Ruse and Bunting Talk Sinister Nonsense
Time to talk about people saying silly things. I know, I know – what an odd activity. What a futile way to spend time. What a bizarre allocation of these golden hours of early 21st century calm and prosperity. I know. One might as well try to give names to all the leaves on the trees (that’s Evelyn, that one’s Marcia, that’s Eric, that’s Deirdre). One might as well try to cook a meal by breathing on it. One might as well dust the living room when it will only get dusty again. I know. But – I can’t explain it somehow, but it seems to call to me – this peculiar avocation of holding public sages up to ridicule and disdain. Oh well what am I saying, of course I can explain it – I’m a petulant rude hypercritical argumentative kibbitzer, and holding public sages up to ridicule is what I do. It is of my essence. What else would I be doing – dusting the living room? Hardly!
There was for instance this irritating mess from Madeleine Bunting via Michael Ruse yesterday.
Michael Ruse, a prominent Darwinian philosopher (and an agnostic) based in the US, with a string of books on the subject, is exasperated: “Dawkins and Dennett are really dangerous, both at a moral and a legal level.” The nub of Ruse’s argument is that Darwinism does not lead ineluctably to atheism, and to claim that it does (as Dawkins does) provides the intelligent-design lobby with a legal loophole: “If Darwinism equals atheism then it can’t be taught in US schools because of the constitutional separation of church and state. It gives the creationists a legal case. Dawkins and Dennett are handing these people a major tool.”
We’ve encountered that part of the mess many times before – but I still don’t understand how Ruse gets there. Dawkins doesn’t claim that, of course, but even if he did, what does atheism have to do with the constitutional separation of church and state? Is Ruse just talking for effect, or what?
Evolution is losing the battle, says Ruse, and it’s the fault of Dawkins and Dennett with their aggressive atheism: they are the creationists’ best recruiting sergeants. Ruse has got to a reckless stage of his career. He prefaced the essay he submitted for Dawkins’s festschrift with the above quote from Dembski and went on to declare that he “felt intensely irritated with Dawkins … It’s bad enough having to fight the enemy without having to watch my back because of my friends.” The editors were horrified and ordered a more deferential rewrite – which Ruse duly provided.
I wouldn’t call that reckless so much as gratuitously aggressive and fight-picking. Ruse seems to be determined to pick fights, and to go about it as unpleasantly as he can.
Even more reckless, Ruse put on the net an email exchange between himself and Dennett in which he accused his adversary of being an “absolute disaster” and of refusing to study Christianity seriously: “It is just plain silly and grotesquely immoral to claim that Christianity is simply a force for evil.” Dennett’s reply was an opaque one line: “I doubt you mean all the things you say.”
He didn’t ‘put it on the net’, he sent it to – of all people – Dembski. Without (to the best of my knowledge) permission. Having initiated the exchange himself. And he’s the one who whinges about having to watch his back? But he’s got Madders putting a nice spin on his story.
But Ruse has got a point. Across the US, the battle over evolution in science teaching goes on…At the heart of many of these local controversies is the firmly held belief that Darwinism leads to atheism, indeed that it is atheism. Across the US, a crude and erroneous conflict is being created between science as atheism and religion.
No, he hasn’t got a point. That situation isn’t ‘the fault of Dawkins and Dennett with their aggressive atheism’ – that’s an absurd thing to say. Does Ruse seriously think that if Dawkins and Dennett didn’t exist, there would be no ‘battle over evolution in science teaching’? Does he think most of the soldiers in that battle have ever even heard of Dawkins and Dennett? Because I don’t.
It’s important that Britain avoids the trap that America is falling into, not just because it endangers good science, but also because there is a fascinating debate worth having about what scientific method can reveal about faith, and what theologians have to say about science…This is the kind of conversation we want to have in this country, but we’re not safe from American-style false dichotomies between faith and science yet…
False dichotomies is it. Okay, MB, go on and explain how ‘faith’ and science are not in tension. Non-overlapping magisteria, perhaps? Different levels? Metaphysical naturalism and methodological naturalism? Worth a try – but not terribly convincing. Even some non-Americans might tell you that.
Update: Dan Jones has an excellent detailed criticism of Bunting’s piece here and PZ has one here.
Couldn’t agree more with your response Ophelia. I think an important mistake made by Ruse and Bunting is conflating the genuine conflict between faith and empirical methods (science), and the lesser conflict of believing in evolution by natural selection and accepting religion (which is possible, if not particularly sensible). Dawkins and Dennett are, of course, simultaneously atheists and evolutionists, and although their evolutionism (for want of a better world) enables them to be intellectually fulfilled without recourse to God the Designer, their rejection of religion and faith runs deeper than the facts of biology. I give my take on the article here: http://psom.blogspot.com/2006/03/richard-dawkins-accidental-friend-of.html.
Bunting’s column made me so cross I wrote to her directly — unlike some of her columns that one did not have a ‘comments’ box. For the record [and my own self-worth], I said this:
But science is atheistic — it seeks natural explanations, not
supernatural ones. Just because supernaturalists find it rhetorically
convenient to attract sleepwalking followers by making explicit in an
inflammatory way the obvious a-theism of scientific explanation,
doesn’t mean that scientists can pretend that science is not
incompatible with religions that demand the acceptance of the
miraculous as real.
Your argument about avoiding the American ‘debate’ seems
reasonable, until you begin to suggest that there is a value in ‘faith’
worth saving from its evolutionary origins — just because people feel
better when they believe things that aren’t true, isn’t a reason not to
point out that the things they believe aren’t true. The placebo effect
relies on ignorance. Ignorance is not a good thing, does that really
need spelling out? Maybe for an individual faced with a threat to their
own health, it’s fair enough, if nothing else works, but religions
indoctrinate whole societies, and whose word do we have that it’s ‘for
their own good’?
When you go on to drag ‘young Muslims’ into it, as if they inhabit a
different universe from ‘young whatever-elses’ who can safely indulge
in scientific thinking, you descend to absurdity.
Undoubtedly, it would be more peaceful, for a while, if resurgent forces
of religious fundamentalism were allowed to have their way with
educational curricula, but for the genuine progress of understanding,
that would soon become the peace of the grave — purely
metaphorically, of course.
The description of Ruse as ‘agnostic’ says it all.
By the way, what is a ‘Darwinian philosopher’?
I think I deserve a prescience award for this.. http://boofykatz.blogspot.com/
on Madders; but it was not I who grassed to PZ. I’m off now to witness the cruel and unusual punishment at Pharyngula……
Given Ruses continued behaviour in some degree favoring the ID’s foolishness I have come to doubt his proclaimed agnostism.
I also think this accounts for his hostility to Dennett and Dawkins. He can’t refute their arguments and secretly hopes they are wrong. So he attacks them personally and sends private emails to others who support his real idea.
He’s a fraud I think.
His behaviour is certainly very peculiar.
I’ve seen at least one commentator put it down to attention-seeking rather than religious leanings.