Who is making whose life more difficult?
I have one or two more quibbles with Matthew Reisz’s diatribe about atheism and science.
The notion that religion is perniciously simple-minded and locked in an eternal fight with science has been powerfully argued by a number of atheist thinkers, many of them based in the academy, with the charge led by Richard Dawkins in his 2006 best-seller The God Delusion. But what counts as evidence for such a claim?
It’s not really reasonable to give a simplistic version of a “notion” that you claim has been argued by “a number” of people, “many” of whom are academics, and then demand what is the evidence for your own simplistic version of a putative notion that belongs to no one named or quoted or linked. That’s a gotcha rather than a question. In any case, the evidence that various clerics and other religious people have tried to interfere with science is not at all difficult to find; one could start by looking up stem-cell research, or the Texas school board.
Particularly in a society as religious as the US, scientists who are keen to reach out and share their work risk alienating their audience if they are openly contemptuous of religion.
If that’s true, it is some evidence that religion is “locked in an eternal fight with science.” Some scientists are openly contemptuous of religion because the “ways of knowing” of science are so different from those of religion and because scientists cannot count on being free from religious interference. If audiences blackmail scientists by threatening to flounce away in a huff any time scientists are not sufficiently deferential to religion, that is a kind of fight – the kind under discussion in this article, certainly. It is the kind of fight that two different ways of inquiring into the world have when they are incompatible. Historians would have the same fight if religionists were always trying to shut them up or re-write their books for them.
“There is no truth in the idea that being a scientist means being a crusader for atheism, and even many atheist and agnostic scientists are opposed to Richard Dawkins for making their life more difficult,” Giberson adds.
Maybe, but there again, this is a kind of blackmail, and also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Giberson spend a lot of his time writing about atheism and science in such a way as to make the lives of atheist scientists more difficult. He’s always picking fights with atheist scientists (one in particular), and telling them off for not agreeing with religious claims, so he can’t pretend it’s just Richard Dawkins who makes life more difficult for atheist scientists. The fact is, Giberson does that too, and he does it on purpose.
I didn’t think of it when I first read it, but if there are any atheist and agnostic scientists…opposed to Richard Dawkins for making their life more difficult, I have never met them. In fact, I sincerely doubt if there are more than a handful of religious scientists opposed to Richard Dawkins. Giberson’s claim is simply, and demonstrably, untrue.
The whole piece is just an effort to convince non-scientists that, if they really love science, they should join the chorus telling atheists to shut up.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Who is making whose life more difficult? http://dlvr.it/6M6xQ […]
I’m not a scientist, but I know a crap load of them since I’m married to one. I have never heard, at any party, get-together, or in the lab while visiting, a single complaint about Richard Dawkins making their lives miserable.
I’ve heard complaints about administration. I’ve heard complaints about graduate advisors. I’ve heard complaints about search committees. I’ve heard complaints about other scientists being dicks about their research. I’ve heard enough complaints about equipment and granting agencies that, if I had $10 for each complaint, I could fund my wife’s lab…
But never have I heard of a complaint about Richard Dawkins. Kerry Mullis, yes. Peter Duesberg, yes. A few other whack-a-loon scientists who give the community a bad name, yes.
As I like to say: put on proof.
But never any of the gnu atheist scientists.
Well…these are supernatural scientists, so you can’t prove that they don’t exist. So ha.
Hasn’t DS Wilson complained about the Gnu Atheists? That would be an example of a scientist complaining about Dawkins…
In any case, I don’t understand why anybody — even accomodationists — is paying attention to Giberson after he said this:
Oooo, thanks for playing, but you FAIL.
Oh come on Ken, have you already forgotten about Tom Johnson?
Bah-dump.
All I can say to him is “oh! Thanks for playing but you lose in the first round!”
Is he seriously saying, the enterprise of science, that has painstakingly, meticulously and with incredibly tedious effort accumulated the invaluable vast array of information that we have at hand today did it by choosing easy problems? Does he really think the Theory of Relativity, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and the Germ Theory of Disease to name a few were arrived at by people just dicking about?
If he does he is incredibly naïve and tremendously stupid. What a silly twat.