understand. Dawkins et. al. celebrate the falseness of religion, but offer nothing at all to perform the functions that spiritual religion.

harry,

you must not have read the last couple chapters of sam harris’ book. in ‘the end of faith’ he takes great pains to establish precisely the distinction for which you praise kitcher.
based on my reading of harris i am inclined to believe that his arguments are much more nuanced and gentle than those for which he is represented and therefore does not deserve to be lumped in with the likes of dawkins and dennett.

If the latter I’d want to know how it had come about and, if I was planning to stay in the place in the long term, I might well want to explore the issue with the local savants with the long term intention of explaining that they were under a misapprehension.

To extend the analogy, suppose many generations of savants had been trying in this gentle, indirect way to bring them in contact with reality, to little or no effect. Would it really be such a terrible thing for a hydrological Dawkins or two to arise in that society?

By the way, the implication in your parable (“I think I would want to find out…) that “militant atheists” take no interest in the historical and evolutionary origins, is flagrantly false. This particular kind of misrepresentation is, I fear, quite typical of those taking your position.

Science and religion as presently construed are fragments of what they both once were in combination, a unified way of being in the world.
That sounds more nostalgic and romantic than it’s meant.
“Science” is a term for the provable knowing of things, it begins at the Cartesian sum and it moves outward from the self toward the as-yet unknown.
Religion is a conversation with what’s already out there. Or an attempt at it.
The conflict is in the application. Trying to make the left shoe fit the right foot, and vice versa.
The arrogance of so many science-partisans – that there’s nothing there until it’s proven – would be ridiculous if it wasn’t so dangerous.
The dangers of religious arrogance are visible all around us.
It may well be that there’s nothing out there, but given the infinite nature of things that seems unlikely. Or do we have to prove the infinite nature of things first, in order to say that? And how will that be done?
Praying before you cut down a tree has a lot of practical benefits, not the least a centering of awareness in the immediate moment and locus, but it’s also got that just-in-case thing going too. What you pray to, and how you form that prayer – that’s the job description of religion.
Science has nothing to offer in that regard. Science doesn’t discriminate between Caligula and Charlemagne, between a life-filled world in harmonic balance and a dead planet void of life altogether.
It’s not supposed to, it distinguishes between them, it describes without judgment.
Global warming is a failure of religion far more than of science, though the specific details of its causes and effects are entirely within the purview of science.
Getting a moral compass to read true without some kind of religious input from outside the solipsistic requires something like a metaphor at the outer reaches of the imagined commons.
These things are wrong because they will doom us all.
But they benefit me.
The rebuttal is, dooming us all has a weight that’s far greater than any personal benefit could ever be.
By what measure?
Something vague and golden way off there down the timeline.
Science has no term for what that is that isn’t demeaning or woefully inaccurate. Religion has too many, and most of them proprietary.
But without a recognition of that ineffable goal, vague as it is, our moral systems have no possibility of compass.

Getting a moral compass to read true without some kind of religious input from outside the solipsistic requires something like a metaphor at the outer reaches of the imagined commons.

Say what? The inverse golden rule is a sound guide for all but the most unusual and complex cases, and religions have never been much use for the latter either (nor have the endless divagations of moral philosophers on recondite thought experiments, no offense to the philosophers among our esteemed proprietors here).

Harry, I know you’ve been put upon to answer “the critics,” but I’m still wondering about what sort of “crutches” you feel you need to rely upon in order to find meaning in life. (As you may have guessed, I’m skeptical that there are any truly irrational beliefs humans need to hang on to to get through the day.)

Also, just as an aside, I’d want to suggest that just as an intellectually honest atheist would be “disrespectful to pretend” to doubt where there is none, perhaps it’s also important to be honest about the extent to which we find religious belief downright ridiculous. The language of ridicule has an obvious cost (viz., the likelihood of alienating an otherwise potentially receptive audience), but there is also a benefit in conveying the sense that religious belief isn’t merely untrue but deeply unworthy of us. I wouldn’t want to engage in pointed ridicule of religious persons, per se; but carefully poking fun at the more obvious absurdities that abound in popular religious belief might on balance have a salutary effect. (‘Ridicule’ may be too strong a word for what I have in mind, but you’ll take my meaning.)

Your post seems to attract all manner of Christianity Denialists.

And that little boy who had the nerve to point out the Emperor’s nakedness- how can you have a decent community when there are such rude people running about?

People just living their lives . . . not so much. (Unless they’re the aggressors, obviously.)

Which, considering how much crap atheists get in our religiose society, the religiously deluded very often are.

Unlike religion, a compass will generally lead people in the right direction.

Also, I think it might be acceptable to take someone’s crutch if he is using it to beat you over the head.

Thanks for posting this; I’ve been trying to articulate a moderate position in the evolution/religion wars and it sounds like Kitcher has made a valuable contribution for those of us trying to steer a course between simpleminded extremes. The recognition of religion’s function as a haven in a heartless world is especially needed. I get really tired of loudmouthed brights assuming that people adhere to religion simply because they’re stupid, without stopping to think that maybe religious belief is completely rational and pragmatic for people who may not have the benefits of a nice middle-class academic sinecure.

Those who think that religious belief in itself is sufficient cause for name-calling are just bigots.

I don’t believe in name-calling either. I do believe in politely but firmly pointing out that your beliefs have been decisively refuted by a huge mass of scientific knowledge and, in my considered opinion, deserve toleration but not respect (those are quite different things). What you do with that information is, of course, up to you. This is actually far more polite treatment than we atheists typically receive from believers.

steve — is that really right? Maybe in the large swathe of history religious believers (like everyone else) have been susceptible to murder rape and pillage. But do you really experience a lot of intolerance — as an athiest — from religious believers? What form does it take? Do you think it comes from most religious believers, or a handful of hotheaded bigots who, if they didn;t have religion to back them up, would be thuggish toward you on other grounds? (For example, it seems silly to me to think that the behaviour of the likes of Ralph Reed, James Dobson, etc has anything to do with their religious belief — in an atheist society they would find other ways to make lots of money and gain lots of status by exploiting the vulnerabilities of others).

“q” — my promise of another post dealing with many of these things directly stands, and I’ll include examples there. But this thread has given me a lot of food for thought so it won’t be immediate, sorry..

Thanks to the many of you who have helped deflect the flack from me! I appreciate it — but also appreciate a lot of the flack which will help me think better about these things.

P.S. Sorry, I forgot that you’re in the US- but then, not exactly, because you’re in Madison. I once ahd a European scientist tell me “when I first came to the States I couldn’t understand why people badmouthed it back home; I found it was a wonderfully enlightened, tolerant place. Then I left Madison.”

I live and work in a much more conservative part of the Midwest (exurban Notheast Ohio) and moreover, working in law enforcement (a heavily Catholic field, around here)as a forensic scientist, I am situated well outside the academic bubble. From were I sit things are as I described.

steve — as I hinted in my post I have close relationships (very much outside Madison) with fervent providentialist Christians (exurban SouthEast Ohio, in fact, which is, I agree, nothing like Madison — and I suspect the other part of the country I have lived in, southern california, is also more like Madison in this respect than like our respective parts of Ohio). Perhaps the closeness of the relationships makes for a different kind of discourse than would otherwise occur. I think that they feel, and have reason to feel, strongly alienated from public discourse and the public culture, and that ridiculing their religious beliefs only enhances that sense of alienation, making it more difficult to engage them around discussions that, if you’ll forgive me, really matter for politics (like around taxation policy, the design of the welfare state, whether we should go to war and stay in wars, whether large corporations should basically control the political and cultural space, etc). What also strikes me is how reasonable they can be about all these topics if they are engaged by people (like me) who seem respectful of them as religious believers, while clearly being (as in my case) atheists.

But sure, they are not used to the idea that atheists can have a moral compass. Ridiculing their religious beliefs doesn’t really help them to understand that morality is entirely available to non-believers (well, maybe it would, I haven’t tried, but I doubt it). If I rolled up with a “nothing fails like prayer” bumper sticker on my car, I can’t imagine it helping me to explain either that morality couldn’t derive its authority from a God, or that we should adopt universal healthcare and take rigorous steps to abolish child poverty and to change zoning rules to promote socio-economic integration of neighbourhoods.

On the paucity of openly atheist elected officials and the (to my, admittedly foreign, eyes) sickeningly ritualistic invocation of God by elected officials, pop stars, sportspeople etc — sure, I think that is evidence of something pretty bad. And even if it weren’t, it would be pretty bad anyway. The idea of a God who helps the Green Bay Packers to win, or who helps some politician get elected is, I presume, revolting to anybody who has reflected about it for at least a second, and that includes people who believe very deeply in providentialist religion. I can only assume that the public permission politicians and sportsmen have to invoke God comes not from religious belief or intolerance but from something like the generalised unthinkingness that allows otherwise perfectly sensible Britons to talk rspectfully of the parasites who constitute the Royal family, or to mourn the death of Diana. Sorry, I’m rambling.

Steve, I have no objection to what you said in post 52–well, a disagreement, but not an objection. I don’t think scientific evidence (such as the overwhelming evidence for evolution) can have any bearing on most of my beliefs. In principle some of them could be refuted by some future scientific discovery, but it hasn’t happened yet. But if I want this kind of argument I can read the Kitcher book or something else along those lines. The line of reasoning that is objectionable is the following–

1. Religious beliefs are totally irrational
2. Person A is religious.
3. Therefore, Person A is irrational and should be insulted until he comes to his senses.

I get the distinct impression that if atheists were the majority in this country, some of them would turn out to be every bit as intolerant as fundamentalist Christians.

Re: 54. Neurobiology doesn’t rule out “spiritualist” religion. It may rule out the cruder forms of it, in which the spirit is viewed as just a sort of magic kind of material substance. But that’s not the only available idea of what spirit means. Consider spirit as a kind of idea, or abstract form, or organizing principle. Consider it as part of the software that operates on our neural hardware. Consider “team spirit”, a real phenomenon whatever might underlie its implementation.

I’d like to read Kitcher’s book, if for no other reason than he wrote an excellent critique of sociobiology, Vaulting Ambition. (Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, incidentally, appear to be a form of atheistic religion, though not all atheists subscribe to them. And harsh, punitive and woman-hating religions they are – sounds familiar…)

I’m a pagan, so I get accusations of damnation and loony irrationality from fundies and atheists alike. However, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the likes of me are practically mainstream. In fact, atheists, Buddhists, pagans of all stripes, and just plain spiritual-but-not-religious folks outnumber the conventional Christians out here.

Given this, my opinion on how to deal with people you think hold silly, irrational, or misguided beliefs is to STFU and MYOB. Unless they are directly making your life miserable. When people tell me that my beliefs are misguided, silly, or what have you, I don’t say to myself, “Why, that Joe is so right! I am silly! I am misguided! Thank you, Joe, for showing me the light!” Rather, I think to myself, “Jeez, that Joe is a loudmouth jerk. He needs to shut up, go away and mind his own beeswax.”

All the atheists I know came to their atheism by self-reflection and consideration, not because someone harangued them about their irrational beliefs. You don’t win people to your side by hectoring them and showing off how very much smarter you are than they – no more than anyone is converted to fundamentalism by reading Jack Chick comics or those Watchtower magazines.

An attitude of smug condescension coupled with a buttinski I-know-what’s-good-for-you is going to alienate people, not win them over.

Another thing is that most atheists – not all, by any means, but a vast majority – are comfortably well-off, college-educated, and white, with all the class and race privilege that entails.

Homosexuality =/= atheism. You don’t choose to be gay. However, you do choose your religion or lack thereof.

People do choose to actually be gay, in the sense of having same-sex partners. They don’t choose to *want* to be gay. Likewise, our spiritual allegiances are a choice that stem from internal desires and environmental background that we did not choose.

Once again, tolerance and respect are two very different things. I would never dream of impinging in any way on your right to hold and talk about what I might regard as distressingly irrational beliefs. But I certainly would’t congratulate you on holding them, which to me is what is implied by the rather strong word “respect”. You seem to think I have no right to say, for example, that “I consider your beliefs irrational and I think it would be a good thing if you reconsidered them in the light of scientific evidence that conflicts with them.” (This is purely hypothetical, you understand, because I have no idea what sorts of metaphysical commitments your version of paganism actually makes.) If you’re not saying that then just what are you trying to say?

Oops, I meant “will NOT be greeted with open arms.” Most people don’t really like Helpy Helpertons.

crystal — I agree with everything you say. But you are an easy case because you explicitly say that you do not want to evangelise, and you imply that you do not base yoour politics on your religious faith, or if you do its not in a way that would bother steve (I’d guess). Steve is more xercised (I’d guess) by people who do want to convert him and/or people who use their religious beliefs to inform their politics in a deep way that might make life much more difficult than it should be for other people (eg who would, if they could, outlaw or penalise in other ways homsoexuality, enforce traditional gender roles etc). I agree with him that when people try to outlaw homosexuality, for example, we should be very straightforward in opposing them and, if they appeal to religious premisses, we need to point out very forthrightly why those religious premisses are flawed (or, which is different, why they don’t support outlawing homsexuality). As to evangelising; I don’t know about that. In a funny way I appreciate being evangelised (its nice to know they care), but resent the presumed assymetry in our positions (why shouldn’t I evangelise for atheism back?). But, and this is one difference between steve and me (I take it from the discussions) I have no interest in getting other people to be atheists. I ‘m an atheist and simply can;’t imagine that changing, but it is not part of my identity at all (in the way that being a pagan or Christian or Muslim would have to be part of one’s identity). SO, irritatingly, there is a correct basis to the presumed assymetry! However, I absolutely do want to convince my interlocutors that they should support a much more egalitarian social order, vote for same-sex marriage and for universal healthcare and the elimination of child poverty and better schools for the poorest children, etc. I think that confronting their religious beliefs will usually get in the way of that. I also think, though, that it makes a lot of sense to argue with people about the compatibility of moral decency with non-belief in God. Again, challenging their theism (let alone ridiculing it) gets in the way.

I disagree about Dawkins. I think he does ridicule Christians, and I think he does it quite deliberately and knowingly. I’ve been coy up to now, but I think there’s a reason for this — he really doesn’t have some other social justice agenda that leads him to want to pry some of them away from their alliance with business/corporation oriented political elites. So, for him, no opportunity cost. He also has enormous self-confidence (as I said, being married to a time lord might do that for you) and has no plan for how, in America, the good that religious belief and practice does for people would be replaced.

I happen to think it’s a bad thing in itself for people to hold unfounded irrational beliefs. And more instrumentally, even when those beliefs are themselves not associated with noxious forms of politics, the existence of a widespread mental habit of unjustified belief certainly renders the ground more fertile for such politics. I can only reiterate that I think Dawkins has gotten these points exactly right. So we’ll have to agree to disagree.

Meanwhile, somebody is buying Dawkins’s book in pretty substantial numbers- and as I said earlier, it’s really of little interest or value to people who already think as he does.

By the way, speaking of people who can make comfortable pronouncements because they’re speaking from a position of privilege, that’s how the prissiness of some humanists with respect to pointing out the damage done by pervasive religiosity appears to us scientists- who are actually on the front lines. The problem for us goes way beyond just the obvious “creation science” and “ID” nonsense. There is a large amount of systematic and highly effective pressure to simply exclude any serious treatment of the “controversial” subject of evolution from K-12 biology education. (The treatment in any of the textbooks from the major publishers is generally derisory, thanks to abominations like the Texas textbook selection committee. And many teachers avoid even the little that’s there like the plague.) This has done massive damage to science education in the US, which is weak enough to begin with. Darrow may have lost the battle against Scopes, but he won the war and it’s stayed that way ever since. (The self-congratulatory “moderate” religionists who like to preen themselves on not being followers of Pat Dobson have for the most part done fuck-all to effectively fight against this situation, with a few honorable exceptions- almost all of the latter being scientists themselves.) Those who don’t have a dog in this hunt ought to think twice before delivering haughty lectures on politeness to those of us who do.

Sorry if I sound pissed off, but that’s because frankly I am.

And by the way if your first sentence in #79 conforms to your standards of politeness in conversation our standards are sufficiently different that we might mean different things by terms like “ridicule” and be talking past each other a bit.

Steve — just adding to my comments in 80 — Ask your 10 smartest colleagues (who have at least a BS in some science subject) why they did not go into middle or high school teaching. I’d be really surprised if half of them even considered it for more tha a minute (an indication of its low prestige); I’d be willing to guess that of those that did, the factors I cite played more of a role than the controversy over ID. But I’d be really interested if I’m wrong, and if so it will really give me pause.

Steve, congratulations on your appointment as official spokesperson and Grand Inquisitor for the Magisterial Court of Science. In this capacity, we will expect you to define and articulate the official view of what science is and what its interests are. We also expect you to be able to tell non-scientists from scientists based on short fragments of text, the better to root out heresy. We trust you will take an active role in making those officialy decreed to be non-scientists shut up.

Harry, with respect, I truly don’t think you fully understand the magnitude, extent and success of the pressures to downplay the teaching of evolution in the K-12 system.* It’s a problem that predates by many, many years the advent of ruses like “creation science” and “ID”. And it’s extremely damaging because very, very few students leave school understanding that evolution is not a detachable part of biology but rather its central, indispensible organizing principle. Of course the other things you mention are huge problems- precisely why it’s a tragedy that they’re further aggravated by the pressure not to teach “controversial” evolutionary topics.

By the way if a Christian or a defender of Christians gets the vapors from Dawkins’s (or my) tone, surely he must have a heart attack reading Hume or worse still, Voltaire…

*Here’s some personal experience for you on how deep the rot goes, for whatever anecdotes are worth. My daughter, now in nitnh grade, has had three creationist teachers in her career- two in grade school and the last, shockingly even to me, her 8th grade SCIENCE teacher. I discovered the latter when my daughter brought home a “critical thinking” handout on the age of the earth which was in fact a compendium of well-worn old earth creationist canards. I got in touch with him and politely but firmly let him know that I was aware of the source and inappropriateness of his handout. I pointed him to sources of accurate information and even had my daughter lend him a couple of books. I suspect he was only rpetending to be openminded but at least he knew he was being watched and there was no more nonsense (and I’m sure you realize that the mere absence of nonsense is very far from being sufficient for good science teaching.)

steve — this may be a case where we disagree because you just have much lower expectations than I do regarding the other factors. I interpret your anecdote as evidence in favour of my complaints, not yours; correct my complaints, and such people either wouldn’t get the job, or wouldn’t feel able to do what they do. Don’t correct my complaints, just get rid of the IDers, and you’ll have similarly incompetent people teaching biology similarly badly. I could give you a ream of similar anecdotes from History and social studies classes in middle and high school, but with Maoists, Feminists, Rrepublicans, Libertarians — the problem is that the principals and the ed schools excercise no quality control and teachers believe they can do what they want.

If you don’t mind me lecturing you for a minute, you should go to the Principal, make sure he or she sees you, show her the assignment, and explain what biology is, and that your daughter and all the other kids in the school should be taught it, and not something else, and that it is the principal’s job to know what is going on in every department, and to be involved in the intellectual life and teaching and learning in the school. If you do, your principal will stare at you as if you have two heads (is my guess). Ok, lecture over, and revealed at the end to be probably bad advice.

But why are we discussing this? Most of Kitcher’s book is a devastating take down of ID and creationism, which shows conclusively that it has no place in the science classroom, and I endorse all that here, and in the piece I linked to ultimately in the THES (which you can get t, probably, by registering, but its probably not interesting enough to bother). So, we agree both on the quality of biology teaching, and on the inappropriateness of ID, but I put much more wieght than you do on the factors I have outlined, and your anecdote doesn’t persuade me otherwise….

Read the comments and I’m left wondering why the line

“A world unimproved in any other way which lacked spiritual religion would be a worse world.”

isn’t rated as the controversial issue here.

The statement for example implies that either the Dutch have improved in some mysterious way, unknown to me, or the US is a better place.

The statement also fails at being consistent with a coherent view of a non religious world.

People don’t offer these community services because they are religious, but because either they feel the need themselves or they are convinced by other people to behave like that.

And neither is going to disappear when people stop being religious. A scientists could easily verify this by comparing religious and non religious communities across the world.

Religion is different for the song and dance, not for the motivation, needs and wishes of people.

The holy cows, Wodan, Mercator, God et al., are a result, not a cause. And thus dropping them doesn’t make the world a worse place.

matt – Time Lords have the secrets of time, so being married to one might give one certain advantages. Yes, its a Dr. Who reference — Dawkins is married to Lalla Ward, who played Romana II in the late seventies, the companion who was also a Time Lord and who, I think, went on to be President. I think, though I’m not sure, that the late Douglas Adams (who was a friend of Dawkins) introduced them.

“A world unimproved in any other way which lacked spiritual religion would be a worse world.”

Well I guess it is trivially true because of the get out “unimproved in any other way”. The question is whether alternative moral and social codes and rituals would replace those of religion naturally and inevitably. Certainly it is not the case that atheists are somehow missing out, so it is not obvious that without spiritual religion those that are currently non-atheists would be missing out on something. The assumption would seem to be that these people are somehow temperamentally dependent on religion, and could not cope without it.

Further evidence on your side, harry b, would be the level of mathematical competence of HS graduates. Most of the same factors that affect science teaching affect math teaching, but creationist thinking is entirely irrelevant. My observation would be that science literacy is not notably worse than mathematical literacy.

I should add that I never make any secret of the fact that I have no use for religion. With people I interact with regularly we’re long since past the “but how can you not believe…” stage and amicably agree to disagree. One good reason for atheists not to hide their views is that many ordinary people really have swallowed the usual canards about atheists… until they actually meet one, whom they know to be a highly ethical person, in the flesh.

Of course they believe in Big Daddy–I didn’t deny that–but so what? I know people who believe in Platonic forms, possible worlds and propositions and others who don’t believe tables exist. So what? Metaphysics is harmless.

They have a notion that there’s “something there” and like the show and the sociability but they don’t care about the details, don’t have any militant agendas about evolution or anything else, and their primary ethnical concerns are with being nice and seeing to it that their kids don’t engage in high-risk adolescent behavior.

So what’s so bad about that? I LOVE religion. I enjoy it. Lots of people do and, whether they’re right or wrong about the metaphysics, whether God exists or not, what’s the problem? They aren’t crusading against atheists, promoting creationism or attacking gays–they’re running bake sales, chatting with friends at coffee hour and singing hymns.

Unlike Donald Johnson, I’m not trying to “break my habit of typing out gigabyte length political manifestos whenever I type a comment”, though I’m making a concerted effort to avoid unnecessary hyperbole whenever I can see it.
This religious business is, and will be for at least a while, the central issue we face as a collective organism. Our morality will change to fit consensus about it, or fragment to fit its absence. Iraq as a military noun is a direct result of our confusion and unresolved bickering about these questions, and the moral confusion that results.
Cheap answers come easy and quick.
The brief version of what I’m trying to say here, for those inclined to skip multiple-paragraph posts, is that the real struggle around this issue is itself Darwinian, on both sides. Or all three may be a more accurate way of stating that.
Crystal: “Authoritarian, suspicious sorts who are intolerant of ambiguity can use any religion OR atheism to push reactionary politics.”

There’s a not insignificant amount of comfort to be had from taking the pernicious garbage issuing from the Bush White House at face value. It’s simple, it scans, and it’s child’s play to rebut and refute. It makes the other side feel good about themselves while at the same time keeping the stage-set presented by the presenter and his script-writers intact. So Bush’s policies are “mistaken” and the result of incompetence, as opposed to intentional and duplicitously conceived.
Much of this discussion occupies similar ground.
The simple and easily met fallacious arguments of the bizarrely powerful ID constituency is idiotic self-delusion; the wishy-washy bland non-assertions of the well-fed ecumenicals is complicity and cowardice.
These are simple and easily analysed, readily explained by anyone brave enough to take on the consequences.
That Bush may have been used as thoroughly as the American people is discomfiting, scary.
That the present state of the nation’s soul may be a result of intentional manipulatiop, and not rampant self-delusion is equally scary.
On the other hand we have the insistence on Darwinian explanation for life as we know it coming from people who are adamantly rejecting any organic Darwinian selection on the human genome as it’s now configured – now that we’ve evidently arrived at the apex of our development.
Maybe the ID crowd’s representative of something more than just the awesome strength of aggregated idiocy? Maybe science in a pure unbiased mode does not and never will exist in human terms? Maybe there’s something else, something bigger and more fateful going on?
Academia’s got a lot to do with what we think are the irreducible fundamentals of discourse – truth trumps desire, the impartial facts are central. In the real world these things aren’t paramount, they’re just strategies, no immediately better than deception and self-delusion; because what matters is what works, solely and finally, selection proves fitness – that’s Darwinian, baby.
In that context the belief in scientific truth as a kind of redemptive quantity is nothing more than religion by another name.
At the same time the anti-Darwinian bunch are up to a mess of heinous duplicities that are textbook examples of Darwinian call-and-response. Like a plant that emits poisons from its roots, or an ant colony hormonally charged to attack alien drones.
And again, triple-conversely, present society’s rife with this Darwin-in-a-box trip that makes it okay to deny the sculpting force of the natural world, the pressures that gave us our “gifts” such as they are – intelligence, quickness, a complex immune system – while at the same time cheerleading a campaign to have economic losers fed to the wolves.
Social Darwinism full-strength or watered-down is waiting behind a lot of the more benign points of argument here.
In Academia possession of the truth furthers survival, and we’re all processed by Academia for at least 12 years or so. This skews the p.o.v. for a lot of otherwise rational minds.
In the real, non-anthropocentric world, possession and dissemination of the truth may over long enough spans of time further survival, but in the short run without much digging we can all find examples of the obverse. And nature’s full of camouflage and deceptive adaptations, where the truth of some coloration or sound is reconfigured to some creature’s advantage, and/or some other’s disadvantage.

LogicGuru: “…whether God exists or not, what’s the problem?”

There was a politician on CSPAN speaking to the egregious nature of the Mohammedan. He said something like
“I have no problem with people talking to God. They can do it all day if they want, I don’t care. It’s when God starts talking to them…”
In the town where I live, when I was a kid there were a few street crazies who would go around talking out loud to “people who weren’t there”. Now there’s dozens of people on the street whenever I go downtown, talking on cell phones. Same thing, except there’s an assumably verifiable human presence at the other end, now. Maybe that’s analogous, maybe it’s not.
An atheist obviously would say God doesn’t talk to anyone, because there is no God. So talking to something that doesn’t exist is at best a kind of hobby, a diversion. But getting communications from your hobby – that’s clinical.
An atheist would also say it’s stupid and a waste of time to pray to the spirit of a tree before you cut it down, because there’s nothing there to receive your prayer.
Certainly if there is a God, if there are spirits we should talk to them, as opposed to pretending they don’t exist and possibly incurring their wrath. But how can we know?
And right there’s where it starts to get scary and uncomfortable. Because somebody’s got to put it on the line, don’t they? Who that would be and how they’d do it are outside the scope of this thread. But I would like to repeat something I’ve been saying for some time now.
The human mind in its locus of the brain is the center of any atheist’s claim to fame, to wonderfulness, to grace and beauty in the world. That brain came out of the flux of animate matter on this planet, Earth, which is a flyspeck of presumably inanimate matter in orbit around a minor star in a universe filled with stars. Every bit of driving energy the brain has and uses comes from a incredibly minuscule portion of the energy given off by that minor star. Really really minuscule. To look at the celestial imagery caught by the Hubble space telescope, or even just the night sky itself, and assume what that is is nothing more than real estate, mostly uninhabited, is an act of arrogance that dwarfs the hubris of Western Man’s “conquest” of the New World, but it comes right out of the same place.
Both scientific atheism and religious fundamentalism have one central thing in common, they’re both violently anthropocentric – one by default and one by dogma.
Those of us who think the arrogance in both those positions may actually be the real problem are getting lost between them, and the unnecessary and artificial amplification of that polarity’s a big part of what’s doing it.

Less Hume, perhaps, than him.