Muddy Waters
G in comments brings up the question of how (and if) Michael Ruse defines ‘religion,’ so I’ve gone looking to see if I can find him doing that in articles and interviews (I don’t have his book, so looking there will have to wait). Here are a few relevant remarks.
From a recent interview – he doesn’t define it, but he does say a little about what he means by it in this context, answering the interviewer’s request to explain what he means by saying ‘the Darwin vs. Creation argument is often a battle of two religions’:
I am not saying that Darwinian theory is always religious – it is not. I am saying that often evolutionists use their science to do more than science and to give a world picture – origins, special place for humans at the top, moral directives – that we associate with religion. Creationism I argue flatly is a religion – the religion of biblical literalist, American protestant evangelicals of a right wing persuasion. Creationists deny that their position is purely religious, but I think that they do this to avoid the separation of church and state embedded in the US constitution. I suspect that many Darwinians will take issue with my claim that any part of their theorizing is religious – but I have made my case and rest it.
So what he means by it for the purposes of this discussion (in his book) is ‘to do more than science and to give a world picture – origins, special place for humans at the top, moral directives – that we associate with religion.’ Okay – that helps. Questions and objections immediately suggest themselves. ‘Origins’ is more than science? I would have thought it was science – origin of species kind of thing. And then, tending to associate things with religion – well that’s a whole big set of problems. Just for one thing, it’s often a mistake to do that. Moral directives for example can and should and do have secular justifications; ‘tending’ to associate them with religion tends to be just a bad and stupid and often harmful habit – so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to say people are doing religion when they talk about morality simply because some people still ‘tend’ to associate moral directives with religion. Does it. And finally – evolutionists give a world picture with humans at the top? They do? That’s news to me. But, it’s a little unfair to argue with the short version when I haven’t read the book. But then again – more people will see the journalistic simplifications than will read the book; journalism is influential; so in another sense it’s not unfair, or at least it needs to be done, unfair or not.
From an article in the Boston Globe:
Evolution is controversial in large part, he theorizes, because its supporters have often presented it as the basis for self-sufficient philosophies of progress and materialism, which invariably wind up in competition with religion.
Well, yes – but then anything of that kind inevitably winds up in competition with religion, doesn’t it. That’s not the fault of evolution, it’s because religion and religious people often think religion has or should have a monopoly on that kind of thing. Well that’s just too damn bad. They don’t get to have a monopoly; they used to, and they don’t any more.
Provocatively, Ruse argues that evolutionism has often constituted a ”religion” itself by offering ”a world picture, a story of origins, and a special place for humans,” while its proponents have been ”trying deliberately to do better than Christianity.”
Okay – so it appears that at least some of the time he is (implicitly or explicitly? we’ll have to read the book to find out) defining religion as something that offers a world picture, a story of origins, and a special place for humans. Well, that’s a pretty woolly definition of religion, frankly. Yes those things overlap with religion – but on the edges, not at the center; and overlapping is not the same as defining. Creationists and IDers are theists, not just people with a world picture and a story of origins and a place for humans. It just muddies the waters, as Stewart says, to pretend otherwise and then use that pretense to blame the people who don’t make truth-claims about supernatural entities for the hostility between religion and science.
So the supposedly religious elements that *some* thinkers have associated with evolution are “a world picture, a story of origins, and a special place for humans.” A perspective absolutely at odds with all religions – both as sets of beliefs and as sociocultural institutions – could easily embrace all these elements.
1. World picture: An anti-religious perspective (atheism, agnosticism, humanism, rational skepticism, whatever) strongly implies a very broad understanding of the world as NOT being full of meaning or otherwise ordered for our benefit.
2. A story of origins: Evolution by natural selection is a story of origins, as is big bang cosmology in a broader sense. Intellectual fulfillment and all that, pace Dawkins.
3. A special place for humans: Depends on what you mean by “special,” I suppose. But humans are creatures with language and culture, and the accompanying extraordinarily flexible behavior, which has all sorts of interesting and important implications for us and for our place in the world – even if one doesn’t believe that such a place was divinely mandated in any way. And of course, humans are the creatures (the only ones, as far as we know) which have ideas about this sort of thing – us, not them. The group to which one belongs is always special :-)
When one’s claims about what constitutes a religion or a religious idea are so broad and vague that one includes everything that sort of resembles a comprehensive world view, one clearly has no sensible definition of religion at all. Even being somewhat neutral on the question of whether religion *necessarily* includes dogmatic beliefs about the way the world is (or ought to be) as a defining characteristic, to broaden the defining characteristics of religion so far that any and every semi-organized system of beliefs counts as “religious” seems simply misleading and not at all useful – or rather, useful only to the wrong people so they can pursue nefarious ends.
Ultimately, Ruse is engaging in the same sort of conflation of (very) different things that creationists do when they claim that evolution is inherently a religious belief system – an atheistic one. But evolutionary biology has nothing to say about the existence or non-existence of any god or gods, it simply makes claims about the way the world is; the way life forms originate and change and are related and so on. The only conflict between that and religion is generated when religion also makes claims about the way the world is – and they don’t have any evidence or arguments, so they automatically lose any and all such conflicts between claims on rational grounds. And that would be the end of the story if humans were, you know, more rational.
By effectively conflating any system of beliefs whatsoever with religion, Ruse is once again working for the enemies of science and reason. He doesn’t mean to be, I’m sure, and he doesn’t seem to realize that this is what he is doing. But he’s doing it nevertheless, dammit!
Well, that’s how it appears to me. I too don’t think he means to be – but on the other hand the whole approach does fit into this always-give-religion-the-benefit-of-the-doubt trend that has been going so strong in the US. His argument makes some sense if you start from the assumption that religion should always be given the benefit of the doubt. If you don’t, it doesn’t.
Those additional quotes certainly don’t make him look any better. You can’t say there’s not misrepresentation going on here, amid all the squirming and beating around the bush. Granted, without having read the book either, but having paid careful attention to what was presented as a direct quote, his beef seems more to be with the Darwinians of whom he claims to be one than with the Christians who are just left alone. If you argue that Creationism is a religion, well then you’re not making a statement, are you? You’re certainly not attacking something that is inspired exclusively by a religious text by calling it a religion. What I find interesting here is that the tactic used to skewer evolutionists is to (erroneously) draw parallels between their ideas and religious beliefs. Instead of saying point-blank that it’s hare-brained to make baseless assertions, he’s claiming that evolutionists are (gasp) drawing conclusions from the knowledge they’ve acquired and are thus intruding on Christianity’s turf, which is all about moralising independent of any knowledge. I’m aware that I’ve strayed here from the discussion of how he defines religion, but a quote like “trying deliberately to do better than Christianity” begs for reaction. In my mind’s eye I can’t help seeing it written on a disapproving end-of-term report card (Christianity is the name of the golden-haired teacher’s pet who gets a perfect score without doing anything to justify it – and you should only see what’s going on there whenever teacher’s back is turned). I know it’s six months early, but should we adopt a New Year’s resolution to henceforth do better than Christianity only by accident so as to avoid any further comment by Prof. Ruse in the Boston Globe?
I have just read Michael Ruse’s Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy article on creatonism. It is quite clear that he is firmly on ‘our’ side and that his cavilling about some proponents of ‘evolution’ is intended to warn us against extending the idea beyond the bounds of close reason. I’m all for the B&W ethos, but I think Ruse deserves a sympathetic reading because of his exemplary record.
I think in interpreting his remark about moral directives one should consider carefully the word ‘directive’.
Directives come from authority, and I think Ruse’s point is that sometimes evolutionary theory is treated as authoritarean when addressing audiences largely unaware of its explanatory and predictive power.
“but I think Ruse deserves a sympathetic reading because of his exemplary record.”
Well that’s why I keep hedging what I say, and pointing out that I’m addressing these articles, not the book. But I also do think that’s worth doing even if Ruse does have an exemplary record, because I think the tenor of these articles just feeds into the all too popular ‘how dare you be critical of religion’ line. I think the rest of us need to keep retorting ‘how dare you ask how dare we be critical of religion’ until this line goes out of fashion.
Stewart commented: “Instead of saying point-blank that it’s hare-brained to make baseless assertions, he’s claiming that evolutionists are (gasp) drawing conclusions from the knowledge they’ve acquired and are thus intruding on Christianity’s turf, which is all about moralising independent of any knowledge.”
Well, this isn’t quite fair to Ruse. His critique, advanced consistently for years, is that there have been many thinkers who have advocated fundamentally moral and/or political opinions under the pretense (or self-delusion) that these normative claims were somehow supported by the science of evolutionary biology: Victorian progressivist ideals, social Spencerism (Darwin deserves no blame for it), racism and eugenics are all examples. None of these are actually supported by “the knowledge they’ve acquired” – that is, by actual scientific (or moral, or political) arguments.
I have no quarrel with Ruse’s well-supported arguments that many ideologies with no scientific foundation whatsoever have been asserted as if they were grounded in or supported by evolutionary biology. My quarrel with him is that it is simply confusing and wrong-headed – in all the ways already discussed, especially in the climate that OB is talking about – to blithely assert that any and all such normative claims are religious in nature. Simply put: All religion is ideology, but that does not mean that all ideologies are religious. This is most definitely NOT a distinction that makes no difference.
I would also add some of the modern Human Hard-Nativist Evolutionary Psychologists, such as Steven Pinker, who despite some exemplary work untying scientific finding from ethical implication in part 1 of the Blank Slate ruins the whole thing by explaining how the current understanding of the brain makes liberalism wrong and conservatism ‘dead right’. I mean, this is the blogosphere, people. You don’t need to take many steps to runs smack into someone with a medium-poor grasp of science who chooses to filter everything through some adaptationist funnel.
“social Spencerism (Darwin deserves no blame for it), racism and eugenics are all examples.”
Interestingly enough, we have a whole chapter on that subject in our recently completed book (Why Truth Matters 2006 available in Waitrose and Boots).
Alex: Couldn’t agree more about Pinker et al. Actually, the same could be said about pretty much everyone working in evolutionary psychology (name changed from sociobiology to protect the guilty). And at least 90% of everyone who has ever researched biological difference between the human sexes.
OB: I already had plenty of reasons to read the book, but I’m glad to know this tidbit. :-)
G, you’ve really got a bee in your bonnet about sociobiology haven’t you? So E.O.Wilson is the great Satan? Pretty much everyone in evolutionary psychology is a wingnut? If I may so opine, these are crass generalisations.
G.,
I don’t claim to be familiar with all that Ruse has written, but I got the impression that in the pieces we’ve dealt with here he’s referring more to the contemporary than the historical (as were you in your later comments). Anyone turning Darwinism into a religion is ripe for criticism. Science will always contain data that can be interpreted in more than one way and the drawing of moral or political conclusions from either data or interpretation is unlikely ever to be free of dispute, which is not a bad thing, either (you want moral absolutes; there’s never a shortage in religion). Where I hope we agree is that Ruse is not painting a fair and true picture by claiming that parts of Darwinian theorising are religious (his own words rephrased to fit this sentence). That is why I use a word like “misrepresentation.” I, too, have seen the evidence that he is on “our” side, but I think that the way he puts things constitutes a double imbalance. Firstly, from the admittedly little I have read, he seems more concerned with criticising the Darwinism that he accepts has adequately proved its point than the religion that continues to be influential (putting it mildly) despite the lack of evidence (also putting it mildly). Secondly, by saying what he does about religious Darwinian theorising, he is likely to strengthen the existing misconception among so many believers that no one is without belief and that science and Darwinism are just another couple of beliefs that claim a special status by pretending to be something else. I cannot overstate how much I agree with OB that this basic and crucial misconception is one of the most important ones that must be fought, challenged, debunked, etc., as persistently, frequently and loudly as possible. And that’s where Ruse isn’t helping at all. Is he really unaware that while we throw bucket after bucket of water on the flames of this wrong idea, the one he contributes to the effort contains petrol?